Pure Schmaltz

MonkeyTrials

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-06-08T05:26:48-07:00

"I am surrounded by legions of church ladies pursing their lips at modernity and reason." One of the more reliable indicators that we’re experiencing EndDays comes from the seemingly sudden presence of MonkeyTrials. I’ll coin this term, referring back to that famous trial a hundred years ago, in which the State of Tennessee charged a schoolteacher with violating their Butler Act, which forbade teaching about human evolution in public schools. The resulting trial brought together two of the most famous lawyers of the time, Clarence Darrow, who appeared for the defense, sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union, and William Jennings Bryan, a three-time populist Presidential candidate, arguing for both the church and the state. ... It attracted plenty of attention both locally and in the national press. The courtroom was packed with people who appeared solely to demonstrate their support for the Bible, believing that teaching human evolution was somehow unholy. Most of the observers of the trial would have been perfectly satisfied if the judge had found old Scopes guilty at the outset, since few seemed to believe that any defense could render him innocent. He’d admitted his guilt so he could become the show defendant at trial. ...Today, our justice department, under our present incumbent, has taken to acting as if it were presenting before Kangaroo Courts. They make absurd motions that are often quashed the moment they’re submitted. Government attorneys have received innumerable threats of disbarment, and the whole concept of justice seems unusually strained. Thousands of Justice Department employees have left rather than engage in such shady dealings. Our incumbent asserts guilt and innocence without bothering to provide evidence beyond the fact that he knows, because he’s looked; nothing admissible ever appears. A slathering crowd gathers around to witness the persecution of the latest victim of another deliberate miscarriage of justice, and all’s supposed to be right with this world. Like strongmen everywhere, our incumbent considers himself to be the finest judge of character. He considers actual judges to be at least somewhat less skilled than he. ... In MonkeyTrials, the outcome seems a given, evidence remains optional, and a cruel certainty influences the proceedings. It takes a judge with superhuman forbearance to adjudicate such trials. In the court of public opinion, the MonkeyTrials ethic seems more prominent now. Poisoned by certainty, mobs form around positions blessed by the absence of what might constitute actual evidence. Our Data Center controversy, the first in my recent memory where I’ve found myself on the opposite side of what most seem to consider reason, has been deeply troubling me. If I attempt to correct what I know to be a counterpart’s misconception, my contributions aren’t welcomed. I usually receive an”I don’t believe that” response and a look that tells me they’re now even more convinced that their misconception’s true. ... They make their holder more miserable for their trouble, yet they seem to genuinely delight in identifying another complication, another odd reason to disbelieve what might be easily proven to anyone more open to orthogonal information. I often find myself surrounded by a crowd of certainty that, frankly, terrifies me. I know these people to be decent, as decent as any Tennessee fundamentalist showing up to a trial to demonstrate that they’re on God’s and the Bible’s side. ...I am no exemplar for any duly diligent trial. I hold my personal prejudices as gospel, too, just the same as you do. I jump to conclusions long before conclusive evidence even imagines entering the deliberation. Hell, I often refuse to deliberate at all. I insist that I know what I couldn’t possibly know, or that I’ll know for certain only after I see it. I go looking for what I’m seeking and, praise God, I find it almost every time, on my first query. ... Actually, I am probably only successfully fooling myself. I am at my most influential when I’m actively trying to convince myself. ... It might never occur to me that I’ve successfully constructed a personal Hell within which I securely gloat about my God-given certainty. God might exclusively exist in inquiry, never in any answer. ...So many seem to have just jumped at the chance to be counted among the holy, opposed to all things Data Center. They find justified criticism of damned Data Centers everywhere they look, often conflating some alarmist characterization as well-understood common sense that just isn’t so, and never was. Of course, Data Centers use inordinate amounts of water, more, they feel certain, than any other industrial application. Except they don’t, and it’s not even close. They don’t inject “forever chemicals” into pristine aquifers, either. They might emit dangerous levels of ElectroMagnetic Flows, though the WHO doesn’t know what a safe or dangerous level of exposure to those might be. That uncertainty seems to be a good enough source for many. Most seem to hold Data Centers to performance standards no other construction has ever been held to, and they seem to feel more holy about these convictions. I am surrounded by legions of church ladies pursing their lips at modernity and reason. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

InLimbo

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-06-07T06:08:19-07:00

"…just imagine what will happen after the midterms render them lame geese." One other end state for our present administration that has gratefully seemed absent without leave since being installed, occurs to me, one that probably works as effectively as any actual ending. A stymied administration that was always incapable of administering anyway, probably accomplishes nothing destined to survive its tenure. Our incumbent seems contorted, as if attempting to wriggle his way beneath a very narrow, flimsy barricade. He’s very likely too fat to succeed. His ill-crafted policies sit InLimbo, neutralized by courts, trading partners, and what he might label fickle public opinion. His policies, such as they were, which he apparently borrowed from seriously unserious people with little notion of how governance actually works outside of the Old Testament, have universally failed. Each advertised transformation has gone bust in turn, leaving divots rather than the promised holes-in-ones. ... With midterms expected to further humiliate ‘his magesty’, he’s seemingly frozen in place, as useful as he could ever possibly be. He still continually foments chaos, though even this seems to have an increasingly lessening effect. Markets correct within seconds of another of his perfectly predictable phony pronouncements. The War with Iran has already ended dozens more times than it ever began, an immaculate conception if I’ve ever seen one. Our economy is already the best ever, though the actual effects don’t seem all that obvious unless you’re one of the few it was intended to trickle up to. His Cabinet seems perfectly suited to his service, more at home on the cover of The Enquirer or as lead on Faux Snooze following some scandal over another predictably failed policy, defending the absolutely indefensible with another clever equivalent of, “I know you are, but what am I?” For entertainment value, these clowns have become world-renowned, as long as your taste trends toward the slapstick varieties. It seems as if they aspire to be the laughingstock, though most of their jokes aren’t actually all that funny. They seem incapable of self-deprecation, which further froze their public’s potential ardor. They behave far too seriously for people who are supposed to be saving civilization from certain ruin. Would it kill them to poke some fun at themselves sometimes, instead of at everyone else? Those who long held that government was best served in infinitesimal pieces, that it should be shrunk until it was small enough to drown in a bathtub, welcome to your dream come true. Except it’s more like a nightmare for you, isn’t it? Your oxen were gored right along with your opposition’s. They might have declared war on woke, but your cherished privileges were also severely wounded. Infringing upon even your enemy’s rights unavoidably also infringes upon yours. ... The corruption, almost complete, were it not for a cadre of grossly underappreciated watchdogs and institutions. Nameless ones, or as good as nameless, that helped rein in the worst that corporations have always been capable of inflicting upon real citizens. Corporations were never people, but lesser beings, incapable of feelings, created not to voraciously feed off the people but to help feed and sustain them. Taking off the controls doesn’t even help the corporations in the long run. ...Who suspected that was even Pandora’s Box we were prying open? Who wasn’t surprised by the malign indifference that came streaming out, as if the Presidency was his alone to steal. He was distracted by stuff that surely seemed more important to him. He was too busy to administer, too distracted to lead, too immersed in scandal to even pretend to be anybody’s moral guide. He was never present in the first place. Elected to serve as the most powerful human on the planet, he was already otherwise employed on something obviously more important: himself. ... He plans to erect architectural monstrosities to himself, each a perfect portrait of irrelevance in practice. He rarely says anything of any significance, and he even more rarely ever did. He was never more than a pretender to a non-existent throne. Only he was surprised when he discovered there was no real underlying power attached to the role, other than his own, which he’d never had and had hoped he’d gain once he ascended. ...Oh, he has inflicted pain on many, but these acts were obviously each a crime of omission, if only because he always lacked the necessary understanding to deliberately commit anything, good or ill. He was never not a shill, ill-prepared to perform the expected duties of any elected or appointed office. He recruited his kind to support him in his imaginary administration, one apparently incapable of coherently imagining what actual administration might entail. They shared the questionable skill of showing up absent, of blankly staring into cameras as if nothing whatsoever were happening behind their eyes. ... They are mostly gone, junketing overseas on less than a whim, and hardly notice when locals protest their presence and chase them back home again. They are the very model of modern major nothingness, an existential danger to the spirit and the soul of us. ... If they’re already lame ducks now, just imagine what will happen after the midterms render them lame geese. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

InBardo

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-06-06T06:00:27-07:00

"…greater respect than his soul's former vessel ever once managed to." Today’s thought experiment takes us into a netherworld, one that some believe exists between states, during periods of transition. Tibetan Buddhist belief labels this no-place Bardo. It holds that Bardos exists between death and rebirth and also between birth and death, that both life and death themselves amount to periods of transition. Existence might be transitions all the way down. A Bardo offers opportunities to experience insight and achieve enlightenment. One might perceive perspectives there that they never before imagined. The naturally self-reflective might experience a satisfying lightness there, while the normally reactive, more superficial actors might experience great distress and discomfort, to the point of believing they’ve landed themselves in Hell. The shock that must occur when a malignant narcissist first experiences what it had been like for everyone else who had ever found themselves in his presence should properly shock any cockiness right out of the least of us. I have been considering the various scenarios under which our malignant narcissist might leave office, but I would be remiss if I missed considering the transitions, both for himself and his minions, for his disappearance will throw the MAGA Movement into a social Bardo all its own. Without their dear, malignant leader to draw attention to the stage, the audience will very likely, rather quickly, disperse and might well permanently disappear like a bathtub fart bubble. Even the least self-aware crowd ever assembled will likely experience some semblance of an existential crisis. A few might glimpse something akin to their first peek at a Woke-like self-awareness, and such experiences tend to feel like ends; little deaths without much immediate sensation of eventual resurrection. I imagine that the MAGA Bardo will induce a deep sense of absence, with little sense of direction or immediate salvation. Even greater cynicism, if such a state could even be possible, could ensue, or even, gulp, some form of enlightenment. What form a MAGA enlightenment might take couldn’t possibly be mine or yours to propose, and I dare not speculate. I’ll just suggest that it will likely take a form that few outside that crowd would comfortably recognize as enlightenment, but then enlightenment was never not deeply personal and never for mass application. Their malignant leader, such as he has been, might have been actively engaging in Bardo these last few years. What experts have speculated must be evidence of encroaching dementia might have just as easily been him slipping into Bardo, which might well appear similar to dozing. The clear disorientation he seems to carry into his reawakenings might just be the residue of his dabbling in enlightenment for a few minutes in the middle of his freaking press conferences. I find it reassuring to make this perhaps over-generous interpretation of these performances because this world works better for me when I believe that even he might just be being hounded by an insistent enlightenment; that even our sublord of Counter Enlightenment might eventually be overtaken by an inevitable lightness of even his being. Bardo seems to be the place for such transitions, so, however unlikely such a transformation might seem, it could be happening as he appears to be dozing. He might be preparing himself for a rebirth. I tried to imagine what our incumbent experiences as he encounters his inevitable enlightenment. I suspect this mirror held up for him to peer into leaves him horrified at the figure he sees performing there; an Ebenezer Scrooge on steroids, a Manhattan Mussolini, goose-stepping in a skinny red tie. I wonder if he will recognize the characters he sees there, or if he can’t perceive himself as he really was. Perhaps his transition might unfold in small increments, tiny insights to match his shriveled attention span, growing into something more genuinely transforming over time, since time seems to be immaterial in Bardo. It’s not mine or yours to know, for Bardo does not follow any straight or narrow plotline. I suspect that it’s different for every soul that experiences it, and probably even radically different from moment to moment for any individual soul. I suspect it’s, at best, a harrowing series of experiences. For those still stuck in Heaven and Hell scenarios, Bardos offer more variety, I suspect, and less eternity, for as transitions, I suspect they’d be inherently unstable. Whatever one might feel moved to possess while passing through might well prove to be mammon there and forever after. Imagine if you can, the most acquisitive man in history discovering himself suddenly incapable of possessing anything tangible. That experience alone would make Bardo well worth the price he pays for admission. He will pay more than mere billions to enter, and, I suspect, ever more than that to exit if there’s anything like justice in this universe. We have rightfully cringed at our incumbent’s routine violations of propriety, wondering at times whether he would ever eventually receive his proper comeuppance. I suspect whatever punishment he eventually receives will probably pale in comparison to whatever he encounters once he enters his Bardo, whether it’s his Bardo between birth and death or the one he’s said to enter after he dies here. Most satisfying for me might be the acknowledgement that whatever he receives in punishment there will be at his own hand. In Bardo, one performs the roles of one's own judge, jury, and bloodthirsty executioner, if, indeed, one can remain thirsty after drinking from Bardo’s firehose. The headlines continue screaming every damned morning that he’s dying for sure. I suspect that he’s up at all hours, madly deflecting via his TruthSocial media, trying to avoid entering his Bardo. If he enters when he dozes off during his press conferences, he might well enter with bells on when his head hits his pillow. Know on faith if we cannot know for certain that he’s in active transition now that the Supreme Court has insisted that he must cancel and repay his illegal tariffs. He’s lost most of his ability to inflict pain on others, just as he starts entering his latest Bardo. I am not holding my breath waiting for this incarnation to experience enlightenment and repent, but I will hold faith that the fruit fly he’s very likely destined to be resurrected into will gratefully hold other fruit flies in greater respect than his soul’s former vessel ever once managed to. ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 06/04/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-06-04T14:28:43-07:00

This week’s EndDays dispatches arrived as the series rounded a philosophical corner it had been approaching for seventy installments. Truth preceded justice and justice preceded reconciliation, and the week traced all three: from the TRC model of Truth& to the paradox of &Retribution, from the structural inadequacy of Impeachable to the bicycle that won’t float in TheMidasPoint, from the bleak arithmetic of Retirement to the quiet accumulation of limits in Resigning. ...This EndDays Story turns the series’ corner toward what comes after EndDays, beginning with Truth as the necessary precondition for anything resembling justice or reconciliation. In this EndDays Story, I considered what form our necessary reconciliation for the crimes committed by this administration might take. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, convened after apartheid’s end, sought something akin to the opposite of Nuremberg’s retributive justice: to acknowledge the wrongs and seek forgiveness. This high-minded effort fell short of its aims, yet still serves as a model for seeking alternative justice beyond the individual and into the social. As much as I might feel attracted to the concept of a bloodletting impeachment, I acknowledge we might need more realignment than retribution. ... Reconciliation demands not just Truth, but the courage to honestly seek it, and, perhaps, the foolhardiness to stand up and declare it. ...“Let us, in our future, not go quite so blindly into any upcoming darkness or sunrise.” This EndDays Story finds me examining the limitations of retributive justice — and wondering if justice itself might be a sophisticated form of denial. In this EndDays Story, I confessed to my own revenge fantasies, which proved enormously satisfying right up until they produced revulsion — right up until they insisted I commit a legal murder to settle the score. The process of retribution seemed at best paradoxical, requiring that the judge, jury, and executioner engage in what would otherwise be criminal behavior. The Columbia Gorge’s ragged burn scar, reduced to ashes and stumps by a thoughtless teenager playing with fireworks, reminded me that nothing any court might find will ever restore that pristine woodland. ... Perhaps justice is just a sophisticated form of denial, a studied refusal to accept that we cannot fix any past. May we learn from their vengeance that vengeance might not have been the solution we historically held it to be. Let us, in our future, not go quite so blindly into any upcoming darkness or sunrise. ...This EndDays Story examines the Constitutional impeachment process and concludes that it amounts to little more than Constitutionally-sanctioned politics — inherently, inescapably corruptible. In this EndDays Story, I traced the history of presidential impeachment: Andrew Johnson impeached for cause and acquitted by a cowardly Senate; Bill Clinton brought up on trivial charges and gratefully acquitted; Trump committing treason twice and acquitted both times by an equally guilty and complicit Senate. It takes much more than committing a crime to be considered Impeachable — even committing unspeakable crimes daily doesn’t rise to any Impeachable level if the incumbent’s party holds the legislature. ... Impeachment seems nothing more or less than Constitutionally-sanctioned politics, and because of this, it seems inherently, inescapably corruptible. ...This EndDays Story finds our incumbent having arrived at TheMidasPoint — that place where commandments fail to elicit the expected response and checks and balances hem in the would-be authoritarian. In this EndDays Story, I proposed that in a similar way that a bicycle is not a boat, our Democracy was explicitly designed not to be a kingdom, monarchy, or authoritarian state. ... Our Founders had seen the troubles that too much latitude could foster, so they prescribed a more rigorous administration featuring strict roles and even stricter limits on any individual's power. Damned nearly everything required a fucking act of Congress to proceed, which meant any individual incumbent would feel like an admiral on a bicycle, toothlessly proclaiming "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" to absolutely no effect. Our incumbent has reached TheMidasPoint: that place where commandments fail to elicit the expected response. ...This EndDays Story surveys the widely varying Retirement options available depending upon whether one is a regular person, a democratically elected President, or a despot. In this EndDays Story, I surveyed the retirement landscape: those who hold ten dollars in cash and no debt belong to the wealthiest portion of the population, yet few employer pensions remain since Reagan-era delusions replaced them with stock market speculation. About 78% of currently retired Americans rely on Social Security to pay necessary expenses, with the median senior living on less than $2,000 per month. ... Despots, meanwhile, might retire with vast fortunes, though they face much greater uncertainty about whether they’ll live to see their Retirement. ... Few expect him to live long enough to cash in his Social Security, though he probably wouldn’t need it anyway. ...“…regrowing our backbones that render him powerless to do much more than resign in response.” This EndDays Story considers the least likely but increasingly plausible conclusion to this administration — that our incumbent simply resigns, not from principle but from the reactive exhaustion of a man who has finally run out of room. In this EndDays Story, I saved what I long considered the least likely EndDays scenario for last: Resigning. Even a Truth & Reconciliation Commission seemed more likely than anything resembling acceptance from our resident malignant narcissist. ... He governs like a drunken sailor dances, practiced at compensating for wave action but still stumbling his way around the dance floor. Our country was founded by a band of resisters, and we're never better than when we have something to passionately protest about. Against this growing force, we might not have found the greatness again that he overconfidently predicted, but we certainly seem to be regaining our backbone, rendering him powerless to do much more than resign in response. ...I have practiced my writing, for instance, virtually every day for decades, but I remain less skilled than I imagine an actual master must be. ... I might finally be experienced enough to understand that I very likely won't discover some previously hidden magic pattern that I might access to manifest this sensation more often. ...My wisdom seems indistinguishable from Cluelessness, most days, and I honestly only rarely ever aspire to anything different, as if there could be better. I figure the struggle I experience every damned morning might distill into an essential element of what I might mistake for my creative ability. ...Maybe the images in this EndDays series carry some of the magic I've been experiencing, for I've used artwork for each installment created by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, mostly in the second half of the nineteenth century. His subject matters and styles fascinate me, for they seem to combine familiar reality with the deepest fantasy, Sleeping Beauty as portrayed by the girl next door. ...They leave me feeling like an Old Testament prophet, whether or not any of them actually manage to prophesy. I see how I might project a reality plenty and enough capable of sustaining me, even though it might be 99 and 99/100% fantasy, an Ivory soap of imagination. I feel as though I spent the week foretelling a future, even if none of what I disclosed ever comes to pass. The stories themselves, their structure and logic, delighted me for a few minutes, and lifted me up and out of a wearying and increasingly terrifying place. ...I've reached another Thursday, grateful for my practice, the one that spawned my Cluelessness book, which might not ever become a bestseller, whatever that entails, but still inspires me to continue creating even though, or perhaps because, I still have little idea how to accomplish whatever it is I set out to achieve when I set my fingers to keys each morning. I encourage anyone who might happen upon this note to take a few precious minutes and attempt to waste them on this week's stories. ...I employed Claude.ai, a commercial AI-powered text editor, using it to perform repetitive copy/pasting work and to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.”

Resigning

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-06-04T05:14:15-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: The Three Fates, gesso rosso (circa 1868) "…regrowing our backbones that render him powerless to do much more than resign in response." I have saved what I have long considered the least likely EndDays scenario for this story, positioning it after presenting what I considered to be the more probable outcomes. Even a Truth & Reconciliation Commission seemed more likely to happen than anything resembling acceptance and contrition, because even the more mildly malignant narcissists rarely, if ever, come to anything resembling the acceptance necessary to engage in what I might recognize as Resigning behavior. That outcome seemed too far out of character to be plausible, if this incumbent can be said to exhibit any semblance of character. Resigning might constitute a strategic play, and this guy doesn’t exhibit much in the way of strategy, even on his few and far between better days. He seems to prefer reckless behavior over even self-preservation, perhaps because he had finally seen himself as being as powerful as he previously so often merely imagined he was. He certainly engaged as if no rules applied to him or his frail attempts at administration. He made bulls in china shops appear circumspect in comparison. Recent events have suggested other possibilities. As his difficulties have exploded, his options for moving at least somewhat forward have been more stilted. What must have seemed like wide-open territory at his inauguration has shriveled and shrunk as his slowly awakening checks and balances have grown. The courts, especially, have finally found injunctions that have slowed what had at first seemed like an inexorable downward momentum. Anyone can disobey any injunction until enforcement kicks in. Then, continuing the behavior becomes something other than merely a matter of will. Until some real consequences start appearing, fantasy powers might well seem inexorable. After, they just seem silly. Even the least aware malignant narcissist might then take a few limits more seriously and choose to simply stop pursuing some particular fantasies. Our incumbent has recently become quite practiced at feigning indifference as he shuffles away from another purely Pyrrhic victory. As his losses far exceed his few meager victories, he seems to have started anticipating what he might consider the worst outcomes. He has recently taken to issuing warnings in threatening tones, predicting perdition or worse if his proposals are overturned. He tends to rely on these sorry exit speeches once he’s exhausted every possibility of ever getting his way. He takes his toys, which almost nobody wanted to play with anyway, and stumbles home, pretending he won. He might manage to fool himself, which bothers almost no one because his losses can be easily chalked up to being our wins. Then, the cycle starts all over again. His acceptance nudges him in the direction of yet another poorly thought-through outrage, and all returns to right in his world. He seems to have little, if any, longer-term memory left, anyway. He governs like a drunker sailor dances, practiced at compensating for wave action but still stumbling his way around the dance floor. He steps on almost everybody else’s toes in the process, but never notices. He still seems to believe himself to be a genius, in spite of or because he so often loses. His Resigning behavior might not signal anything like acceptance going on inside his ever-receding brain, but little more than a reactive response, like instinctively shrinking back from a flame. He has proposed and then abandoned a series of notions that most of us interpreted as seriously unserious. Rewarding previously convicted insurrectionists for what he labeled government persecution. Building a ridiculous gilded ballroom in a domestic economy where those who hold ten dollars in cash and no debt belong to the wealthiest portion of the population. He invokes yet another round of tariffs, justified, once again, by a fresh round of malignant fantasies. Even his former allies are eyeing the exits as he continues making headway toward finalizing the American Brexit: an utterly self-defeating economic retreat undertaken for no discernible purpose. As unthinkable as Resigning seemed in the face of his haughty inauguration, the one where he very carefully avoided holding his hand on the proffered Bible as he swore, Resigning might be the more reasonable end for this weary would-be administrator. He seems tired, dozing through his own press conferences in the sort of resignation impossible to believably deny, however vehemently his few remaining supporters might insist otherwise. Even most allies have stopped denying what their formerly lying eyes insisted. The vast majority of The People can now finally be fairly characterized as resisters, and if there’s one skill Americans have traditionally relied upon with pride, it’s our resistance. Our country was founded by a band of resisters, and we’re never better than when we have something to passionately protest about. The fondly remembered solidarity of the Sixties, that budding Age of Aquarius, was not so much a new-age uprising as a conservative response to the 50s prosperity’s sanguine satisfaction that threatened our very character. Against this growing force, one his hapless proposals gratefully encouraged, we might not have precisely found the greatness again that he predicted, but we certainly seem to be regrowing our backbones that render him powerless to do much more than resign in response. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Retirement

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-06-03T05:21:16-07:00

Retirement plans vary considerably from employer to employer. Few offer pensions anymore, for they were replaced with a Reagan-era delusion that every man and woman should be able to earn ample Retirement income by speculating in the rich people’s stock market. That hasn’t worked nearly as well as expected. Medicare remains essential, if not always available, for those too aged to be covered by an employer’s insurance, though only about 60% of people under 65 have employer-sponsored insurance as of March 2025. ... About 75% of workers are eligible for job-based coverage, down slightly from 2023. ... Employer-sponsored insurance covered only about 20% of people with incomes below 200%, compared to more than 80% of those with incomes above 400%, of poverty. Fewer than three-quarters of firms with 10 or more employees offer health benefits at all, with large employers (200+ employees) offering coverage at a nearly 100% rate compared to less than 60% of smaller firms. Cost-sharing seems significant, too, with covered workers contributing an average of 16% of premiums for single coverage and 26% for family coverage in 2025, with average family premiums reaching over $26,000 annually. Many retirees rely entirely on Social Security to provide a barely subsistence-level Retirement income. ...No vision insurance, either, and Repuglican congresses and legislatures have for years been cutting the remaining meager benefits available to what I might call “regular” people. The wealthy also age, of course, but are much more likely to enjoy some leisure before shuffling off this mortal coil. If your employment included leadership of an actual country, again, Retirement benefits tend to vary widely between jurisdictions. It seems to matter whether you’re democratically elected or a self-appointed despot. Elected leaders tend to retire with an adequate, if not necessarily generous, stipend ($220K for a US President), often including expenses and a security apparatus for life. Despots might retire with vast fortunes, though they face much greater uncertainty about whether they’ll live to see their Retirement. Neither democrat nor despot tends to give a damn about the availability of dental or vision insurance upon Retirement. The despots live more swashbuckling existences, for their careers often careen between highs and lows. It’s hard to beat the highs achieved by even a third-rate tin-pot dictator. Often presumed to be “dictator for life,” their tenure doesn’t require the messy uncertainty of periodic election results. Any halfway decent dictator, by which I mean any absolutely indecent one, can maintain power while draining the public purse. They often rely on a small but extremely loyal military to address minor upsets and uprisings that any aspiring society experiences. They thrive on pomp and circumstance and can usually cast an adequate illusion of absolute authority to keep even a disloyal opposition at bay. ... There’s always a lurking chance that each day might be the dictator’s last. Their tenure requires more than constant vigilance; it requires considerable assistance, often from a supportive big brother dictator wealthy enough to subsidize their extraordinarily expensive lifestyle. Should they retire before being deposed, the dictator might reasonably aspire to a comfortable time with at least half-vast wealth and competent physicians, though he will never escape the suspicion that some opponent might be stalking him. Otherwise, should he “retire” early, he will die infamous, resolving the Retirement question entirely. The democratically elected President might die in office, though he’s statistically unlikely to do so. Recent retirees have enjoyed second careers, one as a prominent financier, another as a semi-professional semi-fine artist, a third as a world-class volunteer for charitable causes. A fourth remains an extremely popular and prominent social commentator and supporter of liberal policies. A fifth went into denial that he’d been retired and spent the following four years campaigning to regain his lost career. Some people retire into denial, while others actually retire. That last one became our current incumbent and serves as the poster child for refusing to elect anyone over 70 to any office, including dogcatcher. He has encouraged the vast majority of his former constituency to fervently pray for him to enter Retirement again, though it appears that he might have missed his one opportunity to move into his twilight year(s) with any dignity. Denial serves as his 401(k). ... Few expect him to live long enough to cash in his Social Security, though he probably wouldn’t need it anyway. ...A colleague was forced into Retirement by his former employer. Nobody deserves or expects to be forced into their Retirement. An employer’s supposed to hesitantly let an employee leave, celebrate their loyal service to the organization on their way out, and award the retiree with some token of their eternal esteem, assuming an employee deserves such a sendoff. Loyal service should earn no less. Our incumbent has served more disloyally than any incumbent in our history, so he richly deserves to be rudely retired. This decision should be taken out of his hands, given that he’s already more than adequately proven to be out of his goddamned mind, and not merely the senile kind. Retirement might be preferable to other means by which a dissatisfied population might decide to end an incumbent’s tenure. He could be removed for cause, though those in charge seem to lack the testicular vigor to perform that particular public service, however urgently needed. He deserves a despot’s retirement, one spent looking over his paranoid shoulder, convinced someone’s sneaking up on him. I’m in favor of whatever might remove him from the office he despoils. ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

TheMidasPoint

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-06-02T05:35:03-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: Christ in Glory (Salvator Mundi) (circa 1874) "…awaiting somebody capable of riding a goddamned bicycle to take over." In a similar way that a bicycle is not a boat, our Democracy was explicitly designed not to be a kingdom, a monarchy, or an authoritarian state. Those latter forms of government, while proven viable in some contexts, just don’t float here, in precisely the same way that a bicycle fails to float. Any odd President might mistake one for the other, but the context under which he might attempt to rule will quickly and reliably betray him and his intentions. He might, by simple delusion, convince himself of his successes, but few of even his most fervent followers will manage to follow along as his bicycle eventually strays ever further from land. Each form of governance requires certain contextual realities. Ours centers around laws, which might never qualify as inviolate but still fail to behave in ways similar to commandments, just as intended. One might command until they’re quite literally blue in the face to little effect. One might convince themself that they have The Midas Touch up until the reckoning comes due and Congress refuses to extend the purse. Curse as he might then, the incumbent has reached TheMidasPoint, that place where commandments fail to elicit the expected response and where checks and balances hem in the would-be authoritarian. I’ve been speaking of options for removing an incumbent President, but have overlooked until now the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of disqualification, resignation, or simple self-negation. There might be no better way to undermine an incumbent leader than by that leader’s own hand, our present incumbent, definitely not withstanding. He has proven himself nearly universally ham-handed in execution, bordering on self-sabotage, if not defining it. He far more often fails than succeeds, and largely succeeds only in his own mind, blaming others for his own, self-wrought misfortunes. He attracts with inflated promises he always fails to deliver, and never fails to find some handy scapegoat to blame. He might make bold moves, or moves that might seem bold to his loyal followers, but these get reversed by the courts. His administration so far has produced a series of divots on an uncaring sea floor, the price of trying to ride a bicycle on the high seas. He quite literally has little to show for his efforts other than upsets. Try as he might, his bicycle will not behave like the boat his policies require. His plans, his Project 2025, for instance, presumed a context that was never in evidence and were destined to fall far short of expectations and, ultimately, to fail. They required a context without rails, while our self-government was designed to be almost 100% rails. There are precedents and procedures for every contingency, for we adopted a form of governance independent from the personality and whim of any incumbent. Our Founders had seen the troubles that so much latitude could foster, leading to tyranny and oppression, so they prescribed a more rigorous administration featuring strict roles and even stricter limits on any individual’s power. Damned nearly everything required a fucking act of Congress to proceed, which meant that any individual incumbent would feel like an admiral on a bicycle, toothlessly proclaiming, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead,” to absolutely no effect. Any odd old Mussolini might march in, only to find little to command. His supposed underlings would be manning their defenses against such things, knowing for certain as their birthright that they were created equal to any goose-stepping monarch or self-important generalissimo. That aspiring Midas might find himself at best only able to turn stuff into lead. He might feel most moved to post delusional wee-hour videos, the only medium within which he can cast himself as the hero and savior of any world, a Lego leader surrounded by plummeting poll numbers. When seventy percent of any electorate sees through the smoke screen, it no longer matters how elaborately it was cast. It failed to elicit the expected response and soon dispersed. In retrospect, it never could have succeeded. For an incumbent who has, in his eyes, never failed, his failure must be especially unnerving. He might suit up and attempt to appear in public, but the necessary illusion of power and/or authority fails to hover closely around him. He seems only an ill-dressed clown, just as Our Founders intended for any future incumbent with a Midas fixation to appear before The People. Often described as “The Most Powerful Role in the World,” the American Presidency features some subtle contingencies to that general designation. Not everyone can credibly project a powerful presence, especially outside the kleig lights and grease paint of campaigning leading up to an election. One might, as this incumbent has, attempt to lead by kleig and grease, and even seem to succeed for a spell, but the deft deployment of the power behind the designation demands bureaucratic and actual political skills, not merely those of some actor or tin pot dictator, even one with a flashy golden touch. The system, our system, was specifically designed to chew up and spit out such pretenders to our non-existent throne. Those addicted to pomp soon learn that they’ve misinterpreted the circumstances under which they ascended. Their agenda melts and crumbles, and that ill-conceived Presidency utterly disqualifies itself and reverts to chaos until the incumbent resigns or simply self-negates until the nightmare ends. It never ends soon enough for anybody pretending to a throne, but the underlying Democracy stands essentially intact, awaiting somebody capable of riding a goddamned bicycle to take over. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Impeachable

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-06-01T05:57:39-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: The tomb of Tristram and Isoude (1862) "Perhaps the founders intended this." The impeachment of a President takes separation of powers to dizzying levels. The indictment, brought by the House of Representatives, requires only a simple majority to be advanced to the Senate, where the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court presides in a trial. A supermajority of sixty-seven Senators must vote to convict there, and thereby remove the accused from office. The Senate may also optionally choose to bar the convict from ever again holding Federal office. Think of this process as a trial complicated by partisan politics played at their most frenetic by the terrified. Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were impeached and then acquitted in the Senate. Donald Trump was impeached twice, then acquitted in the Senate twice. Few equate this impeachment process with justice. Andrew Johnson was impeached for cause, only for a cowardly Senate to refuse to impose well-deserved justice. Bill Clinton was brought up on what history would recognize as trivial, if not trumped-up charges, only to be gratefully acquitted by a thankfully sane Senate. Trump committed treason twice and was acquitted both times by an equally guilty and complicit Senate. It takes much more than committing a crime to be considered Impeachable. As our incumbent, who has yet to meet a law he felt capable of abiding by in his first term, and seems damned determined to demonstrate again for those who weren’t paying attention then, even committing unspeakable crimes daily, doesn’t rise to any Impeachable level if the incumbent’s party holds the legislature. This regrettable reality feeds an Invulnerability Myth, encouraging precisely the behavior the impeachment process was originally intended to handle. The people understandably come to feel as though their government imposes upon them rather than serves them, and this seems precisely what the impeachment process was intended to address. It elevates caution to the point of appearing indistinguishable from cowardice. It’s not uncommon for a prosecutor to refuse to indict an obvious perpetrator because they don’t feel as though they can win a conviction at trial. Perhaps the crime seems too complicated for a jury to comprehend, or the evidence seems altogether too circumstantial. Plenty of criminals get away with their crimes. In fact, our incumbent held the record for crimes committed, both unindicted and convicted, of any candidate in the history of this once-great nation. There was no second place. He stands in the office today as a powerful testament to why our Constitution desperately needs an amendment declaring that no one convicted of a felony can ever be elevated to serve as our President. We must be a country of laws if we expect to dispense justice equally. Felonious Presidents contradict some tacit tenet underlying self-governance. Our President must, above all, remain above suspicion. Being beneath suspicion doesn’t necessarily mean an impeachment indictment’s coming. Once the Democrats regain the House, and even if they manage to take the Senate in the midterms, impeachment promises only a lengthy process. The due process, even for the low-life-iest President like our present incumbent, promises to try everyone’s patience beyond their natural limits. It demands a form of discipline almost unimaginable in jurisprudence, for the indicted incumbent remains in office while the evidence gets aired and, if successfully indicted and tried in the Senate, he remains in office through that trial. This incumbent scoffs at more than convention and will doubtless bring new insults to the office while the outcome remains in contention. I predict strategic chaos to emerge as his primary defense, even though strategy has never been more than a fantasy for every other initiative this sorry incumbent has sponsored. I predict troops being deployed again to sanctuary cities for more than imaginary immigrants this time, but for Democrats, and phony US Attorneys arresting witnesses called by the prosecution to prevent them from testifying. Shenanigans aplenty! Chaos rather than justice. I might conclude that Impeachment, while prescribed by our Constitution as the remedy for precisely the sort of incumbent we presently suffer under, in practice, it seems unlikely to result in either conviction or removal, though I remain prepared to be proven wrong. Once the world economy finally falls into irreparable chaos and people here start experiencing food shortages for themselves, the difficulties introduced by our incumbent, who apparently never successfully passed an economics course in college, should become obvious enough for even the balance of the MAGA rabble to comprehend. Even then, the stigma associated with becoming the first party in American history to lose their President to impeachment and conviction, then removal from office and an injunction from ever holding future Federal office, could likely convince even the most severely politically wounded to vote against impeachment in the Senate. Impeachment seems nothing more or less than Constitutionally-sanctioned politics, and because of this, it seems inherently, inescapably corruptible and therefore corrupt. Our incumbent seems unlikely to live that long. Perhaps the founders intended this. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

&Retribution

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-31T06:29:06-07:00

"Let us, in our future, not go quite so blindly into any upcoming darkness or sunrise." Who hasn’t spent some days, since this administration that hasn’t quite gotten around to administering anything, assumed office, engaging in revenge fantasies? Mine have, at times, been quite satisfying, as I imagined myself the just judge, wise jury, and even the enthusiastic executioner. I figured that the bastards had at least that coming, probably worse, and, rather than merely curse my fate, I might just as well serve some good old-fashioned just desserts. ... The prospect of getting blood on my hands, and probably down my shirt front, too, left me questioning the underlying wisdom actual retribution entails. It seems to require that the judge, jury, and executioner agree to engage in what would otherwise be easily seen as criminal behavior in order to properly dispense justice. ...But those were merely revenge fantasies. ... Once they had insisted that I would have to commit a legal murder, or a legal burglary, or a legal fraud to settle the score, the score no longer seemed so settle-able. Who might later come after me and prosecute me for my prosecution, for the practice of retribution seemed to demand that the judge, jury, and executioner stick their noses where no nose should ever explore, and seemed wholly unlikely to settle any score? There were good reasons, and above all decent ones, why the early Christians rejected Old Testament practices in favor of others. Eye-for-an-eye justice eventually renders more than the guilty blind, and the purpose of justice cannot possibly have ever been merely to render anybody, especially itself, blind. Justice served should have dispensed some sense of closure along with some possibility of recovery. Turning the guilty into another dead body shouldn’t satisfy anybody, especially the dead body or his dispatchers. Stuck with this paradox, justice and the society it serves face a damned-whether-it-does dilemma. We dare not allow criminals to simply roam free, for they seem destined only to take mean advantage and, unrestrained, seem likely only to repeat their performances again and again. We must intervene, but perhaps with intentions different from traditional ones. Once we acknowledge that what was formerly thought to be just punishment no longer serves the accused, the accuser, or society in general, we still face an essentially infinite set of choices. Reducing the possible infinite number of responses by one couldn’t meaningfully reduce the remaining number. We seem limited by little more than our imaginations, though our imaginations might remain focused on replaying revenge fantasies, given that they knew little other until they realized their quintessential error. If retribution goes the same way as vengeance, what cards does any decent prosecution have left to play? When the prudence part of our jurisprudence fails, what might meaningfully replace it? What does juris do when its traditional prudence fails? Juris, a Latin term meaning “of law” or “of right”, has always faced a contradiction when engaging in its remit’s enforcement end, for it cannot hope to “fix” any past, though this seems to be its job when prosecuting a lawbreaker or a wrongdoer. ... Those pasts have already passed by the time the law or the right caught up with the prosecuted. ... Whatever constituted that prior world was already gone by the time the prosecution began, and that before-world will always remain the one thing nobody involved will ever be capable of returning to anyone. ... It seems to closely follow the stages of acceptance, where denial precedes anger, and anger slips into bargaining before finally accepting that the world cannot be restored to how it had been before. ... If even the punishment amounts to little more than another crime, though a legal one that time, what’s advanced by even prudent juris? Last week, The Muse and I attended a Society for the Prevention of Port Commissioners Meeting in the Columbia Gorge. There, a forest primeval once stretched to the far edge of every visitor’s imagination. Now, a ragged burn scar stretches from horizon to horizon, that primeval forest reduced to ashes and stumps by a thoughtless teenager playing with fireworks over a Fourth of July holiday. Nobody in their right mind would ever think to set off fireworks in a midsummer forest, but then few have successfully argued that teenagers ever experience right-mindedness. Most somehow manage to survive those years to thrive in adulthood, but a few do real and lasting damage before they mature. Nothing any court might find will ever restore that pristine woodland. No punishment any prosecutor might seek could make up for the loss. No amount of money, time, or punishment could make a lick of difference to the millions of disappointed visitors or the displaced inhabitants. None of us alive today will live to see those vistas the way our younger selves saw them there. It seems the worse the crime, the more inherently toothless the punishment. ... Their lives never amounted to much less than a hill of beans, anyway, so their forfeited lives were little more than symbolic gestures destined to fail to absolve anyone or anything. Few believed they should grace this world once convicted, but perhaps fewer successfully convinced themselves that killing them made more than retributive sense. ... I fantasized while visiting The Gorge that the teenager was sentenced to a lifelong indenture planting trees for the forest service, where, in his presumably long life, he might plant more trees than he destroyed. After a few hundred years, with luck, a replacement forest might flourish, though not where he destroyed the previous one. Perhaps justice is just a sophisticated form of denial, a studied refusal to accept that we cannot fix any past. My revenge fantasies vis-à-vis our current incumbent have blunted upon further reflection. He has been an idiot in office, and we still hold the promise of a future that is wise in ways presently unimaginable. I pray that the future holds little for those who thought so damned little of themselves that they visited such terror upon us when they were members of this administration that mistook the purpose of administering to be inflicting terror. May we learn from their vengeance that vengeance might not have been the solution we historically held it to be. May whatever we might choose to do before we commit retribution, before we consider &Retribution, be worthy of those who acknowledge that no present act could ever change any past. ... Let us, in our future, not go quite so blindly into any upcoming darkness or sunrise. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

...

Truth&

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-30T06:23:31-07:00

"Let the rest of us seek reconciliation and forgiveness." After the end of apartheid in South Africa, Nelson Mandela authorized the convening of a court-like restorative justice body to both hear testimony from witnesses identified as apartheid’s victims and perpetrators seeking amnesty from apartheid-era civil and criminal prosecution. This body was called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and was intended to achieve something similar to what the Nuremberg trials after WWII had not. The Nuremberg Trials represented retributive justice, seeking to attribute guilt and impose punishment. The TRC sought something similar to the opposite, to acknowledge the wrongs and to seek forgiveness. This high-minded effort fell short of its aims, yet left a deep impression on both South Africa and the world. It still serves as a model for seeking alternative justice for widespread criminal behavior, beyond the individual and into the social. Canada mustered one as part of its Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement to document the systemic harms and history of Canada’s residential school system. Guatemala, Peru, and East Timor also pursued similar reconciliation strategies following self-inflicted human rights tragedies. As these EndDays stories near the end of their series, my thoughts have increasingly turned toward What’s Next, though I already posted my WhatNext Series back in the autumn of 2020. Then, I was anticipating the ending of The Muse and my long exile. Today, I’m considering what form our necessary reconciliation for the crimes committed by this administration, which has seemed to ache for retribution since day one, might take. I have long savored the thought of the necessary impeachment trial, though winnowing down that Bill of Particulars into a convictable indictment might prove nearly impossible. Few believe the Senate would ever convict at trial, anyway, so they wander away thinking our perpetrator-in-chief will probably just get away with it all again. This conclusion might amount to cynicism roughly equivalent to that held by the cynics assembled in the Senate, but it might still prove accurate enough to smother the will to impeach, which will not in any way help resolve the real source of the problem we’re facing. I wrote last week about how Truth must be the primary shared purpose if self-governance is to be accomplished. Lies piled up to near high heaven can never level appropriately the field required for Big D Democracy to effectively play, and undermine every attempt to achieve justice. Under this regime, though, Truth has become a criminal offense, punishable by any of a raft of very likely illegal injunctions. The courts have been working overtime playing Whack-A-Mole with this administration, determined to indict every remaining ham sandwich, however nutritious. Truth has become the chief victim of a thousand criminal conspiracies. It has flourished anyway, in many more than a thousand, often little, ways. The criminal communication system seems determined to supplant what was once considered reliable information, seeking to bring into question even issues long settled by scientists as well as citizens. The resulting uncertainty has gained unprecedented legitimacy under this walking miscarriage of administration overseen by our adolescent incumbent. We collectively ache to become grown-ups again. As much as I might feel attracted to the concept of a bloodletting impeachment, I admit that we might need more realignment than retribution. If I acknowledge that the breadth and magnitude of these crimes might deserve punishment, I must also observe that nobody could ever live long enough to atone for these sins. How many centuries would be required to repay the moral debt incurred in just the first year and a half of this administration that knows no bottom? ... These calculations seem destined to fail to deliver retributive justice but to bring eternal disappointment. Further, if we do nothing to address the cause of this damning erosion of Truth, we might just make matters worse by pursuing Nuremberg justice in the face of these latest and, arguably, ever greater criminal and civil insults. We must reclaim our identity if we are to continue as the nation we believe we deserve, if, indeed, we still feel as if we deserve such a nation, one dedicated to Truth, Justice, and, what was that American way supposed to be about, anyway? Hence, my thoughts return to Truth and Reconciliation. First, the Truth, and little but. This administration, which has yet to meet a truth it felt it could swallow, considers even the smallest truth poison. It thrives on what most citizens acknowledge to be toxic. The media that feeds their obsession do not represent free speech but the loosest and the worsest of loose talk. Free speech does not even imply any right to engage in loose talk. Ask the crowded movie theater when the loose talker yells, “Fire!” The difficulty of determining Truth pales when compared with the deep down damage loose talk has done, and continues to do. Reconciliation demands not just Truth, but the courage to honestly seek it and the perhaps foolhardiness to stand up and declare it, however personally embarrassing it might seem. We have seen the collective and personal costs of undermining Truth. Perhaps we need a civic exercise intended to bolster and promote it. We might start by taxing Faux News out of existence. Let its messages go underground to feed a justly undernourished resistance. Let the rest of us seek reconciliation and forgiveness. (More talk of Truth & Reconciliation to come in my next installment.) ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 05/28/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-28T12:22:32-07:00

This week’s EndDays dispatches arrived in the aftermath of standing up in a room full of local leaders and saying the thing that needed saying. The writing ranged from the patient fury of Tolerance to the slow slide of Erosion, from the epistemological trap of ReceivedKnowledge to the paradox of ExperTease, from the systematic cruelty of Capriciousity to the civic illiteracy of Gumment. The week also brought a sophisticated publishing fraud using a real editor’s name and a nearly correct domain — and BookBub, which appears to be the genuine article. ...“There comes a point in the history of a nation when continued Tolerance no longer cuts it.” This EndDays Story wonders how much longer we patient Americans can sustain our stoic forbearance in the face of unprecedented and arbitrary insults. In this EndDays Story, I marveled that my fellow Americans and I must be the most tolerant people in history, having been tolerating the ignominy of a capricious incumbent and his equally insulting Cabinet. On any odd Tuesday, the current incumbent outdoes the insults King George III inflicted upon our forebears — yet our forebears flinched and fought back, while we seem to be tolerating indefinitely. ... The great power of any Old Status Quo can blind even the most perceptive to what’s looming before them. ... There comes a point in the history of a nation when continued Tolerance no longer cuts it. ...“We cannot maintain anything like a society of, by, or even for the people, if those people, We The People, are not absolutely committed to pursuing truth together.” This EndDays Story finds society Eroding under the cynical leadership of the unserious who don’t believe that truth matters most. In this EndDays Story, I traced the relationship between EndDays and Erosion — each contributing to the other: a snake eating its own tail. ... Cynicism might be the concerted lack of belief in truth’s beneficence, and those who proclaim that truth doesn’t matter will ultimately prove unable to control the Erosion they encourage. Each dawn brings a feeling that less will be greeting me that morning — security absent, well-being missing from the roll call roster, my precious sense of potential seemingly abandoned. ... We cannot maintain anything like a society of, by, or even for the people if those people are not absolutely committed to pursuing truth together. ...In this EndDays Story, I executed a full stop upon reading a New Yorker article that casually characterized all AI data centers as “toxic and water-draining,” as if these were undeniably uniform attributes. ... It also makes me proud of my stupidity, as if I had become the genius I should have remembered I never was. ...This EndDays Story speaks to the limits of expertise and the potential wisdom only found in not sharing all you know. In this EndDays Story, The Muse’s careful research into the financial impact of a proposed data center became an exercise in ExperTease — the delicate art of possessing more information than any conversation can comfortably contain. She employed the Socratic Method, partnering with Claude to shorten search times and build an animated model in an evening, iterating until she could fill in a bigger picture. ... She now possesses a paradox well known to experts throughout history: the best-informed won’t necessarily be better armed for any engagement. ... I left impressed and overwhelmed, clear that I lacked the expertise to even judge the quality of the result — but the questions seemed adequately stunning to render any controversy about their quality moot. ...“Then, perhaps, equal justice under the law might start making sense to even them, though I doubt it.” This EndDays Story examines Capriciousity — the malignant, systematic weaponization of capriciousness as a governing principle, in direct violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection guarantee. In this EndDays Story, I examined how this administration, still struggling to comprehend the concept of administration, has been consistently inconsistent in how it enforces laws — most profoundly in its vicious prosecution of so-called illegal aliens. Declaring an alien illegal merely due to their due process being delayed by an overwhelmed judiciary does not render them illegal in any actual legal sense. ... Under the principle that no one can be fairly characterized as guilty until found so by a jury of their peers, these “illegals” are clearly still innocent, until. Those who arrive here illegally are also guaranteed due process, for that right is not reserved only for citizens but for any person present in this country. ... The punishment for Capriciousity should properly exceed the sentence for virtually any other felony, for it violates such a fundamental principle under our law. Then, perhaps, equal justice under the law might start making sense to even them, though I doubt it. ...“Nobody will ever properly govern for us; we’re required to be more than merely emotionally involved: of, BY, and for.” This EndDays Story examines our colloquial understanding of what we’re governing and how, which has eroded to the point where I seriously wonder how we might ever recover from what our ignorance has wrought. In this EndDays Story, I confessed that I suspect I know much less about how our government works than I suspect, and I doubt that I’m in anything like a unique position on this issue. We haven’t responded with anything like the vehemence these violations have warranted, partly because we aren’t clear about our actual rights and obligations under the law. ... We tend to approach our obligations tabula rasa, as if we’d forgotten the necessary and specific operations behind that kind of long division. We seem an ignorant polity, more interested in idling than in understanding how to properly fulfill our sacred obligations. Self-governance is not a DoorDash order, commanded for our convenience, but more like a gourmet meal we prepare with respect for tradition and to showcase our ever-increasing, if not yet perfect, skills. Nobody will ever properly govern for us; we’re required to be more than merely emotionally involved: of, BY, and for. ...Once an author becomes an author, by which I mean, of course, once the book's published, a psychological syndrome settles in. ...An email comes in querying about the author of this fabulous new book that has just been published. ... In that exchange, the newly fledged author might experience their first flush of what it must mean to be an author. ...Our author seems ready for the plucking, and a plucking he will experience if he's not … experienced. ...Paying for recommendations to a website that fancies itself as the place where serious readers come to discover their next read, though such a place could not possibly exist. The PAD-suffering author will swallow even the most incredible offers, not in that moment noticing that they're only increasing their overhead rather than their return. ...As much as I might want the seduction to be true, I'm experienced enough to recognize that while I might be good-looking, I've rarely been recognized for my brilliance. ... It has so far found only one credible offer from the many that have found me, and that one featured a user interface that defeated my attempts to link up. I learned, when The Blind Men was published, that most of the attention I would receive would have nothing whatsoever to do with the content of my work. ... Many wanted me to dumb down the message for easier assimilation, usually without any prospect of remuneration beyond sales increases that were not trackable and unlikely to ever happen. ... If it's seduction, it's probably not real, but one can reliably feel as though they're on top of an imaginary world for a spell. ...I employed Claude.ai, a commercial AI-powered text editor, using it to perform repetitive copy/pasting work and to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.”

Gumment

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-28T05:45:48-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: Pygmalion and the Image - The Heart Desires (1878) "Nobody will ever properly govern for us; we’re required to be more than merely emotionally involved: of, BY, and for." I suspect I know much less about how our government works than I suspect. I suppose that I’m not in anything like a unique position concerning this issue. I doubt that it was ever any different, though nostalgia might have affected my remembering. I would prefer to believe that we citizens, those of us for whom our government was originally constituted, the much-vaunted “We, the people,” were well-versed in the workings of our governing institutions, but I fear that we’ve never mastered much more than a Pidgin proficiency in either our government or our history. This condition makes us easy targets for unscrupulous operators who might feel little compunction about materially misrepresenting to us our rights and obligations under the law. Certainly, this current administration, which has never been rightfully accused of properly administering anything, has proven no exception to this caution, for it seems to operate as an exception to every actual rule constituted under our laws. We haven’t responded with anything like the vehemence these violations have warranted. I suspect this might be because we aren’t clear about our actual rights and obligations under the law. We largely operate on interpretations dressed up as accurate representations: Second Amendment interpretations that could only embarrass Our Constitution’s framers. Violations of those sacred separations of church and state seem common now, nearly the expected norm for some. Equal protection under any law seems like fiction since Citizens United started ruling the purse. Our colloquial understanding of what we’re governing and how has eroded to the point where I seriously wonder how we might ever recover from what our ignorance has wrought. Never strictly a direct democracy nor properly representative, our government was born hybrid. It carried a mythos from conception that not only allowed but actively promoted certain misconceptions. These might have always been necessary to smooth unavoidable surface imperfections, though they materially misrepresented who we were and our true intentions. From history’s immoral slaveowners to today’s derelict billionaires, equality has always been a popular fantasy, though belief in it certainly luffs our flags, always has, and likely always will. Perhaps every society might, at root, be mythical and utterly dependent upon the innate goodness and maturity of those entrusted to keep both public promises and secrets. Fingers tightly crossed and safely secured behind their backs, our Congress Members and Senators split mostly infinitesimal differences and largely irrelevant rules. They might make up with tradition what they tend to forfeit in execution, with few of us any wiser or better informed for their experiences. The questions underlying the founding of this country and our government were serious inquiries into the rights of people relative to their government. These were only ever answered after a fashion, and relied upon a certain forward evolution to succeed in creating what Lincoln referred to as a “more perfect” rather than a perfect union. That pursuit continues in considerable earnest, with special attention to progress lost to momentum. Like a schoolchild returning to class after a summer spent away from academics, We, The People, seem out of practice relative to our great shared experiment. We tend to approach our obligations tabula rasa, as if we’d forgotten or never really understood the necessary and specific operations behind that kind of long division. We seem an ignorant polity, more interested in idling than in understanding how to properly fulfill our sacred obligations or even exercise our hard-won rights. We’re apt to abandon mankind’s greatest opportunity in favor of some partisan political chicanery. I wonder if we were ever worthy of receiving our precious inheritance. We’ve experienced shortfalls before. We’ve seen the Boss Tweeds and Huey Longs, the Richard Milhouse Nixons and Henry Kissingers who twisted governance into seductive caricatures. We have been serially fooled by Trickle-Down deceptions and patriotic misrepresentations into believing our government was something other than it should ever have been intended to become, or actually was. We are presently under a receding thrall, by my accounting, the worst ever visited upon our innocently ignorant populace. The people might be less deplorable than suggestible, but it says little for the prospects of forward evolution toward more perfection if we can be so easily manipulated into swallowing our present incumbent’s bullshit, even for a minute. I feel the need for a Great Awakening, though I only hesitantly invoke the metaphor so steeped in manipulative history to describe it. We seem to require a little mass enlightenment, a general expansion of civic consciousness, a willingness to accept that we failed that last dedication test and to rededicate ourselves to understanding our Gumment and our essential role in preserving it. Self-governance is not a DoorDash order, commanded for our convenience, but more like a gourmet meal we prepare with respect for tradition and to showcase our ever-increasing, if not yet perfect, skills. Nobody will ever properly govern for us; we’re required to be more than merely emotionally involved: of, BY, and for. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Capriciousity

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-27T05:37:45-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: Pygmalion and the Image - The Hand Refrains (1878) "Then, perhaps, equal justice under the law might start making sense to even them, though I doubt it." Equal protection under the law serves as the bedrock principle under which these United States have operated at least since the 14th Amendment was enacted after the Civil War. If enforcement has been anything but consistent, Congress’s intent in proposing it and the majority of the States’ intent in ratifying it seal its presence as something other than inadvertent. This administration still struggling to comprehend the concept of administration, which has been seemingly deliberately failing to abide by this fundamental underlying principle, as it has been consistently inconsistent in how it enforces laws. Clearly, race and national origin, as exhibited most profoundly in their vicious prosecution of so-called illegal aliens, have appeared with obvious intent to overtly violate this most fundamental legal principle. Declaring an alien illegal merely due to their due process being delayed by an overwhelmed judiciary does not render them illegal in any actual legal sense. If anything, they might find themselves temporarily suspended between legal statuses. Pending might better describe their formal status, and, under the principle that no one can be fairly characterized as guilty until found so by a jury of their peers, it cannot be treated as even a preliminary form of guilt. These “illegals” are clearly still innocent, until. Those who arrive here illegally are also guaranteed due process, for that right is not reserved only for citizens but for any person present in this country, as our Constitution insists. The fiction that we were overrun with “illegals,” then, was always an abomination. It was created to encourage what I consider the most fundamental miscarriage of justice imaginable under our Constitution, a condition I will label Capriciousity. This amounts to capriciousness on steroids, the malignant prosecution of a supposed other, typically a minority, to the point of deliberate persecution. In practice, it’s invoked as a series of double binds. An infraction’s imagined. It never matters if that infraction actually occurred. The accusation serves as grounds for detaining a person for further investigation. The investigation, as executed by this administration which can’t seem to properly investigate any more than they can competently administer, typically holds each detainee incommunicado, without legal representation, and in isolation from their family and community. They intend the detention to seem like punishment and perhaps to make the innocent detainee feel guilty. Then, the threats begin. Let’s Make A Deal choices are proposed. “Would you prefer what’s behind door number one or door number two?” Coerced choices, insisted upon without legal representation, seal many detainees’ fates. Because they chose not to choose or opted for an option that inconvenienced their captors, they might be raptured to a country other than the one they originally came from. They might be threatened with being sent to some place in Africa where an Ebola epidemic rages, without resources to defend or support themselves once abandoned there. If this threat itself doesn’t amount to cruel and unusual punishment, I really don’t know what might. Those who puff themselves up with this sort of righteousness deserve the worst our judicial system might bestow upon them, though even they deserve far better than they gave to these legally innocent civilians, whether or not they had ever been sanctified as citizens. I plead for nothing other than what even the least devout Christian might consider anyone’s due. Nobody, not even you, can ever legally be above any law, but nobody ever deserves to be held below it, either. How ever one might calculate their fear or revulsion at another’s origin, they are never free or legally sanctioned to capriciously enforce even the least of our immigration laws. I find such behavior intolerable. I expect—Hell, I pray—for a decade of reconciliation following the downfall of this capriciously non-administering administration. I expect a full-blown Reconstruction, where the work interrupted by the traitorous President Johnson, finally continues to completion. Where those who chose Capriciousity will receive their days in court, and then serve their sentences as prudence against any such future serial misrepresentation of our lawmakers’ and our Constitution’s intentions. The punishment for Capriciousity should properly exceed the sentence for virtually any other felony, for it violates such a fundamental principle under our law that such perpetrators should not roam free. Maybe the proper sentence for Capriciousity should simply be to deport one convicted of it to some “shithole” country whose constitution insists upon Capriciousity as the most fundamental legal principle. Let them live where the country feels free to persecute those it should only ever prosecute, and even then, only under the goddamn law. Let them have their cake, eat it, and then eat the shit they make with it. Then, perhaps, equal justice under the law might start making sense to even them, though I doubt it. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

ExperTease

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-26T05:47:03-07:00

"…adequately stunning to render any controversy about their quality moot." The one with the most information does not necessarily win any competition, for their competitor cannot compete on the same playing field, and might well default before an actual game can even begin. One might try to more perfectly pair levels of actual ExperTease, lest an encounter dissolve in jest or worse. A contest worth watching tends to be well-balanced, with each contestant nearly equally skilled, lest their play turn into a rout. ... When success turns into a foregone conclusion, who should even be bothered to watch? Likewise, no one except a player’s family enjoys a game between two teams without at least some expertise in the game. ...For The Muse, the potential that a data center presented needed to be carefully calculated. Nobody had gone to the trouble of researching and determining just how future tax revenues might impact our valley. While some complained about the underlying technology, she carefully calculated opportunity costs and expenses. Some seemed to reject any possibility out of hand, some, perhaps, due to some spurious ReceivedKnowledge they held about potential problems. She knew the Washington State Department of Ecology would largely hold responsibility for verifying and validating the data center owner’s designs and claims. As the oldest department of ecology among the states, it had a reputation and experience evaluating scores of existing data centers. Technology and siting decisions were beyond her control as a Port Commissioner, since the Port had merely sold the land to a data center developer, but she could at least try to satisfy herself by projecting the financial impact the development might have. Who has standing to even develop such a study? Not The Muse, for her remit as a Port Commissioner does not prescribe a role for her in analyzing revenues, yet nobody else seemed to carry that responsibility, either. Her curiosity led her to inquire, which in turn prompted her to develop a model showing the source and timing of the likely tax revenues the data center might reasonably generate. She employed Claude®, an AI engine, as her partner, partly because it could determine which publicly accessible databases could be properly queried for historical data. Much of any model’s development gets spent just finding reasonable sources of background data, so partnering with an AI engine to shorten those search times made good sense. She surprised herself when that partnership produced an animated model in an evening. The first iteration was crude but servicable, and encouraged her to continue iterating until she could fill in a bigger picture. Every inch of progress translated into not just a better model, but a deeper understanding of the elements and issues surrounding this impending development. She was employing the Socratic Method, asking questions and discovering ever-deeper ones, iteratively changing both her target and her understanding, but also leaving ever further behind any constituent with whom she might have intended to share the product of her research. She was delving more deeply than most had ever considered the effects of an industrial development on a public purse. Did she even have standing to share her results? ...She sought to validate her model by sharing it with her fellow Blind Men, each with their parochial perspective, arrayed around this particular Elephant. Her model had evolved into something more global than the perspective of any other elected official. No one person held authority over the breadth and width of such a development’s impacts. The Muse had crawled into many narrow nooks and crannies in pursuit of something that might pass muster as truth, though she was well aware that she was largely dealing in future projections, albeit ones informed by much more than idle speculation. She had become an expert, at least in her model. ... Who could be qualified to check the underlying quality of her conclusions? She now possesses a paradox, one well known to experts throughout history. The best informed won’t necessarily be better armed for any engagement. Those holding the best of information inescapably need to interact with those holding much less, and those differences tend to clash. Further, some of the most critical issues cannot be expressed as black-or-white choices but rest on subtle distinctions often invisible to those not more deeply immersed in the nuances of some questions. Reasonable assumptions depend entirely on shared understanding, and deeper subtleties rarely seem reasonable to the less well-informed. The expert faces the real potential of engaging in little more than dialogues with the deaf, the expert’s deafness not the least influence on the quality of any attempted outcome. She’s validating her model now, unsure if she can share it as broadly as she’d originally imagined. She lacks standing to speak for the system she has so successfully modeled, and her model seems incapable of coherently speaking for itself. She might have created a monster for all the usual good reasons, merely seeking understanding, but also purchasing existential angst. People have been encouraging her to widely share this model because it might help proliferate a deeper understanding than seems likely otherwise. As an employee of The Port, her actions are not solely her own decisions, and as a member of this community, she holds responsibilities beyond and beside her own expectations for herself. She must balance these, even as she sees naive conclusions being drawn that her modeling helped her resolve. She kept the transcript of her Socratic dialogue with Claude. I asked her if I could look through it. I left impressed and overwhelmed, clear that I lacked the expertise to even judge the quality of the result. I could judge the quality of the questions she and her electronic partner pursued, though, and they seemed adequately stunning to render any controversy about their quality moot. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

...

ReceivedKnowledge

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-25T06:33:49-07:00

The children of Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Bt and William Morris ..."...as if I had become the genius I should have remembered I never was." I was reading ‘my’ New Yorker over breakfast, when I encountered another especially glaring example of ReceivedWisdom. I found this instance particularly upsetting because the New Yorker has always been renowned for its scrupulous editing and fact-checking, yet here it passed off a popular prejudice as if it were a commonly understood fact. The article, Fools Rush In, was a lighthearted report from California’s new gold rush. With the price of gold hitting five thousand dollars, many had abandoned whatever their prior profession might have been, or after that profession had abandoned them, to work old abandoned placer mines in the Sierra Nevada. The author, Jennifer Wilson, was presenting a brief history of California’s State legislature’s attempt to regulate certain sorts of mining that dredges up long-buried mercury deposits that poison rivers and fish. She claims, “I wanted to dismiss that posture [miner protests against these regulations] as science denialism tinged with macho bravado. But then I imagined how I’d feel living near Silicon Valley, whose billionaire class shows up clean-shaven and well rested at Davos to pitch toxic, water-draining A.I. data centers.” I executed a full stop! In the popular literature, A.I. data centers are almost always characterized as toxic and water-draining, as if these were undeniably uniform attributes of all data centers, when they are most certainly not. This description has entered the public consciousness as ReceivedKnowledge, unexamined and unquestioned because “everyone knows” it’s accurate, except it isn’t. Am I just being overly sensitive? I don’t believe so. Too much of the swirl of information accompanying these EndDays seems to have been reduced into an ever-increasing volume of ReceivedKnowledge. These might increase the efficiency of information transfer while also subtly poisoning the well. The media seems particularly attracted to stories that characterize data centers as evil, and any little opportunity that arises to reinforce that a priori notion seems altogether too attractive not to further amplify. The bad billionaires and their evil data centers do not nearly define the whole genré. The good data centers far outweigh the bad, but, apparently, like apples, a few bad ones are plenty to spoil the whole barrel. Also, data centers represent an evolving technology. Mistakes made in early designs have been corrected with later ones. Unscrupulous actors emerge where big investments appear, and watchdogs often seem to lag in discovering what later seem like obvious shortcomings. Rather than characterize an industry learning where its limits lie, ReceivedKnowledge seems to hold data centers responsible for getting their technology right the first time, when such expectations have rarely been satisfiable in history. Over time, technology might evolve to seem infallible, if it ever manages to outgrow its initial characterization as wholly unworkable. We’re not really trying to solve The Gravity Problem. The least generous interpretation gets attached to any negative ReceivedKnowledge. It’s as if these memes give us permission to turn off our critical thinking and let loose scathing criticism. Few expressions seem more deep-down satisfying for those aching for another conspiracy theory. Screw the theory portion. ReceivedKnowledge is never characterized as theoretical, political, or heretical; it’s received as obvious truth, pre-validated for convenience’s sake. We feel quietly grateful that whatever controversy might have been associated with that meme has been authoritatively brought to ground, once and for all. We might even mindlessly repeat the story. Then, like looking for red cars, everywhere we look, we find confirmation for holding our newly acquired prejudice. This sensation leaves us feeling smarter. How clever we feel to root out so much clear evidence of this latest evil doing! Damn the billionaires and their data centers! Social media hardly even notices the irony it encourages when everybody’s Facebook fills up with reinforcing data center-bashing blurbs. Whatever wisdom and knowledge exists within that latest ReceivedKnowledge sits between the lines. Reading carefully, a reader might find that those landowners complaining about a data center exercising its legal easement right riled them because they refused to pay more than the normal and customary fee for exercising their privilege. This was not a story of bully billionaires capriciously stringing high tension lines for fun and profits, but a typical argument against public use of private property, with more than a little bit of unquestioned ReceivedKnowledge thrown in, perhaps unconsciously by another infected reporter. Objective reportage was never strictly possible, but attempting it when poisoned by a raft of ReceivedKnowledge truly renders it impossible to muster. I suspect that I’m unaware of the extent to which I’ve been poisoned by such spurious knowledge. I figure I need others to help me identify my blind spots, especially those I’m preternaturally proud of possessing. ReceivedKnowledge doesn’t just make me stupid. It also makes me proud of my stupidity, as if I had become the genius I should have remembered I never was. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Erosion

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-24T06:05:28-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: The Falls from the Narrow Neck near the Eastern Headland of the Outlet (1865) We cannot maintain anything like a society of, by, or even for the people, if those people, We The People, are not absolutely committed to pursuing truth together. EndDays prominently feature Erosion. Whether Erosion causes EndDays or EndDays encourages erosion, I can’t say. Both contribute. This snake eats its own tail. It seems certain that once EndDays appear, Erosion increases, just as if some critical mass had been exceeded and gravity simply proceeded doing what she’d always done, only ever so much more so. Truth might have been the first stalwart to go, for it had always been essential and irreplaceable. Once truth starts slipping, a long, inexorable slide appears. There was never any way back from there. Then the end does more than just seem to be growing nearer. Cynicism might be the concerted lack of belief in truth’s beneficience. Any erosion of this simplest faith, that truth—even when not entirely whole or nothing but—preserves all other faiths, lessens us. We need truth to uphold our faith in self-regulation, in our fellow man, even that entrope will eventually render us back into sand. Societies hum along on the simplest fuel and turn cruel when they lack it. The belief that truth matters most matters most. Those who don’t hold this one belief to be supremely self-evident are the very soul of deviant. They seem supremely unserious, not the sort of person one should ever consider electing to any important position in any government, down to and definitely including dog catcher. Those cursed with an unserious chief executive come to know Erosion firsthand, as their civilization starts slipping through their fingers like so much sand. Each dawn brings a feeling that less will be greeting me that morning. I cannot tell, as the sun rises, which pieces of the picture might show up missing that morning; I am learning to expect a few holes in my experience. The sense of security that used to greet me might be absent some morning. That abiding sense of well-being might also be missing from my usual role call roster. My precious sense of potential, of genuine possibility, might also seem to abandon me. These are each and all evidence of Erosion having her way with the quality of my experience. The Centers for Disease Control sure seem to lack control since the son of a bitch with little respect for scientific truth possesses it. Without truth regulating, our military, traditionally serving to defend against enemies, foreign and domestic, becomes the principal antagonist in the world, picking fights for the apparent purpose of picking fights, eroding the distinction between the good guys and the bad. That’s Erosion in the first degree with an oak leaf clusterfuck! Those who proclaim that truth doesn’t matter, the same ones who natter on about non-existent controversies on social media, encourage Erosion they ultimately will prove unable to control. They seem unlikely to survive repeated encounters. They seem dependent upon undermining to animate their beings. Who would they have to become to cheer on civilization? They willingly volunteer their services to support the ash cans of history, past tenses, even in their presence, irrelevancies. Contrary to popular misconception, truth doesn’t necessarily hurt. It hurts much less, for instance, than does the tenacious insistence that truth doesn’t much matter. Those who live to take this sort of advantage of the gullible earn themselves a truly special place in their own DIY Hell. They try to drag decent people down with them, for their own amusement, I suspect, but never for the betterment of even themselves. The absence of truth hurts more and more reliably than even the rawest, most unprocessed truth could manage. The stories I sometimes tell myself when I’d rather not be completely candid with myself reliably undermine my own serenity. I’m still learning to be brutally honest with myself because anything less introduces a whole other level of brutality. Ultimately, truth hurts less than the alternatives, especially once the inevitable Erosion kicks in. We cannot maintain anything like a society of, by, or even for the people, if those people, We The People, are not absolutely committed to pursuing truth together. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tolerance

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-23T06:27:20-07:00

"There comes a point in the history of a nation when continued Tolerance no longer cuts it." My fellow Americans and I must be the most tolerant people in history. We’ve been tolerating the ignominy of a capricious incumbent and his equally insulting Cabinet. We’ve tolerated unprecedented abuses of our public and private decency. On any odd Tuesday, the current incumbent outdoes the insults King George III inflicted upon our forebears. Our forebears flinched and fought back, even though it appeared at first that they had no chance of vanquishing their persecutors. They were that furious. I feel curious as to what offense might flip our stoic forbearance and force us to take up something resembling arms in defense against the continuing humiliation. This is still our nation, after all, and a self-destructive renter has been absolutely trashing our old home place. Any contest between couthness and uncouthness seems foregone from its outset. There are always many things the couth will just not agree to do under any circumstances, while the uncouth are never anything like equally restrained. The uncouth seem to revel in taking mean advantage of every opponent, perhaps believing that their just being opposed to them serves as ample justification for whatever punishment they might impose. Eye for an eye justice never comes into question for them, for they’d just as soon exercise overwhelming force, however otherwise unjustified, if only to absolutely clarify their dominion. The couth might eventually outsmart the unscrupulously uncouth, but they seem destined to take some damage through any interregnum irresolution. These fights seem fundamentally unfair, so it might be wise for the couth to dust off their Tolerance under such conditions, to maintain at least a narrow profile so as not to rile any less disciplined ire. The King James Version of the Bible instructs: “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” Does this Tolerance have roots in ancient religious texts? I doubt this. It might be that we’re shy and retiring in ways that our forebears couldn’t quite afford to be. Perhaps affluence has mollified our otherwise native intolerance and turned us into a nation of appeasers, aiming first to please ourselves, then others. We can’t help but notice just how insane our incumbent behaves. Are we tiptoeing around, hoping not to be noticed by his capricious lieutenants? Is Tolerance just another form of spirited defense, albeit one with much less spirit in evidence? Or have we become a nation of virtual cowards, so terrified of losing our tenuous toehold that we’ll put up with the otherwise absolutely intolerable? Are we tolerant or cowed? How might we determine the difference? Karma, or the Lord, will eventually have their way, and not only because they always somehow manage to. Our renter-in-chief seems to understand that his tenure remains far from secure. Sure, he behaves as if he owns the joint even though he doesn’t. His tenure appears to be more performative, the sort only ever resorted to as a last resort. He abandoned all hope for legitimacy the moment he abandoned decency in favor of belligerent performance. This choice clearly demonstrated the depth of his weakness. He seems to be ripe pickings for any odd passerby Karma or Lord to take balancing advantage of his dangerously exposed flank. He must be the most vulnerable chief executive in history, with nobody even in the running to take second place. His was always a race to the bottom, undertaken in remarkably shallow water. He has very little latitude for error and the overwhelming proclivity to commit unredeemable error. Yeah, Karma or the Lord seems certain to level him. My patience has been wearing thin, having been repeatedly subjected to absolutely unnecessary and arbitrary insults. We have a toddler in charge who fulfills his role as if he’s smearing his Spaghetti-Os all over his highchair’s tray, getting his dinner in his hair. Not even he’s enjoying himself now. He’s way past due for a fresh diaper, but nobody wants to face this inevitability. His nursemaids tolerate instead, trying to buy enough time so the next shift will have to deal with the many-headed mess. Tolerance makes more than a little sense, given these conditions, but it doesn’t have to feel good to be prudent. Some mornings, though, I’d exchange places with my forebear Minute Men, even given that they couldn’t have known whether their rebellion would be rewarded with a home or Heaven. There comes a point in the history of a nation when continued Tolerance no longer cuts it. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 05/21/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-21T06:36:24-07:00

This week’s EndDays dispatches arrived while I was partly in alien territory, writing from the lobby of Skamania Lodge as The Muse attended a Washington State Port Commissioners gathering. The Columbia River predawn fog held steady outside while the week’s writing ranged from the physics of Backwards progress to the theology of Religionism, from the terror of public acknowledgment to the discomfiting blindness of PipeDreaming. I stood up in a room full of local leaders and said the thing that needed saying out loud. ...“…the physics of making this country great again seem to reliably result in rendering it worse.” This EndDays Story employs Aristotelian physics to explain the peculiar sensation that gravity and levity have both stopped working correctly under this administration. In this EndDays Story, I borrowed Aristotle’s two governing forces — gravity and levity — to describe what EndDays feel like from the inside. Gravity seems to be working overtime, with every initiative sinking beneath the waterline, while levity has gone strangely absent, as demonstrated when the traditional White House Correspondents’ Dinner devolved into armed camps rather than light-hearted banter. This administration navigates solely by whim, which Aristotle never listed among his fundamental elements, though it most closely resembles his fifth element, Aether — a gaseous substance that, in this case, reportedly stinks to high heaven. Those of us accustomed to the old, reliable four elements feel rightfully disoriented when balls roll up inclined planes seemingly unassisted and fire sinks beneath water. The physics of making this country great again seem to reliably render it worse. ...This EndDays Story finds me reclaiming my own authority after too long ceding it to the rampaging cynicism surrounding me! In this EndDays Story, I realized that our incumbent has already passed the threshold beyond which no former president ever accomplished anything new — that narrow window of roughly 175 days within which any administration can actually permanently change anything. We are well past that horizon for this one, yet I had somehow ceded my own authority to the spectacle. Viktor Orbán’s recent electoral defeat reminded me of what always ultimately happens to authoritarians who pit themselves against democratic-minded citizens. ... Our incumbent seems to be unwittingly performing no less of a public service, shedding former supporters and losing whatever mandate his tiny electoral victory once secured. ...Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: The Earthly Paradise (Sir Lancelot at the Chapel of the Holy Grail) (1890) ...“Why, in all that’s actually holy, would we ever decide to downgrade ourselves into being merely a Christian nation?” This EndDays Story examines the weaponization of religious zealotry as a reliable sign of EndDays arriving, and asks what on Earth we think we’re doing. In this EndDays Story, I traced the way EndDays always seem to unleash religious zealotry — charlatans proliferating, scripture pressed into the strangest purposes, a prince of peace reintroduced as a god of war. Our Founding Fathers were not born-again Christians but Big ‘R’ Republicans and bigger ‘D’ Democrats who well understood the catastrophic nature of church-state divorces throughout history. E Pluribus Unum was always more about beating our religious swords into communal plowshares than converting everyone into a single cohering conviction. ... Why, in all that’s actually holy, would we ever decide to downgrade ourselves into being merely a Christian nation? ...This EndDays Story finds me finally naming the context my fellow citizens and I have been inhabiting — publicly, in a room full of local leaders — and discovering that naming it rendered it strangely more copeable with. In this EndDays Story, I finally raised my hand at a meeting of local leaders organized to protect immigrant neighbors and said what needed saying out loud: we are presently occupied by a hostile and capricious power, and if you do not feel paranoid, you are not paying close enough attention. ... I remembered when the Nazis overran Denmark, and every citizen showed up wearing stars when the Nazis demanded that Jewish citizens wear them. ... Making the implicit explicit rarely evaporates any implicit — it just renders it more perceivable and therefore strangely more copeable with. ...This EndDays Story finds me examining what happens when a corrupted individual is elected into public office and the whole enterprise starts reeling Backwards. In this EndDays Story, written from the lobby of Skamania Lodge as fog held steady over the Columbia River, I considered what it means to live in a world running Backwards. ... The criminal presently in charge of navigation apparently never learned the most fundamental life lesson: no viable future ever lived in any past, however corrupted and compromised any present might appear. ... But fleeing Backwards was never a viable option — it was always the coward’s path. ...This EndDays Story finds me among Port Commissioners at Skamania Lodge, discovering that those charged with planning our economic future appear remarkably sanguine about what seems to me like a perfectly foreseeable threat. In this EndDays Story, I found myself among The Muse’s fellow Port Commissioners at a Washington State gathering, listening to boosterish presentations about the FIFA tournament and international trade while the news of boycotts, skyrocketing airfares, and quietly canceled hotel reservations seemed to be everywhere except in that room. The conservative commissioner seemed genuinely offended when I tried to pop his bubble about the tournament — he had apparently never imagined that anyone would consider boycotting something so strongly endorsed by Our President. ... The awesome power of any Old Status Quo can blind even the most perceptive to what’s looming right before them. ...I suppose I could have started outlining something resembling a marketing campaign long before publishing the book. I easily imagine a marketing professional debunking my misconceptions about what effective marketing entails, discarding the usual options in favor of less obvious ones. But I couldn't seem to imagine that space before finding myself embedded in it with my freshly published book. I seemed to need to be actually in the context for marketing to even come up. ...I thought, naively, of course, that I might shop by book around, dropping in to bookstores and libraries. I found that my visit had been anticipated and that they'd already created a form to handle what I'd imagined human interaction might cover. The local library has a 'Local Author Form' that they ask every local author who stops by to contribute a copy of their book for the collection to fill out. ...Would I approve the withdrawal and dispersal of twenty-five copies of the e-Book version of Cluelessness, for the purposes of supplying book reviewers with copies? ... I marveled at the discovery and replied that I'd appreciate any information they could provide on how I might get my mits on the link to order some. Three days later, no reply, so I asked my AI assistant, Claude, if it could find where to order these babies. ..."Here's what I can tell you: Outskirts Press distributes eBooks to Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble Nook, Google Play, Kobo, and 450+ other platforms — but only if the author purchased an eBook edition as part of their publishing package. The fact that they asked for your permission to send 25 review copies suggests the eBook exists in their system, but it may not yet be live in retail channels. My recommendation: press Outskirts directly and ask two specific questions — first, was an eBook edition included in your publishing package, and second, what is the ISBN or ASIN for the eBook edition so you can find it yourself. ...If they confirm it exists and give you the eBook ISBN, I can search for it directly." ...I employed Claude.ai, a commercial AI-powered text editor, using it to perform repetitive copy/pasting work and to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.” ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

PipeDreaming

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-21T05:03:31-07:00

"I didn't see him again for the rest of that evening." I might best characterize EndDays as those in which PipeDreaming subsumes otherwise ordinary planning and processing. The Old Status Quo’s natural force seems to defend against acknowledging any more current state of affairs, and those charged with foreseeing expend their increasingly limited energy looking backward, basking in beliefs and perspectives already rendered moot. They do not see the easily foreseeable upcoming, but continue insisting that everything remains essentially fine. Sure, some minor concern might seem prudent, but Our President would not lead us into anything like overwhelming temptation. To them, we seem to be in no real danger, other than the usual business cycle. Sure, they insist, prices might have risen a bit, but the market seems wise enough to compensate before anything crashes. If everything isn’t precisely fine, it sure seems to be trending positive. The campaign promises were received by some as iron-clad prognostications, learnéd predictions about future performance. If things didn’t seem somewhat precarious, current events wouldn’t even constitute believable fiction. We elected a genuine businessman this time, one who certainly knows how to run our country as if it were a business. (This promise seems roughly equivalent to a promise to run a city like a forest or a forest like a tree, completely beside any point I can comprehend, since government and business remain utterly different animals.) It’s no gift to promise to run anything like it isn’t and never could actually be. PipeDreaming seems to be required to maintain faith in any such utterly delusional initiative. How about running the government as if it were the government our Constitution defines? ... Run our government as if it were your private business? How long before our incumbent, who never learned how to avoid bankruptcy in his private affairs, manages to set the precedent as the first president to ever bankrupt our government, which was never exclusively his, regardless of how he pretends? I was speaking with The Muse’s fellow Port Commissioners, since we were attending a Washington State Society for the Prevention of Port Commissioners meeting. ... Commissioners usually cannot informally speak together outside of formal meetings because doing so would violate open meeting laws, since any two of the three commissioners constitute a quorum, and every quorum of commissioners requires a formally-announced public meeting so the public has the opportunity to witness the proceedings. ... This convention leaves the Commissioners mostly mind-reading each other between public sessions, when they can finally discuss their support and misgivings. They’d attended a session about the upcoming FIFA tournament scheduled to begin in two scant weeks. The Seattle Port, part of the area these gathered commissioners represent and also involved in the logistics for the Seattle-based portion of the proceedings, had convened a session discussing issues regarding the tournament. I mentioned that I’d heard the whole shebang was in danger of failing, since many potential attendees had sworn to boycott the affair. None of the commissioners, other than The Muse, had heard anything about the potential boycott. The most conservative commissioner asked why people would boycott the tournament. He genuinely didn’t know why and had apparently never imagined such a possibility. I replied that The Incumbent had threatened to detain attendees, and had raised visa entry fees for foreigners entering The States. The citizens of Denmark had signed a petition demanding that their government withdraw their national team in response to the incumbent’s ongoing threats against Greenland. Also, prices of international flights have skyrocketed in recent weeks, from barely over a hundred to more than four hundred bucks, with even more increases promised as the Iranian War further threatened to undermine fuel markets. ... The whole business sounded like it would be a bust to me, but the majority of the commissioners had heard nary a whisper about this potential. One asked me where I’d heard this news. I replied that I couldn’t seem to avoid it. ...I wonder whether we’ll experience a recession this year, as if we already weren’t, or a full-blown, impossible-to-quickly-recover-from Depression. My money’s riding on the Depression arriving because it seems inescapable now. ... The assembled commissioners gathered like they always had. The FIFA presentation was boosterism rather than thoughtful self-criticism, and those charged with planning and executing our future economic development seem remarkably sanguine in the face of what, to me, sure seems like a perfectly foreseeable threat. The commercial real estate market seems to have been in denial for the last few quarters. International trade, the Ports’ bread and butter, has been in the toilet and trending even further downward. Our hapless incumbent had serially violated every international trade deal, offending every trading partner except his beloved Mother Russia. Yet the commissioners continue boostering, blythely ignoring the future noisily overtaking them and us. The awesome power of any Old Status Quo seems worthy of adoration, for it can blind even the most perceptive to what’s looming right before them. We seem to see our world the way it has always been, and only very hesitantly ever see much of any threat coming over any horizon. The conservative commissioner seemed offended when I innocently attempted to pop his bubble regarding the soccer tournament and his clearly beloved incumbent. It was as if he had never heard a discouraging word about The Incumbent. He genuinely wondered why anybody would consider boycotting a tournament so strongly endorsed by Our President. I could almost see the wheels straining to comprehend, the rusty connections preparing their flight response. I didn’t see him again for the rest of that evening. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Backwards

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-20T05:01:23-07:00

"…going Backwards inevitably proves impossible and ultimately self-defeating." Electing a corrupted individual into a public office sets the whole enterprise reeling Backwards. Whatever formerly passed for human progress abruptly ceases. Utter irrelevances replace significances, and the purpose of the resulting administration, besides their utter inability to actually administer anything, becomes corruption. We should have long ago passed a law, a prominent amendment to our revered Constitution, declaring that no convicted felon could be qualified to hold the highest office. It had never happened before, though this first time clearly shows the wisdom of just such a provision. Now, the corruption extends to pretty nearly everyone still left in this administration incapable of administration, and not only because only the most incompetent remain; all of the honest ones were successfully chased off by their refusal, steadfast and quick, to compromise their ethical standards. Those remaining apparently never had such compunctions. Many gleefully agreed to assist in engineering a delusional Backwards shift. Generations of actual progress toward creating a genuinely more perfect union were discarded in an initial blizzard of misrepresentations. Decency in some cases became an indictable offense. ... Equality under the law was slowly, seemingly inexorably, replaced with a twisted sort of privilege. Those least deserving of special handling seemed to receive the velvet glove. Those most deserving were, in some cases, crudely deported. Those stuck in the middle found themselves disoriented when they could no longer presume that the arc of history trended toward justice, but instead toward the sort of inequality not seen since the failed post-Civil War reconstruction effort. Confederate terrorists were resurrected, their statues reclaimed, and military installations were renamed for insurrectionists. ...The careful clockwork generations of civil servants and regular citizens conspired to erect became suspect once the judgment of a convicted conman and felon was chosen to decide. He possessed an uncanny ability to interpret generational progress Backwards. He ran on a slogan that seemed to deny any promise any future might provide. He screamed Make America Great Again, as if it had ever been greater than its forward evolution had moved it toward. He initiated a concerted war against modernity, casting actual progress as somehow villainous and decline as the one and only true progress. He slanders himself, declaring his contributions to be the very best in recorded history. The mystery resides in those who swallow his stories despite every measurable metric screaming that the only progress observed so far has been Backwards. Regular gas hit $5.95 per gallon yesterday, still rising. While I applaud the progress made to reduce demand for fossil fuels, price coercion might not have been the best strategy for convincing people to switch to renewables, especially when this administration, dead set against competently administering anything, has further complicated the construction of renewable replacements for our ruinous fossil fuels. ...I imagine decades spent rebuilding in our near future. It might be that, having cleared out history, our future might suddenly be even more achievable than it had been before this inhuman wrecking ball of an administration that considers Backwards forward progress appeared on the horizon. Whatever happens, I expect years of back-to-the-future experiences, where we slip into a period in which we will be reinventing previously invented wheels and experiencing genuine disadvantages. No viable future ever lived in any past, however desirable prior experience might sometimes seem. There is no such thing as Backwards progress, because progress moves exclusively in one, inexorable direction. To deny this flow never bodes well. History provides no evidence that anybody’s greatness ever once resided in anybody’s past, however corrupted and compromised any present might have appeared. Progress was never meant to feel familiar, and nostalgia misleads more than it ever informs. I miss nickel candy bars, too, and time off for good behavior. I ache for something, anything familiar, too, just like you do. I’m learning that the future should rightfully seem disorienting. It offers a continual dedication test over whether I’ll choose progress or bend over Backwards to some path of apparently less resistance. That tension I sense before me might, instead, encourage me, especially since facing any uncertain future (and which future was ever NOT uncertain?) demands little more than courage, however inaccessible courage might sometimes seem. Fleeing into some delusion of any past, fleeing Backwards, was never a viable option, and those who choose that pursuit prove to be cowards. No past ever knew what it might ultimately need to move forward. They moved forward anyway, though some chose to take a more roundabout way. ... It’s probably incapable of producing any future at all. The criminal presently in charge of navigation apparently never learned this most fundamental life lesson. We were never supposed to know how to move forward, and going Backwards inevitably proves impossible and ultimately self-defeating. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Terrorized

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-19T04:54:33-07:00

"Such small incremental improvements, even if only in acknowledgements, often produce great differences." The Muse and I were invited earlier this Spring to participate in a group focused on trying to compensate for the terrorism our incumbent had been inflicting upon innocent immigrants. This effort would have been unnecessary, just as it had been under every previous administration, but this administration, which never really dedicated itself to competently administering anything, had taken a different tack. It had decided to attempt to send brown people back to what the administration undedicated to actually administering anything imagined might be their family’s country of origin, or, in lieu of that, even some country the brown person had maybe never even heard of before. Their policy had been to rid the country of immigrants, whether or not their legal status suggested they had a legal right to be here. Oh, this administration that couldn’t quite imagine itself administering anything denied those immigrants the due process guaranteed to everyone, even non-citizens, by our foundational Constitution. Such was the context within which that first meeting, and three subsequent ones since, had taken place, yet that context had never been explicitly mentioned. The organizers of these meetings had reported early on that part of their motivation was that they had family who, in the eyes of those who were color-prejudiced, could be considered brown. Few in the room could claim that their families were any different. I have brown grandchildren and Hmong grand nieces, and we were never what any sentient person could have claimed to have been a white nation. The current administration, which never understood the subtleties of administering anything, has not been in any way subtle when reporting that they believe that this country was founded and built by an exclusively white aristocracy, not at all unlike the long-ago defeated for committing public obscenities and gratefully ill-fated Confederacy. The administration that administers as if it suffers from some serious psychiatric disorder has been explicitly racist in its messaging and its enforcement, so we, citizens, felt forced to organize a spirited defense, though we had never explicitly mentioned our actual underlying shared context. I sat in last night’s session, wondering if my comments, making our shared context explicit, might be appreciated or misunderstood. The organizers seemed to have been bending over somewhat backward to avoid pointing fingers at any specific political party, for instance, for the circumstances under which we had convened, though blame had to be obvious, especially to those of us unfortunate enough to have somehow imprinted on that regrettable party to which the present administration who had been actively mangling the whole concept of administration since the current incumbent had taken office. I’d noticed that the avowed Republicans among us had been strangely mute, given that they had historically been the vocal majority in this county, and that the few more progressive voices had dominated the proceedings. Was it my imagination, or had Republican representation waned since the initial gathering? ...“We are presently occupied by a hostile and capricious power. Had we not been so occupied, we would have had no reason to gather to try to discover ideas to protect our immigrant family members and neighbors. If you do not feel paranoid, you are not paying close enough attention. ... I feel terrorized in this present context. Our Federal government is actively waging a war against decency, against you and me and our families, so we should be scared. ... Neither is the most powerful of those among us. I do not want to forget that this is the context within which we gather here. I remember the late sixties, when the Federals waged war against decency, and I feel afraid again, like I did then. I feel safer when I’m working together with others who are also terrorized and afraid.” I said something similar to that, committing a very public truth. I had been ruminating: It has been my impression that this occupying force behaved rather like the Nazis. I know that similarity might have been overplayed in recent years, but the comparison seems inescapable. ... They tried their Nazi shenanigans there, but to less effect than they’d enjoyed in other countries they’d occupied. When they demanded that Danish Jews wear stars, every citizen showed up wearing stars. When threatened with punishment, the Danes continued wearing their stars. Those citizens might not have effected the terror those Nazis ultimately inflicted, but they had stood up and gotten themselves counted. ... I want the decent people to be so insistent that the occupying indecency cannot belligerently terrorize. I want them to mistake me for an immigrant, like my not-so-distant forebears were immigrants. Count me as a Jew, too, you fucking Nazis! ...Those at my table mouthed “Thank you for saying that.” And little more was mentioned on that subject for the balance of the meeting, though a few people referred back to that context I’d finally made explicit. How often, I wondered, do I move through this world without explicitly acknowledging the context with which I might be grappling? So focused upon content that I tend to forget where my real leverage so often lies. Especially when a context sucks, rendering it more explicit can do much to render it relatively toothless. Without such acknowledgment, context seems to hold me in invisible clutches, for context only rarely renders itself explicit. It must be my job to name that tune insistently, earworming its way into and through my sanity then. ...Making the implicit explicit rarely evaporates any implicit, it just renders it more visible and therefore, strangely more copeable with. Acknowledging how much something sucks rarely stops the sucking; it merely renders it less surprising. I can more reasonably anticipate the direction from which the next insult might be arriving. I admit that might not seem like much of a defense, but it might represent the very best offense possible, given the sucky conditions. Such small incremental improvements, even if only in acknowledgments, often produce great differences. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Religionism

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-18T06:24:07-07:00

"Why, in all that's actually holy, would we ever decide to downgrade ourselves into being merely a Christian nation?" One sure and certain sign of EndDays arriving lies in sustained religious zealotry. Any time might spark a temporary blip in religious fervor, but a sense that EndDays are upon us curses many with a sincere sense that they might be in desperate need of immediate salvation. People will agree to the strangest things when they believe their eternity looms. Charlatans proliferate then, as preachers and politicians, each purporting to hold special dispensations, as if they’d previously died and even gone on to heaven, only to return to council any late arrivers. ... A prince of peace might be introduced as some latter-day god of war. Soldiers might be exhorted to behave like Christians, that kind of Christian who acted more like a Roman soldier. The lyrics, “Onward Christian Soldiers, marching as to war,” lose their allegorical nature in favor of a more literal interpretation. The Ten Commandments get amended to allow a few of the usually more egregious infractions into the lexicon as exceptions, like the prohibition that used to insist Thou Shalt Not Kill no longer applying to upstanding Christian personnel. The very concept of godly gets turned on its ear, and one wonders where we think we’re going, other than nowhere or Hell. Nothing seems to breed zealotry like certainty, especially any certainty that prophecy might actually, finally be fulfilling. An impending Second Coming does more than a Black Friday Sale to increase the volume of frantic shopping. A rumored Armageddon does wonders for pick-up truck and AR-15 sales. The Second Amendment never gets more fervently interpreted than when we’re confronting some trumped-up crisis of faith. ... Start interpreting the New Testament so that it more closely resembles the Old. ...Our Founding Fathers were not born-again Christians. They were Big ‘R’ Republicans and bigger ‘D’ Democrats, who didn’t even believe in political parties, let alone have faith in organized religion to serve as the centerpiece of any great nation. They well understood the shortcomings inherent in the marriages of churches and states. The union might have worked great, but history showed the divorces were catastrophic, and there were always periodic divorces, for they had always been an integral part of sacred bonds. Americans would hold their governance sacred, something transcending mere religious affiliation. This would exact the price of tolerance, no small tax, particularly on the zealously religious. Our founding was steeped in a history of rancorous intolerance. E Pluribus Unim was more about beating our religious swords into communal plowshares than converting everyone into a single cohering religious conviction. Over the ages, God the Father had proven himself to be an insufficiently cohering commander to hold anything like a country together. If the Lord can’t save us from religious zealots, then, I guess, we’ll just have to save ourselves. Those of us who seek more freedom from religion than any sort of freedom to practice any particular religion feel this one need most deeply. We do not voluntarily bow our heads in public prayer, for we find the practice insufficiently democratic, lacking in the freedom to do what we damned well please. I hold no animosity toward anybody’s God, and I suspect that nobody’s God holds all that much animosity toward me. It must be his self-proclaimed representatives here who foster the animosity I see. They seem to exclude accountability for themselves as they curse those who share their convictions to some specially curated Hell. The EndDays preface a definite end, but not the end of the world, just of the world we’ve known. A strange world might well emerge, one that will ultimately spawn some EndDays of its own. Those convinced they hold the only truth must be the ones most cursed by their beliefs. Religionism amounts to so much idolatry, replete with the statue of The Golden Incumbent in ill-fitting golfing attire. As near as I can tell, the only reason to declare ours a Christian nation would be to increase the net subjugation, and our nation, this nation, was specifically founded to prevent subjugation’s rule. We are a nation of laws, acknowledged as imperfect. We seek to increase the net perfection, never to achieve perfection itself. We have no need for perfection or omniscience, embodied in God or otherwise, to guide our emerging judgment. Our judgment will continually prove to have been lacking as we find the means for improving it. We likewise have no need for Heaven on Earth or elsewhere, for we’re enjoined to pursue whatever happiness we desire. ... What organized religion could possibly promise anything superior to self-determination? We have no need for anyone to choose for us. We might not be fully capable of exercising unerring judgment, but at least we remain free to maintain our own conscience. We require no judge to praise or damn us. ... We were originally organized to be the thorn in the side of that unholy power. Why, in all that’s actually holy, would we ever decide to downgrade ourselves into being merely a Christian nation? ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

ChangingWorlds

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-17T06:49:31-07:00

The Earthly Paradise (Sir Lancelot at the Chapel of the Holy Grail) ..."I once feared and felt cowed by their delusions. ...EndDays seem decidedly different than most of the days that came before. ... We have a performative idiot spouting unsettling koans we cannot understand any more than we seem capable of ignoring, even though they most likely signify nothing. I feel astounded at how easily I surrendered my sacred serenity, seemingly setting my own hair on fire in defiance. We see ever clearer evidence that this era might signify nothing more than the vanity of a few of the wealthier fools, nothing this world hasn’t seen plenty of times before. I’ve felt especially cursed when I might have been little more than perfectly normally cursed instead. ... Oh, I wear my hair shirt and suffer right along and right next to everyone else, but I suppose EndDays might be supposed to seem that way. ...I realized this week that our incumbent has already passed the threshold beyond which no former president ever accomplished anything new. A fresh incumbent gets something like 175 days to accomplish their mission, whatever it might be. After that, distractions overwhelm an administration, especially one that never seemed to catch on to what that whole administering anything was really about. ... The backlog of lawsuits stemming from their own inept attempts to impose their new world order undermines whatever remains of their once-grand master plan for world dominion. ... Their keystone legislation is already backfiring by then, and the likelihood of any further cooperation from a once-loyal Congress seems slim. Whether they failed or succeeded in ChangingWorlds, their ability to continue changing them becomes untenable. We’re now well past that horizon for this one, yet we still seem to be in thrall. This office seems most capable of hypnotizing both opponent and partisan. It has been called The Bully Pulpit because it carries precisely this effect, depending. Even the most charismatic incumbent loses their ability to influence over time, though their apparent influence often outlives their practical ability to produce anything useful up there. After that narrow window closes, an incumbent can only create noise, hoping to continue distracting those who might not have been watching closely enough to notice the old charisma evaporating. A desperation emerges, initially as increasing fierceness, later as an encroaching impotent meekness. ... I might have ceded some of my authority to the rampaging cynicism surrounding me. I might have forfeited my own ethical responsibilities in the face of such seemingly overwhelming opposition, which, I seem to faintly remember now, always seems overwhelmingly powerful at the beginning before undermining itself in practice. I still hold almost all of my own cards. I’m no pawn and never was one. Let’s share a moment of appreciation for Viktor Orbán, former Hungarian prime minister for 20 years, who so recently demonstrated what ultimately happens to all authoritarians who pit themselves against democratic-minded citizens. They all get run out of office on a rail, if they’re lucky, though other, less respectful options sometimes prevail. ... Packed the parliament with the usual usefuls, yet still overwhelmingly lost reelection. ... They might never again forget its purpose and the reasons it must be defended. ...Our incumbent, who has never yet once done anything presidential or democratic, has been performing no less of a service for us. He’s shedding former supporters like a dog shedding fleas. He might yet manage to inflict a worldwide economic depression on us, but his days of introducing world-changing initiatives supposedly on any of us have passed. He’s lost whatever mandate his tiny electoral victory might have secured him. He’s headed to become a cautionary footnote in almost forgotten history, yet he will have nonetheless made his mark, rather like the one Orbán made on Hungary. He enjoyed twenty years of increasing paranoia before sacrificing the palace that never really belonged to him in the first place. May the citizens of Hungary remove the palace in favor of another public gathering place, for they have chosen many future celebrations to replace their overthrown oppression, just like always eventually happens. I wonder why I always seem to give my greatest treasures away under so little provocation. It almost seems that I do not know how powerful I am. It’s as if I believed the bullshit our incumbent pushed, when I was once certain I would never believe anything he proposed. I forgot that I always get to choose. ... I’m in charge of ChangingWorlds here, and no power in heaven or earth, or anywhere beneath, can ever subsume my authority in this respect, unless or until I somehow choose to forfeit it myself. ... I am not a compliant citizen but a rather fierce one. I have been savagely slandered, sometimes by friends, but I never once lost my authority to make and live by my own decisions. Those damned Repuglicans were always plotting to take themselves and the rest of us to Hell. They were never once not delusional. I once feared and felt cowed by their delusions. ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Gravlity

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-16T05:40:57-07:00

"…the physics of making this country great again seem to reliably result in rendering it worse." Aristotle posited that two forces governed the positioning of the four fundamental elements: Earth, Water, Fire, and Air. Gravity ruled over Earth and Water by encouraging them to sink to what he referred to as “their proper level,” which sat beneath air and fire. An opposite force, he labeled levity, ruled Air and Fire’s behavior, which, according to their nature, levitated above both Earth and Water. Though his notions would later be shown to be incorrect, they successfully explained the observed behavior of these fundamental elements for two millennia. Earth does indeed tend to sink below the water, and bubbles rise through the water, occupying the space above. Fire produces smoke that naturally rises through air, though the elevating force Aristotle insisted upon calling levity turned out not to exist as he’d envisioned. Still, he described what we might easily accept as our a priori world, the one we all inhabit until actual scientific knowledge supplants our original innocence. My intuition still expects my universe to sort itself out on Aristotelian terms, and I feel deeply disoriented whenever it doesn’t. EndDays seem to deliver just this unsettling sensation, that gravity, for some strange reason, seems to have stopped working correctly, and levity, too, seems strangely absent from this administration that never once had any notion of how to go about administering anything’s repertoire. Their world seems to contain far too much gravity, especially Earth, since every one of their damned initiatives seems to largely exist underwater. Gravity’s suddenly working overtime. What in before, more ordinary times, would have served as a foundation for operations has been steadily sinking, resulting in mild to severe flooding of seemingly every initiative attempted. It seems as if some especially talented gremlin had taken over as Director of Operations and turned every attempted improvement into shit. Likewise, levity seems strangely absent. The traditional White House Correspondent’s Dinner, usually an evening of light-hearted banter between incumbent and press, manifested as if armed camps were preparing for mortal combat. It was hardly surprising when a phony assassination attempt “spoiled” the evening, and everyone went home without dinner. The incumbent had prepared a few venomous remarks with which to respond to the correspondents’ attempts to make a little honest fun. Levity seems to be no longer permitted. With gravity working overtime and levity curiously absent, a heaviness has settled in over the proceedings. Every action suddenly seems ominous. Each improvement attempt comes across as, basically, more meanness. ... Little differences of opinion have become firing offenses, and offense has replaced generosity as the default response to each and every little comment or criticism. Improvement has proven impossible when nobody can or will admit to needing it. Everything gets touted as already perfect, better than ever before, the best ever, though everyone knows they just witnessed another humiliating failure. Further, governance has never appeared less serious. The Supreme Court seems determined to trivialize every question that comes before it, even citing fake data to justify imposing penalties on precisely the wrong parties. Truth as well as justice seem to have left us for the duration. We pray for a speedy cessation of these trumped-up hostilities. Gravlity obeys alien physics where what we should understand must be up gets continually characterized as down, and every attempt to go over seems to just come out sideways. We cannot help but feel lost if our compasses have lost the only True North ever known to exist. What curious navigation system must this administration employ to make headway? Judging by the obvious lack of headway made, it seems reasonable to conclude that nobody’s navigating at all. We’re seeing not so much a wholesale cessation of gravity and levity, but the steadfast refusal to refer to any of the usual gauges. This administration, whose head seems crammed so far up their collective backside that they couldn’t administer anything if they wanted to, but don’t want to, anyway, seems to navigate solely by whim. Aristotle never listed whim as one of the fundamental elements in his physics, though it most closely resembles his fifth element. He held that the heavens are made of a special weightless and incorruptible fifth element called Aether. Since only the previously corrupted prove to be uncorruptable, maybe the fuel on which this administration that wouldn’t recognize an administration if it kicked them in the ass runs amounts to the laws of the physics of corruption: aether, a gaseous substance that reportedly stinks to high heaven. Those of us not used to inhabiting a world ruled by cartoon physics seem rightfully disoriented by the sudden absence of our good, old, reliable, and ancient four elements, arrayed in their properly anticipated hierarchy. We’re unsettled when balls seem to roll up an otherwise ordinary-seeming inclined plane. We’re concerned when we find fire sinking beneath our once-dependable water, and when air repeatedly seems to get sucked out of what used to be reliable briefing rooms. If only our world seemed merely upside down, we might adapt more fluidly. There seem to be no rules, traditional or otherwise, and the physics of making this country great again seem to only reliably result in rendering it worse. When might this corrupting curse disperse into what was once good, old, reliable aether again, and Earth, Water, Air, and Fire disappear into their familiar roles? ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 05/14/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-14T12:52:49-07:00

The King’sHorses of our incumbent’s second administration proved no more capable of saving him from himself than the nursery rhyme predicted. I turned from political catalogues to ask myself the only question that matters — WhatDidYouDo? — and answered it honestly, if not flatteringly. ... And a parade of publishing AgentScenes reminded me that my aspirations for Cluelessness remain cheerfully unimaginable to those who profit from the Published Author Myths. ...This EndDays Story finds me maintaining an enthusiastic public DeathWatch over our beleaguered and clearly ailing incumbent. In this EndDays Story, I noted that rarely has any anticipated event received such an enthusiastic public reception as the impending departure of our incumbent. Each morning first carries astonishment that he has somehow survived another night intact, though he reliably appears worse than when last reported. ... He enjoys an unusually asymptotic relationship with his demise, the beer cooler ice melting and needing replacing while nobody even imagines relighting the hamburger-and-hot-dog fire. He will be curiously fondly remembered as the president who teetered on the edge of death for the bulk of his foreshortened second term — a zombie presence remarkably uninterested in administering anything and, at any rate, incapable of administering even if some spirit might have moved him to try. ...“All the King’sHorses and all the King’s men seem unlikely to save our incumbent from himself again.” This EndDays Story catalogs the epic crew our incumbent assembled for his second administration, those creatures who hailed from somewhere beneath the bottom of any barrel. In this EndDays Story, I surveyed the extraordinary Cabinet our incumbent assembled for his second administration — carefully chosen for their studied indifference, their contempt for constitutional oversight, and their cheerful willingness to double down on whatever transparently illegal activities they’d been caught attempting. ... All the King’sHorses and all the King’s men seem unlikely to save our incumbent from himself again. ...“…it matters how we answer when we ask ourselves this one absolutely essential question…” This EndDays Story turns from political catalogues to ask the only question that might matter when the world is going to Hell. In this EndDays Story, I grew weary of recounting the incumbent’s sins and turned instead to the more uncomfortable question: WhatDidYouDo while the world was going to Hell? ... Find a newspaper from way back when, and you’ll find clear evidence that the world then was also descending into Hell. ... Still, it matters how we answer when we ask ourselves this one absolutely essential question: WhatDidYouDo? ...This EndDays Story portrays our incumbent as a Madman and traces the historical practice of retinues reinterpreting idiotic commands into serviceable policy. In this EndDays Story, I portrayed our incumbent as a Madman — rambling when he speaks, dozing through press conferences, moving like a drunk through the world, bullshit wending through a china shop. He will not be talked out of his irrational convictions, and his Big Tough Guy stances have left him appearing to be the biggest wussie on the planet, while he self-publishes comix, casting himself as the sole superhero president. Throughout history, civilizations have sustained themselves through The Great Man Theory of governance, in which a king’s retinue learned to interpret whatever directions the king might give in ways that wouldn’t ultimately undermine his authority, even if those directions were idiotic. ...This EndDays Story covers what I consider the end of Commerce, where convenience has transformed what was once simple acquisition into an often unresolvable dilemma. In this EndDays Story, I confessed that it has never been more difficult for me to simply buy something, and I blame convenience for the terrible state of Commerce. Finding a product online yields an overwhelming variety of that product, leaving me confronted with the Paradox of Choice, from which I usually escape by quietly deleting the item from my shopping list. On those rare occasions when I successfully trevass that last gauntlet and receive the package, it turns out to be almost completely unlike the item illustrated on that long-before website. I recently had to return some socks with an abominable texture, only to discover a ten-dollar restocking fee waiting for me on the other end. ... Commerce has matured to the point that it’s essentially non-existent, and I am not buying anybody’s pants when I’m in Heaven or Hell. ...This EndDays Story finds me navigating the predatory mythology surrounding self-published authorship, courtesy of several “agents” who contacted me following Cluelessness‘s publication. In this EndDays Story, since publishing Cluelessness three weeks ago, I’ve received several calls from various “agents” seeking to assist me in turning the book into the bestseller they presume I intend it to become. ... Another asked if I wanted Cluelessness picked up by a major imprint — to which I replied that I didn’t really, given that the major houses require authors to transfer their copyrights as a precondition for publication. ... My aspirations for Cluelessness remain modest, given that I’ve released it into a marketplace expected to absorb four million new titles this year. I never aspired to become either rich or famous, given what seems to have happened to everyone who already had rich and famous happen to them. The most meaningful books in my life came by accidental convergence — a book fell off the shelf, an obscure title in a bargain bin. If Cluelessness has any chance of joining that class, it must be promoted as a poorly-kept secret. ...As of last week, you could order it from Bookshop.org., Powell’s Books, or from Amazon. ...Go to the book's Amazon page — you can find it by searching "Cluelessness Schmaltz" — then scroll down to the Customer Reviews section. ... Click it, sign in if prompted, then rate it with stars and write your review in the text box provided. ...Amazon's guidelines prohibit authors from reviewing their own books, so I'm directing these instructions to readers I'm encouraging to leave reviews. ...Next week, I will be visiting my old mothership bookstore, Powell's in Portland, to let them know that I'm on the map as a former Portlander and NW Author. ...My local bookseller informs me that 500 copies of Cluelessness are apparently stored in an Ingram warehouse in Tennessee. They have another warehouse in Oregon, and since I'm a West Coast author, some of that inventory should be transferred out here. I'm working with my publisher to see if they can influence that move. This matters because a bookstore needs to order twenty books from Ingram to secure their full 40% discount over cover price, and bookstores tend to order from the closest warehouse. When he needs to order from one outside their region, our bookseller includes a few very low-priced children's titles to round up his order. ...My local bookseller informs me that his shop might not make it through this year, and it's been here since the early seventies. ... My old friend Franklin Taggert, who consults with creatives, confided to me that the probability of anyone creating art and living solely on those proceeds is much less than 1%. ... Not just readers, and probably not only readers, but communities of people contributing what they can, like reviews. ... Cluelessness, as I announced in yesterday's AgencyScenes post, joins four million other new titles rampaging around in the marketplace this year, and will be joined by a few more than four million more titles next year, ad infinitum, until far beyond any recognizable horizon. ...I employed Claude.ai, a commercial AI-powered text editor, using it to perform repetitive copy/pasting work and to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.” ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

AgentScenes

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-14T05:26:34-07:00

"If I emphatically whisper, I believe the right readers will hear." Since I published my book, Cluelessness, three weeks ago, I have received several calls from various “agents” seeking to assist me in turning the book into the bestseller they presume I intend it to become. Each has a scheme that they claim could transform my work from an unassuming self-published into something notorious. One dealt with connecting authors with agents who purchase subsidiary rights, such as audiobook production, foreign-language, and serialization rights. She had assembled a list of “over 600” active purchasers of such rights. She offered to sell access to this email list for three thousand dollars and to throw in some free advice on the “come-on letter” that should accompany each cold-call contact. I sat through an hour-long self-promotional video in which I was introduced to someone with superhuman self-regard and invited to “invest” in my book. She was not interested in investing in my book, though she seemed more than willing, downright anxious, to profit off it nonetheless. ...There might not be any end to those who feel moved to offer me some scheme to further invest in my dream, though my dream for the book doesn’t quite match the dream they aspire for me to have for the work. I’ve already invested considerable time and treasure just to bring the damned thing to publication. I had not seriously considered creating a money pit where I could continue to throw perfectly decent, if non-existent, savings down into it. I know from personal experience how the Published Author Myths (PAMs) can utterly undermine an otherwise uplifting experience. If my goal in writing Cluelessness had been to become a best-selling author again or fabulously wealthy, I would have been wiser to “invest” in lottery tickets. The dominant PAM must be that the world had been impatiently waiting for me to finally release my brilliance into a marketplace desperate for the deliverance that only my book could provide. Authors have been successfully fetishized to the point where they appear omniscient, even wise, when they’re most often more like Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional greatest writer who ever lived, Kilgore Trout, whose books featured lurid covers and could only be found in shady porno parlors’ back rooms. Author’s ain’t all that special. ...After all, remember that I’m the guy who self-published Cluelessness. An agent I spoke with yesterday, after he contacted me, asked if I wanted Cluelessness to be picked up by one of the major imprints, this being the sort of agent he fancied himself to be. I replied that I didn’t really. The major houses virtually all require that their authors transfer their copyrights to them as a precondition for publication. In return, the author might receive an advance, though these have become increasingly rare, and a small percentage of the eventual purchase price, the bulk of which is split between seller, distributor, and physical book producer, and some “promotion.” The cost of those goods sold far exceeds the author’s share. Of course, Amazon reserves the absolute right to put any work on sale at any time, the discount for which comes out of the author’s portion of the split. I replied that, no, I thought that being discovered by one of the major houses, which signs scores of authors and relies upon the law of large numbers to sort out the few winners, would qualify as something akin to a worst-case scenario for Cluelessness. Just because I’m self-avowed clueless doesn’t mean I’m stupid. Other agents maintain lists and offer to include me on theirs for a modest “investment.” One claimed they operated the site where readers search for their next read, as if such a place existed. I can’t quite imagine that there are legions of desperate readers frantically seeking their next transformative read, and that they subscribe to this guy’s authoritative list. Who pre-reads these works to qualify them for the list? ... In lieu of curating, the list owner sorts out recommendations based on author contributions. Several of the “agents” who’ve contacted me seem to run active shakedown rackets. My aspirations for Cluelessness remain modest, given that I’ve released it into a marketplace expected to absorb four million new titles this year and even more than that in each of the years after that. It’s at best a gnat. I never aspired to become either rich or famous, given what seems to have happened to everyone who already had rich and famous happen to them. That seems like a suicidal goal, one guaranteed to blow up a life. My life doesn’t need blowing up. ... I’m visiting bookstores and libraries, sending press releases, and asking colleagues to leave reviews on their social media—word of mouth. The fact is that nobody knows where their next reader might lurk, and that the connection between any author and their reader must remain mysterious. The most meaningful books in my life didn’t come by recommendation or subscription, but by accidental convergence. A book fell off the shelf in front of me when I was searching for something else. I happened upon an obscure title in a bargain book bin. I stumbled upon an author who never gained notoriety but whose work came to mean virtually everything to me. If Cluelessness has a chance to be anywhere near that class, I must be careful about how I promote it. It might be best touted as a poorly-kept secret whose mystery best endorses it. If I emphatically whisper, I believe the right readers will hear. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Commerce

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-13T06:21:29-07:00

"…Commerce there will likely be no better." It has never been more difficult for me to simply buy something. I blame convenience for the terrible state of Commerce; few things remain accessible except online. More than anyone could ever desire remains available online, though the price of purchasing anything there might convince a shopper that it’s not really worth the accompanying hassle. Convenience brings hassles all its own, completely different than the more familiar yesteryear in-person shopping hassles. Finding a product has been simplified to the point that it’s essentially impossible to find a single instance of any item. Trying to find something invariably yields an overwhelming variety of that product, leaving the shopper confronted with the Paradox of Choice. Comparing two ot three alternatives can seem fairly easy for most, but winnowing down two or three dozen choices produces less a choice than a dilemma, one that seems to damn this shopper whatever I choose. I often decide that I didn’t sufficiently want that item when faced with this dilemma, so I quietly delete it from my shopping list, lest my choice somehow damn me. I tend to be better for whatever I never chose to purchase. ...On those rare occasions where I decide to choose something, unseen externalities conspire to gang up on me. I will probably have to log into or onto some Shopping Cart App, of which there are an infinite variety, each named precisely the same and each operating very, very differently. Each asks the usual qualifying questions, but each requires its own unique syntax for responses. ... It’s not at all uncommon for me to abandon my intention to purchase something because I cannot pass muster with the damned Shopping Cart App. When I abandon my attempt, I will have initiated a future series of innocent queries about whether I wouldn’t rather have consummated the purchase. These will continue nearly ad infinitum or until I finally tag them as junk so they’re routed to another queue in my email app. If I successfully complete the Shopping Cart App’s cross-examination, I’m likely to learn that shipping charges double the price I expected to pay. I don’t begrudge anyone having to pay for shipping something, but when the shipping charges equal or exceed the item’s price, I’m apt to abandon that near-success in favor of thriftiness. I decide that, after extensive cross-examination, I will probably be better off without that item. ...On those rare occasions when I successfully trevass (1) that last gauntlet and I receive the package I had convinced myself I’d wanted, it turns out to be almost completely unlike the item illustrated on that long-ago website I purchased it from. The size might be wonky, something I could have known in a second had I been able to put my grubby mitts on it before purchase. It could be the wrong color, texture, fit, or feel. ...I recently had to return some pairs of socks (wrong size, abominable texture, poor fit), but learned that the company charged a ten-dollar restocking fee on all returns. They would gladly refund 70% of the original purchase price, though, unlike the original, they wouldn’t charge postage for the return. Interestingly, the restocking fee amounted to just a little more than the return postage charge would have been. I wrote a letter complaining about their bait-and-switch customer service, only to have them assess a restocking fee for my trouble? I received a penitent response from their Customer Experience Director that didn’t mention their restocking fee policy, just regretted that they couldn’t satisfy me. A week later, they refunded the purchase price, less that damned restocking fee, of course. I’d threatened to become not merely a dissatisfied customer, but an activist, dedicated to ensuring that nobody I knew would ever even consider buying socks from them. I had been offended, but two weeks later, I’ve almost forgotten that insult. ... Living as I do near the end of every known logistics network, visiting a store in person is often not an option, unless, of course, I feel moved to rediscover all that our local retailers no longer stock. Just this week, I went looking for some heavy jute twine, once a staple during planting season but unavailable here at any price. I could have any number of inferior polypropylene impostors, but none of the genuine article. Online was hardly better, for the impostors dominated those sites, too. It was damnably difficult to judge a twine’s weight, too. ... I didn’t want rope, and the line between twine and rope became ambiguous online. I ached for a salesperson, someone who’d actually used the product and could offer a testimonial and much-needed advice. Few shopping sites offer such services, though snippy little chatbots have become enormously popular. They can rarely, if ever, answer a straightforward question about anything, though they are universally cheerful. Their cheerfulness tends to leave me aching to be an activist shopper again, dedicated to ensuring the company fails in its mission to replace jute with polypropylene. ...I usually leave my online shopping to The Muse, who faces few of the many challenges I encounter when shopping online. ... I will purchase, but only under duress, and only for a well-defined and necessary purpose. I never was much for buying geegaws, and I’m more likely to buy paint, for instance, than paint brushes. ... I will fuss for months over purchasing a new pair of pants, so long that The Muse might finally feel moved to ask if I have any jeans that aren’t grass-stained on their knees when we’re entering some supposed to be semi-formal context. I blame it on Commerce, which has matured to the point that it’s essentially non-existent. ... By the time I’m finished with this world, I suspect that this world will have had just about enough of my shenanigans, too. I will not be buying anybody’s pants when I’m in Heaven, and even fewer should I end up in Hell. I’m uncertain how I’ll tell, except that Commerce there will likely be no better. ...It reads like a portmanteau of traverse and trespass, which actually captures the experience precisely. ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Madman

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-12T05:57:56-07:00

He rambles when he speaks, just as if he cannot help himself. He doesn’t seem capable of sticking to any topic, though he does tend to swerve back to some chief irrelevance, depending upon what he might be obsessing about at that particular moment that week. Very little of whatever he says seems terribly focused. He calls a press conference as if only to berate the dutifully assembled press, sometimes insisting that all reporters leave the room before he begins, to punish them for some imagined infraction, I guess. He often appears to doze, though, admittedly, that might just be some sort of negotiating ploy, if only he had been negotiating anything in those instances. ... He moves like a drunk through the world, coming very close to bouncing off things he passes, bullshit wending through a china shop. He pretends a lot, though it might be that he believes everything he says. If so, he’s a Madman. Of this, little doubt remains. He will not be talked out of his irrational convictions. If only they were only irrational, for they map to no known logical or illogical structure, nor do they appear to be completely random. Enough of a tattered plotline persists to convince many that he’s just being canny, pretending to be crazy to confuse and confound his ever-increasingly many enemies. To a few, he remains a marvelous strategic thinker, arriving at conclusions none of his contemporaries imagined possible, for they do often appear unimaginable. He blythely misquotes his dismal economic record, for he has belly-flopped each new initiative. The tariffs were never evidence of genius, and they produced almost precisely the opposite of what he promised they would deliver. His Big Tough Guy stances have left him appearing to be the biggest wussie on the planet, while he self-publishes comix that cast him as the sole superhero president. He makes up criteria that make his performance rate better than any incumbent in history, with the possible exception of Nero, yielding a superhero exclusively in his own clouded mind. I suppose his staff understands how dire his administration’s actual condition must be. They must sense some semblance of reality. In the past, when an incumbent became disabled, staff circled around to protect the position, if not necessarily the person inhabiting it. Job Number One becomes protecting not the incumbent, but the public from realizing that, at that moment, nobody’s driving, a notion apparently so horrifying that to not fall in line must seem treasonous, though leaking this information might prove to be the most patriotic action imaginable. Madmen often find themselves surrounded by loyalists who’ve also lost their minds, conflating duty with maintaining appearances of the familiar status quo. The incumbent’s reputation replaces actual performance. Ours might negotiate a little worse than a Raggedy Andy doll, but his staff touts him as the master negotiator he originally claimed he was, though never with much in the way of physical evidence. ... The Chief Executive becomes a wholly fictional presence where words and music virtually never match, but nobody seems ready to admit as much. ...He never once ever appeared in public clothed in anything more substantial than spin. According to him, he wore only the finest raiment. He could never have become Emperor without succeeding in projecting this sole superpower. Call it public relations, advertising, or, simply, lying, but the men on that flying trapeze were never normal. No normal human would ever consent to performing so high up there without a net. The job violates the normal human’s self-preservation clause. Not all who wear that leotard qualify as crazy, though. Some seem sane, even given their job’s extreme context. One in a few might well be certifiable, but with their context so absolutely crazy to begin with, I suspect that people come prepared to tolerate more crazy when witnessing anybody performing in such a fundamentally crazy context. Few, if any, presidents’ actions could ever be properly characterized as normal, anyway. Throughout history, civilizations have steadfastly believed in what might be referred to as The Great Man Theory of governance, a popular and perhaps necessary myth. Back in the early Middle Ages, some idiot son of a genuinely brilliant king might gain power through succession. The prince inheriting the position might have been the least capable person in the whole kingdom to fulfill the role of king, but it couldn’t do to have an idiot king when a king needed to be wise, and so they were. Through studied practice, the king’s retinue learned to interpret whatever directions the king might give in ways that wouldn’t ultimately undermine the king’s authority, as idiot and even brilliant kings were sometimes prone to do. The watchwords were: The King Is Wise. Remembering to interpret all kingly commands as if that king were wise requires a disciplined mind. Nobody who merely executes commands could hope to succeed for long. Nor could those not clever enough to convince the king, however idiotic or brilliant, that they had, indeed, commanded whatever brilliant result ultimately came about, long succeed. In this way, it rarely mattered whether a king was an idiot, or brilliant, or a Madman like the one we’re blessed with today. ... If they cannot successfully reinterpret our Madman’s commands, we’re screwed. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

WhatDidYouDo?

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-11T06:02:40-07:00

Perseus Cycle 7: The Doom Fulfilled ...“…it matters how we answer when we ask ourselves this one absolutely essential question…” WhatDidYouDo when the world was going to Hell? Did you doomscroll in resignation or defiantly curse your obviously undeserved fate? Did you take to the streets to protest the unfair outcome? Did you write a haughty letter to the editor insisting upon what should have been done, what still might be done to avoid the worst-case scenario? Did you just tend your garden as if tending garden might be the best anyone could contribute, given the unfortunate circumstances, nurturing a few more hours in heaven before finally submitting to the apparently inevitable? Did you encourage the fall, believing in the transformative potential of some well-deserved time spent, even if it’s spent in God’s penalty box? Did you rail against the unfairness or quietly submit? Did you purchase an AR-15 class weapon to defend your Second Amendment rights? Did you hoard or sacrifice? Were you generous or stingy under the pressure? Did you cheer the political cowardice that led us all there or demonstrate genuine political courage, whatever that might entail? This world has been headed for Hell since before it was born, depending upon whose stories one depends upon. Or, this world has been trying to manifest as heaven against seemingly dedicated opposition, depending again upon which source one depends upon to provide their explanatory story. Some still insist that theirs are the hands of God, even in the face of seemingly preponderant evidence. Others depend upon the story that contends their hands are the devil’s. This contention seems palpable; the choices, though, tenaciously unremarkable. How could the same provocation be interpreted in diametrically opposite directions at the same damned time? How could the same flesh be simultaneously both good and evil, helpful and destructive, right and the wrongest wrong that anyone ever imagined existing? I chose to improve my garden, and might have ruined it in the process. My garden had always been a little threadbare, with bald spots in the lawn and a couple of untamable beds. I figured it existed in The Muse and my image, a fair representation of our shifting attention spans. It usually took us a few weeks to transfer plants purchased in pots with April enthusiasm into their eventual place in soil. Some took longer, and we’d always lose a few to our tenacious inattention. I have two Coral Bells I purchased last summer that are presently thriving in their original pots, having somehow successfully overwintered without being placed in their ultimate resting places in the front tangle garden. I walked the yard’s perimeter in this morning’s predawn twilight and felt like an alien on my own soil. I walked on somebody else’s sod, past some barely anticipatory beds. I might have undermined my future trying to improve on my past. What Did I Do while Hell descended? I must admit I helped somehow, though that was never my intention. I, like you, maintain a list of aspirational improvements, things that one day I hope might be done. I’ve completed most of that list that existed when we bought this place, and added more items than I care to remember, many of which I also dispatched. In that process, we’ve utterly replaced the place with something different. It’s not nearly the same, thank Heavens, or, I think I meant to say, “Thank Heavens,” there, for I invited plenty of devils into my home, too, and more disappointments than I care to recount. I still call this place The Villa Vatta Schmaltz, and I still even more firmly believe that finding this corner of this world qualified as a definite mitzvah for the ages, but I’ve been quietly undermining the place and myself ever since we took possession, like replacing an imperfectly servicable lawn with sod that sure seems like it’s somebody else’s. What Did I Do while the world was going to Hell? I helped. I didn’t intend to help. Perhaps helping might just be another instantiation of the human condition. Find a newspaper from way back when, or go even further back, and then you’ll find clear evidence that the world then was also descending into Hell, for some or even for no particularly good reason. Those who came before us helped, too, often by attempting to improve their situations. That might not be the human condition, but the eternal condition of this world, and probably the equally eternal condition of the universe we inhabit, too. If entropy rules, we rightly have little say in the matter. Still, it matters how we answer when we ask ourselves this one absolutely essential question: WhatDidYouDo? ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

King'sHorses

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-10T06:18:27-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: The Perseus Series: The Death of Medusa I (1882 ) “All the King’sHorses and all the King’s men seem unlikely to save our incumbent from himself again. Thank Heavens!” The administrators and cabinet heads in our incumbent’s first administration were fringe characters, but several seemed to retain enough of their native senses that they eventually acted to prevent a few of his more disgusting abuses of power. These interventions ultimately frustrated and angered our malignant narcissist, and he leveraged these experiences to ensure that no sane person would get a chance to serve in his second administration, the one he clearly intended to remain steadfastly indifferent to administering very much of anything, especially our federal government. And so it came to pass that he nominated not merely the bottom of the barrel, public servant-wise, but generally, creatures who had never quite managed to matriculate to inhabiting the inside of any barrel, but those who hailed from somewhere beneath one. Carefully coached and in collusion with some of the worst legislators in the history of legislating, most of those horrible nominees managed to gain approval. These became what are generally referred to as The King’sMen, even though a significant number of them purported to be women, though none of them in any way traditional or as DEI hires, except, of course, in the caricature, cartoonish way. Anyway, we ended up with an epic crew. Secretaries more interested in exotic travel than in unraveling the very fabric of representative government. They talked big but delivered little beyond fresh litigation, which they would invariably lose. These were administrators perfectly chosen for their studied indifference. A seemingly inhuman Secretary of Health and Human Services who didn’t believe in science. A remarkably insecure and performative Secretary of Homeland Security who believed her primary responsibility involved cosplaying cowgirls. A Secretary of Labor whose father was cited for hitting on his daughter’s employees in their workplace, and who also hosted her direct reports to a visit to an honest-to-God strip club, in an attempt, I guess, to help them get right with God. Most of these clowns pretended to righteousness, helping their boss sell his corrupted Bibles on the side. His Secretary of the Treasury’s son started a business intended to leverage the eventual finding that the incumbent’s tariffs had been illegal and needed to be refunded. He offered beforehand to buy back tariff claims at a discount for those who were being ruined by those tariffs. Similar curiosities prevailed in every department. The King’s Men ran rampant, appearing anything but penitent when called before congressional hearings to recount their precedent-setting sins. They came defiant of their constitutionally-mandated overseers, and declared their Fifth Amendment with near absolute impunity, as if they didn’t need to care. They didn’t seem to share a molecule of guilt or understanding among them, as if they existed solely to fulfill their boss’s often contradictory and indecipherable whims. They generally seemed to do whatever they pleased. Early on, we partisans, we who thought of ourselves as the True Americans, if only because we retained a firm belief in such practices as due process, believed that the brakes that emerged in that first administration might eventually appear in the second, though the early evidence of such an emergence was never all that promising. We saw defiance impudently doubling down whenever another miscarriage of justice was found. We saw Cabinet Secretaries dissemble, doubling down on whatever transparently illegalities they’d been caught trying to get away with. That doubling down went double for the legislators charged with holding those clowns accountable. Collusion seemed to be the primary purpose of this second administration, the one that sure seemed maliciously indifferent to actually administering anything. The incumbent they intend to protect with these dances, though, might just have outsmarted himself, or, more likely, out-dumbed himself this time around. However his loyal bootlickers might try to defend his actions, he doubles down on their double downs on their original double downs. These clowns who seem to firmly believe that they’re actually getting away with something, ain’t actually getting away with anything in the long run. All the King’sHorses might be arrayed to defend him, in hopes of somehow putting him together again, but no men or horses that have ever existed seem terribly likely to make much headway against such a dedicated doofus. All the King’sHorses and all the King’s men seem unlikely to save our incumbent from himself again. Thank Heavens! ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

DeathWatch

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-09T05:58:55-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: Laus Veneris (Between 1873 and 1878) "…once the sour spoilage this incumbent leaves behind as legacy, finally fully decomposes, thank Heavens." Rarely has an anticipation received such an enthusiastic public reception. News of the impending event has become an obligatory element of every edition of every paper and news program across the spectrum, from amateur podcasts to stately professionally-produced broadcasts: video, audio, and print. Each morning first carries news of astonishment that our beleaguered and clearly ailing incumbent has somehow managed to survive another night intact, though he reportedly gleefully appears worse than when last reported. More makeup has invariably been ineptly smeared over some fresh rotting part of his body, typically the other hand. His ankles continue to swell, defying geometry as well as gravity. He’s clearly cognitively not quite what he used to be yesterday, and certainly worse than he was the day before. His demise always seems inexorable. He enjoys an unusually asymptotic relationship with his demise, though people often depart by way of seemingly infinite increments. Few seem to fall in a single fell swoop. Old soldiers do, indeed, seem to fade away, and so, apparently, do old frauds. Few, though, hold such an enthusiastic audience in thrall as they exit, dramatic tension growing greater with each disappointing day’s passing. Poised for an unusual celebration, the beer cooler ice keeps melting and needing to be replaced, and nobody even imagines relighting the long-smothered hamburger-and-hot-dog fire. The children no longer hover to witness the blesséd event, which their elders insist will be long recalled as historic. They will be called someday to remember when, to have been a faithful witness to this divinely-inspired event. The extraordinary has devolved into the disquieting ordinary, as if it seemed perfectly respectable for the villain not to die near the middle of the third reel. One wonders if time will be left for redemption and heartfelt celebration before the movie finally, seemingly inexorably ends. Will this sorry story stretch into a fourth reel or even, regrettably, further? No chief executive has had a greater death wish. Even he seems to see that he holds no remaining successful moves on his great self-sabotage chessboard. I suppose he’s too infirm to tip himself over, or, more likely, he holds sustaining delusions of eventual redemption. He probably imagines someone magically appearing to pay his substantial bail, though such an outcome seems to everybody beyond any likely pale. Like everybody, when he dies, he will remain dead forever, though his present decidedly undead state will very likely hold the bulk of his legacy going forward. He will be curiously fondly remembered, if he’s remembered with any clarity, which seems unlikely, as the president who teetered on the edge of death for the bulk of his foreshortened second term, a zombie presence remarkably uninterested in administering anything and, at any rate, incapable of administering even if some spirit might have moved him to try. It never did. Maybe not today, and perhaps not even tomorrow, but eventually, this absolute bastard will disappear. Yes, then comes the short, sad, utterly accidental tenure of, shudder, President Vance, but he has none of the questionable charisma of his soon-to-be predecessor, and the gift of having been born with his left hoof in his mouth. He will hold authority like that baby monkey holds his stuffed animal toy, with its stuffing trailing out behind. He will be welcomed as an inept replacement for a malignant mistake, and history might well hold him acceptable, given the regrettable alternative he replaced. We are blessed in the meantime with this slowly burning fuse. We know for certain that our nearly universally reviled incumbent will not be much longer for this world, and this one realization has at times felt like the only real possession any freedom-loving citizen has actually owned. I expect to miss the reliable anticipation, like how the best part of my vacation often occurs over the week before I depart. One day, my good old days will be remembered as filled with warm anticipation of the bootheel finally disappearing from the back of my neck. History will probably let out a collective sigh of extreme relief as it comes to believe again that even the most evil activities of mere men always inexorably come to an end. The cult this clown built will very likely evaporate upon his departure, just after the predictably overly elaborate K-Mart-catered state funeral. A collective sigh of relief and release will be heard sweeping across this once-again potentially great future nation, once the sour spoilage this incumbent leaves behind as legacy finally fully decomposes, thank Heavens. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 05/07/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-07T17:40:38-07:00

This week’s EndDays dispatches arrived in the same week as Cluelessness itself — the physical copies of the long-awaited book finally landing on the porch in their plain brown box. ... I watched our incumbent’s Craziness spread through Congress like a communicable disease while his MakeUp spread across his face like a communicable disease. MakingBelieve turned out to describe both a despotism’s operating model and the condition of anyone credulous enough to volunteer to inhabit one. ... I came out the other side of this week feeling remarkably different for having read that thing I wrote. ...This EndDays Story considers the fictional bases every despotism demands, even and especially this one. In this EndDays Story, I examined how despotisms depend utterly on fictions — they begin with a lie and end when some age-old truth finally pierces whatever remains of their heart. The tenure in between amounts to an extended game of MakingBelieve, where demonstrating fealty requires publicly performing unquestioning acceptance of whatever fiction the despot demands. Believing Joe Biden stole the 2020 election serves as table stakes for inclusion in what still passes for the Repuglican Party — not because it’s true, but because faith requires no proof and does not rely upon truth. Those of us who cannot quite bring ourselves to believe the lies live complicated lives under any despotic administration, cheering each fresh embarrassment, and praying for the comeuppance that always eventually arrives. Every despot in the history of the world so far nurtured a little Peter Pan inside, extending adolescence into extreme old age. ...“…that’s what always happens when Vacuity LLC gets himself elected President of a country.” This EndDays Story amounts to a history and a rant on the abiding presence of Vacuity. In this EndDays Story, I traced the anti-polity sentiment that has followed us through the two and a half centuries since independence — the Dark Ages Conservatives who firmly believe that human rights present a genuine threat to their liberty, and who seem dedicated to E Pluribus Chaos as their enduring motto. ... They personify Vacuity: carelessly thoughtless, surprised when tariffs act like taxes, appalled when the courts hold their president accountable, preferring a king while treating every actual king with the same disrespect they’ve leveled at every President since Washington. That’s what always happens when Vacuity LLC gets himself elected President of a country. ...This EndDays Story wonders if EndDays hold time for retribution or only time enough for acceptance when Erring. In this EndDays Story, the first physical copies of Cluelessness arrived, triggering an out-of-body experience akin to witnessing a birth — emotionally complicated, immediately disrupted by what seemed like glaring typos in the first few pages. ... But the following morning, crouched in predawn light, I could not find the errors that had so troubled me the night before. ... It turns out that EndDays are filled with such impressions — experiences that sure seem discouraging but cannot quite be confirmed. ...This EndDays Story considers how a chief executive’s Craziness infects the Cabinet and Congress, rendering the whole system temporarily incapable of acting. In this EndDays Story, I traced the history of governments struggling to respond to their leader's incapacity — from King George III's madness and Parliament's fumbled attempts to reassign his authority, to our own Twenty-fifth Amendment, which might just as well have been written on toilet paper for all the use it's proven in practice. ... Everyone who might act has already contracted a sympathetic case of pretty much the same craziness bedeviling their hobbled chief executive, which leaves the whole legislative branch hobbled alongside him. ... The political cost of admitting to any madness in one's party seems too goddamn onerous. ...“…I lay down for a well-earned nap I might never quite wake up from.” This EndDays Story finds me immersed in SelfReference, experiencing the first full read of my freshly published book, Cluelessness. ...In this EndDays Story, I opened the plain brown box left on the porch and found my book inside — cover sticky with whatever they use to finish new paperbacks, smelling like new books, the cover image of me peering into a mirror, quizzically staring back at me. ... I crawled through that first read, not wanting it to ever end, unsure if I could stand to finish it. ... I felt moved to tears a few times — private tears not included in the text, not even hinted at there. ... I heard myself whisper, “Beautiful,” before I lay it down finished, in favor of a well-earned nap I might never quite wake up from. ...This EndDays Story confirms that scripture underplayed what we would experience during EndDays, if only because no self-respecting Old Testament prophet could have unashamedly predicted what seems to be happening. In this EndDays Story, I noted that scripture predicted strange things would appear during EndDays, but even an experienced Ezekiel could not have unashamedly predicted our Administration Still Remarkably Uninterested In Administering Anything. Perhaps strangest of all stands the now common practice of self-proclaimed conservatives wearing MakeUp — not surreptitious Just For Men applications, but spackle thick enough to qualify as Versailles-grade court cosmetics, complete with mouches. ... Their MakeUp might be the only honest thing they present in public — a cover-up worn openly on their faces, disclosing their underlying insecurity to anyone paying attention. He wears his cover-up on his face for everyone to see and has never once given anyone a peek at whatever horrifying mess lurks underneath. ...As of last week, you could order it from Bookshop.org or from Amazon. ...For instance, now, if you'd prefer, you can order Cluelessness from VitalSource, for the modest price of R191.74 ZAR, VAT inclusive. This means that Cluelessness has crossed the equator to become available in South Africa, long a center of Cluelessness as well as hard-won enlightenment! ... I learned to revile my Cluelessness long before I ever imagined reveling in it as a precursor, perhaps an essential, if not necessarily necessary, precursor to enlightenment. In our post-enlightenment environment, it seems that Cluelessness continues to thrive more or less unencumbered. Perhaps our once hoped-for notion that enlightenment might ultimately vanquish Cluelessness, gratefully only rendered it more useful: finally leveragable. ...This week, I finally found Clueless offered on Portland’s Powell’s Books website, my long-time go-to source for buying books, though their listing included no explanatory blurb. Consider it to be an insider’s source, one where the buyers don’t need no stinkin’ alluring description to seal a deal because they’re already an insider. If you’re reading this, you’re an insider, whether you want to be or not. ...This has been my first full week with Cluelessness resident in my home. I look up from glaring down upon my keyboard, and see it staring me down from the top of the familiar pile on the left side of my physical desktop. I read it cover-to-cover, which might seem like no huge deal, but it proved to be an enormous revelation for me. ... Its presence encourages me to be on my best behavior, because I don’t want it to see me engaging in any disqualifying bad behaviors it might innocently see me apparently engaging in. ... I’m doing my best, though I seem to repeatedly default to who I was before I started gussying up. ...Cluelessness has finally become a growing global presence, just as if it hadn’t already been. ...I employed Claude.ai, a commercial AI-powered text editor, using it to perform repetitive copy/pasting work and to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.”

MakeUp

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-07T05:47:19-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: The Council Chamber ..."Thank the Lord or somebody for such small blessings." Scripture predicted that many strange things would appear during EndDays, but if these are, indeed, EndDays, even stranger things have manifested. I suspect that no self-respecting prophet could or would have unashamedly predicted what we see emanating from our Administration Still Remarkably Uninterested In Administering Anything. That label alone would have challenged even an experienced Ezekiel to announce. “And, verily, The EndDays will bring an Administration Still Remarkably Uninterested In Administering Anything.” Even the more devout and penitent would welcome such news with a heartfelt, “Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.” Our actual experience, given that these might be those long-anticipated EndDays, surprises us all, however Nostradamus-hardened we had become. This life, as usual, wouldn’t really qualify to be believable fiction. That’s probably the primary way we can determine for certain that these times are not, in fact, fictional. We’re not delusional, merely present and attentive. Nobody could credibly MakeUp this stuff. Perhaps at the top of what would have previously qualified as unbelievable stands the now common practice, broadly engaged in by self-proclaimed conservatives, of males wearing MakeUp. I’m not talking about surreptitious applications of Just For Men® intended to cloak an encroaching grey around the temples, but spackle every bit as thick and obvious as anything a Gay Blade Louis The Eye-Ex Whatever wouldn’t have been caught dead without at Versailles, replete with mouches. Our incumbent has always worn copious amounts of the most obvious fake tan on almost all exposed skin, as if to pretend that he plays golf in the nude. ... But he fancies a Florida tan, more orange than bronze, and iridescent even when viewed in full sunlight. He’s not dead yet, but nobody who sees him in life was ever moved to comment on how lifelike he looks. He looks like death, inexpertly warmed over. He’s haphazard, too, with application, edges prominently not quite reaching his hairline, so that the underlying beached whale pale clearly shows around his face’s perimeter. It gives him a curiously demonic, haloed appearance. His Vice sports eyeliner that makes him appear poorly drawn, as if the sketch artist had failed to return to smudge out his initial reference lines. I’m uncertain the message he intends to send by appearing such, but I can report that whatever he intends, I can classify what’s received as a definite mix. I’m confused, especially when he goes off on one of his frequent rants against drag queens reading stories to kids, because he presents as a refugee from drag queen college who’s forgotten to remove the evidence. The effect leans far into ridiculousness, which might make sense if the purpose was supposed to be stealth. Who would suspect that anyone suited in such a clown uniform could be capable of inflicting real harm on anyone but themself and some hapless snooping fashion detective? He, like his boss, might be even more dangerous for their ridiculous getups. Their sense of style easily lulls the unsuspecting into vulnerable ease, on those fleetingly rare moments when they can stop laughing or launching milk out of their nostrils when encountering their appearance. Yes, theirs seems a truly absurd obsession, though their MakeUp might be the only thing they present in public that actually comes even close to disclosing their underlying truth. They are, or must be, deeply insecure, for their MakeUp renders their appearance deeply superficial, shallow as Hell. They present as carrying no depth, or depth they’d rather not present in public, tenaciously two-dimensional. This probably discloses more than enough for any observer to conclude that they must be up to something even they consider shameful. Those who appear unable to disclose their shoes-off selves seem incapable of holding the public’s trust. They simply must be up to something surreptitious, something that seems certain to embarrass us since it certainly seems to embarrass them enough to move them to slap so damned much MakeUp on what’s obviously a pig. The Biblical references to EndDays had to be written as allegories, and it seems from here, if we are, indeed, living in EndDays now, that our days, our news stories seem like allegories, too. We must read behind the headlines and between the lines to find any underlying truth, any truth under the obviously lying MakeUp. What does it mean when an incumbent shows up at his own press conference made up to resemble a freaking orange? Might he be preventing himself from telling bald-faced lies? Might that MakeUp protect him from charges that he committed what every witness confirms he actually did commit, but, unfortunately, not bald-facedly. Without that prima facie bald-faced evidence, it might be that we cannot properly prosecute. He probably knows that. He pretends to be something he isn’t. He never hasn’t. He’s truthful to a fault, if that fault is the fact that he wears his cover-up on his face, for everyone to see, and has never once given anyone a peek at whatever horrifying mess lurks underneath. Thank the Lord or somebody for such small blessings. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

SelfReference

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-06T05:05:54-07:00

"…I lay down for a well-earned nap I might never quite wake up from." ...Who did he intend to enlist to perform in the role of his reader? The book seems to have more premise than plot. He titled it Cluelessness, then cast himself as the protagonist, as almost the only focus. ... If I weren’t the author, I wouldn’t be able to answer. Even as the author, I question whether I could be capable of coherently responding. As the author, my answers might be even more troubling than those posed by any reader. ... Have I gone and spoken what no one should ever say out loud? Does this publication mark the start or end of whatever might have been left of my reputation? In the first sentence, I explain that the book is a work of philosophy, autobiography, history, and fiction, simultaneously, all at the same time. I suppose that pronouncement might work as an introduction for anybody, for what are we but works of philosophy, autobiography, history, and fiction? We must be something other than the sum of our experiences, for even an AI engine can muster responses beyond those explainable by simple exposure. Even though it seems to understand more than it knows, more than the sum of whatever it learned. ...The book had arrived in a plain brown box, left on the porch and not discovered until later. ... I recognized it for what it had to be and opened it. ... The cover felt slightly sticky, as if it had been finished in a light coating of wax. That cover image was me peering into a mirror, me looking at myself, and myself quizzically staring back at me. I immediately set down to start reading as a reflexive action. ... I hadn’t realized that I’d included so many statements of introduction and intent, and I was about fifteen pages into the content before the evening had the best of me. ... I was looking for errors at first, for reasons to reject this book, but I couldn’t find any errors. ...I immersed myself, doling out the experience a scant chapter or two at a time before closing the cover and closing my eyes to what? ... Who was this character passing himself off as me? Was this the me from the summer of 2018, when we still lived in Colorado, before I knew we would successfully end our twelve-year exile, but lose my darling daughter? This presence was clearly associated with my past, but it sure felt all of a sudden disarmingly in-my-face present. ...I crawled through that first read, not wanting it to ever end, unsure if I could stand to finish it. ... As I crossed the halfway mark, the stories seemed to become denser, the pages thicker. I read slower and needed to go back and completely reread a few of the pieces. ... Maybe that had been the author’s intent? I felt moved to tears a few times, private tears not included in the text, not even hinted at there. Who in Hell was this character whispering into my inner ear? ... Nor was he insisting that his reader agree to anything. ...What moved him to even write this book, let alone to force it through the brutal machinery deemed necessary to publish and distribute the work? ... He’d finished four series, the first he’d chosen to attempt a year earlier when he’d sworn to be the writer he’d been declaring himself to be forever. ... Those first four: Another Summer, Another Fall, Another Winter, and Another Spring, could have been followed by Yet Another Spring, ad infinitum, but he decided to attempt to finish a concept he’d been working on with his publisher back when he had still considered himself to be a writer. He’d intended to write an anti-self-help book, one touting the opposite of whatever the typical self-help title might tout. He referred to those works as Self-Helpless, if only because they presented as paradoxes. If they dealt in self-help, why would the reader require their external reference? Following another’s even well-intended directions could only undermine any self-help intentions. ...But Cluelessness would require a different focus, probably not the sort of focus any publisher could be interested in promoting, given that it wouldn’t provide instruction and might not appeal to their usual demographic. ... He wrote on instinct until the project, like many before, slipped to the back burner, only to be revived early on that late June morning. He’d produce a piece each day until the end of that summer and see what he’d produced at the end. That’s what I encountered this week, when I opened that box and found ‘my’ book inside, Cluelessness, A Book of Mirrors, and immersed myself in SelfReference. ... It felt materially different than reading proofs online on 8.5 X 11 printout paper. I held something remarkable in my hand, something my son and I had created. ... This was a testament to something, something other than simply SelfReference. I cannot quite grasp the experience as easily as I held that copy of my book in my hand. ... I heard myself whisper, “Beautiful,” before I lay it down for a well-earned nap I might never quite wake up from. I’d never read anything even remotely like it before. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

...

Craziness

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-05T05:45:18-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: The Madness of Sir Tristram (1892) "I feel reasonably confident that there's no pill for that." Modern governments have struggled to respond to their leader’s incapacity. When King George III went mad the first time, Parliament moved to reassign his authority to his son, the Prince of Wales, but the king recovered before the vote was taken. Later, when he went mad again, his authority was formally reassigned to his son, though George retained his title until his death ten years later. Here, repeated calls for our current incumbent to be removed from his office under the Twenty-fifth Amendment have resulted in no action from either Congress or the Cabinet, the only two bodies holding authority to act. As his madness progresses, it seems unlikely that anybody will act. This seems to be a feature of madness and power. Everyone might agree that someone should act, but nobody seems to see themselves cast in that role. The political cost of admitting to any madness in one’s party seems too goddamn onerous for anyone to act, so they descend into the same madness they witness in sympathetic response. We pride ourselves on being a country of laws, though our laws seem to be divided into two broad classes: Laws we intend to enforce and those we don’t. Nothing’s written in the actual statute denoting which laws are which, but in practice, the separation becomes nothing more or less than glaring. In general, ethics laws are rarely enforced, except in acts of retribution for other, typically unrelated, often otherwise unenforceable actions. A senator or congressman might be prosecuted for something utterly unrelated to whatever action encouraged the enforcement action. Conspiracy has proven perhaps most popular in this category. Within the class of laws intended to be enforced lie a few that seem to have been passed just to serve as the sin of last resort. If we can’t nail them for corruption, we might put them away for conspiracy to avoid discovery of a crime they weren’t actually indicted for. Meanwhile, we see our titular leader further degrade both his office and his mental condition. Everyone seems to wholeheartedly agree, with the possible exception of the perennially disagreeable, that he’s batshit crazy, but the response so far has been some form of, “But he’s our batshit, so we’ll stand behind him.” Given the trajectory of most of his outbursts, I’m uncertain if standing behind him can be considered a prudent placement, but the point is that his madness has become the very reason his partisans cannot act to remove him because of his madness. Because he’s clearly violating the letter and spirit of his office, he’s apparently guaranteed free rein to degrade himself and his office at public expense. Sure, declare a whim war while you’re at it. The madder the better! The crazier, the fewer questions are asked. Of course, you’ll support him in disassembling the office. You’re a patriot, ain’t ya? Anyone who has ever faced madness in their family learns that craziness is communicable. Whoever might get diagnosed with the actual schizophrenia, the rest of the family ends up with something resembling a sympathetic case in resonance. What were before clear lines drawn on unquestionable territory, become all fuzzy whenever craziness rears. The judgment and courage treatment requires becomes the scarcest commodity in the family medicine cabinet. Even those who initially feel overwhelming sympathy soon find their empathy taxed to the point of collapse. Atlas might have held up the world, but not even the strongest of us ever turns into Atlas when craziness visits. So the 25th Amendment might just as well have been written on toilet paper, as useful as it turns out to be in practice. It seems unimaginable that a two-thirds majority of any Congress or Parliament could ever agree to act against any case of executive Craziness, if only because the legislative branch will have inexorably also contracted a sympathetic case of pretty much the same craziness bedeviling their hobbled chief executive, thereby hobbling themselves. I do not know how to resolve this crazy situation. What wisdom could create a statute that, in practice, could counteract such contagion? I feel reasonably confident that there’s no pill for that. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Erring

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-04T05:24:41-07:00

"Was any of his ever any different?" The first copies of my newly published book, Cluelessness, arrived yesterday. I opened the box to find five fresh copies, covers still sticky with whatever they use to cover new paperbacks at the factory. This qualified as an out-of-body experience, akin to witnessing the birth of a child, though significantly less messy. It was emotionally complicated, for such moments reintroduce the age-old tussle between me and my imposter syndrome, for in most ways, I remain a pretend author. I write in the very early mornings when no witnesses can catch me. I publish to a fairly select list, not tens of thousands of social media fans. Heck, I don’t even earn anything other than experience for my efforts. If I were a real writer, my bestseller would have rendered me rich and famous. If I were the real McCoy, publishers would be storming my door seeking additional material. As it is, I write for my own edification, mostly, and for a small and extraordinarily generous community around The Muse and me. ...I was holding the first evidence that my long-ago imagined experience had finally come to pass. I left supper simmering on the stove and sat on the back deck with the book in my lap, and began reading this strangely familiar work. I rather quickly found a typo, and not a little inadvertence, but one of the impossible-to-overlook sort. This could not have possibly been in the galley proofs I’d pored over prior to approving publication. It damned sure wasn’t in the manuscript I had shipped to the publishing coordinator from which the galley proof had arisen. ... After almost eighteen months of effort, the final work has flaws in its first few pages? Statistically, this means the work is very likely riddled with them. Something must have intervened between final proofreading and publication. I assumed that the galley proof represented a photographic image identical to the eventual book, and that there would be no opportunity for anybody to mistype because no additional typing would be required to reach publication. When The Blind Men, my first published work, was published, I received a printed galley proof, one dummied up on crappy paper but in the otherwise exact shape and size of the final work. There could be no ambiguity between that sample and the eventual book, and there wasn’t. This publisher, though, explained that they’d eliminated that unnecessary step, replacing it with foolproof technology, an obvious oxymoron if I ever heard one. ...I had expected that I would probably sleep one of those Sleeps of the Gods after finally receiving hard evidence of having actually accomplished something that momentous. ... I fussed myself to sleep, angry that I might have been taken advantage of. ... Like you, I have a history of occasionally being taken advantage of by some shyster or, through sheer inadvertence. ... I would just go back and compare the galley proof, which I had retained a copy of, with the hard evidence in that delivered package. Since the publisher prints on demand, I’ll just insist that they fix the problem that somehow magically appeared between galley proof and publication. I’ll also insist that they replace any copy already shipped with a corrected copy, at the publisher’s expense. ...But the following morning, still sick to my stomach over this discouraging discovery, I could not, for the life of me, find the errors that had so troubled me the night before. I crouched in dim predawn light, quietly searching for the damning evidence, but I could not find it. I reread the first few pages again and again, feeling a tad more agitated with each unsuccessful pass. I set the book aside and set about writing this story, for it seemed to me in that moment, a moment that has now stretched into this moment, that EndDays are filled with such impressions. Experiences that sure seem discouraging, but that cannot quite be confirmed. I’ve been on an incredibly short emotional leash, ready to lash out at the barest hint of insult, as if I were already wounded and seeking revenge. My attempts to confirm these suspected insults often prove fruitless. ...If these are, indeed, EndDays, time might not allow for restitution. It might be better to simply accept the cards as dealt. I’ll look again, after my blood pressure settles down, and confirm or refute the presence of errors. Then I’ll go on from there. Even if these were early days, resolution would probably insist that the best solution would prove to be acceptance. What’s a few errors in what I’d imagined to be a perfect representation of my incipient Cluelessness? Perhaps a reader would just consider those errors deliberate. ... If I can’t, I suppose I’ll live, though not in quite the grandeur I’d presumed I’d have to become accustomed to after publication. Was any of this ever any different? ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Vacuity

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-03T06:19:33-07:00

Studies of a Suit of Armor ..."…that's what always happens when Vacuity LLC, gets himself elected President of a country." If every particle possesses an opposite, then, I suppose, every polity must also carry an opposing polarity. During our own American Revolution, fewer than half of the colonists supported the patriots’ position: 40–45% were Patriots, 15–20% were Loyalists, and roughly 35–40% remained neutral or “fence-sitters”. (USHistory.org) Nearly as many were apparently indifferent to that world-changing opportunity, and many were opposed. Once won, the resulting freedoms were not universally embraced. Several of my forebears felt oppressed by the emerging Federals and fled into territory not yet governed by anybody but natives, preferring their own chances for liberty over those offered by any more newly-formed polity. Some were religious zealots who firmly believed that The Lord, in his infinite wisdom, had predetermined history so it couldn’t possibly make a lick of difference what anyone resolved to achieve, and that went at least double for any earthly government or slave. Those anti-polity sentiments followed us through the two and a half centuries since independence. Few predicted that an antimatter party would ever capture the Presidency and both houses of Congress after being so long out of fashion. They characterized themselves conservative, but not conservative in merely any conservatory sense. They were more akin to Dark Ages Conservatives, ones who firmly believed that human rights, as plainly spelled out in our Constitution, legislation, and case law, presented a genuine threat to their liberty and freedom. These people represent the antimatter in the physics of our nation and the chemistry of this world. They strongly oppose democracy and decency, straight-facedly characterizing both as forms of forced inequality, championing equal or better representation for good, Old Testament cruelty instead: an eye for an eye, or worse. Proudly ignorant and defiantly begrudging, they seek to undermine rather than encourage stability. They apparently see instability as the opportunity to get even with those who repeatedly embarrassed them in elementary school, showing off because they could read and somehow succeed at performing long division. E Pluribus Chaos seems to be their enduring motto. Those who so strongly oppose enlightenment ain’t what anyone might call bright. They seem quite remarkably dim in comparison to even the more mildly enlightened. They see what civilization has called a great light in this world as a great darkness. They quote non-existent scripture as pretty much their sole source of reference. They ascribe to God what not even a self-respecting demon would attempt. They consider cruel and unusual as sacraments. Every President since Washington complained about this disturbingly vocal minority, for they supported every opportunity to undermine the body politic. They have been in more or less permanent insurrection since before their ancestors were indentured here to get them the Hell out of the old country. Those courts considered such a finding paramount to a death sentence, except these SOBs were so mean that many of them didn’t expire before their indenture, so they gained freedom and some land, both of which apparently went straight to their heads. They joined Mosby’s Raiders and, later, the Ku Klux Klan, and were, to a man, traitors. Some call themselves Survivalists today, an apt label since, if anything, they certainly seem to have somehow survived, perhaps on meanness. These are the ones who firmly believe that those who defended our Capitol on January 6 were the insurrectionists. They believe themselves to be the last bastion of something they refer to as freedom, but to the rest of us, it sure seems like its opposite. Their intellectual justifications for their actions seem empty, but only because they are. They would be silly if not for the ramifications that echo across the broadest expanses of our otherwise civilized world. They are thugs in thug clothing, praising the very Military-Industrial Complex Eisenhower tried to warn us against. They seem like Distopia, Incorporated, specializing in legitimizing corporate corruption and greed. They seem to be precisely who Our Founders tried to co-opt out of being capable of undermining our continuing noble experiment. They deny science, eschew progress, and conspire with the Russians as if that’s what The Founders intended. ...They seem surprised when tariffs turn out to act just like taxes. They seem shocked when missiles won’t cower others on command. They seem appalled when the courts hold their president accountable for his actions. They say they’d rather have a king, but when their forebears had a king, they treated him just as disrespectfully as they’ve treated every President we’ve had since, even, eventually, finally this one now: theirs. For they seem to have authority issues, as if some political system could exist that could favor their preferences without enforcing some common rules. They want to be the exception to every otherwise reasonable rule. They seem to seek anarchy even though they will surely suffer more than most under its ultimately inexorable authority. They’ve succeeded in putting nobody in charge because that’s what always happens when Vacuity LLC gets himself elected President of a country. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

MakingBelieve

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-05-02T05:53:08-07:00

"That age-old truth never once stops stalking." Despotisms utterly depend on fictions. No reality can properly sustain them. They begin with a lie, then inevitably end with some age-old truth piercing whatever’s left of their heart. In between a despotism’s birth and its inevitable death lies a world at least circumscribed by lies, fervently held. Its tenure becomes an extended game of MakingBelieve, with peek-a-boo pieces to retain the true believers’ beliefs, which, in one of the cruelest twists of fate ever to befall them, base their existence on lies. If this seems like a tenuous basis upon which to root any existence, political or otherwise, you probably haven’t yet succumbed to the continually reinforcing messaging intended to reassure and secure your unquestioning support. Those who are not constantly MakingBelieve cannot comprehend what believers gain from engaging in such fictions. It might be that everybody eventually becomes practiced at MakingBelieve, for accepting reality seems to require plenty of accepting a fair number of unresolvable mysteries. ... We grow knowledgeable and experienced, in part, through the clever, intermittent use of fiction. We must be able to hold some concepts as if they were seemingly necessary preconditions to ultimately figure out some stuff. Still, we don’t insist, by nature, on ignoring reality as a necessary condition for living. Partly truth and partly fiction adequately describes any healthy outlook, though which truth and what fiction make a significant difference. Believing Joe Biden stole the 2020 election turns out to be a fiction, utterly unsupported by any physical, admissible in court, evidence. Believing Joe Biden stole the 2020 election serves as table stakes for inclusion in the inner circle of what still passes for the Repuglican Party. ...Some MakingBelieve seems absolutely indistinguishable from willful ignorance. Willful ignorance serves as the currency of every despotic realm. One demonstrates fealty by showing off the surreality they willingly subscribe to. Belonging involves both learning the complex catechism and frequently demonstrating unquestioning mastery. Should the wrong reality slip into an unguarded casual comment, this could spell catastrophe, for that underlying, unquestioning, uncritical countenance remains primary. Any even inadvertent step over that unmentionable boundary can mean expulsion. The greatest sin in any despotism comes with demonstrating disbelief. The despot must, then, expel the unbeliever from their Garden of Eden, for they will have betrayed their faith. ...They hold little of substance. They levitate in the thinnest of atmospheres. ... They extrapolate far beyond whatever data might support. They work hardest at spinning, for that dizzying momentum serves as their gravity. Critical scrutiny easily identifies the insecurities embedded in their underlying beliefs, with special emphasis on the ‘under’ and ‘lying’ pieces. Their faith couldn’t qualify as believable fiction; therefore, it relies on belief, which need not obsess over underlying fact or fiction. ... It does not depend upon truth. It fully justifies itself without external reinforcement. Whatever doesn’t require proof can serve as the basis for faith. If it must be proven, it cannot be held as faith. The Despot exhorts their followers to hold belief as if their life depended on it, because it often does. Those of us who cannot quite bring ourselves to believe the lies live complicated lives under any despotic administration. We root for our country’s opponents. We pray our leaders will achieve their comeuppance. We cheer when ‘our dear leader’ embarrasses himself again, which he does with greater regularity than he ever epitomizes himself as a leader. We marvel at just how compromised his administration becomes, even as it descends ever deeper into depravity’s darker depths. We’re not looking to party. Most of us have never once been inside an actual ballroom, and we cannot imagine why anybody might require one. We live without the magic only MakingBelieve can reliably deliver, but then we are no longer children. We might not prefer playing more adult games together, but we understand the cost of extending adolescence into extreme old age. Every despot in the history of the world so far nurtured a little Peter Pan inside, a part that insisted upon never growing up and living their life as an extended fiction until an age-old truth pierces whatever’s left of their heart. That age-old truth never once stops stalking. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 04/30/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-30T17:49:59-07:00

This week’s EndDays dispatches moved from the surreal to the civic, from the undead persistence of a failed presidency to the tentative arrival of genuine prosperity on my valley’s western edge. The week held its familiar tensions — political exhaustion, garden disruption, the launch of a new book into an indifferent marketplace — while finding fresh angles on each. ... The series passed its fortieth installment, and sod arrived at the Villa Vatta Schmaltz just in time for the end of this Writing Week. ...During Saturday Night Live’s first two seasons, its original News Update anchor Chevy Chase ran a continuing joke, each week proclaiming, “Francisco Franco is still dead.” In this EndDays Story, I borrowed Chevy Chase’s recurring SNL gag about Francisco Franco’s death watch to frame our own interminable vigil over a presidency that has reportedly been on its last legs since before it began. I characterized our incumbent as Undead — not dead, not alive in any meaningful sense, but operating without conscience, without conventional feelings, without the human capacity for tears or laughter that any credible grief requires. ... One day, probably not this morning and maybe not tomorrow either, I will roll out of bed to learn that Donald J. ...“…I’m wishing that I’d just stayed home, where my heart already was.” ...In this EndDays Story, I described my deep Unsettledness at watching my sacred garden violated by the irrigation crew’s trenches and indifferent boots, while simultaneously fielding a predatory podcast offer targeting newly published authors, while half-heartedly beginning to promote my just-published Cluelessness. ... I’m at that part of the Hero’s Journey where I’m wishing that I’d just stayed home, where my heart already was. ...The Muse’s Port Commission campaign offered a counterexample: she chose to show up as the midwestern farm girl she actually is, no costume, no performance, just herself. ... He’s either the most inept actor ever to take a stage, or an irrelevant genius mastering a craft with no plausible use in any universe. ...In this EndDays Story, I coined a new term for one of our era’s defining afflictions: Flacts, facts innocently or more malevolently taken out of context, which function as falsehoods while maintaining the surface credibility of facts. I described how those who deal in Flacts take considerable pride in their resulting ignorance, insisting upon solving the gravity problem before allowing powered flight to proceed. The Muse’s approach as Port Commissioner offered the contrasting model — finishing her homework, admitting her own ignorance when it exists, inviting questioners into actual conversation. ...Perhaps the first principle of project management, which I used to teach and practice professionally, must be: “Never be needier than your project.” In this EndDays Story, I applied the first principle of professional service — never be needier than your project — to the spectacle of our current presidency. ... Our poor little rich boy incumbent demonstrated his unsuitability for any executive role through seasons of his sleazy television series, where he performed as an emotional infant holding subordinates responsible for satisfying his capricious expectations. ... Forty-Seven’s destined to eighty-six as a child, and we will very likely be suffering the consequences through the balance of the upcoming century. ...In this EndDays Story, I traced the long history of scarcity thinking in this valley — the gospel of penury that told natives to know their place while original settler families treated prosperity as their private property. Then I described attending a ribbon-cutting on the county’s industrial western edge, where a corporation with proprietary technology and enviable market share broke ground on a factory that will employ more than a hundred people at decent wages. ...The Muse ordered a few more copies before she understood that I could order additional copies at a discounted price. ... I acknowledge that I couldn’t write a review of the work, either, unless I relied on the galley copy of the work as my source. ...I’ve been wondering what I might offer my loyal readers in exchange for their writing a review on one of the innumerable social media book review sites. I know that many best-selling authors hire ghostly review writers, paying them to produce what will transform into clicks that seem to represent satisfied book buyers. ... I have been receiving good-hearted offers for me to “invest” some of my treasure in what’s generally labelled “Book Marketing.” I believe that the only marketing worth its salt costs nothing and gets delivered by those who feel moved to spread the word, not because they’re receiving some payoff. ... I know, I could write my own, but that smacks of a certain desperation I’d really rather not engage in. I have been readying a press release announcing the publication, but I am holding it until the books are more broadly available. It takes a couple of weeks or more to complete this essential chore, so I’ve been honing my delivery and distracting myself. Overall, the launch feels more like a belly flop than a moon shot right now, but I have been reminding myself that I didn’t write this book for sales or notoriety. ... Some of us work hard to stay visible, feeding our feeds and creating fresh material, all without much in the way of promise of any payback. I keep reminding myself that if I really wanted to get rich, I’d stand better odds buying lottery tickets than writing books. The payback in this sort of business comes when creating the product, and when receiving unsolicited appreciations that seem to come just from being. I received one of these this week when someone in my SubStack networks enthused that if Cluelessness was half as good as my Blind Men and the Elephant, it would be well worth the read. She hadn’t received her copy yet, either, though I will encourage her to share her experience with others. Early in developing Cluelessness, I asked a few loyal readers if they would read the draft and just share their experience with me afterwards. I didn’t want them copyediting or reviewing, but providing me with perspective that no writer can ever access alone. ...I realise again that writing a book is not about selling it, not for me, it isn’t. ... It’s a very good thing that the economics of books have always been beside the point of them. I’m grateful for print-on-demand technology because it almost guarantees that books won’t be printed on spec and pulped when no buyers show up. ...WALLA WALLA, WA — David A. Schmaltz, a Walla Walla writer who has published a new essay every day since June 2017, has released his second book, Cluelessness: A Book of Mirrors (Outskirts Press, 2026, ISBN 978-1-9772-7965-1). The book collects ninety short essays exploring what Schmaltz calls “the most under-appreciated feature of human existence” — our universal inability to know enough to avoid being Clueless. Rather than proposing a cure, Cluelessness argues that how we cope with our inevitable not-knowing matters far more than the Cluelessness itself. ...In an era defined by near absolute certainty on all sides, a book that finds wisdom in admitted ignorance offers readers something genuinely rare — permission to not know, and company in the not-knowing. Cluelessness ranges across the full territory of daily life, from the self-deceptions that allow us to keep moving forward, to the studied ignorance that lets us ignore what we cannot afford to know, to the quiet dignity of maintaining convictions in a culture that rewards getting away with things. Each essay functions, as the subtitle suggests, as a mirror: angled just so, offering readers a glimpse of themselves going about their own daily Cluelessness. ...Since June 2017, he has published a new essay every single day on his blog at PureSchmaltz.com, accumulating nearly nine years of continuous daily writing across more than thirty book-length series. ...His first book, The Blind Men and the Elephant: Mastering Project Work (Berrett-Koehler, 2003), became a bestseller and was translated into five languages including Taiwanese Chinese, Thai, Catalan Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch. ...I employed Claude.ai, a commercial AI-powered text editor, using it to perform repetitive copy/pasting work and to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.”

Prospering

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-30T05:47:58-07:00

"…I'm hopeful we might finally escape the scarce resources allocation quicksand." ...Those who arrived late lose to those who came earlier, before we were discovered and became a destination. Then, our economics devolved into focusing on allocating seemingly ever-scarcer resources rather than sharing communal plenty. Some jealously guarded their plenty lest someone less deserving try to wrest it away from their grasp. We became most masterful here at pinching pennies, at somehow pretending to make odd ends meet, at cinching up the old belt yet another notch, at essentially starving ourselves for our own imagined good. We regretted the uneven distribution of our common largess and hoarded the best against possible future turndowns, justifying our penury as evidence of an underlying righteousness. The cynical defense insists that in the long run, we’ll all be dead anyway, so nothing really matters. ...Rather than imagining scarcity, the prosperous must use that same imagination to envision plenty. ... Both emerge as a product of the same facility, but it matters which one we choose. Here in this valley, a land of plenty if ever there was one, we were raised on the gospel of scarcity. We perceived true prosperity as just out of our reach, or the rightful property of only a few families of original settlers, or millionaires who came from somewhere else. ... We worked the factories and farms through our teen years, and most migrated to someplace where Prospering seemed like it might be something other than a pipe dream. A few of us came back, fleeing the negative externalities Prospering sometimes brings, the sprawl and ridiculous real estate values. Taken to extremes, Prospering becomes its opposite, reverting to its more primitive roots: the allocation of artificial scarcity. ...After our incumbent was elected, I foresaw where our economy would be heading, for our poor little rich boy had shown his animosity toward prosperity. He seemed to believe that Prospering shouldn’t be the property of everyone, but should be possessed solely by a landed gentry, the extremely wealthy. He set about plundering our commonwealth, the better to justify allocating resources as if they actually were scarce. ... I visited our county commission and city council, asking after their strategy for countering the impending economic disaster, but found no alarm, no concern. The stock market, rarely a reliable indicator of anybody but speculators Prospering, had been soaring beneath the biggest bubble ever, so it appeared that our economy might be growing stronger rather than rotting from the inside out. ... Our local governments have been frantically cutting budgets and services. Main Street has more vacant storefronts than we’ve seen in forty years. Happy days do not seem to be impending here again. Then, The Muse invites me to a ribbon-cutting ceremony on some formerly Port-owned property, out on the county’s industrial-zoned Western edge. There, we find a vast field graded flat, and piles of construction materials. Enormous mountains of sand and gravel, cranes and piles of steel, and a large white tent glinting in the bright, late April morning sun. Within that tent, the county’s movers and shakers have gathered to hear sermons of impending prosperity. The chairman of the corporate division investing in the plant they’re building here and the manager of operations for that plant share their plans. They speak of impending prosperity on a scale this valley’s never really experienced before. ... The historical rulers of this realm, the farmers who were virtual slaves to their land and our weather, who reinforced their particular economic ethics on the land and people, and that always-impending scarcity mindset, would be losing its historical grip. I’d seen it happen in neighboring counties as various industrial developments outpaced the traditional rancher and farmer base. Different values began to rule the place, ones less based on the often cruel allocation of supposedly scarce resources and more focused on more widely sharing their common good fortune. They speak convincingly of community, as if they already belong here. This factory they’re building out on that sandy field will become a community asset, employing more than a hundred and paying decent wages. They’d even invited the local United Way executives to the ribbon-cutting. They knew full well that they would shortly be subjected to their share of the largess. This factory has a license for manufacturing prosperity. ... They have been Prospering and they see their responsibility as an opportunity to share the wealth they’ve engineered. They’re only the first one here. More of their ilk are coming, relatively recession-proofed operations almost entirely unlike the traditional agricultural base upon which our familiar scarcities thrived. There was never going to be a resolution to the agrarian problem, for farms leverage tenaciously finite and limited resources. One might make a living, given that one can manage the scale of operations necessary to more than break even, and given relatively stable and generous export markets. ... Our vineyards have already begun an inexorable decline, after a reign of fewer than fifty years. Who knows if they’ll ever come back again? Our wheatfields grow grain once destined for the Far East, since undermined by illegal tariffs. Our future seems to stand along our industrial-zoned Western border, where Prosperity historically seemed least likely to appear. I don’t know if we’re capable of training our collective imagination to accept the challenges Prospering will bring. I’m no booster, but I’m hopeful we might finally escape the scarce resources allocation quicksand. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Neediness

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-29T06:35:19-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: The Calling of Perseus (between 1877 and 1898) "Never be needier than the country you were elected to lead." Perhaps the first principle of project management, which I used to teach and practice professionally, must be: “Never be needier than your project.” This principle was not supposed to be interpreted as an invitation to strive to be selfless in service, or in servitude, to your effort, but to more properly focus the professional’s attention. If one intends to provide some service, it doesn’t do for that service provider to be needier than their client. The client’s needs remain paramount in that context, and while it still matters that the service provider’s needs are attended to, the purpose of the engagement cannot degrade solely into ensuring the caregiver’s satisfaction. I do not intend to ignore the service provider’s legitimate needs, just to reinforce the notion that those needs should not be the primary focus of a service relationship. This principle requires some maturity from the professional, some ability to at least defer their needs in favor of somebody else’s, at least for the duration of the engagement, or, lacking that, how about during office hours? This principle might, in practice, prove to be pure fiction, for in fact, the service provider’s needs must remain a significant part of every service provider’s personal equation. In actual practice, the service provider’s personal purpose for engaging might prove to be the most critical variable in any such equation, for it seems as if that must be clearly understood, lest the service provider lose motivation for engaging. Perhaps the principle would be better stated if it suggested suspending some needs temporarily and focusing most attention on the needs of others when engaging in the profession. The temporary nature of this amendment might mitigate the otherwise apparent need to sacrifice self, which throws a popular imponderable into the equation. Selfless service seems impossible to provide if said service must be delivered by said self. A paradox, but one of many that anyone encounters when trying to make sense of service or profession. The chief problem with our so-called chief executive might be that he was never particularly executive material. He demonstrated this obvious fact through several interminable seasons of his sleazy little television series, The Apprentice, where he pretended to know how to perform in the role of chief executive but only managed to demonstrate how to generate workplace employment law violations. He played the part of someone volatile and unhinged, holding those who played his subordinates responsible for satisfying his capricious expectations. I never watched the show, but apparently, it was run like a lifeboat drill, where individual subordinates were fired in turn until one of the originals remained, who would be crowned Apprentice, or something like that, as if that might be experienced as an award or a win. In practice, our imaginary chief executive performed his role as if he were a child, raising his voice for inappropriate matters, and dismissing “employees” as if their rights and needs didn’t matter. No chief executive worth their salt ever spends so much time finding fault. Maturity was never all it was ever cracked up to be, but immaturity was never necessarily any better. The responsibilities we hold in trust for and with others should properly constrain our actions. We might be free, but never at liberty to emotionally back some truck up and over another. Every role we play demands from us at least an ounce of dignity and understanding toward our fellow human beings. The alternative devolves into something resembling a whim-ocracy, a form of governance where it’s utterly impossible to anticipate its trajectory. This form can’t be good for anybody, and the only reasonable explanation for its manifestation might be that somebody, probably the imaginary chief executive pretending to be in charge, insists upon being needier than his project. This amounts to a rookie form of engagement, disclosing only how unsuited an incumbent might always have been to hold not just the job, but the sacred responsibility everybody owes to others, whatever their job, even if that job turns out to be the President of a once-United States. I am not proposing abstract theory here, but bare rock reality in practice. The Neediness we experience on a (excuse the trite usage) “daily basis” or even more frequently merely clarifies the utter incompetence of our poor little rich boy incumbent. He performs like an emotional infant, an Enfant Terrible, literally getting away with murder. His presence, his ongoing performance, absolutely screams his underlying Neediness. By many accounts, he was always haunted by an underlying unsatisfiable Neediness, as exhibited by his libertine lifestyle and mindless pursuit of what should have been more than enough, but, sadly, wasn’t. Such unquenchable wants point to something other than conventional thirsts. They scream the sorts of immaturity that cannot be cured by either aging or experience. Forty-Seven’s destined to eighty-six as a child, and we will very likely be suffering the consequences of having been led by a child’s abject Neediness through the balance of the upcoming century. Never be needier than the country you were elected to lead. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Flacts

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-28T05:33:31-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: A Sea-Nymph (1879 ) "…this world remains wise enough to usually deny us such privileges." One EndDays feature involves taking information out of context. Facts can natively seem confusing enough, but taken out of context, they cruelly turn false, rendering their champions foolish, though rarely in their own eyes. I suspect we all engage in this business, largely innocently, though others, especially those we characterize as opponents, might try, without success, to clue us in. We suspicion more deeply then, and might even wonder when an old reliable turned toward some newly-imagined dark side. We rail on about emerging divisions while staunchly defending whichever side we somehow find ourselves on. A seeming raft of issues has been subsumed with Flacts, facts innocently or more malevolently taken out of context. While many such commissions seem inadvertent, some relatively bad actors specialize in obscuring context. They tend to speak in unquestionable absolutes, equating opposition with ignorance and worse. Some of the fuss amounts to an absence of sophistication. Those who cannot imagine themselves reaching a reviled conclusion without a little lubrication seem to have no problem imagining corruption when none has occurred. Gone, it seems, are the days when loyal oppositions could argue finer points without villifying each other’s position. Now, they’re either for us or against us, and those against us do not deserve much respect, or get it. Further, it seems to me that those who even inadvertently deal in Flacts take considerable pride in their resulting ignorance. They imagine processes that couldn’t possibly exist, and they often propose draconian resolutions for otherwise relatively pedestrian complications. Had they been in charge, powered flight could never have been achieved, for they would have insisted upon someone first definitively solving the gravity problem. Powered flight only became possible once the age-old insistence on definitely resolving the gravity problem was abandoned in favor of perhaps a much less definitive and even inelegant resolution. Notice how many other problems were also not resolved before powered flight took off. Those gasoline engines sputtered toxic smoke. Some unfortunate pilots and passengers would ultimately die in crashes. Success ultimately relied upon a series of serious compromises, each of which preserved potentially unacceptable risks. Our eventual acceptance of those unreasonable risks allowed progress, after a fashion. They also preserved complications. In some real and certain sense, we might just be practicing. Few difficulties have ever been definitively resolved, and fewer still resolved beforehand. We tend to need to dabble in over our heads and create difficulties worse than anybody originally imagined before our true genius kicks in, or, often, not. When it doesn’t kick in, some turn cynical while others, seemingly uncharacteristically, turn even more optimistic. No better self-portrait of the human condition exists. What doesn’t happen, or happens much less often, involves waiting until all the critical questions have been definitively resolved. That so rarely occurs as to barely warrant a mention, yet this seems to be the first defense of those who arrive at the latest gunfight bearing Flacts; destined to lose again, but lose with noblesse oblige, having been right in principle if not in practice. They might come to feel oppressed, but only for the best of all possible reasons. Their oppression might prove to be their chief blessing in this life. Losing opinions tend to be their own reward. Now that The Muse has become a Port Commissioner, she sometimes gets sideways with constituents. She invites those with questions into conversations where she usually manages to demonstrate that she has at least finished her homework. She can confidently assert whatever she asserts and feels comfortable enough in her skin to admit to her own, sometimes embarrassing, ignorance. She’s never tempted to fiddle with her facts, though she’s often subjected to ad hominem attacks from a not always that loyal of an opposition. She, like each of us, finds herself exposed to others’ ReceivedWisdom, and that wisdom only occasionally proves itself to be terribly wise. Such disagreements might carry no resolution, especially when and if Flacts subsume the validity of actual facts taken within a given context. We each hope for the future we imagine, though this world remains wise enough to usually deny us such privileges. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

StageCrappery

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-27T05:51:20-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: The Golden Stairs ..."All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players;" William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII "I tire of these endless, meaningless performances…" Contrary to popular misconception, all this world was never a stage, and human existence never once very closely resembled mere players. Shakespeare’s assertion, delivered via character Jaques, seems like a cynical approximation, perhaps an apt analogy, but falling far short of anything resembling definitive. Though in our time, one might be forgiven for believing that everyone’s more or less acting their way through life. So much of our experience gets represented on the same small screen on which we’ve seen actual performances, with actual actors: merely players. It seems important, though, to draw at least one fundamental distinction between acting and living. What might such a distinction entail? Authenticity seems utterly different for a player and a person. For the player, it roughly measures how similar their actions seem to resemble those of an actual person under similar conditions. Believability seems to be the primary metric by which a player’s authenticity might be measured. People often behave in unbelievable ways, and one roughly equivalent measure of their authenticity might just be the exact opposite of the players’ measure. The unexpected, indeed, the unbelievable acts tend to be those with the greatest impact, the truer measure of authenticity. Of course, a skilled actor can fake even that, the backward authenticity that you and me find familiar. Nobody acts authentically to achieve some end, though, for whatever behavior signifies authenticity tends to ooze out around often carefully reinforced gaskets. When The Muse ran for Port Commissioner, she faced an essential dilemma. Who should she present herself as being to her electorate? What sort of costume and makeup should she adopt to consistently appear to be her? Our incumbent, for instance, adopted wearing a stupidly long red tie, and that became a significant part of his so-called iconic identity. It didn’t provide an ounce of insight into any of his underlying authenticity, if, indeed, he even had any, but it did display a consistent way to identify his presence, however otherwise vacuous. The Muse decided to attempt to just be herself on her campaign trail. This meant not wearing makeup or dressing up, attempting to impress. She chose to show up as the midwestern farm girl she knew she still was, not all that deeply down inside. She chose to play the one character who wouldn’t require her to perform as if she were somebody different from who she really was. She knew that, for her, any alternative would have required more guts than she probably has, and would have been nuts in terms of projecting her authenticity. Not every politician has undergone this conversion. Many, if not most, still subscribe to Shakespeare’s notion and attempt to pass themselves off as somebody other than who they actually are inside. Some, unfortunately, seem to possess no notion of who they might actually be, having been cultured in toxic environments where they could never disclose who they might have been beneath their wardrobe. These seem like lost souls. They might be skilled in projecting some sense of competence, but they also tend to carry the stench of whatever they cannot disclose. No news cycle goes by without some fresh high and mighty receiving their public comeupance, without their actual authenticity finding presence, and the shocking difference undermining their performative credibility. No story in this world ever adequately mends any identity so rent. Our incumbent seems to trade exclusively in inept StageCrappery. He carefully sets each stage before he takes to it, yet he still manages to generally make another hash of each appearance. He might project some significant backdrop, then deliver a speech that violates the first tenet of whatever that stage set was intended to represent. He often dozes through his delivery. His lack of authenticity has become the most prominent feature of whatever character he’s intending to perform. Everyone who witnesses the least of his performances understands that he’s lying to them. It almost seems that he’s deliberately speaking in reverse, and that his audience is supposed to translate each of his proclamations into their opposite in order to understand the message he’s intending to deliver. He’s either the most inept actor ever to take a stage, or he’s an irrelevant genius, the master of a craft that has no plausible use in this, or any other universe. I tire of these endless, meaningless performances, and I ache for at least an ounce of genuine authenticity from our presidency. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Unsettled

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-26T05:55:04-07:00

"…I'm wishing that I'd just stayed home, where my heart already was." As the grand planned in-ground irrigation system installation spills into its fourth day, my usual composure slips away from me. I sit uneasily, unable to watch the unavoidable desecration happening out in my sacred yard. This has long been my place, almost a secret garden, reserved almost exclusively for The Muse and me. We only very rarely ever invite anybody else into this lair. We are both particularly particular about where we place plants, how we water, and how we mow. We would never even think of hiring an alien to weed or mow. ... Indeed, we would be certain that they couldn’t understand, and not just because we wouldn’t prove capable of explaining, though it’s doubtful we could adequately explain the boundaries of acceptable behavior there to any alien other. This place isn’t merely special, it’s our special. To see a crew scrape off all my lawn, wounded something deep inside me. Yes, that grass had grown tired with moss and oxalis intrusions, leaving bare stretches where red clover reliably took over, but I knew every cubic inch of that lawn. Now it’s gone, replaced for now with trenches crossing once inviolate space now violated, culminating in the irrigation system installer and owner of the company tromping through our favorite bleeding heart bed, smashing half the plant under his indifferent boots. I slipped a sarcastic stiletto at him in response, imploring him to be careful. I had cleared a path to provide access, and he, in mindless haste, chose to forge a shortcut. I’ll have to apologize to him in the morning. It would have been infinitely better had I taken a few days away while the surgery took place, for I have never had any stomach for scalpels and sutures, but my presence proved necessary, though only barely. ... Others, I’d ask, though they didn’t seem to matter, for I had been cast as the naive owner, ignorant of the finer details of modern irrigation systems. Heck, I still haven’t managed to access the app that’s supposed to control this new infrastructure. It employed that ‘we sent you a code’ technology that never sends a code, and no, it didn’t end up in any of my many spam folders, either, though The Muse received a code on her first attempt. I would occasionally be called out of my coma to respond to some question or be called to paint some piece that needed to match its surroundings. Late yesterday afternoon, I learned that the installer had managed to strip off some of the paint I’d so painstakingly applied to avoid painting the parts in place during installation. ... I will be painting them again, in place, then, later. ...I stand between idea and realization, an inherently disquieting location but common as sand. ... I managed to half-heartedly start thinking about promoting my newly published book, though, as I reported in last week’s weekly writing summary, it’s not really available yet. It might be published, but the catalogs have not yet registered its presence, so it cannot be ordered. I did, while sitting Unsettled, receive a call from a podcast called News of the World. They wanted to interview me and offer me full, permanent rights to recordings of the podcast episode for use on my own website to promote my Cluelessness book. I had reportedly been chosen from only five new titles considered this week and was selected at number three. ... The price: just slightly less than I’d paid to have the manuscript copyedited, a small fortune in my world. I declined the opportunity for infamy, though I felt that familiar old twinge of impending notoriety. I don’t really want to be anybody but what I already am. I checked, and that operation is a well-known scam focused on fleecing newly self-published authors who haven’t discovered how to promote their work, sponsored by casinos, and has no fan reviews. They homogenize every title to make it just as salable as toilet paper. That process would prove more painful than watching my garden grown automated sprinklers. I tried it on my Blind Men and the Elephant book. It didn’t work, except to leave me feeling even more deeply Unsettled. These transitions from what I already am into something purportedly better always involve some form of the old familiar giant step backward. Forward progress always, always, always involves more going backward than our planfulness ever imagines. ... We imagine seamless transitions that this world cannot allow. Should we prove capable of immediately making dreams come true without this inevitable regression, possession would no longer be capable of being nine-tenths of anything, much less the law. We simply must have persistence of presence and almost unbearably difficult passages, or else change might replace our essence. Our essence was intended to be inviolable, an endless echo, and not just any old thing we might switch out on a whim and feel good about. ...I see an opportunity to further improve my yard’s soil before the sod installation. I’m seriously considering getting a few bales of peat and a rototiller to improve the friability and drainage of my already incredibly fertile soil. Once the sod’s installed, I’ll be stuck with what I’ve got essentially forever, at least it will certainly prove to be forever for me. I might rather leave another legacy, though leaving that will certainly involve a fresh set of Unsettling experiences. I’m at that part of the Hero’s Journey, where I’m wishing that I’d just stayed home, where my heart already was. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Undead

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-25T05:07:19-07:00

Hasn't he already lingered longer than absolutely necessary? During Saturday Night Live’s first two seasons, its original News Update anchor Chevy Chase ran a continuing joke, each week proclaiming, “Francisco Franco is still dead.” The joke played off the news media’s apparent obsession with Franco’s recent demise. These days, we have what seems to me to be an analogous situation in that our incumbent has reportedly been continually on his last legs since before the start of his second term. Doubtless, he has been feckless and hugely ineffective at accomplishing anything lasting, though he has attempted and perhaps succeeded in undermining a previously stable world order. That accomplishment’s not nothing, but it seems unlikely to persist. Salvation seems ever-impending, simply awaiting his demise, which has been reported as imminent for four-hundred and sixty-one days as of this morning. That qualifies whatever ails him as a long-running illness by anyone’s measure. I’m starting to doubt that he’s actually teetering on death’s door. Perhaps it would be better if we just considered declaring him Undead instead. ...Each morning, along with the requisite, familiar existential dread, I roll out of bed wondering if that sonuvabitch will still be Undead. He was Undead the previous evening, sitting up texting his usual blather, material not really worth reporting on, though it will usually appear above the fold. The world hangs on every misbegotten phrase, seemingly led—or should I say “misled”—by one seriously Undead. He invariably engages in some racist or classist or misogynistic screed, fearlessly letting everybody see that he deep down seems to be absent one soul, especially when he wanders onto topics of religiousity, which he plainly lacks even a cursory background to discuss. He misquotes Bible verses as if he just that minute discovered them, which he probably has. I’m sure he went to a church service once, but probably only to steal from the collection plate as it passed. Who could expect him to pass up any opportunity to receive some more free money? The Undead move about the world impervious to most of the physical constraints that keep the rest of us in check. The Undead seem to have lost their ability to engage in any longer-term planning, so they largely operate on whims; they just get some wild hair crawling up their ass, so they act, heading off to Florida to engage in another meaningless round of what he tries to pass off as golf. ... They cheat with impunity, yet still manage to live with themselves, after a fashion. The Undead operate without conscience, without the normal guiding voices from above. ... They exclusively operate with near absolute impunity. Though few if any of them genuinely believe in the existence of any Gods, save the ones of vengeance. They usually perform as if they were somehow God’s chosen vessel, his spokesperson, a savior rather than a devil. The Undead are and always have been and always will be demons first. Everything else amounts to secondary responsibilities, even fulfilling the responsibilities of the office of our Presidency. ...Trump’s still Undead, though his mortal existence sure does seem to be slipping away a little more every day. Venous Insufficiency barely describes whatever’s going on inside him. He was very likely soulless before he became Undead. His Epstein connection was never more than a symptom of some deeper, infinitely more troubling dysfunction. He has never been what we might call ‘right in the head.’ He was always exceptional in this one narrow way. ... He was correct to think of himself as special, but not special as in gifted, but special as in unfortunate instead. He was not the original poor little rich boy, but he was always poor and always rich, and always, always, always a terrified little boy. His soul died long ago, perhaps done in by too close an association with disco and the seventies New York club scene, back when Francisco Franco was still dead, and he was just beginning his seemingly never-ending career as a leader of the budding disaffected army of the Undead. One day, probably not this morning and maybe not tomorrow, either, I will roll out of bed to learn that Donald J. Trump is no longer considered Undead. His demise will, hopefully, eventually put us out of his misery. He seems not to suffer from his condition, for the Undead lack conventional feelings. He lost his tears when he lost his sense of humor, for no human can believably cry who cannot also credibly laugh. He lost his fears when he refused to feel them, so they became his terrors instead. He texts through the night because sleep remains the final human refuge. The Undead wander through a twilit world, unable to see the light that might render simple decency visible again. He wanders lonelier than any cloud, blinder than a boulder, stupider than otherwise imaginable: Undead. Hasn’t he already lingered longer than absolutely necessary? ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 04/23/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-23T15:25:28-07:00

This week's EndDays dispatches moved from disorientation to defiance, from the poisoned noise of deliberate falseness to the quiet dignity of pea-shelling, from the billionaire class's ravenous absence of Enoughness to a small-town civic supper where a librarian earned a blown-glass heart on an engraved stand. The week asked what sustains a serious person when the signals arriving from the world can no longer be trusted at face value, and found its answers not in grand political resolution but in dirt, in preparation, in recognition, and in the stubborn practice of generous interpretation. ...In this EndDays story, I described my growing inability to trust my own senses, a cattywompus disorientation produced by sustained exposure to deliberate falseness. I acknowledged that I remain a simple man, prone to accepting signals more or less at face value, who finds himself thrown off when up arrives as down. This administration’s news conferences seem organized not to disseminate light but to spread darkness and amplify that day’s fresh set of bald-faced lies. I asked myself what urge still propels me to translate what might simply be absolute nonsense into something at least useful for navigation. ...In this EndDays Story, I traced the long arc of how the billionaire class’s absolute absence of Enoughness became a systemic condition, weaponized through euphemism and meme, recruited its own victims into defending it, and ultimately consumed the very consumer economy it depended upon. The MAGA contingent was coached into a backward insurrection, blaming immigrants for an erosion of living standards caused by the very politicians they were coerced into supporting. ... A generation or three of being treated as they have treated the rest of us will not likely rebalance a society that has lost its sense of Enoughness. ...I spent Sunday afternoon on my knees in the raised bed adjacent to The Muse’s Marion berry patch, pulling and pushing the handplow through decades of amended soil, planting Walla Walla Sweet Onion sets with powdered bone meal and genuinely loving embraces. I described myself not as a homeowner but as a steward, someone who knows every square inch of this soil and has crawled across it more than once or twice. ... The morning glory will not submit to anything I’ve thrown at it, returning with insistence to remind me that mastery was never on offer. ...EndDays time seems short, as if a clock was winding down or the universe itself was wearing itself out. In this EndDays Story, I recognized that I’d been existing in a hand-to-mouth state, maintaining my sacred routine without any compelling horizon to prepare toward. The upcoming irrigation system installation provided that horizon — a liberation that would allow me to sustain my gardens on a fraction of the water I’d previously used and spare me the task of setting hoses at three on midsummer mornings. Preparing for it required moving a shitload of decorative pebbles, cleaning possum leavings off stored garden hoses, and filling half a dozen cat litter tubs with pebbles to handtruck out of the trencher’s path. ... I must maintain my own agenda, as if that broader, over-publicized public one couldn’t possibly matter. ...“If only we could remember this inescapable fact and more frequently act upon it.” No week passes without The Muse, in her Port Commissioner role, being invited to some ceremonial supper or solemn civic society gathering. I accompanied The Muse to a small town civic supper where we took a table with a lovely family — a retired Corps of Engineers hydrologist from Evanston, Wyoming, and his wife, Sara, who manages the little local library and had grown up not far from where The Muse and I once lived during our exile. The after program was set aside for Recognizing: Student of the Year, Employee of the Year, and Citizen of the Year, each receiving a blown glass heart on an engraved stand. ... We left, having lost the dessert raffle, as renewed as if we’d been declared Citizens of the Year ourselves. ... If only we could remember this inescapable fact and more frequently act upon it. ...The Muse returned from a public meeting having bailed — she’d entered to find the opposition already loaded with rebuttals before their opponents had even begun presenting, seeking not dialogue but dominion. I blamed the meme-ification of civic conversation, the Repuglicans and the Russians having flooded social media with imprinting images and phrases that replaced thinking with transplanted ideology. The Muse’s response has been to invite stone-throwers to sit down and hear her thinking, practicing generous interpretation as an active and demanding discipline. ...Because a lag exists between availability and the many distributors’ catalogue updates, it will be a week or more before the work becomes available to order. ...It might sound trivial, but I feel most grateful for my many collaborators who assisted in creating this most unlikely publication. From my original struggle to even classify the work to the final Claude®-assisted promotional blurb, this really did require a community to create and launch. ... I didn’t need to worry about copyediting, for instance, and not only because every author naturally assumes the role of their own worst copyeditor. ... We were less hired guns than daughters and sons of ones in some way related to me and to each other. ... We have, indeed, become a community connected by Cluelessness, which is not nearly as odd or as unusual as it might sound. ...I will be promoting this work, but more importantly, I will be asking you to promote the work, too, through your networks of families and friends. ... Once the work’s available, I’ll announce and ask you to just let your virtual next-door neighbors know. ...Someone still living within it, noticing it daily, and finding that the real difficulty was never the Cluelessness itself but how poorly most of us cope with its inevitable presence. David Schmaltz has spent decades observing the ways humans navigate a universe far more complex than any of us can fully comprehend. In Cluelessness: A Book of Mirrors, he turns that observation inward, offering ninety short essays that catch the author — and the reader — in the act of not knowing, misreading, over-planning, under-noticing, and stumbling forward anyway. ...It offers something rarer: a sustained, wry, warm-hearted investigation into what it actually feels like to be a finite human being embedded in an infinite, indifferent, and occasionally delightful universe. Schmaltz writes about cooking for a crowd without sleeping the night before, about the studied Cluelessness that lets us ignore what we cannot afford to know, about the difference between problems and difficulties, about why driving the speed limit might qualify as a moral act, and about why the most important things we were ever taught arrived without anyone noticing the teaching. He considers the seductive comfort of StudiedCluelessness, the paradox of KnowingBetter, and the quiet dignity of maintaining one's convictions in a culture that rewards getting away with things. He explores what it means to truly cope with impossibility, why the pursuit of excellence so often guarantees mediocrity, and how the humble public library became the last genuinely decent institution in American civic life. The essays range across daily life — traffic jams, grocery runs, church league softball, learning to cook, reading too many library books — and into larger questions about democracy, competition, truth, liberty, and what it means to make any difference at all. Each story functions as a mirror, angled just so, offering the reader a glimpse of themselves going about their own daily Cluelessness. Schmaltz writes from the tradition of the great American essayists — observant, self-deprecating, philosophically ambitious without pretension, and genuinely funny without trying too hard. ... These essays think carefully, emerge from a specific life, document a particular American moment, and hold their facts lightly enough to let deeper truths through. By the end of Cluelessness, the reader has spent time with someone genuinely attempting to live with integrity, curiosity, and good humor inside conditions no one fully understands. ... The book doesn't solve Cluelessness — it couldn't, and it knows it couldn't — but it offers something more useful: the reassurance that we are all, as Schmaltz puts it, Clueless on this bus, and that coping with that reality a little better might be everything we've got. For anyone who has ever suspected that the experts don't know much more than the rest of us — and found that suspicion oddly liberating rather than terrifying. I employed Claude.ai, a commercial AI-powered text editor, using it to perform repetitive copy/pasting work and to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.” ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

ReceivingWisdom

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-23T05:43:22-07:00

"Maybe we find our underlying connections beyond disconcerting." ...Who knows what even constitutes wisdom in these EndDays featuring so damned many false idols? We each seem to imprint on our own trusted sources. Who knows how we discern which ones to trust? Our neighbors seem to rely upon other sources that do not seem nearly as wise to us as they do to them. We cite our sources until long after we begin to turn blue in the face, without convincing anyone not dependent on the same experts we depend on. We each hold Received Wisdom without often considering how it was that we set about ReceivingWisdom in the first place. Does knowing with such certainty even qualify as wisdom, anyway, or does wisdom somehow sort of transcend knowing to more agilely hold controversies unresolved? ...She’d entered the room at the appointed hour to find the usual dichotomy already present. The topic of the gathering was not without controversy, but it seemed to her as she entered that the opposition hadn’t needed to wait until their opponents had finished their presentation. They came with rebuttals already locked and loaded, carrying their brand of received wisdom as if it would necessarily trump anything their opposition proposed. She’d seen this passion play before and felt that she already knew the order of the impending battle, who would win, and in whose eyes, and also who would harshly judge their loser. ... before returning home in time for dinner for a change. These EndDays seem filled with competing Received Wisdoms, which have grown to seem not very wise at all. The Muse voted in favor of a vendor developing a data center on industrial Port property, and no inquiry ensued. Opponents flooded the meeting not with questions intended to get to the bottom of the decision, but with accusations of dirty dealing instead. Many seem to have been previously convinced that data centers are just evil, and that anyone even thinking of supporting them must necessarily be somehow compromised. This contingent seemed to hold an unquestionable Received Wisdom that data centers are, by their very nature, wrong under all conditions. They do not seem to seek understanding so much as vindication for their seemingly pre-conceived convictions, as if their study of the issues had resolved all possible questions. They seem to seek not dialogue but dominion. ...The Repuglicans (and the Russians) were trailblazers in this field, flooding immature social media users with unforgettable images and phrases. These imprinted immediately, overwriting whatever might have previously passed for consciousness or wisdom. What might have encouraged conversation between opposing perspectives became defensive encounters between entranced sides. ... A trench warfare ethic emerged, replete with a seemingly deadly No Man’s Land. Inquiries became unfashionable since few seemed willing to show their thinking behind whatever position they were taking. I suspect this was because of what would have traditionally involved thinking being replaced by a subtle sort of transplant surgery where ideology was crudely injected directly into unsuspecting innocents. ...The Muse has been engaging with these presumed-to-be enemies of inquiry. ... Bring your questions, she invites, and I’ll gladly sit down with you and explain my thinking. This tactic seems uncommonly courageous to me, since she seems to have to simply ignore the blasphemy that many subjected her to as a precursor. She believes in the benevolent power of generous interpretation, but not everyone has been introduced to how to induce this in practice. It represents pretty much the opposite of memes, and often requires something approaching a hyperactive imagination. It seeks silver linings when finding them seems most unlikely. It genuinely wants to understand others’ thinking behind their position, just as if and whether or not much thought had gone into it beforehand. It encourages thinking, whether very much ever preceded it on the topic at hand. It invites more human interaction instead of mumbling memes to fracture. It aspires to win/win even when the counterpart seems insistent upon everybody losing. Wisdom insists that there’s always something missing from every conclusion. There’s always more that might be considered. Even the seemingly best defended reasons might still harbor unresolvable questions. The perfections we routinely depend upon utterly fail us in practice, but generous interpretations often manage to somehow step in and save us from ourselves. We are more tenaciously interdependent than we could ever be decisively independent. I’ve insisted before that not only are we not islands unto ourselves, but we’re also not nearly isthmuses, either. We’re more deeply enmeshed than we could ever guess, ReceivedWisdom definitely notwithstanding. Maybe we take sides to hide from what’s too obvious to us. Maybe we find our underlying connections beyond disconcerting. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Recognizing

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-22T06:59:29-07:00

"If only we could remember this inescapable fact and more frequently act upon it." No week passes without The Muse, in her Port Commissioner role, being invited to some ceremonial supper or solemn civic society gathering. Her presence is expected as a part of her charter to represent the citizens of the county and, especially, of her district. She only sometimes expects me to string along in what I explain amounts to fulfilling the underappreciated role of Arm Candy. We arrive, with her remembering names from last time, and constituents somewhat pleased at her appearance. The majority don’t know her from Eve, and even fewer know the first thing about me. We’ve registered online beforehand and dutifully purchase our raffle and 50/50 Split tickets, the latter of which awards half the evening’s raffle and drinks takings to one fortunate attendee, which amounted to $61.50 that evening. ...Nobody gets especially dressed up to attend, a clean shirt or blouse, and the better boots, but no gowns or ties. Kids are welcome, though they soon grow bored. The organizers attempt to conduct a business meeting with the hall largely filled with indifference, though everyone’s in great spirits. The beer and wine pours contribute to a congenial atmosphere, as if everyone was special for being there, which, of course, they are. The Muse welcomes the opportunity to interact with a fellow Port Commissioner, since she rarely has that opportunity aside from regularly scheduled Port Commission meetings. With only three commissioners, any two constitute a quorum, who must, by law, meet only in previously scheduled public meetings. These sorts of convergences qualify under the law, though they still agree to sit at separate tables to avoid any suspicion of collusion. We took a table with two remaining seats. The other five already seated look like the family unit they turn out to be, and a lovely family they are. ... The dad retired early with full points from government service with the Corps of Engineers. ... He’d spent his final years monitoring runoff in the Snake River Basin from the Wyoming Tetons down to the Snake’s convergence with the Columbia, on the edge of our Walla Walla Valley. She’d grown up in a DC suburb, daughter of a bureaucrat, and he’d been raised in Evanston, Wyoming, where my dear friend Franklin’s Great Aunt had run the local railroad hotel. Every small-city gathering exhibits clear evidence that we inhabit a shockingly, reassuringly small world. ...The supper was servicable if somewhat regrettable. The after program, though, proved to be the purpose of the evening. This was set aside for Recognizing, an essential service, especially in these dreary EndDays times. We might, as the Bible tries to explain, be called to service, though not everybody answers. In small towns, most get at least goaded into providing some sort of service, for everyone wears many hats. There are very few overlaps in essential services, and most competently provide several of these as a matter of course because they live there. This night, the Student of the Year, Employee of the Year, and Citizen of the Year would be announced, and each would receive a blown glass heart on an engraved stand. Each would be called to stand before their neighbors, the very ones they were just attending Knitting Group with earlier, to receive extended standing, heartfelt recognition, and applause for their presence and their irreplaceable contributions. Sara, the mom at our table, was declared Employee of the Year for her efforts to properly organize the little local library. Another received the Citizen of the Year award for convening that knitting circle, which had been creating magical prayer shawls in the First Christian Church basement for decades. The Citizen’s daughters had snuck over from the West Side to witness their mother’s coronation, and all was truly terrific with this world. We left, having lost the dessert raffle, for a twilight drive back to what has been poorly disguised as civilization, as renewed and refreshed as if we’d been declared Citizens of the Year ourselves. ...It seems especially important now, when the headlines struggle to find a single uplifting story to scream, that we somehow take control, if only for relatively small but not necessarily insignificant things. These might prove to be the most significant events to control, especially when everything else in this world feels as if it’s controlled by madmen. We who are seemingly powerless, nearer the bottom of the so-called great cosmic food pyramid, hold good and decent reason to celebrate our existence, even, perhaps especially, through what certainly might seem like EndDays. We’re still students, so at least one of us certainly qualifies to be declared Student of the Year! And we have jobs, so someone, even if we have to squint a bit—though we won’t—deserves some Recognizing for their especially energizing efforts. Each of us might aspire to one day be acknowledged as Citizen of the Year, too, for the designation’s never beyond any of you, or any of us who, too often, feel like powerless captives on a careening bus driven by idiots. We inescapably seem to wear EndDays blinders, our focus cynically influenced. We need not accept anything we might perceive in anybody proffered else’s face value. We should know we’re surrounded by deceivers bent upon influencing our experiences, not necessarily for the better. We remain powerful enough to recognize the differences between hollow political promises and the genuine articles we’re gratefully forced to cope with in our own often underappreciated existences. We could always respond by appreciating more deeply, more sincerely, more honestly. Few experiences prove to be more uplifting than lifting up some fellow citizen for their contribution they might not have noticed made all the difference. ... If only we could remember this inescapable fact and more frequently act upon it. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Impreparation

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-21T06:07:36-07:00

"Amen, again, with real damned purpose this time!" EndDays time seems short, as if a clock was winding down or the universe itself was wearing itself out. When did improvisation replace careful, studied preparation, and most things start happening haphazardly, as if everyone had conspired to just start making up shit as they went along? Seemingly gone are the more careful crafts, replaced with the more relatively careless ones. Reflection, too, might have been overwhelmed by a plethora of knee-jerk reactions. Yes, EndDays seem simply reactive rather than reflective, as if thinking, considering beforehand, had become crimes committed by the cowardly. Goaded on by our chief executive as an extremely public and seemingly ever-present example, we often reject planning as something belonging to an alien culture, as if we were smarter because we didn’t feel compelled to peek ahead. EndDays collapses the long term within which we’re all said to be dead into a presence composed of some combination of unwarranted certainty and dread. In this short term, we live as if we were essentially undead. I recognize this difference because this week I’ve had an actual future event that I needed to prepare for. I realized that I had been existing in a more or less hand-to-mouth state, maintaining my sacred routine without focusing on any upcoming deadline or compelling event. I was dutifully complying, trying and often succeeding, but absent that essential horizon that motivates anyone to start actively preparing for and thereby manifesting an alluring future. It rarely matters precisely what event serves as the placeholder for such projected attention; almost any odd thing can provide the necessary anticipation, and any impending difference might suffice. In my case, the installation of a long-wished-for irrigation system has been providing my motivation. With the drought continuing, the new system should allow me to sustain my gardens using only a small percentage of the water I’ve previously used. Further, I will no longer need to set hoses at three o’clock in the morning during peak summer season to try to avoid midday, near-instantaneous evaporation. This irrigation system represents a liberation for me; consequently, I’ve been enthusiastically engaging in some seriously preparatory behaviors, relocating plants out of the trencher’s path and moving a shitload of decorative pebbles. I am each day, especially through these EndDays, a little more aware of my slowly diminishing physical capacities. They still seem largely illusory to me, though I’m almost certain that some underlying physical realities are influencing my experience. I feel more tired than I remember feeling before, and my limbs tend to feel sorer after much less exertion than I remember from before. A chore that might have once taken an hour can now consume a whole morning or more. I sometimes catch myself engaging in what sure seems like dottering behavior, and now that I am a great-grandfather, I suppose dottering behavior should no longer prove to be completely alien to me. I feel more delicate than I’d grown accustomed to feeling. I carry a few more pounds around the place, too, so I guess my efforts should seem a tad more taxing. I rest on my laurels more than I used to, too, but then I have more past accomplishments to draw from than I used to. I remember when I toted the pebbles from around the garden pond to spread around the gazebo. ... I felt grateful then when I’d completed that effort, thinking to myself that I’d probably never have to engage in something like that around here again. Except the irrigation people need to dig a ditch from the back corner of that gazebo out into the middle of the side yard. Someone will have to move the pebbles covering that stretch, and it looked like I would have to be ‘it.’ I hadn’t been ‘it’ in a while. I actively procrastinated at first, blaming it on these damned EndDays lack of motivation. I’d prioritized every other preparatory task before that one, and finally got far enough down the completed list to leave me with this one. I began by cleaning out the gazebo, a toe in the water of the real work at hand, but a necessary precursor that really needed doing, I explained to my better self, since some of the stuff I’d stashed behind that gazebo would get moved inside so I could remove those pebbles. Possums had been pooping back in that corner. Their leavings were liberally smeared all over coils of stored garden hose and those pebbles. I used the better part of half a roll of paper towels cleaning up that stinky mess, though the stench still hangs in my sinuses. I moved the hoses and some sprinklers, then assembled my impressive collection of empty cat litter tubs. I’ve used these to organize my basement workbench and garage messes for years. It just so happened that most of them were empty at that moment, so I decided that they would serve as the temporary storage place for my pebbles. I held my old D-handle scoop shovel and started scraping, emptying shovel-fulls into the first box. I ended up with a half-dozen or more filled boxes, heavy as all get out, dutifully filled, then handtrucked out of the way of the trenching effort. I felt exhausted but also exhilarated, for I was fully prepared for my long-anticipated fate to finally catch up with me. I might have been five years older than I had been when I originally moved those pebbles around that gazebo, but I was apparently still capable of working myself to a successful, satisfying exhaustion. ...No, the end of the world is not imminent, and even if it were, nothing about any present could disclose whatever might be coming next. ... It’s up to me to properly prophesy and so manifest my own damned future, however actually damned it might ultimately prove to be. I must maintain my own agenda, as if that broader, seemingly grander, over-publicized public one couldn’t possibly matter, even if my replacement focus perceives no further into the future than a sprinkler running without my intervention at three o’clock on some midsummer morning to avoid mid-day evaporation. Amen, again, with real damned purpose this time! ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Dirt

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-20T05:48:45-07:00

"I'm Just Visiting here." ...I never take this work lightly, for it contains consequences. I am less a homeowner than a steward of soil, the house and fences, gazebo and garage, mere backdrops for the real engagement. I know every square inch of the soil surrounding this house. I have crawled across it more than once or twice, though I never counted the number of my interventions, for that would surely have violated some deeper, if unspoken purpose. ... I cannot seem to leave alone what others might believe was already well enough alone. I seek no less than perfection, knowing full well that shortcomings will always enter into my equation. I know my base soils. I can feel the difference between that powder-fine NW corner of the front yard that’s never had an ounce of amendment and the NE corner, which has absorbed its original weight and volume in perlite, peat, and attention. I was inspired by exposure to the original Victory Garden PBS series, the one hosted by its founder, James Underwood Crockett, a charming Down-Easter, a master gardener. He transformed a gravel parking lot adjacent to Boston’s PBS Station into a little Garden of Eden, with friable soils and an enviable greenhouse. He grew everything imaginable, and each vegetable looked picture-book perfect on camera. He even built his own composter and published those plans in the series’ companion book, which I pored through like some sort of religious fanatic scanning my copy of The Dead Sea Scrolls. I built my own composter, too, to his specifications, and it’s still spitting out its black gold, resplendent with past seasons’ cherry and apricot pits, some sprouted, and turning turningforkfuls of tiny composting worms voraciously consuming every ounce of kitchen vegetable waste. I grace each transplant with a few precious ounces of this marvel to prove that I, too, became a gardener, if never necessarily a master. Yesterday, I pulled my handplow out of my garden tool bucket, slapped on a havelock to protect my neck from sunburn, and commenced to crawl down the raised bed adjacent to The Muse’s Marion berry patch. I’d amended that soil over decades. I’d taken off the sparse winter weed intrusion a couple of weeks before, so I set about clawing deeply into that soil. The Dirt responded with practiced consent. I’d pull and push each bladeful, then move on to the next in line, circling back to confirm that I’d loosened every clod. This Dirt, my Dirt, responded with practiced consent. This effort amounted to me scratching its back. I crawled backwards down the rectangular bed, discarding the few pebbles I encountered and undermining any remaining cheat grass rhizomes, discarding them onto the bricked-in path adjacent. Those bricks hold the spring warmth and help transplants and seeds establish themselves, though they also turn the midsummer garden into a genuine bake oven on Summer’s inevitable hundred-degree days. The tomatoes love that supplemental heat. I planted some Walla Walla Sweet Onion sets, baby plants with oversized roots. I excavated a deep-enough V, sprinkled in some powdered bone meal, then set in each plant before squeezing the moist soil around it in a genuinely loving embrace. The planting went quickly, with me listening to the Gnats/Giants game. An April Sunday afternoon in heaven, me on my knees, though not precisely praying. I was celebrating, harvesting, while planting this year’s crop. I was harvesting decades of dedicated practice. That soil holds a better portrait of me than does my accumulated catalogue of writing from that period, though the soil might be too deeply encoded for anyone but me to glean its underlying story. The morning glory will not submit to anything I’ve thrown at it. The best I’ve achieved has been a rough parity. I can keep it in check by frequent cultivation, and though I swear I’ve removed every bit of it, it always returns, if not necessarily with a vengeance. It returns with insistence, a counterbalance lest I conclude that I’m in any way a master of my garden, the way that James Underwood Crockett surely was, long ago now, a master of his. I own nothing in this world. My time seems spoken for before I can catch up to it most days. My home remains mortgaged to a not completely indifferent bank, though I can swear that it has no notion of what it actually owns. I feel blessed enough to have gained permission to spread perlite and peat on some loose Loess soils, to have grubbed out that inherited poisonous oleander hedge and the innumerable soil-acidifying evergreen shrubs. I’ve dug to China and back in the security of my own backyard. It’s little wonder I feel hesitant to leave, even for a well-deserved weekend away or a European holiday, because I know where I belong. I belong where past years’ cherry pits aerate the soil, where volunteer tomatoes and plums poke their heads up come Spring. Home might not necessarily be where the heart sings, but where one’s Dirt resides as respite from otherwise poisonous EndDays doings. I’m Just Visiting here. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Enoughness

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-19T06:07:47-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: Tile Design - Theseus and the Minotaur in the Labyrinth (c. 1861) "There might not be a large enough 'enough' to ever regain that once lost balance." The last forty years have witnessed a steady erosion of what we might acknowledge were decent values. Their replacements have travelled under a multitude of euphemisms, each of which seemed to have been chosen for their ability to elicit a felt sense of whatever they were eroding. Family Values seemed most popular for a time, though when I delved beneath its glossy exterior, it seemed to insist upon a narrow, exclusive definition of family that most couldn’t possibly relate to from personal experience. Other, often Christian-themed replacements, flooded the meme market over this time, each distilling into some fresh mammon unworthy of broad appreciation, though they gained broad appreciation, anyway. One could be excused for concluding that these terms served as Trojan Horses, intended to draw attention from the wholesale burglaries the billionaire classes were committing against the least of us. Income distribution skewed upward while the costs of living soared, utterly undermining what had previously passed for a middle class. I remain amazed that the You, Ess of ‘A’ hasn’t yet suffered from a popular insurrection. Most remain unjustifiably decent despite these insults. The MAGA contingent was coached to engage in a backward insurrection instead, one insisting upon more plundering as its underlying intention, to steal equality from those most impoverished. Weaned on lies, they were easily manipulated into believing that the erosion in their standards of living was caused by immigrants and illegal aliens rather than the very Christian-values-spouting politicians they’d been so subtly coerced into supporting. The velocity of the resulting fleecing only accelerated as a result of Trump’s second succession, producing this sense that we’re now living in EndDays. EndDays prominently feature a subtle absence of Enoughness. Anything worth doing seems to demand some sort of excess. It’s not enough to merely achieve success, a metric that now seems downright Gothic in comparison. One must now seek to utterly vanquish, to “kill.” Incremental improvement, iterated over time, has fallen out of favor for overwhelming force resulting in immediate dominion. These perspectives shouldn’t surprise us. Savings, even when possible, haven’t earned a decent return in decades. Thrift promises no opportunities for prosperity over time. Only speculation seems to offer any opportunity to achieve independence. It shouldn’t matter if the only avenue to freedom entails assuming burdensome risk. The risk associated with not betting seems to far outweigh any potential downside. Such considerations can’t possibly matter if you’re at least equally screwed whichever option you choose. This palpable absence of Enoughness qualifies as a toxic substance. It’s one familiar to any odd billionaire, and even to a few of the more up-and-coming hundred-millionaires out there, too, for they thrive on an overwhelming sense of an absolute absence of Enoughness. Those who labor for their sustenance never lost their sense of Enoughness, even when their powers that be, those that sure used to seem one Hell of a lot more benevolent, basked in their absolute sense of near-absolute absence. What else could have driven them to become so untiringly driven? Beyond an uncertain level of wealth, any further increment could only fail to carry any meaning. Acquisition became a mindless reaction, voracious not to satisfy any particular hunger, but apparently solely to encourage an ultimately unquenchable one. Not even ownership of everything could have ever proven to provide enough. Our own governance became tenaciously rapacious. It came to consume us, we who were once popularly characterized as The Consumers. We were the very foundation of our own economy, not these carpetbaggers lacking any sense of decency or Enoughness. Billionaires seem to believe that the lion’s share of everything properly serves as their fair share. Those unable to compete deserve their fleecing. Those unwilling to play should rightly pay for the privilege of failing in a game they never had even a distant purpose for playing. Many became evangelicals, having found in that false faith ample justification for the punishment and plunder that the world they insisted upon seemed to deliver. The pursuit of some abstract Heaven, achievable only in some hopefully distant future, might help make this contest seem benevolent to the faithful, if faith was what they were actually filled with rather than shit. A generation or three where the billionaire class was treated as they have treated the rest of us will not likely rebalance a society that’s lost its sense of Enoughness. There might not be a large enough ‘enough’ to ever regain that once lost balance. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

TangledWeb

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-18T06:31:33-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: Perseus and the Graiae ..."Oh, what a tangled web we weave, / When first we practice to deceive" Sir Walter Scott, Marmion "They're sunk." I navigate my way through these EndDays not quite blindly, but nearly. My depth perception seems intact. Same story for distance, yet I’m growing to distrust my senses since something I’ve long relied upon seems to be missing. Even as I began to grasp that I might reliably presume the cues coming to me are false, I struggled to reverse first impressions fast enough to maintain my balance. I feel forever cattywompus, suddenly slightly sideways to the world, seriously disoriented. Perhaps that’s the underlying intent, the purpose of what I’m growing to expect to reliably prove to always be deliberately false. I more often seem well served by presuming the opposite of whatever story they serve, though it remains cumbersome to find, let alone to translate, the signal received into one I can believe I actually comprehend. I remain a simple man, prone to accepting most signals more or less as face value received. I can easily comprehend a sliver of shaving off any absolute truths, for I acknowledge the existence of honest ambiguity. I also understand that some truths do not necessarily require elucidation, and can and probably should remain unspoken, yet still remain remarkably well-understood. I’m thrown off when up arrives as down, or down as up, and especially when the misrepresentation seems deliberate. I can forgive inadvertent, and even accept that some truths might be too personally indicting to own up to in either public or private, but if these appear to be the steady diet, all credibility escapes me then. I cannot comprehend either the misrepresentations or the motives of the messenger, except to presume the latter to be something considerable South of honorable. Our administration incapable of administering anything also seems to be actively proving that it cannot tell an honest truth about anything. Its news conferences seem especially organized to prevent any news from occurring. They increasingly seem to be designed to either amplify that day’s fresh bald-faced lies and/or provide some much-needed distraction from whatever catastrophe might actually be happening. Truth seems like an unwelcomed stranger there, occasionally appearing in some reporter’s question only to be vehemently shamed back into humiliated silence. How dare anyone attempt to hold our incumbent accountable for anything? I mean, he’s THE PRESIDENT, even if only in name, while you, lowly reporter, barely qualify for the credentials you’re holding. Shame on you for expecting an honest answer to an innocently posed question! Shouldn’t you have learned better by now? The press corps only rarely presses their points, having learned that the press secretary, let alone the incumbent and his lowly cabinet members, always respond poorly to anything even distantly resembling a well-formed question. The purpose of these events seems to have become the spreading of as much darkness as possible, rather than allowing even the faintest light to be cast against any current controversy or issue. The administration that still can’t administer anything attempts to inform by Pavlovian means, through strong negative feedback and the ringing of hypnotizing bells. Yes, they are heading to Hell with handbaskets blazing, but they still pretend to be observing the usual and customary rituals of an administration intending to administer something, without, of course, apparently ever actually intending to properly administer anything. My head spins. My senses seem to be continually resetting their balance. I forget before I remember that the incoming information I’m receiving is very likely always reversed. This boy reliably cries, “Wolf,” more steadfastly declared than wolves ever once appeared. It’s all illusion, though it’s hardly magic. It’s poison, just that simple. My attempts to translate it into truth, into anything useful for navigation, might distract me from a deeper reality trying to catch my attention. This administration, incapable of administering anything, has earned its irrelevance. What urge propels me to continually attempt to make sense of what might just be absolute nonsense? There might be no resolution to the garbled messages. To attempt translation might only prove to be a perhaps terminal distraction. There might not be any deeper significance to what was always just irrelevant. This administration cannot administer any more than it can even conceive of committing a truth, even a tiny one. It was never self-aware enough to make such distinctions. They only understand self-preservation, and they will pose anything as their stand-in for truth if they believe it might save their sorry asses. They’re sunk. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 04/16/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-16T17:27:03-07:00

This week's EndDays dispatches traced the arc of a chronicler straining under the weight of his own dedication. The series moved from outrage through exhaustion, from the streets of Budapest to a pile of fresh fava beans, from the spectacle of a collapsing administration to the quiet renewal of a Spring kitchen. The week asked how any serious person sustains witness through an ending that refuses to end on schedule, and found its answer not in resolution but in rhythm — the diastolic pause embedded in every heartbeat, the sanity found inside a pea pod, the glimpse of a future already arriving somewhere else in the world. ...I register this EndDays Story as a complaint against the serious unseriousness of the present administration, still dedicated to not competently administering anything. I described myself as a serious person — neither pious nor frivolous — who finds the current administration’s relentless superficiality not entertaining but genuinely threatening. ... I found myself worrying when I should be singing, fussing when I should be celebrating, sensing the wasting away of something unspeakably precious. ... They are people who apparently absorbed the opposite of respect as they grew up and learned to administer it with relish. ...“Now that it’s here, I fear it might not go away.” I fear this EndDays Story might prove to be too self-disclosing. I confessed to something genuinely troubling: I have to talk myself into engaging every morning now. The naturally flowing before-times have given way to extended internal negotiations, to soliloquies I catch myself conducting with no clear resolution in sight. I claimed full ownership of this state — I wouldn’t ascribe my reactions to the provocateurs — but acknowledged experiencing existential dread on a more or less continuous basis. ... Now that it’s here, I fear it might not go away. ...…tall enough to maybe even catch a Glimpse of ourselves standing proud once again.” This EndDays Story finds me Glimpsing one possible Ending to our present complaints. The electoral defeat of Viktor Orbán in Budapest lifted my spirit and gave me something I’d been short of: a glimpse of one possible ending to our own complaints. I recalled The Muse’s workshop there a few summers ago — the grand public market, the neighborhood cafes, the living room jazz concert, the bronzed shoes along the Danube shore representing all those the Nazis drowned there. ... This morning, I was reminded of history’s greatest lesson: oppression always proves ultimately unstable, because the young people always eventually refuse to stand by while their lives slip away. We rise, not necessarily as one, but ultimately together, tall enough to maybe even catch a glimpse of ourselves standing proud once again. ...“Better to extend a few mollifying indulgences than mimic the sinner’s self-destruction.” This EndDays Story equates Trump’s re-election as the American Brexit, and the restrained reaction to his international tyranny as the equivalent of Indulgences bestowed in anticipation of reform not yet deserved or earned. Trump’s re-election represented the American Brexit — an adolescent act of economic self-separation that our trading partners met not with vengeance but with remarkable forbearance. ... Better to extend a few mollifying indulgences than mimic the sinner’s self-destruction. ...This EndDays Story pre-celebrates the coming EndDay, when the failing BananaRepuglicans finally lose all respect and relegate themselves to history’s cautionary ashcan. ...The BananaRepuglicans — credit to Jamie Raskin for the coinage BananaRepublicans — have been collapsing under the accumulated weight of their own failures: the Iran War, the joust with the Pope, the AI Jesus imagery debacle, and the evaporation of their base. ... I know better than to pinpoint the precise moment — commentators have declared dozens of Rubicons since this batch of clowns was elected — but I’ll say it plainly: he’s done. Their reign must thereafter live in infamy only and serve as the foundational cautionary tale defending our democracy from such villainy going forward forever. ...This EndDays Story finds me seeking DiastolicRelief from an ending that seems to have been taking forever to actually end. I ended the week shelling peas and a whole pile of fresh fava beans, it being Spring. ... My dedication to this series had left me hollow — satisfied with what I’d produced, but hopeless about when it might end. ... When chronicling world-threatening events proves too onerous, shelling peas draws attention back to something human-scaled that immediately means something meaningful. ... I will have changed back into an innocent again by the following morning, confident that these EndDays remain well on their way toward ending. ...I thought last week that I’d finally cleared the final hurdle for publishing my Cluelessness book, but I hadn’t. Monday morning brought another missive from my Publishing Specialist, this one insisting that I hadn’t specified the cover price or submitted what she called my Annotation, essentially the come-on that will appear in book catalogues and on Amazon’s and Barnes and Noble’s websites. ...Someone still living within it, noticing it daily, and finding that the real difficulty was never the Cluelessness itself but how poorly most of us cope with its inevitable presence. David Schmaltz has spent decades observing the ways humans navigate a universe far more complex than any of us can fully comprehend. In Cluelessness: A Book of Mirrors, he turns that observation inward, offering ninety short essays that catch the author — and the reader — in the act of not knowing, misreading, over-planning, under-noticing, and stumbling forward anyway. ...It offers something rarer: a sustained, wry, warm-hearted investigation into what it actually feels like to be a finite human being embedded in an infinite, indifferent, and occasionally delightful universe. Schmaltz writes about cooking for a crowd without sleeping the night before, about the studied Cluelessness that lets us ignore what we cannot afford to know, about the difference between problems and difficulties, about why driving the speed limit might qualify as a moral act, and about why the most important things we were ever taught arrived without anyone noticing the teaching. He considers the seductive comfort of StudiedCluelessness, the paradox of KnowingBetter, and the quiet dignity of maintaining one's convictions in a culture that rewards getting away with things. He explores what it means to truly cope with impossibility, why the pursuit of excellence so often guarantees mediocrity, and how the humble public library became the last genuinely decent institution in American civic life. The essays range across daily life — traffic jams, grocery runs, church league softball, learning to cook, reading too many library books — and into larger questions about democracy, competition, truth, liberty, and what it means to make any difference at all. Each story functions as a mirror, angled just so, offering the reader a glimpse of themselves going about their own daily Cluelessness. Schmaltz writes from the tradition of the great American essayists — observant, self-deprecating, philosophically ambitious without pretension, and genuinely funny without trying too hard. ... These essays think carefully, emerge from a specific life, document a particular American moment, and hold their facts lightly enough to let deeper truths through. By the end of Cluelessness, the reader has spent time with someone genuinely attempting to live with integrity, curiosity, and good humor inside conditions no one fully understands. ... The book doesn't solve Cluelessness — it couldn't, and it knows it couldn't — but it offers something more useful: the reassurance that we are all, as Schmaltz puts it, Clueless on this bus, and that coping with that reality a little better might be everything we've got. For anyone who has ever suspected that the experts don't know much more than the rest of us — and found that suspicion oddly liberating rather than terrifying. I employed Claude.ai, a commercial AI-powered text editor, using it to perform repetitive copy/pasting work and to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.” ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

DiastolicRelief

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-16T05:55:42-07:00

"…confident that these EndDays remain well on their way toward ending." Endings sometimes seem to take forever to arrive. What might have begun seeming as certain as any fait accompli turns sluggish in process. Progress comes begrudgingly, if at all, and what seemed like a sprint or a routine walk in the park becomes a trudge. Progress might only be imaginary after all, after all initial evidence to the contrary. This campaign will also demand more patience than anticipated. ... It’s genuinely wearying to require a fresh reason to keep on keeping on every morning, when yesterday’s brilliant reason proved itself inadequate as leftovers. This series necessarily needs ninety good and decent reasons to continue believing that the evil intruding will ultimately have only been temporary, when each fresh intolerable second already seems to have lasted an eternity. What will end this seemingly never-ending ending? My strategic plan called for engaging to maintain my attention. I hadn’t wanted to doze my way through to resolution. This overwhelming insult was some part opportunity, I’d reasoned, for rarely has any lifetime been lucky enough to be present to witness such a downfall. I carried no more than a thumbnail activity strategy. I would merely chronicle progress or the lack thereof, sprinkling in my personal observations, deliberately including the usual decidedly nonobjective observer in each story. I would fulfill the role of chronicler. What could possibly prove to be easier? As usual, I hadn’t explicitly planned for respite. I’d tacitly presumed that my engagement would naturally prove to be self-reinforcing, rendering unnecessary any need I might otherwise possess to rest. I consequently caught myself dragging myself to engage on recent mornings, obviously exhausted to any halfway observant eye, though merely grumpy to mine. No transformation can be distantly observed. Such changes tend to also directly affect each would-be observer such that they might typically expect to be transformed themselves. It has always been the nature of transformation that it visits in unanticipatable guises. The brio with which we create our plans always multiplies the shock that observation eventually extends. There was no safe distance from which to watch that history unfolding. Whatever played out ‘out there’, also played out insidiously ‘in here.’ It’s never clear where such experiences will lead any observer, though a sense of deep exhaustion often accompanies these engagements. Even the ever-beating heart requires DiastolicRelief. What might seem like steadily never-ending activity includes an embedded sigh, a counterbalancing bye, continually repeating split-seconds of respite slipping by. I was shelling peas and a whole pile of fresh fava beans, it being Spring and the time for preparing those seasonal vegetables. They’d arrived just in time, for I hadn’t hardly noticed just how exhausted I’d become, how I’d suddenly managed to be too much in the world to satisfy me. My steadfast dedication to this EndDays series had left me feeling hollow. I felt satisfied with what I’d produced, but also hopeless. The innocence that had carried me through my earliest dispatches had evolved into my usual localized experience. I couldn’t quite as successfully continue pulling some of my unavoidable wool over my eyes. I still believed that our despot’s on his last legs, that our Democracy remains destined to once again find her hind legs, but I’m feeling terribly weary with the sheer slog required to watch this mess resolve. The end seems more endless than imminent, still certain but strangely, frustratingly distant. The universe created mindless effort to serve as DiastolicRelief here. When focusing upon producing or even just chronicling world-threatening events proves altogether too onerous, as it always eventually most certainly does, then shelling peas successfully draws attention back to something more human-scaled that reliably and immediately means something significant. I sense creamed peas and potatoes in my immediate future, and I utterly reset my sense of success. No man can ever feel like a failure when anticipating receiving a pile of fresh peas creamed with fine potatoes. That supper screams renewal like an April rainfall. It insists that whatever I just went through was well worth it, whatever the effort. It serves as one reliable reward even when, maybe especially when, an end seems to have been terminally delayed again. My frustration can return the morning after I successfully shell a pile of peas and find my sanity inside those pods. I will have changed back into an innocent again by the following morning, confident that these EndDays remain well on their way toward ending. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

BananaRepuglicans

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-15T06:15:25-07:00

"…defending our democracy from such villainy going forward forever." Despots must, seemingly by their nature, continually challenge the boundaries normally placed around any leader. Enough can never adequately serve as enough for them. ... This means that every Despot’s rule must become inherently unstable, fragile, and ultimately temporary. When a Despot declares themself Ruler For Life, they’re essentially predicting a radically shortened lifespan, if not for their physical life, then most certainly for their political one. It has seemed much the same for our BananaRepuglicans, our present infestation of despotism. [Thanks to Jamie Raskin (D-MD) for apparently coining this term back before the 2024 election.] They have been actively colluding to undermine many of our proudest traditions, a seemingly cursed mission from its earliest actions, but they moved quickly this time, intent only upon breaking things, and in that modest intention, they have proven wildly successful, though with glaring caveats. Virtually everything they’ve attempted has later proved either ineffective, self-destructive, or both. Their blows to our country’s spirit seemed to have angered and awakened it. It always proves dicey to accurately pinpoint the moment when enough became more than enough, a parody of its originating intentions. Commentators have declared dozens of Rubicons since this batch of clowns was elected, but the tension had been building since before the beginning. No soothsayer’s services were required to recognize that their charter had been rapidly expiring. Each day brought another insult to proud tradition or some innocent. Decency held her nose so continually that she couldn’t successfully applaud. Popular support left the building, leaving only lap dogs and the least popular available to cheer. Decorum, never a primary concern of any BananaRepuglican, ultimately left the building, too, leaving only shamelessness and corruption to support their unfolding wildly unpopular positions and policies. Yet the public respect largely held through that first year. The jeers came from the loyal opposition. They hadn’t often originated from what had previously constituted their loyal base. ... The Iran War will be remembered as the proximate cause, whether it actually was or wasn’t, but beyond that point, all semblance of respect for even the office seemed to disappear. The Iranians produced brilliant Lego® AI opposition videos that were so cute and honest that they were impossible not to smile through, however regrettable the issues that induced those smiles. Every ounce of public respect for both the Despot and his self-beleaguered office and self-disgraced supporters seemed to disappear from the public dialogue. Congressional BananaRepuglicans could only change the topic when cornered with yet another, in a by then endless series of Fundamentally Unanswerable Questions, a sure and certain sign that everything had finally become terminally FUQed up! Then he and his Minnie Me tied into the first American Pope, a wildly popular and sympathetic political and religious figure. It’s long been received doctrine that no one’s ever allowed to fuck with the Pope. ... Besides, those always turn into unfair fights, even if you’re not Catholic and could genuinely not give a good goddamn about catholicism, even if your base prides itself on being overtly anti-catholic. Joisting with any generally acknowledged Prince of Peace transforms the critic into an instant Antichrist. Our Despot responded with AI images intended to make him look like Jesus. He came across looking like Jesus Fucking Christ instead, and was forced to withdraw his offending image and make up a lame story about how he was trying to portray himself as a physician, “because I heal people.” None of this even distantly qualified as laughable, yet it elicited little more than laughs. This Rubicon was not an Italian river, but the point beyond which his presence no longer elicited the respect necessary for him to successfully fulfill even his illegitimate roles. Once seemingly indispensable, he played himself into being ultimately indictable. If he lives, he will certainly be impeached. If he manages to leave office before he’s impeached, he will be tried and convicted on more criminal counts than can be realistically counted, just like every leader of every Banana Republic ever was. With Orbán gone and Putin failing, he’s all alone and flailing. His midnight calls to his sole remaining supporter among the EEU aren’t picked up. He’s become the most popular point of derision on the planet. It’s even considered patriotic now to support Iran in his misappropriated war against it in our once respected name. ...I know, Raskin predicted a flip back before this clown was reelected, and as I said when I started this sorry story, it has always proved dicey to accurately pinpoint the precise moment when this sort of worm turns. It has either turned, or it hasn’t, and, Lord knows, this clown has surprised everyone before. It has, though, finally become inconceivable that he will last to the end of his term, even though, as of this morning, he’s somehow lasted four-hundred-fifty-one dog days. ... Whatever magic he was able to muster to get himself re-elected has dispersed and very likely won’t return. The end for every BananaRepuglican must ultimately be the same. Their reign must thereafter live in infamy only, and serve as the foundational cautionary tale defending our democracy from such villainy going forward forever. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Indulgences

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-14T02:44:48-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: Love Among the Ruins (c. 1894) “Better to extend a few mollifying indulgences than mimic the sinner’s self-destruction.” Trump’s re-election represented the American Brexit. When Britain decided to economically divorce itself from neighboring economies, those economies responded with considerable frustration, as if responding to a toddler’s immature act of independence. The toddler didn’t necessarily register that their neighbor was demonstrating tough love in their response, essentially giving those Tories precisely what they asked for: bureaucratic tangles, logistical nightmares, and a deepening dependence rather than their dreamed-for self-reliance. These complications have helped normalize relations, with Britain somewhat chastened and the Europeans relatively strengthened. The EEU extended Indulgences to Britain for its obvious sins. Rather than seeking vengeance, which might have been fully justified, they insisted upon justice instead and became a different, relatively unexpected ally in the process. It might have been a testament to our stockpile of goodwill that our trading partners didn’t immediately respond to Trump’s adolescent tariffs with extreme protectionism. They were met instead with remarkable forbearance, little more than threats and grievances. Most seemed to hold onto a faith that these insults might quickly pass and that they would be no use overreacting to. True to already established form, Trump’s administration proved itself incapable of maintaining focus, and those initial tariffs appeared and disappeared as if they were quantum particles. The allies’ forbearances amounted to Indulgences in practice, conditional foregivenesses extended assuming future reforms, not solely based upon then current performance. If Trump’s policies were abhorrent, and they were, our trading partners seemed to bet that they would at worst prove temporary. Of course, being American, Trump would bring a level of arrogance and cluelessness no condescending Britain would ever imagine bringing to political disagreement. Because we self-sabotage, we would have to continually escalate. What began as mere insult quickly matured into genuine assault, acts of actual war visited upon the weakest among us. In prior times, I can easily imagine countries declaring war and engaging in battle over less than what Trump’s non-administration routinely accomplishes on any odd Tuesday. These days, though, even their more egregious acts seem to receive tacit forgiveness, as if assumed to represent temporary insanity rather than some permanent descent into evil incarnate. Trump’s been living on byes, blind eyes extended as if to pretend that nothing’s really happening. These Indulgences are not extended cost-free, but as investments. Nor are they simply appeasements. They make good sense when believing some insanity will likely prove temporary. This might not be a genuine threat to world order, but just a passing dalliance. It might be that they extended these Indulgences in self-defense, to preserve a sense of allegiance for what might have passed but hasn’t yet convincingly gone. These might, in some short run, encourage a genuine strongman’s aggression, be seen as placating concessions, and thereby encourage the offending indecency. It’s a calculated risk, but given the logical alternatives, a gamble that might well seem more than worth the potential humiliation if the underlying assumptions prove to have been wrong in the longer run. Our world dangles from a thread. The threat belongs to those of us who were recently seen as the one essential security. We pray for our administration to rediscover our good senses again, something that could start to happen at any one of these terrifying countdown seconds. Trump’s overreach holds little probability of becoming anybody’s new status quo. I believe we’re right, and our former trading partners are right, to extend considerable forgiveness even though that response might not seem wholly warranted by the present behavior. Trump and his twisted policies will very likely not prove eternal, and seem most likely to spark a generation and more of uplifting renewal. The self-saboteurs always manage to undermine their own initiatives, rendering their former convictions irrelevant in the process. I believe that our allies are wise to extend Indulgences to this latest sinner among them. Yes, the behaviors could ultimately prove so outrageous as to undermine what’s passed for our stabilizing world order, but I can see little benefit in rushing toward that border. Better to extend a few mollifying indulgences than mimic the sinner’s self-destruction. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Glimpsing

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-13T05:54:15-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: Hero lighting the Beacon for Leander (c. 1892) "…tall enough to maybe even catch a Glimpse of ourselves standing proud once again." The news from our beloved Budapest this morning buoys my spirit. I feel as though I’m Glimpsing one of the most alluring futures we might also be facing. The electoral defeat of a corrupt, entrenched, extreme right-wing oligarchy that has served as the lead sled dog in the worldwide effort to unseat liberal democracy. Victor Orbán was the figure inspiring every wanna be dictator in the world, including ours. Our incumbent praised his presence and supported his efforts to hobble the European Economic Union while serving his Kremlin overlords. He even sent our vice president to campaign for him, though initial voting results strongly insist that it made little difference, and might have even further encouraged his opponents. The winner was once an Orbán insider, but left when he found himself unable to stomach the overwhelming levels of corruption dominating Orbán’s rule. The streets of Budapest were overflowing with cheering young people, a presence that has been disturbingly absent from our domestic protest rallies. The youth reported that they wanted to feel as though they, too, belonged to something bigger than their beloved Hungary. One said he’d know positive change had occurred if he could go to Spain and find a sense of community there, too. The paranoid borders Orbán defended against the usual and ordinary imaginary enemies became a prison for the Magyars, rather than the promised refuge. Orbán’s continuing betrayal of neighboring Ukraine ultimately offended almost everyone. His heavy-handed collusion with Russian Intelligence resurrected uncomfortable memories of Cold War days, before liberation. This ultimately served to undermine Orbán’s Hungarian Christian Supremacist messaging. A few summers ago, The Muse enrolled in a workshop in Budapest. This gave us nearly a week to ramble around that great old European capital. It was in every way beautiful. We rented a small apartment in a working-class apartment block, and we walked and hopped on convenient public transportation everywhere we went. We shopped in that grand old public market and ate in neighborhood cafes where school children also ate their lunches along with lazy old men drinking their wonderful beers. One evening, we attended a living room jazz concert performed by a three-piece group led by a local who had studied at Berklee in Boston. We felt young European energy, now apparently resurrected. We ate our weight in goulash and sweet pastries. We strolled along the Danube to watch fireworks explode over old Buda. I had mourned that week once Orbán’s reign started sinking in. He’d been in charge when we visited, but his tenure had not yet turned completely toxic. Oh, he’d already banned George Soros’ Central European University, which he’d founded to promote democracy and open societies. Soros relocated to Vienna, another lovely city further upstream the same blue Danube. Budapest has a long history of oppression and succession, heading back to Hungary’s founding. The most moving memorial stands along the Danube’s shore in front of their lovely wedding cake Parliament building. The top of the sea wall is covered in bronzed shoes of every size and description, intended to represent all those the Nazis drowned there during their WWII occupation. If this memorial doesn’t move you to tears, you can’t possibly be human. Once again, I am reminded of and reassured by perhaps history’s greatest lesson. Countries have never much more than managed to dabble in the kinds of corruption and oppression Orbán attempted to impose upon those long-suffering Magyars. That form of governance, in modern times, has always proven unstable, largely because the young people refuse to stand and watch their lives slip by under its rule. Oppressors always lack essential compassion, and vestigial memories might just be eternal. We remember any taste of freedom. We fondly recall former liberations, and we cannot stand by while our leaders engage in oppression in our once good name. We rise, if not necessarily as one, but ultimately together, to depose those phonies. We reawaken our courage and stand up tall again, tall enough to maybe even catch a Glimpse of ourselves standing proud once again. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

TalkinInto

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-12T03:04:15-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: Pan and Psyche (c. 1892) “Now that it’s here, I fear it might not go away.” I feel a sudden overwhelming need to talk myself into engaging during these EndDays. I remember a kind of naturally flowing into and back out of engagements in before times, but now I seem to need to sit myself down and talk myself into beginning or, once engaged, sit myself down to talk myself out of continuing. Whichever, I feel a missing flow, as if I sense or perhaps know I will be further endangered if I proceed. I say ‘further endangered’ because I feel surrounded by danger, threatened, imperiled. This sense lends a certain uncertainty to my proceedings, and it might successfully amplify my sense of presence, but the resulting wariness drains spontaneity from my performances. I no longer lightheartedly float through my days. I slink through them instead, more likely some days to negotiate myself out of doing very much of anything if I feel I can get away with it. I do not always feel moved to contribute. I accept full ownership of this state. I could point fingers and blame my condition on something external to me, like the presidency, but how pathetic would such an accusation seem? I have not been compromised. My ability to imagine has not been externally undermined. I admit that I have been experiencing existential dread on a more or less continuous basis, but I cannot properly ascribe how I react to those sensations to either my provocateurs or to their perturbations. My coping mechanisms seem to need some maintenance, maybe even some serious upgrading. Throughout history, many have been subjected to experiences much worse than I’ve ever imagined, without crumbling. I have not earned the opportunity to undermine myself while blaming it on forces beyond me. There have always been and will always be overwhelming powers utterly beyond my ability to influence them; they will always influence me. The operant question can’t possibly be, then, who or what caused my response, but how it was that I chose to react this way. Maybe I have always tended to need to talk myself into stuff. I can acknowledge that I’ve carried on an extended conversation with myself since I first discovered that I could converse with myself, and that it would be completely out of character if I didn’t, at some level, require some talking myself into whatever opportunity presents itself to me. This just seems to be how I reason my way into and back out of whatever I do, whatever I’ve already done or avoided. I only rarely, if ever, simply step into any option. I have always had to negotiate with myself about whether I would take out the freaking garbage, though even more so recently. I admit to feeling more fraught than usual during these extended EndDays, and I think it must be perfectly natural to engage in response in even more of whatever I might usually do in any given situation. I rightly should become myself only more so. What might have been in before times little more than subvocalized mumbles has sometimes become, in these more stressful EndDays, transformed into more extended soliloquies, some of which probably should trouble me. I catch myself asking myself questions that clearly couldn’t possibly find answers, and double-binding myself with queries that even if answered, couldn’t possibly alter a choice. I sense myself becoming a nattering hesitant, and I rightfully feel troubled by this realization. I’d once imagined that I’d mature into an ever-expanding self-confidence, that as I learned and experienced, I’d evolve into or ultimately adopt patterns of living that wouldn’t leave me continually simmering over with questions. The opposite of this innocent aspiration seems to have happened. I seem to be nattering more but enjoying it less, questioning even the appropriateness of this familiar habit. I might be suffering from nothing more or less serious than a debilitating bout of extreme self-consciousness. The very atmosphere around me seems to be encouraging an increasingly troubling awareness of both dangers and opportunities. I struggle more than usual to decide. Maybe this serves as a lesson in being more careful what I wish for, for I once hoped to find presence. Now that it’s here, I fear it might not go away. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Parody

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-11T05:30:15-07:00

I think of myself as a serious person. Neither particularly pious nor frivolous, I try not to take myself too awfully seriously, but still seriously. I am not trying to fritter away my life. I think of myself as someone who supports worthy causes. I maintain a high moral standard without being prudish. I can be crude, but prefer decorous. I never mind a little pomp if not necessarily very much embellished with circumstance. I read, but not to the point where I consider myself especially well-read. I prefer a well-written novel to pretty much any other form of entertainment. I do not very much like movies, for I find them to be too theatrical and often simply too long for me to bear sitting through. I prefer audio over video because audio reproduces color better. I maintain a low tolerance for unserious performance, the sort our present incumbent seems to prefer and exclusively engage in. I find it offensive, anything but entertaining or informative. It seems a Parody of something real rather than being something real itself. It irks me to be surrounded by such unserious business, as if it might infect me. I believe it does infect me, and has. ... It materially affects the quality of my existence. I worry when I really should be singing. I fuss when I should be celebrating. I sense the wasting away of something unspeakably precious. ... I can reliably predict that whatever this administration touches will be perverted and much, much worse for the experience. Not an ounce of beneficience accompanies even the least of their initiatives. If they were evil incarnate, they couldn’t produce worse results. ...This is not intended to be anything like Parody. It’s every inch serious business engaged in by people who’ve never once had to experience seriousness. They were apparently protected from the harsher, more humbling realities when growing up. Rather than respect, they absorbed its opposite and learned to administer it with something approaching genuine relish. They crush dreams the way most people consume ice cream. They disassemble works of great significance as if they never existed. They cannot see what you and me experience. They seem blind to what binds us together. They seem socially feral, and they imperil much more than our sacred way of living while they imperil our sacred way of life. I have no antibodies to deflect their negative energies that I feel encroaching all around me. I simply feel threatened again this morning, as I have felt threatened every morning since these sonsabitches rose to relative prominence. These are not Americans, though I have become wary of what I might properly characterize as un-American, since it seems every possible human behavior, and a few of the even more bestial, seem to have been practiced by those who claimed genuine American heritage. I will insist that these do not represent the potential that has always defined our American experiment. We might have always fallen short of our loftiest aspirations, but we more or less steadfastly maintained those aspirations. We failed to lose faith through a thousand threatening perturbations, but these clowns deliberately abandoned that faith for what? ...This sidetrip lost its allure for me before it began. I cannot quite see where or when it will cease, but I continue counting days, praying each new one might prove to be the last. I pray that day will come before our future dissolves into frivolous Parody, long before that arch of absurdity despoils Arlington National Cemetery, before these imperialist bastards utterly undermine our historical credibility. I pray that we might insist on some serious nonfiction from here on out, leaving Parody to light entertainment, enjoyed sparingly. The Fake News generators, whose best intentions were never stellar, the silly self-dealers, can go back to their traditional dens of iniquity for all I care, as long as they leave the living to make their own choices when it comes to performances. When life becomes a Parody of itself, life itself seems meaningless. Can we get serious and Make America Meaningful Again, please! ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 04/09/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-09T16:25:15-07:00

This week’s writing carried me deeper into the lived texture of EndDays — not the grand mythological architecture of the first week, nor the disorienting loss of landmarks from the second, but something more personal and more unsettling: the daily work of continuing to exist with dignity inside a world that seems determined to make dignity impossible. The week opened in HardTimes, where I found myself having to choose between accumulating reasons not to act and finding even one dog-eared reason to proceed. It moved through Restsurrection, a quietly subversive Easter spent on my knees in the garden rather than in any pew. NewlyNormalizing brought the recognition that we may never snap back, and that the disorientation itself has become our permanent condition. PlayingChicken named the incumbent’s chief governing strategy for what it is: a child’s game played by someone holding civilization’s steering wheel. EndingAWorld mapped the despot’s oldest trick — declaring victory over an apocalypse he himself manufactured — and Esteem closed the week by tracing the low self-esteem at the root of the whole sorry spectacle, from the incumbent’s throne to the society he’s poisoned. I did not expect to find this week’s theme until I reached the end of it. ...I completed the final approval hurdles for my Cluelessness book this week — a gauntlet of bureaucratic absurdity I nearly abandoned several times — and found myself reflecting on what it means to initiate anything during EndDays, when timing always seems poor, and reasons to defer accumulate faster than reasons to proceed. ... My first book launched the same week we went into Iraq in 2003, and it still eventually became a best seller, but not by the easiest route imaginable. ... It happened to be the wrong time to go looking for an alternate route, and also, therefore, the perfect time. ...I realized again this week that I can no longer claim to be a Christian, though I remain a faithful observer of the calendar. The Muse and I no longer have grandchildren young enough to need us to color Easter eggs for them, so I went looking for Easter in our garden instead, spending an afternoon on my knees weeding the back beds, awakening the soil, finding a palm-sized piece of bubbly red basalt that looked every bit like a poisoned apple. By evening, I had induced a resurrection — an especially restful one, a Restsurrection — while inside, the Muse made Scalloped Potatoes, and we opened one of the better bottles. ...A new normal does not follow from EndDays — just a continuing roil, unsettling ramifications, disorienting contentions with no apparent strategy guiding them. ... What began as a local infection has taken on global intentions; dissatisfied with merely undermining this nation, the incumbent seems bent on ruining civilization wholesale. Our Easter gathering this year was less a celebration than a reunion — we marveled that we could still sit together around a table, speaking of uncertainties rather than coming of age, voicing concern over relationships straining under the weight of continuing abominations. ... Heaven help us since we can’t seem to help ourselves. Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: The Garden Court, photogravure print (1892) ...This EndDays Story complains about children in big people’s bodies insisting upon engaging in meaningless finite games like Chicken. I judge relative maturity by the games people choose to play, and PlayingChicken ranks among the least strategic imaginable — a contest where the only possible win is bragging rights, and the meaningful loser might be civilization. Our incumbent presents as an eight-year-old in most contexts, always playing dress-up as president, addicted to brinkmanship when his job description calls for engineering win-wins. ... Diplomacy and democracy are necessarily infinite games; those who insist on always playing Chicken deal an ultimately losing hand. ...Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: “I rose up in the silent night; I made my dagger sharp and bright” (c. ...This EndDays Story maps the despot’s oldest trick: manufacturing an apocalypse, then claiming credit for surviving it. Every despot in history has eventually faced the absolute necessity of EndingAWorld — it demonstrates essential power like nothing else, a whisper vanquishing a hurricane, a shrug demolishing an ancient civilization. I traced this back to the apocalyptic religious sects of the early nineteenth century, whose prophets, when the predicted rapture failed to materialize, simply declared that the world had indeed ended but that God, in his benevolence, had protected the faithful from experiencing the cataclysm. ... Our despot operates by the same script: announce the apocalypse, renege on delivery, claim victory as savior. ...This EndDays Story traces low self-Esteem from the incumbent’s throne to the society he has infected. Esteem must be one of the more curious human properties — more easily bestowed upon others than upon ourselves, yet both necessary and essential. I’ve found the surest path to self-Esteem runs through humility rather than greatness, since those who pursue greatness tend to forfeit their Esteem as the price of the chase. Our incumbent is a one-man low self-Esteem machine, spewing venom like a teething rattlesnake, lusting after everything and finding satisfaction in none of it, losing when he wins and insisting he wins when he loses. He cannot seem to hold himself in Esteem — perhaps his shit doesn’t stink to him, or it stinks more than he can readily forgive. ... Now I struggle to mount my throne each morning without feeling overcome by the overwhelming stench of someone chasing greatness. ...I learned after I'd posted my last week's Weekly Writing Summary that my final edits for my Cluelessness book had already passed muster. I was, as often occurs, waiting for a notice that had already been delivered. This experience seems more of a testament to email's design than any personal shortcoming, for my email queue has remained in the thousands—nearing ten thousand now—regardless of what I do. People have tried to clue me in to their winning email strategies, but none of them seem to work for me. My strategy might even be a testament to my inherent Cluelessness, but it more or less works for me, albeit with a few embarrassments and missed messages. ...But perfection turned out to be a subtheme of my Cluelessness work. I expected only my best work when creating it, for who would want to publicly exhibit anything but a manuscript at least aspiring to, if not necessarily approaching, perfection. ... By rights, I guess, the text should be at least sprinkled with dangling participles and Oxford commas, if only to properly represent an authenticity. ...It seems to me that anybody's book might just as well be entitled Cluelessness, for each should necessarily introduce its readers to frames of reference otherwise impossible to access. These should be properly quirky; otherwise, any old odd AI engine could have completed the work. A book should work on several levels above, below, and even far beyond the obvious. The odd bits might prove most defining and informative, though some coaches and copyeditors might attempt to influence those weird, potentially wonderful bits right out of a work. ...I made significant progress teaching my AI Assistant, Claude (pronounced "Cloud"), how to assemble manuscripts from my daily postings, an effort that, without that assistance, tended to take me weeks and weeks and require thousands of picky little copy and paste operations and still turn out tangled. Claude insists that it's a master of copying and pasting, and if I can provide access—often little more than a CSV file or an RSS feed—it can assemble a reasonable semblance of a properly configured manuscript. I have had an ever-growing backlog of these efforts discouraging my future, but it seems that this year, perhaps even this quarter, I might render moot what had seemingly always been an impervious barrier to completion. I employed Claude.ai, a commercial AI-powered text editor, using it to perform repetitive copy/pasting work and to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.” ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Esteem

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-09T05:53:08-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: Philip Comyns Carr (1882) "…the overwhelming stench of somebody chasing greatness." Esteem must be one of the more curious human properties. Who even knows from whence it comes? We seem to more easily bestow it upon others we admire more readily than we ever consider bestowing it upon ourselves, yet bestowing it upon ourselves seems both necessary and essential. Those without self-Esteem seem to suffer a self-inflicted fate, as if they should have somehow obviously understood the absolute necessity of fulfilling this one fundamental obligation to themselves. Nobody knows better just how much their own shit stinks than the one mounting that ignoble throne each morning. What from one’s own perspective might ever lead them to hold themself in anything even approaching high Esteem? I wager that ways exist to responsibly discover reasons to hold myself in considerable Esteem. In my experience, the best way I’ve found so far involves pursuing humility rather than greatness. It seems the higher and mightier’s self-Esteem tends to crumble under humbling experience, while those pursuing humility tend to find their Esteem patiently waiting for them there. Those pursuing greatness, for instance, often seem to have to forfeit their self-Esteem as the price of their pursuit, which requires some sort of deficit to motivate essential changes. This choice can complicate one’s ability to grant Esteem to others, leading to a sense of competition rather than companionable cooperation in the act. Esteem should not properly be a form of competition where one’s good opinion of themself prevents holding great opinions of others. Esteem seems to come from within, even when bestowed by another, for even the externally bestowed requires acceptance to work its magic. If I, in false humility, refuse to acknowledge the Esteem you attempt to bestow upon me, I negate more than your precious gift. I also attempt to negate myself. I bring up this subject here, in the muddle of EndDays, because we, as a society, seem lately to be suffering from an increasingly serious bout of historically low self-Esteem. We seem to have fallen into a habit of reviling ourselves. Not without good and decent reasons, mind you, for as a society we have been recently behaving absolutely horribly. I hear you when you insist that it wasn’t you that started any of this, but I also sense, as I sense within myself, that we’re both deeply influenced by the misbehaviors trickling inexorably down from the top: our presidency. Our incumbent seems to be a one-man low self-Esteem machine. He spews off venom like a teething rattlesnake, slobbering poison twenty-four seven. He seems to carry an unquenchable thirst. He lusts after seemingly everything yet finds no satisfaction when he successfully defiles any or even all of it. He seems to experience his greatest successes as if they were his greatest failures. Perhaps they were. He loses when he wins and insists that he wins whenever he loses. I’m no psychologist, but do I have to be one to recognize the patterns common to those who’ve never learned how to hold themselves in anything approaching high esteem? These poor souls pursue mammon as if it were the Holy Grail, and defile anything holy with which they might come into contact. He seems to spend untold hours sitting atop his throne, but cannot seem to find reason to hold himself in high Esteem. Perhaps his shit doesn’t stink to him, or it stinks more than he can readily forgive. Beware those pursuing greatness, for the cost of such pursuits tends toward the onerous. Who could afford to mortgage their sole originating asset to chase after what only others can grant? The hollowness that search insists upon pretty much guarantees an ultimately discouraging result, encouraging an ever-increasing lowering of self-Esteem. I have no advice for anyone, even myself, trapped in the whirlpool of greatness. Those who chase it either learn better or they learn worse. It’s ultimately a curse, never really worth pursuing. I was once proud of my association with my country. I held both in high Esteem. Now I struggle to mount my throne without experiencing anything other than the overwhelming stench of someone chasing greatness. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

EndingAWorld

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-08T05:52:39-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: Paradise, with the Worship of the Holy Lamb (c. 1875-80) "…expect to witness him ending worlds." Eventually, every despot in the history of this world so far has encountered the absolute necessity of EndingAWorld. Despots rely on promises of apocalyptic transformation, something exponentially worse than any actual threat warrants. Such threats encourage a sense of powerfulness like no other stance ever does. If one can end a world, it also demonstrates that essential cavilier nature everyone expects from a despot, seemingly capable of EndingAWorld with all the sangfroid usually reserved for dispatching a gnat. Nothing screams absolute power like such indifference does, a whisper vanquishing a hurricane, a shrug demolishing some ancient civilization. Worlds end every day, as easily and as often as worlds are born. It’s a normal feature of all existence that it blinks in and out on itself, annihilating and restoring in only slightly differing guises. Generations trade batons while continuing ever forward on. Often, that momentum proves convincing enough that we hardly notice our own world’s demise. They often just seem to slip out of focus and evaporate as if they were never here, but they were. They were once more than merely here; they were dominant and preeminent, yet they all ultimately virtually disappeared. No past can ever be present here with us. It’s small magic, then, for a despot, when he decides that time has come to set about EndingAWorld, to muster an end. In the early nineteenth century, one apocalyptic religious sect after another encountered this same age-old dilemma. Their prophecies foretold their savior’s return, and they more or less desperately required an apocalypse to be delivered on some specific day, time, and place. The prophet, the sect’s visionary leader, was expected to be able to predict the blessed event, and so they did. The truest believers then sold all their worldly possessions, or, more properly, simply gave them away to less than true believers. They appeared at the appointed hour, naked of worldly possessions, prepared for rapture, sure and certain that their worldly sins would be foregiven and that they would be transported to a forever and ever heaven, Amen. Of course, this cruel world uniformly failed to deliver on that prophet’s promise. What happened next separated the masters from lowly apprentice prophets. Hasty meetings in the prophet’s tent resulted in an announcement before the disappointed crowd. The best response I know of went something like this: The world actually ended, but our Lord, in his benevolence, protected us from experiencing the cataclysm, leaving us with the illusion that the evil former world didn’t end. Trust me as you trust him, that old world has ended. You have been saved and protected from the pain that EndingAWorld brings. The emperor, then, isn’t as naked as he might feel with a disconcerting breeze whistling between his belly and his knees, but clothed in the finest reward his heavenly father could possibly bestow. Go, then, and thrive, for the long-sought kingdom of Heaven is yours today, forever and ever, Amen. Now, that was one first-class sermon! Not all the acolytes were convinced, though. Some fled to live with formerly disaffected relatives until they could put their old lives back together and start recovering from their recent fleecing. The rest proceeded with an even more unshakable vision and faith in the future certainly awaiting them. Some of this world’s great religions went through more or less this same experience, and each was curiously stronger for it. So, when our despot declares that he’s ending a civilization on Tuesday, then reneges on that promise because his imaginary enemies suddenly came to their senses, a world disappeared, the one that had so securely held that story he had so abruptly wagered before making it utterly disappear. He’s reborn a savior, at least as far as he’s concerned. The rest of us can either deny or believe, but if we expect to experience entertaining theater, we’ll be wiser to suspend our disbelief. There will be no end to such stories. If we demand mythical leaders, we should expect to be roughly treated, for the larger and more transformative the myth, the greater the theatrics necessary to manifest it. That it’s essentially all bullshit does nothing to lessen its effect. Expect the tap dancing to continue at least as long as the despot draws breath, for the theatrics seem inseparable from the necessary performance. He might not be much of a showman, but he holds the stage until he doesn’t anymore. Unless or until, expect to witness him ending worlds. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

PlayingChicken

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-07T06:30:46-07:00

"I rose up in the silent night; I made my dagger sharp and bright" ..."Their approach reliably produces little else but chicken shit." I believe that I can successfully judge the relative maturity of someone by identifying the kinds of games they choose to play. The field of Transactional Analysis proposes that all humans engage in game-playing behavior, though not always deliberately. The inadvertent games might disclose even more about a person than any consciously chosen one, though. As outlined in the best-selling Games People Play by Eric Berne (Grove Press, 1964, ISBN 0-345-41003-3), a book criticized by many professional psychologists, identifying these games can provide both entertainment and discernment, giving a label and therefore a meaning to otherwise confusing behaviors. Who hasn’t found insight in finally interpreting an interaction as merely a Mind Game? In my hierarchy, the more childish games often seem to be favored by the less mature. ...In a classic PlayingChicken contest, two contestants drive toward each other as if intended to create a head-on collision. Whichever contestant swerves to avoid the crash gets labeled “Chicken,” a coward, and declared THE loser. If neither “chickens out,” and a collision occurs, neither gets declared chicken, but both lose. The only way to win when PlayingChicken comes from an opponent losing. ...It’s interesting to note, though, that the winner when PlayingChicken wins nothing but what I might call bragging rights. The winner can forever proclaim their opponent to have been “chicken” and have prima facie evidence that they once proved themselves to be a coward. Bragging rights ain’t much in terms of a payoff, unless the right to eternally demean an opponent seems like a valuable asset. Who might consider that right a valuable asset? ... Certainly, no mature adult could see that right as valuable. ...Except adults can sometimes be fairly characterized as children in big people's bodies. The looks can be more than merely deceiving; they can be convincing. I find it personally difficult to imagine, or used to find it even more difficult to imagine, that a Very Important Person, like The President or The Pope, might embody the child in a Big Person body paradigm. I used to think that to achieve such positions, one would have necessarily needed to completely grow up, to have utterly vanquished their inner child, to enter a more mature sort of maturity than you or me might. ... I’ve found much more evidence that a quiet and unassuming adult has achieved maturity than I’ve found evidence supporting the notion that the rich and powerful necessarily have. Further, the quiet and unassuming have often seemed to remain in touch with their inner child that still survives inside without needing to revert to acting out to express otherwise squelched feelings. ...I usually find enough maturity by noon to eventually pass for an adult again, but I’m reminded that not all grown-ups do or can. Our incumbent presents as an eight-year-old in most contexts. When he attempts to perform as our president, for instance, he always appears to be “playing” president, playing dress-up in sloppy make-up and not quite convincing costumes. When he speaks, he quickly discloses both his intellectual and emotional maturity, often appearing angry about imagined slights and fantasy events. Above all, he seems addicted to PlayingChicken, engaging in seemingly mindless, meaningless brinkmanship when, as president, his job description strongly suggests that he carries the primary responsibility for engineering win/wins. He misinterprets the purpose of democracy every time he lines up another potential head-on collision with some enemy or friend. Those who insist upon there being a loser end up playing an eternally losing game. In his Finite and Infinite Games (Ballantine Books, 1986, ISBN: 0-345-34184-8), author James Carse describes what he refers to as the two types of games. Finite Games, he insists, are played for the purpose of ending play. These produce ultimately meaningless losers and winners, and might well seem simply nihilistic. Infinite Games, he proposes, are played for the purpose of continuing play. One focuses upon improving play rather than on deciding who wins. Diplomacy and, indeed, politics can certainly be played either way. I would argue that they both qualify as necessarily infinite games that, if either side focuses solely upon winning, both sides ultimately lose. Much maturity seems to be required to engage as if winning doesn’t matter. The future of human existence, though, depends upon our leaders exhibiting just this sort of maturity. Those who insist upon always PlayingChicken insist upon playing an ultimately losing hand. Their approach reliably produces little else but chicken shit. EndDays seem overfilled with people who were supposed to be responsible adults, mindlessly, reflexively playing finite games like Chicken. These contests seem meaningless and prove to be endlessly exhausting. Why watch a contest if I know from the outset that the result will ultimately prove to be meaningless? It cannot matter how much anyone spends to secure a meaningless victory, and the newly engaged Iranian conflict already exhibits most of the more obvious toolmarks of ultimate meaninglessness. That it might also spark some combatant to employ a nuclear weapon, and end the world, notwithstanding. The end of any world must necessarily prove to be meaningless, for it means forfeiting the means for judging anything, the most senseless kind of courage imaginable. I spend my EndDays mustering the courage not to play Chicken, hoping somebody might identify ways for everyone to win. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

...

NewlyNormalizing

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-06T05:18:00-07:00

"…Heaven help us since we can't seem to help ourselves." It might be that we’re each cursed to die in some foreign land, far away from familiar territory, especially if we stay close to home ground. Changes brought on by travel or relocation hold nothing compared to those that visit me uninvited. I might have expected to hold some of my old life static as I entered the traumatic final stages of my existence, but if so, I seem destined to experience ever more deepening disappointment. My old world was not even inherently that unstable. It seemed capable of continuing to nearly ad infinitum while entropy went right ahead and had her ways with me. But we grew impatient, I guess, or discontented with the balances that have managed to protect us for the better part of three generations. We opted to seek greatness, though we struggled to agree on what achieving that might achieve. We became the product of our discontent rather than delivering ourselves from any ultimately questionable evil. I live and grieve like I once merely lived and breathed. I dread with each drawn breath, for I cannot make sense of what has become NewlyNormalizing. A new normal does not follow, just a continuing roil, unsettling ramifications, disorienting contentions. Obviously, no strategy, clever or otherwise, guides our path. Nor does it seem that anybody’s merely making very much of this up as we move along. Reactionary might better explain the commentary. I suspect that what seems like little more than lashing out at a disappointing fate amounts to little more or less than that. ... Is this one of the final stages of self-sabotage writ large? I do not remember agreeing to go along for this ride, because I never had. As awful as I imagined this term might become, it already seems exponentially worse. What was more or less (again), a local infection seems to have taken on global intentions. Dissatisfied with merely undermining this nation, he seems to have been targeting ruining civilization for all time. I make no exaggeration when I suggest he’s not seeking anything even vaguely related to world dominion. He apparently seeks total destruction, for what else could even begin to explain his actions? Yes, he’s clearly suffering from dementia, or would be if he weren’t so evidently enjoying his ride. Yes, he was never not deluded, and the kind of deluded that has apparently been communicable. Anyone who ever believed that what America really needed was to be “Made Great Again” suffered from the same ultimately debilitating disease. It comes as absolutely no consolation that I never caught the sniffles from that bug. The NewlyNormalized will never qualify as normal. It will remain different for every minute of its hopefully short life. I doubt that we’ll ever be able to snap back to the way it was, though, for the NewlyNormalizing, however ultimately short-lived, has managed to significantly alter us. We are no longer so endearingly trusting, as we once prided ourselves at being. Neither are we nearly as forgiving as we once were, after having our best intentions swindled for nothing more substantial than hollow promises that were never intended to come true. We might remain disoriented well into and beyond any foreseeable future. We might even lose the power to foresee, which would be the greatest casualty imaginable from this delusional attempt at greatness. Easter was less a celebration this year than a reunion. We marveled that we could still sit around a table together. We had all changed since the last supper we’d shared. We had been growing or devolving; however changing had visited us this latest time. We spoke of uncertainties rather than coming of age. We voiced concern over relationships straining around continuing NewlyNormalizing abominations. ... Changes seemingly beyond anyone’s power to still. A quickening continues, unsettling nearly everything. We have a madman in charge. The best response he can muster seems to be proposing another round of mollifying golf, which won’t accomplish much. Heaven help us since we can’t seem to help ourselves. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Restsurrection

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-05T05:55:56-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: The Council Chamber, photogravure print (1892) "…resurrected again until sometime after next Christmas." I realized again this week that I can no longer claim to be a Christian. I’m uncertain if I could ever declare myself such with conviction, even after full immersion baptism, I felt more conscript than convert. I had bowed to the peer pressure. Everyone else in my Sunday School class had enrolled in the special studying and showed up on that Sunday wearing white shirt and pants while carrying a change of clothes. We’d all stood waist-deep in the baptismal font with the pastor while the little window slid open to reveal the entire congregation watching. We’d each in turn accepted that folded handkerchief over our noses and allowed ourselves to be submerged, ruining our hairstyles for Jesus. We’d also slopped off to a changing room to towel off and change wardrobe, supposed to have been forever changed. I suspect that most of us feigned results as I had. I still observe the Christian calendar, though. I acknowledge in passing a few of the more prominent religious holidays, but without personally participating in any public celebrations. I understand that backsliding Catholics attend only Easter and Christmas Mass. I don’t even consider doing those. I don’t go all druid on myself, though, and carouse myself through those days. The Muse makes Scalloped Potatoes on Easter and Roast Goose on Christmas, we open one of the better bottles of wine, and celebrate quietly, in our own way, not publicly. It’s not that I’ve lost God or faith or, heaven forbid, grace; it’s more that I cannot face the congregation without holding something more than skepticism in my heart. I realized this week, when attending a memorial service in a local church, that a sanctuary can still bring me to tears. I don’t cry for my unforgiven sins, but for a context I once believed in but found false. I still want to believe in nonsense, and to consider myself somehow elevated by my faith, but I just cannot, not in good conscience. I can bow my head in wonder at the traditions being played out before me, but I no longer, if, indeed, I ever believed, that some Father in Heaven listens in. The Muse and I no longer have grandchildren to color Easter eggs for, and we’re not quite deranged enough to successfully hide our own eggs from ourselves, so we must go searching for our Easter in other places. I spent a long day weeding out the back beds, the ones I enriched when I planted five lilac bushes there, five Springs ago, just after The Muse and I returned from exile. That soil had always seemed acidic, so I sweetened it with compost and peat. It’s now perfectly friable, and though the cheat grass still intrudes under the fence from our neighbor’s yard, I can easily dispense with it. The soil abandons those rhizomes with ease. I spent the entire afternoon on my knees, awakening those beds. I carted tub after tub of weeds to the yard debris container I’d moved in front of the garage. I found a palm-sized stone, a piece of bubbly red basalt, that looks every bit like a poisoned apple. I washed that treasure and set it aside for inclusion in my permanent collection. By the end of the afternoon, I’d successfully induced a resurrection, an especially restful one, a Restsurrection, if you will. Hallelujah or something. My knees recall this morning my yesterday’s extended humility, as the day dawned into a picture-perfect Easter morning. In my youth, local churches would combine to produce a Sunrise Service, held either in the local football stadium or, if it rained, in one of the many large churches dotting downtown. I found those services to be distinctly unchurch-like, because they seemed so different. Even between the Protestant sects, those differences seemed glaring to me. These performances seemed more anthropological than ecclesiastical. I’d leave feeling grateful for my home church’s order of service, which seemed more reasonable. Our home church might host two services on Easter and even serve a breakfast. After six hours or more of fellowship, we’d head home after helping to clean up the church’s multipurpose room. There, we’d hide eggs for our little sisters, who’d spend the afternoon rehiding the eggs until most were cracked or discolored. We’d eat ham, scalloped potatoes, and fresh local asparagus, and Jesus would have been resurrected again until sometime after next Christmas. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

HardTimes

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-04T07:27:22-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:The Briar Wood, photogravure print (1892) "Waiting for perfection only perfects waiting." This story serves as a soliloquy by me for me, an encouraging little sermon to bolster my forward momentum. Yesterday, I finally completed all the hurdles for approving my Cluelessness book for publication. The gauntlet qualified as an absurdist’s rendering of bureaucratic inefficiency, but I made my way through it. It seemed like the least effective process possible, but I still managed to make progress and succeed. I felt like simply giving up several times, but I persisted. Cluelessness will launch into another war, into a distraction machine that worsens anything The Blind Men, my first book, faced. HardTimes are not necessarily EndTimes, just EndDays with trepidations. … — EndDays inevitably seem like HardTimes. I’ve greiving, seeming to lose another cherished something every time I try to accomplish anything. My bridges, across which I’ve so often passed without thinking, without appreciating, are burning when I arrive. I might run, but I cannot effectively hide from the grim realizations that my familiar life is ending and one, until recently unthinkable, seems sure to take over. It remains impossible to contemplate, but also not all that impossible to acknowledge now. Timing sure seems poor to initiate anything, yet I cannot hold my life in suspension until these inconveniences pass. Life insists upon going on with me in tow, even though the timing sure seems poor. I might prove capable of only anticipating the worst. The test comes when I feel challenged to initiate something, especially when it’s something important to me. I can choose between all the reasons I can’t or at least one even dog-eared reason I might. I am challenged to choose the latter, for otherwise I seem cursed to accumulate only more reasons why I couldn’t. HardTimes are not impossible ones. They bring plot complications, though not necessarily total negation. My Blind Men and the Elephant book was released the same week we went into Iraq, released into a world terminally distracted. This rendered it nigh on to impossible to garner much attention for it, but I continued with a heart filled with waning hopefulness, for I didn’t want to own any reasons for not having at least attempted to achieve something significant for me or this world, though HardTimes can leave anyone feeling impotent in the face of any opportunity. That book eventually became a best seller, but not necessarily by the easiest way imaginable. It’s never the perfect time to initiate anything. If I go seeking reasons to avoid something, I’m that much more likely to find that something and thereby grow ever more skilled at avoiding. The purpose of my existence cannot possibly be to master the fine art of avoiding anything, but to maintain and improve my initially underdeveloped abilities to be up to something significant, especially in times when any positive outcome seems especially unlikely. Destiny takes no days off due to inclement conditions. There are no deep-down decent reasons to defer any decency, regardless of complicating conditions. Waiting for perfection only perfects waiting. Now was always the time. I don’t mean to encourage myself to go charging into situations where I’m likely to get vanquished. Not every day seems equally auspicious. It’s just that during EndDays, few days seem all that auspicious. I guess the conquest might depend more upon something other than absolute auspiciousity from the outset, then. It might depend upon an ounce or two of foolhardiness, an adequate substitute for both courage and decent weather in a pinch. EndDays seem to encourage a baseline certain foolhardiness, if only because so few opportunities really seem all that auspicious then. It’s a time when one necessarily comes to live by chance, and comes to understand both the cost as well as the many benefits of loss. I miss that same old bridge I never hardly noticed when I crossed. I find that I’m interested, though, in finding another serviceable road between here and there, so even though it’s most definitely HardTimes, and perhaps even maybe the wrong time to go searching for an alternate route, it also happens to be the perfect time to go looking. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 04/02/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-02T17:24:57-07:00

This week’s writing carried me into the second week of EndDays, moving beyond the creation myth that anchored the first week and into the territory that creation inhabits. I found myself exploring what it actually feels like to live inside EndDays — the lowered sky, the dimming light, the missing landmarks, the unimaginable actions undertaken without my permission in my once-good name that have somehow become routine. The week opened with a DayOfRest that turned out to be anything but idle, then darkened into the spreading dimness of LetThereBe (Light) before finding its footing through TheLimit, Ungrounding, Negavation, and TheFourOppressions. I ended the writing week with a secular sermon I didn’t know I had in me, contrasting Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms against the MAGA movement’s four grim replacement oppressions. ...This EndDays Story finds the creation of my EndDays universe complete, leaving me facing a DayOfRest. ...My EndDays universe creation complete, I faced a DayOfRest and discovered I’d been mistaking play for obligation. Flats of flowers sat unplanted beneath our sacred apricot tree while I danced around the task, as if it would be work rather than renewal. The Muse and I have planted flowers together since our first Spring, thumbing our noses at whatever EndDays were trailing us then. ... LightWork — the kind that gains energy rather than expending it — turned out to be the answer. Like angels who never tire because their work is play, I realized that the revolution ahead requires the same orientation: indifference as resistance, play as the only thing that can trump oppression. ...I had grown to take light for granted — light in all its varieties: illumination, truth, justice, The American Way. I noticed the EndDays arriving when I saw the light beginning to fade, when information became more weapon than sustenance, when a spreading twilight replaced the immutables I’d always assumed were permanent. The pursuit of greatness introduced this darkness, and I found myself navigating by echo rather than vision, unable to clearly perceive my collective or individual future. I hold onto the hope that Spring will know the way to Summer, and that Summer will say, Let There Be, and I’ll be able to see my way forward in light again. This morning, I perceived the world deafly — the sky a low blue-grey dome, the Oregon Grape screaming yellow, crows barely audible through allergy-clogged senses — reaching upward like a frustrated seedling, seeking whatever light remains. ...The Sky no longer seems as high or as worthy a limit as it seemed before EndDays appeared. In EndDays, the sky has fallen — not metaphorically but practically, brought down shoulder-high by the great demeaning pursuit of mammon that calls itself Making America Great Again. ... They had been suffocating on their unseen new freedom, unable to perceive the infinite alternatives still available to them. ... Yet I find myself wondering if the microscopic might hold the wealth of kings, if loft and reach were always overrated stand-ins for something far better suited to who we actually might be. Why wish upon a star when perfectly satisfying wishes lurk much closer and more convenient to home? ...This EndDays Story finds me engaging in an exercise I couldn’t have imagined myself doing two years ago. If anyone had told me two years ago that I’d be sitting in a community coalition meeting, group-editing a declaration of resistance against domestic hostile forces, I wouldn’t have believed them. The Muse and I answered a local executive’s call to help coordinate a lawful, nonviolent response to what amounts to an invasion — the kind of thing Lithuanian or Polish partisans might have convened to discuss. The sheriff raised the most objections in the room, then turned out to be our most helpful voice, questioning presumptions that had let us ski way out over our skis. ... We group-copyedited our outrage into gentle tones, as if the opposing general might blush and reconsider. ...This EndDays Story focuses upon what might prove to be a permanent disruption, forcing me to change my primary means of navigation into what I’ll call Negavation. Familiar landmarks have disappeared, and I’ve had to develop a new form of navigation: Negavation — finding my way by what’s missing rather than what’s there. ... My Depression-era parents were master peasants before they’d grown out of their knee pants, one step from the poorhouse their entire lives, no matter how prosperous they became. I had my own apprenticeship in privation — baking Sunday beans, learning peasant cooking during the lean divorce and dismemberment years — and adapted well enough then. ... I feel like an alien in my own hometown, declared a domestic terrorist for calling myself an anti-fascist. I’m Negavating around these inconveniences while finally accepting what I most resist accepting: it might not ever snap back to the way it was, or could have been, again. ...This EndDays Story contrasts Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms with what I label the MAGA’s Four Oppressions. Roosevelt articulated his Four Freedoms in January 1941, nearly a year before Pearl Harbor, to help settle the question of what we thought we might be fighting for. Those freedoms became the underpinning of our engagement in that terrible war, and, later, of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. ... Then this country traded in its reliable cow for a hill of magic beans and set about writing wrongs — with our beleaguered Four Freedoms cast as the enemy. The MAGAs proposed four replacements: the freedom to squelch speech, the freedom to impose Christian Nationalism, the freedom to oppress the poor for being poor, and the freedom to inflict fear. ... If this is what greatness costs, I vote for four simple freedoms again. ...I am still waiting for final confirmation on Cluelessness, A Book of Mirrors, and the galley proofs, so I can see for myself whether my wishes might eventually make it into print. I have recently been inundated by social media advertisements for every possible kind of publishing support: vanity presses, editors of every sort, folks who've specialized in helping authors create book websites, and promotion experts! ... Much of this promotion seems designed to encourage my dissatisfaction with how it's always been. I know of no author who feels anything like 100% confident that they're doing The Lord's Work. Many, like me, feel less worthy than their readers usually insist they might be. These exchanges prove astounding because I might have mistaken myself as at least my most knowledgeable reader, better able to assess my positives and negatives than anybody else. ...We cannot read anything without relating to what the author must have had to experience to give birth to that piece of work. ... All writing should properly be classified as fiction since every paragraph of it got first filtered through some prejudicial-by-nature author. I can no more write nonfiction than I can fly, yet my work gets reliably classified by some other label than fiction. It was all a product of my anemic imagination, even the stuff that others might easily recognize as accurate descriptions of something that actually happened. ...My Cluelessness book might, I'm still somewhat confident, still become available sometime later this year. ...I employed Claude.ai, a commercial AI-powered text editor, using it to perform repetitive copy/pasting work and to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.” ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

TheFourOppressions

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-02T06:45:08-07:00

"I vote for four simple freedoms again. ...In the months leading up to the United States entering the already raging World War, President Franklin Roosevelt articulated what he labeled The Four Freedoms in his January 1941 State of the Union Address. He intended these points to inspire a vision of a post-war world, where freedom would once again rule. These points were aspirational then, embodying what he hoped could be the hopes and dreams of those whose faith in freedom might well be severely challenged, even discouraged, over the upcoming period. This speech came nearly a year before Pearl Harbor, when we were still squabbling over whether to lend our support to Britain. Roosevelt decided to try to settle the questions about what we thought we might be fighting for, signaling an end to our period of isolationism. He enumerated four “essential” human freedoms: Freedom of speech and expression, Freedom of every person to worship God in their own way, Freedom from want, meaning economic understandings that secure a healthy peacetime life for all, and Freedom from fear, specifically a worldwide reduction of armaments to prevent physical aggression. These Four Freedoms became the underpinning governing our eventual engagement in that terrible conflict, and guided our involvement in the creation of the United Nations, which incorporated these four freedoms into its preamble of its Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. These intentions deeply influenced the world that I was born into, the one I felt proud to be a part of, for they outlined what decency meant to me and to the ever-expanding free world. Then this once bastion of freedom began pursuing greatness. It traded in its once-reliable cow for a hill of magic beans. It promised to set about writing wrongs, with our by then beleaguered Four Freedoms filling in playing the part of the wrongs. They called themselves the MAGAs, the Make America Great Again crowd, and they were, if anything, inordinately proud of their passion and their sincere lack of compassion for others. They perceived mortal enemies where nobody had seen them before, at least since just after our divisive Civil War. They proposed Four Oppressions as worthy successors to their forebear Four Freedoms, arguing, if not eloquently, that the world should be divided between the worthy and the others, with their chosen people considered the worthiest: what others labeled Deplorables. TheFourOppressions proclaimed freedom for a few, at onerous cost to the many. They proposed severely limiting the freedom of speech and expression, proposing a freedom they reserved for themselves, a freedom to squelch. This amounted to a capricious oppression, one exclusively visited upon their critics and sundry truth-tellers. They reserved the right to lie their fool heads off with absolute impunity, and practiced it with near absolute inanity. They feigned a religious fervor previously unseen outside of a few of the more militant Muslim sects. They practiced an Old Testament Christianity, falsely insisting that our country was founded as a Christian Nation, then employed the temerity to redefine it as such. Other traditions were characterized as un-American and therefore lesser than what they characterized as The One True Religion, an oppression that history had repeatedly proven false and not once found true. Their religion was predicated upon this great lie. They instituted targeted austerity programs intended to punish those incapable of fending for themselves. They taxed the poor to benefit the rich, and cut the wealthiest’s taxes in a long-before discredited cargo cult belief that prosperity quite naturally trickles down from great wealth. Never in the history of the world so far had that belief ever been held to be true, yet it was the bedrock belief beneath this third Oppression, The Necessity of Want, the Freedom To Oppress The Poorest. We capriciously levied tariffs on utterly innocent trading partners, deepening economic inequality and severely wounding ourselves. The Oppression of the poor to make everyone wealthier joined its counterparts to further erode what we’d previously known as great freedoms. The freedom from fear became a gleeful Oppression intending to focus our nation’s great strength to inflict fear on innocents, especially those with no way to properly defend themselves. We strived to become a bully nation, one feared rather than respected, one no longer trusted to keep our word. We deliberately became a renegade nation, reviled by former friends and allies, oppressing ourselves for fun and obscene profit. We blew innocent fishermen out of international waters, then refused to provide proof that they were somehow international drug traffickers. We started a war of choice that crippled the world economy on little more than an arrogant whim. We were much more miserable as a result. So, those are our Four Oppressions: The Absolute Freedom to Squelch Speech, The Absolute Freedom To Be An Evangelical Fundamentalist Christian Nationalist, The Absolute Freedom to Actively Oppress the Poor for Being Poor, and The Absolute Freedom to Inflict Fear. Quite the accomplishment, don’t you think, to flip our identity from aspiring peacemaker to the chief oppressor nation in the world? ... What seemed straightforward and simple as a freedom gets tangled when transformed into an oppression. The need for defense spending soars, and the need to behave defensively around other nations becomes prominent. We remember when a simple vision for our future inspired rather than terrified. Now, we experience a simple-minded vision utterly undermining what we once understood constituted freedom. If this is what greatness costs, I vote for four simple freedoms again. ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Negavation

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-04-01T06:05:15-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: Ruins at Chiaravalle near Ancona, Italy ...“…it might not ever snap back to the way it was…” ...Long-relied-upon way points have turned unreliable, and travel has turned into repeated bouts of disorientation, degrading into despair. ... I know why they fled, but I cannot know to where or if they will ever return. ... After months of denial, a begrudging acceptance starts settling in, then an emotion almost resembling pride. I cannot successfully hide my grief over losing reliable trails, but I realize that I am no longer precisely lost. I can still anticipate, if not traditionally navigate. I accept that I will face detours and that my original estimates won’t be worth shit, as if they ever were. A different game seems to be afoot now, and I am more-or-less successfully adapting. Do I wish I had not lost the benefit of all my former experience? ... Am I nonetheless pleased that I still seem capable of discovering viable alternatives? That yields a more hesitant acceptance, though it still distills into a definite yea. ...Once was that I could imagine a circuit and then circumnavigate it with little exception. I knew where to go to do whatever I proposed. Now, it’s different. EndDays have not only brought shockingly more expensive gasoline, it’s brought inventory shortages and closing stores. ... My actual paths seem more informed by what I find missing. I leave more often without whatever I’d simply formerly forgotten. Now I leave empty-handed because the store couldn’t get their hands on what I sought. I’m learning how to do without again, moderating my expectations to routinely include my fair share of disappointment. I swerve to some alternative, informed first by what I couldn’t acquire. This negative navigation I’ve grown to think of as Negavation, and I’m realizing that this has become my new normal, like it or not. Of course, I didn’t think much of it at first, though I’d had considerable prior experience with it in my youth. My parents, Great Depression survivors, were filled with stories of routine borderline privations. They had become master peasants long before they’d grown out of their knee pants. My dad spoke of poaching deer to supply the supper table, and my mom spoke fondly of what seemed like near starvation to us kids, who’d been raised in plentier times. Still, we shopped the dented can store, where odd lots of damaged case lot cannery vegetables were sold without labels to the public, at pennies on the dollar. This was how we learned to pinch our pennies, too. It seemed to me then that we could have afforded more luxury than my folks allowed themselves to afford, so deep had been their early indoctrination into maintaining a continuing dread of impending privation. They were one step from the poorhouse until they died; however, otherwise prosperous they became. I admit to having been spoiled by plenty in my time, though I’ve had my chances to adapt to loss, as well. The divorce and dismemberments radically lessened my disposable income, nudging me back into an undergraduate lifestyle while in my forties. I took the setback as probably temporary and, I thought, maintained what was left of my dignity fairly well. I’d bake a pot of beans on Sunday night, then feast on them through the following week, breakfast and dinner. I took to learning how peasants cooked, transforming stale bread into fabulous soup and religiously avoiding all the expensive cuts of meat, without remorse or obvious lasting damage. I forged new norms out of apparently limiting resources until I hardly remembered an any more prosperous where or when. ...This time, these EndDays seem exponentially more limiting. I once, for instance, found pride in associating with my birthplace. My country sure used to seem ‘of me,’ if not precisely my identity. Now I feel like an alien in my own hometown, and have been declared a domestic terrorist for considering myself an anti-fascist. This situation’s somewhat worse than my grocery store being “temporarily” out of my preferred brand of beer due to “supply chain problems,” a term I’ve learned means ‘self-inflicted political problems.’ It means we put an immature eight-year-old in charge, and he, understandably, lacks executive discipline. If I were less mature myself, I could get grudgy about my repeated inability to navigate my world as I’d grown accustomed. Every day brings another otherwise unnecessary disruption, apparently the result of our titular leader’s disabilities. I’m Negavating around even these inconveniences while finally accepting that it might not ever snap back to the way it was or could have been again. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Ungrounding

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-31T06:29:17-07:00

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: The Prince entering the Briar Wood ...Just like too many EndDays Stories, this one properly begins with the fateful phrase, “If anyone had told me just two years ago…”, before going on from there. Today, I routinely engage in previously unimaginable actions, formerly genuinely unthinkable ones. Some, in defense, hoping to ward off an indistinct yet ever-present sense of impending evil, and others in preparatory offense, as if for an anticipated assault. I’m mostly making my actions up as I go along. I engage in rituals every bit as effective as those my forebears invoked to prevent The Evil Eye from getting them, rubbing salve on imaginary future wounds. For the first time in my pacifist life, I’ve begun to understand the urge my Second Amendment friends must feel when they fondle their assault rifles. I feel protective of my past, which has most certainly already passed now, and I feel genuinely insulted by what seems too likely to become our future. The Muse and I were invited to join a conversation convened by a local executive. She intended to create a coalition, a partnership of concerned citizens. We would try to coordinate our “thoughts and actions” to keep our valley “safe for all.” Her idea centered around the notion of a “lawful, coordinated, nonviolent, and united effort” that might, “in collaboration with other community partners”, strengthen public safety, reduce fear, protect immigrant families, ensure equitable access to services, and help keep business and community functioning smoothly. This gathering promised to be a far cry from a mustering of a more traditional Community Chest, for we were threatened with invasion, like what we’d been seeing inflicted on our neighbors in Chicago, Washington, DC, California, and Minnesota. We had been called to prepare for an invasion by hostile domestic forces under the direction of a madman, under the foreign and Domestic clause of the standard oath of office. This call to conversation seemed more akin to what Lithuanian or Polish partisans might engage in. None of us who showed up very much resembled Minute Men, and our convener carefully refrained from explicitly naming the cause of the tensions she hoped to prepare us to better cope with. The draft wording of this proclamation seemed light and airy on first reading, so it seemed unnecessary to me to pore over the content for editing. We were directed to hold up a green, yellow, or red card to indicate our reaction to each of eleven statements. These seemed innocuous until others at our tables—we were arrayed around a room at small round tables—began reacting. Some took umbrage at seemingly harmless statements: motherhood, apple pie, and what on initial reading sure seemed like Fourth of July proclamations. We tried to resolve those tensions with a predictably clumsy group editing exercise, and ended that first evening mostly of one mind but also subtly divided. The second session began by recapping the first. The convener had edited the first session’s comments into a second edition, preserving the complaints that surfaced in that session. That second evening would be spent fishing for red, trying to identify unworkable language that could not be preserved into common acceptance. The sheriff, absent in the first session, won the award for showing the most red. I found myself wondering what kind of sheriff would vote against apple pie declarations until he began to explain his objections. He was not betraying his oath of office, championing MAGA perspectives, but voicing some genuinely trance-busting observations. Many presumptions were subsequently questioned as our initial glowy, transcendent sense from the first meeting gave way to its real-world counterparts. Perhaps we shouldn’t declare that we’re “upholding constitutional and statutory protections” if few of us actually understand what constitutes constitutional and statutory. We caught ourselves way out over our intended skis. It intrigued me how nobody mentioned the elephant in the room, the Republican Party. ... Our granddaughter has Hispanic and Native American heritage. We were there because a racist cabal was actively violating federal and state law, harassing innocent citizens, and committing greater crimes to arrest those only suspected of committing much lesser crimes: treating as criminals those only suspected of administrative infractions. The threatened and delivered punishments rarely fit the crimes, and due process had been almost universally denied. I felt like a Minute Man, studiously group copyediting a declaration of my outrage into gentle and respectful tones as if the opposing British General might be generously predisposed to reconsider his intrusion with a blushing, “Excuse me, please.” I wondered, “To be delivered to whom?” One attendee said he couldn’t vote for a statement unless it retained the phrase, “We believe in advocating for secure borders.” Rather than spend the rest of the night there squabbling over one man’s obsession with his secure borders myth, we voted to delete that statement, as if the revolution might ultimately be won by relatively simple omission rather than confrontation. I stand in favor of neighbors standing steadfastly against the insults presently being visited upon the populace. I feel tremendously grateful that the worst promised has yet to visit us, but I’m not fooled by the apparent peace presently surrounding us here. I stand ready to stand, knowing that we might first need to muster a few inspiring words before we can properly respond by taking up arms, in whatever form that might need to be; hopefully by voting the sonsabitches out of office. I suspect there will be considerable violence before this scourge has been chased back into wherever it emerged. There will always be racists with us, though they only occasionally accumulate enough power to deeply trouble anyone with anything as innocuous as a brown grandchild. We bless ourselves with our best intentions. Anything we can agree to do together makes us stronger, and we’re better when we can chase off some of the glowy trance before we engage. ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

TheLimit

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-30T06:05:36-07:00

Edward Burne-Jones: The Land of Beulah (1881) "…when there are perfectly satisfying wishes lurking much closer and more convenient to home…" In EndDays, apparent limits shift. What might once have been measured in ‘sky’ seems not nearly as impressive or high. ... I might ascribe this narrower sense to the usual limits imposed by age and experience. I’ve learned to moderate my possibility senses in anticipation of not being able to fully satisfy them. This might seem like a dandy adaptation to prevent discouragement or depression, but it also materially affects my sense of possibility. If I give up on myself without much in the way of challenging, it seems I must be prelimiting my influence. Those who cannot imagine might struggle to manifest. Back when the sky served as TheLimit, I felt much less restrained than I do entering my waiting dotage, where I hold the benefit of so much more experience manifesting even impossibilities. I feel forced to admit that I’ve been limiting myself. I remember consulting with a group in a company that had just been acquired in a buyout. Everyone would either be invited to relocate to Texas from Massachusetts or be laid off. Their company’s fate was not in question. Each seemed not quite ready to forfeit their relationship with their company. They understandably dwelled upon what they would be losing. Few felt drawn to living in Texas, and no one in any way wanted the alternative. Damned whatever they might do, they grieved. There were, of course, still an infinite number of other alternatives, any of which might ultimately prove superior to their apparent double-boundedness, but nobody seemed to have access to whatever those alternatives might be. Their limits had been reset, rendering them stuck. We engaged in a few exercises intended to open previously unexplored possibilities until a fresh sense of potential began to take over. They realized that until their fate actually appeared, they were temporarily free to do whatever they cared to do. They had been suffocating on their unseen new freedom. And EndDays bring just such suffocation at first. My response might naturally default to ever greater limits, for I feel as though I’m losing my future. If these are, indeed, my EndDays, I can’t presume that my todays will continue to extend ad infinitum, as I have always assumed in the past. My morning suddenly and disquietingly becomes a more precious commodity, rare and only growing rarer still, rather than extending toward and into infinity. Something, then, must be concomitant on me in this second, something, perhaps, other than deliberately limiting my potential. If these are the EndDays, this morning must be worth multiples of whatever I had valued my old, now ordinary, merely infinite mornings. What might well now be severely limited in numbers need not necessarily be limited in worth. ...The sky, though, that old ‘sky’s the limit’ sky, doesn’t seem to stretch nearly as high as before. My limits might still reach clear up to the sky, but the sky seems much lower, much closer now. To maintain my historical loft, I’d need to reach much higher than just the sky. To say the sky’s the limit now seems to radically limit my potential, for Chicken Little might have been right. ... The public focus upon acquiring mammon, that great demeaning Making America Great Again movement, seems to have caused my once limitless-seeming sky to have fallen. ... My vision suddenly seems obscured by what once seemed like lofty clouds, now reduced to mere fog. My vision’s visibility sure seems severely limited, and TheLimit, that universal indicator of lofty greatness, suddenly seems little more than shoulder high. Maybe I’m freer than I’ve ever been before. Liberated from my presumptions of the infinite, I hold opportunities to spend my seconds as if they were precious. Why do I need the sky when even the microscopic suddenly seems to hold the wealth of kings? Maybe we no longer require vast empires to achieve great wealth. Maybe loft and reach were always overrated, stand-ins for attributes far better suited to who we always were. Maybe a microscopic vision can be a worthy replacement for something traditionally much more massive. Maybe The Sky’s The Limit was, by nature, invasive, distracting attention too far away from an even better home. Who needs to wish upon a star when there are perfectly satisfying wishes lurking much closer and more convenient to home? ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

LetThereBe

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-29T07:04:33-07:00

Edward Burne-Jones: Flamma Vestalis (1884 - 1890) Gallery Notes: Burne-Jones’s daughter Margaret modeled for this painting. The Latin title refers to the Vestal Virgins of Rome, who tended the perpetual fire on the altar of the goddess Vesta. Begun before Margaret’s marriage in 1888, the painting aligns her with these chaste women, suggesting her innocence and purity. ..."Let there be light" is an English translation of the Hebrew phrase יְהִי אוֹר‎ (yehi 'or) found in Genesis 1:3 of the Torah, the first part of the Hebrew Bible. In Old Testament translations of the phrase, translations include the Greek phrase γενηθήτω φῶς (genēthḗtō phôs) and the Latin phrases fiat lux and lux sit. It is part of the Genesis creation narrative. Wikipedia I had grown to take light in all of its variety for granted. It was as if some God had commanded it, and nobody could rend it asunder. Truth lingered somewhere in there, too, and justice, and even, beleaguered, The American Way. Those were the days before American became a pejorative term, and patriotism still stood for something upright rather than creeping around in artificial night. Light seemed infinite and immutable then. It stood as purification, clarification, and sustenance. I sensed the EndDays were coming when I noticed the light diminishing, when information became more weapon than sustenance, when simple truths could still manage to sustain themselves without much in the way of artificial amplification. Before an incessant mumbling all but erased our sense of greatness. The pursuit of greatness introduced a spreading darkness over the world, as if the command Let There Be had somehow been suspended. A twilit world appeared, one defined by shadows. Half-truths encroached on formerly immutables, and derision began eclipsing vision. We began navigating by echo rather than plan. I could no longer reliably see the hand held up before my face. I became lost in considerable space. What once seemed tangible forfeited a dimension or two and seemed flat and featureless, uninteresting. What had once quickened my pulse left me dizzy and delirious. I lost my past in dimly lit clutter and could no longer clearly perceive my collective or even individual future. Without light, I lost an essential sense of myself, as if existing in darkness. Is my memory faulty, or is it likely that a darkness has been spreading these past few years? The Damned Pandemic visited during our resident idiot’s first term, inviting insanity into the larger room. Four years of well-earned respite resolved the contagion and began raising the shades to let in the sun, before a reversion slammed them shut again, with even greater earnest this time, seemingly achieving total darkness at times. Were it not for the Spring, Winter would have never receded this year. This living in dimness exhausts my spirit and suffocates my soul. I must keep going, though, always forward and upward, even when–especially when—I cannot quite see where I’m going. Maybe Spring will know the way to Summer this year, and maybe Summer will say, “Let There Be,” and I’ll be able to see my way forward again. EndDays encourage me to seek light. Like a frustrated seedling, I naturally reach upward. Perhaps I should be reaching out as well. Perhaps the more directions I can seek, the more likely I will be to find the light I’m looking for. I look without clearly perceiving. My eyes work mostly by some facility resembling muscle memory, only faintly recalling the time when light still shone brightly and when my own vision of myself still felt compelling. This morning, the sky holds a low blue-gray haze, like a dome containing Spring within. Trees leaf their tender yellow-green while an Oregon Grape hedge screams yellow in comparison. Vision seems muted, as if seeing the world through allergy-clogged ears. I can barely hear a murder of crows complaining about the dog walkers violating their territory. I perceive deafly. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

DayOfRest

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-28T05:48:06-07:00

"I'm planting those flowers this morning." The Muse and I have several flats of plants sitting beneath our sacred apricot tree. We bought them over the past two weeks in fits of the usual enthusiasm, as Spring started emerging, imagining that they’d somehow just plant themselves, I guess. It’s been more than a week now, and there they sit, still not planted. ... It’s been our shared ritual since that first Spring we spent together back in that little apartment overlooking The Willamette, just downwind from where my prior relationship played out its EndDays. We planted flowers to thumb our noses at what had so recently seemed like the end. They represented our new beginning, and planting them then seemed like the opposite of work. It was renewing and rewarding, and reassured us that we still inhabited a welcoming world, regardless of the EndDays still trailing their toxicity along just behind us. Planting day always feels like a DayOfRest to us, yet I’d still been resisting engaging. I spent time earlier this morning, warmly anticipating planting those flowers today. For some reason, I have been dancing around this responsibility, as if the effort might overwhelm rather than reassure and renew me. It occurred to me, as I sat, anticipating in predawn darkness, that I might have been thinking about that planting as if it would entail work instead of play. Maybe I was mistaking the opportunity for an obligation, as if I would be realizing somebody else’s objective rather than my own by engaging in it? EndDays can twist perspective, making play seem like work, and even potential salvation seem like impending damnation. Mistaking a DayOfRest for a day of even holy obligation can ruin an experience. ...Time feels short then, so idleness can surely seem like the wasted effort it isn’t necessarily. I might feel even more moved to continue contributing, to not let any precious time slip away to idleness, when every second feels damned precious. But I do not want to labor to complete exhaustion, however lofty my inspiring ideal. ... Just like not all effort can be properly categorized as work, not all work requires great effort. Some work, LightWork, for instance, seems relatively effortless in comparison, and one might swear that LightWork requires essentially no exertion at all. Angels never tire, not because they laze around all hours, but because their work entails what they must experience as play. They do not expend energy, but gain it from their efforts. They feel more rested after a shift than they felt when grabbing their lunch pails to head out the door that morning. The old Zen adage comes to mind: Until it’s fun, it’s better left undone. LightWork does not exhaust like we were told that real work should. ... It offers opportunities for the world to become more like the way it was always supposed to be. It might not offer any tangible compensation for effort, but it still pays in ways infinitely more satisfying than cashing any paycheck. I imagine that God, having created the basics in those first six days, spent the seventh in something other than mere idling. He must have had a jillion little fine tunings to attend to, small quirks that always appear in first use. Creating a universe in just six days must have left a backlog of chores competing for divine intervention. ... We engage in them as if they were a form of loving because they are. Such nurturing serves as the finest imaginable rest, not idling, but actually improving something. Many people presently feel as though they’ve been impressed into the role of preserving Western Civilization. That’s a heady assignment, and one not even distantly resembling idleness. Yet many suddenly feel as though they’ve found their true calling, or that their true calling has finally found them. The frustration that first fueled their engagement quickly turned into a passion capable of transforming even drudgery into sublimity. We are suddenly masters of situations we formerly never suspected required mastery to sustain. We are suddenly recognizably We, The People again, members in more than merely decent standing of the ideal for which this nation was founded. Our justifiable pride propels us into play, to imagine and implement ways to preserve this union against its enemies, who seem to be primarily of the domestic variety at the moment. We might be damned from the outset of this contest. We might have waited, idle, far too long to mount a successful defense, but our passions are finally at play. ... We make a fuss because we’re Us, The People, and no longer merely idle observers anymore. ...Because much effort still lies before me, I’d better learn to play. Because our opponents think it their responsibility to oppress us, it falls upon us to resist with every ounce of indifference we can muster. In this paper/rock/scissors contest, only play can trump, and anticipating heavy work and onerous responsibilities seems more likely to defeat than energize us, leaving flats of flowers unplanted beneath the sacred apricot tree. EndDays demand better of us, the ability to play our way through to deliverance. They demand that we embrace our elevating intentions, to refuse to see an endless slavery before us, but play, along with the opportunity to engage in ways that refresh this weary EndDays context while also ennobling us. I’m planting those flowers this morning. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

...

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 03/26/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-26T17:14:38-07:00

This was the most remarkable writing week I've experienced since I began writing this series of series 35 quarters ago. ... I sensed that EndDays belong to that class of sensations that cannot be wholly validated, or, indeed, really experienced until they're over, since there's no way to determine between actual and mere sensation until the EndDays end. Counterbalancing those sensations, I stumbled upon the remarkable Days of Creation hexaptych by Pre-Raphaelite painter and designer Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones — a single work composed of six panels. These six panels functioned both independently and as a unified whole, which was precisely how I employed them this writing week. Each panel stands alone as the image for its corresponding EndDays installment, while the complete sequence forms a single, coherent creation narrative underlying the entire series. ...I began by describing the EndDays context in EndDaysIntro, representing its illuminating light source, then pointed out one glaring difference between End and ordinary times: the meaning of Goodness, which represents my EndDays Sky. I then described the sense that everything's Collapsing, though Collapsing doesn't qualify as a state, like EndDays can't exist until after they've finished. ... I reported on our wounded underlying mythos, introducing the concept of Fictos to describe the fictional basis upon which EndDays inevitably exist. ... This writing week's final installment introduced TheBeast, which, according to our creation myth, was created on the same day as The People, though The People were given dominion over TheBeast, a situation that goes backwards during EndDays. I ended this writing week, warmly anticipating the world that We, The People, are actively creating to follow our seemingly endless EndDays. ...I believe we’re witnessing EndDays, whether or not our incumbent imminently crashes and burns, though I’m hoping he will. I begin my thirty-sixth series on the first day of a new quarter, as I have since June 21, 2017, when I mustered my foolhardiness and declared myself a writer by committing to produce one story every morning — clear, unambiguous evidence. I have not yet faltered, and I haven't altered my approach either, beginning each series without an ending in mind, seeking emergent properties rather than preplanned conclusions. ... Because not a day dawns without some wise commentator wondering how much longer our present incumbent can last, having committed something on the order of at least one impeachable offense each day since swearing to uphold an office he clearly never intended to uphold. His lawless un-presidency will prove to be one for the ages, though the transformation he'd hoped to make on this country will succeed in the opposite way he intended. ...Any odd, even evil thing our incumbent does in self-sabotage might be considered an ultimately Good thing. ...Each fresh infraction, each new low our self-saboteur incumbent manages to limbo beneath, each transparent misrepresentation delivered before a national audience, arrives as curiously reassuring — every insult bringing him closer to total collapse. ... Religion has been taking it in the shorts, too, as the vast right-wing evangelical conspiracy against representative democracy undermines itself, potentially permanently solidifying that sacred separation of church and state our founders insisted upon. ... Decent people cannot sit through such an insult without eventually acting up, and righteousness renders certain behaviors simply intolerable, which represents precisely what our incumbent cannot sense coming. EndDays Goodness creeps in on less than the tiniest cats’ feet, often seeming like it will take forever before manifesting fully, especially before the least of us absorbing the lion’s share of abuse. ...This EndDays Story reports on how nobody can credibly insist that anything’s Collapsing until after it finally collapses. ...Collapsing cannot be validated until after it completes, which makes distinguishing it from mere growing pains genuinely frustrating — yet fifteen months ago our economy was the envy of the world, and it now appears to be leading us toward a depression not experienced in nearly a century. Our incumbent embodies the very ills he visits upon us, his announcements contradicting themselves minute to minute, his diminishing capacity treated as innuendo rather than clear and present evidence while the train wreck maintains its traditional slow-motion momentum. ... Worse is what feeling surrounded by these notions does to me personally — I sense their deep-down wrongness yet have no convenient countervailing righteousness to inject into the wholly unnecessary argument. ... His physical limitations will likely ultimately decide matters, though his departure won’t magically restore our balance — pretenders will attempt to preserve the disunion before inevitably failing incoherently. ... I fret that we might be Collapsing, and these thoughts haunt and terrify me every day. ...Every despotism’s future was written before it began, back when its founding deception still seemed charmingly wrapped in swaddling clothes. ... Its founding self-deception fuels an ethic of ever-expanding duplicity, inevitably producing MassDeception — where feedback fails to properly inform even its originator, daily reports espouse nothing but endless successes, and the gap between what’s experienced and what’s reported grows exponentially until nothing stands between the despot and his unseemly end. ... The legacy of every Despotcy must ultimately be anonymity — later generations marveling at what they couldn’t possibly comprehend, thinking less of a few forebears who fell for it. ...This EndDays Story recounts how a founding mythos can be corrupted by an intruding fictos to undermine self-governance and herald in the beginning of EndDays. Good governance ranks among the most boring human activities, which encourages politicians toward studied myth-making and performative statecraft while actual deals get struck far from any floor. The presidency carries by far the greatest volume of mythos, its responsibilities genuinely bordering on the mythical — yet checks and balances on presidential power prove more mythical than actual, and no President has ever been removed for cause despite several clearly deserving it. When governance so fails its founding aspirational myths that it becomes a fictional presence, mythos becomes what I call fictos — a living betrayal of founding creeds — and that shift marks the beginning of EndDays. ... To so violate the governing mythos should be considered treasonous — those who undermine it attempt to murder the spirit inspiring the whole idea of self-governance. ... Our mythos alone enabled our impossible existence to sustain itself for two and a half centuries, and those introducing their cheap-looking, phony gold-plated styrofoam Oval Office decorations place themselves beneath contempt. ...This EndDays Story follows the creation myth to continue building the stage upon which the balance of this series will perform. TheBeast and The People were reportedly created on the same day, though The People were granted dominion over TheBeast, not the other way around. However unsettling the election results had seemed, TheBeast that emerged from that victory was much, much worse — a fool who fooled people, which only amplified their sense of betrayal. His inauguration came off as more like a funeral, that first day in office setting a fresh record for perfidy as a deep sense of dread echoed out from the quickly despoiled Oval Office. ... The resistance responded immediately, with millions taking to the streets, as innocent children, full and legal citizens, began being deported to countries their families had never visited, and TheBeast typically refused to obey the courts that ruled against him. On the Sixth Day, Genesis insists, God created the animals, TheBeast included, and also bestowed upon man and woman dominion over the beasts of the field — not the other way around. Greatness cannot be found in any yesterday but only eternally ahead, and nostalgia is the self-saboteur's creed, never The People's. TheBeast's greatest unintended accomplishment was inspiring The People to rise up and insist upon their birthright again, shaking off the complacent prosperity that had rendered democracy a passive pastime. ... We, The People, will have earned our Big D Democracy again, our lease having temporarily lapsed under the promises of TheBeast, ultimately only an uncommonly clever ass. ...I end this writing week summary with the hopefully now-familiar image of the cover of my upcoming book, Cluelessness, A Book of Mirrors. This work might be nearing its publication date, and though I don’t yet know the precise release date, I want to reinforce its impending appearance, lest you, dear reader, miss your opportunity to avail yourself of a copy (or several). ... Publishing requires that the author stand back and let the market have her way with his work, though an audience isn’t usually averse to some good-natured goading. ...If I’m not there, or if I’m there but nobody senses my presence, I’m secure from all but the most insidious forms of threat. ...I’m certain I will see right through myself and thereby undermine my purpose in creating the work in the first place. ...Everyone seems most interested in self-promotion, and I feel like an idiot stepchild for failing to get with this program.

TheBeast

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-26T04:53:46-07:00

Edward Burne-Jones: The Days of Creation: The Sixth Day ..."On the Seventh Day, The People rested." However unsettling the election results had seemed, TheBeast that emerged from that victory was much, much worse. It became clear even to those who had not before figured out the scam that they had been had, and not by any particular master. They had been fooled by a fool, which only amplified their sense of betrayal. The sacred promises he swore all along the campaign trail fell one by one into a gutter soon overflowing with treachery. His inauguration came off as more like a funeral, with fewer attending than at any such gathering in modern history. That first day in office set a fresh record for perfidy as each presidential proclamation seemed to amplify a sense that he was abandoning reason to pursue who knew what? A deep sense of dread and stunned recognition echoed out from the quickly despoiled Oval Office. ...No typical period of solidarity followed that swearing-in ceremony. TheBeast had not even held his hand on the ceremonial Bible. Perhaps he understood that he would have certainly burst into flame had he done so. His already teetering popularity plummeted immediately and never recovered. As he ineptly began making America Great? Again, his popularity fell ever further. There were protests in the streets, the size and vehemence of which were initially only almost unprecedented in size. Subsequent ones quickly outpaced those passionate initial ones. Millions were taking to the streets to express their distress and heartfelt opposition, especially as innocent children, full and legal citizens, began being deported to countries their families had never before visited. The courts, always slow to respond to real-time crises, ruled against these measures almost every time papers were filed. TheBeast typically refused to obey lawful court orders. The people became ever more incensed with his insolence. On the Sixth Day, Genesis insists, God created the animals, TheBeast, included. He was also said to have created man and woman that day, and bestowed upon them dominion over the beasts of the field, especially including TheBeast so recently inducted in a feeble-minded attempt to set the clocks back to achieve some imaginary greatness. The people know from where greatness actually comes. It cannot be found in any yesterday, but only before us. ... Those who would attempt to reverse progress to recover some lost sense of dominion deserve to discover neither dominion nor greatness awaiting their arrival there. Only betrayal hovers there, and The People instinctively understand which way time inexorably runs. Backwards couldn’t work because it can’t exist, except as a putrid promise. Nostalgia is the sense that if I didn’t exist, then things might be better. It’s the self-saboteur’s creed, never The People’s. ...Someone asked a local congressional candidate what good TheBeast had done since he took office, and after recovering his composure, he responded that he had inspired The People to rise up and insist upon their birthright again. Our democracy had become as passive a pastime as watching a cut-rate television serial featuring an irate boss surrounded by hapless apprentices. Nobody progresses if the only meaningful direction they ever receive amounts to a vehement, “You’re fired!” That’s not direction but abrogation, an insistence not upon progress but abasement. We were always better than that. Activism was never a matter of trashing our Capitol, but more a matter of defending what actually matters, and TheBeast’s insistent nattering never once qualified as anything that really mattered, not even to him, self-saboteur that he always was. It was a crime that real people died during the painful transition from hibernation to engaged response, but the resulting response has inspired a sense that some had sworn had been worn out of us by a complacent prosperity. We suddenly and decisively cannot perceive complacency from here, with TheBeast resorting to withholding statistics to maintain some sort of grace as his imagined world crumbles and burns around him. His popularity numbers embarrass the pollsters, who wonder after their methodologies as the president becomes almost but not quite as popular as herpes. The People now know, and The People will never forget. TheBeast will suffocate on his own vomit, and his sycophants will quickly dissipate. Those few who will continue to lobby against decency will rightfully regain their proper status in society and resume accumulating grudges for little more than fun and profit. The People will regain their authority again, and not only because justice demands it. We, The People, will have earned our Big D Democracy again, our lease having temporarily lapsed under the promises of TheBeast, ultimately only an uncommonly clever ass. On the Seventh Day, The People rested. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Fictos

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-25T07:13:37-07:00

Edward Burne-Jones: The Days of Creation: The Fifth Day (1870-1876) "…if, indeed, our politics even survives this latest unbridled EndDays assault." Few human activities can seem more boring than the practice of good governance. It definitely does not ordinarily qualify as anything resembling any actual spectator sport, except sometimes it engages in activities of such monumental importance that it manages to attract quite the audience. This quality of only occasionally qualifying for full attention encourages politicians to engage in some studied myth-making. They speak of such things as Masters of the Senate, a label that at best describes some especially skillful bureaucrat. They occasionally engage in brinksmanship, seeming to leave society teetering on some cliff-edge, but much of that amounts to performative statecraft. The actual deals get struck far away from the House and Senate floors, though the office of the President carries by far the greatest volume of mythos, if only because the presidency’s responsibilities definitely border on the mythical. Chief administrator of every department of government, Commander-in-Chief of the military, perennial plenipotentiary of seemingly damned near everything in our political universe, our president more than borders on the edge of a mythical being. Checks and balances on presidential power seem more mythical than actual, too. We hold that one role to the highest standards of any elected official. The expectations of the office alone should guarantee that nobody could ever actually satisfyingly fulfill them. Surprisingly, few have ever been impeached, and none have ever been removed for cause. Not that a few didn’t deserve to be removed for cause, but that the electorate, as well as that typically excruciatingly boring legislative contingent, have never managed to gain adequate focus or traction to eject from office even those that clearly deserved it. This has resulted in periods where our government has so failed to live up to its founding aspirational myths that it essentially became a fictional presence for a time. Mythos became what I’ll call fictos, a living betrayal of its founding creeds. The point at which the founding mythos shifts to degrading fictos marks the beginning of EndDays. The stop clock starts there. It’s not that our governance starts existing on borrowed time then, but on stolen time, burgled and quintessentially irreplacable. Our future starts consuming our accumulated goodwill, and that will degrade a justifiably proud old state very quickly into a degraded and, eventually, an inescapably jaded one. Cynicism becomes the currency of governance then. Where word was once bond, it becomes the primary misdirection intended to distract from whatever’s going wrong. Much goes wrong, though reports of distress somehow miss their press conferences, unless those pressers are called by the frustrated but still loyal opposition. The contention seems continuous. Our present incumbent has transformed our solemn mythos into a series of seemingly degrading running jokes, as if the populace were merely rubes and he played the role of perennially believable confidence man. He more than deserves to be impeached. To so violate the governing mythos should be at least a capital offense, considered treasonous, for no decent governance can properly represent any electorate without upholding its originating mythos. Nothing trumps this importance, and though it might seem subtle and indistinct, its absence seems as tangible as tyranny and infinitely more abominable than simple dereliction. It might be the only crime higher than those high crimes and misdemeanors that qualify an officeholder for impeachment, and it must be the highest responsibility of all those held responsible for maintaining a government to enforce this edict in every instance, without exception. Those who undermine a mythos attempt to murder the spirit that inspires the whole idea of self-governance. There were those then who insisted that no populace could ever prove qualified to govern their own affairs, that they were essentially children when it came to such things. Our mythos was the only element that proved that perspective wrong, and it, alone, has enabled our impossible existence to sustain itself for two and a half centuries. It was f.u.c.k.i.n.g self-evident, for cripes sake! Those who would do anything to undermine this most essential fiction of a nation must remain the most reviled enemies of the state. They create their EndDays by introducing their cheap-looking, phony gold-plated styrofoam Oval Office decorations. They place themselves beneath contempt, though our legislators and judges seem hesitant to act. Fictos renders otherwise decent public figures corrupted and inept. Their chief responsibility goes unfulfilled while their sorry incumbent gnaws away at the foundation of pretty much everything any of them ever stood for. Their inability to act in defence of our governing mythos should rightly haunt them for the balance of their political lives, if, indeed, our politics even survives this latest unbridled EndDays assault. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

MassDeception

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-24T06:23:38-07:00

Edward Burne-Jones: The Days of Creation: The Fourth Day ..."His results can't and don't validate anything." The future of each despotism was written before it began, back when its founding deception barely qualified as a foundling. When the lie, wrapped in swaddling clothes, still seemed charming in comparison with many competing distractions. There will always be evil in this world, but some evils have always been worse than others. Those who merely color or circumscribe seem somewhat better than those who exemplify somebody’s essence. When their very presence depends upon some founding deception, the resulting story was already headed in an inexorable direction at inception, for there can be no redemption if the basis upon which one exists is, at root, a deception. Peel away the misrepresentations to produce perhaps much worse than a founding lie: an abiding, all-consuming hollowness inside. Despotism harbors nothingness in its core. It possesses no backup plan. It dare not seek redemption. It’s worse than anyone could have imagined, layered upon itself. It was self-deception first, and it remains that as foremost, whatever else might get layered over to build the resulting legend. This result seems the equivalent of soullessness, incapable of receiving blessings. It thrives on curses instead, forceful, seemingly powerful, yet hollow. It rails in obvious frustration. If it were as powerful as it proclaims, it seems as if it could have vanquished everything that so frustrated its founding. The original sin would have ended with that first disapproving scowl. Later, that scowl becomes the chief recognizable profile representing the entire regime. Even a despotism, even a budding one, amounts to an entire system, and a complex one. It survives, like all systems, on the quality of the feedback it receives and uses, especially on the quality of the feedback it feeds itself. Its founding self-deception fuels an ethic of ever-expanding deception, inevitably resulting in a state of MassDeception, where feedback fails to properly inform even its originator. The despot’s motive might usually be to try to get away with something, but the gods of feedback work diligently against even that working effectively. Instead of potentially constructive criticism, deception insists upon exchanging only positive feedback, a form useless for the purposes of regulation. The daily reports, then, espouse nothing but endless successes. Results, though, grow increasingly alarming. The gap between what’s experienced and what’s reported grows; eventually, it grows exponentially. Then, nothing stands between then and the despot’s unseemly end. Despots die near the end of a path paved with unfulfillable promises, in a fog of MassDeception. The despot’s press conferences first become a form of entertainment. They lack serious content, though the despot might well seem like the very last one to notice. Lackies and hangers-on will, of course, attempt to amplify the message, though their performances accomplish nothing in terms of propping up the despot’s image. They rather amplify the underlying, unspeakable message. The emperor not only stands naked, but he stands before us soulless as well. We will wonder whatever got into anyone who supported his, by then, hopelessly inept seeming incumbency, and everything he even imagines turns to shit before his commandments. Ultimately, he will be the only one for whom his deceptions work, his founding self-deception devolving into the sole remaining duplicity. The rest have become little more than drama, signifying considerably less than nothing. The legacy of every despotcy must be anonymity. Whatever was believed to be compelling reasons the despot was necessary must be forgotten to history. Later generations will marvel at all they couldn’t possibly comprehend, and doubtlessly think less of a few of their forebears. You just had to be there for the MassDeception to work. In the despot’s eventual absence, it reads more like a practical joke or a mass misunderstanding. Despots weave worlds that make neither believable history nor inspiring fiction. This characteristic might be the only one validating that the despot must have really existed in this world. His results can’t and don’t validate anything. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Collapsing

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-23T06:22:36-07:00

Edward Burne-Jones: The Days of Creation: The Third Day (1870-1876) "…these thoughts haunt and terrify me every day." Collapsing cannot be properly characterized as a state, for it cannot be validated until after it completes, and much naturally prevents that end from ever appearing. Certainly, the peril might always exist, but distinguishing between growing pains, for instance, and Collapsing patterns should properly prove frustrating. Societies thrive on experiments. They can also die due to them. There can be no sure or certain recipe for avoiding Collapsing, and even the Ancient Greeks understood the principle that one tends to produce whatever they vehemently attempt to avoid. Fifteen months ago, the United States’ economy was widely acknowledged as the envy of the world. It now seems to be leading the world into an economic depression the likes of which we haven’t experienced in almost a century. Leading indicators seem grim, though still not yet completely certain. Our incumbent seems to embody the very ills he visits upon our society. Commentators disagree on how to properly diagnose his difficulties, but based upon family physical inheritances and obvious symptoms, his mental and physical health appears to be Collapsing. He still stands before The Press, though his announcements make ever less sense, contradicting themselves even in the same speech, even minute to minute. It seems impossible to conclude that he’s not Collapsing up there on the biggest stage, yet the train wreck insists on maintaining its traditional slow-motion momentum. His otherwise obviously steadily diminishing capacity has still been largely treated as innuendo rather than clear and present evidence. If he has been actively Collapsing, we somehow, for some unknowable reason, seem satisfied to just let it happen. We are a nation occupied by hostile domestic forces Hell-bent on destroying whatever’s decent. They seem determined to undo what’s worked in favor of a collection of extremely odd minority opinions that have never once been held to be true in practice. They seem to balance their books with belief and a curious kind of faith. They sublimate our society’s inevitable imperfections into evidence of certain damnation and seek to punish in advance any who might promote building on what’s worked in the past. They even vilify aspirations of equality, equity, and inclusion, cursing enlightenment as “woke,” without even defining their derision. We have no idea what they’re so upset about other than that they seem to ache to get even for something they’ve not bothered to define. They say they’re only trying to Make America Great Again, but they seek a greatness nobody’s ever once experienced, and few agree with what they believe greatness entails. Worse seems to be what feeling surrounded by these notions does to me. I cannot for the life of me, for the life of my precious society, seem to be able to soundly rebut these abusive sentiments. I sense their deep-down wrongness, yet have no convenient countervailing righteousness to inject into the wholly unnecessary argument. My outrage feels powerless! The inability to agree on the simplest concepts complicates every attempt to right our floundering ship of state. Our incumbent enjoys manufacturing upsets: he’s a masterful Uproar Inventor. He seems to have no interest in calming any waters. He much prefers to roil them instead. He can turn any odd issue into another ultimatum, and minor disagreements into Federal cases, complete with masked enforcers and remarkably inept prosecutors. He specifically specializes in gumming up works. The underlying momentum preexisting his conditioning served to steady the freshly continuously insulted state, but how long can such accumulated momentum compensate for his clearly compromised mental state? It seems likely that his physical limitations will ultimately decide. Once he dies, the negative momentum he injected during his final throes of existence will continue to influence. We will not magically find our balance once he departs. Several would-be pretenders to the imagined throne will attempt to preserve the disunion for their own profit and amusement. They will certainly fail, too, and their efforts will inevitably prove to be incoherent. At some point, the experiment, however noble and flawed, might ultimately collapse. Then, and only then, will we be able to confidently say that we had been Collapsing for the period leading up to where virtually everything fell apart. That point remains unthinkable, but terrifyingly not quite beyond the realm of my imagination now. I fret that we might be Collapsing and these thoughts haunt and terrify me every day. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Goodness

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-22T05:27:08-07:00

Edward Burne-Jones: The Days of Creation: The Second Day ..."…a Goodness we will certainly have earned when it finally arrives." The definition of Goodness changes during EndDays. What was bad before becomes a deeper sign of impending collapse, and so it becomes a harbinger of sorely needed change. In most ways, things have gotten worse each day as our self-saboteur incumbent reliably raises his already unwinnable stakes. It’s as if he’s trying to prove he can do even worse if he simply applies himself, and, increasingly, astonishingly, he repeatedly succeeds at appearing increasingly simple. However low he already showed he could go, he goes even lower. However indictable he had already seemed, he becomes convictable. However survivable his previous perilous state might have appeared, he seems just that much more like a gonner this time. While each infraction fully qualifies as truly terrible, not mere misdemeanors, the accumulating undermining effect arrives as curiously reassuring. Each insult brings him closer to total collapse. This might be the only beauty in self-sabotage. I find many once-sturdy isms undermined like this. Patriotism, once a haven for jingoism, no longer seems to mean unquestioning support. I consider refusing to tune into his State of the Union address a patriotic act because it means I stand against the incumbent’s lies. ... Those who tuned in were subjected to the most transparent misrepresentations ever publicly presented. They experienced another new low. Those who refused to tune in were not surprised when the newspapers reported on the performance, and we felt vindicated that our judgment was sound; there was no need for us to suspend our disbelief. I even thought it a generally good outcome that he continued his descent, leaving even partisans wondering if his dementia was acting up again in public. This, too, qualifies as a public good whenever our incumbent comes across as an ever-more-perfect idiot in public. Anything to undermine the public delusion in his competence. Religion has also been taking it in the shorts under this incumbent’s abuses. As his sexual history bleeds into public awareness, those evangelicals who swore he was the anointed second-coming increasingly appear to have been out of whatever might have been left of their minds. They bet whatever credibility they might have held within their communities on the apparent chance that their choice might offer them immunity when their eventual indictment finally comes in. Their more rapacious religious practices, those that more than bordered on sexist and racist, have come into even greater public scrutiny as the underlying perversity of their plans has been introduced into enforceable law: courtesy of Old-Testament Catholicism and Sharia Christianity. What once insisted it represented absolute morality now seems much more closely associated with odd forms of perversity. The undermining of the vast right-wing evangelical conspiracy against representative democracy can’t help but eventually turn into a very good thing for our country, permanently solidifying that sacred separation of church and state our founders insisted upon and evangelicals have been infringing upon since. The injustice visited upon the least of us by this non-administration might ultimately result in ushering in the greatest Goodness we will enjoy from enduring through this often hopeless-seeming period. Each oppressive act seems to awaken something dormant in the American spirit, indeed, in the spirits of decent people worldwide. As our country, so recently “’tis of thee,” and a “sweet land of liberty,” becomes the primary source of injustice in the world—The Great Satan—more than public opinion shifts. Decent people cannot sit through such an insult. We must act, even act up, and we will, of course, prevail. It’s not that right makes anyone necessarily mightier; it’s that righteousness renders some behaviors intolerable. Self-evidence empowers a Goodness that only ever manifests when it really matters. Despots have never possessed any defense against this force. Decency relatively easily vanquishes such evils, and this response represents what our incumbent cannot sense coming. EndDays Goodness comes in surprising guises. It often seems to creep in on less than the tiniest cats’ feet and often seems like it will take forever to fully manifest before us, especially before the least of us, who must absorb the lion’s share of the incumbent’s unwarranted abuse. Each insult serves to further undermine his dominion. Each cruelty comes at some ultimately collected cost. We’re rarely tested in this way, but I have faith—even if I’ve abandoned all faith in formally-organized religion—that the human spirit remains more or less intact and more powerful. This has not been anything like a vacation from what might have become complacency. Despotism was never anybody’s destiny. We might be remembering what we should have never forgotten in ways that we’re unlikely to ever forget to remember again. In this way, if few others, EndDays introduce a Goodness we will certainly have earned when it finally arrives. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

EndDaysIntro

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-21T04:29:44-07:00

"I intend this series to serve as a ring-side seat for witnessing the upcoming EndDays." Another new beginning, if that image isn’t too redundant to hold its intended meaning, or even if it might be. ... Not even they can survive on nothing but endings. I begin this series, my thirty-sixth by my count, since I began writing series on June 21, 2017. I sought a new beginning then, after months of professional discouragement. My courage at a historical low, I mustered my foolhardiness and committed to a practice I’ve continued since. I declared myself a writer that morning, though I insisted that I produce clear, unambiguous evidence. I proposed that acceptable evidence might appear in the form of writing, a story every morning, because writers write. If I were insistent upon being so outrageous as to declare myself a writer, I would henceforth hold myself to actually writing rather than merely thinking or talking about it. I would just need to do what I intended. And so I have continued through thirty-five series of ninety-some installments each. I began each precisely like this one on the first day of a calendar quarter, and each ended on the eve of the following solstice or equinox. ... I have begun without an ending in mind, for I intended each series to be an exploration rather than just an explication of stuff I already understood. I never knew beforehand what I was pursuing with my writing, if, indeed, I was ever pursuing anything at all. I was certainly not seeking enlightenment or trying to teach anyone how to improve, or to correct some error. Neither was I evangelical, having no desire to convert anybody to my way of thinking. I also rejected the notion of deliberately plotting, since real life, or at least the real life I’ve led, never relied upon an author’s clever plotlines to create coherence. I wanted my writing to produce emergent properties: experiences, explanations, and insights happened upon in passing, the way life has always delivered mine. ...Not a day dawns now but what some wise commentator doesn’t wonder how much longer the sorry term of our present incumbent can last. He’s seemingly been on his final swollen legs since the day he swore to uphold the office he clearly never had any intention of upholding. He’s committed something on the order of at least one impeachable offense each day since, leaving a Bill of Particulars which will very likely prove to be his sole legacy. His lawless un-presidency will truly prove to be one for the ages. The transformation he’d apparently hoped to make on this country will succeed in the opposite way he intended, permanently sealing our insistence that we will henceforth live up to the promises upon which we were founded. We will become the liberal democracy we should have strived for and embodied all along, an ever more perfect union. We won’t ever forget what we came so close to losing, either. If that sounds like an impending new beginning, whether or not that term sounds too redundant, it also hints at a great collapsing. The conservative ideal that metastasized into its Nazi eigenvalue has utterly disgraced itself. ... It plays on borrowed time, its line of credit precariously overdrawn. As gasoline prices race toward a new baseline of five dollars and natural gas becomes functionally unaffordable, renewables will resurge, but not immediately. We are looking at many decades of struggle to recover from a few short months of this clown’s non-administration, and I believe those decades will make us tougher and more compassionate. We should properly end them feeling as if we actually belong together, having survived the worst disasters in recorded history by then. I will not be accompanying my great-grandchildren across that finish line. ...I enter this period hopefully, understanding that EndDays bring the promise of cessation of many long-standing insults visited upon humanity by what the Iranians refer to as The Great Satan. In my youth, I believed not in ‘my country right or wrong,’ but that my country was always on the side of right. My rites of passage into adulthood involved coming to grips with the painful contradiction that my country was more than capable of doing wrong in this world, even continuing egregious wrongs. I aligned myself with the forces I believed to be right and have never wavered, even though some friends and acquaintances inexplicably swerved into the dark lane. I have often felt afraid, like an alien in my own country, but I have never seriously wavered. ...He never engages without undermining his intentions in the ensuing process. It’s a gift, and one his supporters apparently underestimated. They’re the ones with enormous gas-guzzling pickups that cost two hundred bucks to fill up. My Subaru gets by for only seventy, which still seems like way too much to me. ... Through his second so far, we’ve seen little evidence of there being brakes on his clown car. The courts have largely found against him, though, as always, they have ridden terribly slow horses. ... I sense that his house of cards is finally near collapse. He’s beset on more fronts than the entire catalogue of Shakespeare’s most tragic characters, except it will be one Hell of a celebration when his administration finally collapses. ... He must be impeached if we are ever to be known as anything other than The Great Satan again. I intend this series to serve as a ringside seat for witnessing the upcoming EndDays. ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 03/19/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-19T16:53:44-07:00

The final writing week of my Unscrolling Series snuck up on me, even though I could have sworn I was paying close attention. I’d hoped to bring it in for a near-perfect three-point landing, but then I can never know until after I land whether or not that will prove possible. ... I declared the Nature of Social Media and ended wiser than I’d started this series, thirteen long weeks ago, just before Christmas. ...Social Media has become the most efficient disinformation delivery system ever devised, and attempts at regulation — from Meta’s First Amendment shields to the EU’s largely ineffectual rules — have done little more than natter around the edges. I keep wading in anyway, like RFK Jr. swimming in Rock Creek with his grandchildren, knowing the water’s contaminated but lacking any viable alternative. ... So I splash around in the creek, hoping for the best, expecting some of the worst, and reminding myself that anything that seems too good to be true almost certainly is. The Fords, Rock Creek Zoo Park, Washington, D. C. - Detroit Publishing Company postcards 10000 Series (1898 - 1931) — The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. “The Fords, Rock Creek Zoo Park, Washington, D. C” New York Public Library Digital Collections. ...“The meanings could not be clearer if they were written on the mirror he’s pretending to peer through.” This Unscrolling Story offers some hope for those bedevilled by conspiracy theories in their Social Media feeds. ...Conspiracy theories have metastasized into ConspiratorialCertainties, so reliably wrong that they’ve become their own refutation. ... We’ve developed extremely sensitive sensors by now, capable of smelling what’s stuck to the bottom of their boots even when they can’t. ... A few years of disappointing practice left us scrolling smarter, less likely to swallow rubber worms with hooks inside. Our incumbent, still blaming Biden and trotting out his familiar hobgoblins, now serves less as a threat than as the best available vaccine against renewed contagion. The meanings couldn’t be clearer if they were written on the mirror he’s pretending to peer through. ...This Unscrolling Story tells a story of unrelenting change that seems to make little difference. ...I remain amazed that Dick Tracy's two-way wrist radio has become my everyday lived reality, though its arrival delivered considerably less transformation than I'd imagined. Chester Gould and Buck Rogers projected futures that proved too modest technologically while remaining surprisingly accurate about human nature — we're still contentious, the villains still tenacious, the world still largely indifferent. Tracy never managed to retire however many evil-doers he retired, and instant communication promised more than it ultimately delivered, precisely like Social Media has done. My disappointment with what Social Media became traces directly back to my own transformative fantasies — I chose delusion over probable reality and pinned my hopes on something no future has ever managed to deliver. Not every technology transforms, and even those that do often achieve it invisibly over decades, leaving us curiously more disappointed upon arrival than before. ...This Unscrolling Story tells about how we tend to hope in fewer dimensions than our futures unfold, thereby disappointing ourselves. Social Media represents just another instance of us getting precisely what we insisted upon but nothing like what we’d expected — which turns out to be less an exception than an immutable rule of human aspiration. We specify expectations on one or two dimensions while leaving the bulk to default to what usually happens, then reliably surprise ourselves with the results. The internet promised more than the Enlightenment — universal connectivity, tyranny’s end, direct democracy without contention — and we collectively crushed that potential in sloppy, all-too-human execution, recreating our same-old Earth while reaching for Heaven. Yet cynicism remains the wrong response, for aspiring lives in imagined futures and serves as the only available antidote to a disappointing present. We will address what Social Media has injected into our freshly threatened civilization, ratcheting ourselves forward on disappointment as we always have, flailing in the general direction of salvation, never directly. ...This Unscrolling Story finds me contemplating the underlying Nature of Social Media and what that DNA might say about its future. Social Media seems destined to become ever more of whatever it already was, its DNA programmed toward increasing distraction and intrusion. Autoscrolling, ambient audio, AI-prompted conversations, heads-up displays, preprogrammed dreams, collective dreaming through clever networking — the separation between self and app will continue dissolving until thinking itself becomes genuinely optional and most simply link into the HiveMind® to better coordinate. Those present days of seemingly overwhelming Social Media will seem crude in comparison to what's coming. I'm not wishing this future upon anyone, only projecting based upon what typically happens as any convenience matures into essential unusability — subscription fees replacing free features, preferential algorithms available for modest monthly charges, advertisers finally admitting what everyone already knew, that nobody ever remembered a single Social Media ad. ... Think of what's coming as electronic hip-hop — not actually music, but utilizing identical rhythm and melody for every track, a singularity of sorts, utterly unusable. Henry Fuseli, artist; Moses Haughton, engraver: The temple of nature: Frontispiece from the Collection: The temple of nature; or, The origin of society: a poem, with philosophical notes (1803) —- Carl H. ...This final installment of my Unscrolling Series finds me still scrolling while acknowledging that the jury’s still out on whether scrolling’s necessary now or merely an unnecessary evil. By pure Kismet, a landmark Social Media trial unfolded in Los Angeles while I created this Unscrolling Series — the jury still deliberating as I wrote this final installment. ... I've rendered myself a more circumspect scroller, incapable of the mindless scrolling I practiced before, though I still can't quite draw anything resembling a definitive resolution. ... With Spring approaching, my attention extends naturally back to gardening — decades of dedicated practice having left most beds perfectly friable, the cheatgrass mostly at bay except along the back fence bordering that neighbor's yard. ... Synchronicity frolics there too, and more than a few stories in this series started with some half-baked inspiration stumbled upon while scrolling. ...I feel so distant from my Cluelessness manuscript that I’m probably less ready for its publication than I’ve been since I began readying it for publication. The many proof readings, the professional copyediting followed by yet another careful proofing, the galley proofs, and the hundred and fifteen little inconsequential decisions have all conspired to leave me … Clueless about the end product. I believe, as of this writing, that I’ve finally managed to submit my next-to-final copyedits in a begrudgingly acceptable manner, by which I mean the only manner in which I proved to be capable of submitting them, though I continue to wait for final confirmation. I have not yet permitted publication, though I suspect the lengthy final review dance nears conclusion, seven weeks after starting. ...I became Clueless, though I suspect I might have been deep down clueless all along. ... Then, one day, that subtle ability abandoned me. leaving me with forms I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to complete. Not yet a complete idiot, but apparently well on my way, I retreated from public life to become the most clueless professional of all: a writer. I became my own supervisor, one that would never, as a matter of simple principle, expect his subordinate to fill out even the simplest forms. ... Not a frequently published one, since publishing requires many abstract forms to be completed and picky decisions to be made, but a consistent and satisfied one. ... Hundreds see my products every week, but few suspect what it takes to share this stuff, especially if the creator’s clueless like me. ...I employed Claude.ai, a commercial AI-powered text editor, to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.”

JuryStillOut

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-19T06:34:59-07:00

Juan Gris: Still Life (1922) "Scrolling holds deeper purposes than escape and addiction." Before the judge in the landmark Social Media case unfolding in Los Angeles, while I created this Unscrolling Series, released the jury to begin their deliberations, he instructed them that they would not be deciding using Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a foundational law that generally shields online platforms, websites, and users from liability for content posted by third parties. This law did not apply to these deliberations because the case was not about product liability per se, but platform engineering and design rather than content. Should Meta and YouTube have known their social media services posed a danger to children? Were their designs negligent in this way? These must have been challenging questions because after weeks of prosecution and a week of deliberation, the jury remains out. In closing arguments, the plaintiff’s attorney harangued the defendants for profiting from users’ attention, comparing their features to a Trojan horse. Lawyers for Meta and YouTube denied that their apps are purposefully harmful for young users. Meta’s defense argued that the plaintiff’s difficult home life left her turning to their platforms as a coping mechanism, a means of escaping from her mental health struggles rather than the cause of them. The context within which this case has played out will doubtless influence how an estimated 1,600 pending cases approach their claims. These involve hundreds of families and school districts also interested in receiving judgments for addictive effects. The result of this case might be a new understanding of product design liability rather than one just focusing solely on content. It was pure Kismet that this case paralleled my creation of this series, and that the Jury would still be deliberating as I was creating the final installment in this Unscrolling Series. Obviously, the direct result of creating this series will not be me ceasing all scrolling, for as I discovered over the course of writing this series, scrolling has become an integral element of modern life. I could stop scrolling and gain nothing. Unscrolling’s promise only pretends to predict a positive outcome. I have adopted greyscale scrolling, which renders the resulting displays less visually attractive. This has made the habit only slightly less addictive, though the experts agree that a scrolling habit doesn’t quite satisfy the formal definition of addiction since ceasing doesn’t necessarily cause any harm or damaging distress. Scrolling might well be habit-forming, not addictive, and still be the Devil himself to quit. I think of myself as a more circumspect scroller as a direct result of creating this series. I hope the same for my readers. My naivety with which I began this inquiry, eighty-nine installments ago, has not survived the effort. I seem to have rendered myself incapable of so mindlessly scrolling now that I’ve more deeply considered the practice. With Spring approaching, my attention naturally extends to gardening again. I’m no longer cowering against Winter’s discouraging winds, but out in our yard digging in my dirt again. Decades of dedicated practice have left most beds perfectly friable, with the cheat grass mostly at bay, except, of course, along the long back fence, which borders on a neighbor’s yard, which has always been the source of all the cheatgrass incursions. I have a viable alternative to scrolling ever more inward, so I have reason to stem my unseemly scrolling habit or addiction, whatever it is. It has been a comfort through the cold. The deliberating jury has sent several questions to the judge related to the plaintiff’s family troubles and how much she actually used Instagram as a child. Experienced court watchers doubtlessly drew some conclusions from these questions. The rest of us will have to wait and see. Me? I’m also considering all I stumbled upon through my quarter-long deliberations. I’ve turned over and over this most piercing question in my mind, yet still can’t quite draw anything resembling a definitive resolution. I still seemingly scroll too much, or I might scroll just the perfect amount for me. I discover plenty when I scroll. It’s not just another Devil’s playground, but synchronicity frolics there, too. More than a few of the stories in this series started with some half-baked inspiration I stumbled upon when scrolling. Social Media’s not merely mindlessness and streaming cat videos. It holds deeper purposes than escape and addiction. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Nature

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-18T06:50:03-07:00

from the Collection:The temple of nature; or, ...Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, The New York Public Library. "The temple of nature: Frontispiece" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed March 18, 2026. 'https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/8f556120-c604-012f-eb75-58d385a7bc34' "…a singularity of sorts, utterly unusable." It seems to be the Nature of things that they become ever more complex as they age. ... It most often introduces obfuscations unimaginable earlier, as if accompanying sophistication. Social Media seems destined to become even more of whatever it was before. Through upgrades and legislation, specifications will more than merely morph over time, but will very likely utterly transform these platforms into the unrecognizable, and for some, into utter unusability. We’ve seen these evolutions before, and they do not bode well. If Social Media presently seems mildly distracting, it seems destined to become ever more so into the future, for its DNA seems to be programmed that way. Unsatisfied with the results simple scrolling provides, expect some autoscrolling features to appear in upcoming years. It should become possible to run most Social Media in something resembling a background mode, where sessions will not have to be interrupted to transact most business. Bone connecting headphones will allow ambient sound to slip in around most audio tracks, so communication can continue regardless of what’s going on back there. Isolation will be possible while carrying on realistic-seeming conversations. Prompting apps will use artificial intelligence to feed a predictive script to a user to free up their attention for more critical activities, like scrolling through cat videos. Map apps will feature spot ads for businesses we’re passing by, in real time, encouraging their further use regardless of traffic or time. It will be possible to tune into virtually any proceeding while driving. ... Heads-up displays in cars will finally allow drivers to watch movies without materially affecting their ability to safely drive, thanks to AI. It will even prove possible to continue scrolling in your sleep, to essentially preprogram your dreams, employing most social media apps. Tandem or collective dreaming should even become possible through clever new networking strategies. If you’re presently overwhelmed with Social Media’s presence in your life, prepare for much worse into even the near future. Any sense of separation between self and app will continue disappearing. The need for thinking will evolve to become truly optional. Most will opt to link into the HiveMind® app to better coordinate and communicate. Those going it alone will be a negligible proportion of the overall population. The whole notion of family will be supplanted with a more fluid notion of tribe. Those who share your platform will become more important to you than those who share your DNA. We will quietly float away from each other on bandwidth presently unimaginable. These present days of seemingly overwhelming Social Media presence will seem to have been crude in comparison. Some will pine after attention span lost, but if the past proves to be prologue again, most won’t notice. They will be so focused on whatever’s coming next that they’ll very likely miss their own presence. I’m not wishing this future upon anyone, mind you. I’m only projecting based upon what’s typically happened before, as a convenience matures to ultimately become essentially unusable. I am currently avoiding upgrading my Pages app because I’ve heard that the new release changes much of its functionality into a subscription basis, so that I’ll have to pay extra to perform what I currently accomplish for free. How many apps have I had to delete because they discovered usage fees? ... I will not be surprised when Meta offers a preferential algorithm service for a fee, providing guaranteed rather than randomly provided access for “small” monthly charges. Eventually, all apps will probably require user payments, once advertisers finally figure out that everyone long ago mastered the ability to blank out all Social Media ads. No user ever remembers any of them, and never has. We do not yet inhabit our future, however futuristic our present feature set might seem. There’s definitely more to come, and some, if not most of it, will deeply dissatisfy most current users. This won’t matter because Social Media was designed for future users, never the present ones. We present users imprinted upon features that cannot age well, and impressionable new users remain capable of imprinting on ever more intrusive features the rest of us will likely remain blind to, or too overwhelmed to comprehend. Think of the future of Social Media as like electronic hip-hop. Not actually music, but something utilizing identical rhythm and melody for every track, a singularity of sorts, utterly unusable. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

FlurriesWithTheCertaintyOfSnow

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-17T06:59:13-07:00

Utagawa Hiroshige 歌川広重: Sparrows and Camellia in Snow (c. 1831-33) "The worms in our apples might keep us human…" Social Media represents just another instance of us getting what we insisted upon but not what we’d expected. The chief difficulty with Social Media might lie in just those expectations, but then that diagnosis does not render either Social Media or human expectations exceptions to any rule, but rather exemplars of one immutable rule. We tend to expect in slim dimensions, suspending the understanding that everything simultaneously manifests in multiple dimensions. We usually clearly specify expectations on one or two of those many facets, leaving the bulk of them to manifest without specs, to essentially default to what usually happens. Then, what usually happens does happen. We routinely surprise ourselves with the shocking differences between what we asked for and what we received. As near as I can determine, such outcomes have always been the case. It’s a testament to something tenacious, perhaps the human spirit, that we seem to continue believing that we might simply receive what we clearly ask for, rather than some mix of preferences and defaults. It’s also a testament to something that we continue to surprise ourselves with such results, for few instances have ever manifested much differently. Our heartfelt hopes for our future seem both necessary yet insufficient. We must, it seems, relearn how to cope with disappointment all over again to avoid simply choosing to become cynical when our future arrives as another surprise. Worst case might be that we’d opt not to scheme for better, even though we should also know to properly prepare for some form of disaster whenever we do. We tend to recover, after some fashion, often leaving our dignity in question, and suddenly not feeling nearly as omniscient again. And again and again. For this might represent the truer human condition, that we aspire with blinders on, and must, yet we must also continue to aspire if we expect desire not to shrivel within us. We certainly should strive for better, undissuaded rather than jaded by our prior experiences. Aspiring lives in imagined futures and serves as an antidote for a disappointing present. That it, too, might mature into fresh disappointments has no business in its business, which deals exclusively in hopefulness rather than wary watchfulness. Rarely in the course of human history has any greater opportunity appeared than the internet presented. It promised to rewrite history more than the Enlightenment, for it promised to bring connectivity, the universal necessity for humanity to ultimately thrive. It promised to bring down tyranny by facilitating the largest experiment in direct democracy ever imagined. It seemed conceivable that everyone could voice their opinion on any conceivable issue and thereby achieve consensus without contention. Few imagined a cacophony of contention emerging instead. We created the potential together, then crushed it together in sloppy, all-too-human execution. This outcome was missing from the excited anticipation. We imagined Heaven on Earth before recreating our same-old Earth again. We will address the multitude of problems Social Media has injected into our freshly threatened civilization. We might even ultimately be better for the detour, though we’ll likely find no way to accurately account for the benefits. We will ratchet ourselves along on our disappointment again, just like we always have before. We might well get closer next time, and closer still, through many subsequent times after. We advance by circular iteration, hoping before failing again, flailing our way in the general direction of salvation, never directly. The worms in our apples might keep us human as they fuel fresh disappointments with opportunities embedded within. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

DickTracy

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-16T05:10:18-07:00

Dorothea Lange: Tracy (vicinity), California. Missouri family of five (1937) "The human condition remains, perhaps improved but also little changed." I remain amazed that my future has actually arrived. Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio, later TV, has caught up to me. It no longer qualifies as a distant fantasy, but my everyday lived reality. How could this be? Way back in the Dirty Thirties, when Chester Gould started creating Dick Tracy comics, long before I was born, my day-to-day existence today wasn’t even focused fantasy yet. Between Tracy and Buck Rogers, futures were endlessly projected, though those anticipations would prove to be far too modest to accurately represent the eventual actual technological progress, though two-way wrist radios contributed little to actual human progress. I’d contend that we seem little different, even if our lives today might not seem nearly as short and brutish. We remain contentious, maybe more so. A careful reader of Dick Tracy would catch the character’s unshakeable faith in human goodness, though Tracy would often have to resort to violence to achieve a laudable end. His villains were tenacious, dedicated to the opposite of what he seemed to be committed to protecting. He was continually challenged and never managed to retire, however many evil-doers he retired. Instant communication promised more than it ultimately delivered, precisely like Social Media. Precisely like technology has always done, and probably always will do … or not do. Much of my personal disappointment with Social Media lies in what I’d imagined it might become. It didn’t become what I’d imagined, so I seem to have caused my own disappointment. Had I imagined the future Social Media has brought, I wouldn’t feel abandoned or lost with what we have, and I had access to enough historical information to reach a more realistic conclusion about my future then, I just didn’t reach that conclusion. I chose delusion instead, and pinned my hopes on something different than any future has ever managed to deliver. Part of imagining probably naturally involves dreaming away the difficulties of daily living. I certainly subscribe to transformative fantasies much more often than I engage in projecting probable realities. If the future isn’t going to utterly transform, my reasoning seems to go, why bother constructing a future at all? If that two-way wrist radio I imagine won’t do a whole lot more than enable simple two-way communication, what’s the attraction? The marginal improvement that more convenient distance communication might provide seems unlikely to change the content of any message or transform the life of any odd communicator. It’s a step change without transforming significance. Even the later addition of television communication added little to the lived experience of any detective. The world remains indifferent, as do the criminals. What fundamental difficulty of human existence had been technologically resolved? Not every technology transforms. Some don’t even hardly improve. Even those that utterly transform often achieve that end invisibly, over lengthy stretches of time, so that we hardly notice any difference other than, curiously, an increasing disappointment when it arrives. After decades anticipating technological salvation, I’ve grown somewhat jaded with what has passed for realization. Even if we could somehow magically eliminate all the many negative externalities presently associated with Social Media, I struggle to imagine how that might change the way we live or the way we will undoubtedly continue to relate with each other then. The difficulties we face were never merely difficult, but genuinely hard, likely impossible. The human condition remains, perhaps improved but also little changed; change bringing little difference. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

ConspiratorialCertainties

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-15T04:04:53-07:00

"The meanings could not be clearer if they were written on the mirror he's pretending to peer through." After an uncertain number of iterations, the speculative might become a certainty, as the previously unknowable slowly becomes routine. So have conspiracy theories gone in what seems in retrospect like a remarkably brief time. It seems like just yesterday, when that certainty still evaded us, when we genuinely felt blindsided by some fresh-ish revelation. We had no idea how low they could go, and we held out for the longest time, hoping that they and we might prove more trustworthy than we all became. It seemed like a game at first, to somehow concoct some fresh worst-case scenario before second-guessing our hard-won earlier conclusions. In the years before Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide became common fiction, we blythely disbelieved most of whatever the vast right-wing conspiracy served up because it beggared belief. Now we can be almost one hundred per cent certain that whatever they declare describes one hundred per cent the opposite of whatever might actually be there. ...Conspiracy theory has become clinical certainty, though the stories still seem to be delivered backwards. So much projection goes into their telling that they almost always amount to confession rather than accusation. The hackneyed “I know you are, but what am I?” has become more than merely a childish chide. It has become what renders a statement right. They might still be capable of swallowing their own bullshit whole, but we’ve moved on into weary acceptance. They cannot seem to prevent themselves from showing these cards. Their artifice might still work magic on their own perceptions, but it’s surely lost on the rest of us. What they perceive as ample justification doesn’t even qualify as fiction for the rest of us now. We’ve developed extremely sensitive sensors and can smell what’s stuck to the bottom of their boots, even when they can’t. Our Social Media feeds would be impossibly dense were it not for this ever-more sensitive sense capable of sniffing out these pseudo conspiracies. It’s been so long since one wasn’t transparently wrong that we hardly fuss over the most recent discoveries. They might still believe that they’ve successfully fooled everyone again, but they’ve increasingly only fooled themselves. As the depth of their own self-deception deepens, the overall mood within the formerly confusing communication medium lightens. We’re rarely victims of these stories anymore; they seem to bite their authors more than they gnaw on any intended victim. There was a time, not all that long ago, when we were still capable of being turned as a society, as an innocent polity, by what they insisted were well-founded conspiracy theories. They used the term theory unconsciously ironically, and maybe they still haven’t caught on. The rest of us have pretty much moved on. It’s now considered more patriotic to choose not to tune into the State of the Union Speech, since most well understand that it will not describe the state of any union ever known to man. It will spout caustic fiction, dressed up as if it might have actually happened. Most just look at the messenger and understand he’s a deeply untrustworthy presence. We can safely disregard whatever evidence he insists should convince us. We can confidently discern such differences, even if our providers and governments never manage to create effective barriers to prevent conspiracy theories from disseminating. Our senses seem to have rapidly evolved to become sensitive enough to filter out the worst of them. It no longer holds much in the way of sway over most of us. Once theory becomes clinical certainty, such conspiracies no longer influence anybody but the few remaining dedicated cultists. It’s remarkable how indifference can heal and how interest can wound. When Social Media was more of a novel presence, most seemed to hold little in the way of immunity to its worst effects. A few years of disappointing practice have left most of us more wary than we were. We grew some scrolling smarts and stopped swallowing so many rubber worms with hooks inside. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me for the ten thousandth time, shame on anybody not tumbling to the presence of a ConspiratorialCertainty. These conspiracies carry a stench, along with a look and a feel. Our incumbent, now a merely hapless presence, reminds us of the game with every proclamation. He serves as the best vaccine against repeated contagion. He’s still blaming Joe Biden for his problems and all the other overused hobgoblins we’ve grown accustomed to hearing him trot out to defend against his own shortcomings. The meanings could not be clearer if they were written on the mirror he’s pretending to peer through. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Plopaganda

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-14T04:39:41-07:00

The Fords, Rock Creek Zoo Park, Washington, D. C. Detroit Publishing Company postcards 10000 Series (1898 - 1931) The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. "The Fords, Rock Creek Zoo Park, Washington, D. C." New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed March 14, 2026. (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/c18e35e0-c62e-012f-caa8-58d385a7bc34) "Social Media's way more scary than it first appears." This world has never provided a better medium for spreading disinformation than our present Social Media system. Not that the system isn’t trying to improve itself, not to reduce the proliferation of deliberately misleading crap, but to improve its overall efficiency in disseminating it. So far, attempts to encourage self-regulation have resulted in responses ranging from Meta’s insistence that any attempt at regulating Social Media speech amounts to too much to the EU’s conclusion that their attempts at regulating have not produced the systematic behavioural change it was designed for. The difficulty seems to lie in Social Media’s design. The outrage and algorithmic engagement Social Media relies upon to profit produce the same dynamics that encourage propaganda to spread. Further, most Social Media firms are based in the United States, which has traditionally viewed Social Media speech as protected under its First Amendment. I liken immersing myself in my Social Media stream as similar to Health and Human Services Secretary R. F. Kennedy, Jr. swimming in Washington DC’s famously polluted Rock Creek, which is essentially an open sewer. He claims to do this with his grandchildren to promote health, and I suppose, if one doesn’t contract some serious infection, one might manage to build some immune protection from this practice, but it seems like a ridiculous activity for any HHS Secretary to admit to engaging in. Swimming in Social Media seems probably more likely to infect an innocent swimmer, though the infection will very likely be less obvious. No high fever or other outward sign will likely appear, and a single exposure might not produce any symptoms. Repeated exposure, though, seems almost certain to result in some serious infections. I engage in Social Media because I don’t seem to have any viable alternatives. Nothing else seems to carry the breadth of information, even though I know it’s liberally sprinkled with mis- and disinformation. I have to sort out the differences, even though I know I will prove incapable of discriminating in some instances. I can feel confident that bad actors are vying for my attention and that my native gullibility will continually work against me. I still enter the creek, splashing around, hoping for the best, knowing for certain that I’ll also encounter some of the worst. I tell myself that at least I’m vigilant. Many enter the same stream, even more trusting and gullible than I. They might come seeking some convenient lies to reinforce their beliefs, rather than a few facts capable of puncturing a few myths. Our Social Media system seems mythical in scope and reach, but only because it is. The future looks bleak for anyone hoping for someone to intervene to clean up the Social Media creek. The EU has rules and has levied a few fines, but the magnitude of this difficulty dwarfs any and every attempt to get some arms around it. It might be blythe and altogether too easy to insist that people should figure out how to get along without their Social Media feeds. People will always insist upon engaging in activities that are not conducive to health, wealth, or even continuing life. We revel in our little vices, even when one of them grows all out of proportion to all the other ones. I want to believe that there’s something Big Brother can do to protect us from the more malign actors, but I’m afraid I don’t believe there’s anything a Big Brother can do short of nattering around the edges of the problem, which does nothing. Does anyone seriously believe our current incumbent could have been elected President without the focused and malign efforts of countless propaganda mills flooding Social Media with lies? Malign actors will prove incapable of not continuing to leverage the most powerful medium ever created for spreading mis- and disinformation. They will profit from coming efficiencies that will transform the medium into an even more convenient form, whatever that might become. We will need to remain vigilant and still probably expect to get hoodwinked a few times more, and even more again, for this is a Wild West medium, complete with the virtual equivalent of gun slingers. Avoid whatever seems too good to be true. Try not to forward every satisfying meme that comes through. Do not disclose more personal data than you would to your brother-in-law. That supplement that mainstream science has reportedly been preventing distribution of doesn’t do what that commentator insists. It could ruin your liver. Let each user remain wary. Social Media’s way more scary than it first appears. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 03/12/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-12T17:20:14-07:00

This writing week, I entered the final glide path for this Unscrolling Series. My purpose no longer remains the mystery it was when I began, and yet I have not yet discovered the full meaning of this excursion. I have learned, or I believe I’ve learned, that my purpose here was never to learn how to stop scrolling, however much I might have aspired to achieve that end when I began. I realized last week or the week before, that Unscrolling would become gratefully unattainable, another one of those innocent aspirations the Gods rarely satisfy. ... At some indefinite point, success becomes what I would have earlier characterized as failure, and all continues to be righter than I ever suspected with this world. I began this writing week investigating one of the founding memes of this meme-laden era, Meta’s ultimately discredited MoveFast/BreakThings motto. I then confessed to some deeper dabbling with and broadening appreciation for the much-maligned AayEye. I characterized the episodic Social Media life as Episidiodic, one of my more clever created terms. I asserted, from exasperated personal experience, that modern life demands more SelfDiscipline than any previous era. I then characterized Social Media practice, as presently practiced, as a form of UnEnlightenment. I ended this writing week with a deeply personal reflection on the cost of Social Media amplifications in SmallSlanders. ...This Unscrolling Story recounts how we go about engineering futures and might explain how things come to be the way they are. When Facebook embraced “Move fast and break things,” they believed their speed and boldness would create a brilliant future. ... What started as a brash motto ultimately shaped their destiny—leaving them to confront the unintended consequences of breaking things they never intended to harm. ...To me, Social Media seems driven by artificiality, with Artificial Intelligence blurring the lines of what intelligence even means. As machines get smarter, we keep redefining intelligence, often realizing we know more about what intelligence isn’t than what it might be. ... Ultimately, both intelligence and artificiality seem endlessly shifting, leaving us in a confusing middle ground. ...This Unscrolling Story finds me investigating how episodic streaming seems. ...These days, my life feels less like a sweeping story and more like a series of unconnected episodes—much like a Social Media stream or a streaming series waiting for the next release. ... I find myself living in a world of unresolved episodes, which feels both unexpected and strangely fitting. ...This Unscrolling Story speaks of a SelfDiscipline modern life insists we each develop. ...In my lifetime, the options for entertainment and distraction have exploded—from a single fuzzy radio station along the Columbia River Gorge to instant satellite broadcasts and endless streaming. ... Still, I often fall prey to distractions and scrolling, struggling to hang onto the SelfDiscipline I’ve never quite mastered. I measure my worth by what I can live without, suspecting most modern conveniences are more peril than blessing. Ambition; a journal of inspiration to self-help, [Cover] (February, 1902) — International Correspondence Schools (Publisher) — General Research Division, The New York Public Library. ...This Unscrolling Story considers the disharmonic resonance, the UnEnlightenment, that our social media presence seems to create. Social Media, as I see it, doesn’t create harmony but amplifies incoherence and disharmony, spreading a kind of collective unrest. ... The dream of connecting everyone has revealed just how inhuman we can be together, each of us adding to the discord. ... Social Media feeds on these fissures, amplifying them until we’re all victims—winners and losers alike. ...I think the key now is to disrupt this poisonous resonance and rediscover our underlying goodness, something we’ve too often neglected in our Social Media lives. Calligraphy by Mishkin Qalam: The Name of “Baha’ullah” in the Form of a Rooster (1887-1888) — Creation Place: Middle East, Iran ...This Unscrolling Story speaks to the SmallSlanders our Social Media amplifies. ...I’ve seen this firsthand when The Muse, serving as a local commissioner, became the target of unfounded rumors and heated online attacks after a routine decision. Social Media now seems to encourage a guilty-until-proven-innocent mentality, making it nearly impossible to defend against even baseless claims. ... Social Media itself is just a medium, but those using it often underestimate its power to magnify discord. It’s become a place where we assert more than we question, creating more confusion and conflict than real conversation. ...He created this roll, known as “the scroll,” in a three-week burst of typing in April 1951, to avoid interrupting his creative flow to change pages, resulting in a single-spaced, paragraph-free draft. This result underwent further editing before publication, though the myth stuck that a skilled writer really should produce flawless prose from simple stream of consciousness typing, even though that most often amounts to a streaming form of unconsciousness ignorning important communication conventions like spelling, grammar, and even coherence. A printed published work must necessarily be published several times before final publication, each attempt nearly perfect yet not nearly perfect enough. The ultimately acceptable work might not seem as immediate as that long-ago first draft seemed, but it almost always has been materially improved for all the useless-seeming effort required before anyone’s willing to waste otherwise perfectly useful ink on it. Then, it’s for the ages, not for the moment of inception anymore, and whimper as every author might after the humbling final efforts, this world might even be better for the baffles introduced by that copyeditor and the other publishing professionals, who might not have ever had the talent Kerouac had. ...It must necessarily be of a broader timeframe, one with many more facets. ... In an alarmingly real sense, every reader will experience a different work than the author intended in the moment of first inception, a moment, like every other, certain to be lost almost the minute it visits. Attempting to retain that moment has been the downfall of many more than one publishing effort. After another week spent trying to satisfy the final criteria before publishing my Cluelessness manuscript, a new barrier surfaced this week: miscommunication. I’d fully specified my changes to the galley proofs three weeks ago via email, though I couldn’t figure out how to submit the changes on the required forms. I finally managed to submit those forms incorrectly, but still submitted them, and that sparked a response from the final edit editors, only to learn that they’d ignored one of my most important directives because it wasn’t “usual.” I responded that I thought, as the author, my judgment might reign on this one issue. ...I employed Grammarly, a commercial AI-powered text editor, to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.” ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

SmallSlanders

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-12T05:17:55-07:00

Early American newspapers were filled with slanders great and small, though their limited distribution rendered them relatively benign. Thomas Jefferson famously railed on about the destructive nature of the popular press, yet still concluded, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” The press never suggested it was anything more than the first draft of history, anyway, rather than anybody’s final word. That history continues unfolding today in all of its original contention and more. Social Media easily amplifies SmallSlanders into much broader coverage. Even a half-baked lie can today even more quickly circumnavigate the globe before truth puts on his shoes. Some days, it seems as though truth cannot find its shoes and so simply slumps back into snoozing. I worry about the SmallSlanders and find them continually unsettling. The Muse has finally managed to get sideways with some portion of her constituency. As a proudly elected commissioner of the local Port Commission, she enjoyed just over two years in that position without much in the way of controversy. We both acknowledged that some issue would eventually prove capable of cauterizing that universal support into factions. We watched it arriving in the form of a decision to sell some industrial property to a data center development company. Torches and pitchforks turned out for that fateful session, where the commission agreed to perfect the letter of intent by agreeing to terms. Only two testified in support of the motion; the rest seemingly deeply disturbed about some aspect of the imagined transaction. The commissioners didn’t yet have a specific list of particulars, let alone anything resembling final specifications, but the anticipation proved more than sufficient to fuel heated accusations. The local Social Media featured scandalous assertions, mostly falsehoods or prejudices rather than facts or questions. Portraits of the accusers more than of the accused Muse. I reflected later that our Social Media experience seems to have encouraged a kind of Napoleonic ethic in our public rhetoric. We suddenly seem to be guilty until somehow proven innocent, with any odd accusation capable of smearing even the better original intentions. There’s no defence in advance of such attacks because the accuser stands in as the sole judge, jury, and gleeful executioner. The initial assertion rarely questions a premise or even an intention. It rather insists that the worst possible interpretation serves as the basis for resolving even the more misguided question. Often, these lines of questioning double-bind everyone involved, leaving little latitude for one who never had to stop beating their dog because they never owned one. Accusers perceive attempts to clarify in such situations as clear evidence of further deception, cleverly unmasked, as if they were successfully avoiding a fast one. It might, in theory, prove possible to be found innocent by a jury of peers, but a jury comprised of dedicated detractors and conspiracy theorists deals exclusively in SmallSlanders, leaving any accused guilty as charged, guilty as original sin. The effortlessly invisible amplification Social Media enables seems to encourage vicious assaults. It’s literally no sweat to take a swipe that might even decide the controversy without eliciting even a sufficiently cowed response. There is no effective defense against such insidious assertions, however justified any accuser might feel. Often, the accused seems more powerful, and Social Media serves as the relatively powerless accuser’s force multiplier, providing genuine dog-piling power. If all was never fair in such contentions, all sure seems fair when facing some imagined faceless bureaucrat. The notion of asking clarifying questions or engaging in co-equal inquiry rarely seems justified in the light of an imagined sleight. Any attempt to explain or, heaven forbid, justify a position only further solidifies the opposition’s opinion. They seem to demand an immediate acceptance they refuse to accept themselves for their perspective, for they seem to feel that they’re not merely dealing in perspective, but something much more absolute, like truth, justice, or something akin to an all-American Way. They might be right. Social Media remains indifferent, incapable of caring one way or any other. It seems venial and innocent, mere medium. Those who employ it often seem to underestimate its subtly underlying authority, though. The casual poster rarely suspects when they inadvertently start an avalanche. It behooves every user to at least try to be circumspect and avoid attempting to wreak vengeance there where nobody can look their counterpoint in the eye to judge the quality of their testimony. Social Media serves as more echo chamber than recording studio, the resonance more accidental than purposeful. What might sound sweet to the singer’s ear often proves annoying to those waiting in line for their turn. We do not always converse via Social Media, but scream across impenetrable voids. We cannot reliably intuit intention or interpret anybody’s underlying purpose there. We should probably question more than we assert, but we don’t. We seem to almost exclusively use Social Media to assert, and therein lies its rub. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

UnEnlightenment

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-11T05:11:04-07:00

The Name of "Baha'ullah" in the Form of a Rooster (1887-1888) ..."…we haven't always insisted upon this in our Social Media presence." Could it be that Social Media, as presently practiced, creates a pervasive disharmonic resonance? Instead of vibrating at a renewing frequency, might it vibrate all over the place, amplifying not coherence, but incoherence incarnate? This seems to be the case. Worse, the incoherence seems to be spreading. It would have been unthinkable for our current incumbent to have ever been elected dog catcher, let alone President, even in our most recent pasts. We’ve elected scoundrels before, but never one so absolutely incoherent, one apparently incapable of even acknowledging the presence of even our most self-evident rights. He commits greater crimes than those his presumed perpetrators committed when arresting them, and calls that even. He violates the emolument clause with more than mere impunity. ... He personifies the context within which Social Media rages. Never before in the history of this world had such a powerful potential presented itself. The dream of finally connecting every human being to every other one has revealed just how inhuman we can become together. We might be inherently incapable of creating harmony together. We resonate at frequencies so varied that we disrupt the potential harmony any odd individual frequency certainly seems capable of amplifying alone. ... We dissent, acting out as if wronged. We invent convenient enemies and then wage aggression against them, even if it’s only “pretend.” There are and never were any such things as unrepresentative behaviors. We are whatever we do. We do whatever we are. We seem drawn to the poison. We contribute our share, which always amounts to much more than our share, of disharmony to the collective. We might innocently commit these sins, but we still commit them and so become guilty as charged. False dichotomy must surely be the result of this churning, opposites opposing apparent others, two sides emerging from some great invisible continuity. Our Social Media exploits these fissures, amplifying them discordantly, encouraging ever greater attempts at reformation that only prove to become even more degrading, amplifying what nobody says they want. We’re all equal victims of it, even the apparent winners, even the losers. Some insist that the disconnection will ultimately prove to be self-healing, that the fissures produced in early-adoption ignorance might ultimately spark some enlightenment. Perhaps this notion serves as just another poisonous resonance, innocence bent on self-destruction or worse. We are clearly at war with ourselves, even though we scarcely admit it. The age of enlightenment promised better, but better required certain behaviors. It forbade fleeing backward into ignorance, however attractively the old legends seemed to promise. Progress demanded abandoning childish things like omnipotent kings, omniscient gods, and an impotent polity. It required education to fuel an adequate appreciation of all we could never know and of all we might one day come to understand, to counterbalance the endless reassurances ignorance provided. ...Our Social Media selves seem altogether too proud of themselves. We show off to each other, praying for followers in lieu of any actual appreciation. We seek attention and anonymity in almost equal measure. We crave exposure, mistaking that for engagement. Our engagements promise nothing but endless promises. Our purpose seems to be ignominy, or might just as well be. We are definitely not a community, but something more like a wannabe community, as if we’ve forgotten or abandoned the resonance that naturally comes from harmonious interaction. The fractious and ruinous attractions we commonly practice: preaching, teaching, screeching, preening, all unsolicited, these become our resonance, and they have become poisonous. One primary purpose for Unscrolling might be to disrupt the disharmonic resonance. Resonance was never necessarily inherently good, however otherwise we might have assumed. I believe we still hold access to our underlying goodness. It sure seems curious that we haven’t always insisted upon this in our Social Media presence. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

SelfDiscipline

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-10T06:24:25-07:00

Ambition; a journal of inspiration to self help, [Cover] (February, 1902) International Correspondence Schools (Publisher) General Research Division, The New York Public Library. "Ambition; a journal of inspiration to self help, [Cover]" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed March 10, 2026. (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/39f65f90-c608-012f-027d-58d385a7bc34) "Well-produced but vacuous undertakings." Living in our time requires perhaps more SelfDiscipline than at any previous time in history. Just in my short lifetime, the latitude I have enjoyed for choosing for myself has expanded exponentially, and with that ever-expanding freedom, came the equally-expanding necessity of extending my ability to discipline myself. Fifty years ago, I would joke that the radio reception was so poor along a stretch of what was then called Interstate Eighty North across northern Gilliam County, Oregon, along the mighty Columbia River Gorge, that the only accessible station played only Gary Puckett and The Union Gap tunes, with the very occasional Marilee Rush. Today, I complain when my satellite radio kicks out when the basalt rimrock interrupts reception along that stretch. I have instant access, in season, to live hometown announcer play-by-play from each and every team in Major League Baseball, in either English or Spanish. Sorting from among such overwhelming choices demands a whole bunch of SelfDiscipline. Some turn on their television the instant they get up in the morning. Some even keep a TV in their bedroom so that they needn’t bother themselves to get up to tune in. Everyone else keeps a pocket version providing instantaneous access, twenty-four/seven, to whatever whim might insist they stick their nose in. Without some almost superhuman SelfDiscipline, nothing would get done, given the easy access available now to so damned much distraction. Some, particularly the young, might be excused from having developed requisite SelfDiscipline, though this situation has encouraged schools and parents to exert a heavy hand to prevent scrolling from becoming every kid’s major focus in their education. Structural weaknesses prevented such excess when I was young. Not only was the reception limited along that stretch of The Gorge, but it was little different elsewhere. I remember visiting Garibaldi, a small sawmill town on the Oregon Coast, in the fifties, before they could get a television signal there. At home, even the television signed off every early morning, broadcasting a test pattern instead of programming through the weeest hours. If I wanted entertainment or diversion, I would have to create it for myself because the now-burgeoning entertainment and distraction industries hadn’t developed the reach necessary to completely distract me from my mission, whatever that might have been. Now, of course, I only ever ultimately manage to accomplish anything because of my often waning SelfDiscipline. If I had none, I’d be screwed. I fear I have not nearly enough left to properly defend myself from being entertained and distracted to death. I miss a few lunches each week. I figure my no-longer girlish figure can use their absence. We keep our television in an inconvenient place to discourage overuse. I still meditate twice daily, a practice I’ve maintained for fifty-three years and counting. Those are times when I’m unplugged for sure, when I might sometimes even manage to hear myself thinking, or even manage to do a tiny bit of thinking for myself, increasingly rare disciplines these days. I measure my worth not by what I possess, but by what I can gleefully live without. I’m rarely in acquisition mode. I ain’t no saint and probably won’t ever be considered angel material. I scroll like a demon many days, and fritter away time I’m certain to regret forfeiting, probably sooner than later. I struggle to maintain the remnants of the SelfDiscipline I once possessed, even acknowledging that I was never anybody’s paragon of SelfDiscipline in the first place. I consider many of our modern conveniences to be perils to a decent existence, stand-ins for imaginary shortcomings. Well-produced but vacuous undertakings. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Episidiodic

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-09T05:14:13-07:00

Dorothy Dehner: Damnation Series: Aspect of the Episode (1946) "This creates a different context for living than I was expecting." Either life mirrors art or art mirrors life. It might not matter which. I believe that both occur so that it might prove impossible to ever tell whether the chicken or the egg arrived first. Life certainly imitates art; otherwise, fashion would not influence any of us. It also seems obvious that art at least attempts to imitate art, however imperfectly. It used to be, or it certainly used to seem as though I lived within a rather grand narrative arc. I lived in the middle of some greater adventure, definitely heading somewhere, making history along the way. These days, my life seems less cinematographic, hardly a short story. I live rather like a Social Media stream, in a series of unrelated episodes without much in the way of any grander plotline. Some thinkers have ascribed this sense, increasingly common, to simple aging. Once achieving some uncertain age, most of the striving that dominated younger ages has been resolved. One no longer aches to know who they are or what they will become, for those great mysteries were solved. Likewise, the passion and drama that commonly accompany such striving understandably settle down as one settles into their life well won. Then, a broader scope might well seem to be missing, and one sets their compass on narrower horizons. A certain cadence replaces grand adventure, and one focuses upon smaller scales. This can bring nostalgia for the grand adventure without necessarily degrading the present experience. Short stories suffice after one loses their epic novel attention span. Serializations first became popular with the expanding popular press in the first half of the nineteenth century. Before then, one might read books, each of which necessarily carried more than a narrow perspective. They featured chapters that would build to complete some larger concepts than could be compressed into a handful of pages. Serializations enabled stories to dribble out a little over time. They necessarily separated their components into nibbles rather than meals. Much time might separate installments, rendering each piece both incomplete and distinct. Given the distribution difficulties of the times, any piece might be the last, so incompleteness became a feature of that form of entertainment. One left partially requited, with the desire for more, and wondering where the narrative might lead next. Anticipation became the expected product of the diversion rather than resolution. Electronic media amplified the episodic nature of those earlier serializations. Their entertainment was intended to accompany rather than dominate the audience’s attention. It fostered a more casual relationship with its consumer. Before streaming, though, serializations were tightly timebound. If you missed the broadcast window, you lost the continuity radio and early television relied upon. While books and magazines could be consumed at the audience’s leisure, radio and television came with a regulating mechanism, or they did until streaming appeared over the horizon. Streaming unshackled serials from time. What might have been a vast wasteland of content before streaming became trackless, featuring Do It Yourself schedules. Whatever regularity our radios and TVs used to provide, which served as an accompaniment to individual narrative arc, evaporated and left one drifting in purely episodic space. The urgency one once felt when trying to make it home in time to watch something important, a sprint that added to the narrative drama of existence, disappeared, leaving relative nothingness in its place. Last night, The Muse and I watched the 4th installment of a streaming television series only to learn that the subsequent installment wouldn’t be released until the following week. In the old days, we wouldn’t have expected otherwise, but streaming has rendered us dependent upon controlling our episodes in place of maintaining any broader narrative arc. We seem to be comprised now of eternally partially completed stories, forever unresolved. This creates a different context for living than I was expecting. (More coming on this subject.) ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

AayEye

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-08T06:32:15-07:00

Salvator Rosa: The Fall of the Giants (1663) "We're stuck in some middle." The artificial seems to underpin much of what passes for Social Media, most prominently, the curiosity called Artificial Intelligence, or AayEye. As a concept, AayEye has been attracting interest since nobody remembers when, with perhaps more insistence that it always was and still remains impossible because we believe intelligence to be a solely human capability. Some controversy seems understandable, though, because as machines have acquired abilities that used to be considered evidence of intelligence, those abilities have been removed from the list of evidence of intelligence, if only because the very fact that a machine can perform them must mean by definition that they cannot be evidence of intelligence. Our definition of intelligence has perhaps been the greatest change brought about by advances in AayEye. We seem to better understand what intelligence isn’t than whatever it might actually be. We would prefer sentient machines, even though we can’t quite agree on what constitutes sentience. Even human intelligence doesn’t seem to be the property of any single individual, though some people sure seem to have more of it than others do. Nobody seems capable of outthinking a group of people. Of course, no single individual has proven capable of being stupider than some groups of people, either. Some insist that intelligence at least partially exists only within specific contexts, as exhibited by the apparent differences between ‘library smart’ and ‘auto shop smart.’ Some even argue that intelligence exists beyond the brain, that muscles and molecules exhibit kinds of intelligence, too. In the early twentieth century, a gym teacher and amateur horse trainer exhibited a remarkable horse he called Clever Hans. Hans appeared to be able to count, perform mathematics, speak German, and perform several other activities usually associated only with human intelligence. After his owner died, a commission was mustered to consider whether Hans was truly as intelligent as he seemed or if the owner had somehow cued him into correct answers. Interestingly, Hans continued his remarkable performances without his original owner, but his success evaporated when he wore blinders. The commission concluded that Hans had been especially gifted at reading cues so subtle that not even his owner likely knew he was passing tells. The Clever Hans Effect has become a part of AayEyE research, too, as models have become so massive that influences between various variables become untraceable. What better facility to produce Deepfakes than an artificial intelligence? I’ve already concluded that the usual Social Media base isn’t biased toward authenticity, but quite the opposite. Its authors retain the desire to appear credible, then perhaps artificial truths better serve the underlying purpose of encouraging engagement. AayEye queries can sure seem prescient, and no amount of argument to the contrary can really blunt the satisfying sensation of having one’s mind read, even if it’s Clever Hans reading it. There might be as many kinds of intelligence as there are artifices, which might explain why the very meaning of the term intelligence continues to evolve as our machines seem to grow smarter. We probably are in the business of out-smarting each other, and I can’t convincingly argue that this won’t ultimately turn out to be a very good thing, indeed. Intelligence might be the only commodity other than artificiality capable of simultaneously being both too much and too little. We’re stuck in some middle. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

MoveFast/BreakThings

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-07T05:53:27-08:00

Unidentified Artist: Things in Space/Space in Things (1942-1949) "This concludes today's lesson in engineering futures." "Move fast and break things" was the original internal motto and core engineering philosophy for Facebook (now Meta). Coined by Mark Zuckerberg, it prioritized rapid development, risk-taking, and innovation over stability, guiding the company's culture until it was updated to "Move fast with stable infrastructure" in 2014. Business Insider (2/16/2022) Social Media giant Meta’s first motto might seem both ironic and telling when considered from today’s distance from its founding. Then, it was young and filled with itself and hope, believing itself to already be master of a universe not yet concocted. Like anybody, its founder believed he could create his own rules of engagement because he was blazing trails. The history of such development has always been paved with just this sort of arrogance, the belief that reality was theirs to define rather than to align themselves to. This tiny perspective shift has been turning grand intentions to shit since way back before Egyptian times. If anything, moderns have only become more adept at deluding ourselves. We might create seemingly sparkling new futures, but we also inadvertently concoct their eventual Achilles Heels. As near as I can tell, there’s never been a prescription that effectively prevented such negative outcomes, even in retrospection. Initial enthusiasms aside, we cannot seem to hide from such certain fates. Even should we somehow hold back long enough to measure three times before cutting, we still manage to engineer in a few terminal shortcomings. Later, auditors will stroll through the wreckage, dispatching the wounded, and some sort of reckoning seemingly has to take place. Some of the foundation laid in the earliest days will have to be replaced if the organization is to survive. What’s lost in the furious race toward alluring futures might not have been possible to create, given the then state of comprehension. We are inevitably too late that smart, and can seemingly only learn some lessons after having royally screwed up something significant. Those who try to alleviate this shortcoming tend to fare no better, for they lose some critical development window and their future leaves the station without them aboard. Those who manage to catch that train might well understand what they’re missing when catching that train, but at least they’re moving into their future, even if their most entertaining challenges certainly remain before them. Their past will pursue them until it catches up to their progress at some truly inconvenient point. While development hurdled forward, some inadvertent products were being produced along with the obvious targets. The organization’s DNA gets programmed into being while everyone’s distracted, being hyper-productive. Choices get made without due diligence, options selected with sublime inadvertence. The way things manifest there emerges from the fuss and feathers of a seemingly necessary great urgency. Patterns of coping with problems solidify into unspoken, often unspeakable doctrine. A corporate culture is born without an obvious father. However beligerent the ethos might seem, everyone involved becomes invisibly and inexorably indoctrinated. How We Do Things Here becomes the primary imperative. Those who violate the unspoken doctrine get singled out for reform or, most likely, nudged out along the way. The company’s proudest asset becomes its greatest vulnerability. Twelve years later, after formally discarding his founding motto, that motto’s author gets called to testify in a trial trying to determine if one of the things broken when moving so quickly, so irresponsibly, into that future might have been a customer, perhaps a whole class of them, and more. The question seems out of context then, but only because it is. Anyone moving fast into their future leaves behind concern for the past they’re also creating. They intend to only speak vaguely, inspiringly, of breaking things, and never really intended to break anything valuable or vulnerable or irreplaceable. It was a smartassed slogan, for cripes sake, never intended to seriously damage anyone, especially anyone as vulnerable as a six-year-old. Our future might be the direct result of some smartassed slogan never intended to create whatever we actually ended up with. This concludes today’s lesson in engineering futures. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 03/05/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-05T16:27:25-08:00

I realized—or, re-realized—that I would not be abandoning my scrolling as a result of my investigating into my nefarious habit or addiction. ... I should not feel surprised if it sometimes seems to suffer from the same self-importance that encourages most everything these days. ... I scroll in greyscale now, and I doubt that I’ll ever return to color display on my iPhone. ...I began this writing week acknowledging that technology seems destined, if not necessarily designed, to go off TheRails. ... I reflected on what occurs within any PostTruth society, like this one, where we’re still clumsily adapting to this unsettling reality. ... I ended this writing week with my head and my iPhone in the Cloud, the seeming source and destination of all social media scrolling. ...This Unscrolling Story finds me wondering how I might tell if my technology might be going off TheRails on me. I’ve learned that new technology usually arrives before we’re truly ready for it, leading to inevitable failures and surprises. As an early adopter, I’ve grown used to updates that cause more problems than they solve, and I see how complexity now makes proper testing nearly impossible. Recent headlines—from a young woman’s struggles with social media addiction to the Pentagon’s ethical clash over AI for autonomous drones—show how unprepared we remain for the consequences of our inventions. I try to stay cautious, letting others face the first wave of problems, and do what I can to avoid getting swept up in the enthusiasm over the latest tech trends. My goal is simply to avoid going off the rails, even if I can’t always see where those rails might be. ...“Engage in some extended scrolling and call me the next morning if you’re ever experiencing a SickDay.” This Unscrolling Story finds me touting scrolling as a perfectly acceptable SickDay companion. I once thought this Unscrolling project was about quitting social media, but I’ve realized scrolling isn’t all bad. On a recent SickDay, instead of feeling isolated like I used to, I found comfort and a sense of connection in my social media feed. ...This Unscrolling Story finds me fruitlessly scrolling through my social media feeds seeking what inevitably always turns out to be UnNews. Social media feels like an egalitarian’s dream—anyone can be a writer or journalist, and every opinion or mundane moment can find an audience. After big events, like the recent attack on Iran, real information seems to be the first thing to disappear. ... It may look authoritative, but it’s mostly just a flood of misinformation—still nothing new under the sun (again). ...(1842) —- The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. ...“Social Media ultimately seems simply nihilistic, an homage to PostTruth meaninglessness and little else, even though it attracts engagement.” This Unscrolling Story finds me wrestling with social media’s PostTruth context and its ramifications. ...I used to think I was immune, but I’ve realized I’m as vulnerable as anyone to its distractions and cynicism. ...This Unscrolling Story finds me running down another Social Media-amplified Rumor.I see social media as a world built on rumor, where truth and fiction blur and almost everything should be doubted. It’s hard to tell what’s real, so I rely on a few trusted sources and treat the rest with disbelief. Life online feels unreliable and chaotic, and I’ve learned to navigate it with caution and a healthy dose of skepticism. ...Building supply companies in San Diego are doing a tremendous rush business, and there are rumors (unverified) of a shortage in building materials.” [Farm Security Administration Photographs] (12/1940) — The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. ... Building supply companies in San Diego are doing a tremendous rush business, and there are rumors (unverified) of a shortage in building materials.” ...My iPhone grabs my focus like a manic Van Gogh, but most of what captivates me comes off The Cloud—a mysterious, essential network of data centers powering everything from my scrolling to my thermostat. These concrete, windowless buildings serve as the almost invisible backbone of our digital lives, consuming resources and drawing growing local opposition as they multiply. People fear their environmental impact, but I see them as both a necessity and a likely source of prosperity—if we’re smart about managing them. As our world grows ever more connected and reliant on The Cloud, I’m left wondering if the real challenge is learning not to fear the future. Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita): of love (1967) — Persistent Link: https://hvrd.art/o/328973 — Physical Descriptions:Screen print — Dimensions: 38.1 × 45.7 cm (15 × 18 in.) — Inscriptions and Marks: Signed: l.c.: Corita — (not assigned): Printed text reads: OF LOVE RESTRICTED DATA [stamped in red ink] — Standard Reference Number — Corita Art Center Cat. #67-42 — Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Margaret Fisher Fund © Courtesy of the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York ...It’s been two weeks now since I announced the impending publication of my Cluelessness, A Book of Mirrors. The effort remains in that sort of Limbo that bureaucracies sometimes seem to have been invented to encourage. What would our experience here be without at least the possibility of some Limbo intruding into our naive plans? My last exchange with my publishing partner involved his demanding that I should be able to complete a form I could not complete, as a necessary precondition for publication. ... I placated by replying that I would try, thinking that he might follow up in a less demanding mood after a respectful period of my unresponsive silence. I usually prefer to wait out these delays because they cannot ever be resolved under the terms they manifest. It never matters how much anyone insists that another should be able to do something they cannot do. ... I sent a follow-up last night, suggesting that if he knew what I should put on the form, perhaps he could put that on the form, send it to me, and I could just agree that it represents what I’d hoped that form would hold. ...I have been a square peg in this publisher’s process since the beginning of our relationship, coming on fifteen months ago. I was supposed to have figured out how to navigate their publishing portal, though I struggled, as usual, to just make it past the PastWord portion of their production. ... I would inevitably try to return a form I’d improperly filled out, but fail to understand where I’d gone off the rails. ... I’m amazed that the final proof ultimately passed muster, or will, I’m certain, once I finally gain access to it so that I can sign off on the effort, … probably on another form. ...I’m wise to approach completion hesitantly, even though I feel like a fool, unable to complete a form deemed necessary before the effort can be considered finished. ...I employed Grammarly, a commercial AI-powered text editor, to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.”

Cloud

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-05T05:49:57-08:00

Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita): of love (1967) ...© Courtesy of the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York ..."Those who fear our future fear themselves." My iPhone draws my attention like a manic Van Gogh. I can hardly look away, but that tiny display holds almost none of what attracts my attention. Much of what attracts me resides somewhere else, off in what’s referred to as The Cloud. That Cloud contains much besides moisture. Ask your favorite AI engine, which also resides in The Cloud, to describe the kinds of data commonly found there, and you’ll receive a dizzying array of data types, most of which I can guarantee you’ve never heard of before. They represent the ecosystem from which your scrolling emerges. Scrolling couldn’t exist without this cloud’s contents, and those contents could not exist without that amorphous Cloud. The Cloud serves as the metaphor for what we know as Data Centers. These dystopian, concrete, windowless buildings hum with invisible activity. They might not quite qualify as scrolling’s soul, though they might best represent its spirit. Much of what occurs when we’re scrolling is disembodied. It doesn’t actually reside in any specific anyplace. The data and associated processes are distributed between various Data Centers for security and other purposes. The presence we sense when we’re scrolling only exists in amorphous virtual space. It’s largely an illusion designed to both attract attention and preserve space. Attempting to trace the physical source of any specific interaction, including financial transactions, proves frustrating, for scrolling seems to be a virtual phenomenon that occurs precisely nowhere specifically. Data Centers have attracted more attention than their owners ever intended. They were supposed to be invisible. ... They seem like utility incarnate, with no effort put toward appearances or aesthetics. They appear absolutely utilitarian and so, alien to every eye. We’re not supposed to think about or care about whatever occurs inside. We think they’re eyesores because they are. They consume seemingly vast amounts of energy. Older models also manage to use a lot of water for cooling. Those employed to teach Artificially Intelligent agents, who learn by perusing very large data sets, can produce surges in demand at inconvenient times. Depending upon local regulations, which are still all over the universe and largely irrational, households in the area of a Data Center can experience sharp increases in their electricity rates with no apparent benefit. Some Data Center operators have learned how to steal from the poor to get richer. Local opposition to these Data Centers has grown to a fever pitch as our incompetent administration cancels renewable energy generation efforts. The resulting pinch will eventually cause energy prices to rise steeply, not necessarily the fault of Data Centers directly, but of incoherent energy policies. Still, we couldn’t conduct a Zoom meeting without our integrated networks of Data Centers. They exist as the absolutely essential invisible underpinning of all things scrolling, and what’s not scrolling these days? My thermostat employs the freaking Cloud, as does our Schooner’s entertainment and navigation system. As rain was once touted as following the plow, these days, prosperity seems to follow the introduction of Data Centers. ... They’ll be proliferating, though, fortunately, even they seem to be learning exponentially how to provide their services with ever smaller footprints. Maybe they’ll eventually become essentially invisible. The torches and pitchforks appear whenever a new Data Center gets proposed. ... It’s possible to construct and operate a Data Center without devastating or even deeply impacting the surrounding environment. There’s so freaking much money in Data Center operation that the one proposed for our corner of the state pencils out like we discovered a Permian Basin beneath us. ... If we’re smart, and not just Data Center smart, not merely artificially intelligent, we could leverage our Data Center into genuine rain following our ever-aging plows. A hundred and more years ago, the farm kids migrated to the cities to find prosperity. Now, it seems that prosperity might be moving some operations here to transform farmers and their farms, bringing swarms of electrons and a few dystopian buildings to serve as the rain. Those who fear our future fear themselves. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Rumor

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-04T05:28:09-08:00

Russell Lee: "Sign at lumber company. San Diego, California. Building supply companies in San Diego are doing a tremendous rush business and there are rumors (unverified) of shortage in building materials." [Farm Security Administration Photographs] (12/1940) The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. "Sign at lumber company. San Diego, California. Building supply companies in San Diego are doing a tremendous rush business and there are rumors (unverified) of shortage in building materials" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed March 4, 2026. (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/140a3880-7017-0137-9e01-05b46baa16fe) "Rumors of information's demise on social media have been greatly exaggerated." Rumor seems to be the very stuff of Social Media. While doubtlessly, many postings contain provable facts, fact-checking has never been a requirement or a significant element governing social media posting. I think of it as a slightly focused form of crowd-sourcing, as if a coherent gist could be derived by blindly repeating approximations. Some postings fully qualify as wild, not even attempting reliability—many intended only to rile—while others have received relatively rigorous proofing. One cannot reliably determine which postings are which, so it behooves the peruser to presume that every posting qualifies as little more than the rumor it most probably is. The only onus occurs when someone mistakes a probable rumor for an immutable fact, and that’s the straw that repeatedly bends social media’s camel’s back. This situation’s no different than perhaps the most tragic of the many literary misinterpretations, the one where people interpret their Bible as literal history. The Bible, being an allegorical work, was never intended to serve as an immutable store of accurate historical information. Quite the opposite, our forebears understood the greater value allegory and metaphor provided for those interested in what came before. They focused upon patterns of behavior rather than what we might consider historically accurate ones. The arcs of history better informed future generations than could photographic perspective. It seems, though, that some religious leaders found more leverage insisting their Bible was literal rather than merely literary, images cast in stone as opposed to sand, to reliably devastating effect. Today, we see Social Media as the source and primary amplifier of our most damaging pseudo-information, all of which began as Rumor before heading steeply downhill from there. Prior generations nurtured their The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and The stab-in-the-back myth (Dolchstoßlegende), both of which served to fuel what bloomed into the Nazi Ideology, all of it Rumor but widely interpreted as immutable fact. In our time, our Damned Pandemic seemed to spawn some fresh Rumor every second; many focused upon discrediting proven, reliable treatments in favor of seriously dangerous alternatives. Anti-vaxers came into their own, fueled entirely by mis- or disinterpreted Rumors. The burgeoning Supplement Industry seems to be right at home on Social Media, selling their versions of “wellness.” Wellness itself might better qualify as a Rumor than anything even distantly resembling established protocol. Skepticism seems an inadequate response to this suddenly Rumor-rich environment. Skepticism perhaps presumes an underlying foundation of truth, of morally or ethically supportable fact, but Social Media does not seem to even be comprised of that. Each “engager” over time collects the contacts they consider to be reliable. Of course, they’re inundated with unverified and unverifiable intrusions, too, but each user holds a trusted few “influencers” to trade in self-evident fact. The rest might not precisely qualify as rumor mongers, but they’re at best unverified providers and therefore questionable sources; maybe even more than merely questionable, questioned. Not received with skepticism but disbelief, as if they probably were deepfakes, if only to preserve the tenuous integrity of what we’ve absolutely verified as trustworthy. This might explain why our online lives seem more like they occur in Pottersville than Bedford Falls. Our futuristic mass communication system might not be precisely rotten to the core, but it remains deeply questionable, baseline unreliable. Curious things occur when a society’s primary information sources become widely recognized to be deep down unreliable. Some become cynical, behaving as if nothing could possibly be valuable because their information is poor. Some become more bold than they might otherwise behave, taking fantastical positions without exhibiting great fear that their bluster might get found out or themselves discredited. Most of us learn to keep our heads down. We sometimes manage to forward what a colleague will properly identify as a deepfake lie, and we’ll apologize. It’s not like everyone hasn’t already had to rely upon some colleague’s better-attuned eye to survive some cleverly tricked-out lie. Life on Social Media has been rumored to thrive, even without the guarantees we once seemed to rely upon. Rumors of information’s demise on Social Media have been greatly exaggerated. It mostly relies on canny interpretation today. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

PostTruth

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-03T04:37:04-08:00

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes: Truth Is Dead Other Titles: Series/Book Title: Los Desastres de la Guerra, 79 Series/Book Title: The Disasters of War ..."Social Media ultimately seems simply nihilistic, an homage to PostTruth meaninglessness and little else, even though it attracts engagement." Perhaps the single most compelling reason to avoid engaging in social media lies in the lies it spreads. Its engagement model does not distinguish between good and evil, truths and lies. Whatever attracts attention, encourages engagement, and engagement embodies the whole purpose of its existence. ... Repeated ad infinitum, a PostTruth context emerges, inverting historical measures of goodness. Where truth was once widely believed to be superior to fiction, the once sharp distinction eroded into what became, in practice, a superior fiction, trumping truth for many intents and purposes. If value directly correlates to hits, and hits relate most to lies, then goodness follows this trajectory, too. Truth holds little currency in any PostTruth society. ...We might have even giggled at this abject absurdity, while firmly believing, albeit falsely, that we somehow stood above this fray. The day would come when we realized that we’d let something important slip away in favor of transitory entertainment, or even less, a few diverting moments dedicated to distraction. We were no less susceptible than those whose fates we believed inevitable. We felt smarter, which turned out to be the residue of repeated exposure to the PostTruth context, where nothing ultimately matters. That we believed ourselves uniquely invulnerable couldn’t have mattered even if we had been invulnerable. If we were in this experiment together, we couldn’t really afford to write off anyone in the coalition. ...We can plead that we didn’t notice until it broke through the skin, and by then, our condition might have already been terminal. By then, Truth had already developed a sullied reputation. Those who worked the edges seemed to enjoy more benefits than those who shied away from fully deploying decoys. What harm could a few embellishments inflict if they positively affected our engagement numbers? If we stick with sarcasm, it won’t be like anybody really believed anything we posted. ... An ounce of snark can improve a puddling’s mouth feel. A pinch of bad taste can enhance the flavor of good taste, can’t it, improving it? ... Once the morals crumble, there is no longer any limit to how low one can go. Our incumbent touted himself as the first PostTruth president. He might yet prove to be the last. He’s no longer accountable for dispensing even the spare odd ounce of truth. Even his social media app’s a lie: TruthSocial. He lives life as if he’s embedded in that social media. He values outrageous above all else. ... His policies have been uniformly disastrous, though a few die-hard followers seem encouraged by his disturbing antics. He remains a child, emotionally about eight years old, intelligently, a little younger. He long ago lost addressability to anything even vaguely resembling truthiness. It seems unworthy of consideration to him. He favors the outrageous, the flaming, the ultimately damning. He’s a dedicated self-saboteur, which seems the likely fate of anyone weaned on social media. I still believe myself capable of wrestling with this demon and somehow dominating, though both data and experience suggest that I’m only getting more skilled at lying to myself. That’s the direction one heads when entering into a PostTruth context like social media. Ultimately, one can hardly help but start lying to themself. Otherwise, the whole house of cards would immediately crumble. Not that it ultimately won’t. A PostTruth world dedicates itself to oblivion, even if that oblivion attracts a lot of reassuring attention. The truth must matter, or else nothing does. Social Media ultimately seems simply nihilistic, an homage to PostTruth meaninglessness and little else, even though it attracts engagement. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

UnNews

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-02T06:11:57-08:00

Samuel Putnam Avery (Collector) Charles Emile Jacque (Etcher) Auguste Delâtre (Printer of plates): Un homme dans une cave. [A Man in a cave.] (1842) The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. "[Un homme dans une cave.]" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed March 2, 2026. (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/6d488120-c611-012f-7b0d-58d385a7bc34) "There's nothing new under this sun." Social Media has become an egalitarian’s dream come true. Imagine a space wherein everyone can be a writer if they choose, even a journalist, without the questionable benefits of training. Where every opinion finds a ready audience and every otherwise mundane happenstance can be publicly celebrated. Where world events can be dissected without being constrained by facts, and headlines can scream whatever they please without fear of being challenged. Think of it as the Wild West with coffee service. It’s almost a full-time job just searching out the few pinpoints of truth, though following those does not guarantee that the algorithm will reliably serve them up in the future. There’s much muck to wade through between truths, and the reward at finding them doesn’t always necessarily seem worth the considerable effort required. We propel ourselves forward, onward, seeking something that, on reflection, couldn’t possibly exist. Social Media seems to be an impossibility. Three days after the disastrous attack on Iran, information has already become the first casualty of the war, just like it always has before. This administration incapable of administering anything has no story to tell, operating on a whim as they apparently do. Their strategic intent remains as yet unconsidered. They insist that the Iranian people will spontaneously create a new and vastly improved form of government out of the rubble that the Israelis and we left behind. The mind readers have conquered social media, though, sharing their brilliant insights into what everyone’s thinking from their home offices with carefully-selected book titles displayed behind them to amplify their omniscience. Bullshit would be preferable to whatever in the heck this is, or pretends to be. We abhor vacuums, so we create vacuity with which we carefully fill each void. The void remains, but with lights flickering, better if two or more mindreaders are bickering over whose fiction best describes what isn’t actually happening. I lose the patience to scroll to the next station of this double cross, where I genuflect with my scrolling hand while trying to work out the cramp in my smartphone hand. I skip each advertisement as soon as possible and never remember the content of any of them. One day, I suspect all those advertisers will suddenly discover that their messages were never received, and the sole support of our immense vacuity will disappear to some place where they can better waste their money. One day, but not today and probably not tomorrow, either, but one day. It’s possible to acquire a dependence on nothingness. Social Media stands as prima facie evidence in the case of the information that didn’t inform, the news that never clues in, the dog that never learned how to bark. It bites, though, and has even been known to draw some blood on occasion. The wounds are only rarely life-threatening. They threaten tranquility instead. They inject expectation without delivering. They promise, rarely requiting. They might appear authoritative, but they’re deep down ill-informed, sharing their wealth of mis- and dis-information as freely as the medium allows. There’s nothing new under this sun. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

SickDay

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-03-01T06:01:26-08:00

Francesco Rosaspina: Healing the Sick (18th century) "Engage in some extended scrolling and call me the next morning if you're ever experiencing a SickDay." I must have already apologized at least once for my short-sightedness in naming this series Unscrolling, for that title presupposes something. It strongly suggests that the underlying purpose of these stories must necessarily be to eradicate scrolling, when that was never my entire objective. Yes, I admit that I sought to reduce my scrolling habit, which had, at times, overwhelmed me. I couldn’t always control that urge to access my social media feeds, but that alone couldn’t have motivated me to dedicate an entire quarter to such an endeavor. Scrolling seems only intermittently annoying. It’s not destroying my life. It often contributes important benefits, one of which appeared yesterday when I experienced one of the rare visits of a SickDay disrupting my semi-sacred routine. Since the damned pandemic, I continue to curtail my circulation out in the general population. I was never much for shopping. Aimlessly strolling down store aisles was never my idea of anything to actually do. I’m in and out with a minimum of browsing. I’m unlikely to stop and chat up some stranger while I’m shopping, either. I attend the very occasional public meeting, but other than those brief forays, I’m rarely in any position to get exposed to whatever's going around. The Muse, who’s continually out in public, could be a conduit, but we don’t usually live in all that close of proximity. Even with all that distance, I’m still likely to show up on sick call some days. Gone are the days when I would spend a SickDay covered up on the couch watching Perry Mason reruns. I’m most apt to crash in the guest bedroom, curled up with one of the cats. My social media feed stands in for Perry Mason reruns. In times like these, I appreciate the automated video feed. I can lie back, close my eyes, and let the algorithm be my guide. I do have to occasionally kill an unwanted advertisement, but at least I can kill an unwanted advertisement. I never could do that when binging on Perry Mason reruns. I can doze or focus as my illness allows. My day wanders away from me. I’m still in my pajamas at four in the long afternoon. My social media feed might be the perfect SickDay companion. It occasionally connects me to others as a comment or a like filters in through the day. I feel far away but still connected, and far removed from death’s door. I remember the intense isolation I’d feel when suffering through a SickDay then, when the whole wide world seemed to have abandoned me, or I abandoned it. I was not fit for even my own polite company then, and I recovered in something considerably less than satisfying isolation. Perry Mason was never adequate compensation. Neither were the 7Up chasers my mom would make me drink, thinking they might settle my unsettled tummy. A SickDay provides a context perfectly unsuitable for healing. ... Monotonous entertainment. At least social media seems familiar. As isolated as I sometimes feel when scrolling, on my SickDay, I found that scrolling left me feeling better connected. It was almost as if my social media insisted upon my inhabiting my usual haunts rather than an uncomfortable couch. That insistence alone seemed to help me recover from whatever I was experiencing an unexpected bout of. By the end of the afternoon, The Muse was surprised to find me up and prepping supper. I’d grown terminally bored with the continuing updates and felt ready to try being out in the world. We prepped supper together, with her continuing to keep her distance. I grilled the trout outside in the early spring evening, and all seemed fairly right with the world again. Engage in some extended scrolling and call me the next morning if you’re ever experiencing a SickDay. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

TheRails

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-28T07:06:33-08:00

Samuel William Reynolds I: Trial of a Nun in the Vaults of the Inquisition (19th century) "It was never my intention to become a tester for Unscrolling technology." It might be true that all technology comes to market before either the technology or the markets are truly ready. Without some experience, limits cannot be knowledgeably drawn. Without a few failures, edges aren’t obvious. The early adopters take much of the brunt, buffered by a blythe ignorance that they’re exposing themselves to experiences nobody could have possibly imagined. The more complex the context, the more this principle seems to hold. Boeing can’t seem to release an airplane that reliably flies the first few times. I long ago resigned myself to duck and cover whenever a new release was announced, for it has become certain that even “necessary security and reliability” updates will inevitably end up degrading some functions. We seem to have achieved levels of complexity that render us incapable of properly testing anything before releasing it on a justifiably wary and suspecting public. The landmark social media case in LA got around to the plaintiff’s testimony this week. She described how she so imprinted on likes, comments, and subscribers that she’d panic in anticipation. She described how she’d panic even worse when her mother threatened to take away her smartphone. She experienced iterated damned if she did and damned if she didn’t at age six. She continued her immersion into this version of Hell through her formative years. META’s attorney countered that the plaintiff’s treatment history failed to show much focus on her social media use, to which her defense countered that it was a definite contributing factor over and above her family’s divorce and abusive home environment. The plaintiff admitted she still, at twenty, struggles to limit her social media engagement time. The Pentagon threw an embarrassing conniption this week when an AI supplier denied them permission to violate Asimov’s first rule of robotics: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”. The Pentagon had proposed using its leased AI engine, Claude, to inform autonomous drones, a definite no-no in the robotics field. The Incumbent lashed out as only the truly ignorant can lash out, accusing the AI company of being WOKE, whatever that might mean, and lefty-liberal, which doesn’t seem like that effective of a criticism. An AI engine could have easily generated better! The administration, incapable of administering anything, pronounced that any government contractor using that AI would lose their contract and could even be fined. There are no other AI engines capable of replacing this one, though Elon Musk has one that’s proven to be capable of artificially undressing children. He’s offered his without restrictions. This amounts to offering to loan Wylie Coyote another anvil. Nobody will be surprised when the DoD accepts the offer, and as a result, autonomous drones start massacring their former masters. ...We can never be fully capable of declaring when and where our technology will go off TheRails. TheRails seem an emergent property, necessarily undefined for the longest time. As soon as an edge gets identified, a new release commences, and the fresh fences no longer define the border. The cutting edge of science might insist, but only ever tentatively, pending fresh experiences and discoveries. We never know before. We would be wise to be wary, but we only rarely agree to take our technology slow and easy. We expect instantaneous results and surprise ourselves when a door blows off on a virgin flight. The AI company turning its back on hundreds of millions in DoD contracts to maintain its ethics might be almost unprecedented. We more often launch the ship before we’ve finished testing and experience genuine shock and surprise when it somehow sinks itself on its maiden voyage. Because we are not natively cautious, we might be wise to stay a few releases behind whatever’s defined as current. Let the early adopters absorb the first lessons. Even though the science shows that not even most six-year-olds ever experience genuine social media addiction, we’re wise to show caution. Even for ourselves. I read of one social media user who bought a safe he didn’t know the combination for. He’d secure his smartphone in that box for several hours each day so he could stay away from his feeds. I understand there’s an app for that now. I’m actively avoiding signing up for these inventions. It was never my intention to become a tester for Unscrolling technology, just to try to keep myself from going off TheRails, wherever they might be. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 02/26/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-26T17:54:22-08:00

This writing week found me entering the final third of this series. The first third always finds me struggling to understand what in the heck I’ve gone and gotten myself into. ...I began this writing week reporting on how social media seems to be very skilled at BreakingNews. I then reflected on how my native resistance to technological “improvements” has always become FutileResistence. I next noticed how we have this tendency to turn possibilities into VastWastelands of missed potential, as we have so far with social media. I reported, because I’m not a reporter, how FakeNews seems to animate and motivate social media, while, given freedom, we seem more interested in segregating, reverting into Tribes on our social media feeds. I am ending this writing week, noting how much InstantaneousExpertise our social media seems to have spawned, though Expertise cannot ever properly be instantaneous. ...This Unscrolling Story describes how BreakingNews tends to appear on social media feeds. What begins as breaking becomes terribly fragmented in delivery.I now rely almost entirely on social media for breaking news, rarely turning to traditional TV or radio. While social media provides immediate updates, I find the quality of reporting poor—most “reporters” lack journalistic skills, bury important facts, and often inject bias or mis/disinformation. ... Ultimately, social media’s approach to news feels chaotic and fragmented, leaving me longing for a single trustworthy voice to make sense of it all. ...Early cell phones felt inconvenient and confusing, and later smartphones seemed overly complicated and even a threat to my own skills, like navigation. Though I eventually got an iPhone, I found it distracting and felt that each technological advance made me lose something important. I suspect many people share these feelings—nostalgic for a time when connections felt more personal, like when I mailed out newsletters with my kids’ help. ...This Unscrolling Story finds me wandering through a VastWasteland, the traditional source of our entertainment I’ve always seen Americans, myself included, favoring lowbrow entertainment—what I call the VastWasteland—over genuine culture, from the frontier days to TV and now social media. Every new medium, no matter its promise, eventually becomes just another wasteland of distraction and shallow content. Even with access to high culture, I find myself drawn to the familiar comforts of mainstream, often trivial entertainment. Despite pretending to have higher standards, I end up, like most people, spending my time scrolling through the latest version of the VastWasteland. ...Works Progress Administration (Sponsor) (1939)—Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, The New York Public Library. ...“If its content was all proven to be true, it couldn’t draw a respectable crowd.” This Unscrolling Story finds me describing how FakeNews serves as the primary driver of social media engagement. Social media has turned FakeNews into an everyday reality, and I’ve watched it influence politics and public life, even as I try to spot the lies and deepfakes. Despite knowing how unreliable it is, I keep coming back, drawn to the chaos and spectacle. Being on social media means surrendering some independence and getting caught up in a constant mix of truth and falsehood—because the biggest lies and public failures seem to attract the most attention. ...This Unscrolling Story finds me watching us disintegrate back into Tribes. The true price of social media must be the self-discipline necessary to properly exercise any absolute freedom. I’ve watched modern society try to move beyond tribalism toward universal values like equality and freedom, but social media has pulled us back into our old tribal divisions. Instead of connecting us, it’s fragmented us into ever smaller groups, each speaking its own dialect and enforcing its own beliefs. I find it ironic that, given freedom, we often create new forms of self-imposed restriction. ... Despite this, I still hope we can choose to move past our tribal instincts and employ social media to discover what we have in common. ...This Unscrolling Story finds me extolling one of the imaginary skills social media seems to induce in its users: InstantaneousExpertise. Social media has made it easy for anyone—including me—to claim expertise instantly, but I know deeper down that real understanding takes years, not seconds. ... I’m reminded that genuine expertise still requires patience, humility, and deep learning—something social media rarely encourages. Unidentified Artist: Nuestra Señora de Belén con un retrato de donante indígena - Our Lady of Bethlehem with Portrait of an Indigenous Donor (18th century) —Nuestra Señora de Belén, a patron saint of the city of Cuzco, Peru, Convent of Santa Clara. ...Last week, I announced that I’d cleared the final hurdle to publishing my book, Cluelessness. ... I learned the following day that their procedure required me to fill out a form listing all the galley proof changes I’d requested in a series of emails going back to the previous month or so. I’d been unable to utilize their futuristic system for reporting those changes as I suggested them, because it relied upon some curious pop-up technology that I couldn’t get to work for me, so I’d been submitting my questions and suggestions the old-fashioned way, via email, and they’d sent updated versions of the galley proofs in response. I’d just sent what I believed would be my final message, clearing the work for publication. ... It didn’t help that their form was in a closed format requiring me to convert from Klingon into a form I could use, then back again. I reasoned that they must have already received my suggestions, since the latest version of the galley proofs showed them updated. ...I’ve rarely met a form I could complete unaided, and often encountered ones I’d found impossible even with assistance. I once left a dentist's office when confronted with a large pile of forms they required before providing treatment. These forms wanted information I knew was probably lurking in files back home, so I left the dentist's office, traveling home to find the information. The dentist’s receptionist tracked down The Muse to ask where I’d disappeared to, so The Muse called. I explained that they’d needed answers to questions I didn’t have access to in their office, so I’d gone home to find the data they’d said they’d needed. ...This feature of my existence might be the heart of what I this week labeled FutileResistence. ... When this world finally dissolves into just so many forms, I will no longer find a place for me in it. ...I employed Grammarly, a commercial AI-powered text editor, to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.” ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

InstantaneousExpertise

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-26T06:35:06-08:00

Unidentified Artist:: Nuestra Señora de Belén con un retrato de donante indígena Our Lady of Bethlehem with Portrait of an Indigenous Donor (18th century) Nuestra Señora de Belén, a patron saint of the city of Cuzco, Peru. Convent of Santa Clara. "We should be justly proud of our accomplishments…" Social Media has introduced the greatest volume of instant experts in the history of this universe. Before, expertise came through patient practice, sometimes through apprenticeships. It might take decades before a novice could be properly considered to be an expert, even in their own mind. Now, a simple search can place the apparent wisdom of the ages in the palm of one’s hand. This does not even require a lengthy attention span. One might be wise to question such easily acquired skills, but such commodities have come into common commerce now. Any conversation, especially one with even the sparest hint of controversy, will attract at least one offering their well-intended InstantaneousExpertise. The internet exists as a most convincing collection of seemingly everything. ... With this as the research base, it seems possible to instantly access whatever information might be necessary to find. But finding it within that massive morass proves challenging. The first barrier lies in distinguishing between research and the relatively simple searches social media encourages, and its users seem to thrive on. Searches tend to produce self-sealing responses. They at best produce what they request, with ignorance, prejudice, and even blind preference invisibly embedded. Research requires some curation, for it accesses previously acquired information, organized in some fashion. Without the key to that organization, a naive search will very likely fail to find the significant context essential for proper interpretation. The satisfied naive accessor will be apt to go off much less than half-cocked, firmly believing they carry a revelation, as if they’ve discovered something other than reinforcement of originating conception, without really learning anything. Factoid in hand, they pounce and face-plant! Social media often seems populated by such freshly-saved souls, ones more confident of their salvation than they ever should feel about their recent insights, which might blind them to reasonable conversation. They play their hands as if every card they play really should be the one sure to trump whatever anyone else might have played. The real experts quietly excuse themselves from the table while those whose wealth consists solely of InstantaneousExpertise convince themselves they’ve won the argument. This tedious game gets repeated so frequently and repeatedly on social media that actual experts only very rarely bother to open a thread or comment on others’. Often, the raw data seems fine, but lacks context. Someone will post that a data center annually wastes a million gallons of precious water cooling, without understanding that a center-pivot irrigation rig has been routinely using multiples of that amount to irrigate much less valuable crops over much shorter times. The apparent goal of InstanteneousExpertise seems to be to elicit some form of outrage. Raw numbers often appear where only relative comparisons could ever prove useful. The future’s often amplified or ignored, its shadow either over-emphasized or severely under-played. InstantaneousExpertise is not congruent with systems thinking. It’s far too episodic and melodramatic to find much use beyond the most superficial competition. Prompting artificial intelligence seems little different than naive searching in practice. Prompting has been fast becoming the essential skill of our artificially-intelligent future, for the responses it elicits make all the difference between intelligence and the borderline stupid response. But few will ever care to gain the expertise required to goad the technology into producing a genuinely intelligent response. They will blame the AI engine rather than the operator’s InstantaneousExpertise. If it proves anything, social media seems destined to prove that expertise cannot be acquired instantaneously. It still demands lengthy apprenticeships and more judgment than one can conveniently shake any odd stick at or acquire a priori. Broadband no more imparts wisdom than owning a set of Encyclopedia Britannica ever did. Access does not guarantee results, however much anyone might desire it to. Properly used, it seems to me that social media should induce a deep sense of humility at the vastness of the unknown, a more reinforced connection to unknowability than the false certainty it more often seems to induce. We should be justly proud of our accomplishments, but understand that we’re still barely scratching the thin surface of any expertise however otherwise we might too easily convince ourselves. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tribes

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-25T05:48:33-08:00

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Modern Bohemia (1924) "It might not yet be too late to choose another fate." Modernity has been a concerted move away from the tribal toward the more universal. Equality, fraternity, and liberty were impossibilities as long as some people were considered naturally better than others. Of course, conservatives always faunched at these aspirations, for they believed tribal identities had been bestowed by God. Which God was beside the point because each tribe firmly believed that only their God was legitimate, and the rest were clearly pretenders or outright frauds. Secular societies were unprecedented two hundred and fifty years ago. It seemed for a time that the secular would surely succeed where kings and commissars had failed, but then the ultimate level playing field arrived, dragging social media behind it, and we commenced to re-fragment. The tribes became almost immediately self-evident. Those engaged in criminal activity loved the newfound anonymity social media offered. They could carry on with their nefarious activities without the authorities poking into their business. Governments created super-secret forms of communication before setting out to crack each other’s codes. Individual people seemed to adopt the new technology by self-selecting which societies they’d claim. Knitters joined with their peers, and deer hunters joined theirs. Liberals and conservatives enforced new barriers to sharing or even having to care about their opponents’ opinions. Social media became ubiquitous while simultaneously recreating a Tower of Babel. Specialized dialects proliferated while our liberal society seemingly disintegrated. I find it curious, perhaps ironic, that given freedom, people tend to construct little prisons for themselves again. Remove oppressive governance, and people will inflict it upon themselves. I might conclude that we don’t natively know what to do with freedom. We seem to mistake it for latitude or a simple lack of discipline. The subtle part about absolute freedom lies in the necessity of applying an increasing level of self-discipline then, for dictator or no, forward momentum relies upon reigning in many of the baser human tendencies. A free society demands more prohibitions than any authoritarian one, since most of the essential bans can only be enforced by oneself and not by any other enforcement mechanism. We require ethics and morals within which to exercise our freedoms; otherwise, they prove to be meaningless or much worse in practice. The trolls stalking our social media’s halls are not exercising freedom with their presence, but their dedication to whatever serves as freedom’s opposite: oppression. Freedom of expression does not necessarily include any obligation to criticize any other. It, too, must know boundaries and color within those limits. Our social media barely qualifies as social and rarely satisfies the demands of any actual media. We limit its range and utility. Special interests intervene, attempting evangelical transformation. Their absolute insistence that they know better and that they must therefore reform others so that they might properly enjoy their freedom amounts to the most absolutely oppressive form of despotism. The chiding and belittling common to every neighborhood listserv notwithstanding, we could have chosen to move beyond our Tribes to discover and revel in what we share inside. It might not yet be too late to choose another fate. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

FakeNews

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-24T04:46:12-08:00

Elihu Vedder: The Fates Gathering in the Stars (1887) ...Elihu Vedder depicted the three Fates of Greek mythology working the thread of life: Clotho spins the thread, Lachesis fixes its length, and Atropos cuts it at the appointed time of death. Their symbolic tools—spindle, distaff, and shears—rest in the foreground, emphasizing the Fates’ decisive role in matters of life and death. Vedder adapted this painting from an illustration he had designed for an 1884 publication by Edward FitzGerald—a translation of the work of 11th-century poet Omar Khayyám, The Rubáiyát. Vedder was attracted to mysterious, visionary subject matter. Here, he explored metaphysical questions of life, death, and afterlife, subjects at the core of Khayyám’s poetry. "If its content was all proven to be true, it couldn't draw a respectable crowd." Social media has been the playing field upon which the whole concept of FakeNews proliferated into the baseline reality it has come to be today. Our incumbent rode FakeNews’ coattails into high office, where he employed this once fringe concept to utterly debase our federal government. He dealt almost exclusively in confounding paradoxes, playing the role of the barber who shaves all the men, and only the men, who don’t shave themselves. ... It was eventually inevitable that he never once committed a truth, and yet he still managed to get himself re-elected. This astounding result describes the curious power FakeNews wields. It also might explain the ever-burgeoning popularity social media continues to enjoy. You might have thought that any media so infused with falsity would have been swiftly abandoned, but this has not proven to be the case. Social media’s very unreliability might actually be the key to its popularity. Could this be due to some perverse need to avoid straights and narrows, to at the very least, at least edge close to the wild side? I have grown accustomed to frequently checking whether what I’m reading amounts to another deep fake. I’ve learned that if something seems to make a little too much sense, it’s probably fiction. Almost every revelation I encounter turns out to be a deliberate misrepresentation. Either it never happened, or it happened in another context unrelated to the story I encountered. War or peace, the breaking news will reliably arrive in disjointed pieces, only some of which can or should be verified. Yet I return, prior sins all but forgotten, temporarily forgiven. Social media requires more than the willing suspension of disbelief that drama requires, but the willful suspension of judgment, or else its whole premise fails. Its near-instantaneous communication comes with this universal complication, as if The Imps had designed the user interface: any and everything accessed comes in questionable form. It’s like interacting with a practical joker, never knowing precisely when the latest joke will begin, but always aware that one’s either impending or just ending. Later, I might understand which was which: which was intended to merely fool me and which was maliciously designed to make me into a fool. Eventually, social media renders every user a fool. That’s perhaps its primary term of engagement. Engagement serves as the term used to gauge involvement. One ‘engages’ with social media. This suggests a different relationship than ‘using’ might entail, for users control while engagers submit to. An engagement willingly cedes some independence and subtly commits to an indefinite dependence. Social media popularity gets gauged in numbers ‘engaged,’ former individuals willingly surrendering their independence to enter into a partnership. Social media renders independence meaningless, since it requires dependence to cast its spell. There, FakeNews holds a prominent place and might even be as revered as one of The Fates once was to the Ancient Greeks. FakeNews can anchor attention more reliably than even the most obvious truths. Often, on social media, huge crowds gather to watch a fail unfolding. The bigger the lie, the greater the potential attention. Nothing draws engagement like a reliable public failure. ...For every dozen who swallow FakeNews hook, line, and sinker, at least one spectator well understands what he’s witnessing. Turning Point LLC turns out to be just another slow-motion train wreck, but it zooms to the top of the engagement ratings in the weeks and months before it stumbles into its inevitable comeuppance. The Epstein Files amount to just another repository of FakeNews. Each revelation crashes across social media’s bow, washing the deck with fresh injustice, only some of which seems destined to be proven true. The difference between what will eventually be proven true and rampant speculation fueled by deliberate FakeNews provides the energy and momentum that fuels engagement and thus, social media’s momentum. If its content was all proven to be true, it couldn’t draw a respectable crowd. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

VastWasteland

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-23T05:45:21-08:00

Hughie Lee-Smith: Wasteland Works Progress Administration (WPA) Art United States. Works Progress Administration (Sponsor) (1939) Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, The New York Public Library. "Wasteland" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed February 23, 2026. (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/ccb33860-fe37-0131-598a-58d385a7b928) “…probably damned whatever we choose to log into.” The great American public has always strongly preferred VastWastelands as our sources of entertainment. We have never been all that high-minded. Sure, there have always been pockets of actual culture lurking around the margins of our society, but we’ve only rarely allowed that culture to dominate our leisure. In Frontier America, the tavern attracted more patrons than any theater, fistfights always had more witnesses than did concerts, and even public hangings were generally judged superior uses of time to any alternative. It was no surprise when the marvel of broadcast radio, then television, quickly turned into just another VastWasteland. We should express no less surprise as we realize that we’ve just gone and done it to ourselves again. Social media might be best understood and acknowledged to be the latest instantiation of humanity’s longest-lasting tradition, for we have also transformed what might have been the highest of high culture into another rather run-of-the-mill VastWasteland. I won’t bemoan this outcome, but merely acknowledge it. Who would we have had to collectively become to create anything other than another in an infinite series of VastWastelands? Social media has and has had its higher points, but each attempted redeeming improvement quickly fell under seemingly pre-ordained debasement. Free speech becomes loose talk. Free expression becomes expensive obscenity. Wilderness becomes farmland, which becomes suburban tract homes, which are ultimately abandoned to become a more debased VastWilderness than it was when it began, but nonetheless still wilderness. In 1961, incoming FCC Chairman Newton Minow gave his famous VastWasteland Speech to a gathering of the National Association of Broadcasters. In it, he challenged members to spend a day watching their product. He predicted boredom for them, declaring their efforts to have successfully created a VastWasteland. He was not wrong. He noted that children spent more time in front of the television than they spent at school, and that the three traditional sources of a child’s education: Home, School, and Church, had a fourth element now: Television. He challenged the assembled broadcasters to create something other than game shows, westerns, and fantastically unlikely family dramas. Minow went on to charter WETA, the first Public Broadcasting television station in the nation, and help sponsor Sesame Street, a more purposeful replacement for the Dialing For Dollars cheap old movie broadcasts that used to greet my enthusiastic after-school wasteland viewing. I was learning on the broadcast equivalent of backstreets then, before television developed what passed for a conscience. Our incumbent, of course, seems to be all for discarding broadcasting’s conscience in favor of strong-arming tactics. The VastWasteland stands eternally prepared to reclaim any previously ceded ground. The boat that sank in the opening sequence of perhaps the best example of VastWasteland midcentury television programming, Gilligan’s Island, was named The Minow in back-handed homage to that FCC Chair who dared to suggest that the VastWasteland could do better if somebody insisted. Better emerged, though it remained a continually harassed meadow in an increasingly exploitative wilderness. In 1961, the larger cities had as many as three separate television channels. Now, of course, the number seems infinite, and might just as well be infinite, for there seem to be more channels than there are eyes to watch them. Ten thousand channels and still nothing really worth watching ever on. So it should be no surprise that our lives seem even more distracted than they were in our youth. Entropy might be all anybody needs to explain why. Even high-minded fare seems more entertaining if viewed over the shoulders of the Mystery Science Theater smartasses. I personally find smart-assery more renewing than anything Beethoven ever produced. I have personal access to the products of the finest minds who have ever lived, but if I’m honest, I prefer the latter work of Sheldon Leanord. Why should my scrolling prove to be any different? We each pretend to maintain higher standards than we ever seem to manage to maintain in our actual lives, which we seem to prefer to live on a VastWasteland, probably damned whatever we choose to log into. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

FutileResistence

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-22T04:05:58-08:00

Gustave Moreau: Jacob and the Angel (1874-1878) "At least there's no toll taker, trying to assess me for roaming now." I have a long and perhaps overproud history of resisting technological change. I have not yet successfully completed the leap from analogue to digital, and I not so secretly hope never to fully consummate that leap. When cell phones first came into fashion, my partners forced one onto me. I was never able to complete a call. I’d try, but get no further than some toll collector who’d explain that I was roaming. Roaming was apparently a minor felony punishable by an immediately calculated and extracted financial penalty. This served as a necessary gate through which a caller had to pass to successfully connect. I’d declined the invitation and go find some landline payphone to complete the connection. My partners insisted that the phone would prove to be convenient, though it never once was. Later, once that technology had advanced beyond the roaming phase, The Muse leased an early model of a smart smartphone. It was not nearly as smart as today’s models, but it seemed too complicated for a guy like me to ever learn. This was before iPhones, so she acquired a BlackBerry, which required learning unique languages, like MS-DOS miniaturized and on steroids. I declined that invitation and chose a little thing called a Jazz, which allowed telephony, after a microminiturized fashion, and primitive text messaging, which I never figured out how to do. I was wary and fearful, concerned that the technology might encourage the atrophy of certain essential parts of me. I feared having access to a map app in my pocket, lest it disable my fairly mature original intuitive navigation system. When we relocated to Washington, DC, I refused to even carry a paper map with me, lest I lose the ability to effectively read and learn from my surroundings. I eventually had a superior orientation to my surroundings there than most natives. My first iPhone was both a revelation and a huge distraction. I found it almost impossible to use but also irresistible. I flushed innumerable otherwise memorable moments fussing with that damn phone’s protocols. I swore at first to never use any apps. I’d keep the phone for telephony. That commitment surely eroded, as digital technology continually sank its talons deeper into me. Rather than an advancement, the technology always seemed more like debasement to me, as if I were resorting to utterly unnecessary alternatives. I suppose one of my forebears might have developed a digital dependency back in the early seventeenth century in Germany. My heritage seemed to scream that I should avoid depending upon those things, a sense that I suppose I was ultimately destined to lose. I don’t suppose my story seems in any way extraordinary. I suspect that many have tried and failed to avoid assimilating emerging technologies. We might all be Luddites, fearful of losing whatever tenuous abilities we inherited from prior generations. The new stuff sure seems shiny, but also mighty suspicious. What does it promise? What were we lacking before that demanded we abandon our hard-won facilities for? We seem to assimilate externalities, ultimately regretful of every technological advancement. I still remember when I didn’t have social media to feed, when I still sent out periodic newsletters. I’d enlist my kids to help stick address labels and stamps and staple them closed. I felt inordinately close to my subscribers then. It was as if I reached out and physically touched them. Even with my weekly Friday Zoom Chat and nearly continually updated comment feeds, I feel no closer today. At least there’s no toll taker, trying to assess me for roaming now. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

BreakingNews

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-21T05:00:26-08:00

Harold Edgerton: Hammer Breaking Glass (1933) "This future sure seems unduly fragmented." I find myself almost exclusively turning to social media for my BreakingNews. I haven’t tuned into a local television news broadcast in nearly five years. I don’t have access to CNN, Fox, or MS-Now on TV, or even access to the network television news broadcasts. I will, on occasion, still tune into NPR if I’m near a radio when news breaks, but I have been increasingly bee-lining to my social media feeds when I catch a whiff of something important occurring. I most often get those whiffs from my social media feeds, too, though I’ve grown increasingly cautious. The proliferation of deepfakes there means that I often check the credibility of the URL behind whatever seems to be breaking. I, sadly, often find the questioned URL carrying the BreakingNews to be broken. The news itself seems broken by social media. It has spread the reporting to almost exclusively feature people who clearly never received any sort of training as journalists. They almost universally struggle to get to their point. I often find myself impatiently waiting through several long minutes of self-promotion (”Be sure to subscribe!”) and largely unnecessary introduction (”We’re the most watched site on YouTube this week!”) before encountering anything resembling a lede. To say these tend to be buried amounts to a gross understatement. They seem inundated. These exist as requiem to the once familiar who, what, when, where, and why. The reportage tends to be decidedly one-sided, partisan, especially anything insisting that insists it represents a fair and balanced perspective. Most social media reporters shamelessly lie. It’s like entering a store where the shelves are organized by the order of the inventory’s arrival: Last In, First Out. Background’s easy to access but difficult to conclude from, for they amount to preserved glimpses absent any clarifying analysis. Everything seems to have been created for some specific, immediate purpose, as if reporting were primarily about classifying. The narrowing perspective tends to amplify specific issues at the price of any broader context. I could say that most social media news gets presented as if its context was either unbelievably narrow or simply didn’t matter, neither of which was very likely the case. The sense of disconnection, something that real reporting might reduce, seems amplified by social media reportage. The amateurs and well-intended color commentators clearly aren’t generally up to the job they’ve chosen for themselves. If you need understanding, tune in later that evening, well after the BreakingNews has finished shattering. I have gratefully not yet acquired the podcast habit. I find their pace off-putting. If BreakingNews seems pedantic, podcasts seem downright Titanic, oversized, and overblown. They typically feature someone famous for being famous, and many followers, because they have so many followers, hardly an authoritative voice among them. They often pretend to be elder statesmen, though their assertions seem especially flimsy, if only due to their age. Nobody’s anybody’s elder anything when they’re under thirty. It seems strange how immediate BreakingNews doesn’t seem on social media. No queue exists to segregate the breaking from the previously broken, so it feels terribly frustrating when tracking down such stories. It seems as if a fuse is burning toward igniting a great explosion, but I’m distracted trying to tie my shoes. I might have a few dozen choices from the search I made when I heard the first inkling, each uniquely useless in the context of those first tense minutes. I’d gladly settle for one semi-reliable voice, a familiar Walter Cronkite to clue me in, even though I would know he was in some studio far away from the source of the BreakingNews. He could deliver such information apparently unbroken, as a seemingly seamless interpretation of stuff I struggle to cobble together from my vastly better-resourced social media. This future sure seems unduly fragmented. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 02/19/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-19T14:17:30-08:00

I began following the jury trial of Meta and YouTube, who have been accused of trading in products harmful to children, from in here to out there. Out there, the world seems fairly preoccupied with presumptions about itself, notions not yet quite proven by experience or validated by science. ...I began by noting how large companies tend to come in only one of two flavors: Boobs or Sonsabitches. ... I stumbled upon a handy distinction between habitual and addicted, learning that few social media users qualify as clinically addicted. I began a probable subtheme in this series by calling out InternetSmart as a troublesome part of social media use. I ended this writing week back in the courtroom, considering the testimony of somebody who certainly appears to be a BigMan. ...This Unscrolling Story focuses on who we’ve entrusted our precious attention spans to. I reflect on how easily we handed over our valuable attention spans to tech giants like Meta, Google, Amazon, and X. At first, these companies seemed friendly and accommodating, offering free services that helped us connect with others. But as their platforms grew, it became increasingly clear that we—the users—were actually the product, our data sold to advertisers. Algorithms began guiding our every click, turning social media into an obsession and rendering advertisers ecstatic with new insights into our lives. ...Their leaders weren’t exactly benevolent, and as the businesses grew larger, they seemed to become ever more self-serving and less wise. ... Ultimately, these are the entities we’ve allowed to control our attention and, in many ways, influence our lives. Thomas Bolton Gilchrist Septimus Dalziel: Illustration of “The three sons” by poet John Moultrie (1868) — The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. ...This Unscrolling Story recounts how passing a law banning the TikTok app resulted in an uptick in its use. Scrolling has suddenly become central to our lives, with social media dominating headlines and even our president using it to spread information—often misinformation. When Congress and President Biden passed a law targeting TikTok’s Chinese ownership, it was supposed to protect national security and prevent data misuse or manipulation. ... The platform only grew more popular, and I doubt any real control is possible except individual choice—if that still exists. ... With society distracted and obsessed, it feels like we’ve become our own worst enemy, undermining ourselves more effectively than any foreign power ever could. ...The unusual crescent-shaped light in patches in the shadows was caused by the eclipse of the sun(04/1940) — United States. Farm Security Administration (Sponsor) — The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. ... The unusual crescent-shaped light in patches in the shadows was caused by the eclipse of the sun,” New York Public Library Digital Collections. ...This Unscrolling Story considers the SpecificRisks which might be associated with social media use. ...This law is supposed to make online platforms safer, but it’s clear from countless studies—some more rigorous than others—that social media is harming us, especially children. I’ve seen how kids’ attention and behavior shift for the worse, while adults, myself included, aren’t immune to increased anxiety and depression. It’s unsettling how the harm isn’t spread evenly—those who create and actively use social media tend to benefit, while passive users, often older or less privileged, suffer more. The evidence for regulating kids’ access is especially strong, and I can’t help but wonder if we’ll ever reach a point where the risks finally outweigh any benefit, leaving us to go cold turkey. ...I find it fascinating that so many of us, myself included, feel addicted to social media like Facebook, even though science says true addiction is rare. The field of social media research is barely off the ground, yet we’re already labeling and misrepresenting our experience, much as we’ve done with other new technologies. The difference between being a habitual user and being addicted is blurry; once I start calling my use an addiction, it’s harder to control, even if I’m not technically addicted. ...“…repeated social media use has introduced a much broader swath of the population to this sort of experience than has previously existed.” This Unscrolling Story speaks to the sort of learning and the kind of intelligence that social media scrolling seems to foster: InternetSmart. My compulsive social media use has me soaking up memes—those quick, visual shortcuts that feel like knowledge but lack depth or real understanding. ... Social media’s randomness means we don’t all see the same things, which only deepens loneliness and nostalgia for simpler times. I see how this widespread, memory-driven knowledge has made us more divided and less able to cope with complexity. Unknown Artist: A smart pig—Caldecott -- Farmer’s boy (1912) — The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. ...Watching the Meta and YouTube trial, I see Mark Zuckerberg playing the latest “BigMan” role, just like Rockefeller and Carnegie before him—trying to soften a ruthless image with awkward humility. It’s a bad time to be a billionaire, and Zuck’s robotic attempts to seem normal only highlight the gulf between oligarchs and the rest of us. On the stand, he claims the prosecution misrepresents things while victims and their advocates try to make him look all-powerful and indifferent to suffering. The trial feels like a performance, with the BigMan feigning meekness in the face of accusations that his platforms hurt the vulnerable. Despite denials of “clinical addiction,” the real harms and responsibility feel lost in a haze of nuance and legal maneuvering, and I’m left wondering if anyone can ever really hold these powerful people accountable. Moses King, Compiler & Publisher: John Davison Rockefeller (1899) —- Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library. ...Four hundred and fifty-three days ago, I contacted a self-publishing firm, Outskirts Press, and began the process of turning my manuscript, Cluelessness, into a published work. ... The Outskirts Press process complicated everything, for they have reduced their publishing process into a series of programmed choices featuring innumerable forms, and I’m form-phobic. They organized these forms into a system resembling one of those portals health care providers employ to prevent their patients from accessing personal information. ... Needless to say, the whole operation was under strict Pastword security that routinely left me unable to connect with whatever part of the system I’d been directed to access. ...I also insisted on my son creating the cover image, as he’d done for my Blind Men and the Elephant book. ...The final few weeks amounted to struggling over the galley proofs, a .pdf file containing page layouts displaying precisely what will be published. We tusseled over image rights, even though there are only two images in the whole work. Also, page numbering complications extended the effort by additional weeks, largely because I didn’t know how to manipulate and display the .pdf file. ...I employed Grammarly, a commercial AI-powered text editor, to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.”

BigMan

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-19T06:10:41-08:00

Moses King, Compiler & Publisher: John Davison Rockefeller (1899) Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library. "John Davison Rockefeller" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed February 19, 2026. (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/87f79b40-86d4-0131-769f-58d385a7b928) “The value of its services explains why so many use them so much, not ‘clinical’ addiction.” The bellwether trial involving Meta and YouTube eventually reached the point where the BigMan was called as a witness. Mark Zuckerberg serves as the BigMan this time, in the same role that a long succession of big men served before. John D. Rockefeller was as nasty a competitor as was ever born, though he managed to soften his image later in life, after he’d shrunken, by handing out dimes to street urchins while delivering little sermons of something he never mastered himself: thrift. Andrew Carneigy was an equally heartless capitalist before he chose to donate much of his ill-accumulated wealth in the form of libraries, generating great goodwill. Zuckerberg’s not yet achieved sufficient dottage to be seen as a benefactor, though I’m sure he contributes plenty to various charities, none of them amounting to anything threatening his personal billions. It’s a tough time to be an oligarch. The billionaire class has perhaps never enjoyed less public acclaim since the Great Depression, and even then, many fewer were injured by their studied indifference and ignorance. The masses usually feel outclassed by those assholes, not because they serve as exemplars of any particular culture but because they bring the better indifference to encounters. Zuck, according to the NYTimes reporting, has been subjected to remedial training by his beleaguered public relations department after several embarrassing attempts to come across as a regular Joe in public. His performances came across as some mix of unfeeling and robotic. He even confessed after taking the stand, “I’m actually well known to be sort of bad at this.” As a billionaire, he couldn’t appear in any but a bad guy role, so he tried to keep his answers short. Under examination on the stand, he several times resorted to the well-worn, “You’re misrepresenting this,” when the prosecutor presented evidence. None of this case seems clear and compelling, except to those who lost children to what appears to be the effects of lax policy enforcement and malign design on Meta’s part. The prosecution represents one person, now twenty years old, who complains that Meta’s apps severely damaged her. Meta responds by insisting that her lengthy and detailed clinical history shows no evidence of treatment for any social media-related difficulties. Prince Harry has mustered an activist opposition group to organize the parents who’ve lost children to social media use. He’s about as big a man as I can imagine, so as per usual, even this trial seems to pit one BigMan against another. The game, though, if any of this can be said to be or played as if it were a game, amounts to making the BigMan appear meek and much less powerful than his vitae might make him appear. To what possible use do his billions matter when compared to the calamity his products appear to have visited upon the most vulnerable among us? Juries have long histories of ruling in favor of the underdog, so the canny BigMan plays just as humbly as he can when on the stand. He can disagree with the prosecution’s interpretations. The prosecution can do everything they can to make the BigMan seem indifferently all-powerful. How callous would anyone have to be to oversee such malign influence? How much of his unimaginable billions should belong to his victims? Instagram’s chief executive testified last week that the app was never “clinically addictive,” though he admitted that social media could cause harm if used excessively. Between the clinical definition of addiction and the lax oversight of adolescent use lies a universe of nuance. The judge ordered everyone in the courtroom to remove their smart glasses in an abundance of caution that no one would be able to threaten any juror by recording the proceedings. The news coverage features those hand-drawn glimpses into the workings of the judicial system rather than crisp little AI reels designed to tug at heartstrings. Nobody knows how these proceedings might go. Zuckerberg, when appearing before Congress two years ago, was compelled to stand up and apologize to all those his apps had harmed. That image left an impression on this jury, I’m sure. The BigMan insists his company has changed since then. The value of its services, he insists, explains why so many use them so much, not “clinical” addiction. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

InternetSmart

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-18T05:32:06-08:00

Unknown Artist: A smart pig—Caldecott -- Farmer's boy (1912) The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. "A smart pig" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed February 18, 2026. (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/b197e850-c5bb-012f-0e24-58d385a7bc34) "…repeated social media use has introduced a much broader swath of the population to this sort of experience than has previously existed." Our continued compulsive use of social media probably produces several secondary outcomes. I might scroll for distraction, entertainment, or information, but once subject to so much visual and auditory experience, I very likely absorb stuff without being totally aware of what. Social media seems to have been largely constructed out of memes, imitation genes. These tend to be visual and verbal summarizations, shortcut representations capable of transferring some semblance of understanding without much in the way of scholarship or studying, resulting in knowledge perhaps best described as iconic. The goodness or badness of whatever’s so represented almost always seems obvious. Memes accumulate like strings of very limited knowledge, often knowledge without any underlying understanding. Ideas seem like things, easily, even preconsciously classified, and recalled with such immediate dexterity that they manifest without much in the way of questioning accompanying. This largely visual learning process mimics how one adopts prejudice. It begins with what only seems obvious. ... So much the better if it’s delivered, as many memes seem to be, humorously. Ironically also works, though its additional entrendé will very likely be missed by many. Sarcasm, too, tends to improve meme retention but at the cost of comprehension. Memes seem to be, preconsciously, absorbed quite literally at face value. They seem to mean precisely what they appear to say, without much, if any, ambiguity. Absorbed memes quickly solidify into fixed knowledge, typically unquestioned because their original absorption raised no critical questions. I’ll label the resulting knowledge InternetSmart, a unique sort of intelligence with which we tend to cope poorly. ...It’s comprised of concatenations of distillations, with reference and source material only rarely accompanying. This sort of intelligence is therefore terribly fragile. Within the domain from which it came, it might pass muster, but taken further afield, such as in even a slightly different context, it tends to mislead more than inform, and mislead in a truly terrible, essentially invisible fashion. ... It was knowledge swallowed whole, without much in the way of cogitation or contemplation. It’s disconnected information, resembling nothing so much as the scrolling an algorithm might produce. Conclusions drawn from iconic memory often cannot be questioned, for to question them threatens their holder’s very identity. That which was originally swallowed whole contains no constituent parts and cannot be decomposed or fascily reconsidered. It’s like something a snake swallowed. The InternetSmart have classified their world into satisfying categories. Goodness and badness seem obvious, just as obvious as stupid seems in anyone not sharing their particular set of memes. Things retain the iconic identity memory assigns, and might seem impossible to redefine. Once concluded, a concept becomes tied to one’s identity. With iconic memory, tribal membership becomes easy to ascertain, for every member sees the world through similar eyes, similar social media. The nature of social media, though, disallows groups of people from developing nearly identical internal representations. The algorithm works more randomly than that. Sure, some cult members might limit their scrolling to the official social media channels, but almost everyone’s somewhat scattered across the virtual world. This behavior might explain why scrolling social media so often produces feelings of deep loneliness and nostalgia for seemingly simpler times. InternetSmart is a savant’s intelligence in that it’s almost entirely memory-driven rather than resulting from abstract reasoning. ... It tends to be primarily focused upon a single aspect and built out from there: i.e., some self-classify as “technical” and others as “non-technical.” The specialty also serves as their proud prejudice. The technical harbor great misgivings about the intelligence of those who identify as non-technical, and even the non-technical might view themselves in an inferior light because they haven’t mastered enough Easter Eggs to smoothly navigate the great mother internet. I believe that repeated social media use has introduced a much broader swath of the population to this sort of experience than has previously existed. This might be more feature than problem, but the divisiveness in modern society seems to suggest that we’re thus far coping poorly with this introduction. I’ll be looking at some of the practical ramifications of this shift in upcoming installments. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

HabitAddict

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-17T06:42:14-08:00

Honoré Victorin Daumier: A Gentleman Who Wanted to Study the Habits of Bees too Closely, plate 6 from Pastorales (1845) "I'm just not complying with their wishes at the moment." "It is fascinating that so many Instagram users believe that they are addicted when, according to clinical criteria, the risk of addiction is relatively rare." [Anderson, I.A., Wood, W. Overestimates of social media addiction are common but costly. Sci Rep 15, 39388 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-27053-2] The science assessing social media use does not appear to have entered its infancy yet. It seems to be barely fertilized instead. Measures have yet to evolve. Meanings have not yet solidified. We are embedded within an ecosystem we failed to prepare for, indeed, one we failed to consider whether we needed to prepare for. It has arrived anyway, and we’ve already created dependencies we hadn’t foreseen or even imagined we might acquire. As usual, we’re redesigning on the fly, unable to meaningfully interrupt continued use even when we sense that might be the best response. In this world, we’re more than apt to jump to unwarranted conclusions. We’ve been busily creating misleading labels that will stick for generations, like “tin” cans and “tin” foil did. We are actively learning how to misrepresent our experience because we have no chance of properly representing it to ourselves yet. It might be best if we could just forestall concluding anything yet, to admit that the jury’s still actively considering, not yet deciding, but this has never been our way. We adopt immature technologies and design our infrastructures to solve different problems than those our experience will ultimately present to us. We will waste an inordinate amount of money and time arguing about problems that will require no resolution, like “radiophobia” in the 1920s, when people passionately believed broadcast radio waves caused illness. Social media might have more myths than facts at this point in its evolution. It will continue evolving. Typical of these effects, the above-quoted study concluded that the likelihood of a person acquiring an actual addiction to social media might typically be around 2%. The likelihood that a frequent, habitual user might self-diagnose their use as an addiction might be many times that threshold. What’s the difference between habitual and addicted? There’s the rub. The study employed the most common metrics for measuring addiction, while those self-diagnosing used colloquial terms. They felt addicted, and so they convinced themselves they were, even though the typical negative side effects of stopping use never manifested. Further, this study found that those who diagnosed themselves as addicted found it much more difficult to control their habitual use than those who characterized their use as habitual. Once they affixed the addicted label to their own behavior, their struggle came to more closely resemble an addict’s. ...Studies will continue to evolve. As organizations seek to control what sometimes seems utterly out of control, expect to see a variety of means employed, with science perhaps representing the most modest contributor. Litigation will very likely define more limits than science ever manages to discover. Insurance companies will very likely presume liabilities under some abundance of caution and seek to mitigate those perceived risks, whether or not science confirms their existence. Nations have already forbidden social media use by children, and it’s only reasonable to presume more and even broader controls will come over time, again, probably driven more by popular opinion than scientific reasoning. We’ve seen this movie before, and we know that the plot never changes and the drama never ends. I feel reassured to learn that I’m probably not as addicted to my social media feeds as I might feel, that I can act to curtail whatever I feel might qualify as problematic use. I will probably not suffer health-damaging withdrawal symptoms. No worlds will end when I suspend some social media subscription, except the largely imaginary one scrolling on my screen. The study I cite above defines excessive social media use as anything exceeding three hours per day. Whether I log more or fewer hours apparently depends upon what I prefer. Those tech billionaires might have tried to get me hooked on their product, but they’ve apparently failed. That’s not to suggest they’re not still trying. I’m just not complying with their wishes at the moment. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

SpecificRisks

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-16T05:32:28-08:00

Lewis W. Hine: Making Apparatus for Laboratory, Glass Works, New Jersey (c. 1937) "This world remains in flux." The European Commission recently found that TikTok’s addictive design appears to be in breach of the Digital Services Act, a landmark 2022 legislation designed to create a safer digital space by enforcing accountability, transparency, and user safety on online platforms, social media, and marketplaces. It mandates content moderation, bans certain targeted ads, and imposes severe penalties for non-compliance, with special obligations for “Very Large Online Platforms” (VLOPs). VLOPs can be assessed up to 6% of their total gross annual revenue for violating the Act. This announcement must have sent chills up whatever passes for spines in the Googles, Facebooks, and TikToks of this world. These findings are not based upon a single study, but upon interpretations of several inquiries and formal studies performed with varying degrees of rigor. Specific, peer-reviewed studies have not always been cited, though reputable organizations have drawn what appear to be warranted conclusions. The injuries social media inflicts have not yet been universally acknowledged, though children have already been the special focus for many, since children’s behaviors and activities might be more conveniently studied. Distraction disorders, for instance, might be more easily observed in classrooms where most children spend considerable time, in ways that adults do not usually congregate. Also, maturing brains seem to be more susceptible to influence than ones already set in their ways. Studies have shown dramatic changes in children’s behavior when exposed to such social media design features as rewards that incentivize time spent, personalized “Rabbit Holes” that entrap in harmful content feeds, pressuring, enticing, trapping, and lulling strategies to induce prolonged engagement, and the “negligible impact” of existing non-manditory or easy-to-dismiss time management tools that fail to mitigate compulsive use. Further, a study from San Diego State University and others concludes that short-form video, like on TikTok, causes a drop in cognitive focus, supporting the claim that it induces “autopilot” responses. Studies on adults seem to have made fewer headlines and led to fewer governmental actions thus far, but adults still show significant effects from social media use. Increased anxiety, depression, and loneliness, and some research even indicates causal links to decreased well-being. Using seven to eleven platforms seems to triple depression risks compared to using zero to two, and active, heavy use, especially posting, seems linked to worsening mental health, poor sleep, and even physical inflammation. These symptoms sure seem to sum up the current human condition as observed since the damned pandemic. Unsurprisingly to me, specific demographic variations seem to accompany social media use. Younger, better-educated, and white demographics might experience more benefits from social media use, while older, less-educated, or minority demographics may experience more harm, note researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Social media might prove most beneficial to those who create social media and potentially most harmful to those who more passively consume it. The MAGA cult, for instance, might be largely an artifact of these social media features colliding with demographic preconditions. Many juries seem to still be out when it comes to drawing actionable conclusions regulating adult use, with the definite exception when children are concerned. The evidence there seems compelling, if not necessarily peer-reviewed-overwhelming yet. Many people continue to research, and litigation might ultimately decide which specific designs survive. It could be that the risks of releasing social media apps could eventually exceed any possible return from their use, introducing a cold turkey society. (Shudder!) This world remains in flux. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

UnusualConvergences

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-15T05:59:45-08:00

Russell Lee: Shadows on the snow in the mountains in Bernalillo County, New Mexico. The unusual crescent shaped light in patches in the shadows were caused by the eclipse of the sun (04/1940) ...The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. "Shadows on the snow in the mountains in Bernalillo County, New Mexico. The unusual crescent shaped light in patches in the shadows were caused by the eclipse of the sun" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed February 15, 2026. (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/ba84e0f0-4993-0137-010c-2971ff3091f6) "We have become our own foreign adversary now." Scrolling has seemingly suddenly taken an historically outsized role in current affairs. Hardly a newspaper can be published without some story harkening into some aspect of social media. Our president uses his own private social media platform as the primary conduit for disseminating government information. True to its social media nature, much of that information amounts to deliberate mis- and disinformation. In 2024, Congress passed, and President Biden signed into law, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACAA). It was intended to address national security concerns regarding TikTok’s ownership by the Chinese company ByteDance. The act identified some critical risks that they insisted necessitated a forced sale or ban of the platform. Congress feared that the Chinese government might employ its national intelligence laws to compel ByteDance to share so-called sensitive personal data of more than 170 million American users, including location and biometric identifiers. Congress and the Biden administration also expressed concerns that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could covertly manipulate TikTok’s powerful recommendation algorithm to suppress dissent, spread disinformation, or influence American public opinion, particularly during election cycles. The move was seen as being part of a broader “tech war” and ongoing tensions between the U.S. and China, with officials arguing that a platform with such massive influence should not be controlled by a “foreign adversary”. Some legislators cited more immediate concerns, such as the alleged promotion of pro-Hamas propaganda and anti-Israel bias on the platform during the Israel-Hamas conflict. It’s rare that so many issues converge beneath a single umbrella issue. The law required ByteDance to sell its U.S. operations to a non-adversarial owner within roughly nine months (by January 19, 2025) or face a ban from U.S. app stores and web hosting services. The ban did not penalize individual users; instead, it targeted third-party companies like Apple, Google, and cloud providers, making it illegal for them to distribute or maintain the app. Notice how the app remains widely available. TikTok appealed to the Supreme Court, which, in January 2025, upheld the law as passed. However, executive actions and a restructuring deal significantly altered the implementation of this law. In early 2026, TikTok finalized a deal to restructure into a new majority American-owned joint venture (TikTok USDS Joint Venture) involving investors like Oracle to avoid a permanent nationwide ban. Enforcement was repeatedly delayed by executive orders from the Trump administration to allow for these negotiations. You might remember how TikTok’s chairman was invited onto the dias during Trump’s inauguration and also how he subsequently visited Mar-A-Lago. ...Arguably, the current administration’s approval of a restructured TikTok changed nothing. Its product seems even more popular than it was back when Congress deemed it a danger. ... As of early 2026, TikTok is projected to grow its user base by 17%, with an average daily use time of just under an hour per user, up from just under thirty minutes in 2019. Data must probably be available in whatever form an interested party might require. It is, after all, the most downloaded app in the world. I suspect there’s no practicable means for controlling either its use or its reach, other than individual choice, if individual choice even exists anymore. A compunction seems to have overridden a once somewhat-reliable governor on such systems. People might have once experienced occasional obsession, but not such widespread addiction-quality distraction. The age of mass distraction has overtaken us. It can’t be a coincidence that so many are litigating against so many social media firms. ... We cannot maintain innocence or inadvertent guilt in the face of such overwhelming experience. What was once perhaps an inadvertent attraction must come into question as the information repeatedly floods the headlines. I’ve become more aware of what I once hardly noticed. I actively seek alternatives instead of simply succumbing to these strange attractions. A better life might even exist in a world beyond continual TikTok videos. If the Chinese, or anybody, wants to overwhelm the culture, they need not invade. If they just stand back, we’re fully capable of invading and undermining ourselves by merely obsessing over something as trivial as TikTok videos, whoever owns the underlying platform. We have become our own foreign adversary now. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Boobs&Sonsabitches

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-14T02:43:02-08:00

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. ... Accessed February 14, 2026. (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/faee0690-c5bb-012f-199f-58d385a7bc34) "These are who we’ve entrusted our precious attention spans to." Who are these people we so easily entrusted with our precious attention spans? Most of us had no clue how precious our attention spans might have always been until technology made it practical to distract them. But even given that technology made mass distraction a practical possibility, who might find tapping into that an attractive occupation? ... Such an occupation seems to demand a certain sense of presumption beyond what any technological capability might impart. A sense of privilege and self-possession might enable one to engage in any of the snoopier professions. ... One must identify as a spy, an occupation that hardly lends itself to gentile persuasion. One lurks, often under misleading pretenses, and draws attention away from one’s actual operations. The providers of such services tend to grant themselves expansive labels: Meta, Google, Amazon, and X come readily to mind, names that provide little hint at what might pass for day-to-day operations going on under their hoods, but hint at the enormous and infallible. They seemed the very soul of accommodating at first. Heck, they didn’t even charge for their services. The typical user found a rather threadbare system that allowed easy connection with friends, family, and business colleagues. The more competitive users quickly accumulated scores of followers, but most seemed satisfied checking in on at most a few distant cousins. The services provided seemed ridiculously modest: personal profile, friends, birthday announcements. Services quickly expanded into forms of commerce, with classified advertising and bartering proving to be popular. ... The apparent users, the individuals and small businesses who used the platform as a matter of convenience before it became a necessity, were actually the product whose search patterns could prove valuable to advertisers. Data, which almost nobody used to have, came into existence and became a sought-after commodity. Every one of the advertisers’ tricks would eventually find its way into the everyday experience of each and every social media user, with no thought by the platform owner of ever sharing the proceeds of these surreptitious surveillances. The platform owners improved their services to include invisible guides. The so-called algorithms that deftly directed users’ attentions toward potentially interesting content. Those algorithms trained the users to explicitly choose their interests, better for the advertisers to survey ever more distinct demographics. Social media became something more than a handy Rolodex replacement. It became the purpose for many sessions, as check-ins lured users into wandering further afield than they’d intended. Social media grew to become the national pastime, the national obsession, the universal habit. Advertisers went batshit crazy, as if they hadn’t always leaned heavily in that direction already. Needless to say, social media companies were not populated by choirboys. ... Their revenues grew until they exceeded what any brick-and-mortar company had ever produced. They became the nearly invisible bankers and stockbrokers who controlled even public opinion through clever, surreptitious manipulation of survey data surrounding elections. They did more than host people with opinions; they attempted to become the opinion makers, transforming their users from innocent sources to explicit agents. They “weaponized” their content, withholding access to fair and balanced reportage. ... They began exhibiting most of the symptoms common to what would become known as Billionaire Poisoning, the tenacious need to turn everybody into bloodsucking conservatives. We were complicit, if only via our presence. In my vocabulary, the bigger a business becomes, the stupider it inexorably turns. ... If businesses were people, the largest and outwardly most successful inevitably turn out to be either Boobs or Sonsabitches. Which one they become might not matter, because both archetypes tend to be remarkably predictable. Of course, they tout themselves as capitalist enterprises, though they won’t always play by anything resembling free market rules. Boobs and Sonsabitches classify their self-serving acts as benevolent ones, under some inherited abiding sense of privilege the wealthiest have always possessed. What’s good for us is even better for the whole, or so their corporate mottos seem to go. The greatest error any individual can make when engaging in any commercial activity might be to mistake Boobs or Sonsabitches as benevolent entities. They are and will always remain the enemy, if not necessarily explicitly avowed. They play by rules exclusive to their privilege. ... They might consent to split some differences, but only after they’ve already covered their overhead first, their competitors and customers be damned. These are who we’ve entrusted our precious attention spans to. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 02/12/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-12T16:28:58-08:00

At the start of every writing week, I wonder what might rise to any level of importance that would warrant writing about it. ... This writing week turned out no different—a faith-based initiative executed by someone not necessarily infused with faith. I never know until I post, and often not even then, if I’m being true to my intentions and moving this curious ball further afield. I strongly recommend to anyone who might be interested that they consider becoming anything other than a writer, but if they choose writing—or writing chooses them—to befriend that urge. ...I started this writing week trying to distinguish between real and “Reel” life, not entirely successfully. I then noted that with social media, Checking In often seems indistinguishable from Checking Out. ... Next, I switched to some real-time events, reporting on Opening Statements at a real-life social media liability trial. I noted the distinction between Content and Context, an essential understanding if anyone hopes to grasp social media’s attraction. I ended this writing week noting that social media has managed to recreate our society in miniature—or expand it, in Predation. ...This Unscrolling Story acknowledges some differences between real and ReelLife as depicted in social media. I’ve always been fascinated by how representations—like art, photography, and social media—reflect and distort real life. Even though I know they aren’t quite real, I’m still drawn to them and sometimes even feel guilty about it. Social media, especially, offers quick, compelling versions of life, but I know genuine experience can’t be replaced. Still, as technology advances, it’s harder to separate what’s real from what’s represented, and I wonder if, in the end, life itself is just a collection of such shadows. Harper Pennington: Holiday festivities in colonial times; dancing the Virginia reel (1891-01-03) — COLLECTION — Prints depicting dance; Theatrical dancers in groups or more than two but not in a ballet or theatrical dance scene — Josephine Butler collection of dance prints from illustrated periodicals — Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library. “Holiday festivities in colonial times; dancing the Virginia reel” New York Public Library Digital Collections. ...“I still feel compelled to check in from time to time and seem to possess no reliable defence against Checking Out before I exit.” ...Even though I crave genuine presence, I keep getting pulled back in, unsure whether I’m truly checking in or just checking out. ...I realise now I was too quick to judge social media, forgetting how complex and layered it—and we—really are. Even when I get frustrated, I know abandoning it would mean missing out on any hope for redemption or surprise. ... Now I’m rethinking my cynicism and recognising there’s still hope and potential in these spaces I almost dismissed. Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita): than of everything (1967) — Inscriptions and Marks: Signed: l.c.: Corita (not assigned): Printed text reads: THAN OF EVERYTHING BULK RATE [stamped in black ink] © Courtesy of the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York ...This UnscrollingStory reports on the OpeningStatement in the first major trial, trying to hold tech giants responsible for hypnotising and addicting our children. It will probably be decades before anybody tries to go after them for addicting the rest of us. ...It reminds me how slow change is—just like with seat belts and cigarettes, regulation takes decades. Advertising has always tried to manipulate us, and now phones and apps have made everyone, especially kids, even more vulnerable. I believe tough regulation is overdue, but real change will be slow, and future generations may look back on our social media habits the way ex-smokers remember cigarettes. ...This Unscrolling Story finds me uncynically scrolling, hoping for reassuring glimpses of the social media I’d hoped to find. I’m following the lawsuit against YouTube and Meta, where the plaintiff is challenging the addictive design of their platforms instead of just the content. ... Thinking back, I realise the confusing, addictive context of social media was always the real hook, keeping us coming back just like in a casino. ...Being a selection of narrative poetry for the young, with illustrations by Thomas Dalziel, engraved by the Brothers Dalziel. ... Dalziel, Thomas Bolton Gilchrist Septimus (1826-1906), Illustrator. —The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. ...We tried to build a better world with social media, but ended up repeating our old predatory patterns, leaving the most vulnerable—especially young girls—exposed to harm. Despite good intentions, innovation outpaced caution, and now we’re scrambling to fix what we overlooked, realising our dreams for progress have once again produced unintended dangers. ...The AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Administration) has painted out this fence as being an outstanding type for ranch use. It keeps out predators (wolves, etc.), the wire is stapled loosely to allow for expansion (06/1941), United States. Farm Security Administration (Sponsor) — The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. ... The AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Administration) has painted out this fence as being an outstanding type for ranch use. It keeps out predators (wolves, etc.), the wire is stapled loosely to allow for expansion, and” New York Public Library Digital Collections. ...As proposed, it seems to offer little threat to our natural resources, though prior immature technologies and past unscrupulous operators have made data centers in other locations the very bane of many protestors. The Muse, one of three commissioners charged with making this monumental decision, performed her usual diligence, though few who unconditionally opposed the choice chose to contact her directly. ... What if the proposed data center wouldn’t raise residential electricity rates, wouldn’t waste obscene volumes of water, or any, and would increase the county’s tax income by nearly 50% without raising taxes for any resident of the county? ...Hoping for a more benevolent owner to build a data center seems like a hopeless endeavour, if only because there aren’t better. Huge companies, like the kind that can transform a county’s tax base, come in one of two basic flavors: Boobs and Sonsabitches. ...She’d invited some of the more vocal opponents to most new developments over to the house before signing the letter of intent, way back at the start of the process, fifteen months ago. ... Some of those people now jeer from the sidelines served via some data center or other. ... Those opposed to data centers because they encourage the proliferation of AI applications stand opposed to an apparent force of nature. ...Those who believe that I came to a different conclusion than they because I was stupid or ill-informed need a better story, as I do when I complain about those who don’t seem to know the underlying story behind this installation, which seems different, but still strongly oppose it. ... It begs for an irresolvable mystery sometimes, and a stronger and more forgiving stomach than anyone really has a stomach for, that seems for sure! I employed Grammarly, a commercial AI-powered text editor, to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.”

Predation

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-12T07:00:19-08:00

AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Administration) has painted out this fence as being an outstanding type for ranch use. It keeps out predators (wolves, etc.), the wire is stapled loosely to allow for expansion (06/1941) United States. ...The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. ... AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Administration) has painted out this fence as being an outstanding type for ranch use. It keeps out predators (wolves, etc.), the wire is stapled loosely to allow for expansion and" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed February 12, 2026. (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/f54aa060-84a2-0137-2a98-29e7943b6d77) "Our lust for Utopian futures reliably produces their opposite." In the beginning, there was a civilization aching to spawn a better one. It produced an infant with tremendous potential but carrying the same curse its parents held, for they were predatory, just as their offspring would most certainly be. Though they had long dreamed of transcending their nature to amplify their better angels, devils continued to haunt them. They had proven themselves capable of great compassion as well as appalling Predation, as would their offspring. The child seemed anything but wild at first, fragile and vulnerable, but it grew bolder as it came to cover more ground. It began in academia before breaking into commerce, then on into what it deceptively called Social Media. It remained capable of producing great goodness but often proved disappointing. ... Let the browser be wary, and they were. The children came with their innocence intact, easy prey for even the laziest predators. Always defenseless to culture, young girls seemed most vulnerable, and so the predators flocked around them. They’d stroke delicate egos and reassure, hoping to lure those girls into situations none of them were capable of imagining. The new world became a nightmare for many, a definite devil’s playground. Accounts got hacked, sensitive data swiped, and the most vulnerable paid this new piper. Whatever might have become of that new world had it been more scrupulously engineered didn’t happen. Sure, it created connections unimaginable under the old regime, but it also produced crimes equally unimaginable there, especially concerning vulnerable young girls. The platforms, as they were called, failed to create adequate safeguards. The territory they produced made the Wild West blush, or should have. ... What might have seemed a communication machine was 110% advertising. Nobody could do anything without being interrupted by some message from an unwanted sponsor. The ads were annoyingly brief, often not even allowing time to identify the product. Shady commerce dominated: questionable nutraceuticals, Midway barker-quality life hacks, get-rich-quick schemes, along with a very few familiar products. It was never clear whether there was any connection between that advertising and actual sales. It seemed impossible that there could have been, but stranger things have probably happened. New Mexico law enforcement posted a fake Facebook page for a thirteen-year-old girl, featuring a photograph of her last baby tooth and describing her first day of seventh grade. In response, she immediately received a sexually explicit message accompanied by a pornographic video. The attorney general was so shocked by the speed and depravity of the responses to this and other postings that he’s suing Facebook’s parent company, Meta, for making misleading statements about the safety of its platforms for teens and preteens. It almost seems as if it was designed for Predation. ... The outcome remains undecided, yet we each have personal experience with being mistaken for prey in our online world. Whether some troll posted disgusting pictures on your wiki page, as happened to me, or merely hacked into your email account, there’s no doubt that controls as exist in our real-world civilization simply do not exist yet in our virtual worlds. Had we been more deliberate when designing those newer worlds, we probably would have still overlooked essential controls, for they serve as the water to our fish. We have little experience designing non-predatory environments, since not one of us came from such places, which do not exist. We might have been more cautious, but innovation despises caution. That’s something we throw to the winds when we’re busy obsessing with inventing our future. Only later might we slow enough to recognize that we’ve gone and done it again, however high-minded we might have intended our invention. Then we get better at retrofitting than we ever were at original design. Yes, we will feel perpetually behind and more than a little humiliated. How could we have been so thoughtless as to leave the most vulnerable among us so unprotected? Our lust for Utopian futures reliably produces their opposite. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Content/Context

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-11T05:36:47-08:00

Thomas Bolton Gilchrist Septimus Dalziel, (Artist) ...Content: Illustration of "Contented John" by poet Jane Taylor. ...Being a selection of narrative poetry for the young; with illustrations by Thomas Dalziel, engraved by the Brothers Dalziel. 1868) Dalziel Brothers , Engraver. Dalziel, Thomas Bolton Gilchrist Septimus (1826-1906), Illustrator. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. ... New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed February 11, 2026. (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/fa2a2ba0-c5bb-012f-990f-58d385a7bc34) ..."We can't seem to stop ourselves from coming back again and again to such contexts." The plaintiff in the breakthrough social media lawsuit against YouTube and Meta, now taking place in Los Angeles, has introduced a novel approach to the proceedings. Internet “content providers” like Meta and YouTube have thus far operated under an act of Congress immunizing them from liability for content posted by third parties. Since both YouTube and Meta thrive largely as Context providers, with a few exceptions, they’ve survived accusations that their moderation excused offensive materials. The law explicitly assumes good faith moderation and that they cannot be treated as the publisher or the speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. This law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (47 U.S. Code § 230), has been referred to as the law that built the internet, for Congress created it to encourage the growth of the internet and to foster free expression. It has succeeded, though at some cost. Many have expressed frustration when platforms like X, formerly Twitter, and Facebook, published lies and hate speech before elections, proclaiming exemption due to § 230 protections. It seemed more common-sensical to moderate content, though nobody seemed able to define just where lines should be properly drawn. The result has produced what appears to be haphazard regulation, where what offends any particular one seems to get protected as another’s freedom of expression. We have our current mis-administration in no small part due to just this sort of misregulation. The novel approach our current plaintiff has employed to sue YouTube and Meta involves focusing not on protected content, but on the context they’ve provided to contain content. The plaintiff insists that their context, featuring ‘like’ buttons and infinitely automatically invoking videos, more closely resembles slot machine design. They’ve introduced some internal memos where executives argued about whether they were designing gambling equipment. One memo even discussed targeting three and four-year-olds. The defense has introduced extensive counselling records from the mysterious plaintiff, K.G.M., now a twenty-year-old. They contend that whatever psychological troubles the plaintiff has encountered can be better explained as being the result of her offline family of origin experiences. That family has apparently suffered divorce, and most of the usual troubles families tend to get into. Nobody’s digital life exists in a totally isolating bubble. The defense contends that K.G.M.’s treatment records will clearly demonstrate that social media has been the least of the problems. This case has been called a bellwether case because it attempts to plow fresh ground. The context focus seems just novel enough to perhaps sidestep § 230 liability restrictions. I suspect that many reasons might emerge to appeal any decisions the jury concludes. Everyone seems to expect a flood of class action lawsuits to follow this one, however the jury decides. ... In New Mexico, the Attorney General has sued social media for failing to protect minors from obscene material. Oakland, California, has joined with several other school districts to seek damages for the expenses they claim to have incurred helping their students recover from various degrees of what might be called social media poisoning, the effects of over-exposure to the slot machine-like context. ...I suspect that not one of us inspected the context we were immersing ourselves into when we first engaged with social media. The context seemed completely hidden behind the content, though it was, I seem to remember, context that proved by far the most frustrating of the elements I encountered when first browsing social media. I’d lose what I’d mistaken for a thread. I’d try to forward some posting only to learn that the receiver didn’t have proper permission to receive it. The rules of engagement were either never delineated or hidden down some nearly invisible rathole. The mysteries curiously kept us returning, believing that we might eventually feel as though we’d mastered something. Social media has always been, if anything, supremely frustrating to use. Perhaps that frustration was always the hook, the alluring unresolvable. Like in a casino, there’s no mastery ever involved. The context subtly compels continuing engagement even though the payoffs remain random or worse. We can’t seem to stop ourselves from coming back again and again to such contexts. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

OpeningStatements

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-10T05:24:06-08:00

"Progress moves more slowly than molasses." The attorney for the plaintiffs delivered his opening statement in what PBS described as “a lively display.” He asserted that the case is “easy as ABC,” which he said stands for “Addicting the Brains of Children.” Simple as his case might be, he was nonetheless unable to complete his OpeningStatements before the lunch break. The defense, of course, denied every allegation, and so the process began. This is how we determine reality in the twenty-first century, just the way we did it in the prior centuries, for we demand proof, not necessarily beyond any reasonable doubt, but enough to compel the checkbooks to come out and cough up. Two of the wealthiest corporations in the history of corporations stand accused of deliberately engineering dependence in adolescents. I suspect they’ll be found guilty as charged. We have always been cranky when it came to protecting consumers. Through the nineteen-sixties, one state after another followed Wisconsin’s example, mandating that seatbelts be installed in the front seats of new cars. By the end of that decade, Federal regulations made that mandate applicable in all states, but it wasn’t until after New York made seat belt use mandatory in 1984, and California followed suit in 1989, that seat belt use became required in all states, circa 2021. It took fifty years for such a non-controversial regulation to pass into actual law. How much longer might it take to meaningfully regulate social media for children, let alone adults, who, by most measures, seem every bit as vulnerable as the kids? Controversy seems to be easily amplified whenever the ox that might be gored has deep pockets. Tobacco companies stiff-armed meaningful regulation for decades while steadfastly poisoning their target demographic. Smokers were unsurprisingly militant when faced with the erasure of their beloved habit. Clutches of disaffected smokers congregated twenty-six feet from every public entrance to every building, continuing to blow smoke long after the judges and juries had made their terminal ruling. It took a few following decades before the kids stopped dabbling, though they found ready replacements in vaping and Zin. Some percentage of all corporations depend upon encouraging some sort of dependence from their customers. Those who don’t, sure wish they could, for there’s no better marketing strategy than one that ensures the customer feels compelled to continue returning. Back in the 1920s, modern public relations and advertising were created. Their stated objective was to engineer consent, and one of Freud’s nephews was perhaps the principal contributor to the founding of this now dominant enterprise. We’re subjected to scores of prompts each day. Seemingly everywhere we go, we see attempts to persuade us. In essence, each advertisement tries to hypnotise everyone it touches, to persuade them to do something the advertiser wants them to do, regardless of the individual’s desires. Of course, the advertisers insist that they’re “just” satisfying their potential customers’ wants by informing them of a choice they might have overlooked. ... They actually desire to instill a need that only they can satisfy, whether it be created by inventing some quality or by promising more than anyone could ever deliver. Those pops were never actually sweeter, and their taste was never new, and nobody could explain what it might mean for them to have been “shot with sugar, through and through.” Sugar Corn Pops® were an imaginary commodity created by engineers and sold by cynical advertisers to innocent children and their placating parents by a paragon of the modern corporation. They made billions marketing corn deliberately made LESS nutritious. Our economy seems to float in a sea of just this sort of misrepresentation. Why should social media be any different? The advertisers used to drool over the dream of one day convincing every potential consumer to carry the medium for delivering proven hypnotic advertising on their person 24/7. Technology has now delivered, sweetened, and colored by various pretexts like social media apps. What started as a more convenient telephone became everybody’s surrogate home. I need no more evidence than the fact that these “phones” have somehow hypnotized almost everyone to type with their freaking thumbs! ... The technology seems to have been designed to continuously erode our innate impulse control. We’re now one click away from virtually anything any heart could be convinced to desire, even the usurious financing required. We have almost become our nearly perfect enemy. Our kids must be even more vulnerable. So it makes good sense that we regulate social media from the bottom up. I do not doubt that the billionaire class will be found more or less guilty as charged, though they will appeal to higher courts, which will likely find some procedural errors that will further delay any significant change. France has scheduled the implementation of severe restrictions on adolescent social media use for this September, following Australia, which has already outlawed use by anyone younger than sixteen. One day, we each might find ourselves huddled like soon-to-be ex-smokers, sucking the final few ignorantly satisfying lungfuls of our long-preferred poisonous social media habit, while a new generation comprised of those who never experienced the addiction engages in some new and innovative self-destructive behaviors. Progress moves more slowly than molasses. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

GreaterThan

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-09T04:03:56-08:00

Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita): than of everything (1967) ...(not assigned): Printed text reads: THAN OF EVERYTHING ...© Courtesy of the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York "(They don't speak the language.)" I should have been more careful with how I characterized social media, for nothing was ever quite what it appeared to be. We each feature layers, each consequential but no single one ultimately definitional. We are always and inevitably a melding: yin and yang, helpful as well as utterly helpless, useless yet ultimately useful. Our nobility lies in precisely these dichotomies rather than along any margin or within any conclusion. Some days, perhaps even most days, social media sure does seem beyond redemption, yet abandoning it, even for its proven shortcomings, could only erase any possibility of any hope of redemption. Repeating ad nauseam, which might be the only way any such defensive strategies ever get repeated, creates a world of formerly hopeful alternatives, discredited in practice. We inevitably create a world of also-rans and disappoint ourselves. Hope was never intended to resolve itself. It exists solely for its own sake. Whether or not it’s ever requited surely must remain irrelevant, for other emotions and aspirations seem fully capable of filling out the palette of possible perspectives. I suppose that any actual Christian might never lose their belief in ultimate redemption, that anyone, however apparently undeserving, might forever remain capable of foregiveness. That any old anybody might ultimately prove to be a saint. It takes a seemingly superhuman stretch of any all-too-human imagination to reach such conclusions. ... They might occur more often if we held more faith in such possibilities. My social media’s blowing up this morning with reports of a genuine miracle having occurred. Had I not witnessed the blesséd event, I might feel skeptical. But I was there, watching the broadcast live, when the most consequential single broadcast I’ve ever witnessed unfolded on the screen before me. Bad Bunny, for me, an obscure figure in more modern musical performance than I’m typically interested in, made a powerful statement. His Super Bowl halftime performance was truly one for the ages. I had never before sat through a Super Bowl game. The Muse and I usually flee to the country to watch gambolling lambs on that day. This year, though, found us at my son’s place surrounded by family, celebrating the decidedly ordinary. ... I tried my hardest to perform the part of Grumps, the elder, casually watching a one-sided football game. The home team was winning from the first play. I didn’t understand a word Bad Bunny sang. His performance transcended language. It depicted a world I readily recognized as the one I inhabited, except it seemed more delighted than it’s usually depicted. It focused upon extraordinarily ordinary activities, the ones common to daily living. These seemed extraordinary when presented in this context. It was enormously reassuring, as if everything actually held the distinct possibility of ultimately turning out right. (That kid who accepted that Grammy was the one ICE abducted in Minneapolis and held in detention in Texas until a judge insisted he be returned to his family.) Every action depicted in that performance held stunning significance. The wedding was a real wedding, occurring in real time in that stadium! How fortunate I felt to have witnessed this event, especially since, had I repeated my usual choices, I would have surely missed it. Now I question my previous characterizations of my social media “addiction.” Was it ever and always as bad as I’d concluded, or had I just threatened to give up on something still filled with potential and possibility? Had I already divorced myself from it, I would have missed all the reassuring and enlivening commentary about Bad Bunny’s performance. I might have easily continued sitting in disappointed discouragement, missing an experience of genuine consequence. If this doesn’t turn the tide in the resistance, nothing can. The opposition has no notion of what’s about to happen next. (They don’t speak the language.) ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Checkiningin/CheckingOut

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-08T06:44:04-08:00

Will Hicok Low: Checking His Love Trance, a Cup He Took Full Brimm’d (1885) "I still feel compelled to check in from time to time and seem to possess no reliable defence against Checking Out before I exit." It seems to be the nature of social media that the mere act of checking in insidiously transforms into a form of checking out. All intentions aside, once inside, things naturally guide the eye to other, often unrelated, entries, before a trance completely overtakes the proceedings. I might consequently feel lucky to make it back out of there alive, though I sometimes feel as though I exclusively exit as some form of undead. Not quite dead yet, I wash up like an exasperated, if better-informed fish. I will have inevitably gained some remarkably arcane knowledge, often the kind with no obvious practical application, though somehow nonetheless supremely satisfying, as if I’d gorged on popcorn or salad dressing. My palate will feel temporarily satisfied without growing much more sophisticated. My CheckingIn/CheckingOut boundary becomes my primary dichotomy. I seem unable to maintain a stable relationship between seeking important information and settling for the barest, most useless trash. I seem to have become unnaturally attracted to every bright/shiny, regardless of its quality. The sleezy seems roughly equivalent to the consequent, so I lose my usual ability to distinguish between the two classes. My once-discriminating taste ignores textures and might even temporarily prefer a few sweet things over anything more substantial. I consume empty calories, which even seem to temporarily satisfy me, though I start feeling hungry again almost immediately. The volume of seemingly useless trivia I’ve retained astounds even me, but since everybody seems to be absorbing the self-same stuff at ever-increasing rates, I gain no real advantage in trivia games. Everybody already knows the real names of each of the Three Stooges and is also well aware of the technological advantages US troops enjoyed in WWII’s South Pacific campaign. No detail seems too trivial to become the subject of somebody’s TikTok video. Likewise, no trivia qualifies as too arcane to break the endless chain of oddly related links. Judy Garland’s half sister’s hairdresser even seems to be an utterly reasonable topic for a little forty-minute biopic. My mind juggles virtual bubbles filled with something much more vacuous than nothing. “Accidentally” leaving my phone behind seems a reasonable defence against my ever-eroding CheckingIn/CheckingOut boundaries. Same with road trips, which were once the ultimate distraction from everyday existence but have now become as close to full-emersion experiences as I seem to get. The Muse and I actually converse without one or both of our noses maintaining connection to whatever the algorythm’s serving. She asks how I’m doing because it occurs to her that she doesn’t know. We hadn’t thought to actually check in with each other, separated as we were by half a living room and different algorithms. I find her question to be bordering on the unanswerable because I’d been Checking In or Out so often that I’d forgotten to ask myself the same question. Intimacy seems an increasingly rare commodity as we spend our days immersed in the strangest sort of privacy. My security protocols ensure that nobody peeks over my shoulder when I’m scrolling, but something else prevents me from fully connecting to whatever I’m doing when I’m feeling so secure in there. I am not very often creating lasting memories. I was joking that time stands still after entering there, but that’s certainly a lie I tell myself to pretend I engage in activities of little to no consequence, when there’s quite literally no such experience. Whatever I do that I feel might be of no consequence might just be the most consequential. It might actually matter whether I’m CheckingIn or CheckingOut, or not feeling quite capable of determining which I’m engaging in at any particular moment. I still feel compelled to check in from time to time and seem to possess no reliable defence against Checking Out before I exit. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

ReelLife

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-07T02:31:51-08:00

Harper Pennington: Holiday festivities in colonial times; dancing the Virginia reel (1891-01-03) ...Prints depicting dance Theatrical dancers in groups or more than two but not in a ballet or theatrical dance scene Josephine Butler collection of dance prints from illustrated periodicals Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library. "Holiday festivities in colonial times; dancing the Virginia reel" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed February 7, 2026. (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/24c44fb0-f763-013b-db97-0242ac110002) “Maybe all life qualifies as representational, merely so many shadows on those cavern walls.” Real life has always paralleled unrealistic representations of itself. The differences were explained as poetic or metaphoric, since no mirror image can ever be true to its image’s source. The mirror fiddles with perspective, but it provides access to experiences otherwise impossible. We somehow thrive in spite, or perhaps because of, obvious imperfections. The purists among us might deride the representations as not being “real”, though they certainly inhabit a 1820s real-enough space of their own. A novel might be fictional but still adequately-enough represent its subjects. Social media’s little different, though it does prominently display some rather glaring contrasts. Consequently, it might seem utterly unique when compared with other representations in history. When photography was first introduced in the 1820s, it must have seemed astounding, though the early products hardly stood out as outstanding when compared with paintings and drawings. Photographs began as crude representations before managing to produce far superior images than those available by other means. Even then, people were clear that those images were not real in the way that their subjects were. They were borrowed or stolen, taken from their source, and still merely representations. In some ways, the ReelLife presented in social media seems far superior to what real life seems capable of delivering. Real life often produces ponderous productions that seem to take forever to deliver any point. ReelLife can present crisp snippets that deliver their gists in seconds. ReelLife is no replacement for real-life experience, but it can deliver satisfying complements. The question should never rise to the level of one or the other, for only the real could be capable of existing without the other. ReelLife, however situationally superior, was never intended to be a replacement for real-life experience. But with ever-growing technological sophistication, who doesn’t find ReelLife increasingly infringing upon the real? Life doesn’t stop when I focus on any representation. Life marches on, still evolving, while I seemingly stand aside. I might gain useful insight standing aside, or I might just manage to waste a little more of my purportedly precious time. ... Nobody spends all of every day strolling through art galleries. We at least break regularly for real meals. I might carry an inner prejudice against ReelLife. I acknowledge that its content isn’t real, yet I still feel a great attraction to its essentially illusory content. I feel weak and dirty if I indulge too openly in ReelLife. I won’t advertise or even report the hours I spent focused on representations instead of primary sensory sources. I value an hour gazing out my office window more highly than I value an hour spent gazing into social media’s unblinking eye. I imagine I’m gaining something much more valuable gazing out my window than from glazing in front of any flickering screen. ...My ReelLife isn’t going anywhere. It’s probably destined to expand its proportion of my attention span. The history of representational imagery strongly suggests that I will never completely rid myself of it, but that it will continue consuming at least as much of my attention as it ever did before, and probably more. It might be that I eventually meld into a movie of myself, projecting experience as if primary when actually representational. My experience then might not seem any different, since I’ll lack any baseline experience to compare it with. Maybe all life qualifies as representational, merely so many shadows on those cavern walls. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 02/05/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-05T14:18:12-08:00

This was the writing week I dreaded since at least Christmas, though I found ample reason to celebrate before it finished. ... I conceded this week, with the petunias still alive and roses budding, that this might actually come to be the winter where winter never visited. We’ve had a few frosty mornings, but nothing sustained enough to set our gardens very far back on their knees. ...I dabbled in a little StrategicForgetfulness, and stumbled into genuine realization by Trolling instead of scrolling my social media for a change, resulting in some serious change. I acknowledged that, however maligned, social media also provides some EssentialServices, and that I should acknowledge both its goodness and its shortcomings. I posted a mysterious story that attracted a surprising amount of attention on LinkedIn, but nowhere else, with Macrocosm, a meditation on the enduring possibilities social media continues to offer. I ended this writing week with a brief homage to the DigitalDespots, our reliable scrolling companions. ...This Unscrolling Story finds me ReadingBooks rather than scrolling through my social media feeds. I’ve been trying to spend less time scrolling social media and wondering what I might do instead. While activities like theater or reading can also distract, I realize that social media scrolling seems different—it’s endless, unfocused, and leaves me feeling scattered and unfulfilled. ...Books have actually changed my life, while nothing on my social media feed ever has. I can return to books for inspiration in ways that social media doesn’t allow. Recently, I’ve started going back to my local library, hoping to revive my old reading habits. ... I still check social media now and then, but I’m choosing to let books, not feeds, shape my days. The Belevskii-Zhukovskii Collection of manuscripts, photographs, drawings, books, and printed ephemera, Vasilii Andreevich Zhukovskii family album: Girl (Alexandra) reading a book (1846) - The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Art & Architecture Collection, The New York Public Library. ...“…forgetting my phone on purpose when I’d most often accomplish that by default.” This Unscrolling Story finds me engaging in the most successful Unscrolling effort so far, fueled by some StrategicForgetfulness. Despite my best efforts, I find it nearly impossible to stop scrolling—unless I accidentally leave my phone behind. Recently, forgetting my phone forced me to disconnect, and I ended up reading and feeling more present. I’m starting to see that strategically forgetting my phone might be the best way to break the scrolling habit, and I’ll gladly claim this forgetfulness as wisdom. ...“Her influence seems as eternal now as the Yew, and as paradoxical, too.” This Unscrolling Story finds me grateful that I spent some predawn time scrolling or, more precisely, Trolling for information I desperately needed to stumble into, proving that Scrolling can sometimes prove essential. Today marked the painful anniversary of my daughter Heidi’s suicide—a day I’ve dreaded for four prior years, knowing it would always bring sorrow. Recently, a friend encouraged me to celebrate her life rather than mourn her absence. I learned that February 2, the day she died, carries deep symbolism in both Christian and pagan traditions as a time of renewal and hope, which fits with our family’s own “Lamb Looking Sunday” tradition of searching for signs of spring. Heidi’s struggles with chronic pain and unsuccessful treatments led her to despair, ultimately, to her taking her life with yew needles—a plant rich in paradoxical symbolism. I wasn’t able to be with her at the end, nor at her funeral, because of the damned pandemic, and that feeling of distance and loss lingers for all of us. Today, I honored Heidi’s memory by tending a fire, clearing clutter, and finding meaning in the traditions and discoveries that eternally connect us. Through this, I choose to celebrate the lasting impact of her life, as enduring and paradoxical as the yew. ...This Unscrolling Story tells of my recent revelation that scrolling provides some EssentialServices and isn’t all evil. I began this series with what turned out to be false assumptions, but I now realize that’s part of the process—every serious inquiry starts with partial truths and evolves through discovery. Writing about the supposed evils of doom-scrolling, I expected only to confirm its harms, but found instead that scrolling can sometimes offer unexpected insights and even Essential Services. My experience yesterday, sparked by random social media browsing, brought me a new perspective on grief that I never could have planned for. ... While I’ll still criticize scrolling when it deserves it, I’m also willing to acknowledge its surprising usefulness. We can’t undo our place in modern life; sometimes, even our so-called vices have value. ...This Unscrolling Story finds me uncynically scrolling, hoping for reassuring glimpses of the social media I’d hoped to find. Social media started as an expansive idea—one meant to connect everything—but over time, it splintered into parts, often hijacked by cynics for profit and manipulation. Social media, once full of promise, now often feels like a tool for division and repression, though its original idealistic DNA still lingers beneath the surface. Each platform only poorly reflects the whole, and our constant exposure to these fragments can leave us disillusioned and addicted, repeating empty patterns. Yet, sometimes, even in the midst of cynicism, genuine moments of connection and hope emerge, reminding me of what social media could still become. I realize that perfection was always a flawed goal; what matters are the choices we make and our capacity for wisdom over cynicism. ... As I doomscroll, I search for those glimpses of hope and idealism, and on good days, I even manage to find them. ...While we have the right to speak, we also have the responsibility to be careful—digital despots are everywhere, and caution seems essential. ...No scenario now exists that will allow us, tucked away in this lovely valley they named twice, to avoid an even more severe drought than we experienced during last year’s severe drought. These events compound upon each other as we start out this year even drier than almost any prior year, so even if we receive the same stingy volume of moisture we received last year, which could happen, we’ll end up with less usable water than ever before. ...Those of us who firmly believed we were learning anything from our experience feel betrayed to discover that way too many continued to insist upon ignorance as their sole imperative, albeit steeled with what they must have believed to be redeeming faith. ... Even when caring seems determined to tear out our hearts, we must care, we must continue caring, and even probe ever deeper into these voids because nobody else will. Those indifferent to absolute insanity will not be any more okay than the rest of us, who still feel vulnerable to its viciousness. ...I employed Grammarly, a commercial AI-powered text editor, to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.” ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

DigitalDespots

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-05T05:58:48-08:00

Albrecht Dürer: The Desperate Man (1515–16) "There seems to be few viable alternatives. Caveat emptor here." Was it always the case that the exercise of free speech rights attracted dedicated despots? This seems to be the case with our ‘internets.’ That space seems brimming with budding as well as practiced despots plying their slippery trade. The ratio of authenticity to absolute bullshit seems impossible to assess, but the presence of despotism there seems, finally, to be a given. It’s not just the Russians playing poltergeist, either, but what might appear to be upstanding business and political figures. Who isn’t suspected by someone? Whose motives are pure? The chief difficulty of any free speech medium might be that it encourages people to speak freely rather than circumspectly. Free speech has never been the same as loose talk, and social media seems to tolerate altogether too much loose talk. Is this the proper price for this franchise? The greatest gift The Gods gave humans was the blesséd inability to read each other’s minds. We were born blind to much of what inescapably lies behind much of what constitutes our presence. We might be mostly cardboard cutouts of ourselves as far as most others are concerned. Our spouses might get deeper glimpses, as might our coworkers after many years, but we, gratefully, largely remain sphinxes to each other as well as to ourselves. We do not require access to anything even vaguely resembling whole truths, let alone much in the way of anything buts. We are generally shy and retiring about most things, or at least we were before we started accessing social media. Suddenly, we began contributing to keeping public diaries. Comments we once reserved for only our own eyes started creeping into our feeds, which didn’t seem all that public at first. We had no idea of the reach any posting might achieve, mostly because reach was out of our control. The medium seemed to have a silent mind of its own, which determined who might access and where it might be served. It was all just so much magic. It mostly didn’t matter. The cynical hadn’t taken over at first, though they were frantically accumulating the means by which they might control the meta-narrative. Like all despots, they sought to manufacture their own truth first lest more authentic varieties render their scam toothless. We were easily scammed. We still believed in the existence of benevolent billionaires. We trusted in the deep-down decency of most of the people in this society. We acknowledged the theoretical existence of a very few very bad actors without really believing they might be targeting us. The Steve Bannons earned millions teaching the feckless how to more effectively lie to us. An underlying ecosystem emerged, built on the foundation of falsehood. A subculture grew, dedicated to undermining decency for fun, profit, and inhumanity. Its titular leader was even elected president, then elected again, on a platform misrepresenting whatever he actually stood for. Nobody knew and never will. We hold the absolute right under our constitution to say whatever we think, but we also hold a sacred responsibility not to say whatever we think. Social media enables us to share thoughts better left unthought, let alone widely shared. Yes, we’re scared and seeking allies. The strangers we meet on social media streets are not lost puppies needing shelter from a cruel and indifferent world. Some are operators who know how to pull your strings and push even the most sophisticated of us into shady endeavors. We are accompanied here by DigitalDespots, that’s just the way it is. There seems to be few viable alternatives. Caveat emptor here. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Macrocosm

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-04T06:03:52-08:00

Lucas Kilian: Second Vision, from Mirrors of the Microcosm (1613) "On my better days, I catch reassuring glimpses of it." In the beginning was an idea, a concept expansive enough to encapsulate everything. As that idea spread, it began decomposing into constituent pieces, not because these were necessary, but because each represented choices, and because they seemed to better serve somebody or some constituency. The cynical, as they often do, eventually co-opted the more idealistic. They insisted that a system capable of connecting could easily accomplish division. ... They encouraged shady operators to promote patent medicines and conspiracy rumors, certain to attract and entertain the least discerning. ... The most progressive invention in the history of humanity became the primary engine of repression. Social media retains the DNA of its hopeful founders, though its stewards long ago largely chose cynicism because it offered greater revenue potential. Have we forgotten the originating whole? ...Each platform serves as a microcosm of the originating Macrocosm’s whole. Unlike a conceptual microcosm, though, each platform poorly represents the whole. We’ve easily mistaken some part as representative of the entire potential, when it most certainly doesn’t. ... We catch ourselves contributing to what we never wanted, seemingly addicted, endlessly repeating meaningless memes. A few reassuring results emerge, even from the most cynical swirl. Minneapolis seemingly spontaneously organizes against cynical oppression, which can find no effective defense against such seamless opposition. The kind of communication originally envisioned by the idealistic founders suddenly seems capable of saving our beleaguered democracy. The Macrocosm speaks a universal language transcending distracting quibbling. Those who came to believe that reality was theirs to represent however they chose will lose to those who came to know better. Propaganda could never replace the obvious, especially when amplified innumerable times. The few who said they knew better, who flooded the “inter-tubes” with their cynical blather, collected their meager thirty pieces of silver and purchased cybercredits. They became masters for a second of a disappearing universe. As the first generation of suckers passed, the next generation became more circumspect. They’d seen what happened when their parents swallowed cynicism hook, line, and sinker. Their offspring found reason to feel more hopeful. The first iteration of perfection tends to fall the furthest from the ideal. Further attempts might tighten up results a bit, though perfection eventually loses its appeal. ... Better to use material for what it’s capable of producing instead of getting too awfully tangled up pursuing ideals. The choices in any Macrocosm sum to infinity. No failure, however catastrophic, proves fatal to the remaining potential. We properly iterate and come to understand the essential difference between cynicism and wisdom. We are the ones chartered to choose. We do not need to take any offering on its face value. We can make acceptable what first seemed fake. We can render any authentic unacceptable by the choices we make or those we allow others to cynically make for us. Social media might be a minefield now, but it retains its potential. The originating ideal also retains its appeal. No, we have not yet so mortgaged our future and experience that we’re doomed to become as cynical as the current losers became. ... It seems most attractive before it becomes physically interactive. It’s built on bright ideas destined not to work nearly as well in practice as they seemed they would in theory. Heaven help those who choose to try to govern their society by cynical means, for they will find the true price of the liberty of choosing to lie to themselves. Before the truth sets anyone free, it first must have its way. It will sit you down and insist that you choose. I doomscroll seeking glimpses of the idealism I know must be lurking in there somewhere. On my better days, I catch reassuring glimpses of it. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

EssentialServices

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-03T07:10:22-08:00

Mieko (Chieko) Shiomi, George Maciunas: Water Music (1964) "Scrolling can serve some incredibly useful purposes, sometimes even EssentialServices." I sincerely apologize for starting this series under what I should have known would turn out to become false premises, but each of my series so far has eventually stumbled into this same realization. I might conclude that non-false premises can’t coexist with serious series writing, since some of their purpose should rightfully and properly remain in actually discovering something. I couldn’t have known precisely where the falsity might emerge, only that it would inevitably emerge and, in doing so, turn me into, if not a liar, then a perveyor of partial truths. Absolutists, those who only peddle in complete truths, might not actually exist, so at least I might consider myself in reasonably good company. If my purpose was to discover something, I required some partially-baked basis upon which to initiate my search. The issue might never be whether premises prove to be false or not. It might be better understood to be about what one does with their inevitable discovery that they were pursuing a partial lie. Unscrolling serves as a good enough stand-in for an example of this principle in action. I began writing about the presumed evils of scrolling, specifically doom-scrolling social media. It had become a bit of a problem for me and for many, many others, so I figured I might learn some non-obvious something about the business if I focused my attention on it for a quarter. I proceeded to mostly badmouth the practice, alternatively pretending that I was not as addicted as I was and flaunting some of that addiction’s products. I never plagiarized, but I leveraged plenty. I was never alone in my inquiry, for there were many engaged in trying to comprehend what seemed to so easily engage so many. The practice revealed many facets. My revelation yesterday, which I barely hinted at in my Trolling story, discovered what I might label as EssentialServices. Not only has scrolling not turned out to be nearly as distracting as I’d initially feared, but it also held potential I’d hardly considered. I have long argued for the necessity of some access to some sort of random divination process. Manipulate the yarrow sticks, deal the deck, not to predict the future but to perhaps gain some insight. Tarot provides no magic beyond the perfectly ordinary kind, that which offers some alternative framework within which to interpret. Synchronicity might be more feeling than substance, certainly not a repeatable process. It just proves useful when some usual interpretation flags. Yesterday, as a result of Trolling my social media, I discovered an entirely fresh meaning for what I expected would have to be a repeat of my previous grieving. I hadn’t wanted what I discovered. My notions of what might have constituted a resolution for my grieving problem had absolutely nothing to do with what emerged. I was open to discovering something while plugged into a system that seemed to emulate random selection. The usual collection of largely irrelevant postings summed into an insight for the ages. It might be that too tightly focusing upon finding such resolutions effectively prevents them from emerging from the ether surrounding us all. It might be that we hold too tightly to what we already know, searching for validation instead of even necessary revelation. We might have all the tools required to utterly reframe any unfortunate circumstance if only we could somehow lose our laser-like focus and innocent insistences. If only. I must now consider the goodness in the obvious evil, lest I leave my best intentions behind. I must acknowledge that I have ready access to such vast resources that they blind me to their subtle significance. I busted through so much unfinished business yesterday, after the sun rose on ample justification to celebrate instead of grieve, I felt like some sort of superman.—Don’t be concerned, I will not be donning any Spandex® as a result of this experience, just softening my focus.—I intend to vilify scrolling when it needs vilifying, and I also intend to embrace its attendant usefulnesses. We are moderns, however unsettling that realization might feel. We do not have the option of undoing even a millimeter of our forward evolution, not even the ugly, unfortunate, seemingly backsliding bits. Scrolling can serve some incredibly useful purposes, sometimes even EssentialServices. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Trolling

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-02T06:30:57-08:00

"Her influence seems as eternal now as the Yew, and as paradoxical, too." Today is the day I’ve been dreading since at least Christmas. For the last four years, I have anticipated this day with deep gloom, recognizing that there would be no way to sidestep the experience. It would come, wreaking havoc, then depart, leaving me worse for the experience. This seemed to be my curse, since this date will forever be the anniversary of my darling daughter Heidi’s suicide. Speaking with an old friend a week ago, I recounted my dreary January experience. He advised that I find some way to celebrate on that day. ... February’s full of celebration days: Groundhog Day, Fat Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, and Presidents’ Day. It’s Black American Month, too, and Heidi was always touting how she was a citizen of the world, not merely an American. Now, she’s a citizen of the universe, and her presence continues to stick with me, her family, and her many colleagues. ...That she chose February 2 to depart this realm struck me as painfully ironic, for it seems to be the date that celebrates the promise of resurrection. I learned while scrolling, just this morning, that in the Christian tradition, this date has been celebrated since sometime in the fourth century as Candlemas, the date Jesus was first presented in a temple. I had never noticed, but it serves as the date halfway between Christmas and the Spring equinox, and so might be considered the first harbinger of Spring returning. That Groundhog might predict when Spring will arrive, but regardless of that prediction, Spring will come in six weeks. ...Pagans, unsurprisingly, also celebrated this day as Imbolc, which marks the start of spring. In that tradition, seeds start sprouting underground, even though snow might blanket the ground. They tidy clutter and light a small fire and candles. This celebration focuses on cleaning up after Christmas and preparing for the upcoming Spring. In my family, we practiced our annual pagan holiday on Superbowl Sunday. That being a day when the roads were relatively bare because everyone was partying somewhere, we’d toodle down into the Willamette Valley when Heidi was small to look for the surest sign of Spring of them all, newborn lambs. In both Candlemas and Imbolc, lambs featured prominently as symbols of innocence and rebirth. Our Lamb Looking Sunday tradition remained in our family even unto the year before Heidi’s death, and remains to this day. I remember toodling down 99W past Union Mills and finding one of the grandest expanses of sheep meadow we’d ever found. We pulled into a ditch, then spent the longest time watching in rapt wonder and amazement at the acrobatic antics of that year’s batch of newborn lambs. ...Heidi had been suffering from a series of what might be labeled female problems that sparked some unsuccessful exploratory surgeries. These had left her increasingly discouraged and in pain, which, if she took medication to dull, it disabled her ability to do what she did for a living: simultaneous translation. ... She grew convinced that she suffered from a condition American doctors don’t recognize, though it’s successfully treated in much of the rest of the world: mini-hernias. In the weeks before she departed, she tracked down a specialist in Los Angeles, who connected her to a specialist at OHSU in Portland, who hesitantly agreed to perform an exploratory surgery, though she didn’t believe in the mini-hernia theory. She performed that operation in December without finding those mini-hernias, and through the following deeply disappointing January, Heidi apparently concluded that she would never move beyond the pain and humiliation her condition induced. Her doctor had started suggesting she should consult with a psychiatrist. She left without telling anyone where she was going. ...The instrument she chose for the task was the yew plant, a common enough, highly toxic evergreen shrub. Both Druids and Christians view Yew as a sacred plant, symbolizing rejuvenation: eternal life, resurrection, and the soul’s journey, and also paradox. ... Heidi drove into the Cascade foothills, where she gathered and ingested Yew needles. As she grew woozy, she phoned her mom in a panic, complaining about feeling weird. Her mom immediately dialed 911 and left to get Heidi’s husband, Pablo, and drive to that spot in the foothills. She arrived after the first responders, who had already removed Heidi from her car and were working on her in an adjacent ambulance. ... Heidi died while they stood helplessly beside the ambulance in the rain. I was a million miles away in Colorado, under Covid lockdown, and unable to return for her small funeral. Her survivors still feel abandoned, and we always will. We will still go lamb-looking again this year. I will build a small fire and burn some candles today, and deal with some clutter I’ve been accumulating since before Christmas. This Unscrolling Series is halfway finished today, a day I will deliberately frame as a Trolling Day. Today, I celebrate the product of my early morning scrolling, my Trolling for some reassuring meaning, where I stumbled upon both the previously unknown to me Candlemas ceremonies and also the equally obscure Imbolc traditions, which so comfortably seem to encapsulate my family’s longstanding Lamb Looking practice. Had I not been scrolling … er, Trolling for something this morning, I would not have stumbled upon the clues that might enable me to find some reason to celebrate instead of hopelessly grieve my grievous loss today. I’ll light a fire and roast a leg of lamb, dispatch some clutter, and share some supper with The Muse, grateful that Heidi was born. Her influence seems as eternal now as the Yew, and as paradoxical, too. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

StrategicForgetfulness

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-02-01T06:10:49-08:00

"…forgetting my phone on purpose when I'd most often accomplish that by default." However I might try to slice the challenge, Unscrolling still seems difficult. It carries the usual difficulties associated with trying not to do something, a philosophical impossibility if not necessarily a physical one. It might just as well be impossible for all the success I seem to engender whenever attempting to accomplish it. Not even my very best intentions, freshly shaved, showered, and dressed in clean jeans, seem capable of succeeding very often, and even then, it seems more accidental than intentional. Still, I accept accidental as a valid tactic, except I cannot will an accident any more than I seem to be able to not do something as seemingly innocuous as scrolling. ...Hopeless or not, I don’t seem to yet be beyond leveraging my budding forgetfulness towards this end. If I were to forget my phone, I would lack the means to scroll anything until I returned. A lack of opportunity has probably prevented more felonies than all the discipline in Christendom. What if I could strategically engineer absences of opportunity? How might that be as a strategy for me to at least accumulate some otherwise absent Unscrolling experience? The beauty of this strategy lies in the fact that I do not need an ounce of discipline for it to succeed, other than that moment of forgetfulness when I might accidentally or even deliberately remember. Once I’ve left the mothership, I’m gone until I return. I know a bit of how that first astronaut felt when he engaged in that unteathered Extra-Vehicular Activity. He crossed a Rubicon, uncertain if he could ever return. He might have volunteered to participate in his own demise. ... Only the suddenly unknowable future could know, and only will know then. I told The Muse that I was heading out to see if I could get a haircut. It was a foggy Saturday afternoon, and I was between obligations. I slipped into some outdoor shoes and hopped into the Schooner. I was more than a mile away before I noticed that I hadn’t plugged in my phone. I was a little farther afield when I discovered that I’d apparently left my phone at home. ... What if The Muse tries to connect with me? What if she needs me to pick up something on my way back home? After a few frantic thoughts, I felt something snap inside my head. I’d brought a book to read during the inevitable wait. ... Chances are, The Muse would not even notice I’ve gone until after I return. Further, I’d lost the ability to scroll while waiting. My forgetfulness had taken that threat out of my hands. ...I was home fifteen minutes after I’d left. Even then, I didn’t rush into the house to hunt down my phone. ... I sat and read, as I’d planned to read while waiting my turn in the barber chair. It was at least another hour before I felt compelled to check in on what was happening out in the world. My ability to engage in instant communication doesn’t mean I’m required to engage in it. It remains as optional as if it were impossible until I feel the necessity of engaging in it. When I was a kid, I never felt the urge to initiate instantaneous communication, and not only because it was not yet possible. Some doubtless suffered from an unrequitable urge then, and some might today when separated from their sacred damned communication instrument. I hope to become sanguine, indifferent when I strategically forget to bring my phone along. I’m not so important that I need to stay in continuous contact. Continuous accessibility seems to be more in the way of a problem for me these days. ...I figure that a man of my age and stature might conveniently integrate forgetfulness into my daily routine. I sense that it might even be integrating itself, without me having to necessarily instigate anything. Time mediates all afflictions, albeit ironically, by inflicting additional afflictions to ultimately undermine whatever’s troubling. Scrolling might become a self-correcting problem, or come to seem self-correcting, anyway, especially if I come by the strategy honestly, the old-fashioned way. I can inflate my waning self-esteem by insisting I’m engaging in a strategic ploy, forgetting my phone on purpose when I’d most often accomplish that by default. ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

ReadingBooks

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-31T06:30:54-08:00

The Belevskii-Zhukovskii Collection of manuscripts, photographs, ...Girl (Alexandra) reading a book (1846) The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Art & Architecture Collection, The New York Public Library. "Girl (Alexandra) reading a book" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed January 31, 2026. (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/0a3ba380-6a47-0135-7c5f-1dfb8ba095ee) "I will revert to the literary for a change." ...If I’m dedicating myself to at least reducing my scrolling, to what might I reasonably assign the time I gain from the shift? Modern life has always insisted upon some attention being directed toward visual engagement. This might include anything from theater to ReadingBooks, but are either of those occupations really any different than scrolling? I mean, they can both serve as distractions and might well become problems if over-engaged in. ... Television, in its infancy, was feared for its addictive trance-inducing qualities. Theater, too, might serve as an escape from rather than into anything useful. I contend that scrolling social media serves a unique and as a uniquely dangerous purpose, wholly unique from any of its analogue precursors. ...Social media scrolling seems to be an infinite activity. ... One inevitably enters into the middle of something to find they’ve missed the start. In this sense, scrolling always carries a sense of playing catch-up, and a kind of catch-up, one eventually finds, that cannot be resolved. One thing bleeds into another, and though one might have entered with some definite intention, the swarming distractions often leave one stumbling for any exit, having forgotten why they entered. Maybe you were seeking information about that big snowstorm back east, but ended up stumbling upon a video of some sovereign citizen’s arrest for driving without a license. When did that become a thing of interest to me? An hour later, I’m no wiser. ReadingBooks seems much more intentional. The very nature of a book tends to focus the reading experience. Unless one is skimming through an encyclopedia, the pace of ReadingBooks seems relatively ponderous, leaving adequate space to actually ponder. My mind wanders when ReadingBooks. It might manage to maintain adequate focus to make progress through the material, but I’m also more aware of my physical surroundings in ways that I never seem to maintain when scrolling through social media. I feel much more present and accounted for, even when I’m just tearing through some second-rate detective novel. I sense my boundaries expanding when I’m ReadingBooks, as if I’m inhabiting some places I’ve never physically visited. Social media might provide a window through which I might witness fleeting experiences, while ReadingBooks provides a more convincingly immersive inhabiting experience; it’s expansive. ...I cannot claim that anything I ever saw on my social media feed changed my life. I have shelves full of books that permanently shifted my focus. Furthermore, I’m capable of returning to revisit those sources in ways that social media never allows. Social media scrolling enforces the separation between self and experience. ...I have returned to my local library since I started creating this series, figuring that I might rekindle my old, pre-social media reading practice. I’ve long insisted, as many better writers had before me, that ReadingBooks seems to be the single most important contribution to any writer’s education. Well, that and the essential New Yorker subscription. ReadingBooks recharges whatever spring original writing flows from. It’s not plagiarism or in any way mimicking when a writer finds encouragement or inspiration in another’s writing. Perhaps we find reassurance that what we’re doing might eventually amount to something besides random collections of phrases on pages. Social media seems much more like that random collection: entertaining, but toward what end, to what beneficent purpose? I return the latest pile of books to my local library triumphant, feeling as though I’ve genuinely accomplished something. I’ve probably influenced my writing engine in the process, too, and feel wealthier for the experience. I immerse myself in the promise of the Recently Acquired shelf to find a few old friends, one I’d completely forgotten existed. I check out my upcoming experiences, then return to The Villa warmly anticipating becoming productively and enjoyably distracted from my social media feeds. I won’t completely forget to check my Facebook and my email, but that effort won’t so dominate my upcoming days. I will revert to the literary for a change. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 01/29/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-29T17:07:11-08:00

I wish every writing week would leave me feeling as though I’d discovered as much as I managed to stumble upon this writing week. ... I show up, mustering some hope for the best, and I feel genuinely blessed when my gumption’s rewarded. ...As I’ve delved more deeply into the notion of Unscrolling, I’ve discovered as many redeeming qualities as damning ones. Unscrolling seems like a one-sided objective now, perhaps a part of a resolution, but very likely not anything like the full resolution for anything. I cannot just cease scrolling and expect to advance much, just like with every negative-space objective I’ve adopted before this one. ...I noticed that scrolling fiddles with and fuzzes my InHere/OutThere boundary, sometimes replacing me with some alluring, masquerading projection of me. I reported on A Curious Case … of social media denying my requests, an increasingly common if unsettling experience for me. I questioned whether I really need to accept the incivility that social media induces in me and others, and I started to imagine an alternative I call OutCivility as a present possibility for how I might choose to engage. I caught myself labeling the social media context as one that keeps me enmired in endless Dooming, even though I know there’s room in me for more generous and hopeful interpretations. I ended this writing week reporting on what I see as the first of probably dozens of Civil-Liability lawsuits that I expect will be brought against social media purveyors for dealing in addictive products. I’m grateful you’ve followed along with me as I’ve been feeling my way through all of this. ...This Unscrolling Story characterizes scrolling as just a current form of Tarzan’s old JungleTelegraph. I compare Tarzan’s jungle uproar—a web of animal warnings only he can fully decode—to today’s social media storm feeds. ... I’m captivated by it, even when the storm won’t affect me, because it revives my old thrill of feeling prepared and slightly smug. In my constant scrolling, I recognize a primal hunger for information and take comfort in feeling wired into this vast, mysterious chorus—reassured simply by knowing that, somewhere, Tarzan’s on the move again. ...“I seem satisfied to accomplish no more than to gape at shadows playing on some utterly imaginary wall.” “I seem satisfied to accomplish no more than to gape at shadows playing on some utterly imaginary wall.” I’ve realized that social media can trick me into feeling more present in the virtual world than in my own real life. When I get absorbed in scrolling, I neglect everyday responsibilities and avoid genuine self-reflection, comforting myself with a shared, superficial sense of connection. Stepping away to do something physical and tangible—like cleaning up my driveway—reminds me what it feels like to truly inhabit my own life. When I stay anchored in my inner self instead of mistaking the online world for my real one, I feel more grounded, capable, and present. ...This Unscrolling Story finds me fruitlessly searching for stories I know were posted, but which social media renders inaccessible. ...As her influence grew and her voice felt ever more essential, Facebook made her—and even my own posts—harder to reliably find, hiding current content behind a confusing, seemingly arbitrary feed. I don’t know whether this behavior is intentional or just “the algorithm,” but it’s maddening. ... I’ve started to see this as a kind of social media Stockholm Syndrome: I keep returning to platforms that frustrate and obscure what I’m looking for, endlessly posting and scrolling in search of a completeness that never really comes. ...This Unscrolling Story describes what happens when civility outs itself in social media contexts seemingly built to transmit outrage. ...I’ve realized that social media doesn’t create incivility; it magnifies the impulse I already have to lash out, judge, and spread outrage. Simply leaving Facebook wouldn’t solve this, because the real issue is how people—including me—behave in crowds and echo chambers. My response is to practice what I call OutCivility: quietly choosing restraint, decency, and the decision not to pile on, even when I feel provoked or justified. Often that means not commenting at all and remembering I’m here more to witness than to reform everyone else. ...By holding onto it, I feel I’m doing my part to keep things from sliding even further out of balance. ...This Unscrolling Story reports on the ever-burgeoning Dooming industry, seemingly the only part of our economy thriving under this administration that steadfastly refuses to administer anything. I’ve watched a thriving Doom Industry grow alongside the internet, where rumor, innuendo, and partisan misinformation—especially from conservative media—have turned ordinary social media use into nonstop doomposting and doomscrolling. Platforms like X and Trump’s Truth Social pump out lies and conspiracies that dominate the tone of online communication, making it feel like we’re inevitably headed for disaster. Even though scrolling could, in theory, be neutral, the constant flood of apocalyptic content traps me in a doom loop where simply checking in leaves me feeling anxious and hopeless. It’s getting harder to see anything positive online or to justify trying to spread joy when the medium itself feels like a killjoy. I say I want to “unscroll” and step back, and I long for a virtual world where I can safely connect with others without being hammered by doomsaying that risks becoming self-fulfilling. ...This Unscrolling Story reports on what might mark the start of a new social media era, with a Civil Liability suit going to court in California. ...I’m watching what could be a turning point for social media: a young woman, who started using major platforms as a child, is suing tech giants, claiming their apps addicted her and caused severe mental health and body-image problems. Her case is being framed like the Big Tobacco lawsuits, with internal documents suggesting companies knew their products were harmful and addictive for kids but pushed them anyway. ...I’m struck by how children already know terms like “body dysmorphia,” while the platforms insist their products aren’t harmful—despite evidence to the contrary. I can’t quite picture what life after addictive social media might look like, but I’m reminded of how radically smoking changed once courts held tobacco companies liable. If juries start awarding big damages here, our relationship with social media—and the products themselves—could shift just as dramatically. Part of me hopes we might one day be ex-scrollers, more reflective and less compulsively distracted, if cases like K.G.M.’s really gain traction. ...As winter descended into parts of this country more accustomed to spring in January, my corner continued to experience drought and spring-like weather. ... This world has proven herself more fickle than anyone imagined, threatening to deny simple water to a small, beautiful valley completely dependent upon snowfall. ... We fear what we likely won’t sense, even in the unlikely event that the worst happens. ... Not one of us has ever proven to be omniscient, though our social media seems to insist that some of us can predict what has never yet happened before. ... I wish I could know what comes next until I more deeply consider how much I enjoy being surprised. I employed Grammarly, a commercial AI-powered text editor, to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.”

Civil-Liability

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-29T05:54:21-08:00

Winslow Homer: Jurors Listening to Counsel, Supreme Court, New City Hall, New York (published February 20, 1869) "Stay tuned. We all might end up on the payday side of some future class action." This week, in January 2026, marks the start of what might prove to be a new era in the history of social media in the United States. A civil suit brought by a 20-year-old woman, identified as “K.G.M.”, who created a YouTube account at age 8, then joined Instagram at 9, Musical.ly, now TikTok, at 10, and Snapchat at 11, finally comes before a jury. Her lawsuit claims she became addicted to the social media sites as a child and experienced anxiety, depression, and body-image issues, including attempted suicide, as a result. TikTok and Snap, the parent company owning Snapchat, settled with the plaintiff before trial began. The remaining defendants will claim protection under a federal shield law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, that has thus far protected them from liability for what their users post online. K.G.M. seeks monetary damages and will reportedly present a case based upon similar arguments that resulted in huge settlements against Big Tobacco in the 1990s, when companies like Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds were accused of hiding information about the harms of cigarettes. Those suits resulted in over two hundred billion dollars in fines, a ban on cigarette advertising, and a dramatic reduction in the number of people who chose to smoke. The New York Times reports that documents showing concerns expressed among the cited social media companies’ executives will likely be presented as evidence that the defendants knew their products were addictive and posed risks to target user groups. This suit serves as the first of more than ten filed, but yet to come to trial, in California. Recently, Australia banned the use of any social media for its citizens under the age of 16. School districts in this country have increasingly banned the use of smartphones on school property, responding to growing evidence that social media use proves to be at least distracting to achieving their educational mission. Observers have commented that the threat of monetary damages and the nature of civil suits give plaintiffs an advantage when presenting their cases to juries, who have proven much more likely to award damages when corporations are characterized as having inflicted harm. “In 2019, Meta removed some Instagram beauty filters that made users look as if they had undergone plastic surgery. Internal documents showed that in 2019 and 2020, Meta executives emailed Mr. Zuckerberg, asking him to reconsider a plan to restore those beauty filters. The filters were known internally to lead young users, particularly girls, to body-image issues. One executive said her own daughter had suffered from body dysmorphia. The filters were still restored.” Social Media Giants Face Landmark Legal Tests on Child Safety, New York Times, January 27, 2026 I spoke with my 4th-grade granddaughter about this case, and she proved aware and shockingly conversant about issues like body dysmorphia. She had learned about this in her school, whose district has restricted cell phone use by students. School districts are reportedly preparing lawsuits as well. It appears that the social media giants might be forced to shift their focus. Of course, they have very deep pockets and have hired the best litigators to defend their position that their products do not produce the effects they obviously produce. Who are we supposed to believe, Zuckerberg or our lying eyes? I struggle to imagine the effect of findings that hold these giants responsible for these effects. It seemed unimaginable back before the states brought those cigarette suits against the tobacco giants that the cigarette business could ever be different, but once they were held accountable, they changed, and we changed, too. Addictions only ever become choices when viable alternatives become recognized. We remain easier victims as long as evidence remains in the realm of accusations. Once a jury transforms anecdotes into facts, perhaps not beyond reasonable doubts, but, as with all civil suits, facts enough to justify hefty payouts, choices change along with the products offered. We might have always been fully capable of healing ourselves, but the addition of a few hundred billion encouragements floating around has, in the past, opened significant ground. What will our society become once we become ex-social media scrollers, no longer lurking just outside public buildings, surfing sites like smokers used to flock when trying to respect the legislated safe distance between smokers and the public? Will we no longer see people reflexively drawing their phones upon exiting to check into their own continuing hyper-personal distraction? Will we become more reflective instead, holding thoughts in our heads instead of instantly sharing what we barely even know ourselves yet? Our world could be dramatically different, though I can’t predict how it might be then, or how I might become. The most radical evangelicals have used the inherently abusive nature of social media to the greatest destructive end. It would be a godsend to erect some barriers to undermining civilization via social media addiction. We’ll have to wait and see if K.G.M.’s suit gains any traction. I suspect that this sort of suit will come into popular fashion. Stay tuned. We all might end up on the payday side of some future class action. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Dooming

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-28T07:00:55-08:00

Sir Edward Burne-Jones: Perseus and Andromeda, study for The Doom Fulfilled (1875) "Dooming seems to inevitably become self-fulfilling." As our economy slumps, one segment remains robust. The Doom Industry has been achieving new heights monthly, as each successive performance outstrips the previous. The market for handbaskets has likewise proven robust, with demand up and supplies reduced in each of the prior twelve months. Both the doomposting and doomscrolling segments of the industry have been thriving, thanks in no small part to our administration that continues to steadfastly—some suggest valiantly—refuse to properly administer even the smallest functions. No analyst needs to dig very deep to find reinforcing data. Every headline, as well as each obscure footnote, screams demise. If only we could tout such performance from the balance of our economies. Unfortunately, we cannot. The Doom Industry grew in parallel with the internet. It relied upon vast networks of connected computers sharing rumors. Curiously, the net volume of information fell in each quarter following the introduction of the earliest social media applications, replaced by rumor and innuendo, each of which quickly proved much more popular and powerful than even the most truthful rendition of any actual action. Conservatives seemed most adroit at manipulating this emerging communication form, supposedly because their belief system had always relied upon the spreading of poisonous misinformation. From creation to salvation, conservative media became the masters first of what we now label Doomposting, and ultimately, went on to encourage and pretty much dominate Doomscrolling, too. With Musk’s purchase and rebranding of Twitter into X, and the founding of the oppositely labeled Truth Social, a crude but remarkably effective conduit for fresh, unfounded conspiracy theories confounded less reactionary heads. Truth Social, owned by our very own inept incumbent, has become the de facto outlet for government pronouncements, even though few actually subscribe to it, and it repeatedly proves to achieve only insolvency. It persists on the thin gruel of cruel misstatement and ugly innuendo, and ranting that should properly convince any witness of the instability of their author, our hapless incumbent again. Only he could turn the government’s primary information conduit insolvent. At least he succeeds at something. This underlying context, rooted in deliberate lying, intended for fun and profit but producing only insolvency, suddenly sets the tone for much of the entire internet communication industry. Glaringly false Truth Social posts encourage both supporting and digressive resonance across all social media platforms. People predict with ever-increasing vehemence the desperate need to stock up on handbaskets because it sure seems to almost every observer that we’re definitely bound for Hell for sure this time. This ever-increasing death rattle results in rattling more than the markets. It further encourages predictions of doom. I mean, the likelihood seems obvious. Generous interpretations of current events go more than begging; they essentially disappear from what passes for the airwaves. Scrolling social media might at root be a value-neutral activity, neither a net positive nor negative influence, but sprinkle those streams with endless doomposting, and scrolling inevitably turns into doomscrolling, regardless of the intention when engaging. We seem to be trapped in a doom loop, where mere inquiry can send the strongest of us reeling. It’s become increasingly tough to find the pony in the internet’s stall, and many have been considering just throwing in the whole connected-to-each-other towel. It hardly seems worth it to expend our energy to even try to spread some joy when the very medium we employ has turned into a perennial killjoy. I claim to want to actively engage in Unscrolling, but I’d prefer my virtual world to feel safe to connect with others again, without doomsaying innuendos endlessly disrupting the attempted conversation. Dooming seems to inevitably become self-fulfilling. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

OutCivility

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-27T06:05:10-08:00

Retrieved from (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/baced180-c607-012f-777f-58d385a7bc34) "Civility can only be meaningfully measured in eons. ...Perhaps the major complaint I hear against social media in general and scrolling in particular harps about the incivility found there. People, freed of face-to-face constraints, speak altogether too freely, as if civility didn’t actually matter, as if the rules of engagement had suddenly been suspended. ... We do do that to each other: sister to brother, neighbor to neighbor, stranger to stranger. Who hasn’t failed to catch themself before committing some public truth probably much better left unspoken? Who hasn’t had to crouch way down, failing to avoid some judgmental frown, or been the source of the same aimed toward some other sinner, as if they’d never failed in public themself. We seem to have known no shame when we shame, to alone stand innocent of anyone’s blame. The primary criticism of social media might be that it too effectively amplifies our hypocrisy. Leaving Facebook won’t cure this because Facebook was never the cause. It served as a temporary space where anyone might publicly lose face. We’re each prone to lose control, especially when we’re surrounded by others exhibiting even less control than we feel we possess, which might well be much less than we’d wish for them or for ourselves. The seductions seem endless, but then we’re in a context where we might be influenced by any random presence. One individual acting up can utterly shift a context. Those even temporarily lacking firing discipline can watch themselves engaging in unimaginable abominations: Buying into ungenerous insinuations. Reposting some hyperbolic criticism without first checking its source. We each contribute to the echo chamber we also endlessly refuse to recognize our contributions to. ...Civility might have been intended for deployment between more than merely the already civil. It might even be most effectively deployed on the street, where it might appear to belong to a distinct and underappreciated minority. Perhaps that minority status serves as the deeper point of civility. It might not be the sort of thing that wins the most votes. Incivility seems to have always been the crowd pleaser. ... A choice made for something other than gaining popularity points. One made expressly not to disappear into a predictably unruly crowd. Not deployed as a snide criticism. Not to masterfully silence anyone or to put anyone in their rightful place. In practice, OutCivility seems like something designed to encourage something almost opposite to popular support. There are no contests to determine who encourages the most civility. It’s neither a spectator sport nor a spectacle. ...It might be that we best retain who we were supposed to be when we’re the most outwardly civil, with ourselves as well as with each other. When we’re not even thinking about trying to score points. When we’re merely tacitly decent. Not trolling for recognition or appreciation, when we’re not trolling at all. Civilly scrolling entails much not commenting, choosing instead in each borderline insensed instant not to comment, not to set the original poster or follow-on commenter straighter, as if to finally set the world right. It might be the dog that doesn’t bark or bite. OutCivility might be ninety parts forbearance to ten parts acceptance, the belief that we’re mostly here to witness rather than to reform. OutCivility certainly takes on some of the greater challenges, but usually more effectively than by storming another castle with pitchforks and torches, however justified that action might seem in any moment. I remain outraged, just as many of the most prolific social media creators seem to encourage, but I am not about to lose my hard-won and hard-held civility in response. I do not consider either inciting anger or casting stones to be particularly reasonable responses. I know the opposition holds even fewer scruples than I can imagine, and that they consider civility to be a potentially dangerous contagion. Why else would they so fervently invite people to lose their cool? Cooler heads almost always prevail, but only after the hotheads fill the headlines with incivility and outrage. ... I am steadfastly maintaining what might ultimately bring the mess into better balance. The shelf life of social media outrage gets measured in seconds. Civility can only be meaningfully measured in eons. ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

TheCuriousCase...

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-26T06:29:01-08:00

Honoré-Victorin Daumier: The Print Amateur [L'Amateur de Gravures / Les Curieux à l'Etalage…] Alternate Title: The Curious at the Display (c. 1855) "A marriage created in purgatory." During The Damned Pandemic, I discovered Heather Cox Richardson’s reassuring voice. In daily “letters,” which she posted to then-budding social media, she debunked the craziness espoused by the then-inhabitant of the Oval Office. I found her to be quietly reassuring and authoritative. She brought her deep understanding of history to the party, usually leaving me feeling better oriented as to how my situation fit into broader historical contexts. She became irreplaceable. With that incumbent’s surprising return to elected office, her voice took on fresh vehemence, since said incumbent immediately set about trying to make America Stupid Again again. He has been failing, in no small measure because Ms. Richardson continued providing relentless historical context. She became a superstar, publishing an immediate bestseller and continuing her almost daily canvassing, promoting her perspective, which increasingly seems to become our perspective, too. If the incumbent was the voice of insanity, she became the voice of reason. Her anger and reassurances were mine, ours, and her presence took on fresh significance. How did social media respond? By transforming her reliable postings into intermittent ones. I found that I could not rely upon finding her latest when I logged on in the morning. Not even formally following her there relieved my frustration, for I found that I could muster up a roster of her postings, but they would be served up sorted randomly. Not even the Lord seemed able to find her most current posting. Sometimes, it would rise to the immediate top of my feed, but increasingly, it became impossible for me to find, however I might try. It became clear that the social media server, Facebook, in this example, was deliberately obscuring her postings. Nothing else could explain my experience. Looking deeper, I found the same principle at work with every poster, even my own work, which I steadfastly post each morning. She has a private Facebook group, as do I, but even when “pinning” a post as “Featured,” group members cannot expect a chance of seeing my latest, just like I cannot rely upon accessing hers. This might seem to be ACuriousCase… were it not the absolutely common surrency of this particular realm. Why would any self-respecting platform deny its users access to its most popular products? Some blame The Algorythm, that handy catch-all, indefinable. This explanation seems similar to accusing demons or poltergeists. It’s impossible for me to conclude that this state of affairs must be intentional. What Facebook gains from such obtrusion escapes my imagination. Some conclude that Zuckerberg actively sabotages anyone’s feed who disagrees with his political positions. With millions and millions of active postings, how would it even be possible for such a nefarious strategy to even be possible? I don’t know. Let’s just refer to this as TheCuriousCase…, because we cannot know for certain what might constitute the actual explanation. It’s damned annoying. Heather Cox Richardson and I have both been parallel posting on SubStack, which doesn’t provide access other than a thoroughly humiliating if normal Pastword security regimen. SubStack doesn’t deliver in the old familiar timeframe, though, with Heather’s postings appearing to lag way behind what I’d earlier grown accustomed to. I cannot say that she, I, or anybody has been uniquely identified for special abuse. I can insist that this is just how social media works. I keep coming back, hoping for better treatment. I earlier concluded that my continued returning, and yours, can be chalked up to cases of Stockholm Syndrome. It might be that social media’s unique attraction comes from the personalized-seeming abuse it doles out to anyone even attempting to keep regular scrolling habits. The pursuit of completeness seems to require continued unrequited posting that, curiously, only encourages ever more scrolling in search of a satisfaction seemingly deliberately withheld. A marriage created in purgatory. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

InHere OutThere

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-25T05:21:15-08:00

Thomas Nast: Out of the ruins... ..."I seem satisfied to accomplish no more than to gape at shadows playing on some utterly imaginary wall." Social media scrolling fiddles with the In Here/Out There boundary. Firmly focusing on the media via any device induces a convincing illusion of In-Hereness. It sure seems then as though the real world—by which I refer to the flesh and blood world—was Out There and the distantly disembodied virtual world was the more intimately personal one. This effect might amount to little more than a figure/ground misattribution if it weren’t for the broader and deeper ramifications stemming from this situation. I guess that video games can induce the same effect, where their user inhabits the projected world more confidently than they inhabit their own body. Normal activities of daily living might go begging in favor of feeding the non-sentient presence. Schools have begun confiscating students’ cell phones in acknowledgment of just this influence. For whatever reason, virtual existences seem to be terribly attractive in ways that can ultimately prove to be self-destructive. The self in this face-off voluntarily surrenders to its virtual counterpart. Whatever the physical or psychological justification the user might pose, this ceding of personal presence should alarm anyone accessing social media. The presentation seems to be such that we have no clear defenses against its brand of hypnotism. The experience seems to be self-reinforcing. Chores might back up without really registering. Unfinished business might become overwhelming, which, alone, might further justify retreating into that more comforting illusory world. We lose the notion that we’re not interacting with the world at all, but with clever projections of that world. Our eyes might even favor the fictional version since it omits many of the more unsettling externatities. There’s no heavy lifting involved in social media scrolling. If it becomes momentarily boring, one can just scroll on to the next in an infinite series of alternative points of focus: each new and strangely familiar, too. ...becomes a meaningless inquiry in the social media world. One need never confront anything approaching serious introspection. ... Every “user” belongs to an invisible community, bound together by shared perspective. It’s as if they all share the same narrow peephole through which they feel free to interpret whatever’s presented. The theatrical nature of these performances easily disappears in the face of all of the familiar plot twists. Heroes and villains, angels and devils, each perform true to their roles. ... We feel as though we are ever more intimately connected to a world that steadfastly, if subtly, excludes our physical presence. We revel in this sensation. ...Last Fall, I stayed ahead of the leaf fall by continually mulching and raking, and cleaning up. But then, a furious windstorm passed through, as it tends to every year, leaving a mess just as if I’d never once even attempted to stay abreast of the work. I admit that I could more easily face my social media queue than I could slip into my overalls and clean up that resident eyesore. Yesterday, I finally escaped the social media world to inhabit my own side yard for a spare half an afternoon. The world seemed bright, even given the late January light. ... I disappeared those errant leaves and left the driveway demonstrably better. I left myself better, too. My social media somehow survived my absence and even seemed indifferent when I showed little interest in catching up to whatever I’d missed when I later returned into the house. I had reset my In Here/Out There sense, with preference toward what was real for once. Since I set my iPhone to greyscale, its tractor beam attraction has lessened. The foggy overcast, typical January weather here, encourages deep, almost smothering introspection, but I should not mistake social media scrolling for introspection. It’s clearly an Out There activity rather than an In Here one. When I can be clear about the distinction between these two, I seem to function better in my real world. Hell, I don’t even have a real world during those times when I innocently commit another terrible misattribution. ... When securely anchored within, I can take myself anywhere without losing addressability to the me I know inside. When I mistake Out There for my In Here, I don’t seem to go anywhere. I seem satisfied to accomplish no more than to gape at shadows playing on some utterly imaginary wall. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

JungleTelegraph

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-24T07:02:24-08:00

Israhel van Meckenem the Younger: Wild Men Climbing to the Flower of Love (15th-16th century) "What harm could it possibly do to learn that Tarzan's on the move again?" Somewhere within every Tarzan movie ever made, some group would go on the move. Background jungle sounds would increase, but not so much that any non-native would notice. Every inhabitant seemed to get involved. Elephants would trumpet and monkeys chatter, lions would roar, and alligators splatter. The purpose of the commotion would be a form of primitive communication that seemed to transcend language, for every animal: human, hippo, and reptile, seemed perfectly capable of passing on the message, which would remain deeply encoded. Tarzan, of course, having been raised in the jungle, was perfectly conversant, so he could translate. He knew, for instance, when the bad guys began their inevitably failing pursuit because his animal allies would keep him informed. When he’d swing off on his conveniently separated vine highway, word would spread so his passage wouldn’t surprise anybody but the bad guys. Our social media serves as our JungleTelegraph today. It involves ten thousand and more voices, each with its unique perspective, though the canny native can more or less successfully decode each, even though many won’t have much in the way of identifying markings. Scrolling to gather additional information about this weekend’s massive winter storm, I encountered dozens of StormTracker presentations, each claiming to be the best source for up-to-date information, though none of them came date or time-stamped, except for a note disclosing how long ago they were posted. They might have been created days before, but the moment posted starts a counter that serves as the only hint as to when they might have then been current. The source is rarely mentioned, though I learn from experience which one originates in the Blue Ridge and which in Texas. Each carries more or less the same warnings, only slightly adjusted for local conditions. Some warn of dangerous ice while others focus on wind chills. I learn that it’s universal that nobody really knows how to drive in blizzards. The best advice usually amounts to ‘stay home’ and ‘don’t drag your bar-be-que rig indoors, no matter how cold it gets inside after you lose electricity.’ Everybody will seemingly lose electricity. Most broadcasts include the obligatory shots of the empty shelves at some hapless Walmart. Some show heavy machinery loading salt onto the back of plows. Each invariably includes a multi-color weather map showing the differing kinds of precipitation expected. I cannot get enough of this stuff. My desire for the latest information knows no limit, even though I’m one of the few who will not be touched by this history-making confrontation between primitive forces and what passes for civilization. I miss the drama of it, that sense that I managed to get ahead of it for once. The self-satisfaction from knowing that I snagged two bags of ice melt before the hordes descended. My deep larder always left me feeling smug then, pitying those poor souls who relied upon store-bought, freezer aisle fare. I was always unquenchable then, even when all I had was the near-constant blather of a single local television weatherman. I’d sit rapt before the television, as if absorbing absolution, preparing myself for a catastrophe that would very likely manage to miss me again. I’d step out every hour or so to scrape off the accumulated snow so that I wouldn’t be left with some two-foot drift to plow through. I’d always feel on top of the world when snowed in. A very large part of the attraction scrolling feeds into for me must be this apparently innate need for even vacuous information in the face of some budding potential catastrophe. Most of the data doesn’t really concern me, yet I consume it hungrily, as if I couldn’t possibly be satiated by it. And perhaps I can’t be. This might be a large part of the attraction. Maybe I just marvel at the contraption, where hippos and alligators join the spoonbills and monkeys to pass on what might prove to be critical information. It soothes something inside of me to sense that I’m a part of something as rich and mysterious as a JungleTelegraph. What harm could it possibly do to learn that Tarzan’s on the move again? ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 01/22/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-22T16:42:45-08:00

This writing week found me even more fully engaging in the curious occupation of Unscrolling. I began the week KillingTime, an activity I characterized as sometimes necessary, perhaps essential. I next noted the Spurious Premises social media offers, though they sure don't seem all that spurious when I encounter them while scrolling. I noticed and reported on how scrolling seems perfectly suited as an activity for the Powerless, and that, perhaps, it's "just" a symptom rather than a problem. I then declared the enormous difference between simply ceasing and genuinely Desisting, insisting that desisting often proves impossible. I introduced the Witness/Participant balance, which seems currently out of balance to me. I ended this writing week insisting that scrolling social media amounts to spying on myself. Thank you for following along as I try to understand this obsession we seem to so vehemently rely upon. ...This Unscrolling Story identifies a context within which scrolling seems acceptable, perhaps even necessary. ...I arrive ninety minutes early for a chamber music concert, and realize my mistake and retreat to my car with time to kill. As I huddle in the driver’s seat scrolling on my phone, I reflect that not every moment of life seems necessarily precious, that some time feels like surplus that can be legitimately “killed” or given back. After tossing away forty-five minutes in distraction, I return to the venue feeling lighter and reset, fully ready to enjoy the music. I conclude that, just as one can drown in too much water, one can be smothered by too much time, and that deliberately wasting a little of it can sometimes revive something essential. ...This Unscrolling Story investigates the Spurious Premises that commonly underlie (with particular emphasis on the lie) Social Media. I argue that social media runs on SpuriousPremises: headlines lie, stories collapse into ad farms, real information gets buried, and “engagement” metrics mostly con, designed to fool advertisers. I see myself as a deliberate exception—reluctantly on SubStack, refusing to advertise or obsess over stats, and unwilling to pay for subscriptions or apps that hide and creep their charges. For me, social media feels like endless first acts with no endings, watched while wading through septic fields of other people’s waste. I insist that this same spurious ethic has bled into government—especially among “Repuglicans”—who advertise the opposite of what they deliver and then act offended when reality-based people object, while the offline world still mostly resembles what it claims to be. Artist unknown [spurious signature of Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322), dated 1301]: A Hunt in the Mountains of Heaven (Late Ming /early Qing dynasty, 17th century) ...This Unscrolling Story considers the deep sense of Powerlessness Social Media seems to elicit. Social media offers a powerful illusion of connection and influence, especially for those who feel powerless, because it allows criticism, outrage, and performance without real-world risk or responsibility. ...I notice that using social media—especially since the pandemic—has steadily eroded my sense of hope and agency, feeding a constant sensation of powerlessness in the face of scandal and idiocy. When I step away from this, I briefly regain a sense of personal agency and a more hopeful outlook, realizing that it’s not just my own weakness at work; the medium itself seems to have been structured to generate and amplify powerlessness. ...This Unscrolling Story explores the curious nature of its own objective, which I’ve defined only in negative space. ...This Unscrolling Story reflects on “Unscrolling” as a “negative space” objective—one defined only by what it wants to eliminate, not by what will replace it. At first glance, simply stopping a behavior seems easy, but there’s a world of difference between briefly ceasing and truly Desisting, which means sustaining that absence over time. Using quitting smoking as an example, I insist that it’s not just the act but the surrounding habits and comforts that leave a painful void. Any routine we stop carves out a divot that demands a replacement, and creating that new, tangible pattern proves to be far harder than just stopping once. In the end, I argue that goals framed as pure absence are inherently difficult: nobody can successfully build a future on what isn’t there; One needs a real, sustaining presence to keep any old behavior from returning. ...“…what once seemed fair enough and fairly well balanced now sure seems fairly poorly balanced.” In this Unscrolling Story, I feel fated to be forever catching up, formed by a world that no longer exists. Once, life held a clearer balance between participating in events and merely witnessing them; now, with television, smartphones, streaming, and social media, that balance has tilted hard toward passive observation and vicarious living. I recall when major events like the moon landing were experienced communally and felt personally real, compared to today’s isolated, feed-based witnessing. Yet I refuse to simply blame technology, recognizing that my own choices—then with the “boob tube,” now with social media—have helped shift me from participant to spectator. I wonder whether something essential gets lost when secondary and tertiary experiences drown out primary ones, though I admit this might just be my ever-advancing age talking. ... From my aging vantage point, what once felt like a fair witness/participant balance now seems skewed and poorly balanced—though it might, I concede, always have been thus. ...This Unscrolling Story characterises our social media scrolling obsession as a game of Spy Vs. ...I describe how Congress banned TikTok over ByteDance’s surveillance of Americans, only for a second Trump administration to refuse enforcement, profit from a forced sale, and leave TikTok more entrenched than ever—its spying unchecked and the law effectively gutted. From there, I argue that scrolling itself makes us complicit in a “perfect crime”: mass, invisible data theft that leaves no obvious wounds and thus no mass outrage. Responsibility doesn’t stop with Trump or Congress; it extends to every user who keeps tapping and swiping while claiming addiction or compulsion. A few TikTok stars get rich, while the rest of us become cannon fodder in a quiet war against our own interests. I conclude that, in practice, we seem to prefer cat videos and surveillance to actual freedom—rewriting the old slogan as “Live Surveilled or Die”—and that we probably deserve the consequences of that choice. ...This writing week unfolded in the context of an emerging New World Order. ... Distractions seemed to naturally overwhelm any primary perceptions, just like social media scrolling. This week seemed to echo the world we live in, one that has forgotten many of our most hard-won lessons. ... Those of us accounting for the vast majority who have been acculturated to an old status quo find even the vaguest hints of a replacement status quo inherently unsettling. ... So, it’s particularly unsettling when some Jahu attempts to undermine our hard-won inheritance with the rough equivalent of obvious absurdity. ... Those who played hooky when those lessons were taught cannot insist that our history was never present, but merely some perverse story, however they might insist. Such seems to be the birth of a New World Order. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Surveillance

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-22T03:26:08-08:00

Simon Guillain: "A famous spy!," plate 77. Series/Book Title: Cries of Bologna [Una spia famosa] (17th century) "We probably deserve anything stemming from our sorry reasoning." In late April 2024, President Biden signed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, a bill passed by both houses of Congress in response to the abuses of TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance. The Act insisted that the company had systematically spied on American citizens, using TikTok as its medium of intrusion. The Act banned TikTok in the United States after January 20, 2025, the date of Trump’s second inauguration. The Trump administration refused to enforce the law as one of its first formal acts, later forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok in a transaction from which Trump was reported to have profited. Consequently, TikTok has gained even greater presence in our social media environment, without reassurances that it won’t continue its Surveillance on American citizens, and without an ounce of enforcement of the provisions of that act of Congress. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of our national scrolling habit might lie in this underlying, corrupting quality. To scroll social media is to accept complicity in what will probably later be “discovered” to have been the crimes of the century. The crimes committed inflict no immediate damage. They seem exclusively insidious, invisible in the instant of commission, and ongoing. Whether “merely” gathering demographic data or tracking individual users’ location changes, no fingerprints remain once the treasure has been lifted. Performance doesn’t necessarily degrade when the theft begins, and won’t improve after successfully completing any extraction. The corpus remains invisible to the soul it was extracted from, and nothing remains to point fingers or bring indictments afterwards. This amounts to a perfect crime. We need no more evidence to conclude that our incumbent is complicit in these crimes. Congress remains complicit, too, for they could have mustered some enforcement mechanism after the non-administration refused to enforce their law. Indeed, the decision not to enforce should be on the ever-lengthening list of impeachable offences committed, though it, sadly, pales in comparison to the many other entries already on that list. Indeed, I and everyone still scrolling through their social media, might also be indicted, for by accessing TikTok, we’re violating not only a Federal law, but a perhaps more important social rule. We’re burgling our own security, complicit in the crime, perhaps liable to serve some time, though we suspect that outcome could never happen. It probably won’t. But because of this single act alone, we demonstrate our lack of fealty to the law of this land. Our own corruption reflects our apparent lack of discipline. We can plead that we just couldn’t help ourselves. We experienced a compelling, undeniable urge, the alternative of which felt as threatening as death to us. We could not forbear our fingers from logging in so that we could peer into that dark mirror again and see ourselves in stark reflection, masquerading as the stars in our very own personal cat videos. Yes, there apparently are TikTok millionaires, people who post on that platform and somehow manage to eke out a spare personal seven-figure income as a result. The rest of us are cannon fodder in a war we can’t seem to perceive being waged in dark earnest against our best interests. We’re willing allies to the forces arrayed against us. We plead addiction, obsession, or overwhelming compulsion, but we’re nonetheless entertained. We have conveniently forgotten all the sworn testimony that translated into a rare two-house majority voting to ban the application from operating against our citizens. Then, in a genuine act of Stockholm Syndrome, first the president and then the citizens rose in opposition to those who had imposed security on us. Frankly, it appears that we’d rather watch cat videos than live free. That old Revolutionary War slogan needs some amending for modern times: Live Surveilled or Die. We encourage and support the spy rather than rely upon our own resources to provide entertainment. We probably deserve anything stemming from our sorry reasoning. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

WitnessProtection

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-21T06:18:11-08:00

"…what once seemed fair enough and fairly well balanced now sure seems fairly poorly balanced." I might be destined to play catch-up for the rest of my life with little hope of actually catching up to anything. I hold the sorry distinction of having imprinted on ways of existence that no longer exist, and very likely will never exist again. I, myself, am not yet obsolete, but many of my understandings and coping mechanisms have definitely gone the way of the goony bird. I remember, for instance, a certain balance between my role as witness to these proceedings and my role as a participant therein. In those days, I achieved balance through much more participation than through witnessing. Witnessing was more of a passing part of my existence. I was much more of a participant. Television, of course, steadily eroded the historical boundary between participant and observer, even more determinedly than had radio before it. I remember my elders warning me, much as I later warned my own progeny, that they were in danger if they spent too much of their potential participatory time decomposing, witnessing in front of the boob tube. The phone in each of our pockets makes the old black-and-white boob tube look absolutely brilliant, and our early witnessing in front of it seems downright participatory in comparison. Before streaming, everyone had to tune in together to take in a spectacle, so our witnessing then would today seem like no more than a mildly disconnected form of participation. The evening when man first walked on the moon was more like attending a performance than merely witnessing from a distance. ... The event was massively communal in a way that nothing comes close to matching today. Now, we’re closeted witnesses, clearly not in any way even distantly participating in what we witness. We live more vicariously now than we ever imagined living before. Historical events felt personal when they occurred instead of like distantly disembodied reportage. I was actually there when that first step was taken on the moon, and I had a roomful of witnesses with whom I could validate my experience. Events seem to occur at greater distances now. I can’t say that this change consequently qualifies as bad. It doesn’t necessarily suggest that I should invest heavily in handbaskets. I am not doomed due to my witness/participant balance shifting so far to the left. I remain free to engage in any number of activities, and I am not yet enjoined to have to witness anything I don’t choose to see. If my witness/participant shift has a cause, it’s in my own hands and has been largely a matter of me choosing for myself. I might argue that certain conditions more or less forced my hand, but I know the truth. I am long-familiar with the enemy. I know him to have always been me. If I want a different witness/participant balance, that choice remains in my control. Much in the same way that I once avoided homework in favor of watching the latest episode of “My Mother The Car,” I still choose perhaps the greater of two evils when tempted to engage with my social media feeds. The boob tube might have become smaller and more personal, but I’m still the boob. Ancient Greeks probably railed on their children about the dangers of watching too many performances rather than engaging as actors in the plays. Without primary experience, the secondary experiences merely witnessed might well lose some of their impact. Representations of roses carry no scents at all other than those dredged up from memory of some prior primary experience. An out-of-balance witness/participant boundary seems destined to undermine some significance, though that might just be my antiquity speaking. I do not know for certain whether an optimal witness/participant balance even exists, though I can swear that I sense an encroaching absence with the growing presence of secondary and tertiary experiences outweighing primary participation. Rome was not built in a cave. It might be that the future I will never witness will not remember there ever having been anything even remotely resembling a witness/participant balance. It might be that humanity’s future was already destined to be increasingly lived vicariously, and that this constitutes positive evolutionary progression, survival of a different fittest. I feel fairly certain that the way I live would have both delighted and disgusted my forebears, who somehow managed to thrive long before boob tubes had even been imagined. ... Absent readily accessible caverns, we today have handheld machines capable of standing in for them. We can seemingly access the world while securely sequestered within our closets. One day, we may choose to simply forego primary existence in favor of some exotic flavors of virtual experience. And we might be better as a species for that. Far be it from me, an increasingly ancient ancestor of my present self, to declare whether there will still be a Hell then or even a need to frantically purchase more handbaskets. I can only say that what once seemed fair enough and fairly well balanced now sure seems fairly poorly balanced. ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Desisting

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-20T06:16:15-08:00

Image Design for a Poster, Wagenaar’s Cantata ‘The Shipwreck’ (1899) "Ceasing's relatively easy. Desisting's inevitably difficult and often impossible." Unscrolling belongs to a rather unique class of objectives, the Negative Space ones. Each features the character of nonexistence as its premise. They never aspire to attain or acquire, but to rid themselves of something. What might precisely replace that unwanted element never gets mentioned in its title. These provide no hint, not the barest clue of what might do as a replacement for the unwanted element, just that its purpose extends no further than elimination of that space presently containing that unwanted item. In our case, through this series, I’ve labeled our negative space objective “Unscrolling.” Notice how it declares only what it doesn’t want. It wants to undo scrolling, whatever that might entail. The most curious property of every negative space objective might be its apparent, even obvious simplicity. What could possibly be more straightforward than eliminating something? One must simply, as countless court injunctions have insisted, cease and Desist. This pair initially seems more redundant than they prove to be in practice, for ceasing turns out to entail one thing, while Desisting includes considerably more. Ceasing merely involves stopping, while Desisting insists upon persisting that stopping ad infinitum, that is, to not merely cease, but to continue ceasing into and beyond the foreseeable future. Ceasing seems more like holding breath, while Desisting tends to feel more like a death, a permanent condition rather than a temporary cessation. Desisting turns out to more closely resemble a permanent condition. Permanence requires some sort of sustenance, something to maintain its state of, in this case, absence. It seems when proposing some negative space objective that success should prove nothing if not straightforward. How much simpler could accomplishing a simple suspension prove to be? It’s not as if anyone has to actually do anything to achieve success, except that it always turns out to be trickier to do one of these enjoined nothings than it usually seems to require to satisfy a similar injunction to do anything tangible. At least the ‘do something’ injunction proposes an action that might serve to replace the unwanted one. The absence of a definite replacement action turns out to be the rub, as Shakespeare might have said. That replacement requires definition and, often, agreement. It generally requires exponentially more effort to achieve any negative space Desisting than it ever does to accomplish even the most complicated one-time ceasing. Ceasing’s easier than persisting into any future. It’s not the smoking that’s missed, but the surrounding habits, when someone “quits.” Subtle anchors to their existence disappear in an instant, but leave behind persistent markers. That pocket so used to holding that packet of smokes might get slapped dozens of times each day as the recently ex-smoker preconsciously checks to make certain he hasn’t forgotten his smokes. ... My hand became the very personification of the devil’s playground. Fidgeting became my initial replacement habit. ... I became ants-in-my-pants animated at the mere prospect of sitting through any meeting. I became more practiced at pacing, often calling one-on-one meetings by proposing a walk through an adjacent park, where we could “talk in private.” I was not so much seeking privacy in that park, but some adequate replacement for my sanity, which proved to be the first casualty of my negative space, stopping my once-dominant smoking habit. One need not have been addicted to anything to find themself struggling with the sudden and sustaining cessation of any routine, and, believe me, anything, when Desisting proves to have been a routine adequate to leave a divot needing filling. ... Any of us might manage to sustain any negative space objective, but the effort should rightly prove to be memorable. We might even manage to move beyond the former behavior, but some vestigial memory of it will very likely live on and linger in long-term memory, rarely fondly. Constructing a replacement for a previously very likely preconscious behavior might be the most difficult kind of effort anyone ever attempts. The string of failures trailing behind such efforts serves as an adequate reminder why it’s better to state an objective in some positive, tangible terms. No future features freely-floating absences. Features must necessarily contain presences, tangible replacements for whatever came before. Until the tangible manifests and becomes more or less self-sustaining, the objective of undoing whatever preceded that future continues haunting. Ceasing’s relatively easy. Desisting’s inevitably difficult and often impossible. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Powerlessness

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-19T05:22:47-08:00

"This is the cow with the crumpled horn, that tossed the dog."( ...The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. "This is the cow with the crumpled horn, that tossed the dog." ... Accessed January 19, 2026. (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/751bf0f0-c5bc-012f-99fe-58d385a7bc34) "We engaged in passionate revolution and found that it rendered us Powerless…" Social Media seems to be the perfect means for the Powerless to interact. ... One can safely cower in their individual redoubt without exposing any vulnerable surfaces, yet still maintain a fairly convincing illusion that they’re communing. One might post radical ideas without fear of anyone reacting with much more than disembodied comments, easily discounted. It seems to out-virtualize virtual, a place to call in one’s presence and distantly engage. It provides a spare illusion of interaction, but in comparison to nothing, it proves convincing enough for our general intents and purposes. No need to stand at the podium to speak to power when one can more conveniently email in that criticism. Why look anyone square in the eye if you can anonymously spy on their personal life? Why make amends when you can just unfriend in response to disagreement? Social Media makes for a perfect playing field for insurgents. It offers them cover as well as access. One can rile up a populace without going to all the trouble of rounding them up. Memes serve as the medium of exchange, clever phrases intended to catch in the mind of both partisan and opponent. Few victories better buoy a discouraged spirit than ten thousand anonymous likes instantly reassuring it. One can say whatever crosses what’s left of their mind without fearing much more than temporary rejection. Of course, the reassurances prove to be equally fleeting, but Social Media deals most prominently and almost exclusively in transactional interactions, like stand-up comics trading barbs from the security of a well-lit stage. It’s performance first, and whatever else it might have aspired to later, if ever; usually never. I can feel brilliant by merely forwarding another’s brilliance to my followers. Everyone maintains their followers by feeding them clever phrases. We engage in battles to maintain influence, the currency exchanged measured in humor and horror, along with a sprinkling of actual human-centeredness. Much of the posting and commenting focuses on complaining and criticism. Fewer ever propose resolving anything, other than by others changing or being forcefully changed. ... The conflicts seem eternal and necessary, and our role in them might be no more than to feel and then pass on the pain or emptiness in turn. The Powerlessness I feel when encountering yet another in a seemingly endless series of reports of another latest scandal initiated by our incumbent seems bottomless. ... He seems to be heading ever lower. No power in this universe seems capable of blunting his awe-inspiring idiocy or the Powerlessness it elicits within me. Doomscrolling seems the only reasonable response, but, of course, it’s not in the least bit a reasonable response at all. I notice a sense of agency emerging when I manage to avoid entering into my Social Media. That overly familiar sense of deep impotence that even superficial Social Media interaction elicits in me suddenly seems absent. I catch myself feeling hopeful about the future instead of uncomfortably carrying the burden of civilization on my shoulders. ... I cannot always rise above my own deepening sense of Powerlessness to pass anything other than that sense on to my readers. I’d rather be offering more uplifting stories, but this medium’s context seems to discourage, if not entirely prevent, that passage. I might nurture this budding awareness that it’s not just me who’s natively Powerless in this context, but the context that encourages and nurtures deep feelings of Powerlessness within my otherwise powerful grasp, perhaps yours as well. ...warmly anticipate my future, when I believed this world might inexorably be trending toward better. I have felt that sense eroding, and I suspect that sensation might not have been entirely of my own making. Back during the damned pandemic, it seemed necessary to immerse myself in inherently disquieting information, if only to distinguish between that and malign disinformation, which seemed to too-easily proliferate on my Social Media. ... It sure seemed as if we were engaged in battle for the body and soul of the civilization, of the world. That sense has never once abated on Social Media since. It found its genré during that damnable pandemic and never managed to grow beyond that disturbing point of conflict. The context of that context came to proliferate the conflict rather than to contribute to resolving it. ... We engaged in passionate revolution and found that it rendered us Powerless in its presence. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

SpuriousPremises

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-18T06:03:19-08:00

[spurious signature of Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322), dated 1301]: A Hunt in the Mountains of Heaven ..."They wandered so far from truth that they cannot relate to it anymore, if they ever could." The social media world’s content seems defined by an overwhelming presence of SpuriousPremises. It seems unabashedly not whatever it declares itself to be. ... Content often gets continued to pages containing only advertising, rarely the rest of even an enticing story. Pages one might care to revisit usually disappear without leaving even the hint of a trace of their permanent location. Advertising, haphazardly curated for maximum offense and irrelevance, usually interrupts any content threatening to be of real interest. Even the more trusted commentators seem to care more about commanding viewers to subscribe to their channels than they seem interested in imparting their touted important information. They almost always bury their ledes behind an indeterminate length of barely relevant and uniquely uninformative pre-ramble. I can count on the fingers of one hand, with fingers left over, social media posters who avoid such antics. I like to think of myself as an exception to these apparently otherwise ironclad principles of social media engagement. I only begrudgingly agreed to allow The Muse to set up my SubStack space so that those who feel moved to can support my efforts. I have not and will not advertise my presence. I began this experiment holding the firm belief that internet content should be freely shared and just as freely accessible, insisting that I would not use it to generate revenue. The founders of social media deliberately made it essentially impossible for people like me to track their followers, anyway. Facebook abandoned earlier efforts to render postings trackable except in the most abstract ways imaginable. LinkedIn offers such services for extra charges. BlueSky seems opaque even when compared to Facebook. Google offered traffic tracking services that required a double PhD in Computer Science to invoke. I considered tracking stats to be a joke created to fool advertisers. That’s perhaps the overarching grandfather SpuriousPremise ruling social media engagement tracking. ...Between the continual baiting and switching and the impracticality of tracking traffic, the whole premise of social media seems deliberately spurious. It’s as if at the dawn of television, programming consisted of first acts of the now-familiar situation comedies, but never the denouements, and even those interrupted themselves with offensive advertising. As if programming consisted of endless promises, rarely delivered, and people basically tuned in because they were mesmerized by test patterns. This seems to be the pattern social media has produced to serve as its basis for future development. It’s like tiptoeing through a septic field, at least ankle deep in somebody else’s shit. Yet we seem strangely, obsessively attracted to it. It might be that those who can be a little heavier with their subscribing hands receive a better social media experience than those of us who refuse to subscribe to anything charging for the spurious privilege. I might follow some “content creator,” but not if following is contingent upon my paying them something. I’m the same way with apps. I pay for very few apps, since they tend not to provide any easy way to track their charges. They do not announce upcoming charges and only backhandedly explain when and why they decide to increase them. They seem conditioned on the presumption that their subscribers won’t track their charges, as if they’re the sort who won’t insist upon a copy of every receipt, even for a cup of coffee. When a coffee comes to five seventy-five, I’ve got to keep track of the charge. There are no trivial social media charges. This SpuriousPremise Ethic had bled off into other areas. Our government, over the last year, has increasingly embraced the same notion that they can insist they’re something they’re really not. They describe something close to the opposite of what they actually inflict upon the people, and seem to expect people to swallow that shit. Further, they seem offended when us more reality-based question or complain about their spurious premises. Who do they expect us to believe, our experience or their bogus explanations? (That was a question I didn’t really need to ask because I knew the answer before I asked it.) I’m finding, as I spurn some of my social media engagements, that the real world, by which I mean not the virtual one, does not seem to be so riddled with SpuriousPremises yet. Out here, people seem to be more what they appear to be, and generally still prove to be reliable, except, of course, the poor Repuglicans, who still seem to thrive on SpuriousPremises. They wandered so far from truth that they cannot relate to it anymore, if they ever could. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

KillingTime

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-17T06:52:21-08:00

Torii Kiyomasu II: Susano-o no Mikoto Killing the Eight-headed Dragon (1748) "…ressurect something crutially important in me by Killing off some of my extra time." I arrived at the venue an hour and a half early. The annual Chamber Music Festival had started the night before with a string quartet delivering Benjamin Britten, starting at six o’clock. I had presumed, without confirming, that the Friday evening performance at a different venue would start at the same time, but I was wrong. The festival organizer approached me, asking if I felt as though I’d arrived a little early, since nobody but the two of us and that night’s quintet were present, the quintet warming up with a little Mahler on the makeshift stage. He welcomed me to stay and listen to the sound check, but I ducked out the door instead, heading back to The Schooner, which I’d left in a remarkably great parking spot. I had some time to kill. I know, KillingTime’s just an aphorism, but there are times that, however regrettably, time needs killing. When I’m lying on my deathbed, counting my last seconds, I might find time to regret all the time I will have killed by then, but in practice, every second is not precious. Some seconds sure seem like excess, just too much in that moment. The myth of life insists that we shouldn’t waste a second of it, but all time isn’t equally treasured. Some unavoidably gets left over, selvage, not really usefully employed. I suppose I could always, if I were Horatio Alger, use bits of apparent excess time to accomplish something, start writing an epic poem, or something that might further my legacy, but in practice, I could sometimes use a few minutes for nothing. I could use a little time out, so I return some time unused to the gods who doled it out. Thanks, I whisper, but you gave me too much. Though I’ve been dedicating myself to Unscrolling, I’ve stumbled into one of the perfect times to engage in some scrolling. Scrolling proves to be the ideal time waster, if not necessarily a malevolent TimeKiller. This distinction might not matter, for the difference between wasting and killing seems indiscernible where time’s concerned. Neither yields anything refundable. Life sometimes proves fully capable of sidestepping time, of seemingly escaping its otherwise inexorable grasp. Focusing upon something mindless, or even focusing on something mindful, for a few moments, can render time invisible. A minute might as well equal an hour or an hour a second; the distinction seems and is indiscernible then. I will have nothing to show for my investment. I will leave no richer or poorer for the distraction. I might return renewed, though, refreshed from a brief break from the otherwise inexorable forward march. I dabbled in a few moments of timelessness, which, of course, can never be accurately measured in moments, seconds, minutes, or hours lost or otherwise forfeited. Let the accountants and auditors try to determine the differences. I slipped back to The Schooner only to enter that overly familiar world I usually only enter at home. My phone provides access to the usual gang of brilliant idiots that, in other circumstances, might seem like thieves of my time. I freely part with some of mine this time, feeling a little heavy in my watch arm that evening. I toss away three-quarters of an hour as if it were a used Klennex®, then enter the venue a little lighter than I’d earlier exited. I’d reset my evening by shaving off a little lingering afternoon, leaving just the perfect amount of room for an evening hour of chamber music, performed in a winery’s huge, echoy production room, surrounded by more than a hundred huge oakwood casks stacked to the ceiling along the side. A fan kept switching on and off as the group performed, sparking the double bass player to remark that they were being accompanied by the sound of winemaking in the background. The motors seemed to operate in perfect synchronization with the music, though, time being somehow perfectly aligned across two radically different contexts for that time. The rest of my evening unfolded swimmingly. With that time trimmed and rudely thrown away, I felt as though I’d just had a first-class haircut and shave. I felt discernibly lighter and in extraordinarily good humor. I suspect that I sometimes suffer from some undiagnosed excess of time, that it’s grown overly heavy in my hands and therefore less than useless. Then I might reasonably treat some as excess and pursue some strategy for killing some off before it smothers some essential part of me. If I can drown in too much water, I suppose that I might also be capable of smothering under the influence of too much time. Then, I might usefully revive my nascent scrolling habit and thereby resurrect something crucially important in me by killing off some of my extra time. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 01/15/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-15T13:43:50-08:00

This writing week sure seemed as if I started making steady progress. Each story opened up a fresh realization about the nature and practice of Unscrolling. ... I began this writing week commenting on how ungrokable social media content seems to be for me in “Ungrokkability.” ... I reported that I had discovered a Distraction Hierarchy and that distractions don’t necessarily have to be negatives. I commented in passing on the sense of Immediacy I see in social media content and access. I noticed that some memes, perhaps most, carry a sense of Self-Evidence. They seem unquestionable and rarely encourage much in the way of questions. I ended this writing week reporting how Vulnerable I tend to feel just before I resort to doomscrolling. ...“I have no great need to resolve any of the greater or lesser mysteries in life.” In this Unscrolling Story, I suggest that much of the social media I scroll will forever remain Ungrokable. ...This Unscrolling Story describes my struggle and humiliation when failing to learn calculus in college, after having been told in high school that I wasn’t “college material.” Facing both a lack of preparation and a language barrier with my instructor, I failed calculus and was advised to pursue a different course. Over time, I came to accept that calculus—and certain other challenges in life—may simply be beyond my understanding, and that accepting such limitations can itself be a form of wisdom. I liken the incomprehensibility of calculus to the often confusing content on social media, concluding that not all mysteries need to be solved to live a meaningful life. ...This Unscrolling Story explains that social media scrolling started feeling like an encroaching threat to MyWork. ...This Unscrolling Story explores my deep, often conflicted relationship with my creative work, which I view as both a personal duty and a burden. While acknowledging that social media scrolling offers occasional insights, I acknowledge it primarily as a distraction from my true calling. I describe my routine of working early to avoid distractions, and admit to feeling guilty when failing to complete my daily tasks. The essay highlights the importance of maintaining a personal connection to one’s work, the challenges of sustaining motivation, and the need for intentional engagement and discovery, rather than succumbing to the mindlessness of an activity like passive scrolling. Pablo Ruiz Picasso: The Blind Man (1903) Other Titles: Original Language Title: Mendiant Former Title: The Blind Beggar Alternate Title: L’aveugle © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York — The Harvard Art Museums encourage the use of images found on this website for personal, noncommercial use, including educational and scholarly purposes. ...This Unscrolling Story finds me reconsidering my Distraction Hierarchy, acknowledging that distractions can serve useful purposes, too. The Unscrolling Story examines the role of distractions in modern life, arguing that they are not inherently negative and, in fact, are woven into the fabric of society and our economy. I reflect on how activities like shopping, hobbies, and even work can all serve as forms of distraction, each ranked differently according to personal preference and expected satisfaction. Rather than judging distractions harshly, I suggest that time spent on them—even social media scrolling—can have value and contribute to one’s sense of well-being. Ultimately, I conclude that distractions are a matter of personal choice, reflecting our changing interests and values, and that the quality of life may well be measured by how enjoyably we spend our time, regardless of how “productive” those distractions might be. Unknown Artist: Publisher’s proof of the publications of L. Prang & Co.: Trade card depicting a distracted waiter (1876 - 1890, Approximate) ...“…the journey seems deliberately designed to lead us nowhere but to keep us endlessly coming back, a Modiüs Strip existence.” This Unscrolling Story explores the world of unrelenting Immediacy, the world we enter whenever we scroll our social media. The Unscrolling Story critiques social media’s fleeting and superficial nature, emphasizing that it exists only in the present moment, without memory of the past or anticipation of the future. ... Attempts to revisit or organize past posts are futile, as the platforms prioritize instant impressions over retention. I liken this environment to a shallow, timeless “heaven” where users are reduced to products, continuously entertained but never truly engaged or enriched. Ultimately, I portray social media as a space designed to capture attention and commercial preferences, keeping users trapped in an endless loop of momentary distractions with little lasting purpose. ...“Disconnecting from the twenty-four/seven reinforcement machine has been helping me see what wasn’t otherwise self-evident, and what, disturbingly, was.” This Unscrolling Story questions the Self-Evidence social media reinforces. This story explores how the fleeting, repetitive nature of social media messaging leads to certain ideas or “memes” becoming accepted as unquestionable truths, or “Self-Evident” concepts, among users. Continuous reinforcement and algorithm-driven content create echo chambers where beliefs are rarely challenged, and independent research is discouraged. Doom scrolling keeps users trapped in these cycles, reinforcing prejudices and isolating groups from each other. I reflect on their own susceptibility to these patterns and note that stepping away from constant social media input allows for more critical thinking and awareness of previously unexamined assumptions. ...“Every minute I’m not scrolling my social media, I’m looking out for encroaching Federals.” This Unscrolling Story describes how I tend to doomscroll on my social media when I’m feeling most vulnerable. The Unscrolling Story describes my growing awareness of my feelings and behaviors since intentionally reducing social media use. Previously, mindless scrolling provided a trance-like escape, but now I notice a heightened sense of vulnerability and anxiety, especially regarding the actions of the current presidential administration, which I observe undermines the rule of law and induces public insecurity. I reflect on how easily unqualified leaders can be elected and how this, combined with troubling government actions, fuels widespread doom-scrolling and paranoia. Ultimately, this story highlights a cycle of anxiety, helplessness, and vigilance that persists even when I step away from social media. ...Our president (notice how I employ lower case ‘p’ here) has gone out of his way to transgress every possible interpretation of his oath of office, steadfastly violating the Constitution he swore to uphold; though, to be fair, if not necessarily balanced, he does claim to have not actually held his hand on the Bible when he swore. ...Had he chosen to act in accordance with the rules, his changes might have had some chance of outliving his tenure. As it is, the courts have overturned as illegal virtually everything he’s attempted. ...Taking his War on Decency to Minnesota strikes me as the most curious move in presidential history. ... It might almost make sense, though, to take that war to perhaps the most decent place on Earth. ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Vulnerable

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-15T06:20:27-08:00

As elector of Saxony and king of Poland, Augustus II (r. 1694/97–1733) presided over the ambitious transformation of his capital, Dresden, through advances in architecture, the arts, science, and technology. Produced beginning in 1710 through royal sponsorship and funding, Meissen porcelain was an exclusive luxury good of its time. Around 1728 Augustus conceived of replicating the animal kingdom in porcelain for display in a Baroque palace that he was transforming into a showcase for his collections of Asian and Meissen ceramics. This porcelain zoo was intended for the long gallery on the main floor of the palace. By 1733, the year the king died, more than thirty different models of birds and almost forty animals had been made, many by the sculptor Johann Joachim Kändler, who worked at Meissen from 1731 to 1775. Kändler drew this vulture from life, which allowed him to animate his work with the creature’s quintessential spirit. Such porcelain animals remain the most vivid expression of Augustus’s wish, as elector and king, to possess and rule over the natural world. "Every minute I'm not scrolling my social media, I'm looking out for encroaching Federals." Now that I’ve started reducing my social media scrolling, I’m noticing some things that were invisible before. Back when I was still more or less mindlessly engaging in scrolling, I’d failed to notice the feeling associated with initiating another scrolling session. Hell, I’d hardly noticed when I started scrolling again. I would usually notice I was scrolling after I had been scrolling for some indeterminate period of time, like awakening from fitful sleeping. Now that I’m more deliberately regulating my scrolling, I seem more capable of feeling and of noticing. The sense I get as I slip into another trance-like session feels like one of extreme vulnerability, bordering on desperation. I often feel stymied, and then, as if I’m incapable of independent action, I feel co-opted. When I experience this state, scrolling envelops me like a protective older sibling. I notice that I feel this way a lot lately. Our incumbent seems as though he’s designed his whole administration to induce just this sensation on the general population. His insistence that the laws of this land do not apply to him or his administration leaves the law-abiding feeling betrayed. The oath of his office, really the sole promise he might be held legally accountable for fulfilling, insists that he will faithfully execute the Presidency and preserve, protect, and defend the U.S. Constitution. ... It amounts to a violation of the very Constitution he swore to defend. Such a violation should leave even the most powerful of us feeling vulnerable, for our Constitution stands between us and chaos. It’s curious that in our system of government, few requirements exist for those who would hold public office. Presidential candidates must be citizens and of a certain age. Other than those rather modest qualifications, executive experience, for instance, cannot be required. Elections exist to determine the will of the people, not the skills, abilities, and experience of any candidate for office. Our sheriff can legally be less qualified for employment than our dog catcher, since dog catchers are hired, and so they can be required to possess applicable skills and experience. Our elected sheriff need not have ever sat through even the barest orientation course teaching law enforcement. ... (This is our will-of-the-people democracy in action, folks!) The president might make ten thousand crocodile promises on the campaign trail, not one of them in any way legally binding. An incumbent must possess a moral compass in order to successfully navigate fulfilling campaign promises. Heaven help any electorate that selects a morally incompetent president, for that incumbent will induce a continuing deep sense of vulnerability on the populace, just like our present incumbent has. It’s really no wonder, upon deeper reflection, that so many find themselves obsessed or addicted to doom-scrolling their social media. This seems a perfectly natural response to an administration continuously performing vulnerability-inducing acts. It’s not law enforcement to send untrained troops to troll through peaceful neighborhoods, trying to incite the inhabitants to defensive violence. It’s not in any way normal for our more vulnerable to have their vulnerabilities rubbed in their faces by essentially untrained and unrestrained federal agents. It’s not normal for anyone to lust after becoming the unelected president of a place like Venezuela. ...I feel myself panicking as my mind races, unable to logically resolve the paradoxes cornering me. ... I pray for neighborhood hunting parties to take out the clowns wearing silly cosplay masks and armed with idiotic paintball weapons. I fantasize about painting over ICE agents’ license plates so that they might get their cars towed. ... I have too often slipped into a trance instead, only to startle awake some indeterminate period later, doom scrolling in retribution. I’m carrying a small whistle in my coin pocket now, ready and hopefully able to scare off the big bad federals should they come prowling around my neighborhood. I might be no more powerful than Little Red Ridinghood, but I can damn-well sound the alarm when I’m feeling most Vulnerable. Every minute I’m not scrolling my social media, I’m looking out for encroaching Federals. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Self-Evidence

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-14T05:45:19-08:00

"Disconnecting from the twenty-four/seven reinforcement machine has been helping me see what wasn't otherwise self-evident, and what, disturbingly, was." The very impermanence of social media messaging fuels the need for almost constant repetition of certain themes. Depending upon what each user’s algorythm presumes, unique reinforcements of prominent messages continue virtually continuously: continually and virtually. This repetition results in certain concepts, “memes”, taking on a unique quality. They enter the realm of Self-Evidence. They require no proof. ... For those not initiated in a particular strain or dialect of these babies, the result can seem completely disorienting. Messages seem to start somewhere in the middle, producing incoherence. For those inculcated, though, the memes hardly require repeating. They seem to be echoed more for the purposes of reinforcing than declaring, for their assertion, their very certainty, seems Self-Evidently correct. Nobody for whom they’re targeted finds any reason to question what they presume. They presume virtually everything. Doom Scrolling serves as an essential element of this Self-Evidence. It becomes necessary because most memes, however obvious they eventually come to seem, cannot stand up to even casual questioning. The scrolling distracts the thumbs from independent research, which social media fairly thoroughly prevents, anyway. Search doesn’t serve as anything like an adequate replacement for actual research, for search most often serves as a self-fullment operation while research pushes edges as its premise. We tend to search for the answers we want rather than the answers we might need. We reject contrary information as obviously irrelevant. We feel successful when our prejudices get reinforced rather than when they get gored. Doom Scrolling serves to keep us contained within our own constituency, free from contrary concepts and disturbing questions. Our faith in common sense blooms while we wallow in self-reinforced ignorance. This goes for the left as much as it does for the right. Whatever else social media succeeds in, it excels in keeping people isolated within their constituencies. What goes on within competing social media universes seems unconscionable to the unwashed and reassuring for the natives. The hate speech that shocks some when it slips out through some seems like everyday fare for those who belong there. Even the most easily disprovable memes enjoy great credibility there among the partisans. The reinforcements are self-administered, much like a cancer patient receives access to a morphine syringe attached to their IV rig. Their’s are not information injections but identities pumped into their social veins. They might not be addicted in any traditional sense, but they nonetheless grow dependent upon the reinforcement. The poison was planted long ago, only needing reassurance to continue growing. We were once two people, only separated by a common language. Now we are a multitude divided by tenacious Self-Evidence. Jefferson, employing a common rhetorical gimmick, asserted that certain truths qualified as self-evident. The utility of employing such a tool lies in the irrefutability of the assertion produced. Nobody can refute Self-Evidence without disclosing their own imperception. In practice, only an idiot could even attempt to refute Self-Evidence, since its proof requires no supplementary arguments. ... But ours do not seem to live quite as independently as Jefferson’s asserted rights once did. ... We need frequent recharges to maintain the trance necessary to continue our separation dance. Whenever I catch myself engaging in absolutist thinking, I might slow myself down to question an underlying assumption. Disrupting the constant social media scrolling opens some space for me to face that I might have fallen in with some disreputable characters. Do I really believe that all billionaires are evil, or have I accepted some heavily reinforced reassurance as evidence? Have I researched (not merely searched) for evidence that all data centers might not be created equal, or have I accepted some reassuring reinforcement of an underlying prejudice? I quickly flinch when I encounter the product of another cohort’s faulty reasoning or obviously absent questioning, but curiously, I feel just as quickly reassured when I happen upon some story that reinforces my preexisting prejudices. I must be an amalgam of many different memes, each quietly encouraging me to draw their conclusions rather than mine. Disconnecting from the twenty-four/seven reinforcement machine has been helping me see what wasn’t otherwise self-evident, and what, disturbingly, was. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Immediacy

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-13T07:02:37-08:00

Giovanni Battista Moroni: Portrait of an Ecclesiastic (c. ..."…the journey seems deliberately designed to lead us nowhere but to keep us endlessly coming back, a Modiüs Strip existence." Social Media has managed to project a space where neither future nor history exists. It exhibits in a moment, for that moment. It produces no memory nor projects any gonna-be. It exists only for the instant encountered. Once experienced, it might just as well never have been. It takes living in the moment, one click less retentive. It’s outdated before you can finish a single serving, never to return. Because of this, it lacks apparent purpose, deeper or otherwise. It deals exclusively in the superficial. It seeks only attention: not recognition, certainly not retention. It counts its presence in clicks, that most ephemeral of all presences. It collects flashes of fleeting acknowledgement, disembodied, timeless, useless for other contexts. Try to create a list, in ascending time sequence, of your own postings to your own private Facebook group. You will not be able to do it. Try the same with your postings on your personal SubStack channel. ... The automated assistant will introduce the concept of “tags,” which will be attributes you could have added when you posted each piece, but prove nigh on impossible to retrofit. Maybe you can produce a list of items with an identical title prefix, but it will be presented in randomly sorted date order. Date isn’t considered a worthwhile attribute of any entry within social media’s timelessness. Try to return to a Facebook “Reel” you found fetching, and it will have disappeared, never to return. There never was nor will be, or apparently could be, a searchable database of previously presented Reels. If there is, it’s purposefully inaccessible to the naive user. It could disrupt the necessary trance. This world might be mistaken for a sort of heaven. No future, no past: nothing within it built with even the most distant intention to last. No history, no prescience: no need for memory or precocity. No retention, no waste: tidbits exclusively consumed in a curious haste. One engages to grow almost instantly impatient. One opens only to close once the punchline discloses that it’s almost over. Nothing’s finished. One survives on an unsteady diet of gists: meanings juxtapose to render each other meaningless, so as not to clog up the recollection circuits. The meals seem just as disposable as recyclable cardboard silverware. One might follow, but only in the sure and certain recognition that the algorythm will decide if you ever see another installment from that “influencer” again. By tomorrow, that instant of attraction will have been forgotten, overwritten by another dozen fleeting impressions. What happens when one abandons a world disturbingly comprised of memories and anticipations in favor of one completely defined by initial impressions? No relations exist there. ... A soothing, almost silent background noise subsumes the foreground experience. Intelligence proves unnecessary there, replaced with continuous entertainment, a Kinetoscope updated to provide a virtual peephole into an imaginary two-dimensional world without depth or death. A riskless existence beckons, one completely comprised of first impressions, where there are no conclusions to draw or reflect upon. It’s all What If?, meaningless questions intended to remain eternally unanswered. Its deepest purpose, superficial. It exists to collect your passing presence so as to project your commercial preferences. You and I are products, not consumers. No destination exists there, just the journey, and the journey seems deliberately designed to lead us nowhere but to keep us endlessly coming back, a Modiüs Strip existence. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

DistractionHierarchy

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-12T06:27:06-08:00

Unknown Artist: Publisher's proof of the publications of L. Prang & Co. : Trade card depicting a distracted waiter (1876 - 1890, Approximate) "Both scrolling and unscrolling must be gold-plated…" I have been guilty in this Unscrolling Series of implying that distractions are necessarily bad, when they’re most decidedly not necessarily so. This culture thrives on distractions. I dare say that our economy would be in much worse shape than it already is if we were to suddenly abandon our distractions. Shopping itself, a necessity for sustaining life, often serves as a distraction for many, a reliable treatment against encroaching boredom. It might even seem that our occupations serve more as distractions from our distractions than something we seek to merely distract ourselves from. I can see the possibility of describing distractions as the hierarchy they might be in our minds. I see some as beneficial and others as evil, though in total, they might appear roughly equal in their contribution to the quality of my experience. More than mere spacers between the more consequent components of existence, we might have evolved to the point where the various elements of our existence serve as distractions from each other: distractions spaced by distractions. As Ghandi never said, “It’s distractions all the way down.” I might have unfairly singled out our social media scrolling as regrettable. Like anything, it can be taken to extremes, but even then, it might seem to be a sort of victimless crime. It wastes time. That’s hardly an indictable infraction. Wasting time might serve as the underlying purpose of life, since we all enthusiastically engage in it, usually as more than merely an idle pastime. Some of us label our time-wasters hobbies, elevating them to a more noble status than distracted nose picking might be seen. One person’s hobby easily serves as another’s abomination. Who are any of us to judge? We have stores, whole industries, dedicated to supplying dedicated hobbyists. Some of us focus much of our attention on our social media connections, and some of those—actually, remarkably few—even get rich as a result of their obsession with this particular distraction. Some taste scotch for a living, though some unfortunately become alcoholics. I rank books higher on my DistractionHierarchy than I rank social media scrolling. I rank gardening higher than other competing distractions. Some I manage to avoid altogether because they just don’t interest me. The Muse spends winter weekends in her basement sewing room. I enjoy cooking dinner sometimes, even though it can distract me from more interesting activities. I relent and complete the obligation, then move on to some higher-order distraction. I feel free to rank my distractions however it might please me, on some abstract satisfaction scale or by some measure of productivity. I consider my writing distraction to be among the highest placed on my personal DistractionHierarchy scale, though when my neighbors see me writing in my office window when they’re walking their dogs in the morning, they wonder what I might be doing up there. Distractions are choices, nothing more or less. They might well represent portraits of our values, though drawing conclusions from raw observations might well prove misleading, even for oneself. I change my preferences more often than the seasons change. Some of my more prominent distractions became boring over time, so I replaced them with more alluring ones. Few things seem more satisfying than a brand spanking new distraction to rededicate wasting my time to, for time might exist to serve as the fuel for the ever-burgeoning time-wasting industry. It seems as if I’m poor, indeed, if I cannot feel as though I’m properly wasting my time. Prosperity might be best measured by the amount of that most precious commodity frittered away. Both scrolling and unscrolling must be gold-plated, distinguished only by how we calculate return on our investment. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

MyWork

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-11T05:19:20-08:00

Pablo Ruiz Picasso: The Blind Man (1903) ...© Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York The Harvard Art Museums encourage the use of images found on this website for personal, noncommercial use, including educational and scholarly purposes. "I need to stumble upon it by myself…" Scrolling was never MyWork, but a distraction from it. MyWork, however humble and modest, has always felt sacred to me, even if not to anybody else. I figure this is right and proper since nobody else can accomplish MyWork. MyWork seems at least as much a curse as a blessing in the same way that anyone might deep down revere and despise even their greatest gift. Nobody else ever gets to experience MyWork from my perspective, and it often seems lame from over here, however brilliant or not it might appear from over there. I will never experience MyWork from anyone else’s perspective, and nobody else will ever see it from mine. The time I spend scrolling around my social media threads cannot be spent engaging in MyWork. This doesn’t quite qualify as tragic. Even I allow myself some time away from my workbench. But I am still Protestant and Catholic enough to firmly believe that MyWork comes first, or should, and that it amounts to a sin to play before completing my daily chores. This explains why I rise so damned early every morning, before distractions get too active, and finish my daily writing obligation before the rest of the world can get up and distracting. My will might be no stronger than the least of any other. I just corner myself along the edge of the day when distractions seem least prominent. I face a blank page every damned day. I’ve grown accustomed to focusing to completion. The few times that conditions weren’t conducive to me completing my work, I was wracked with something similar to guilt. I knew I could never regain that time, that I had squandered away a part of my legacy. I returned the next day to resume my work’s cadence, but I’ve not forgotten any of the times I abandoned my bench before completing my sacred obligation. ...I’m certain that Picasso found even his remarkable universe to be well beneath him some mornings. Familiarity can’t seem to help but foster some contempt sometimes. My relationship with MyWork has not been consistent. My interest waxes and wanes, like anything, I guess. I maintain a schedule that’s capable of being disrupted but usually isn’t, though it can always be encroached upon. My scrolling habit, or obsession, or addiction—whatever—has come to pose an unclear and distantly present threat to MyWork. This recognition, this begrudging acknowledgement, sparked my interest in initiating this Unscrolling effort. I see the complications deeply embedded in my intention, yet I will persist in exploring this seeming contradiction: I feed my social media while attempting to break the attraction others’ social media feeds have cast in my direction. MyWork could never be anyone else’s. ... If the most personal also tends to seem the most universal, then I might conclude that MyWork will remain relevant only if it remains personal. I try not to tell anyone else what to do, figuring that’s their own work to do. I can tell my stories, and if another finds some insight by reading about my modest struggles, so much the better for us both. I acknowledge that I sometimes gain insight, too, from scrolling through my social media feeds. Not always, but sometimes. When my scrolling somehow avoids becoming mindless. ...It requires a spark that mere scheduling can’t impart. It needs time to consider for itself before my fingers find the keys. If I expend that cogitation time scrolling, I tend to lose what I should have been seeking. My beginner’s mind has not been filled with experience yet. ... Scrolling might induce a mindlessness, but never once a beginner’s mind. That takes empty space not subsumed with clever production or prescient scripting. I don’t need to be told what I need to know. I need to stumble upon it by myself in MyWork. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Ungrokability

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-10T06:51:12-08:00

"I have no great need to resolve any of the greater or lesser mysteries in life." My greatest humiliation I experienced when finally pursuing higher education occurred quite innocently, in a beginning Calculus class. Why the university imagined that anyone pursuing a business degree might need calculus was not for me to question, for I quite literally knew nothing about higher education. I was fortunate to have been deemed Not College Material by my high school guidance counsellor, so for seven years, I’d never questioned whether or not I should pursue a degree. That decision was thankfully made for me when that kindly counsellor convinced me that I was not suitable. I set about planning my life around that possibility until seven years after high school graduation, when my first career stalled out, and I grew weary of working casual labour jobs. ...I was directed to bonehead sections of most subjects, for my background, as attested to by my high school guidance counsellor, had not been academically stellar. ... I had not even a fading interest in receiving an A. I figured those were reserved for geniuses and overachievers. ... I paid close attention and dutifully did my reading and homework assignments, and did okay until I found myself enrolled in that Calculus class. The professor was a graduate student for whom English was not his first language. ... It quickly became clear to me that I couldn’t understand very much of what he said. I recognised little of what he tried to impart as belonging to the same food group as long division. I hazily remembered a few concepts from what little Algebra I’d taken in high school. I’d successfully faked my way through Geometry without ever once understanding the purpose of proofs, though I’d asked until I understood that my questions weren’t appreciated: “Just what are we trying to prove here, anyway?” I learned the concept of tautology, though, and graduated high school understanding that some subjects were securely beyond knowing, beyond grokability. ...The department head was alarmed and asked for a conference during which he determined that I didn’t have the background necessary to properly perform Calculus. I couldn’t explain to him how I’d parsed the problems, and he rejected my interpretations as illogical. I asked where someone might acquire the skill to properly interpret such problems, since it seemed clear that the textbook had failed to explain whatever it was trying to impart. He replied that I should consider retaking every math class I’d ever taken before, starting with whatever I’d taken before I was exposed to Algebra I, way back in seventh grade. His suggestion would have taken me more than the years I’d allocated to getting my degree to satisfy. He suggested that I might otherwise drop out of his Calculus section and go seeking another Science credit I might actually earn in lieu of total reeducation. ...I enrolled in a bonehead Physics section that promised no math and scraped by with a decent passing D because the final exam was 100% memorisation. I tiptoed my way through the balance of my degree requirements, never encountering anything nearly as daunting or mysterious as Calculus again. Once I’d graduated, though, I retained an interest in what had happened in that undergraduate Calculus course. I collected Calculus books with alluring titles aimed at convincing people like me that maybe we could be qualified to learn the subject after all. I was serially disappointed to discover that none of those authors had managed to master what seemed like the necessary precursor skill, that of knowing how to explain calculus without resorting to its own specialised language. Each seemed to subscribe to the idea that Calculus required full immersion in a world destined to make no sense. After serving a necessary probationary period, realisation would supposedly come on some odd, utterly unanticipated morning. ... None of the books coherently explained what one might expect to achieve from performing such an exercise, either. ...A friend later confided that calculus, indeed, all of mathematics amounts to an utterly arbitrary language. It could be acquired but never fully understood, just like we acquire our native language, and some acquire foreign tongues. There are no why questions to be answered in such acquisitions. ... I found a book by a guy who claimed to have learned calculus after he retired. He had a niece who taught advanced mathematics at an Ivy as a tutor. ... It had become too personal for me to appreciate or understand, though he sure seemed pleased with his accomplishment. Much of what I encounter when scrolling through social media seems of a similar character: so lacking context that it must forever remain fundamentally Ungrokkable. ... No matter how many well-intentioned MIPs I might apply to resolving the mystery presented, I will fall short of resolving it. ... Like my relationship with The Calculus, that sense that I might somehow ultimately make sense of the mess motivated further fruitless inquiry, ultimately resulting in a backhanded kind of wisdom: the acknowledgement that mastery of that subject seems to be the sole purview of other people, not me. I might be fully capable of frustrating myself in pursuit of an understanding that would probably ultimately not be mine to gain. I figure that there are plenty of people capable of mastering The Calculus without my shadow ever coming close to crossing that threshold. Such a resolution might be the most difficult for anybody to accept. I accept that Calculus ain’t mine to master, and that I’m no worse or better for that acknowledgement. Acceptance of such essential differences might be the foundation of the greatest wisdom. ... I’m unsure what social media has that renders its content similarly Ungrokkable for me, but I am coming to acknowledge that it seems disturbingly familiar to my struggle to comprehend The Calculus. ... It need not be an embarrassment to say that I’m not a Calculus person. ... I still can’t voice a single practical purpose for deploying calculus, but then I’m no rocket scientist. I’m also not a computer scientist, and much of what they’ve wrought seems more focused on their interests than mine. I use my social media feed as if it were a sort of email distribution system, something requiring nothing more than a rudimentary understanding of addition and subtraction, with only very occasional need to understand multiplication or division. ... I have no great need to resolve any of the greater or lesser mysteries in life. ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 01/08/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-08T17:45:18-08:00

This writing week began with the most innane act a government can ever engage in, the violation of a neighboring country's territorial integrity. Make no mistake, this was nothing other than a forcible rape of decency; however the perpetrators might argue their innocence. I figure the act will just render them that much easier to impeach when that time comes, and it's definitely coming. ... and making it stick before acknowledging that Flurries of useful information fall in even the otherwise most innane social media scrolling. I noticed how what was once news has turned into Speculation, then realized that I scroll my social media searching for Validation. ... I concluded that I have been actively Procrastinating, if that concept isn't too contradictory. I set about unprocrastinating, by which I mean that I started doing something I'd been actively avoiding. ... I ended this writing week marveling at how social media encourages people to Make rather than take Sides. ...This Unscrolling Story finds me reading a truly terrible novel but unable to put it down. This Unscrolling Story reflects on the nature of power, suggesting that true authority lies with those who can say “No” and make it stick, rather than with those who merely grant permission or control resources. Drawing from my project management experiences and current political events, I observe that reality often undermines plans and intentions, and that power frequently emerges from unexpected places. The piece concludes with personal reflections on the difficulty of disconnecting from ongoing news and the broader impacts of lost trust and withdrawn support. ...This Unscrolling Story confesses that I’m still intermittently scrolling and that it’s even a useful activity sometimes. This Unscrolling Story explores the complex, addictive nature of social media scrolling. I acknowledge that while scrolling can be distracting and sometimes harmful, it also provides access to valuable and timely information, often in ways that weren’t possible before digital platforms. I compare the compulsion to scroll to other addictive substances, noting that the benefits and drawbacks are intertwined. I reflect on the struggle to practice moderation, admitting to repeated lapses and the difficulty of staying away from the “scrolling pit.” Despite its risks and frustrations, the experience sometimes yields genuine, important news, leaving me both wary of and grateful for my social media habit. ...This Unscrolling Story recounts how “the way it is” morphed into propaganda and Speculation. This essay examines the transformation of news media in the United States, tracing the decline from fact-based reporting to speculation and entertainment. I argue that the rise of cable news—particularly Fox News (“Faux News”)—and later social media, replaced traditional journalism with opinion, propaganda, and Speculation, blurring the line between fact and fiction. As news outlets prioritized entertainment value and partisan viewpoints, public understanding fragmented, and reliable information became harder to find. I lament the loss of trusted, global perspectives and acknowledge that staying informed now requires skepticism, effort, and reliance on less authoritative sources, with no guarantee of actually grasping “the way it is.” Unknown Artist: Color Reconstruction: Ahuramazda in the Winged Disk (21st century reconstruction of 5th century BCE original) ...“I doubt that heaven awaits those who get saved from pursuing their purpose.” This Unscrolling Story stumbles upon my originating purpose for starting to scroll. This Unscrolling Story reflects on my increased use of social media during the isolation of the pandemic, emphasizing that my scrolling was not simply a waste of time but a search for information, connection, and, most importantly, validation. Social media became a crucial tool for maintaining communication, sharing experiences, and feeling seen during a period of loneliness. I contend that the pursuit of validation qualifies as a natural, ongoing need—more like regular nourishment than a problem to be solved. Rather than viewing scrolling as merely addictive or negative, I conclude that it’s a meaningful, if sometimes compulsive, part of my life, fulfilling important emotional and social needs. ...This Unscrolling Story finds me identifying a plausible source motivating my scrolling: Procrastinating. ... Scrolling might amount to shirking.This Unscrolling Story explores my need for validation through social media, tracing it back not only to pandemic isolation but also to my overwhelming backlog of uncompiled manuscripts. I describe a long-standing habit of daily writing and the daunting, procrastination-inducing task of compiling and editing these works into manuscripts. Scrolling social media becomes a form of distraction and reassurance, helping to avoid facing this massive chore and its associated anxieties. Ultimately, this story suggests that procrastination often leads to facing the avoided work—despite the challenges—after some frantic, unproductive activity. ...This Unscrolling Story considers how social media seems to depend upon participants MakingSides, creating eternal dichotomies rather than resolving or integrating anything. This Unscrolling Story reflects on how social media fosters division and opposition rather than cooperation. I observe that people have adopted a habit of “MakingSides,” turning discussions into battles where winning is valued more than understanding. This dichotomous mindset encourages defensiveness, argument, and a scarcity mentality, degrading true conversation and mutual understanding. As a result, social media interactions often become addictive competitions, entertaining for some but ultimately reinforcing conflict and preventing genuine connection or consensus. ...Realization might visit in an instant, but the energy released was usually built up over a much longer period. A year ago, the US economy was reportedly the envy of the rest of the world. ... Anyone who wondered how our incumbent managed to bankrupt every business he touched shouldn’t be surprised when realizing that he’s turned his primary skill on us. I might have chosen the worst time possible to wean myself off of my social media feeds, just when the most credible end-of-the-world scenario in my lifetime starts unfolding. ... I consume news and innuendo with almost equal zeal, as if information acts as a vaccination against an encroaching infection. ... If anything, it amplifies vague feelings into even greater clarity without hinting at any resolution strategy. ... I gain Nothing from undermining the foundation upon which I’ve so long relied. I even decided to double down this week, dedicating fresh energy toward finally compiling the balance of my series into actual manuscripts. This should be a near-perfect activity to overwhelm me into activity After Epiphany. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

MakingSides

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-08T03:14:17-08:00

Dorothy Dehner: Family Group (1954) © Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts "…they create the losers they compete with…" If it takes two to tango, it also takes two to tangle. Two opposing sides seem capable only of erecting impassable barriers. Of course, they’re also capable of creating cooperation, but our social media environment seems powered by opposition more than by cooperation. This situation seems tragic, since opposition often leaves little room for thriving. One struggles instead under a steady diet of squabbling and worse. Many take these conflicts seriously, as if they had more substance than any argument could ever properly contain. It might not matter who’s to blame for this continuing and even escalating situation, who’s wrong and who’s right. I’m more interested in understanding what’s left once we’ve divided ourselves by MakingSides. We were not necessarily born with dichotomous brains. We might not have been created to divide, to perceive more difference than similarity, but somewhere along the way here, we seem to have adopted that habit. It didn’t seem so much like a choice as an imperative, perhaps a clever survival strategy, to “divide and conquer.” That old adage failed to mention that such divisions tend to result in conquering ourselves, or should I suggest instead that we vanquish ourselves? Our dichotomous brains easily outsmart themselves, leaving everyone poorer as a direct result. Our dichotomous brains believe there’s such a thing as winning, as they encourage self-destructive behaviors in the belief that we might otherwise become losers. Experience suggests something more like the opposite of that assertion, of that poisonous belief system. Both/And has always been more powerful than any Either/Or. Yet we persist. We persist in resisting consensus, or even pursuing it. We take positions instead, behind defensive rhetorical barricades, seeking to win arguments. The art of rhetoric has degraded under this regime. It might have once been a matter of giving and taking, of seeking mutual understanding. Now it seems more weighted toward taking in anticipation of being taken from, evidence of a tenacious scarcity mindset working beneath the surface. As if we might drown if we found we were wrong. As if we might die if we discovered we’d based an opinion on a lie. As if we might lose if we ceded an inch of ground. So we construct our defenses from double binds. We ask fundamentally unanswerable questions in the belief that we might not survive should we leave an inch of headroom in any conversation. We firmly believe what could never possibly be, and choose to live or die upon that misbegotten belief. This describes the present social media playing field. Presumptions rule there. Questions get shared not in genuine ignorance, but as a defense, to determine if the opponent answers correctly, according to the questioner’s firmly held, desperate belief. What might have sought common ground only degrades into misbegotten competition intended to determine who was right or wrong all along. No benefit of any doubt intrudes upon this dissection. Only division can result from such an ongoing inquisition. The conflict seems entertaining at first, especially for the partisan. Anyone who enters the playing field convinced that they alone know the answers to the eternal questions, that they, perhaps alone, represent the last and best chance to properly settle some controversial question, poisons the resulting interaction. Conversation cannot emerge from such a context, only conflict. For those amused by irresolution, and this designation might include any of us sometimes, this situation amounts to entertainment. It can be addictive, especially when defending what so obviously seems only right and proper. What more valiant position than to stand in opposition to ignorant assertions? The partisan loves this left-handed competition; they always win. That they create the losers they compete with never enters the conversation. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Procrastinating

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-07T04:36:57-08:00

Once I admitted to having been seeking Validation when scrolling, I began wondering how it came to be that I needed to seek so much validation. Yes, the damned pandemic had robbed me of some sources of external validation, but it had not stranded me in the middle of some interaction desert. I had long employed social media for much, perhaps the bulk, of my interactions, since my work had taken me far from home and I hadn’t reported to an office in many years. I started working virtually before the internet, before I even acquired a cell phone; hell, before there were even cell phones for me to acquire, so I was well accustomed to being alone much of the time before that damned pandemic visited. What about that event left me suddenly so apparently needy that I sought so damned much social media-sourced validation? This seemed a perfect question until I eventually managed to track down a parallel thread to my story. Something else had emerged around about when that damned pandemic appeared. ...As those who have been following my stories already know, I hold myself responsible for writing and posting a fresh story each morning. By the end of every quarter, the accumulated total number of pages usually exceeds three hundred. ... The day after I finish one, I start another, or so has my practice persisted since June 21, 2017. This means that this story is not quite a quarter of the way through my thirty-fifth series I’ve duly created and posted since I started this serious exercise of writing. Each completed manuscript serves as a fresh starting point for a whole other process, one, in ways, much more onerous than the original creation ever seemed. Between a completed set of individual stories and a finished manuscript suitable for publishing lies a vast minefield of mind-numbing effort. Just compiling individual stories into a consistent whole requires hundreds of individual copyings, pastings, and tedious reformattings. Further, once compiled, the whole requires a fresh reading or two to experience the relative absence or presence of intended continuity, not to mention at least one complete copyediting. This author hasn’t even compiled half of the series I’ve produced. This represents an overwhelming backlog well worthy of supporting some serious procrastinating. The presence of an overwhelming-seeming chore, of which one is actively procrastinating, presents the sure and certain preconditions to support a frantic continuing search for external validation. The higher the pile of uncompiled manuscripts, the greater the probable need for distracting reassurance. ... It often appears as rather frantic activity, somehow altogether too desperately seeking satisfaction. ... Scrolling social media makes a near-perfect foil since it successfully distracts from the shame-avoiding truly essential work induces. ... I might even be making progress toward achieving well-informédness. ... It amounts to a wasting strategy, destined to crumble under its own inertia of avoidance. I had “lost track” of my stories. In a fit of frustration last year, I’d created an amended story repository because it seemed that working within the master one had grown too cumbersome. Bordering on 4GB of storage, simply saving each additional entry to that master often took a lot of time. Updating crashed my system with some frequency, too, so I created a fresh instance of the master and deleted most of the history from that copy, archiving the old master for future reference. Then I set about actively Procrastinating accessing that archived master. I tried to access it a few months ago, and it appeared at that time that I might have bungled the transfer. I didn’t find the history I’d expected to find there. This left some possibility that I might have lost about five years of production, which gave me further reason to continue Pracrastinating. I didn’t feel as though I could afford to confirm my mistake, so I avoided confirming. ... Scrolling social media with even greater abandon. ...These entail finally facing up to whatever effort was so actively procrastinated. Usually, this results in the dissolution of the great myth that reinforced the distracting effort. A huge sigh of relief gets quickly followed by the fresh realization that the hero has opened a huge can of worms. ... I can’t rightly say that any but one of those series is finished with all of the steps necessary to turn it into an actual manuscript. If I could manage to transform one manuscript each week, I’d be finished with the currently “completed” manuscripts by about the autumnal equinox, but by then, I will have finished three more series, which will each require a week to finish manuscripting. So, the middle of October could be my target if I can muster turning over a manuscript each week. ...It will probably be resolvable with some systems analysis and practice. ... I could, I guess, find someone to write me a script that might automate a portion of the effort, delegating to some semi-intelligent machine the responsibility for compiling my mindful stories. That seems like a contradiction, for it would rob me of perhaps essential time alone with each story as it’s compiled. It’s only work, and less onerous than many available alternatives. It might even prove to be more entertaining and satisfying than scrolling through social media. It will only require discipline until I find the edge that renders it mine. Once I find that edge, I might not be able to avoid engaging any longer. Nothing more or less significant than my legacy lies in this balance. ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Validation

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-06T06:49:54-08:00

A young man is singing and playing the lute on an open veranda. ... The music and the theme of the paramours Pyramus and Thisbe in the painting in the background suggest that harmonious love is the subject. ..."I doubt that heaven awaits those who get saved from pursuing their purpose." Before I conclude that scrolling through my social media feeds amounts to an unconditional waste of my time, I might be wise to consider my underlying purpose for being there in the first place. I did not end up there because I held a deep desire to waste my precious time. Nor was I necessarily an unwilling victim, or even a victim at all. I realize that I was pursuing something important there, and that I might have even found it, however overshadowed in foreboding or misgivings, by which that result might have been accompanied. Remember, this behavior pattern emerged during the darker and most isolated periods of my existence. I’d never, before that damned pandemic, spent so much time in agonizing isolation. I strongly prefer introversion, so pandemic isolation might have brought the best of times to my experience, but it didn’t. ... I could still get out, but only if dressed like a bandit and maintaining strict distancing. I’d never seen the faces of more than half the people I interacted with every week. ...I began convening my weekly Zoom Chat then, a practice I continue every Friday morning even unto these days. I became the most serious writer I’ve ever been to address a sense that I’d previously just been dabbling in the profession; a pattern I continue to this day, too, even unto this very story. I also increased my so-called virtual existence, the one accomplished via social media. I leveraged my PureSchmaltz Facebook group into a base of interaction, and a fair community accreted around me. ... Seeking more information about the damned pandemic served as the gateway for my ever-increasing social media use. It was not a problem, but a solution, or, more precisely, it was me in search of solutions, for the dilemma I was living then could not possibly have been a one-and-done problem. ...I sought not only information but also something nearly infinitely more valuable. I’ll admit that I also sought Validation, evidence that I existed and that my presence mattered. If I could help proliferate some cheerful quip, my day was made. If I could share some relatively rare and precious emergent insight, I felt useful. When I posted my latest PureSchmaltz story, I felt as if I had not wasted my time but had wisely invested it instead. ... Even cruising, looking for some unknowable something, and stumbling upon some snippet of useless but still interesting information left me feeling more purposeful. None of those efforts wasted time, even if many of them never returned anything even approaching a thin dime. If they amplified my sense of myself, they were useful effort, for I felt as though I was in danger of disappearing. That sort of activity was probably destined to continue even after the damned pandemic was over, for it set patterns of behavior that seemed fully capable of endlessly reverberating. I might forget what I originally set out seeking, but I might continue the behavior just as if I hadn’t forgotten my deeper purpose. Once I’d discovered a form of Validation that worked, what possible justification might anyone propose for me to cease and desist? Even if I forgot my underlying purpose, I’d still be validating, experiencing that sublime reassurance that can’t help but mean so much. In that sense, my apparent compulsive scrolling was never really either an addiction or necessarily a compulsion, just a feature of my late middle age universe; more an integral part of my internal ecosystem than a malign intruder. I might find a thousand reasons to justify the behavior once I remembered my purpose was first Validation. ...I dare not speak of Validation as if it were something tangible, some bauble containable in a box. ... It’s rarely overwhelming in its presence, but more often quietly sustaining. It seems to be more maintenance outlay than asset. ... It seems more like a liquid or even vaporous wealth, like cash flow, never intended to become retained earnings, yet without its steady trickle, the whole system seems less viable. One satisfying meal never once cured the ongoing hunger problem. Not even one supremely satisfying season managed to sustain its presence beyond the following equinox or solstice. My body expects lunch to be served more or less every early afternoon, regardless. My spirit, too, seems to require steady hits of Validation, regardless of the season. A moratorium from Validation seems more like a starvation than a salvation. Where scrolling’s concerned, the problem seems to be the solution, too. So, my job cannot be to “solve” my scrolling “problem,” for nothing sought for Validation can ever be fairly characterized as merely a problem. ... Too much of even the very best of good things might produce truly dreadful outcomes. ... I, quite frankly, don’t quite know if I have a scrolling problem or if it’s just an oddly disguised feature manifesting. ... Whatever I “have,” it seems well worth considering, for it will not do to discipline myself unnecessarily or even fruitlessly, in ignorance of the underlying value I’m gaining. Streetcorner preachers might produce instant converts of people who were no more than momentarily confused; less saved than disuaded, distracted from what might have passed for chasing their true purpose by a spate of disappointment. I doubt that heaven awaits those who get saved from pursuing their purpose. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

...

Speculation

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-05T05:02:06-08:00

Carved from brownish limestone, the Persepolis sculptures were painted and sometimes further enhanced with gold overlays as well as blue inlays imitating the semiprecious stone lapis lazuli. The color reconstruction you see here, made of plaster with acrylic paint, is based on close examination and scientific analysis of the original relief fragment (1943.1062) displayed immediately outside this gallery [in gallery 3460]. The incised star patterns are revealed by “raking” light, which illuminates the surface from a low angle. Traces of bright red cinnabar (mercury sulfide), green malachite a copper carbonate), and Egyptian Blue (the oldest synthetic pigment) are visible with the naked eye. Similar depictions, notably on glazed brick reliefs, provide further clues, but the reconstruction remains partial and speculative. ... This may well have been the intended effect, heightening the splendor of what is most likely a representation of the god Ahuramazda. ..."I work much harder now, trying to become informed." The few decades between when broadcast television supplanted radio as this country’s primary news source and the proliferation of first cable, then social media-based outlets replacing broadcast TV, the content of what passed for news changed. More properly, the content of what passed for news transformed into what Walter Cronkite could not have claimed represented anything even remotely resembling “the way it is,” if, indeed, it ever had. I fear expectations failed to shift in unison with that change; however, so many people continue to believe that what passes itself off as news today resembles what used to pass muster as news. ... A slow erosion of reportage was replaced with what I might most generously label Speculation. Explanations of what just happened were supplanted by descriptions of what might occur and what might have occurred: reportage became Speculation. When Faux (Fox) News branded itself as “news”, new ground was broken. Newspapers had for eons featured some publications that were little better than scandal sheets, classified as news but containing little of it. These were published as entertainment, but video had not previously dabbled in such desecration. Radio had begun creeping more deeply into similar territory with Rush Limbaugh souring those airwaves, but aside from late-night junk “religious” broadcasts, video still observed the separation of information and speculation. It was dog bites man, and man bites dog back, until Rupert Murdoch, an Australian scandal sheet publisher, created Faux News. It was an immediate hit among those more attracted to entertainment than actual reportage. Murdock’s addition of the tag line “fair and balanced” completed the illusion. ...It soon became the chosen media for the vast right-wing conspiracy that had been trying to undermine Democracy ever since the Tories lost the war for independence. They wanted kings and tax breaks, and railed against innumerable imaginary enemies like socialism, liberalism, abortion, and secular schools. Anyone raised on actual news could see right through the transparent manipulation of information they engaged in, but, again, many sought entertainment over understanding. ... They routinely voted against their own best interests and blamed whichever opponent their “news” outlet suggested was behind their misfortune. Few ever figured that they were the authors of their own destiny, they and their poorly informed choices. ...People broadcasting what decent people would not have dared whisper in public beforehand. ... The way it is became a matter of opinion, and not a well-informed opinion. Regardless of the ageless wisdom that one might be free to choose their opinions but not their facts, it became fashionable, if not obligatory, for people to insist upon choosing their facts, or having their chosen entertainers choose which facts they should choose for themselves. ... People could and did inhabit fantasy bubbles where liberals conspired to ruin real lives and begrudgment against imaginary enemies fostered ever greater animosity. Eventually, with the internet undermining even local advertising, The News shrank in relative importance. It couldn’t afford to compete with the ever more popular made-up shit it was forced to compete with. The propaganda and the Speculation attracted advertising dollars, too, because they attracted so many more viewers. Slanders from well-positioned politicians helped encourage a belief that reportage was usually just “fake news.” This encouraged ever more fake news outlets to insist that they represented fair and balanced reportage until it became nigh on impossible to distinguish between bullshit and reliable information. This fragmented public opinion, and more people bought into the idea that freedom bestowed the obligation to make up one’s own facts as well as opinions, until it became impossible to definitively determine the way things were. The disturbing part of scrolling through what might serve as news must be that there’s little distinction between information and speculation. I have my trusted sources, though these definitely no longer include the NYTimes and the WAPost. ... What might have once been news has been replaced with, at best, well-intended Speculation. ... I trust my sources, but I also understand that they’re not anything like infallible. I access them more to keep me watching than to necessarily settle anything. I understand that their scope might be just a little broader than mine, but that together, we might better understand. I do not mourn the days when Cronkite could definitively proclaim the way it was. He didn’t know what came next, either, which made even his certain plumbline reporting just another form of Speculation. I tuned in to anticipate that by learning the way it is, I might better foresee the way it might be next. This urge exactly mirrors why I scroll through my more speculative social media feeds. I tell myself that at least I haven’t been duped into believing Faux News was ever fair and balanced. Declaring fairness and balance must be the most self-disclosing tell that you’re neither. ... I work much harder now, trying to become informed. I have no way to determine whether I actually am or not. ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

...

Flurries

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-04T05:42:16-08:00

Claude Monet’s trip to Norway in 1895 was perhaps the most physically taxing of all his many painting campaigns. Touring the country with his stepson Jacques Hoschedé, who lived in Christiania (now Oslo), he was awestruck but initially frustrated in his search for good motifs amid the snow. Nevertheless, he painted 29 Norwegian scenes during a two-month stay. These included at least six views of Sandvika, a village near Christiania whose iron bridge may have reminded Monet of the Japanese bridge at his home in Giverny. ..."Then I feel glad for my little social media addiction." It’s not that scrolling only produces distraction. It also produces fantastic information, sometimes far superior to anything accessible before the unfortunate downfall of journalism and the rise of so many blogging platforms. Though blogs gained their initial popularity as a conduit for various nefarious conspiracy theorists, they have since attracted plenty of more credible contributors, some of whom the algorythm even allows me to access. Just when I’ve about convinced myself that scrolling cannot be justified, something actually happens out there in what still passes as the real world. Suddenly, all the foreground filled with idle speculation masquerading as news disappears, replaced by some actual reports from actual fields. For a change, and if only for a little while, mainstream breaking news matches the streaming contributors, and my scrolling manages to bring some events into actual focus. It was always tough to access adequate information surrounding any breaking news. In the old days, I’d frantically switch between the three available broadcast channels, trying to glean additional incremental bits of actual information. Now, of course, I just continue scrolling through what my algorythm serves. The primary problem with any addictive substance lies in its beneficial qualities. ... When my daughter attended her junior year of high school in Chuquicamata, Chile, a copper mining town at over 9,000 feet in the Andes, her host family gave her coca tea because she was overly sensitive to the altitude. My mother’s Aunt Dora, publicly a Seventh Day Adventist teetotaler, routinely asked my mom to bring her a pint of that Mogan David wine, for medicinal purposes, of course. Scrolling, too, has its beneficial uses if its more damaging aspects can be kept contained. Even when I fail to contain those aspects, benefits can still slip in through my defences. Were I to completely cut myself off from access, I would be cutting off some of my nose to spite my face. Many greys remain even when a situation can be generally characterised as either black or white. ...These might well prove to be simpler than managing continuing intermittent use. I find that I must frequently relearn moderation, and that prior successes do not necessarily preface any future easing of effort. Experience might well complicate responding to additional challenges because success produces memories of what occurred after the struggle rather than reinforcing what happened during the heat of the battle. Entering with confidence might undermine the senses needed to accept and cope with the sense of helplessness necessarily always accompanying any addictive activity. No redemption can occur without first stumbling into some pit and being genuinely surprised by the experience. Nobody ever gets skilled at getting unhooked again, though many seem to nurture their facility for repeatedly falling into their pit. I seem to be getting awfully skilled at stumbling back into my scrolling pit again. My growing awareness of its dangerousness doesn’t usually disuade me from reentering. Nor am I necessarily haughty about my personal extrication skills. I stumble almost as blindly as I ever did, recognising the role my muscle memory must play in it. I am sometimes rewarded for my obvious weaknesses. Something actually happens out there in the real world, and there! I find myself perfectly situated to access additional information. The New York Times confirms that the initial announcement wasn’t something recycled from last April, and the informal network of knowledgeable citizens and the usual collection of internet idiots begin broadcasting seemingly every perspective. Of course, my algorythm is actively curating, protecting my more delicate sensibilities from exposure to the more exasperating right-wing perspectives, but to the extent of my feed, I’m feeling well informed. ... That’s one way I can tell whether it’s real, though some level of exasperation does seem to be the background condition of even my everyday newsless newsfeed. The headlines will shrink between now and the next genuine crisis, though with this incumbent, genuine crises seem to occur on a more frequently than daily basis. Still, his standard one hundred overnight “tweets” tend to be well worth ignoring since they’re usually just evidence that he’s stark raving. I know some swallow even those as gospel. They are damned to a Hell of their own making. I feel myself slipping down that slope sometimes, but I have so far managed to pull myself back from that brink many times. I’ve had no luck at completely avoiding the brink, and I cannot seem to avoid blinking when I’ve sworn to avoid social media engagement. I take my peeks and sometimes get sucked back into that predictable pit, but sometimes I stumble across Flurries of real, important news in there. Then I feel glad for my little social media addiction. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

No-ing

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-03T05:20:20-08:00

Gallery Notes: Even as an inexperienced young artist, Rembrandt did not shy away from experimenting. Here the light glances along his right cheek, while the rest of his face is veiled in shadow. It takes a while to realize that the artist is gazing intently out at us. Using the butt end of his brush, Rembrandt made scratches in the still wet paint to accentuate the curls of his tousled hair. "…I'd take my marbles home while mumbling"Good riddance!" ...It might be that I scroll to try to identify shifting power. In times as volatile as these, advantage seems to be continually shifting. Any news cycle, any odd minute, might hold evidence of where power might be shifting next. Our incumbent, widely acknowledged idiot that he has proudly proven to be, shifts focus more frequently than he farts, so he creates much churn in the channels, and so sparks my near constant interest. Scrolling sometimes seems like reading a truly terrible novel I can’t bear to set down for a minute, completely beyond my volition. I might need permission to stop, though from whom such permission might come seems like another fundamentally unanswerable question. ...In my youth, I believed that power came from granted permission, that somebody powerful could bestow the authority for something to happen, and that it consequently did. As a budding project manager, I watched each project’s sponsor dole out a budget and a remarkably fuzzy set of objectives for the effort. What was ultimately delivered seems to have little to do with what that sponsor allocated, either initially or eventually, after approving additional funding and several iterations of an inevitably reduced requirements set. Something other than the sponsor’s budget and requirements seemed to determine development. The power never really resided in either the purse or the objectives, but more often in some of the more obviously unpowerful places in the community. It took me a long time before I finally figured out what those actual power sources had in common, and it was never the authority to grant permission. Quite the opposite, they each held the curious power to say, “No!” and somehow make it stick. Maybe they held a skill that was absolutely needed but in terribly short supply. The sponsor might insist the product be delivered by July, but the guy whose specialty needed to be involved wasn’t available in that time frame, so the whole effort would morph around what was actually available, and begrudgingly reset expectations, usually with the sponsoring authority gnashing its teeth in the background. Such authority was almost always inadvertantly held. Nobody plans to create such narrow passages, but whether the effort was managed as an authoritarian invasion or a more democratic intrusion, someone or something invariably stepped in to more properly define the reality the effort was actually inhabiting. ... The result was at least partly an adaptation, an improvisation that accounted for what proved possible within that context. The clever project manager would avoid punishment by promoting radical acceptance. For any dream to come true, the ‘how to get there’ has to die. Our incumbent reminds me of the more hapless sponsors. ... They believe themselves to be in the superior negotiating position because they wield the bigger budget. They believe themselves indispensable, at least until subtler realities rule. Democracies seem to have been based upon a similar proposition. If the electorate votes, “No!”, their decision sticks. ... Their influence will always be limited by the extent of their resources. ... stick might demand nothing beyond their absence. Those who can say, “No!” and make it stick, always wield the most power. I’m currently struggling to make my “No!” ... I can’t seem to tolerate being out of the loop on whatever’s currently cliffhanging. I am witnessing the dismantling of much I’d been unaware I’d held so dear. Subtle balances and checks that I’d never known as absences leave glaring holes as they depart. ... I find myself cheering for our trading partners as they find their hind legs and extend themselves to standing straight and properly proud. A Canadian pension fund owns the largest employer in my county, and I’ve been reading how Canadian pension funds have been withdrawing their investments in our suddenly intolerably volatile economy. They can say, “No!”, and that might stick it to me. We have been dependent upon the kindness of absolute strangers who have invested their life savings with us, only to have our incumbent insult their decency and intelligence. If I were them, I’d take my marbles home while mumbling, ”Good riddance!” ... I can’t help but continue watching our dismantling. ©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 01/01/2026

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-01T14:36:05-08:00

This writing week was the first full writing week of posting my new Unscrolling series. Over its course, I felt myself starting to grasp whatever might have moved me to choose to expound on this topic at this time. Long-time readers might remember that a year ago, I was starting my series on what I labeled NextWorld, the world likely to emerge from our incumbent taking the oath for an office he never intended to fulfill. I started that series ignorant of its purpose but found the experience eventually morphing into being suitably satisfying, nonetheless. Each series starts off like this, in near-total ignorance, before starting to trend toward a deeper understanding, usually in the first full week of the investigation. I began this writing week acknowledging the garish colors that social media almost exclusively trades in, and what that means for credibility. I switched my garish iPhone display for a greyscale version and found some respite from my scrolling obsession. ... I wondered if distractions might be countered or amplified by second-order distractions before railing on about the widely accursed algorithm. I ended this writing week surprisingly defending my favorite social media platforms, but blaming that defense on a bout of Stockholm Syndrome. ...This Unscrolling Story finds me disabling the Kodachrome user interface on my iPhone to make it less alluring. I describe how a New York Times column about reducing compulsive smartphone use led me to switch my phone display from color to greyscale. This drained the device of much of its visual allure, making it feel subdued and less addictive, and I soon found myself less attached to their phone, even turning it off between uses. I contrast my new phone experience with growing frustrations about modern mobile technology: unreliable ringing, cluttered features, overwhelming email, and opaque social media algorithms that obscure real engagement. I argue that the main remaining draw of smartphones must be their colorful, hypnotic interface, despite their poor keyboard and overall usability. Living in greyscale changes how I see photos, holidays, and work, nudging me back toward reading, writing, and using a real keyboard. In the end, I suggest that iPhones function more as status symbols than tools, and I describe my ongoing effort to “Unscroll” and find a more modest, intentional place for the damned phone in my life. ...In this Unscrolling Story, I make the distinction between primary and representative experience, suggesting that Greyscale better represents my primary experience than does either black and white or Kodachrome. I contrast extreme black‑and‑white thinking and garish, hyper-colored media with a more nuanced “Greyscale” mode of perception. ...By switching my iPhone to greyscale, I feel the real world coming into sharper focus and become more aware of the differences between primary experience (direct, real-world perception) and representative experience (screens, videos, media). I worry that constant consumption of colorful, representative experiences leads to “amusing ourselves to death,” replacing genuine consciousness and lived experience with shallow stimulation. ...Though I remain tempted to return to color and feel the loss of easy distraction, I find life suddenly both more difficult and more authentic when lived in this Greyscale mode. ...The piece argues that we wrongly expect complete cures for problems and addictions, when in reality, most can only be managed, not eliminated. ... There is no final antidote to habits like obsessive scrolling; instead, a good life means accepting persistent urges, setting personal limits, and building routines that keep our obsessions less harmful. ...This Unscrolling Story finds me attempting to distract myself from my distraction disorder, using 2nd Order Distractions. I argue here that each political era sets an emotional tone, and that our current “distractor‑in‑chief” has helped normalize a culture of chronic distraction. Tech companies have amplified this effect by deliberately designing platforms to hook our attention, leading to a “second-order distraction” where we now distract ourselves without outside prompting. ...Drawing on a study showing that masks reduced COVID spread by only 5% yet still saved many lives, I conclude that even small reductions in distraction—rather than total abstinence—can make a meaningful difference. We may not escape the noisy, manipulated world we’ve inherited, but we still have some agency to carve out our own modest but significant “5% solution.” ...This Unscrolling Story portrays “The Algorithm” as the shared villain behind our compulsive scrolling—a mysterious, opaque system that decides what shows up in our feeds. It sometimes feels eerily accurate and other times infuriatingly wrong, like an unpredictable oracle or Magic Eight Ball that is unreliable by design. I argue that users are effectively lab rats or peons in a commercial machine run by tech titans like Zuckerberg and Musk, whose priority seems to be serving advertisers, not users. Despite being routinely frustrated, insulted, and interrupted by irrelevant ads and erratic content, people keep coming back, unable to fully explain the pull of this mutually assured distraction. ...In this Unscrolling Story, I admit that I might be exhibiting symptoms of suffering from a social media-induced case of the Stockholm Syndrome. In this Unscrolling Story, I reflect on New Year’s Day 2026, when we are all dragged into unwanted futures by time and technology, especially social media and computing, which did not fulfill their early utopian promises. ...I liken my attachment to abusive platforms to Stockholm Syndrome: despite knowing that social media and tech systems are hostile, humiliating, and designed more for creators than users, I have still grown loyal to them and even define my identities through them. Password hassles, clumsy interfaces, and constant advertising are seen as everyday abuses we tolerate while still defending the very platforms that mistreat us. I proudly avoid some platforms (like X and Snapchat) but remain deeply tied to others (especially Facebook), understanding this loyalty as complicity born from trauma rather than a psychological disorder. ... In a world where even basic communication depends on demeaning technologies, I see society collectively coping at the edge of its abilities, and worry that the next stage may just be another involuntary kidnapping into yet another unwanted future. Jesse Torrey: Kidnapping, American slave trade: or, An account of the manner in which the slave dealers take free people from some of the United States of America, and carry them away. ...I’d taken a pair of infrequently worn boots with me, figuring they could work whether we encountered snow or not. ... The next morning, there was no way I’d be able to even fit them on. ... Fortunately, an REI was located less than a mile from our hotel, so The Muse drove me over and I entered in stocking feet, shopping for some replacement. After failing to fit a few pairs on over my wounded toe, I finally choosing a pair of vinyl shower slippers. I wore those to the memorial service we’d come to attend, and back home, trudging through the Denver airport, trying to keep from sliding out of them with every step. Then, on New Year’s Day, The Muse and I attended some friends’ annual soup feed. They live in a shoes-off house, so we shuffled around in stocking feet visiting with friends. When we were leaving, we started sorting through the considerable pile of shoes in the entry hall, but I couldn’t find mine. ... Our host loaned me a pair of thin carpet slippers to wear out through the freezing rain, though they felt no more substantial than the pair of socks I was wearing. That friend texted later, reporting that he'd found my shoes and would deliver them in the morning. ...It seemed to me that my back-to-back Emperor’s New Shoes experiences just had to mean something, especially since the last instance occurred on New Year’s Day, a day traditionally given to predicting.

StockholmSyndrome

david@projectcommunity.com — 2026-01-01T06:34:51-08:00

"We all seem to be coping near the edge of our native abilities now." This being January 1st, New Year’s morning 2026, I am reminded that none of us inhabit our present or proceed into our future completely willingly. Each of us might have preferred to slow down the inexorable progression of time at times, if not halt it altogether. ... No, time moves in only one direction, and it drags us along as if kidnapping us. We come to inhabit a once-upon-a-time future we wouldn’t have chosen, thereby challenging our always emerging, though never quite mature enough coping mechanisms, sometimes to our detriment. For my generation, the so-called Baby Boomers, the emergence of computing and its many associated industries has proven to be the most disconcerting. We realize, as I suppose only someone who remembers before times could, just how far from our imagined future our actual future has fallen. ...No future ever arrives as previously imagined, though, so my generation’s no different than any prior. We were “just” kidnapped by different technology, and the society we share proves just as foreboding as the ones our forebears encountered unawares. ... Forgive me if I declare that I don’t feel as though I really belong here. I’m working on accepting this as the dream that came true, however false it might sometimes seem. And, yes, I do deep down feel as though I have been kidnapped and held against my will, pretty much like everyone else, I suppose. The silver lining might be that I’ve grown rather fond of my kidnapper. Even though I know it is and always was a malign interloper, I still find succor there. Mine might be a disturbing symbiotic relationship, but at least I have a relationship. I feel nurtured sometimes by my kidnapper’s presence, and the more we interact, the less I dwell on what time and circumstance so rudely stole away from me. My kidnapper and I might even be said to be buddies now. We call this process of growing attracted to one’s kidnapper the Stockholm Syndrome, after the trauma response exhibited by victims who were held hostage for six days by bank robbers in Stockholm back in 1973. Those hostages defended and even aided their captors, and, once freed, refused to testify against them. ... Their response has not been recognized as a formal psychological disorder, but more a complex response to extreme stress. A year later, heiress Patty Hearst was abducted and afterward filmed participating in a bank robbery with her abductors. ... I insist that we social media users are not ignorant of this response, either. Social media and all computing platforms have proven to be steadfastly cruel to their users. These cruelties might be characterized as run-of-the-mill negative externalities, though many of these seem more deliberate than inadvertent. The simple ethic that systems get designed for use by their designers more than by their users serves as a continual reminder that our computing environment was deliberately designed to be hostile toward the majority of its users, built for ease of creation rather than ease of use. We’ve been encouraged to pretend the user interfaces work when they often don’t. We develop fierce loyalties toward platforms that constantly demean our dignity and native intelligence, and are discounted for not being sufficiently “a computer person.” The widely-adopted PastWord standard, whereby forgetful people are forced to recall specific words and phrases to even access their own information, satisfies anyone’s definition of cruel and unusual, except it’s common. By rights, we should have all rejected every invitation to join every platform, for they’re all similarly corrupted and each will humiliate every user, however enthusiastically they might initially join. I proudly maintain a list of social media platforms I’ve refused to join. ... I refused to join it when it first became available because I couldn’t imagine what I might use it for. ... That much of the critical information passes between people and nations on ‘X’ amounts to an abomination, and I feel powerful that I never acquired an addiction to its form of humiliation. ... I maintain an arm’s-length association with LinkedIn, though I still don’t know what it’s there for. I post there daily and eke out a hundred or so hits each week. I’m most loyal to Facebook, a rightfully much-maligned platform that commits every sin in the social media prayer book. ... I’m so naive that I still believe the internet would have been better if it existed to promote free exchanges, commercial transactions not allowed under any circumstances, though I know that boat sailed away almost at the internet’s inception. ...This isn’t a preference anymore, if it ever was, but a well-defended instance of myself. I would be nobody without my social media presence, even though I know my chosen platforms abuse me daily, every time I interact with them. ... I know their sins, yet I still defend them, at least to myself, because it seems that in defending them, I am defending myself. ... No, this probably isn’t a deeply-seated psychological disorder, but an almost normal or at least not unexpected resonance of deeply traumatic experiences. Being bombarded with irrelevant advertising until I can no longer physically comprehend whatever the message they’re failing to convey, that definitely qualifies as an abuse. Being forced to change my PastWord because the platform can’t remember or otherwise successfully identify me routinely demeans me, yet I remain steadfast. Even the relatively innocuous and routine checking to see if I’m a machine or human deeply offends me, and should, for it’s an example of careless coding if not evil intent. ...Nothing better explains the rise of the MAGA movement than the notion that cult members often exhibit behaviors common to those experiencing Stockholm Syndrome. An abusive leader publicly humiliates himself and his public, even his base, and they elect him President in response. If that’s not evidence of a severe psychological disorder, I’ll hesitantly accept that it might be a collective response to continuing trauma. When even our primary medium for communicating with each other, our cell phones, involves engaging in endlessly humiliating transactions, it’s little wonder why we’re all exhibiting Stockholm Syndrome symptoms. I understand that there’s a life after trauma, and one that might even prove to be better than the life that came before, but the transition there seems like it will prove to be long and onerous. ... We all seem to be coping near the edge of our native abilities now. ...©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

TheAlgorythm

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-31T05:37:54-08:00

John Singer Sargent: Sketch of Sir Edward John Poynter (Aug 5 1913) "…cursing TheAlgorythm every inch of the way to nowhere again. ...If a common villain emerges from everyone’s scrolling stories, it’s undoubtedly TheAlgorythm. This mysterious presence is said to make the decisions about what any odd accessor might see in their social media feed. It doesn’t matter which individual feed gets mentioned, its underlying algorythm gets blamed for choosing what’s presented for our obsessive/compulsive perusal. This seems perfectly justified if only because TheAlgorythm works in such mysterious ways. It’s said to do this or that, indifferent to any user’s underlying needs. It feeds upon what it needs first, last, and, reportedly, always. It seems to operate well beyond reason, far beyond any logical justification. Not randomly, though its operation might sometimes easily be mistaken for random generation. It appears to operate more randomly than random could, and probably does. It’s a black box with whatever anyone might imagine operating inside. It serves up a curious mix of frustration and satisfaction. Sometimes, it seems to read a user’s mind, delivering something eerily prescient. “Just when I was thinking about buying some new shoes, TheAlgorythm delivered a targeted ad touting precisely the sort of shoe I had been considering.” Other times, it just frustrates its user’s intention, like when it seems to hide a once-reliable feed that said user had grown addicted to accessing. Those times, it can be infuriating. Notice how I refer to it as though it were an actual ‘it,’ instead of some disembodied presence? It sure seems to hold intent, however mysterious. I think of it as like an Oracle of Delphi. Nobody really needs a predictable oracle; otherwise, why bother? The response should at least surprise if it can’t reassure. It should be capable of shocking, too, but not every time. It should seem remarkably stupid at least as often as it seems insightful, so the user can occasionally feel like its superior. It works like a Magic Eight Ball, except it holds more than the typical fifteen different responses. Some days, it responds quite differently from how it responds on other days. Overall, TheAlgorythm seems remarkably unreliable, a paragon of pitiful programming. Zuckerberg or Musk is thought to be their master. They stand accused of designing the odd behaviors that somehow serve advertisers, first and foremost. The users, from whom data gets extracted, play a role somewhat south of lab rats. They engage in efforts they cannot and need not imagine. They believe themselves to be surfing on their own volition, but they hold little influence over which waves they’re served or where sharks might be hidden. They, we, serve as flotsam. That we willingly submit to this role seems astounding to anyone not bitten by the bug. Nobody who’s never been immersed in TheAlgorythm’s world could possibly comprehend the attraction, the seemingly mutually assured distraction, involved. It’s very unpredictability, curiously, might be its underlying magic. It insults each user with impunity, yet the vast majority return, enthusiastically. We might threaten to delete the application responsible for delivering these never-ending insults to our dignity and intelligence, but we manufacture lame excuses faster and in greater volumes than The Algorythm abuses us. Proper rulers should sometimes seem like unruly adolescents, if only to keep those peons on their toes. And make no mistake, we users are peons in these vast and mysterious commercial enterprises. We can’t imagine how or why they’re managing to make money off our innocuous, barely conscious actions. We know we never pay attention to the advertising TheAlgorythm serves up to us, or we very rarely ever do. We scream when our video gets interrupted five times by some fragment of an utterly unintelligible piece of apparent advertising. We put our heads down and continue surfing, cursing TheAlgorythm every inch of the way to nowhere again. And again. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

2ndOrderDistractions

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-30T06:45:31-08:00

"What's my 5% solution? ...Each era sets a tone, a rhythm for living in that time. Obama brought hope for a liberal democracy wounded by two terms of pseudo-conservative idiocy, for instance, and Biden’s time reinstituted a sense of decency, which, predictably, set the corrupt class absolutely crazy. This brings us to our current era, where our leader, above all else, specializes in distracting himself. I doubt that he’s completed as many thoughts as he’s completed sentences, by which I mean there’s absolutely no evidence that he’s ever successfully completed either. ... It probably isn’t an accident that we’re suddenly suffering from severe bouts of distraction disorders. Sure, we started seriously distracting ourselves during the COVID years—remember who the incumbent was then?—but it took some practice and serious repetition before it turned into a discernible problem, just in time for old, reliable Mr. Distraction to take office again. This theme provides personal insight into the self-esteem of our oh-so-fearful leader. What seems like a personal problem might well be more resonance than reflection of personal shortcomings for us. First, we have had some of our most brilliant minds focusing on creating and amplifying the problem. The Tech Bros have been promoting the distraction business for fun and world domination. They’ve employed the best and brightest Stanford grads to create this so-called solution. Our distraction is their solution, and a wildly successful one so far. They started out playing us like derelict pianos until they’d enabled us to play ourselves. The technology was specifically designed to produce this kind of distraction, the sort that requires little intervention from without. We’re experiencing 2nd Order Distraction now, where we’re becoming fully capable of distracting ourselves from the distractions provided. We’re regulating ourselves with our own obsessions now. My relatively tiny brain diagnoses the root problem and concludes that a solution might lie in distracting myself from the distractions. If distraction worked in opposition to my best interests, how might I harness this practice into something that might prove more therapeutic? What might an anti-distraction look like and where might it originate? I stumbled across an app yesterday that purported to provide just such a treatment. Invented by two renegade tech bros, it was supposed to employ the same technology that created the distractions to attenuate their effect. Unfortunately, their technology wanted some sort of Pastword to download, and after exhausting every possible combination of PastWord I’d ever used and failing, I abandoned my innocent attempt to sic the technology back onto itself. ...I have been given a great gift, one that enables me to experience what it feels like inside a world-class distractor. Our fearful leader feels this revulsion inside that I’m suddenly feeling. He’s unable to control his horrible feelings. ... What we might remember as positive self-esteem, even peaking self-esteem sometimes, he’s never once experienced, for his default-installed defense against this cruel world was designed to distract himself from its effects. This superpower never once protected him from the usual slings and arrows, but left him extremely vulnerable. He became cynical at an early age, a criminal uninterested in obeying laws, a pedophile. He was hardly a renegade, but a reprobate instead. He surely felt rotten to what passed for his core, an experience that we’re just now starting to share with our rightfully maligned theme setter. ...I take some respite in acknowledging that I’m resonating and certainly not the sole author of my suddenly sorry condition. I won’t feign contrition when I refuse to accept that I’m the sole or even the immediate cause of this situation. This was a collaboration and one stacked against my better interests from the outset. I entered as an innocent and will leave, if, indeed, I ever manage to leave, much more experienced. I might even manage to stumble upon a few effective 2nd Order Distractions to counter the infection. I want to leave this story on that note. A friend posted a report about the effectiveness of mask mandates in Britain during COVID. It concluded that wearing masks was about 5% effective in disrupting COVID-19’s spread, and that this sure seems like a modest result, perhaps even a failure. Except the way epidemics spread relies upon 100% unchecked spread, and even a 5% disruption, their study concluded, resulted in saving about half the number lost to that epidemic. ...I take perhaps premature solace in acknowledging that even distraction, which seems to have been spreading essentially unchecked through the population and even amplified by the presence of a distractor-in-chief in office, might be meaningfully countered with much less than total abstinence, which seems impossible given the current conditions. The White House will continue spewing fresh distractions at about the rate the average Gatling gun uses ammunition, but I might meaningfully deflect enough of the noise to make a significant dent in my negative experience, even if I currently lack the discipline for total abstinence. ... We have inherited the world we’ve inherited. We might retain agency to take even this mess on our own terms. What’s my 5% solution? ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Antidotes

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-29T04:31:03-08:00

Minne was a leading figure in European turn-of-the-century symbolism, which posited explorations of interiority, spirituality, and the unconscious as antidotes to the materialism of an industrialized society. The figure of the kneeling youth was a recurrent motif in Minne’s oeuvre, and this one’s serpentine figure and downcast face evoke a state of contemplation and solitude, if not melancholy. The omission of naturalistic details, like musculature or individualized toes, abstracts the depiction of the youth’s body. This slim and angular figure exemplifies the artist’s sculptural style, which was celebrated for its synthesis of the elongated figure of the Gothic with the contemporary decorative style of Art Nouveau. ..."Living inescapably involves getting used to noticing what's missing in our lives." Most of us seem to more or less automatically revert to magical thinking when we encounter something we perceive to be a problem. We resolve the difficulty by a priori imagining the existence of a solution, even though full solutions appear to be rare in both the literature as well as in our lived experience. We might be able to ameliorate some of the worst effects this problem produces, but full remission only rarely, if ever, gets achieved. ... Don’t fuss, the worst it has ever gotten for me was a few high blood pressure readings. ... My doctor advises that I have not dodged anything but some of the more troubling symptoms. He pointed out that my continuing prescriptions mean that my heart disease continues, too, albeit in some form of suspension, and will continue for the balance of my life. ...Many of the “solutions” we experience seem to be of similar character. They ameliorate some of the worst symptoms without really resolving anything. ... I can no longer remember which pill treats what, nor can I remember their names. ... I do not have to think about it, other than to remember to head up to my medicine cabinet after breakfast and dinner, and to take the pills in the order I’ve arranged the vials on the shelves. In the morning, I take two from the first bottle, and one each from the second, third, and fifth. Evenings, I take two from the first and one each from the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth. None of them are Antidotes to anything other than some symptoms. ...I suspect that my scrolling obsession, which I’ve identified as a problem, carries this same nature. It probably doesn’t have a cure, though it might be treatable to prevent the worst effects from running rampant. ... Give away my iPhone and join a monastery with a ban on electronic communication. Maybe I could find the discipline to keep myself from abusing myself with the technology. ... Turning my phone’s display to greyscale resulted in an immediate halving of my scrolling time, but the habit returned the following day, with an apparent vengeance, even in greyscale. ... I remember when I stopped smoking cigarettes, I bounced off success for many months before finally landing on the other side of that habit. It was so ingrained that I felt compelled to sneak a smoke sometimes, though the satisfaction I received diminished over time. The antidote to cigarette smoking involved smoking more cigarettes so that I could experience more reasons why I didn’t really want to smoke anymore. ... Not even not smoking has turned out to be an antidote to sometimes feeling the urge to smoke. Still, I swear that it was better for me to have smoked and quit than to never have smoked at all. Had I not fallen prey to the habit, I couldn’t have possibly understood what my body was capable of becoming addicted to, or, indeed, gained an appreciation of what it means to be addicted. ... It shouldn’t logically be able to happen, yet it’s common. No warning in the universe seems adequate to prevent anyone from tumbling into such a situation. Even understanding that it’s possible, and even having overcome a prior addiction, does nothing to prevent another one. It takes much time and even more good fortune before anyone stops trying to avoid their former addiction. It’s common in twelve-step programs that some people become addicted to their regimen and become every bit as obsessive in avoiding their obsession as they ever were when merely practicing it. I realize that there are very likely no actual Antidotes to obsessive scrolling. I also realize that the technology was designed to make it extremely difficult not to engage in some level of obsessive scrolling if it’s available. ... Turn off my phone when I’m not using it. ... Engage in anything interesting just to distract me from my default obsession. ... My doctor also suggested that I ride my exercise bike for 30 minutes each morning. ... The problem with countering conditions and obsessions must be that the countering almost always requires some form of discipline, and I know myself to be incredibly lazy. ...The Antidote lies in acknowledging that there never was an antidote, and never could be. Living necessarily involves learning when I’ve reached enough and when I haven’t, and adopting habits that make observing my chosen limits tolerable. There’s no adequate replacement for the satisfaction a well-earned cigarette once provided. No such experience exists in my life anymore, but I only occasionally notice its absence. I’ve mostly moved on to obsess on other things, hopefully less dangerous ones. Scrolling seems every bit as dangerous as cigarette smoking, though I doubt it will ever be linked to lung cancer. ... Its absence leaves me feeling ill at ease, jittery, tense, clear tells that I notice something missing. Living inescapably involves getting used to noticing what’s missing in our lives. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

...

Greyscale

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-28T05:33:02-08:00

Lucian and Mary Brown: Untitled [baby on scale] (1955) "My life seems both harder and better when lived in Greyscale." Our world was never given to present itself in oversimplified blacks and whites. Every dichotomy amounts to a lie, an oversimplification intended to amplify difference rather than similarity. Likewise, our world was never given to present itself in garish colors as if it were a Vincente Minnelli movie, another oversimplification intended to downplay difference and dazzle the eye—more entertainment than information. Real life, if I even dare speak of reality in these times, lies somewhere between these two common extremes, in what I might refer to as the Greyscale, where shadow and light highlight both similarity and difference, and distracting dazzle seems more properly muted. We seem to have evolved into a species that expects, first and foremost, to be entertained, and both Black & White’s controversy and Kodachrome’s garishness seem well-suited to that purpose. Both mediums seem to hide information to amplify the potential for entertainment. ...It’s maintaining subtle information. It often seems determined to complicate what could have been rendered as simple cartoons. ... With details retained, conclusions come more begrudgingly. Choices must be more deliberately made when decoding whatever I’m seeing. I can see the influence of opposites on composites, how insignificant details influence overall impressions. These features seem to better represent our actual visual experience than even the sharpest full-color or purely black-and-white renderings might. We’ve grown to mistake the visual domain as being somehow exempt from the allegorical and the metaphorical, when it is easily as impressionistic as the spoken word or any abstract painting. I blame television for eroding these distinctions. Since I turned off the Kodachrome on my iPhone, the “real” world has started popping into sharper focus. It seems as though I’m making better distinctions between representative and primary experience. A representative experience might be any experience rendered from its native context into another. Every video contains only representative experience, never the actual. When I look out my window, that’s a primary experience. The differences between representative and primary experience seem to erode with the constant presence of representative experiences. With the easy access my iPhone provides, it might be that I have been registering more representative experiences per day than primary ones, even though a primary experience always accompanies every representative one, though it often goes unnoticed. Who pays attention to what they’re doing with their hands when they’re watching a TikTok video? Such representative experiences can become absolutely all consuming, though overwhelming in ways we’re unlikely to even notice. One author referred to this phenomenon as Amusing Ourselves to Death, though both the associated amusement and the death seem tiny and utterly inconsequential. When trolling for a tiny dopamine hit, our attention diffuses. We might essentially lose consciousness, or enter an altered conscious state almost indistinguishable from unconsciousness. Into a world seemingly without pain or confusion, the representations we experience there effectively work as replacements. ... Replacements for experience. ...Perhaps I overstate my case here, for I am a biased witness. I have done no objective analysis on this subject, and I speculate about whatever happens when I distract myself with Vincente Minnelli renderings of otherwise perfectly, normally confusing happenings. These small amusements almost always draw conclusions for me, saving me the trouble of noodling through the inherent ambiguity to conclude something for myself. But then, the inherent ambiguities often get rendered out of the representative experiences. I have come to ache for more Greyscale portraits. ...I remain sorely tempted to turn the color back on, to abandon this probably foolhardy enquiry into my scrolling habits. I feel the obsession battling with my reason. ... I feel somewhat abandoned without my little visual morphine pump taking off the edge. In this season especially, looking out the window finds me experiencing Greyscale, too. ... This accurately, if allegorically, represents my experience with my iPhone’s Greyscale turned on. It forces me to more deeply consider whatever I’m viewing. The meaning’s no longer effectively conveyed in garish colors. I notice myself drawing different conclusions than the authors of my representative experiences seemed to have intended. Maybe I’m no longer so easily manipulated if my world retains its natural ambiguities. My life seems both harder and better when lived in Greyscale. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Kodachrome

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-27T06:16:57-08:00

This lithograph is the fourth in a series of prints entitled Small Worlds published in 1922 at the Bauhaus, the famed school of art and architecture in Weimar, Germany, where Kandinsky taught from 1921 to 1933. In each of the abstracted compositions Kandinsky utilized a theory of art he had developed as a leader of the Blue Rider artists' group a decade earlier. Each form and color in the composition is governed by a principle of inner necessity that is supposed to speak directly to the soul of the viewer. In this work, the yellow acts as an aggressive color, while the green and purple are more restrained. ... The result is a microcosm governed by its own laws and rules of engagement. ..."I'm seeking it's proper use and place by Unscrolling." A recent guest column in the New York Times reported on the author’s experience with Unscrolling, for she, too, had grown concerned about what she referred to as “devoting too many hours to an embarrassing medley of political commentary and makeup application TikTok videos.” She went on to report how her condition seemed more like a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder than full-on addiction, but she copped to the fact that she had been spending something over eight hours each day immersed in her phone, navel-gazing. Then she came across a small suggestion that she reports made an immediate and significant difference in her daily smartphone usage. She changed her phone’s color palette from Kodachrome to greyscale, a simple switch that made a huge difference. A friend and reader sent me the article and I immediately switched my phone to B&W. Suddenly, that alluring world turned into midwinter Kansas before Dorothy was transported to Munchkinland. ... My eye was not so easily attracted since what used to be garish had turned rather bearish. ... I’ve always preferred black and white movies to the color varieties, insisting that no color film had ever come close to bettering the best of the black and whites. When we were exiled to DC, the American Film Institute’s landmark theater in Silver Spring used to play a 70mm version of It’s A Wonderful Life each Christmas. ...My iPhone remained just as functional, but I found myself leaving it places, no longer as interested or obsessed with needing to have it close. I even took to shutting it down between uses, rather than just sleeping it. The technology had advanced, with the latest iOS releases, to being genuinely user-hostile, anyway. For instance, I have not been able to find out how to make the phone reliably ring. ... I need to remember to check my messages because I’m more than likely to have missed a call, more likely several, since the calls now often automatically miss me. Other similar tangles were introduced to make the phone a lot less functional than it once was. It seems to be on an evolutionary path to eventually turn into a Bakelite brick. My email queue just went over seven thousand messages again, an essentially impossible backlog. Facebook recently installed an update that makes it formally impossible to track engagement, something I was only barely able to do under the prior arrangement. Somebody must have gotten word that users were getting ideas about how many active readers they had, a number that apparently must remain a closely held secret. The algorithm has become anything but helpful for the typical user. It has taken to hiding certain authors I follow, making it virtually impossible for me to routinely follow them. I might happen upon something they’ve posted, but never on anything like a regular rotation. I could easily find a hundred reasons why I should have just given up on the pipe dream of mobile communication, since it has proven to be virtually impossible in practice. It remains securely theoretical, and largely unproven, yet it seems to have become more popular than ever, though it’s largely comprised of electronic bilge water. About the only reliable thing mobile communications has had still going for it was the Kodachrome user interface. The color could hypnotize better than any content ever could, apparently better, even, than functionality. The glow must be reassuring because the results of “surfing” usually aren’t. I’m surprised that engineers have not found a way to properly correct spelling errors. The tiny keyboards projected on those minuscule screens guarantees a high number of one-off entry errors. I usually have to retype any request I enter a minimum of three times, when an active editor could have checked and made reasonable corrections in-stream, as I was entering them. Often, even if I slow way down and get supremely deliberate, I still can’t enter an entire word without one-offing something in it. This amounts to a first-degree interface failure, yet we still tolerate it. ...I celebrated an old-fashioned Christmas this year with everything in proper sepia tones, like in Victorian times. I came close to reading a book in one sitting last night, my eyes finding ample local color portrayed there in the usual black on white typeface. My phone use is way down, too, though I’ll have to wait until I get a new report to see if I’ve been fooling myself on my actual usage. I don’t know if I had become addicted or, like that author, just obsessive-compulsive. I received a proof of my next book’s cover art and layout, which I reviewed in black and white. This helped me focus on the layout rather than the artwork, which I’d approved before submitting. I’d rather be writing than watching TikTok videos. I’d rather be typing on a real keyboard, with my full two and a half typing fingers, than trying to communicate using one apparently crooked finger on my iPhone. iPhones might be more ego than technology, more status symbol than useful, anyway. I’m seeking its proper use and place by Unscrolling. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 12/25/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-25T16:49:17-08:00

This writing week tacitly included my annual Christmas poem-writing exercise, where I try to write a dozen or so (more or less) Christmas poems between Solstice and Christmas morning. This always adds a bit of stress to a season that already seems to bring stressors, but it enables me to avoid shopping. I also ended my Decency series, which I consider to have been a completely successful excursion into the source and character of a widely misunderstood choice freely open to each of us. I also began a fresh series—albeit on typically wobbly wheels—Unscrolling. I will probably find my balance before Epiphany, or at least, it usually happens that way. I began this writing week considering the opposite of selfishness, selflessness, the very soul of decency as I’ve come to understand it. I then ended that series and opened the fresh Unscrolling series, where I will attempt to understand and curtail what might have become a dangerously self-destructive habit shared by many of us: mindless scrolling through our largely newsless newsfeeds. I stepped into what I labeled the First Infinity, the one that lies beyond what had become habitual, unseen, and in need of more experience. I then explored the remarkable absence of news in my so-called newsfeeds. ... I then peeked into the source of my current scrolling practice, the Covid shutdown, and noticed what sure seems like an addiction. I ended this writing week by characterizing scrolling as a way to employ randomness to address a hollowness. ...“I’ll be studying and learning this lesson for the rest of a halfway Decent lifetime.” This Decency Story finds me reminding myself of my duty to practice a Decent Selfullness. ...In his new role, he embraced a more balanced approach, prioritizing self-care and allowing others to lead, finding greater fulfillment in his work. ...This Decency Story contains the ending coda of my Decency series and the opening salvo in a fresh series: Unscrolling. I conclude my Decency Series, reflecting on the importance of choosing decency freely and its potential to create good fortune. I then introduce a new series, Unscrolling, exploring the impact of social media and streaming services on information consumption and my own struggle with distractions. I aim to either embrace the streaming culture or become a social media hermit through this new series. ...This Unscrolling Story starts unfolding the space within which unscrolling takes place, exploring a 1stInfinity that appears after exiting the scrolling universe. In this Unscrolling Story, I describe the overwhelming nature of infinite possibilities, comparing it to Giordano Bruno’s concept of infinite worlds. I argue that while scrolling offers a seemingly infinite stream of information, it ultimately leads to a loss of time, relationships, and genuine engagement. I'm choosing to limit my scrolling, embracing a new sense of freedom and the opportunity to engage meaningfully with the world around me. ...his Unscrolling Story finds me searching for the News that’s lost in my newsfeed. In this Unscrolling Story, I express disappointment with the current state of news media, finding it sensationalized and lacking in substance. I reminisce about the days of NPR, which I once found informative and reliable, but now perceive as lacking credibility. I feel overwhelmed by the constant barrage of information and am losing interest in staying informed. Robert Dighton: Well Neighbour-- What’s the News?,from A Set of Heads (c. ...“One might never notice what’s not present in their life as a result of their scrolling addiction.” This Unscrolling Story finds me ClosingIn on my scrolling addiction. ...During the Covid shutdown, scrolling became a consuming activity, providing a sense of connection and community. Initially a harmless habit, it gradually escalated into an addiction, replacing hobbies and higher-order engagements with endless entertainment. The subtle nature of scrolling addiction makes it difficult to recognize its negative impact on one’s life. ...This Decency Story finds me in steerage, wondering how my interests got Excluded when hospitality became an industry. In this Unscrolling Story, I compare the aimless scrolling of social media to a desperate search for Serendipity, a random payoff in a world lacking hope and upward mobility. This lack of hope, exacerbated by economic inequality and political decisions, has led to a generation seeking satisfaction in fleeting, intangible experiences. I argue that this “scrolling epidemic” is a coping mechanism for a society deprived of meaningful opportunities. ...A Less Than Perfect Christmas Poem Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, this season seems to be overflowing with expectations of great joy. I find those expectations more onerous than uplifting, for I do not know how to create joy. ... It properly must be a surprise or it doesn't qualify as joy, so I cannot will it or otherwise engineer it into being. Merry and happy seem similar, both difficult to impossible to create and probably fruitless to insist upon. Insisting that another be happy seems like a reliable recipe for inflicting misery. How about wishing someone a reflexive Christmas or a satisfying New Year? ... Burdened with the command to be happy, I feel a little desperate, especially when I'm just not feeling it. ...It wasn’t, or had never been in my experience. It was rarely the saddest day of the year, either, ...or, more properly, I might feel happy then. ...because it was also a feature of poem writing. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

...

Serendipity

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-25T09:18:09-08:00

Anthonie Willem Hendrik Nolthenius de Man: Wheel on a pole (1814) A wagon wheel on a tree trunk, with garments, a jug and a tub on it. On the right a chicken. — — — — "…an undifferentiated dopamine rush, and then another." My scrolling most closely resembles stumbling. I move relatively directionless. If not necessarily so at first, eventually. I lose whatever thread of coherence with which I might have begun scrolling, then commence to seeking some Serendipity instead. I feel hopeful, as if I might surprise myself, though I sort through a raft of crap before, finally, eventually stumbling upon something vaguely satisfying. That seems to be the reward for the aimless wandering, a clear waste of precious time, paid off for with some Serendipity, a discovery I couldn’t have possibly held a specific intention to find. I receive a random payoff after taking an equally random walk. Once I’ve extracted the goody off that one, I’m likely to continue scrolling with the tacit intent of repeating that satisfying discovery with something different but identical, ad infinitum. What happens when an economy, a society, quietly but inexorably leaches out the ability of its citizens to expect? They say that once upon a time, people could subscribe to something referred to as The American Dream, and seemingly feel fairly certain of attainment. Since then, Repuglican tactics to steal the means for upward mobility have largely been successful. Now, a third of all people under the age of thirty-three in our society (supposedly the wealthiest society in the history of the world) live at home with their parents because our economy cannot provide enough income for those “kids” to survive on their own. They can’t fledge until reaching an age where half their forebears had already died. The quantity of available hope in this world has been plummeting for a few decades now, at least since the “Reagan Revolution.” This was the direct result of deliberate decisions and not the fault of our children’s generation, or, necessarily, of ours. A few extremely wealthy and conniving immorals chose to create a world like this. It’s left us with an almost frantic need to cope with the situation. With ever fewer legitimate avenues for advancement, it seems understandable if many people adopt essentially random strategies for experiencing better. Scrolling seems just as reasonable as playing the numbers used to seem to discouraged immigrants generations earlier. The promise of some random salvation sure seems a whole lot better than nothing. Even if it usually results in nothing terribly tangible. A dopamine rush amounts to much when compared to nothing much at all. Yes, TikTok videos seem disarmingly trivial, yet they seem to pack punches than produce satisfaction, after a fashion. If we cannot successfully compete for tangibles, intangibles will have to do. To experience an actual act of Serendipity might just be the best thing somebody experiences all day. Every day. The search for such satisfaction can take over. The need might be greater than any medicine is capable of ameliorating. The new national pastime amounts to profligately spending time pursuing absolute intangibles. Social interaction recedes into people’s heads. We’re connected like never before, though, now, we seem to have little to talk about or seek. I think the scrolling epidemic might not be conventionally curable as long as people seem to have so little to hope for. The Repuglicans overreached their intentions. They demolished the very purpose for which many were living. They’ve contributed to creating a generation of nihilists with little left to strive for, so they live defensively, increasingly desperately seeking Serendipity. Serendipity requires no particular skill to succeed. It thrives on a lateral slide. It moves without a specific purpose and grows to become extremely easily entertained. Their purpose becomes that lazy lateral search without clear intentions. They seek satisfaction without first imagining what might constitute satisfaction, other than an undifferentiated dopamine rush, and then another. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

ClosingIn

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-24T06:31:40-08:00

"One might never notice what's not present in their life as a result of their scrolling addiction." Scrolling started in earnest during the Covid shutdown. It didn’t start immediately, but it seemingly inexorably grew to consume an inordinate amount of a typical day. ... The television doesn’t work in our house until after sundown. The Muse was working remotely—first in the basement, then, after we relocated back home, in her back-of-the-second-floor office. There was little else to do, or so it seemed, and the illusion of connection fed what would become a full-blown addiction. I’d finish my work before seven a.m., then look at the day stretching out before me before immersing myself into the only activity left that would have me. That world delivered convincing cues that I was doing something. I was accessing news, or so I imagined. I was following up on headline stories to discover other relevant bits. I could connect with sequestered others, and together, we could create a convincing sense of community. I reconnected with people with whom I’d previously lost touch and became familiar with some who had never been more than distantly casual connections before. None of what we discussed ever went anywhere, but going anywhere might not have been the point. Nobody was going anywhere then. The Muse’s sister began posting a daily update on the dreaded contagion, and that serial provided more than adequate justification to log in every morning. Sharing and commenting could occupy a morning. And I genuinely felt as though I was getting smarter. I was posting my daily PureSchmaltz stories, too, and those kept me logged in through the earliest mornings. I only rarely ever missed making one of my morning postings. They would spark a little commentary. Later, on Friday mornings, I began convening a Zoom chat that continues to this day with a few dedicated attendees, most of them from the earliest days of Covid and before. My world felt adequate for the period. I was never anybody’s rodeo-queen extrovert. I hadn’t learned to hang out in coffee houses or bars for anonymous conversation. I’d slip out for masked grocery excursions, speaking to nobody for those durations. I honestly felt more in public while scrolling than I ever did while roaming around. Dependencies do not start out as imperatives. For the longest time, they remain genuine choices, to be taken or not without ramifications. Then at some indefinite point, what was choice becomes inexorable, no longer a choice but more like a duty, an obligation. It seems as though something terrible will happen if you don’t engage—a sure sign that you’re engaging in something that could ultimately prove to be truly terrible behavior. Like anything, addictions creep in on those infamous little cat’s feet, unremarkable and innocuous; perfectly normal. We tend to tolerate initial doses of even toxic substances. They poison by accumulation over time, by the inch-pebble rather than by the mile-boulder. There was never a point denoting the beginning, so it seemed like a perfectly natural continuation with perhaps a little bit of escalation, but nothing alarming. Quite the opposite: addictions are first solutions, reassuring adaptations to present conditions before they turn into obsessions we cannot shake. Scrolling ain’t like opium addiction. Those of us who scroll aren’t properly characterized as fiends, though a few of us undoubtedly feel at least slightly fiendish down in what’s left of our souls. Scrolling might be, at root, a soulless or, at worst, a soul-neutral activity. It’s certainly not inherently evil, even though its demands fuel the explosive need for data centers and electricity price increases. ... It’s simply a matter of doing what you’ve seemingly always done, only more so. What might have gone toward exercising a hobby becomes enough of an obsession to essentially put an end to that hobby. Further, it’s inherently enjoyable, featuring ample bright lights and shiny attractions to keep anyone entertained. It’s at root entertainment squeezing out higher-order engagements. Since entertainment never leaves behind any evidence of its existence, it wastes whatever time might have contributed to creating something instead. One might never notice what’s not present in their life as a result of their scrolling addiction. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

News

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-23T05:11:28-08:00

Its concept called for creating an alluring spectacle first, then sprinkling in little bits of News to give it gravitas. Even those little bits could dilute the entertainment parts, so they also added lies in liberal quantities. They never promised to be all-the-news-fit-to-broadcast, but “fair and balanced.” They were the opposite of fair and balanced and often not News at all. Needless to say, they became popular among those who watched television during daylight hours. The Rush Limbaugh crowd easily transplanted their hate radio addiction to the cable ‘news’ version, and a notorious Australian “yellow” “journalist” made billions under the ‘never overestimate your audience’ principle and the ‘how low can you go’ ethic. My social media news feed contains less News than the local Safeway shopper circular. Little of it seems terribly urgent or especially consequential. Much of it comes hyped, even the actual News, I suppose, because it must compete and everyone’s hyping. Every event purports to be world-changing and hair-on-fire urgent, though little of it genuinely qualifies as such. The result seems to be a panoply of flashing lights that draw my attention but rarely deliver anything life-changing, or even life-threatening. I’ve become inured to disappointment. The hook attracts, then bites. I escape through fate or good fortune, or I swallow the lede hook, line, sinker, and pole. This diet does not seem especially nourishing. For much of my adult life, I lived with NPR. It was created when I was in my early twenties, and it was a novel and welcomed presence in my life then. Newspapers still held credibility and circulation, and TV News had not yet completely disgraced itself, but NPR woke me up most mornings and filled me in on the doings while I breakfasted. It was more convenient, and it featured genuine entertainment, too. I was addicted to NPR for twenty or thirty years, maybe more. During that time, it was unthinkable that I wouldn’t listen to Morning Edition and All Things Considered, along with Fresh Air, Prairie Home Companion, and even Weekend Edition. NPR did a decent job of summarizing what I would have found in the New York Times and the Washington Post had I been able to subscribe to them in my location. I thought of them as a democratization of elite journalism. I felt extremely well-informed. These days, NPR reporters end their sentences with question marks, like interns, and their credibility has slipped. Our local AM radio station belongs to the Sinclair Network, which means it’s turned to hate speech and conservative social conditioning in place of providing News. I tiptoe my way through my feeds, discouraged by the offerings. The damned algorithm chooses for me, so I cannot always access the outlets I’d prefer to reference. The media climate seems decidedly unsettled and hostile, and my satisfaction with available News offerings has fallen to an all-time low. I do not know what’s going on. I’m losing interest in ever knowing again. I take frequent respite from even trying to be well-informed. Few of yesterday’s urgencies ever came to pass. This, too, shall also pass. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

1stInfinity

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-22T04:56:29-08:00

Gallery Notes: This bozzetto, or preparatory sketch, was part of Tiepolo’s designs for the fresco ceiling of the Guard Room in the Royal Palace in Madrid, which was executed by his large workshop. The artist excelled at manipulating perspective and color to create dramatic compositions in which space seemingly recedes toward infinity. ... The first is the promised deification of the Trojan hero Aeneas, who is depicted in red rising to the Temple of Immortality, accompanied by winged personifications of Victory and Justice. The second is the appearance of his mother, Venus, who is clad in white at the upper right of the painting. Along with the Graces, she presents Aeneas with arms forged by her lover Vulcan, who supervises their making below. Tiepolo gradually lessened his use of earthly reds from the bottom to the top of the composition, which exaggerates its dramatic effects. ..."I wonder what I so passionately and, ultimately, passively sought there." In the 16th Century, Giordano Bruno argued for the existence of infinite worlds within infinite worlds. He was burned at the stake for his trouble, yet we recreate his speculation each time we try replacing one habit with another. Scrolling, for instance, seamlessly immerses us in an infinity, one in which space and time lose meaning. This easily becomes all-consuming, so high a priority that we can neglect everything else without remorse, without even noticing. The time when I first chose to limit my entry into the scrolling infinity, the first thing that occurred to me was a sense of nearly limitless time. My most prominent limit had essentially evaporated, leaving me with a fresh sense of infinity. Unlike the infinity I inhabited when scrolling, which had gone beyond my conscious awareness, this 1stInfinity overfilled my consciousness. I felt a real sense of excess. I couldn’t yet grasp what to do with it. I suspect that this sense will diminish over time, as fresh infinities cast shadows over this latest, freshly discovered one. As Bruno proposed, it’s infinities all the way down, up, and sideways. To enter the least of them is to also join the most prominent, for each infinity, from the tiniest and least significant-seeming to the largest and all-consuming, seems equally overwhelming on first encounter. It appears to be in our nature to try to tame these infinities, however, so we shortly tend to tame them into seeming understandable. Our ability to preconsciously inhibit our perception can leave us simultaneously open to multiple infinities without us even realizing what we’re doing. ...What was invisible behind scrolling’s focus becomes present in the moment, first, as glimpses of possibility, and later, as genuine potential. ... Fleeing back into scrolling’s relative unconsciousness should seem more appealing than facing so many decisions. The response might seem like indecision, but it’s more a matter of inexperience. ... We speak of freedom more fondly than we ever actually experience it. In practice, it’s mostly a pain in the ass, demanding and not nearly as satisfying as spouting off about it was. 1stInfinity should properly seem like a void, empty of genuine possibility. Losing any addiction seems indistinguishable from losing a confidant and friend. ... I felt informed, after a fashion, or at least I would run out of leads. ... The whole idea of draining infinities as a living seems absurd only from a distance. Only from the perspective of any orthogonal universe does draining any universe seem absurd. From within it, resources seem genuinely infinite, filled with comforting, essentially limitless excesses. ...We go unconscious when faced with boundless spaces because our consciousness requires limits to properly perceive. Immersed in any infinity, we might just as well be absent. In fact, people who knew us noticed our absence whenever we immersed ourselves in another undifferentiated infinity. Scrolling does more than consume time; it so dominates attention that time effectively ceases to exist. ... We lose intimate connections, even though we might feel extremely well-informed. ... Who isn’t already consumed in their own infinity, constantly informing their own perspective, too? Scrolling, we become neither better-informed nor particularly influential, but just another capable of repeating the same unsurprising headlines as if they were revelations. I wonder what I so passionately and, ultimately, passively sought there. There comes a time when a fresh infinity’s called for, one we haven’t yet spoiled with familiarity and dulled with resulting complacency. One with some sense of immediacy for a change. A world without so many foregone conclusions, absent so many familiar iterations. One with at least a spark of consciousness replacing quiet compliance. Enjoined from checking my feeds, I felt strangely free to actually engage rather than plot and plan for some indeterminate future engagement. A moment held real meaning, as if it might represent a point at which I might choose to make a difference rather than mindlessly repeat the same sad cadence. ... When at odds, I’m trying not to default back into my previous unconsciousness. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

DecencyUnscrolling

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-21T06:51:20-08:00

As I neared the end of my Decency Series, I, as usual, began fretting about what might follow. By the eightieth installment of any series, my sense of its content has become a permanent resident. I no longer fret about what to write next because the flow has become inexorable. ... But I end each series on the upcoming equinox or solstice, so when the winter solstice started casting shadows, I began my usual fussing again. I had finally become accustomed to where I was going just in time to reach my agreed-upon dead end. ...Whatever comes next will later seem a prescient choice, but in those moments before I decide, it looks as if I should be hiding from rather than warmly embracing my future. Always, the questioning comes: do I really need to create a thirty-fifth series? ... I know the answer to these questions before I ask them, but a body needs an occasional injection of skepticism, if only to avoid being compromised by unquestioned optimism. I feel the need to be careful and not to presume past patterns must carry forward. I’ve found the Decency Series to be enormously satisfying to create and also to re-read. This has not always been the case with my concluding series. A few of them never seemed to find their own identity and so remained collections of more-or-less random reflections. This didn’t necessarily diminish them, but it frustrated the pattern-seeker in me. I leave the Decency Series freshly convinced that Decency must always be a choice, and not a forced one. It must be as freely chosen as any imperative sense should ever be. It’s not supposed always to seem easy or obvious, though it often proves to be far easier than any readily available alternative. “When in doubt, do something Decent” wouldn’t be an indecent motto to live by. The relentlessly Decent seem to create their own good fortune, though, as usual, no guarantee appears on the packaging. Let those thoughts serve as my conclusion to the ninety installments of my Decency Series. ...The recent past has been variously characterized as the undoing of Western civilization or as its renewal. It’s likely been a bit of both depending upon one’s perspective. ... If anything has accompanied those characterizations, it’s been a fundamental shift in how we access our essential information. Newspapers and broadcast news have fallen into disrepair while social media and streaming services of various credibilities have been sucked into the resulting vacuum as replacements. They have made terrible replacements, but each subsequent generation requires some warm-up laps to find its rhythm. Our social and streaming presences have not yet discovered their rhythms and remain disarmingly primitive, injecting a tenacious arrhythmia into our information-seeking efforts. TikTok and Reels posts routinely omit their time stamp, so they report on yesterday’s tragedies as if fresh news, apparently to keep interest churning. I’m continuously switching to Google to see if an earthquake really did happen today in the Berent’s Sea. Usually, the provocation was an untime-stamped recapitulation of last year’s breaking news. ...If scrolling has become the primary medium of our information seeking, what, then, of Unscrolling? The most prominent aspect of a scrolling culture must be the trance it induces on each of its participants. Now that we carry the key to accessing the universe in our pants pocket, we find it disturbingly convenient to continuously “check” on the state of our world. Much of the product of these check-ins produces the sort of red herrings I mentioned above, untime-stamped churn, alluring distractions. How many times have you gone to check the weather on a whim, only to glimpse some alluring chyron, which you dutifully follow, only to remember, a few minutes later, that you had intended to check the weather? I often survive a half-dozen thwarted attempts before finally managing to check the weather, a full half hour after I began chasing that intention with unrefundable minutes. Where has the underlying rhythm of my life gone? ... I read of an alarming new addition to street fentanyl that only affects withdrawal. When it’s present, the crash following a dose becomes an existential crisis. ... The withdrawal’s so extreme that it drives even the most desperate to do anything to secure just a small additional dose, just enough to ward off that horrific withdrawal experience. This story seemed like an allegory about our obvious addiction to social media and streaming services. We suddenly seem incapable of distracting ourselves from our distractions. Even when I catch myself indulging in distractions, I respond by distracting myself again, ad infinitum. I begin today, as I end my Decency Series, declaring a war of sorts on these distractions with a new series I’ll call Unscrolling. The anticipation of what this series might discover seems both uplifting and terrifying. I might come to accept how the world seems to have become and embrace this curious streaming culture, or I might become a social media hermit as a result of this enquiry. I don’t need to know the outcome to engage in the enquiry. I learned long ago how to avoid beginning with any ending in mind. ...Goodbye for now, to my enquiry into my now even more revered friend Decency, and hello to a fresh, strange bedfellow: Unscrolling. Let’s see where this adventure might take us. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

...

Selfullness

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-20T02:13:21-08:00

“I’ll be studying and learning this lesson for the rest of a halfway Decent lifetime.” Brian was always the brightest person in any group he worked with. He naturally gravitated toward performing in a pivotal role, often as a leader. If not the formally-declared leader, then the most widely-acknowledged one. He was, by any measure, an enormously Decent person, patient, often to a fault, and extraordinarily kind. He promoted The Muse and my work, sponsoring some workshops and championing our perspectives. ... When our business went bust, The Muse found a real job, primarily on the strength of Brian’s lead and his firm, supportive recommendation. ... He developed the habit of never taking vacations, since he was really the critical presence when one of his dozen or more projects faced a significant milestone. ...HR finally confronted him after he’d accumulated three months of unused vacation time. He decided to take it all at once, more as a sabbatical than as paid vacation. He spent the first month looking for a new job, then left after he’d used up his accumulated leave. After he announced his departure, a couple of senior executives met with him to try to entice him to stay. One appreciated him for finally clearing his backlog of leave, noting that several other members of staff had also accumulated more leave than seemed reasonable. He invited Brian to lead an effort to determine how the organization could better encourage staff to use their vacation time as they earned it. Their solution to the Brian Leaving Problem was to offer him an opportunity for even greater leadership responsibility. ...In his new role, he didn’t disclose how central a role he’d previously played. ... He steadfastly refused to lead anything or anyone, rejecting every offer to guide any effort. He took to offering quiet observations instead, asking genuinely innocent questions, and letting others figure out their tangles on their own. He’d realized that his well-intended attempts to direct the universe hadn’t accomplished much, other than to render him indispensable and to burn him out. He reported that he felt a whole lot better about his contributions when he wasn’t perceived as indispensable but as useful. He began to find a certain joy in his work that had gone missing when he was still indispensable. He started interpreting what he had once seen as serious problems as mere plot twists, so he left their resolution mostly to the younger, more excitable ones. He wasn’t above offering occasional advice, but usually in the form of some well-intended question so as not to disrupt someone’s up-and-coming effort to become indispensable themselves. Brian was displaying perhaps the most crucial element of Decency I’ve discovered in this long and winding exposition. Most of the stories have focused on Decency as an out-there act, something one contributes to the world or, at least, to others. Those kinds of interventions remain near the heart of Decency, of course, but one precursor practice seems essential, the practice of what I label Selfullness. ... It is kindness to oneself first, to create the platform upon which Decency might be more meaningfully and reliably dispensed. Brian learned after many years of selfless service that he could contribute more effectively if he put on his own oxygen mask first. He essentially suffocated himself so others could breathe until he caught himself nearly suffocating himself in selfless sacrifice. He was spending principle when he could have been expending some of the infinite interest everyone naturally holds. Decency dispensed from such a bottomless well proves to be the most renewable source of Decency. It proves impossible to meaningfully deplete the resource if you’re continually replenishing it yourself. Each act of Decency toward ‘little old me’ merely adds to the preexisting infinity, ensuring that there’s never a meaningful shortage whenever additional Decency’s needed. That infinite well’s not really bottomless, but it might just as well be bottomless if you’re continually replenishing it with additional personal Decencies. ... The little choices made when nobody’s watching keep the foundation secure. ... It presumes improvement by diminishing the very agent responsible for creating differences. ... As a lifestyle, it’s slow suicide, clear and obvious. By far the most daunting Decencies I ever commit are ones I contribute to myself. I, probably like you, was poisoned when educated into believing that I was somehow the least essential element of every engagement. I was enjoined to let others have the limelight and to avoid taking credit for my contributions lest I offend others’ more delicate sensibilities. I was taught how not to be myself as the primary means for succeeding, and I excelled in my studies and my practice. I forfeited much of my earned vacation, too, a sure sign that one is depleting their otherwise infinite well. ... I learned better later, which proved to be a perfect time to learn better. I still struggle to treat myself as Decently as I deserve (I almost said “probably” deserve, as if there were still questions about whether I really deserved my own damned Decency). I am learning to take my leave as I earn it, not to defer necessary renewal and recognition, and to tenaciously practice Decency upon myself. I expect I’ll be studying and learning this lesson for the rest of a halfway Decent lifetime. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

...

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 12/18/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-18T19:06:00-08:00

In reflection, this writing week delved more deeply into Decency's philosophical underpinnings than had any previous writing week in this series. As I near the end of this series—only two more installments remain—it might make sense that Decency gets reduced to the philosophical it might actually be, though I consider it more an ethical philosophy than a necessarily moral one. The distinction, since I'm already delving into the deeply philosophical, lies in who directs the action. ...I began this writing week avoiding providing instruction, instead simply reflecting "On Being" Decent. ... I ended this writing week with a touch of sarcasm in Excluding, living in a world where hospitality and Decency have been turned on its head. ...This Decency Story finds me describing not how to be Decent, but the seemingly simple invocation of it. ...In this Decency Story, I describe my now extended exploration of Decency that has been more about discovery than instruction, emphasizing that I have no final, tidy definition to offer my readers. Through writing many “Decency Stories,” I’ve learned how complicated and unsummarizable Decency tends to be, especially around the problem of staying Decent in indecent contexts. I see indecency as a bully that pressures me into silence, self‑censorship, and complicity through inaction, which I judge as worse than committing an actual indecent act. From this, I conclude that Decency can generate its own context: it does not require that I wait for safe conditions or invitations, but steps forward with courage and almost foolhardy faith. Decency often emerges from uncomfortable, risky moments, and its central issue tends to be timing rather than content—the time to act Decently has always been now. ...This Decency Story describes how I feel increasingly unable to conform to the emerging Decencies. ...This Decency Story explores how Decency depends on being able to read and respond to one’s social context, and how aging can erode that ability. I describe my lifelong sense of distance from the world, beginning in childhood with the feeling of being a visitor in someone else’s already-claimed territory. Over time, I’m learning how to better read social expectations, develop preferences, and generally feel capable of behaving decently within familiar contexts. As the world changed, though, I began to feel out of place again, unable to decode new norms, roles, and fads. Today, I experience myself as disconnected, largely irrelevant, and living in a private, essentially unshared world where most contemporary trends feel alien and trivial. ... I continue to defend my own standards of Decency as if they were timeless, even as I note that each generation judges the next as indecent. In the end, Decency appears as something subjective and context-bound, residing in the increasingly cloudy eyes and era of the beholder. ...TThis Decency Story reflects on the paradox that simply living makes one complicit in moral wrongdoings, and that striving to live a Decent life intensifies this sense of complicity. I describe my increasingly strict personal limitations—refusing to patronize certain corporations and individuals whose policies or actions I find indecent—knowing these choices narrow my world and complicate daily life. Every ordinary decision (where to shop, what to eat, what to watch) becomes a moral minefield in which all options are tainted. These refusals function less like sacrifices and more like sacraments, rituals that affirm my convictions while also highlighting my own limits and possible virtue signaling. Decency becomes akin to original sin: an ever-present awareness of wrong that leaves me feeling guilty and complicit, even as I try to avoid further wrongdoing. ...This Decency Story argues that people habitually underestimate how quickly systems, societies, and moral orders recover from disruption, which fuels unnecessary pessimism and cynicism. Drawing on a friend’s observation, I note that while crises feel catastrophic and endless, history shows that recovery often happens faster than we predict, even though we rarely perceive it in real time—much like not noticing children grow day to day. We confuse disruption with permanent destruction, cling to fixed “nouns” instead of noticing ongoing “verbs,” and assume the future should resemble the present, which makes inevitable change feel like decline. ... I suggest that cynicism might be overgrown skepticism, and that optimism and decency are, in fact, more resilient and quicker to reassert themselves than our fears and gloomy forecasts imagine. ...This Decency Story argues that true Decency has been twisted into a “FauxDecency,” which employs moral language to justify cruelty, bigotry, and control. I criticize political moves, such as labeling countries that support diversity, equity, inclusion, or abortion rights as human rights abusers, as examples of Decency turned inside out and upside down. I condemn right-wing conspiracy believers and public figures who proclaim their own righteousness while promoting inhumanity, racism, and claims of superiority, which I declare inherently self-discrediting. In contrast, I define actual Decency as quiet, humble, non-competitive, and non-evangelical—something practiced by people capable of humor, selflessness, and forgiveness, and never used to humiliate or dominate others. Decency has no enemies, seeks no glory, and does not claim divine endorsement or inherent superiority; it simply acts for others rather than against them. I reject the concept that white supremacy or bigotry could ever lead to genuine Decency, insisting that any ideology that humiliates, seeks dominion, or parades its virtue could not possibly represent decency at all, but a perversion unworthy of the name. ...This Decency Story finds me in steerage, wondering how my interests got Excluded when hospitality became an industry. This Decency Story criticizes the hospitality industry—especially airlines—for abandoning genuine Decency in favor of selling status and exclusivity. It argues that hospitality has become a system of queues, lounges, and elite tiers designed to separate customers into classes and flatter their egos, all while extracting more money for so‑called “free” perks and upgrades. ...People who just want to travel see this obsession with special treatment as sad and absurd, while those who buy into it are encouraged to think of themselves as kings. ...Who was I to think that I might properly represent Decency in a series? I, while nobody particularly special, was perhaps a Decent representative of the sort of person charged with proliferating Decency in the world. There could never be any such person as The Decency Czar, and authority and power seem useless when used either to encourage or to discourage Decency. The seemingly simple tangles any odd anyone encounters when attempting Decency in this world hold all the instruction and reassurance anyone's experience could offer. ... Both our successes and failures seem perhaps equally instructive, for it seems as though Decency only ever really shows in practice, not in theory or in decomposing philosophy, however reassuring such exercises might prove. ... Near misses and apparent failures can also serve to reinforce its purpose, for Decency isn't merely what it does, what it achieves. After studying this critter for the best part of three months, Decency might first and foremost, and also last and utterly, be all about its underlying intention. That choice to act in concordance with a deeply felt sense—moral, ethical, or some other—counts more than whatever results. To live Decently seems to be a matter of choosing generously, of noticing and then acting, not of actually achieving any specific thing. Yesterday, I stood aside as I approached a doorway so that another who had been there before me could enter, but he insisted that I proceed first. I noticed in that moment that while my invitation wasn't accepted, both that anonymous man and I exchanged the most sublime Decencies between us. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Excluding

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-18T05:43:02-08:00

Chickens thinking they have found the cage where they spent their early childhood, plate 21 from La Crinolomanie (1857) ...This lithograph focuses on the outlandish crinoline fashion, which lasted about a decade. Among other activities, Daumier’s exuberant crinolines destroy gardens, sweep up street trash, and catch their wearers in high winds and turnstiles. While this plate comes from the Actualités series, it has also been catalogued under the topic La crinolomanie (Crinoline Mania). This sheet and others by Daumier play on the support garment’s incongruous approximation of the human form. Daumier’s images stress that these contraptions, whether cage- or basket- like, were functionally useless. ..."…we can curl up in wonder…" The hospitality industry has finally become the least hospitable industry. I intend no artificial irony as I declare this obvious truth, just the old-fashioned kind of irony. What could be more Decent than hospitality? Perhaps nothing, unless it’s turned on its head. It has been turned on its head by seemingly everyone working in that most curious of industries. Hospitality seems an odd industry, anyway, because I can’t see smoke stacks protruding from whatever hospitality might be doing, and I think that I really should see smoke stacks protruding from the top of any Decent industry, even hospitality, if it actually imagines itself to be an industry. In my day, even a half-decent industry featured assembly lines and efficiency experts. ... Its assembly lines were more disassembly lines, though, since they broke up crowds into distinct queues. To facilitate this transformation, hospitality invented fresh classifications, ones designed to attract those most interested in status. Those who fancied themselves a cut above others were especially appreciative of this attention, for they had been born attention hogs. They’d gladly pay through their nose to anyone willing to suppose they weren’t one of “those,” “those” being a pejorative term signifying lowly born. Before long, hospitality went from deep-down Decency into even deeper-down perversity. No industry seems more opposed to democracy than the hospitality industry, for it promotes class division and inequality as its primary purpose. It builds what it refers to as lounges, essentially private clubs, in public properties like airports, so that patrons won’t have to wait for flights surrounded by “those” people. Hospitality encourages its customers to think of themselves as kings. They’re constantly pestering their patrons to invest in such ventures: Offering a credit card that strokes delicate egos every time it’s used and charges for that service, upgrading from mundane into the service you’ve always secretly deserved. Their target client gladly pays through the nose for “free” stuff and the accompanying ego income. What happens when 90% of an industry’s clients think of themselves as members of a vaunted 2%? Far be it from any hospitality provider to ever even hint that they provide perks to commoners, but the economics of the industry demand just such subterfuge. But it dare not admit this fact, even to itself. It designs ever finer grades of exceptional until they can include almost everyone in some terribly special category. So much the better to repeatedly plunge for the jugular, for the whole hospitality industry seems populated by vampires and their eager victims. One can hardly count themselves as human without those tell-tale fang marks on their neck. Those more interested in just transporting themselves from place to place couldn’t care less whether they travel first class or steerage. They’d just as soon sit in the back of the bus in one of those non-reclining seats next to a colicky baby as put up with beverage service before the door’s even closed. Those who feel compelled to gild their cornflakes seem pathetic to those just seeking breakfast. The constant need to be recognized as more special ultimately seems sadly pathological. Airlines now make more money selling upgrades to basic services than they make providing those basic services. They make more money “giving away” “free” duck confit sliders in their frequent flier lounges than they ever made just flying people around in airplanes. The tail of hospitality seems to be wagging the entire industry now. And what of Decency under this regime? Where does common courtesy go when it becomes contingent upon some arbitrary designation? The digital divide thrives on every domestic flight, where full service is only available if you’ve humiliated yourself by pre-paying tribute. Whether that comes as the all-important priority boarding or the ever-popular “free” baggage service doesn’t matter. The commoner slinks into a middle seat and secretly wonders when hospitality started meaning there’s never any room in the overhead for their carry-on. One day, probably not today or tomorrow, but one day, I predict a Les Misérables-quality uprising as Decent people finally grow too fed up with special treatment and turn on their placators. It will be a bloody, scary affair. Until then, we can curl up in wonder how we managed to get onto a flight with so goddamned many kings on board. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

FauxDecency

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-17T06:30:44-08:00

"…I'd prefer to believe most would perceive such beliefs the utter opposite of Decency in action." If Decency has always been a matter of choice, what constrains such decisions? I see today a proliferation of what I must characterize as poor choices made in the name of what I can’t quite comprehend as representing Decency in action. Our State Department’s embassies recently received a directive from the White House declaring that every country practicing Diversity, Equity, or Inclusion is guilty of human rights abuses. Likewise, those acknowledging their women’s right to choose. These pronouncements seem the very opposite of Decency. Decency stood on its head and turned inside-out: FauxDecency. I would live and let live in this instance except this instance seems a perverse exception, and it is the perversion that drives my aversion. This cannot represent Decency, even as practiced on Mars, or else Decency itself becomes a meaningless concept in practice. The vast army of whacko right-wing conspiracy believists are not theorists, for they seem to firmly believe that their wickedness represents true righteousness. The Charlie Kirks of this world, and, apparently, those of the next, seem simply inexplicable. They rail on indecently, praising inhumanity as if it were received wisdom, offering implausible excuses for bigotry and overt racism. Anyone who believes themselves superior disproves their claim with their very insistence. Superior people wouldn’t seem so damned full of themselves, so self-promotive. They wouldn’t insist that superficial characteristics were so damnably definitive. They wouldn’t seem so stupid. The founders of Decency, whomever they might have been, would have shown their wisdom had they attached a tiny proviso to their definition of Decency. It would have cautioned that only upstanding people of good humor should attempt to practice Decency, for those incapable of temporary selflessness or forgiveness can’t seem to help but bungle their attempts to practice it. They tend to try to turn Decency into a competition filled with more losers than winners, more self-aggrandizement than humility. Decency was never intended to be a spectator sport. It’s definitely not and never was a cause. ...There couldn’t possibly be genetic characteristics that bestowed privilege. Only faith or firm belief could ever hope to balance those scales, and only in the eye of the true-believing faithful. ... It does not engage in asserting its inherent superiority. ... It does not engage to win, but to continue playing. It does not even try to humiliate others into compliance or tout its inherent superiority, however obvious. Decency doesn’t need to be right, wrong, or oblong. ... It never needs to be evangelical. It’s not engaged in any battle for either good or evil. It should properly remain a riddle much of the time. Why would one extend such kindness if not with the hope of gaining at least temporary advantage? ... It contributes humbly, without the intention of vanquishing anybody or anything. It doesn’t tout a message. It does not engage in self-aggrandizing behaviors because it doesn’t seek to gratify its ego. It aims not to make such a spectacle of itself. It stands appalled at what passes for evangelical Decency, a contradiction in practice, more than merely in terms. That which trades in forced-choice Decency seems to leach most of what might have otherwise qualified as Decency right out of the equation. Freely chosen, I’d prefer to believe most would perceive such beliefs as the utter opposite of Decency in action. I am not on a crusade here, though I clearly stand in opposition to those who promote FauxDecency. I acknowledge that I stand atop a slippery slope, declaring my opposition to what I firmly believe to be a clear perversion of what Decency entails. I could be wrong. ... Bigotry could prove to be the backdoor to some backhanded sort of Decency, though both seem merely perverse to me. I do not intend to extend any theological wars, simply to express my disgust at what some insist correctly represents a Decency that I do not believe exists. If it humiliates anybody, it’s not Decency. If it seeks dominion or claims divine intervention, it remains a perversion, FauxDecency, and unworthy of Decency’s name. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

AlternativeFutures

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-16T05:28:41-08:00

Edward King: A future politician (1874) "Decency’s probably more resilient than even the most practiced cynicism." My old colleague and friend, Al, who has followed my writing for about thirty years, reminds me after reading my recent story featuring pointed comments about cynicism that, as a species, we seem to be much better at predicting long recoveries than at experiencing them. He contends that most systems recover much more quickly than their intimates predicted. This pessimism about our resiliency might fuel much despondency. As we watch what we consider Decency crumbling before us, we do more than just order handbaskets. We believe we might never recover from this latest round of insults, even though our history seems resplendent with examples of more rapid recovery. Even if we held the power to regenerate a severed limb spontaneously, we wouldn’t necessarily relish the experience. We might come to believe that we were more finite than we’d ever actually been, and confidently predict that any individual lobbing off would do us in. We are already recovering from these latest insults, even as the wolves continue devouring so much of what we hold so dear. The disassemblers are no more skilled at demolition than they seem to be at construction. They’re disrupters. In the strict parlance of that business, disruptions represent interruptions rather than permanent destructions. Though The Muse reminds me that we don’t build back, we do seem to be capable of building forward. Recovery, always residing in the future, permanently remains speculative. We cannot know its true nature. We cannot, as my fifth-grade teacher insisted, start with the end in mind and outline the path forward before advancing. If only this universe allowed such reassuring projection. The absence of that capability, though, need not necessarily insist that we can’t get anywhere from here, or that we must by fate move ever further backward. Time moves tenaciously forward. We inexorably follow. My friend Al commented on how quickly children seem to grow up, even though, watching them closely, they don’t seem to change from day to day. The scale of observation seems materially different than the scale of existence. Maybe I cannot see at the actual speed of whatever’s evolving before me. It looks frozen to my perception, though it moves without exception. I surround myself with nouns and miss the verbs endlessly swirling around me. Maybe we need to freeze what we perceive to believe it exists. Verbs make unreliable neighbors. Nouns reassure us, but also mislead us to conclude that we’re more screwed than we might otherwise be. In December, Spring seems an unlikely future. In Summer, Winter seems impossible. Cynicism about the future might be the residue of some vestigial sense that our futures were not supposed to be different. Because they are different, we experience much that makes little sense to us. We might believe that our children are genetically incapable of maintaining the world they inherit, without recalling how unprepared we were to inherit the world we received. It would likely take forever to make progress toward social justice, and not one of us understood what it would take to accomplish much. Backsliding discouraged even the most stalwart, just like it did for those who came unprepared before us. Whatever it is, whatever it was, this too shall pass, rather more quickly than anticipated. The replacement will find balance more rapidly than we can imagine, because we seem to be incapable of imagining such a thing, not because recovery must necessarily remain out of reach for long. Perhaps that cynicism was just skepticism gone to seed. Optimism returns faster than it’s ever overturned. Decency’s probably more resilient than even the most practiced cynicism. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

BecomingComplicit

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-15T07:01:35-08:00

Anneliese Hager: Untitled [Portrait A. H.] (1947) "Attempting to live Decently incurs ever more complicity." To live is to become complicit. Attempting to live Decently only deepens this dilemma, for one may not insist upon society respecting one’s personal proclivities. Vegans surround themselves with murderers. Choosing to live Decently distances one from some, though it might also bring others closer. The least common denominator seems as unconscionable as it also seems most divisive. No way exists to avoid experiencing this division. The higher the aspiration, the lower the everyday experience. I have cordoned off vast swaths of my community as unworthy of my presence. I won’t shop at Walmart because of their disgustingly indecent business policies toward those they euphemistically call “Their Partners.” I won’t visit the Tractor Supply store since they tried to gain street cred by noisily cancelling their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies under the phony guise of promoting actual equality. I was not born yesterday. The more I embraced Decency, the more complicit I became. What I once engaged in without concern turned into burning issues. The shop owner here, who killed a fleeing shoplifter who had stolen a belt buckle, lost me as a customer forever. I don’t care how inconvenient cordoning him off might be for me. I won’t associate with someone so utterly devoid of moral character, not if I can help it. I can see that there might be times when I cannot help but resort to visiting his business, but I’ll feel the infraction every second I’m there. I’ll feel as though I’m collaborating with the enemy. My sense of Decency does not seem to be intermittent. Quite the opposite. It haunts me in every waking moment. It demands constant vigilance, and I gladly contribute that, for it must be the price of my chosen brand of liberty. The idea might be that I won’t have to feel so guilty if I religiously observe these admittedly studied omissions. I do have to tiptoe, questioning which gas station might leave me feeling least complicit after I visit: The one that side-stepped responsibility for the Valdez spill or the one that killed the wildlife off the coast of France? My sense of Decency gets stretched most egregiously when forced into just these sorts of choices. Do I buy the corn-fed beef because that’s what The Muse prefers, or choose a tougher cut of the greener grass-fed stuff, or bypass the beef section altogether in solidarity against the corrupt administration fiddling with the cattle markets and increasing prices? Decency compels me to live as if such choices matter. They do, of course, but perhaps not on the scale I’d wish. Decency demands such sacrifices, though they do not seem very much like sacrifices in practice. They seem much more like sacraments, rituals reinforcing underlying beliefs. I either live by my convictions or undermine my purpose for being. Of course, few if any of these observances “really” matter. They might be little more than virtue signals reminding me of where I’m falling short of my own expectations. Choosing Decency quite naturally declares me guilty, as I myself charge. Decency might embody original sin, the ability to perceive anything as wrong and any act as somehow confirming complicity. I am continually guilty as charged, even though I try hard to avoid committing additional crimes. If I choose to watch a streaming series on Amazon Prime, I commit the crime of colluding with a heartless billionaire. If I visit the Home Despot, I enrich someone deeply complicit in electing our idiot incumbent. I need not do anything, it seems, to fall prey to some scheme I should have avoided. To live is to become complicit. Attempting to live Decently incurs ever more complicity. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

DeSensing

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-14T05:43:33-08:00

"Decency primarily exists in the cloudy eyes of its beholders." Decency requires certain sensitivities before it can be successfully deployed. One must accurately perceive one’s surroundings before one can engage congruently. Imperfections can create divergences such that Decencies escape my ability to properly muster them. I increasingly exist out of context, disconnected from the surrounding world. Early on, I sensed that this world was someone else’s. It was as if I was just visiting and not quite a full inhabitant yet. Initially, I hadn’t even developed a sense of impending inclusion. It seemed that the world had already been conquered and that I would forever be excluded from initiating personal preference. In deference to those who came before me, though they couldn’t have known the impression I received from mutely watching them so masterfully performing. I had not found words to describe alienation, and even if I had, I doubt that I would have then diagnosed myself as in any way alienated. I wasn’t a blank slate, but I was apparently learning. I dutifully became more headstrong and began insisting on certain things as a matter of personal preference, sometimes of urgent need. I learned that neediness could easily turn unseemly, the father or mother of much indecency. I slowly became more sensitive to what fit and what didn’t, and behaved more or less accordingly. I realize now that I never completely outgrew that sense of distance, the feeling that I hadn’t quite figured out this world and my place in it. I tended to avoid situations I couldn’t untangle or hadn’t yet untangled, so I developed no compensating behaviors that would allow me to properly engage. Decency stood beyond me there, and I privately labeled many of those contexts indecent, perhaps only because I couldn’t grok their principles. They often seemed unprincipled to me, which seemed like the very soul of indecency. I found my spots, the contexts within which my experiences had seemingly properly prepared me to perform Decently. I had a few decades where I could more or less comfortably exist within my skin, and within which my skin even seemed to fit me. But that sense of fitness eventually turned into a wasting asset. The world continued to change, and I guess I slowed down in my ability to keep up with it. ... It now seems that I’m destined to feel increasingly out of context as I exit. The world seems to belong to somebody else again, like it did when I was ten. ... The often confusing ambiguity nearly everybody exhibits today was largely absent from my world then. Yes, I suppose I didn’t perceive the ambiguities that were there then, but the quality of the images before me was much less confusing. People seemed to stay in role better, which made them more predictable. As I grew into my teens, I gained sensitivity to my own preferences and to society’s unspoken expectations. I was called out for coloring outside expected lines, and I complied or resisted as I felt called to respond. I learned right from wrong and felt as though my judgment was generally good and that I could trust it. ...I frequently feel as though I’ve missed a memo announcing something coming into or out of vogue. I frequently feel blindsided and confident that I’m not merely lost or confused, but also irrelevant. My perspective doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in the current social economy. I cannot for the life of me keep up with current events. ... I can get to the bottom of some menus without finding anything I’m familiar with, let alone anything I’m even distantly interested in trying. ... I am increasingly inhabiting a world of my own, one with few attractions, where almost everything has been reduced to the level of distraction. I’m growing out of context again. Decency requires certain sensitivities before it can be successfully deployed., and some of those sensitivities erode as we age. The implicate order we intuitively understood in middle age grows increasingly confusing as we roam further from that middle. ... I observe the fashion and manners of an increasingly ancient age. I wear the equivalent of a morning coat and top hat compared to the Oompa-Loompa shorts and tattoo sleeves worn by my younger contemporaries. My Decencies were once well-attuned to the realities around me. Now they increasingly seem better aligned with memories of how things used to be but are no longer and will never be again. I remain defiant in my Decency practices, insisting that my proprieties turn out to be more eternal than thou’s. It seems to have been each generation’s destiny to see their world go to Hell in the hands of their progeny, each of which invented fresh indecencies with which to inflict the future on their forebears. Decency primarily exists in the cloudy eyes of its beholders. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

OnBeingDecent...

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-13T06:30:00-08:00

Gallery Notes: This elegantly attired nobleman – who is young (giovine), handsome (bello) and rich (ricco) – flaunts his possessions. His affluence is emphasized by the pile of gold coins on the table and the many costly attributes of art, gaming, and diversions that literally surround him. ..."Decency's question is rarely what but when." On Being Decent … In Indecent Places I can speak with authority only about my personal experiences, and even that ability seems limited. I have nothing to teach anyone else, except by example, often by bad example. I am no paragon of anything except not being a paragon of anything. This context says nothing about the content of whatever I consider here, for I consider here to present an example of considering, not necessarily to conclude anything. That said, I have been writing Decency Stories for eighty-two consecutive days, discovering more than declaiming, sometimes seemingly shaming myself in the process. I have stumbled into contradictions and many tenacious misconceptions, realizing how little I understood the topic of my efforts. As I near the end of this series, I realize that I probably won’t be offering any crisp summarization of my subject at the end. I didn’t intend this effort to reduce understanding into a spare handful, but to expand it. It has proven more expansive than I could have imagined when I began. One prominent subtext, though, that many of these stories have shown, involves one of the more common yet perplexing situations: On Being Decent In Indecent Places, not How To Be Decent In Indecent Places, but “merely” On Being Decent. I’ve convinced myself that no practical instruction manual could ever exist detailing how to be Decent. As my prior Decency Stories have shown me, the how-to of Decency seems to be far too sensitive and varied a topic to lend itself to` such summarization. ... Much Decency seems to need to be expressed in seemingly indecent places. Indeed, many of my own most Decent experiences have been curiously encouraged by the presence of some intimidating indecency. Such situations do not always bring out the best in me. Often, just indecency’s contextual pressure seemingly prevents me from engaging as Decently as I know myself capable of behaving. I’m troublingly apt to go silent, invisible in the presence of a clear and all-too-present danger. ...I think of indecency as a bully capable of discouraging. Decency doesn’t always require courage to deploy, but to the extent indecency seems present, Decency does seem to demand the consequent courage to engage. The pressure easily enrages and seems to automatically disengage one’s better angels. The context does not seem nearly safe enough to expose Decency’s soft white underbelly. It often appears as though displaying Decency might get me disembowled, gutted, and left for dead, so I play dead instead, or might just as well have. I censor myself more thoroughly than any enemy could ever quiet me. Worse, I watch myself betray my better intentions and sense myself becoming complicit in precisely what I didn’t want. ... I become the potential difference that chose not to act. ...This act makes chickening out seem like an Olympic medal performance in comparison. To be guilty of inaction seems exponentially worse than engaging in the present indecency myself. To have seen the opportunity to make a difference but choose not to act is far worse than engaging in some actual forbidden act. Engaging in indecency might always be a forgivable sin, while choosing not to make a difference seems an act without possible recompense. The opportunity for forgiveness evaporates the second I make such choices. Do overs demand the presence of at least a crime scene. Roads not chosen never come into being, leaving only regrets in their wake. However fully justified such choices seem in that critical second they’re selected, their wake remains eternally present and irreparably broken. The lesson I’m learning seems to be that Decency might be something capable of providing its own context. Whatever other influences seem to be dominating a situation, Decency might always create space for its deployment. ... It knows its course and possesses permission adequate to justify itself at all times. The anticipated criticism that indecency might inflict remains merely projection until it hits, and Decency most often serves as an effective shield against even the worst of that. Decency seems to require a tad more faith in itself than any odd mustard seed might prove capable of providing. A faith bordering on foolhardiness most often seems essential, but it is foolhardiness set against another unending regret. Weighed up like this, Decency doesn’t seem nearly as expensive as its alternative. Decency seems as if it’s usually deployed in indecent places. It reliably appears as though it might upset some overly delicate balance. It aches to go along, not to have to make such a spectacle of itself this time, yet it knows it only ever exists when it must make that spectacle. ... Decency’s question is rarely what but when. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 12/11/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-11T16:22:41-08:00

This writing week proved to be a relatively quiet roller coaster ride with highs and lows properly attenuated and ultimately, unsurprisingly, unanticipated. Little happened as I’d either hoped or feared, so much for prescience and good fortune. I’m coming close to concluding that we’re not the deciding factor here; we might thrive on synchronicity and luck, whether good or bad, but ultimately beyond our ability to influence. The fact that we feel an innate ability to control only makes this roller coaster ride more entertaining as our expectations repeatedly and ultimately, thankfully, disappoint our expectations. We should be both well used to and warmly accepting of these disappointments that visit us when we don’t immediately realize that our prescience so frequently fails us. Decency was not as I'd expected it to manifest. ... Decency was ultimately fuzzier than expected to manifest and, if not ultimately disappointing, still curiously surprising. I began this writing week considering the HarshJudgements I'd assigned to far too many people in my life under the auspices of a misguided Decency. ... I suspected that Decency, like everything, might be best considered a step further from enlightenment than anything else, in Endimbenment. I accepted that Decency must ultimately be considered InPractice, and nowhere else. I ended this writing week conceding that I possess the power for CyncismProofing if only I can find and employ it. Decency ultimately ain't all it's trumped up to be. ...This Decency Story wonders whether it can be considered Decent to make HarshJudgments. This Decency Story explores the nature of Decency, questioning whether it gives one the right to criticize others. I argue that unsolicited criticism remains generally inappropriate and often reflects the critic’s own privilege or need to judge. I portray Decency as a personal, voluntary choice rather than a duty to enforce on others, and I characterize excessive moralizing as counterproductive. I’ve found True Decency in leading by example and practicing humility, without the need to overtly call out others or claim moral superiority. ...“The difference between Decencies might not matter as much as the intensity of each audience member’s suspended disbelief, not to mention the actors’.” This Decency Story explores the importance of SelfDeception in the everyday practice of Decency. Practicing Decency requires continual self-correction and, at times, self-deception to maintain self-esteem. Because Decency happens in the moment and isn’t always perfect, accepting its imperfections remains pivotal. Over-emphasizing one’s own Decency can backfire, so it’s best handled subtly and without terribly much fanfare. ...This Decency Story finds me feeling remorseful for passing judgment on indecent as well as DecentPeople. This Decency Story explores how people seem to have a deep-seated drive to classify others, perhaps to boost self-esteem, which can lead to prejudice and unfair judgments. I cop to labeling individuals as ‘Indecent’ or ‘DecentPeople’, recognizing this as an arbitrary and potentially harmful distinction. I acknowledge that human behavior changes and that forming such categories often reflects more about the perceived past and the person judging than those being considered. I call for more generous definitions of each other and argue against rigid judgments, emphasizing self-reflection and the fleeting nature of Decency and its counterparts. ...This Decency Story discloses what I’ve been learning about Decency through this enquiry. This Decency Story explores how gaining knowledge and understanding—especially about abstract ideas like Decency—rarely happens as expected. ... Attempts to define or communicate these insights often fail, leading to more humility rather than the anticipated certainty. Ultimately, I discover that enlightenment doesn’t feel the way anybody expected, and the quest for understanding often leads to realizing how little one truly knows. ...“I might have initiated this enquiry only to continue it ad infinitum, InPractice.” This Decency Story finally finds Decency lurking InPractice rather than in theory, in enquiry rather than exposition. I should not feel so surprised when I stumble upon the discovery that Decency, like every other concept, only manifests InPractice. ... Only InPractice does it exhibit its underlying nature, which proves to be indescribable. ... Not natively being either person, place, or thing, it steadfastly sidesteps all attempts at facile description, let alone definition. I suppose its dictionary definition performs as well as any dictionary definition might aspire to, though, as I believe I’ve shown in this series so far, much variation swirls around the concept’s central core. ... In fact, Decency seems unusually dependent upon well-formed context to exhibit much of any meaning at all. ...This Decency Story contends that humanity’s central struggle must be against cynicism, which appeals to those tired of life’s predictability and can undermine both individual and societal well-being. I observe this through recent experiences of public incompetence and cynicism in leadership, which have left me personally exhausted. In response, I’ve found escape in Decency: a personal standard that brings meaning, discipline, and value to everyday life. I frame Decency as a mindful approach, especially important during trying times like the holidays, sustaining me through rituals and creative expectations. Despite temptations to fall into cynicism, Decency endures as a vital spiritual defense, quietly resisting despair and anchoring my sense of purpose. ...These ultimately invade every surface in this part of the neighborhood and are extremely difficult to clean up. Those that survive until Spring, which, here, comes near the end of February, will try to turn themselves into Maple trees. These sprouts feature the most amazing roots that tenaciously hold regardless of the force brought to bear against them, usually breaking off. ... Despite there being no clear connection, the two seem to depend on each other. I once thought it my responsibility to ensure that no little Maple trees sprouted come Spring. ... My yard’s not nearly as tidy as it once was, and I’m learning not to feel that guilty about this glaring shortcoming in my performance. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

CynicismProofing

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-11T06:23:37-08:00

"I will mount my defence against encroaching seasonal cynicism with some Decent poems." I believe that there’s only one essential battle fully worthy of human engagement, the eternal battle against cynicism. ... It tends to interest those who have grown weary of the utter predictability of existence, those who convince themselves that they can see through “the game.” Those who contend that they play no game play the most encumbering one of all. The utter predictability of life can sometimes seem like a curse. Three score and ten, give or take, including the genuine risk of an early demise. ... They project what they claim to oppose by merely breaking rules, as if liberty were little more than a tenacious inability to get along with anybody else. After a dog-year downwind from utter incompetence, this witness to the attempted reintroduction of cynicism into our governance finds himself exhausted from the unending exertion. Every damned day, another means of disobeying the law comes into play. The courts have become understandably backed up for decades into the future, while our cynic-in-chief continues merrily projecting spurious grievances. Rejecting both past and future, he’s left with denial. He acts with all the authority of anybody utterly lacking in morality. He vilifies the future in favor of an utterly mythical and eternally unattainable past. ... They backfire more reliably than a 1924 Hupmobile. ...On close scrutiny, Decency might seem like a sorry sort of defense, indeed, in that it ultimately defies description and offers little in recompense. It lacks substance, though it reliably works for the purpose I intend. It provides a formal response to even the most cynical acts. ... It minds its manners, even when there’s nobody else at the table. It maintains a certain standard that elevates even the most mundane. It reminds me how much the kind of engagement matters, even when I’m the only one who notices; maybe especially when. ...Decency insists that there are no insignificant events, no trivial encounters, that every engagement at some accessible level remains sacred. However attractive cynical engagement might sometimes seem, it never promises the reassurances Decency brings. Cynicism seems like dropping dishes into a sink without an accompanying intention of returning to clean up the mess. ... It disposes of experiences, even the golden ones, in favor of whatever bright-shiny distraction draws attention next. Decency anchors an existence, making it meaningful for its own sake if not necessarily for everyone else’s. It’s a form of solitaire where the player never cheats or ever employs questionable shortcuts. Decency wins or loses with equal resolve, understanding that each moment is both irreplaceable and eternal. ...As I near Christmas, a holiday with which I have a long and decidedly mixed relationship, I catch myself relying upon my Decency to sustain me. Christmas was always a myth, yet I cannot deny the effect it has on those who believe in it, and even on me. I believe in it after a fashion, not a cynical notion that I must know better than the true believers, but a needier one that recognizes the necessity of respite and celebration, even after—especially after—a dog year like the one just ending. I almost mindlessly flee into my annual mindfulness rituals, grateful for the respite they promise. ... How will I muster another dozen and more original holiday poems this year? How will The Muse manage to produce so damned many Stöllen? What will encourage me to shop for the vintage ornaments again, and to drag that artificial Christmas tree up from the basement? ...Cynicism was unable to dislodge my Decency again this year, though under considerable scrutiny, I came close to undermining it myself. ... Decency might be one of that class of mysteries I’m enjoined to simply let be. It has served me well as an innocent response and as an unquestioned ritual. ... I know it when I need it most. ... It requires no more than an innocent need, the sort of need that cynicism perfectly encourages. ... It might be folly, fa la la la la la la la la. It sometimes qualifies as holy, especially when I catch myself just before ordering handbaskets from Amazon Prime. For me, Christmas amounts to CynicismProofing, regardless of its relative truth or fiction, just like Decency does. On the upcoming night before Christmas, all through this house, at least one creature will certainly be stirring. That will be me innocently searching for words that rhyme with mouse, but haven’t been so overused as to have become meaningless. I will mount my defence against encroaching seasonal cynicism with some Decent poems. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

InPractice

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-10T06:43:11-08:00

"I might have initiated this enquiry only to continue it ad infinitum, InPractice." I should not feel so surprised when I stumble upon the discovery that Decency, like every other concept, only manifests InPractice. In theory, it seems to contradict itself. Only InPractice does it exhibit its underlying nature, which proves to be indescribable. ... InPractice, Decency seems to exhibit little if any ‘thingness.’ Not natively being either person, place, or thing, it steadfastly sidesteps all attempts at facile description, let alone definition. I suppose its dictionary definition performs as well as any dictionary definition might aspire to, though, as I believe I’ve shown in this series so far, much variation swirls around the concept’s central core. ... In fact, Decency seems unusually dependent upon well-formed context to exhibit much of any meaning at all. You might not notice it when it exhibits. Contrary to popular misconceptions, none of us really shares a reality. We exist within at best fuzzy approximations of genuine perceptions, each missing some part of some broader theoretical whole. Decency, having been taken from the Latin ‘decentia’, “being fitting,” requires comparison to even come into focus. Fitness has always been notorious for its innate fuzziness, being utterly dependent on a raft of similarly fuzzy conditions, such as purpose and intention. It’s a wonder anyone ever agrees upon what constitutes Decency InPractice, even when some theories seemed to have shaved off much of its innate fuzziness. I spent much of my career failing to teach people better ways to engage in project work. The first stage of such activities usually requires the creation of something to serve as a description of the content of the theories behind the professed practice. What could be more obvious? Prospective students wanted to know what they would learn should we engage in a workshop together. I complied as best I could, only to discover that each prospective student apparently read a different description than the one I had written. Much was apparently sacrificed to interpretation, which depended upon each prospective student’s context. In this, as in most cultures, people spend very little time concerning themselves with their context. We’re too focused on the outcome to get overly interested in where we’re coming from, though, when embarking on anything, the point of departure proves critical to arriving. Most of what I’d tried to propose was ultimately lost in failed translation. I learned, though I proposed to be the teacher, that what I aspired to teach could only be taught by each participant to themself. My presence served as little more than a catalyst. I’d propose some exercise within which some discovery might occur. Those discoveries utterly depended upon the student’s aspirations, not mine. Project work turned out to amount to a deeply personal practice. To adopt another’s process undermined the purpose. I never once successfully described what any student would get from attending my workshop. I rarely ever knew what they discovered, so personal was the experience, and necessarily so. Project work, too, turned out to disclose its significance only in Practice. The underlying theory seemed meaningless in comparison. The project practice-certifying agency turned itself into a Change Prevention Operation, enforcing a backward vision while intending to light the way forward. I eventually just got out of the business. ...I stand before you as a wounded optimist. My optimism remains surprisingly intact, given what it’s encountered over the years. I still gambol out like a Spring lamb when faced with another challenge. I hope never to learn to more accurately predict the inevitable outcome of any of my proposed enquiries, even though I might manage to sidestep some crushing realizations by so doing. Decency for me demands that I embody a certain uncertain innocence when enquiring. I do not need to pretend ignorance, for I easily forget my prior insights when pursuing fresh ones. I am a heavily modified verb InPractice, not a noun, whatever form each enquiry takes. I have so far more or less steadfastly refused to draw much in the way of conclusions. I do not enquire to put a concept to rest, but apparently to further animate it. ... I might have initiated this enquiry only to continue it ad infinitum, InPractice. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Endimbenment

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-09T06:01:45-08:00

Enlightened Protector Mahakala with Six Arms [Shadbhuja] (18th/19th century) "Certainty must certainly be the surest sign of ignorance." Acquiring knowledge and understanding never occurs as advertised. I understood that I would be acquiring something and come to know as a result of my efforts, but the outcome seems to reliably be different than either of those. Determining the endpoint, when such searches are finished, proves challenging, and applying what I learn, even more so, for it seems that I acquire much less, but also much different, than I expected. Even when I adjust my expectations beforehand, based upon my long and disappointed experience, the result underwhelms me. It always seems much simpler than it should properly seem and also much more complicated. I tend to find myself incapable of explaining what I experienced, what I definitively learned. I feel more humbled than haughty. It’s little wonder why the uneducated look down their noses at eggheads, for the learnéd among us have suffered a shit ton more humility than have the great unwashed. Those who never pursued enlightenment might have been the wiser for their choice, and might have wisely suspected the chase would have just become another ruse in disguise. They’ve been hoodwinked before. Take my attempt to understand Decency, for instance. It began in relative innocence. ... It seemed to be missing much of the time. I believed that I might come to understand better if I just asked myself some questions about Decency’s nature and practice. And I have come to realize, though the brand of realization surely doesn’t seem all that enlightening, or, if it actually is enlightenment, it doesn’t feel like I expected it to. Maybe that’s the essence of enlightenment, that it doesn’t feel like it’s supposed to feel. It feels different, and that difference seems somehow unexplainable. Learning must not be like saving documents into files and files into folders where they can be easily retrieved. It’s far more fleeting than that. ... Not a possession at all. Not necessarily reduced to an elevator speech. It seems more of a nod. ... Not a thing after all. ...Ask me what I’ve learned about Decency, and I won’t know where to start explaining. My explanation seems more than likely to fail to explain anything useful. My emerging understanding of Decency does not seem fungible, so I feel cursed to use words that cannot help but misrepresent it. It seems primarily comprised of a most curious substance, one I might best label “not that.” My understanding seems to be the opposite of something. If I could only come to understand that opposite, I might be on to something, but understanding seems destined to lead back to the same point on my mind’s Mobiüs strip. Understanding seems different from what I expected. Even when I adjust my expectations to account for the differences I’ve experienced in my past, I still fail to grasp what it was I learned. ...Humbled by both my search and by what I suppose I found, I have little to parade around. ... I bring no golden ones, either. I’m still learning. I’m coming to understand that understanding Decency will most likely continue to elude me. Have I advanced beyond the naive state in which I began this exercise? ... Just don’t ask me how, for that disclosure seems too personal and must be stored in some unspeakable language. I feel humbled. I feel as though I’m bumbling this experience. I sense that I should have come to understand more tangibly, which was my naivete talking when I began, that I tried to adjust my expectations against, but failed. Enlightenment might be coming to sense that it was never about enlightenment. The more I come to understand, the less I know for certain. Certainty must certainly be the surest sign of ignorance. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

DecentPeople

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-08T07:35:59-08:00

Vincent van Gogh: The Drinkers (1890) ...During his time in the Asylum of Saint-Paul in Saint-Rémy, a small town near Arles, Vincent van Gogh made a number of copies of the work of artists he admired, which freed him from having to produce original compositions and allowed him to concentrate instead on interpretation. For this image, Van Gogh copied a wood engraving from Honoré Daumier’s Drinkers, a parody on the four ages of man. The exaggerated figure types capture Daumier’s characteristic humor and convey his sad message about the horrors of alcoholism. The greenish palette may well be an allusion to the notorious alcoholic drink absinthe. ..."My Decencies seem as fleeting as my days." People seem to have a deep need to classify each other into categories. A deep need for self-esteem might drive this tendency, though there must be better ways for us to feel good about ourselves. This practice seems the likely source of prejudice, misogyny, and a startling list of the more prominent human frailties. I wonder why we couldn’t be generally better than this, since we hold the capacity to make finer judgments and even to choose to make no judgments at all. Would it kill us to make fewer judgments under some ‘judge not, lest ye be judged’ rule? ...I feel embarrassed to acknowledge that, in this whole series, of which this writing finds me 85% finished, I have been spouting deep antipathy toward a class I labeled Indecent without clearly defining who belonged to that group. Likewise, I have been promoting an apparently opposite group whom I labeled DecentPeople, as if Decency were a tendency common to swaths of society rather than an individual instance of human behavior. It seems a bit more than a stretch to create a class of otherwise faceless individuals based on my perception of their prior behavior. Many, maybe all, I preconsciously included in my indecent group remained fully capable of committing some Decency in their next act. None necessarily deserved to be damned due to their history, especially a history cobbled together by me so that I could assume some form of superiority. If Decency has an evil side, I suspect it lies along this exclusionary line, the one delimiting one person’s prejudice more than their reasoned judgment. We presume to know whatever lives in another’s heart based solely upon our personal perception of their behavior. ... I know this assertion sounds naive, for what besides precisely this sort of judgment, however flawed, might allow me to pass the judgments that keep me safe? This might provide a sorry sort of safety, though its conclusions seem almost perfectly self-sealing. We might misclassify somebody as indecent when they’re more often not. ... We might just as easily classify DecentPeople as indecent without ever suffering any adverse effects from passing such judgment. The ill effects, if they show up at all, probably appear as a narrowing of association. We might shun some we could otherwise have known, or know some we might otherwise have ignored. I plead guilty to the sin of censoriousness, the act of being severely critical of others’ behaviors. This behavior seems roughly equivalent to any other -ism I might revile. I have been a practicing indecency-ist, reviling others’ personal practices. Certainly, some of those practices do seem indecent, but we all occasionally dabble in our own indecencies; none stand innocent of that sin. We might define each other more generously and, maybe, sometimes choose not to judge each other at all. On our better days, we might even manage to forego the harsher judgments we might routinely make against ourselves. Am I so needy that I feel I must disparage whole classes of individuals? Their past no more defines the indecent than Jewishness defines any individual’s potential. The past was never prologue, but practice, and while repetition might never produce perfection, it never definitively defines future capability. There’s little leverage in damning anybody to anyone’s Hell. Nor is there much advantage to be gained by continual virtue signaling. Whom am I signaling, and why am I seeking their approval? Am I so needy that I must maintain an army of indecency around me for my innate Decency to show? Indecency seems to be a fleeting thing, if it ever qualifies as a thing at all. Decency might describe the next act and the ones thereafter, though some indecency’s more than likely to slip in there, too. The dichotomy says much more about me than it says about my world. I might better inform myself without resorting to finite classifications, or perhaps rely on more value-neutral ones. The beiges that dominate the late autumn landscape would seem indecent in the middle of May. My Decencies seem as fleeting as my days. My judgments alone might stand most eternal. If that notion’s not sobering, I don’t know what is. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

SelfDeception

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-07T06:10:46-08:00

Antonio Mancini: Self Portrait; verso: Two Self Portraits (c. 1900-1902) "The difference between Decencies might not matter as much as the intensity of each audience member's suspended disbelief, not to mention the actors'." Discussions of Decency rarely mention the essential role that SelfDeception plays in its daily practice. Unlike a character in a novel or history, the Decent must wrestle with all the complexities and contradictions inherent in any practice. From one minute to the next, conditions might change, disrupting an intended trajectory. So, while one hears plenty of talk about choosing a path, one only rarely hears stories of having to pick and then continually choose again and again. There sometimes seems to be no end to the choosing when it comes to Decency. This can become understandably frustrating, with some loss of focus and discipline seeming common. The Decency originally intended can sometimes get twisted in delivery and manifest in rather embarrassing ways. A Decent SelfDeception might kick in then, to preserve self-esteem. The story remembered often seems divergent from the story as initially intended and executed. Lapses in discipline are not uncommon. These do not necessarily suggest any deep-down dysfunction, though they might disappoint the more judgmental among us. Especially when it comes to judging oneself, a fuzzy focus might be best: close enough rather than bull’s eye hits. Perfection might show burnt edges or still be a little undercooked in the middle. Since many Decencies are cobbled together in the moment for a specific purpose, the delivery might understandably appear ragged. These have rarely been practiced beforehand and will not be retained for additional performances. Many might seem eminently forgettable and best forgotten quickly. A glancing appreciation without effusive fanfare serves as adequate acknowledgement for most Decencies received, for most intents and purposes. It might also be best if the Decent avoided thinking of themselves as Decent, if only to avoid submitting to unrealistic expectations. Decency seems better delivered as an anomaly, anyway, for this convention makes it seem just that much more special. Nobody needs Goody Two-Shoes self-esteem. Such notions too easily go to one’s head and set up those around them to experience disappointment when the inevitable feet of clay appear. It might even enhance Decency’s impact if the otherwise Decent person sometimes displays a certain canny ruthlessness, not as a steady diet, but as an occasional side dish, to keep the audience off balance. Displaying this sort of variety renders one into a much more complex character, and people love a good contradictory character, the loveable rake and the whore with a heart of gold. Nobody lives by bread alone. If Shakespeare were still alive today, he would doubtless regret ever having said that we’re all actors performing on a stage. While this observation has proven to be remarkably accurate, it was probably also always destined to become banal, one of those thoughts that seem so damned universal that they’re better left unmentioned. We might all be actors, but we’re not all Academy Award material, nor are our plays necessarily the sort that prompt memorable performances. Some of the most satisfying performances I’ve ever witnessed happened when the kids mounted the window seat as their stage and immersed themselves in extended pretending. We all knew every difference between performer and character, part and performance, but some underlying authenticity shone through both the play and the performance. I suspect life’s like this. The difference between Decencies might not matter as much as the intensity of each audience member’s suspended disbelief, not to mention the actors’. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

HarshJudgments

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-06T05:27:41-08:00

Nicolas Chapron: Judgment of Solomon (17th century) "Let he who is without indecency cast the first criticism." The Decent seem to have the greatest license to criticize those with fewer scruples. They appear to inhabit unimpeachable high ground that bestows better judgment, so who better to critique others? Does Decency necessarily assign such a responsibility upon its perveyors, or are they somehow enjoined from overly overtly criticizing, lest that seem unseemly? I suspect the answer to these questions must be the responsibility of each Decent person. I know the answer for myself, though my answer sometimes shifts, depending. I do believe it’s unseemly of me to criticize harshly, or, perhaps, to criticize at all. It might be at least borderline unseemly to even criticize lightly without first receiving an invitation from the one being judged. Without their permission, any criticism falls under the unsolicited feedback rule, which calls for it to be ignored and the critiquer to receive the greater criticism for unloading uninvited. Further, since feedback always says more about the critiquer than the criticized, even if I might feel fully justified in attacking their performance, that sense probably most reflects my sense of privilege. I can see how casting myself in the role of judge and jury might well appear unseemly. When Decency becomes evangelical, it starts to creep toward evil. I don’t believe I’ve overstated the case. If Decency remains a choice, then anyone’s free to either choose or reject Decency in any situation; otherwise, it’s not a choice at all. One need not be Decent one hundred percent of the time to meet the threshold of Decent behavior. Heck, a single act of Decency sometimes reframes a hundred counterexamples. Choice presupposes that each possesses sufficient judgment to decide; otherwise, it seems a hollow power. Even choosing indecency might lay the groundwork for later increasingly Decent actions. Who made me responsible for calling my neighbor’s fouls? Precisely nobody, that’s usually who. Decency does not necessarily confer responsibility to reform anybody. Church ladies more often prolong aberrant behavior than cut it short, if only because it feels so satisfying to ignore their tight-assed insistences. Decency might demand tolerance instead, acceptance that everyone has already been trying to the very best of their ability to satisfy their intentions, and that those intentions represent their definition of Decency for them. Decency might firmly believe that it’s learned if you do and also learned if you don’t, that both Decency and its opposite might prove to be equally powerful instructors, and that everyone’s fully capable of learning for themselves. Evangelism might provide temporary solace, especially in situations of injustice or inequality, but blaming the victim of indecency for their ignorant or innocent actions seems unlikely to improve anyone’s lot. Decency sometimes seems like a curse. When it opens up my eyes, I sense that I perceive better than anyone else. Of course, I never get to sample the view from their window, like they never get to see through mine. I can certainly work against any forces I choose to oppose. But standing in judgment seems different than serving as an activist for change. I consider the considerable sins of our incumbent, for instance, to be self-evident. I feel some guilty pleasure when I catch myself railing against him again. If his indecency is, indeed, self-evident, then what am I doing besides dog piling on already acknowledged dog shit? I’m most likely virtue signaling, letting others know that I’m not like him, that I oppose what he’s doing, though, in so doing, I’m kinda sorta mimicking him, too. ... If his behavior was always self-evidently indecent, I might have been unnecessarily amplifying his very presence. Mentioning that behavior resurrects it. Decency demands a certain humility in those who practice it. I might believe that my Decencies stand for themselves. That if I want others to behave as Decently as I perceive myself as acting, I might believe that I stand as an example without getting altogether too verbally explicit about it. Decency seems at least as self-evident as indecency. I need not provide the color commentary unnecessary for anyone to see, or even inspire them to behave like me. But I violate some tenet of Decency whenever I insist that another follow my lead. I’m no paragon of Decency myself, and I’m not above learning a few new tricks of the trade from others who, like me, at best intermittently practice Decency. Let he who is without indecency cast the first criticism. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 12/04/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-04T16:35:15-08:00

This writing week saw the first hard freeze in this Valley They Liked So Well. It also saw the start of its typical seasonal socking-in as this bowl filled with fog that the weakening sun could not manage to burn off. Rudolph the Red-Nosed had a prominent franchise here in my youth, and would today if video games hadn’t undermined most of our traditions. The Villa felt cozy with the fireplace blazing after my granddaughter Tilda struck the fateful match that lit the first pile of kindling and firewood, leaving the fireplace warming through the long post-Thanksgiving weekend. ... I suspect that if I focused this much attention on any topic, though, I’d only undermine whatever I thought I understood about it beforehand. ...I began this writing week trying to set a crooked record straight, reframing the slandering that has lately been insisting that the seat of our self-governance has become a swamp needing draining, in DeCency. I continued undermining my previous understanding by introducing relativity into the inquiry with RelativeDecency. I took a slight side trip to comment on the indecencies embodied in monopoly, oligarchy, and other SelfDealing. I delved into my InnerIndecency before confronting the MoralHazards inherent when interacting with apparent insanity. I ended this foggy writing week with Ferocency, a story focusing on the ferocity Decency sometimes employs and enjoys. Thank you for following along as we passed into the seventy-fifth story in this series. ...This Decency Story deconstructs the false “Drain the Swamp” story concocted to foster the self-hate that authoritarian states require. This Decency Story argues that Washington DC was never a ‘shithole’ but a city established on self-governance and civic pride, not ruins or corruption. I criticize the ‘Drain the Swamp’ narrative as misleading and damaging, insisting that self-governance requires compromise and is not fundamentally corrupt. ... Ultimately, this story warns against those who attack government for personal gain and proposes valuing the civic Decency that DC represents. ...This Decency Story dabbles in relativity, a property that even Decency exhibits. This Decency Story discusses how Decency seems subjective, existing on a spectrum, and therefore difficult to define or consistently judge. Individuals may believe in their own Decency, but this conviction can be delusional or based on changing standards. ... Ultimately, people maintain confidence in their own sense of Decency, even if it cannot be absolutely agreed upon or proven. ...This Decency Story discusses SelfDealing, a hair-splitting necessity sometimes taken to indecent excess. ...Selfishness must be balanced with the needs of others, as extreme forms—either in greed or self-denial—ultimately fail to sustain society. Pursuing self-interest without regard for others leads to destructive outcomes, undermines cooperation, and ultimately creates instability and opposition. ...This Decency Story speaks about how we seem to perceive InnerIndecency. This Decency Story discusses how easily beliefs can turn into firm convictions about things that don’t exist and how outwardly Decent people sometimes hide damaging inner beliefs. I warn that appearances are deceptive, as everyone naturally conceals some indecency beneath their respectable roles, and that it remains prudent to be skeptical of others’ true character. Inner beliefs reveal themselves over time through actions and words, and those who boast of their Decency may actually display more indecency than they readily admit. I ultimately advise caution in judgment, acknowledging both the limits of perception and the prevalence of self-deception. ...“- This small line here indicates to me that you are going to get a royal thrashing!,” plate 126 from Actualités (1859) ...This Decency Story reflects on how Decency isn’t fixed but shifts with context, emotional state, and the behavior of others—especially when faced with irrational or ‘insane’ actions. Encounters with such behavior ignite internal conflict, questioning whether conventional limits can or should be set aside, and whether retaliation or abandoning Decency might become justifiable. This raises deeper doubts about responsibility, fairness, and the nature of justice when only one party adheres to Decency standards. I conclude that Decency must be a series of ongoing choices made in situations without clear answers, particularly when the environment undermines simple moral responses. ...“Under certain uncertain conditions, a two-by-four to the side of the head could be considered an intervention of Decency.” ...Decency shows up in many forms, sometimes gentle, sometimes tough, and might not always be tied to outward kindness. Social standards have become fuzzier, and what has become accepted as Decent often depends on context and the observer’s interpretation. Decency seems deeply relational—it always affects someone else, even if that someone is part of oneself. The concept resists a simple definition and often blurs the line between helpful and offensive, but it tends to shape meaningful experiences even through awkward or challenging exchanges. ...I have been trying to be on my very best behavior while I've been investigating Decency here. To do otherwise seems unthinkable, however I might struggle to embody what I aspire to achieve. This amounts to nothing more or less than the standard issue human condition, contrition most probably required. ... Surprisingly, I've somehow managed to muster no new ones in this effort, though I could be fooling myself on that count. It might be that we can only resonate more deeply with whatever we originally embodied, and that progress, transformation, and even salvation, amount to little more than vanities, pleasing to an otherwise unappreciative palate. What ever convinced me that I wasn't born fine, fully capable of living my three-score and ten and then some, given the benefits of modern dentistry and psychic healing? I notice that I seem to be one of those left standing, however unlikely that might have seemed at times. It's no testament to my prescience that I've accomplished anything. I have been writing this Decency series on spec, precisely like I've approached every other accomplishment in my life. We're trained to believe that we can plan and reassure ourselves with some adopted or discovered prescience. ... I appreciate myself as I finish this writing week, for persisting through clear evidence that this might not be going anywhere interesting until it, as always, somehow turned fascinating. I do not need to understand anything, it seems, but to just continue searching. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Ferocency

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-04T06:54:19-08:00

The female personification of Cruelty (Crudelitas) sits on a bag where the collected grain flows out. She hands a bread with a fish to a dog, and a stone with a snake to a young child. In the tree behind her sits an owl with a burning heart in its beak. On the left in the background a river with a current acceleration. On the right in the background a face on a village. On a field, a woman sprinkles food for the pigs. In the margin, a six-line exlanatory poem in Dutch, Latin and French. ..."Under certain uncertain conditions, a two-by-four to the side of the head could be considered an intervention of Decency." Varying intensities are permitted when deploying Decency. It needn’t always seem gentle or even necessarily kind. As with most things, tough love equivalents unquestionably exist, though one must usually deploy them circumspectly lest motive be interpreted differently than intended. In business, for instance, certain otherwise unseemly intensities seem permitted under the self-referential rubric that “business is business,” a multi-purpose excuse intended to cover every possible variation. It seems as though nobody can call “violation” regardless of the intensity of the application if it’s done in the pursuit of profits. I’ve also noticed a certain erosion of what used to pass for decorum, allowing for some rather coarse words to be injected into otherwise benign conversation. Some of what had previously been considered first-class violations gets ascribed to simple cultural variation, as if someone’s background might justify employing shocking language and manners even at a grandmother’s table. I intend my point here to remain rather more fuzzy than clear because the lines delimiting the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable no longer seem clear. I do not intend to resolve that ambiguity here, just to note its often unwelcome presence. I cannot judge this book by its cover. Delivery might easily belie the underlying Decency. ... It might pay me to attempt to be unoffendable, accepting experiences as something other than necessarily value-laden. Whether one employs the F-bomb or not does not necessarily tell a listener very much. There’s much more at play than whatever merely offends the ear. The rules at play remain first the listener’s, who might frequently feel challenged these days to find the Decency lurking in the messaging they’re commonly exposed to. Like I was exploring yesterday, when asking how Decency and insanity might play together, the questioning mind seems more likely to find something meaningful lurking in what initially might have seemed offensive. ...I have returned to this principle again and again as I’ve explored what underpins Decency. Decency seems to be something inside me, perhaps nothing any meatier than a vague intention. I tried to find a helpful definition for it, but failed. I still insist that I will know it when I encounter it, even though I know for sure that I won’t always. I find it helpful to remain mindful of a few of the more common exceptions to any more general rule. Decency can sometimes seem like a rabid lamb, appearing soft and cuddly but potentially deadly, especially to some of the more fragile states. Some Decencies serve to utterly undermine a deeply held conviction. A kindness given to a mean old man or a seemingly mean old comment given to a stuck young person. Under certain uncertain conditions, a two-by-four to the side of the head could be considered an intervention of Decency. Decency must be more than merely a choice. It must also represent a relationship. Who could be Decent in the absence of another? Even when treating myself Decently, where it’s just me, I seem to be filling two distinct roles. I am the nursemaid and the patient, one extending while the other accepts. It’s possible to inflict Decency on somebody, but even that seemingly independent action relies upon the unwitting receiver. Decency must be a choice affecting another, even when that other is just another part of oneself. The delivery matters, but not always overwhelmingly. Sometimes Decency slips out of its carefully tended cage to slap another in the face. These experiences can serve as the basis for exploring some places ordinary experience rarely invites us to visit. We might blurt out our most significant contributions, only to understand later how fortunate we were to have violated a limitation. Decency seems destined to remain a mystery, even after I’ve finished writing this explanatory series. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

MoralHazards

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-03T06:48:15-08:00

"What does it mean to respond Decently then?" ...What constitutes Decency in one context might border on indecency in an adjacent space. ... One might easily justify different responses when feeling angry than when feeling secure. Decency does not provide an isolated or isolating platform for responding. Everybody’s inescapably in each fray together, whatever their behavioral or moral preference. It might not prove helpful to equate Decency with morality, especially when subtle senses of superiority creep into the internal conversation. That said, the Decent might behave more consistently, if only because they insist upon certain limits and boundaries. There are probably many more things Decency won’t consent to do than indecency even notices. I’m fussing today about how Decency can get twisted in the presence of the insane. Insanity has proven to be one of those difficult-to-diagnose conditions that even serious professionals routinely disagree on, so it seems particularly germane to consider here. Specifically, our incumbent repeatedly exhibits behavior patterns that seem clearly insane. How does this behavior influence what I consider to be Decent behavior when reacting? Do I get to blythely disregard my usual self-imposed limitations, defining what I consider to be Decent, because he can’t seem to display even an odd ounce of Decency? ... What does Decency get anybody in a situation where only one side seems capable of even pretending to play the game? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, which might reinforce the importance of continuing to ask them. Decency should not be overly situational, or so my instincts about the matter insist. I should not intend to invoke my Decency on anybody’s sliding scale, yet sometimes, like when I find myself in the presence of what clearly seems to be insanity, the urge to escalate indecency in kind more than crosses my mind. I am capable of plotting mutually assured annihilation when properly offended. It does not seem in any way fair that the insane should be able to get away with anything just because they carry some serious brain anomaly. I ache for eye-for-an-eye justice, just as if justice should have something to do with such interactions. My Decency seems poised for over-reaction then. It just wants to win, even when—especially when—the interaction in question wasn’t necessarily a competition. Do the insane somehow make me react out of my usual character? Does insanity carry the power to reconfigure the choices I make in response? I feel as if I’m encouraging the behavior if I don’t react more strongly than I might otherwise respond. I want them to feel at least a little of what they seem capable of inflicting on me. ... It feels as if it’s smothering me, depriving me of essentials. ... I do not want to acknowledge such behavior as valid. ... I want to inflict some penalty on the offender, even when I feel reasonably sure that any other action than the one that so offended me was probably beyond their capability. Maybe I’m furious about feeling forced to be the adult in a room filled with raging adolescence. Perhaps I want to lie down and roll in the mud with equally blythe abandon. Could I be jealous of the apparently insane because they seem to be getting away with something? Even attempting to act responsibly can sometimes prove to be a gigantic pain in the butt. ... Sometimes, I’d much rather not have to pay attention to anyone else’s limitations or feel responsible for compensating for their more self-destructive behaviors. I’m nobody else’s savior, and even on my better days, I’m barely capable of saving myself. I see only some of what interacting with insanity does to me, and what I probably do to myself in resonance with that presence. What do I owe those who apparently hold nothing but seething contempt for me? What does Decency demand of me then? Perhaps Decency expects no more of me than to continually ask such fundamentally unanswerable questions, and then to continue choosing. It might be that Decency was never a tendency or a behavior, but a choice, and that each fresh encounter represents something of a MoralHazard. If we could refer to a clear-cut set of rules, we wouldn’t have to choose without fully understanding the ramifications of each choice. But we were apparently blessed with a different class of dilemma than anything that could have been checklist-driven. We’re routinely called upon to consider responses to situations without clear conclusions. We choose somewhat mindlessly, or we forfeit the opportunity to choose at all. When encountering insanity, a break in the logic and reason usually overseeing interactions, the questions become particularly perplexing. ... What does it mean to respond Decently then? The answer only spawns an additional, even less answerable question, ad infinitum. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

InnerIndecency

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-02T07:19:09-08:00

Honoré Victorin Daumier: The Emperor of Morocco in Consultation With the Famous Magician Desbarolles. “- This small line here indicates to me that you are going to get a royal thrashing!,” plate 126 from Actualités (1859) "They ultimately only manage to fool themselves." Some things I firmly believe that I can see might not actually exist. Belief provides more than adequate evidence to convince almost anybody that almost any nonexistent entity probably exists. Beliefs can be remarkably incorrigible beasts, so they must be held with a certain circumspection. They might support unshakeable conviction in absolute fiction. I concede that many of the worst indecencies I’ve ever witnessed fed on just such convictions. Furthermore, few who held those convictions were ever considered to be felons, though the damage they inflicted might well have supported criminal indictment. Their InnerIndecencies often came cloaked in outwardly Decent appearances. Maybe they’re clergy, elderly, a doctor, a lawyer, or even an Indian chief. I’ve grown wary, wondering who harbors nefarious inner beliefs. I’m, frankly, scared of those lacking inner governors capable of staying the more extremist tendencies and beliefs. There might have never been such a thing as common sense, but I still cling to some vestiges of belief in common Decencies. So much the worse for me. So much the worse for anybody still clinging to reassurances. It might be better to listen closely to those skeptical inner voices when they whisper warnings. It’s not necessarily cynical to refuse to accept anybody merely on their face value, for we all know, or should have learned by now, that inner lives always accompany face values. Those inner lives might not be discernible from any outward perspective, and we have nothing but outward perspective to rely upon at first. No need to necessarily presume the worst, but it seems prudent not to necessarily rely upon presuming the best of any stranger or friend. They need not be anybody’s Pollyanna to prove trustworthy, but presuming anybody, sight unseen, to be Pollyanna within seems more delusional than cautionary. Prudence might prove to be indistinguishable from cynicism. Better for me to presume they have an inner life and that it’s not necessarily congruent with what they outwardly present. ... For many, their privacy will always remain their most important product. Solely on appearances, I can sense—or I fancy that I can sense—incongruencies between inner and outer lives. I believe myself to be so perceptive that I can perceive what no combination of my five senses could ever register. Even allowing for a sixth intuitive “sense,” which might not make any logical sense, most of the subtleties I believe I perceive probably amount to clever projection, clever enough to fool me, anyway. I see what I expect, and I attribute that to the hapless other I stand before. However innocent my resulting misperception, it becomes an element of my inner existence that I leave for others to imagine they perceive. I believe that I can see InnerIndecencies by the products of whoever hosts them within themselves. Few can help but disclose in their works the beliefs they hold within. The more deeply and passionately such beliefs are held, the more likely they are to significantly color the accompanying outward presentation. The whore with the heart of gold, a standard stock character in American theater, glows with an inner goodness regardless of the nefarious outward activities she performs in her business. Likewise, the preacher who spews disdain for immigrants discloses his twisted inner belief system, perhaps without recognizing what his words disclose. Our incumbent seems to possess nothing but InnerIndecencies, since his outward performance in the execution of his War on Decency seems unrepentantly indecent. I will grant anyone that he might possess vestigial Decency in there somewhere, though it appears to be held hostage and incommunicado. It’s funny—but not funny ha-ha—how those with overwhelming InnerIndecency promote themselves as more Decent than thou. Their righteous speeches might seem, to some, indistinguishable from those attributed to Jesus in their Bible. Some might even swear that our orange incumbent embodies their Second Coming. In that context, it couldn’t possibly matter how any less delusional and more Decent anybody might counter their arguments. It must require an unimaginably enormous volume of InnerIndecency ever to imagine oneself a second coming of any Jesus. It might take only a little less faith to believe that they’re witnessing that second coming in their lifetime, and by a washed-up, garbage-spewing, self-described real estate tycoon and third-rate ex-television performer cast as their president. This scenario couldn’t even qualify as believable fiction for most, thank heavens. Some InnerIndenencies require no magical perception to perceive, for these are worn overtly, proudly on somebody’s sleeve who apparently honestly believes they’re infallible. They ultimately only manage to fool themselves. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

SelfDealing

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-12-01T06:47:05-08:00

Stuart Davis: Study for “Package Deal” (1956) "Nobody Decently corners any competition." Decency requires some hair-splitting. One must somehow manage to sustain oneself without over-reaching. Society maintains laws against monopoly because we deem SelfDealing indecent. It’s unseemly for anybody to merely compete with their own interests. It’s considered Decent to engage as a part of a system rather than as the entirety of it. Monopolists freeze others out, essentially robbing them of opportunity, however much their monopoly might resemble greater efficiency. Efficiency in the service of nobody else amounts to wasted effort. Efficient monopolies are merely rapacious. Oligarchies are monopolies on steroids. They amount to a series of concatenated monopolies lined up to dominate an economy. They also mock efficiency more than even the most dismissive monopolist could. Oligarchs are not monarchs, nor are they citizens. They are owners hell-bent on preventing others from ever becoming owners, intent on fostering a society primarily composed of renters with no hope of ever succeeding in accumulating wealth. They pray for protection from forces that threaten their dominion. They cannot imagine how they’d survive actual competition, because they wouldn’t. The whole point of monopoly and oligarchy involves the indecency that insists that somebody must be considered superior in order for the world to work for all. The paradox comes with the realization that this belief insists that disenfranchisement must be the key to a world that works for everybody. Selfishness seems both necessary and insufficient to support human existence. One must become selfish enough to feed themselves, for instance, without insisting that others starve so they can exercise that privilege. Likewise, the martyr commits an opposite, if equal, sin: depriving himself of essential sustenance leaves nobody any better off. The martyr takes themselves out of any potential competition, believing that the world might be better for their absence. That’s no more sustainable than any other form of extreme selfishness. The flight attendant asks that everybody put on their own oxygen mask first, not so anyone might beat the competition, but so that everyone receiving oxygen can help anyone unable to help themselves. SelfDealing smugly sits with their success strapped on while their neighbors suffocate unassisted. SelfDealing sucks the collective oxygen out of a society. It vilifies cooperation. It diminishes competition. It perverts pretty much everything it touches once it moves beyond moderation. There was never any success like excess, because excess produces failure rather than success. Those who never learn when to say, “When!” seem destined to become tragic figures. The Midas Touch proved to be much more of a curse than a blessing. The Emperor’s haughty new suit of clothes left him naked. The ultimate absurdity of pursuing generational wealth has never produced what its champions might have hoped. Their excesses ultimately undermined their family’s existence, spoiling the first generation before utterly ruining subsequent ones. There were only promises of privilege awaiting in Heaven. Those who actually arrived found their appetite for privilege had abandoned them in the transition from Earth to there. The privileged on Earth never deliver on their promises, either. Those who would trade for absolute advantage create, at best, a short-term reward, if even that. Anyone forced to lose will attempt a reckoning. SelfDealing creates an opposition absolutely dedicated to unseating its advantage. Because of this, it’s at best a short-sighted strategy. Nobody Decently corners any competition. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

RelativeDecency

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-30T05:24:37-08:00

"…I will remain confident that I understand what constitutes some relatively absolute Decencies." Like everything else, Decency exists on a sliding scale. ... One person’s Decency might well prove to be another’s downfall. Further, it often appears in know-it-when-I-see-it guises. I sometimes feel surprised to find that what I thought might degrade me turns out to elevate me instead. Likewise, some actions initiated in good faith and lofty intentions leave me feeling humiliated. Even with my considerable decades of experience, I have yet to develop a foolproof method for classifying Decencies. Yet I continue as if I understood, as if I could know how to tell Decency in action. I’ve many times proven myself fully capable of fooling myself. What could be preventing anyone else from fooling me, too? I still consider myself firmly on the side of Decent. This conviction, like many, could be a delusion. ... This might be another way to say that I continue to learn. None of us was born understanding very much of anything. Though many consider Decency innate, an inevitable element of everyone’s behavior, the history of presumptions about innateness does not inspire much confidence in this belief. We might most often guess wrong before concluding otherwise, discarding earlier expectations as they fail to satisfy intentions. The space between indecency and Decency only seems glaring, perhaps, because in the most extreme cases, it really seems convincing. But how many experiences can we rightfully claim that we experience in such extremes? The relative rarity of extreme cases hardly encourages certainty—quite the opposite. ...Yet, together, we often agree on what we see before us. Maybe we’re sharing subtle cues that lead us to reach a shared conclusion. ... I know, though, as you know, that a whole population presently believes Decent what we cannot ever understand. Those who perceive our incumbent’s actions as Decency incarnate quality as nothing more than aliens to me. They could not possibly share even distantly similar perceiving and reasoning systems. There’s just no way those behaviors appear to qualify as ambiguous, either, yet here we are, separated by more than mere dichotomy. ...I have been counseled to seek to understand these counterparts, even if they do usually seem to be from Mars. If only the difference seemed more geographical, because being from Mars doesn’t seem as if it would present even half the barrier RelativeDecency brings. I cannot imagine a language that could carry such a conversation. The term ‘values’ seems absurdly abstract when the other clearly appears to carry no discernible values at all. I might as usefully attempt to carry on a conversation with a dog or a blade of grass. This sort of difference seems to accompany every Decency discussion. They each seem destined to fail even to find a premise upon which the differences might be discussed. By necessity, we hold our convictions mutely. I expect to continue confidently declaring what I consider to be evidence of Decency. I might even prove to be mostly wrong in these assessments. I do not anticipate modifying my approach in the face of contrary evidence. You see, relativity cannot exist in any moment. It must reside simultaneously in two different places. There must be some comparison for relativity to exist. Since I have no way to inhabit two separate time slices simultaneously, I’m stuck with one. The one I choose to be stuck with must necessarily be the one with which I hold the greatest confidence. ... It might not even quite qualify as evidence. It seems capable of bolstering adequate conviction to draw convenient conclusions. I will retain a vestigial understanding that my convictions might not be conclusive evidence, and I will also hold that alternative universes and understandings most likely exist out there, somewhere else, but I expect to remain faithful to the one world I inhabit. I might be wrong, but I will remain confident that I understand what constitutes some relatively absolute Decencies. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

D_e_C_ency

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-29T04:09:09-08:00

Unidentified Artist: Social Settlements: United States. ..."Noel House": Noel House, Washington, D.C.: ..."Beware the land speculator promising to eliminate non-existent swamps." Contrary to popularly promoted misconceptions, our nation’s Capitol was never a shithole. It did begin life as a swamp, one owned by that era’s most enthusiastic land speculator and so-called founder of our country, none other than General Geo. ... Those promising to “Drain The Swamp” were centuries too late, for the original swamp had long before been drained and filled to allow a truly great city to be built. The result was not, like most of this world’s capitols, some ancient artifact built on ruins, but a testament to a country’s citizens’ dedication to self-governance. They funded and built an odd collection of buildings, some grand and inspiring, others quite the opposite. The boulevards were broad and laid out so that every few ran diagonally. The result seemed absolutely unique in this as well as every other country. Its heritage was that of a swamp, for sure, but its legacy was self-esteem. Many have noted that perhaps the primary function of government has always been to “Make Sausage.” By this label, they meant that government demands compromise, and that can seem brutal at times. It does nobody any good, however, to disparage their abattoir. ... They kill to survive, but no legislatures were ever stood up to merely commit murder. A legislature performs necessary services, some of which should properly upset the squeamish. Every alternative seems worse if the goal remains self-governance. Authoritarians can, of course, come to conclusions without having to resort to public disagreement or perform any but the most cursory and brutal convincing. Self-governance must necessarily be disconcerting. The Drain The Swamp Lie encourages a subtle but pervasive condition in both citizens and politicians. It requires that each adopt a self-hate perspective rather than self-esteem. To slander the very context within which we craft and administer our civic Decency seems inherently indecent. Of course, there has been documented evidence of corruption in the process, but it’s more than a stretch to be convinced that the whole operation must have been corrupted as a result. We strive for a more perfect union rather than perfection, after all, and calling for simply storming and deconstructing the place where the people’s business occurs stinks to high heaven, and should. The authoritarian deals in redirection. He seeks to steal whatever affection one might hold for themself so that he might hoard it instead. They continually cast themselves as saviors, and this character requires that others be damned as one of several essential preconditions. Damned is a state beyond grace, distanced from the source of any inherent greatness. It demands that its sufferer first and foremost come to despise themself, since self must ultimately serve as the trustworthy source of self-esteem. Convinced of their inability to reverse this course by themselves, people become easy pickings for conscription into one or another crusade. These always come with specific promises, not one of which was ever necessary or even possible. Once one finds themself divorced from themselves, they’re likely to hook up with anyone, if only out of desperation; even some passing authoritarian whoremonger. DC already contains more than ample D_e_C_ency. Like everywhere, it has its problems. It never promised to become Valhalla, after all. It remains worthy of each citizen’s admiration, though, even when it finds itself occasionally overrun by carpetbaggers bent on reforming what they do not understand. Beware of those who villify those who serve as stewards, for they’re unlikely to deserve support. They have always tended to be in it for themselves, not for the people they continually tout. They trade in self-hate rather than salvation. They actively seek to instill damnation to burnish their own soiled reputations. ... The best explanation that I can imagine insists that the indecent hate themselves, and that they must crave company. They deal in seduction based upon studied misdirection. They describe salvation as a swamp and promise to drain it in what always turns out to be actual damnation. Beware the land speculator promising to eliminate non-existent swamps. They despise themselves. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 11/27/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-27T16:55:52-08:00

This writing week, like every previous week, was destined to become a writing week that was. Like you, I live with a trailing tail endlessly emerging, persistently trailing me, and refusing to let go of my present past or my fading presence. ... Any engine designed with the presumption that it might perform at its design peak was always designed to fail. Any engine built to perform well beneath its design spec was always built to actually exceed its more optimistic expectations. I began this writing week naming a familiar haunt, the Dundency that has always followed me. ... I reframed my experience of Decency as a Decendency rather than as an ascendancy up and into any place above. I reported that indecency seems radioactive in Radioactivization (which is a term Google® found no hits for on the internets). I ended this week with a short screed insisting that Decency must be deployed relentlessly if it is to be effectively used. I appreciate all those who shamelessly employ their Decency without ever once necessarily expecting to be rewarded for their efforts. Bless us all as we defend the continuing insults to our Dignity again. ...This Decency Story introduces a familiar sort of Decency in which everybody occasionally engages: Duncency. The Decency Story tells how shows of Decency can often be insincere but are nonetheless widely understood and tolerated as harmless social conventions. These acts—such as forced niceness or exaggerated politeness—are usually recognized by both parties, serving to keep interactions smooth and protect privacy rather than to maliciously deceive. While being aware of this insincerity might prove to be important, confronting it generally proves to be unnecessary, and trying to eliminate it would disrupt social bonds. ...This Decency Story celebrates Dignity&Freedom, two prominent attributes of Decency. The Dignity Story reflects on Ukraine’s ongoing struggle as not just a defense of territory, but a profound fight for both Big ‘D’ Dignity and BIG Freakin’ ‘F’ freedom. ... I lament that my U.S. has turned away from these ideals, and criticize current leadership for betraying both national and global responsibilities, leading my country into division and moral decline. I find hope and inspiration in Ukraine’s dedication, emphasizing that their pursuit of dignity and freedom seems an intrinsically valuable and self-fulfilling act that preserves and renews those very ideals. ...This Decency Story expresses nostalgia, noting that even everyday items and experiences from then now seem extraordinary. Decency was never truly common, but always remarkable for the effort it takes to manifest. Acts of Decency stand out because they’re rarely the easiest choice, and their rarity increases their value. I ultimately conclude that everything, including whatever might be otherwise considered ordinary, is in fact extraordinary when closely enough observed. ...“That’s how Descending Into Decency feels to me.” I hope this Decency Story helps dispel the notion that Decency usually comes from somewhere on high. I think it more likely that we’re usually Descending_Into_Decency instead. I describe Decency not as something lofty or superior, but as an immersive, grounding experience that feels like descending into rather than ascending above. ... I see it as originating from everyday people and experiences, rather than from some higher authority. I compare this transcendent feeling to entering a welcoming dive bar, where one quickly feels at ease and more authentic, with the experience remaining warmly memorable. ...“That’s what Decency appears to be here for.” This Decency Story recounts how radioactive indecency tends to seem. This Decency Story employs the metaphor of radioactivity to describe the nature of indecencies, arguing that while they may provide short-term resolutions or benefits, their effects become toxic and persist far beyond their intended use. It highlights the dangers of such choices in both personal and political contexts, noting that they often require extensive, costly efforts to address the resulting damage. I point out that leaders who abandon principles or laws leave society with deep and lasting harm, akin to civic contamination. Yet, this story also expresses hope that, with time, these destructive elements will ultimately decay, allowing for eventual renewal and the potential restoration of Decency. Barbara Norfleet: High level radioactive waste storage tank: Savannah River Plant (300 square miles): Aiken, SC. 35 million gallons of high level radioactive waste are stored in the deteriorating tanks ...“This necessarily requires that the Decent fear less and be Relentless more.” This Decency Story explains that Decency demands to be deployed in a requisitely Relentless manner. This Decency Story argues that only Relentless Decency can effectively counter persistent indecency. While indecency often presents as loud and shameless, true Decency involves consistently standing up for what might be right, even when that feels futile. Decency can seem small compared to the overwhelming presence of indecency, but regular, fearless demonstrations of Decency provide a necessary alternative. For Decency to matter and counter indecency, it must be practiced boldly and without fear, making its presence known whenever indecency appears. ...Leaves fell at a leisurely pace, which I mostly managed to keep up with. Two bins of my composter overfloweth with the finest chopped leaves, those from the crabapple, plum, and apricot trees. ...I finally tore off the construction cardboard that had been protecting our new front porch deck while the post-and-beam covers and railings were installed. ... The porch, after two years and three months of remodeling, looks finished from the street, even without the back stairs and rail cabling installed. I grew accustomed to having the front entry under construction and hadn't noticed what that barrier had been costing me. My context sensitivity left me feeling diminished until that remodeling was finished. I'd been missing my primary egress, though the only symptom was an unassociated hollowness. It was as if I'd had my brick front removed and replaced with crime scene tape. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Relentless

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-27T06:12:48-08:00

Félix Edouard Vallotton: Cover for Paris Intense (1894) "This necessarily requires that the Decent fear less and be Relentless more." As near as I can determine from here, the universal antidote to indecency must be RelentlessDecency. Nothing more annoys the indecent than Relentlessness being employed in the service of the Decent. I know that we most often associate Relentlessness with more nefarious activities. However, I suppose that Decency probably seems evil enough to the indecent, perhaps among the most heinous possible activities, especially for the Relentlessly indecent. To be Relentless in the service of the good side of any equation demonstrates a reassuring dedication, for even Decency demands some consistency. Nobody much appreciates the merely fair weather Decent. One must, it seems, become requisitely Relentless to be taken very seriously. If I retreat into numbed silence or simply disappear whenever another indecency appears, especially when it seems Relentless itself, I might just as well have never been here. My sporadic contributions to the general well-being might not have gone for naught, but they probably didn’t go half as far as they might have gone had I more diligently held my ground. Relentless Decency demands some courage from its practitioner, for it won’t always feel safe to honestly display your Decency when immersed in some den of iniquity. The indecent never seem the least bit self-conscious about spouting off even the most absurd rubbish in public. A huge part of being indecent apparently requires a steadfast context insensitivity. The indecent know no place where some things aren’t appropriate. Whether it’s evangelizing their faith or deploying their potty mouth, the indecent never catch the cues that scream “Not Here!” The indecent, though, never seem to embarrass themselves. They often seem incapable of shame, so they continue screaming at and terrifying otherwise innocent sheep. The Relentlessly Decent at least attempt to shush them, if only because they deeply feel the embarrassment the indecent have grown incapable of sensing. Decency too often seems like an awfully little light when compared with the klieg lights indecency so often employs. A deep ‘little old me’ sense often accompanies Decency on his rounds. He perceives profound inequities but often believes he’s not nearly as influential, consequential, or powerful as he might well be. Decency can be awfully self-effacing, sometimes to the point of self-negating. This seems tragic, especially since Decency might be the far more powerful and longer-lasting intervention. It does seem to require an ounce or two of the old mustard seed to be added to each deployment. Indecency looks so big and mean, while Decency seems, well, rather wimpy in comparison. It doesn’t help to believe that Decency has God on its side when a clear and terribly present devil appears to be standing alongside. Decency will likely always remain a faith-based initiative, rendered Relentless only through practice. This sort of practice does not seek perfection, but simple repetition. The underlying concept proposes that success stems from RPMs. Since indecency always seems to be spinning some story, its antidote might be opposite rotation. This isn’t necessarily a competition but more of an active comparison. Indecency’s spin tends to compare poorly to even scant ounces of Decency fearlessly deployed. Indecency’s spin almost always seems absurd in comparison, if only because it tends to be absolutely stupid—no need to overemphasize any comparison. Simple presence shows the superior choice. Indecency thrives in a world devoid of countering commentary. Decency does better in nearly every situation where choice and diversity are present. Decency itself is that choice and diversity only when it’s adequately Relentless. Because indecency can only survive in echo chambers, Decency demands that it be at least Relentless. This necessarily requires that the Decent fear less and be Relentless more. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Radioactivization

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-26T07:43:34-08:00

Barbara Norfleet: High level radioactive waste storage tank: Savannah River Plant (300 square miles): Aiken, SC. 35 million gallons of high level radioactive waste are stored in the deteriorating tanks ..."That's what Decency appears to be here for." ...They perform like unstable elements, bleeding atoms on their way to becoming something else. They are by their very nature transitory and poisonous. ... They prove unsuitable for use in anything lasting. We do not build bridges out of radioactive materials for good reasons. ... They can produce relatively short bursts of extreme energy and, when properly harnessed, longer-lived power. Whatever the use, though, they leave behind messes far exceeding their initially intended usefulness. ...I visited my dentist last week and noticed that they no longer draped a reassuringly weighted lead-lined blanket over me when taking pictures of my mouth. The hygienist explained that they now use such low doses of radiation that the blanket has become unnecessary. I asked if I could get one of their used ones, but she said they had been shipped to a radioactive disposal facility because they had absorbed radiation over time. Indecencies, like radioactive materials, sometimes prove useful, though they always carry heavy externalities. They ultimately produce more waste than product. ... Those who dabble in indecencies and those who seem to deal exclusively in them tend to get poisoned by their close association with them. They contract strange cancers and wasting disorders that prove difficult to impossible to treat. The Muse and I live near the Hanford works, a place so poisoned from processing plutonium that it has become a perennial Superfund site. The economy of the surrounding area, the third-largest metropolitan area in the state, is primarily based on federal cleanup dollars. After eighty years, the clean-up effort has barely scratched the surface. Radioactive solutions tend to have very long tails. Indecencies sometimes seem like the best of several terrible, conflicting options. ... I do know—or I’m convinced I know—that they’re more than likely to bite somebody in the butt on their way through whatever process they were intended to preserve. The “little white” entities tend to contain more gray area than anticipated. ... Indecencies seem like those things where, because you don’t have time to do it right, you do it wrong so that it might get done, only to learn later that the solution only made the situation worse. ... For this reason, if no other, we must remain extremely cautious about what we choose. Our incumbent seems to have chosen to ignore the Constitution he swore to uphold. This foundational indecency has already utterly undermined his presidency. He opted to ignore the law, which was as close to a measure of Decency as we ever possessed. He’s built radioactive bridges into an utterly delusional future. He’s built roads using unstable, poisonous materials. He’s produced imaginary changes, ones that will, as their primary effect, produce generations of terribly expensive cleanup efforts. He’s created a civic Superfund site without endowing the inevitable clean-up. His proposals have not even proved stable over short durations. They have no hope of lasting into future generations. His will be remembered as the short-sighted incumbency. Reform and cleanups will be his only lasting legacy. The Radioactivization that already seems to be transforming society will very likely result in producing some utterly different politics than intended. Our billionaires could not have better reinforced public opinion against them than by publicly championing their self-serving agendas. They’ve proudly worn their cold-heartedness on their sleeves like unit patches on Onward Christian Soldiers’ shoulders. Rather than demonstrate the righteousness of their self-serving perspective, they’ve clearly demonstrated the opposite. Their radioactive initiatives should fuel a progressive backlash that should make the Roosevelt administrations seem like warm-up exercises. The good news about unstable elements must be that they’re actively undermining their own existence. They are destined to degrade into something less poisonous if we manage to survive their half-life. The half-life of indecency seems indeterminate from somewhere in the middle of it, but its ultimate destruction seems inexorable. We can always build back even better than before. That’s what Decency appears to be here for. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Descending_Into_Decency

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-25T06:19:28-08:00

Ohara Koson: Descending egrets in snow (1925 - 1936) Five settling herons between snowflakes; snowy reed at the bottom left. "That's how Descending Into Decency feels to me." I instinctively think of Decency as holding an elevated position, slightly higher and left of some center line. When I engage in an act of Decency, though, I feel a sensation more like Descending. I reflectively think of myself as Descending into Decency rather than stepping up into it. This descending should not be mistaken as degrading or any of the other coming-down metaphors. Decency feels like immersive activity, effort that seems to cloak and reassure me, as if I were being carried and cared for, even though I know I’m the one caring for myself in those moments. Decency seems inherently innocent. It expresses an inner innocence regardless of a person’s prior experiences. It can even be an antidote to some experiences, a penance, or a form of forgiveness. Because Decency’s always a choice, it brings certain limitations. It represents the presence of guardrails, which necessarily inhibit some movements. If these guardrails keep the Decent safe, they also delimit space. The Decent have fewer options, even when they seem to take a rare or unusual one. There are always some things they will not do. They maintain boundaries. They appear to hold values, though these might be more defined by what they seem to assiduously believe than what they wholeheartedly hold. Whatever the territory, the Decent are actively choosing rather than merely running on autopilot. They perceive most moments as choice points, places where something of real consequence might be lurking. Now is always their time. This represents their chance to make a real difference. It does nobody any good when somebody moves through the world with their nose in the air. I always wonder what they’re trying to smell up there. Better to get down with the crowd than try very hard to stick up and out. The most Decent often seems to come out of a sunrise or sunset, from some unanticipated or blinding direction. Decency usually appears to rise from a plain rather than trickle down from somewhere on high. This leads me to consider, counterintuitively, that Decency probably originates from below, a bottom-up phenomenon rather than a top-down one. Decency might always be comprised of the salt of the earth rather than manna from the heavens. It’s bestowed by man, never the Gods. It’s beans, not filet mignon. It almost always seems strangely familiar, like coming home to a place you barely remembered. In downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, there used to be a dive bar located one storey below grade, accessed by a shadowy stairwell down into the sidewalk. It was a dark basement hovel, though when entering, one felt as if they’d just entered the most exclusive joint in town. The furniture and fixtures were nothing much, well-used and well-suited for their purpose. The regulars each inhabited their table or stool, as did the bartender. There were stories shared between those folks that stretched back generations. The stranger never feels like a stranger for long, for to enter seems an immersive experience, a baptism. The stranger might have entered sensing some secret danger there, but those imaginings quickly dispelled. The stranger notices that he feels a little more like himself there than he did before he entered. Truth told, he feels a little more like himself there than he usually feels at home. He won’t stay long. He has other places to go, though he will long remember the visit and warmly recall the warming sensation. That’s how Descending Into Decency feels to me. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

CommonDecency

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-24T05:59:04-08:00

John Singer Sargent: Venetian Glass Workers (1880–82) ABOUT THIS ARTWORK Trained in Paris, John Singer Sargent traveled to Spain, the Netherlands, and Italy early in his career in order to study how painters such as Diego Velázquez and Frans Hals captured the effects of light and rendered figures in space. Venetian Glass Workers is one of several genre scenes featuring glass-bead workers that Sargent executed in the early 1880s. This backlit view of a shop in Venice is dark and atmospheric except for the brilliant strokes of light green and silvery white paint that describe the canes of glass as tradespeople prepare to cut them into bead-sized pieces, which will then be polished and strung into jewelry. — — "…everything's extraordinary, especially and including CommonDecency." I once inhabited a now utterly mythical place: The Past. What seemed ordinary and commonplace then, when it was present, seems utterly extraordinary and absolutely unattainable now. I do not mean that some rare and special things are now rarer and even more special, but that even the most pedestrianly commonplace items have now joined the ranks of the exceptional. I can almost experience these once-so-ordinary things vicariously now, through dreams and fading memories, though the colors and textures seem blunted after the passage of so much time. I have been noticing lately just how remarkable almost everything suddenly seems. I have caught myself appreciating even the more common items as if they were manifest miracles, perhaps because they are, and also because I’m sure they will one day seem even more remarkable, before nobody will be left to remember their textures and substance. Even those items that won’t disappear will change in response to their surrounding contexts. This old oak desk, which has been following me around for forty years, has seemed different in each of its many contexts. Its drawers remain filled with stuff that seemed appropriate several iterations ago, but I do not know what belongs there now or where what once belonged there should go instead. People grow ever longer tails as they age and experience things. What of CommonDecency? People have been asking me and each other lately: Whatever happened to it? Where did it go? Why has it seemed to disappear? The more I search, the more I’ve felt convinced that Decency hasn’t actually gone anywhere. It’s still just as here as it ever was. No, we have not grown coarser or cruder over the intervening decades. We were not actually better or worse before; we were just remarkably similar, though the ways we measure might have changed considerably. I’m learning, or I think that I am, that Decency comes in only one flavor, one I might best describe as extraordinary. There never was what we’ve always referred to as CommonDecency; only the ordinarily extraordinary kind ever existed. Decency might be commonly perceived and labeled, but each act might more easily be classified as truly exceptional, for each demonstrated the astounding human capability for Decency from the astonishing array of often much more available alternatives. Decency seems to rarely be the most convenient choice. One must frequently put themselves out to accomplish it. It’s like choosing the more costly alternative, even though no clear advantage seems to be associated with it. Decency only ever matters in this choice. Attempts to tame or commonplace it undermine its underlying intent. It’s supposed to be rare, even when it’s seemingly everywhere. Its commonality in no way explains away its native extraordinariness. The moment after Decency’s invoked, it joins the ranks of every experience I had in my youth, even the mean or vindictive ones, even the most indecent. I feel as though I’ve been tossing my experiences down into a deep and mildly disturbing well where they will be rendered inaccessible: Nevermore. On my best days, I feel like I’m sitting on the prow of history in the making. Every damned thing seems fleeting. Everything I’ve created might as well have turned to dust in the moment immediately following its creation, because it has. Nobody’s any more the master of any moment than the least of any of us ever was. This amounts to no kind of tragedy, for this world has always worked like this. Sometimes the seductive illusion of permanence convinces us otherwise. Still, when I pay close attention to what actually seems to be going on around me, I can clearly see that I’m surrounded by the extraordinary, where the sole commonality must be that everything’s extraordinary, especially and including CommonDecency. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Dignity&Freedom

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-23T04:51:34-08:00

Paul Giambarba: The Withered Arm (c. ..."May Dignity&Freedom never abandon them…" Facing invasion by a hostile neighbor, Ukraine declared its purpose for defending its sovereignty. It announced that it was fighting for Dignity&Freedom. Their Freedom demanded a deeper purpose. It could not stand alone as sufficient to justify the suffering inflicted in its defense. Dignity would have to be Freedom’s companion to properly justify the struggle. This combination has lent Decency to Ukraine’s otherwise purely defensive strategies, inspiring freedom-loving nations around the world. Unfortunately, my country tisn’t of this at present. Our incumbent has made it his special mission to discourage our intrepid ally by denying it the necessary and prudent support that any freedom-loving nation deserves. Now the world observes a different struggle, one between Decency and its enemies, who presently most prominently include Russia and the once United States. My country once ‘twas of thee, sweet land of Decency. Now, it’s gratefully fragmenting, bisecting along something other than merely sectarian lines, but into factions. Our incumbent, who explains that “elections have consequences,” as if elective office bestows a blank check on the winner and humiliation on the loser. He insists that the majority of the electorate voted for something the incumbent explicitly vowed to oppose before he was sworn in, under an oath he had no intention of ever upholding. Not one person who voted for him expected what he’s attempted to deliver. He’s delivered a cruel bait-and-switch instead, and split these once-united States along Decency lines; Decency being the new enemy in his deluded mind. Dignity&Freedom inspires in ways that freedom alone can only aspire to. ... It justifies struggles and delivers its promise when merely pursuing it. Ukraine isn’t simply trying to regain lost dignity or compromised freedom, but actively defending against its destruction. This focus delivers the desired end the instant they pursue it, for defending Dignity&Freedom amounts to an audacious act, one that requires both Dignity&Freedom to wholeheartedly engage in. Dignity is embodied in the very pursuit of dignity, as Freedom, too, seems embodied in the very quest for itself. To seek either must be to find them. To pursue them preserves them. Those who attempt to compromise such rights fight an ever-disappointing uphill battle against entrenched defenders. Indecency and its apologists can drop rockets down upon innocents, but this produces neither Decency nor justice, and not even hollow victories. Indecency’s successes amount to embarrassments. No celebration accompanies these; just renewed dedication by the opposition to engage in Dignity & Freedom again. Decency’s opponents mostly battle themselves, for they lose more than merely battles they never could have won. They forfeit their future in favor of some imagined past, glory in its most degraded form. The G20 meets in South Africa with the once United States absent, save for a few academics like Jeffrey Sacks, who reports that our tyrant was too busy having a tantrum like a four-year-old to decently celebrate Dignity&Freedom together with its (former?) ...Evolution moves in one direction, like time. It still attracts a fair opposition, delusional defenders of the ever-eroding old status quo. The glory that once was Rome’s was not inherited by anyone, but was utterly transformed into ever closer approximations of improvement, often by way of near-total degradation. Through all those changes, over centuries, Dignity&Freedom remained the common attractor. It lent a sense of courage in the face of often-impossible odds, revealing its great gift through the mere act of engaging. What other factors have proven more inspiring? What other aspirations have proven to be so self-fulfilling? Even as the previously unthinkable occurs, even as the once self-declared bastion of Dignity&Freedom reneges on its most sacred commitments to itself and others, our allies promote what we’ve apparently abandoned. These once united States divorced for a good and, dare I say, Decent reason. Some of us chose to forego Dignity&Freedom in favor of mammon. The balance refused to retreat from the challenges. The Decent here continue enjoying the blessings of Dignity&Freedom bestowed upon us because we still believe in and pursue them. Thank Heavens for the Ukrainians’ inspiration! May Dignity&Freedom never abandon them or they abandon it. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Duncency

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-22T06:17:56-08:00

An admirer of 19th-century French artist Honoré Daumier’s social caricatures, Mervin Jules satirizes the myopic gaze of a bourgeois connoisseur scrutinizing a painting. The painting-within-a-painting depicts workers demonstrating against the backdrop of a smoke-filled industrial landscape. The subject memorializes the infamous 1937 Little Steel strike, during which police fired on unarmed unionized steelworkers and their sympathizers protesting low wages and poor working conditions. Jules executed this painting during a formative time when he was studying with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League and employed by the silkscreen unit of the Works Progress Administration. ...Not all Decencies contain the same quantity of sincerity. Some seem more phony than actual. ... I mention this not to encourage paranoia, for minor discrepancies are probably nothing to lose much sleep over. For one reason or another, or for no discernible reason at all, some will pretend to be acting Decently when they actually aren’t. ... The insincerity says much more about them than it ever could about you, and what it says about them will probably remain unspoken, even if you were to break ranks and ask after the disconnect. ... You might be able to convince yourself that something smells fishy, but the fish rarely admits to any deliberate deception, or even inadvertent. This often means they’re not aware of their inauthenticity. ...I speak here of that niceness that seems out of context. ... The welcoming greeting that doesn’t feel all that welcoming. I suspect that every culture maintains a few of these pseudo Decencies for use when necessary. When called to praise an enemy, for instance, when you’d rather that enemy not notice where your true sensibilities lie, these are Crocodile emotions, like Crocodile Tears, that seem deep down insincere. It’s often the case that everyone present understands the underlying nature of these performances. ... It’s often most advantageous to go along with the Duncency, since everybody already understands how utterly unimportant this performance will prove to be. These can almost always be totted up as benign performances. They are tests, though, exams assessing your own perception. The deception’s rarely skilled enough to escape detection, though it’s seldom conclusively terrible enough to absolutely confirm its presence. Anybody can easily talk themselves out of these shadowy perceptions, for they often only trouble distant intuitions. They seem to pose no apparent or immediate danger. This passive presentation can encourage anyone to slip back into dozing through these interactions, to show up absent. So entranced, one lobs off a subtle but essential part of these performances. If you ache for superficiality, there’s really never any pressing need to acknowledge the Crocodile emotions working the room. The full appreciation, though, strongly suggests that you not get into the habit of deliberately ignoring even shadowy corners of your intuition. Those spider senses are there for reasons perhaps beyond your present ability to appreciate them, but failing to acknowledge them can result in ultimately losing addressability to them, and they’re essential. I prefer to acknowledge Duncency as an open yet unacknowledged secret in the room. If everyone’s in on it, it doesn’t really amount to much of a secret. The hostess who attends a little too joyously might seem phony, but she’s disclosing as much as she feels safe to share in that moment. Whatever’s missing remains tacitly accounted for without ever requiring explicit mentioning. No rule insists on full disclosure, and we each protect a few private parts through simple, relatively innocent misrepresentation. I won’t pretend that bad actors who hone these performances to turn apparent Decency into malign advantage don’t exist. I know of no defense against such actors other than to abandon belief in the widespread, reassuring existence of some baseline Decency in this world. So what if that’s fiction? If it works well enough, it works. Full disclosure or insisting upon some absolute authenticity wouldn’t reflect the more informing reality. Not everybody’s equally capable of Decency, but that difference rarely matters. ...They amount to little more than tiny white lies between acquaintances. Some small volume of misrepresentation shouldn’t undermine whatever trust a relationship contains. It might be that they didn’t ask you how you were feeling because they were particularly interested in how you were feeling, but because they didn’t want you to suspect how little they cared. ... We both know there’s something the other struggles to disclose, perhaps even to themself. If we ignore the signals or insist upon fully decoding them, we could render each other as stupid as we sometimes feel. Duncency begins when we insist upon definitive answers to fuzzy questions, or when we ask questions that hardly warrant even a fuzzy answer. ... Nobody’s responsible for explaining how or why their relationships work. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 11/20/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-20T16:28:59-08:00

Our concrete contractor, Pablo, and his crew laid a new sidewalk on the north side of our newly refurbished front porch this week, bringing us one step closer to completing our infinite front porch remodeling project. A new sidewalk serves as the closest thing The Muse and I might ever contribute to permanence here, lasting evidence that someone once lived here, evidence that should last well into the following century. This Writing Week proved to be more speculative than concrete. ... Our hapless administration, still apparently uninterested in administering anything, has been exhibiting some gravely serious difficulties recruiting and retaining EvilPeople in sufficient numbers to completely undermine our Democratic order. ... The Elites seemed teetering again, on their usual precipice of greatness … or something. I praised our sacred Jurisprudence, which has proven to be the most stalwart defender of our civic Decency. I admitted to feeling Enraged, however politically unacceptable that emotion might seem in a discussion of Decency. I ended this writing week praising the Insubordinate as the true patriot of Decency in our ongoing passion play. ...This Decency Story reports on some reassuring news from the frontlines of The War On Decency. The enemy appears to be having difficulties recruiting and retaining sufficient numbers of Evil People to sustain their offensives. This Decency Story describes the difficulties faced by the movement waging the “War on Decency,” highlighting issues with recruiting and retaining sufficiently ruthless personnel. Bonuses and incentives failed to attract or keep enough people, and many who initially joined could not reconcile their tasks with their moral values, leading to high resignation rates. Court rulings have blocked efforts to use the military to undermine Decency, and the MAGA movement underestimated the resilience of their opposition. ... The overall outlook is one of impending failure and dwindling influence for the indecent MAGA movement. ...This Decency Story reports on a growing Awakening that seems to be undermining our incumbent’s agenda. In this Decency Story, I express disgust and deep skepticism toward our incumbent’s political support, describing it as formerly cult-like and unshakable despite his incoherence and scandalous behavior. Conspiracies like QAnon, once directed at opponents, have come full circle, with evidence now pointing at the incumbent for the very crimes his base accused others of committing. As the incumbent responds with increasingly desperate measures, including hiding evidence and alienating his own base, longstanding supporters are finally abandoning him. Economic decline and public scandals have made impeachment likely, and I frame the situation as a national nightmare from which an awakening seems imminent. ...This Decency Story wonders whether our Elites are really necessary to the smooth functioning of our society or if they are merely in the way of our greatness. This Decency Story argues that believing in the necessity of societal Elites has proven misguided. History shows that Elites often serve themselves rather than the public, and their actions typically contradict the American founding principle of equality. ... Even today, public admiration for Elites persists, despite clear evidence of their frequent failures and self-serving behaviors. I suggest abandoning the myth that Elites are required for a functioning society, as relying on them has repeatedly led to disappointment and societal decline. ...This Decency Story discusses concerns about attempts to undermine our sacred judicial system and the civic decency that accompanies it, noting that while there are instances of indecency and incompetence, the traditions and careful deliberation inherent to the courts generally protect the rule of law. The system, though imperfect and often slow, was specifically designed to resist corruption arising from hasty decisions. I present both Decency and jurisprudence as fluid, ongoing efforts rather than completed achievements, and the story argues that even those who threaten these principles still deserve justice, underscoring the enduring strength and purpose of our sacred judicial framework. ...This Decency Story tries to clear up the popular misconception that Decency necessarily equates with passivity, when Decency might more often understandably feel EnRaged! This Decency Story argues that decency does not equate to passivity; in fact, heightened sensitivity can make Decent individuals more prone to internal rage when encountering injustice or indecency. The Decent often suppress this rage, sometimes resulting in depression and internal conflict, as Decency discourages overt outrage. However, when conditions become unbearable or when repeated frustration with injustice occurs, Decent individuals can react with powerful, outward anger—this tendency to restrain rather than express rage can make negotiation with less restrained parties more challenging. I disclose an ongoing personal struggle between the impulses for quiet Decency and active outrage, warning that suppressed feelings should not be mistaken for passive approval. ...This Decency Story discloses an unsettling fact about the Decent. Their gift often requires them to act as an Insubordinate. They have to be responsible for their own actions without relying upon another’s orders. In this Decency Story, I describe Decency as an inherently individual, insubordinate act that cannot be mandated or systematically taught. It relies on personal intention and context, with real examples rarely repeating themselves. Attempts to enforce Decency, especially through hierarchies and rigid obedience, often create the opposite effect. Genuine Decency emerges through creative, responsible choices, often in challenging or unfamiliar circumstances, and might be largely invisible to others. Ultimately, only the individual can meaningfully judge their own Decency, since it depends on personal authenticity rather than external validation. ...Autumn brings falling leaves and induces in me a deep sense of departure. ... I reluctantly rake leaves, acknowledging that I’m dispatching the final evidence of my own days. I use my lawnmower as if it were a vacuum, before scraping peripheral leftovers into a tattered but still somewhat serviceable tarp, and dragging my memories into a VW Van-sized pile in the street in front of The Villa. ... I sit there after exhausting myself dispatching my memories, plotting improvements for indeterminate upcoming chapters. I acknowledge an increasing disconnection to many of my most sacred traditions. ...Days seem many hours briefer than they once were, even without the disappearance of my sacred delusionary Daylight Savings Time. ... They leave me yearning for something I’ve not yet experienced but ache to see. ... I never once desired to be different from what I ever was before, yet this world, this universe, seems to insist upon at least this much. I was never once well-prepared for even the most modest change. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Insubordinate

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-20T04:53:29-08:00

Pierre-Paul Prud’hon: Head of Vengeance (c. ...A study for the figure of Divine Vengeance in Prud’hon’s celebrated paintingJustice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime (1808), the head of Vengeance, who pursues Crime as an agent of Justice, brilliantly reflects the artist’s stated aim for the painting: “to give a commotion to the soul.” Although the drawing’s blue paper has faded almost completely to gray, the work’s expressive power remains intact. ..."The Decent direct themselves for their own damned reasons…" Decency must be an Insubordinate act. It cannot be ordered or productively insisted upon, but must be more or less freely chosen by the individual engaging in it. One may take instruction in its practice, though this offers little beyond a grasp of its underlying concept. Practice proves different in actual practice and utterly depends on context, which shifts so that any two instances might prove the opposite of being indistinguishable from each other. Even experienced practitioners often wonder if what they just tried really represented the Decency they intended. Not even the receiver can always confirm receipt. So much of its delivery depends upon intention, which often necessarily remains implicit. Decency frequently appears in unexpected guises. Indecencies can easily be coerced. Many indecent acts stem from out-of-context commandments, attempts to deliver the likely impossible in a specific context. The big f-ing hammer employed in the attempt to comply adequately explains why these so often go awry. The hierarchies themselves might well be the primary source of indecency, since individual actors struggle there to be properly Insubordinate. Well-ordered frequently seems synonymous with indecency, though it’s usually intended to be its opposite. It might be that any subordinate act undermines the potential for Decency to manifest. Those who merely follow orders break some necessary underlying order necessary for Decency to thrive. To be truly alive might require Insubordinate action. If these statements are true, Decency demands much from each of us. It insists that I make up much as I move through life. It means that I must be responsible for my Decency, for nobody can rely upon becoming Decent merely by association. Decency’s subordinate never becomes Decent by even the closest association, but by some Insubordinate action, one they own alone. These often come in moments of extremity when the Decent thing might seem impossible to produce. These usually seem embarrassing, if only because they break some well-entrenched patterned behavior. I believe that much of the indecency we witness comes not from volition but from mindless repetition, from merely doing the most familiar thing in response to, perhaps, some extraordinary situation. ... One misses an opportunity to contribute some Decency, but not by necessarily plotting to commit gross indecency. Decency feels compelled to color outside the expected lines. It can and sometimes does occur inadvertently before, shockingly, producing an unanticipated outcome. Then one can build on that happy accident, not necessarily to repeat the same action, but to gain inspiration from the success that came from choosing a different response. The possibility always exists to do something different, especially when it seems impossible to do something different again. Decency often demands more creativity than anybody would readily contribute. It demands difference from a world most often obsessed with producing efficiency. It seeks to break a habit to create insight, perhaps delight, though Decency, even when properly made, might disappoint. Decency can be mighty messy. Ultimately, everybody gets to say what constitutes their Decency. It might be that nobody else even notices my attempts to get stuff right and improve over prior attempts. Only I am ever qualified to judge the quality of my Decency in practice. Decency is not a spectator sport. It’s not trotted out to receive applause. It remains largely a private act, a wrestling match between convention and often haphazard invention, judged only by the actor’s intention, by the actor himself. The absurdity of even a priest insisting upon a parishioner’s Decency appalls me, for it produces a paradox. Nobody can insist on another’s Insubordinate act without stealing their ability to make the sort of choice that really matters. The Decent direct themselves for their own damned reasons and might well appear Insubordinate when contributing their best. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

EnRaged

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-19T06:14:16-08:00

William Hogarth: The Enraged Musician (November 1741) "Don't tread on Decency!" Contrary to popular misconception, the Decent do not naturally lean heavily toward passivity. In some significant ways, Decency can encourage a fury, if only because it tends to sharpen sensibilities. Those incapable of properly parsing experiences, who live a more numbed existence, might find it more challenging to act out when encountering the subtly outrageous. Many infractions fail to piece together their native insensitivity. This can lead to a disturbing passivity. Those, however, more primed to sense disturbing differences might be much more easily encouraged to respond with rage, and even to complain that certain events leave them feeling EnRaged. This fury doesn’t always show, for Decency sometimes, even often, paradoxically, encourages a stifling of certain rages, lest a reaction appear equally outrageous. The resulting ‘anger turned inward’ can spawn periods of dark depression as inner frustration fails to find adequate release in outward expression. The Decent sometimes foments dissent. They do this when they find conditions reaching a threshold of unbearable outrageousness. Then, the anger turned inward, seeks outward expression and might be released with considerable passion. The rightly righteous, they say, carry fury like no other. Those merely mildly pissed off cannot compete at this level. Likewise, the merely frustrated. Those with simmering grudges compare very poorly, too, and tend to appear wimpy when up against any truly disgusted Decency. It becomes the Decent’s special burden to nurture ways to blunt their understandable vehemence, for it does nobody any good to be storming around seeking vengeance. Mostly, it seems, the Decent are called upon to forestall their inner rages and find ways to peacefully mediate the trouble, for fully expressed, I suspect, most opponents might not survive initial contact with an utterly outraged Decent. Indecency has a well-earned reputation for fomenting outrageous behavior, though Decency’s no slouch on this scale under some easily recognizable conditions. Continuing frustration stemming from an inability to successfully mediate or right some wrong can bring such rage to full expression. Oppression holds this power to frustrate even the most Decent into fierce action. Sadly, such reactions don’t necessarily advance anyone’s preferred agenda. Once reason leaves a conversation, even if it only abandons one side, negotiations slide into much more difficult-to-resolve tangles. Even when the opposition steadfastly refuses to engage in reason, if the Decent partisan joins them, irresolution seems the more likely winner. It’s common, then, that the Decent engage through at least somewhat gritting their teeth, suppressing some of their rage in the interests of attempting to engage. This situation might even give the indecent an advantage in negotiations, since they seem freer to express their outrage. There are some things the Decent won’t do, or they consider themselves a failure should they so engage. Peaceful protests might seem like wasted effort unless understood as a Decent way to express this often-suppressed outrage. I won’t pretend that I don’t sometimes harbor indecent fantasies where the forces of righteousness go all Empire Strikes Back on Darth Vader. I could hardly have been a child of this culture had I not absorbed a deeply embedded sense of the innate righteousness of frontier justice. My inner John Wayne tussles with my inner Maharishi to see who will enter the playing field each morning. My Decency seems Janus-faced, not merely enlightened but also almost equally EnRaged most days. Many days, there’s no competition between my passive Decency and my more outwardly EnRaged one. I try to remember then that I’m experiencing feelings, and that Decency’s primary contribution has always been to mediate between such feelings and my actions. Please do not mistake my apparent inaction at any moment as approval of any indecency I see. I’m watching, and very likely simmering, EnRaged in ways you can’t suspect. Don’t tread on Decency! ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Jurisprudence

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-18T05:56:25-08:00

Raphael Morghen: Jurisprudence (18th-19th century) "Even those who assault our Jurisprudence deserve justice. Decency demands it." We hold our judicial system sacred, or we have. It has seemed imperiled lately, if only due to the sudden incursion of indecency into her hallowed halls. Our Jurisprudence was the store of our society’s civic Decency, though it has lately seen repeated attempts to degrade it. These have been mainly unsuccessful, if only due to the native ineptness as lawyers of the agents of indecency attempting to intrude. They have filed motions that don’t pass muster and suits that almost always prove frivolous. Our budding Department of Injustice turns out to actually be a department of dunces and indecencies in practice. They seem to believe that they can make anything so by merely declaring it so. However, our Jurisprudence, by which I mean our legal philosophy and long traditions, usually renders that functionally impossible, thank heavens. Between judges chosen for their partiality and a SCOTUS half dedicated to indecency, our civic Decency has sometimes been taking it in the shorts. These sleights have thus far proven to be far from the rule, so the vaunted Rule of Law seems to be holding, though our justice system has been showing signs of stress. Each of the Enlightenment thinkers insisted in their time that enlightenment depended upon people of high moral character in order to function. Nevertheless, some individuals of the lowest moral character have managed to infiltrate our Congress and, consequently, our Courts. They’ve set about making jokes of even the most common Decencies, corrupting pretty much everything they touch. Still, the courts have largely deflected these assaults, though they seem to have been riding to our rescue on the slowest of slow horses. ...They were never designed to make rapid decisions; Decent decisions demand deliberation. Honest people must ask honest questions seeking honest answers to maintain our historical Jurisprudence. Less prudent decisions are sometimes welcomed, but they do not tend to age well. They often crumble under even the usual forces of nature. The more haphazard decisions tend to get revisited, for they remain troublesome even after what were supposed to have been final decisions. Also, there’s no guarantee that every plaintiff and prosecutor performs with equally highbrow principles. Unprincipled players have always bedeviled Decency, even our judiciary. It was never written that Jurisprudence should prove easy. It might rightly be extremely difficult, close to impossible, for it was posited as ideals. It might prove worthy of every hassle experienced attempting to perfect, and sometimes failing to improve, its inherent imperfections. Jurisprudence’s blindnesses, its scales, and sword do not comprise the final word on Decency in our society. They attempt to maintain some semblance of order as we advance, even though they sometimes introduce wobbles instead. Decency was seemingly never always as decent as desired. It existed aspirationally before it ever managed to manifest and find balance. Its existence, like our Jurisprudence, might be best imagined as attempts at balancing rather than achieving any stable, balanced state, for both Decency and Jurisprudence remain works in progress, ever defending against corrupting forces. Both institutions are human in that they are the product of people trying to work together, and sometimes, too, the result of corrupting intrusions. Neither Decency nor Jurisprudence, though, has any need to be entirely on the defensive. They remain capable of maintaining their traditionally assertive position, asserting what remains true and rejecting their opposites, whoever champions them, for whatever reason. When some hapless incumbent asserts some delusional power, well-entrenched forces oppose. The intruders tend to be less well-versed in precedents and often hold little understanding of the procedures by which laws can change. We frequently complain about how slowly our legal system works, though speed is nobody’s friend where Decency’s concerned. We are creating a legacy, not merely for our present, but for our progeny’s future. Those attempting to employ indecency to repair their past should find themselves stymied. Those who wish to pervert Decency to respond to a trumped-up emergency deserve neither Decency nor justice, but they get it just the same. It might not seem fair when someone appears to hide behind their freedom of speech rights to spout insurrectionist crap, but it’s better to hear what they’re up to than to suffer a muted surprise attack. Decency deserves justice, even when our Jurisprudence seems like it’s bending over backwards to achieve it. Even those who assault our Jurisprudence deserve justice. Decency demands it. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Elites

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-17T06:06:12-08:00

Eugène Carrière: Elise Smiling (1895) "…they always seem to disappoint us and themselves in practice." Some hold a belief in the absolute necessity of maintaining an Elite class in a society. History provides strong evidence against this belief. The story insists that Elites set the standards others follow and sustain society’s highest ground, enabling “regular” people to attend to lesser interests. This notion contradicts the first principle upon which this country was founded: the notion that all people are created equal. The historical record reveals many examples of Elites who, rather than serving their publics, merely served themselves. Crowned heads more often abused their power than wisely deployed it. Of all the awful notions humans have spawned, the notion of the necessity of superiority might have proven to be the worst. Yet, we still worship leaders and imagine them somehow superhumanly capable when, much more often, they’ve proven to possess feet of the most fragile clay. Our country was founded partly to address the paradoxes that Plutocracy inevitably produces. Rule by the wealthiest insults the majority, as those inexperienced in everyman’s struggles fail to imagine and ameliorate their troubles. “Let them eat cake!” They provide solutions that often exacerbate the problem or benefit only themselves. I suppose the originating ideal imagined that yeoman farmers would be elected rulers, as they would be the sorts of people with whom almost everyone could most easily relate. They might lead with humility rather than hubris and might best understand the concepts of liberty and justice for all. The wealthy might serve as cabinet secretaries under the direction of more experienced persons. Of course, these ideals quickly succumbed to the ministrations of professional politicians who seemed destined to become Elites themselves. E Pluribus Electi: out of many, only a few are chosen. The great myth that Elites are necessary to the smooth functioning of our society continues, apparently undaunted by the volumes of contrary evidence. We see our billionaires make the most ridiculous errors, yet we still seem to revere them as fonts of wisdom. We watch them fail to imagine what people want, producing what they imagine they should want instead, yet we still turn our heads to listen whenever they mumble something. On social media, Elites have the most followers; in fact, many Elites became Elites on nothing more tangible than their number of followers. Those followers might feel a part of the Elites by dint of their distant association in the role of follower: self-selected second-class citizens. The concept of a representative government seems imperiled by the presence of such dominant Elites among us. Especially if the Elites receive the consent of their followers, who once reserved their consent for their duly elected candidates. We now have trend-makers trailed by trend followers, rather than public servants collaborating with empowered citizens. The moneyed Elites take first guesses. They lobby for support from the electeds without necessarily considering the needs and wishes of the vast majority of the governed. Money was never speech, free or otherwise, but an undermining scream incapable of representing everyday needs. It doesn’t depend upon any social good to determine what it should support. It can only be self-serving until the ayes no longer hold together society, but the me-s insistently tear it apart. I accept that we might need to explore every possible variation in our pursuit of an ever more perfect nation. Lord knows, if there ever was a Lord, that we’ve tried on some real stinkers. Our present experiment should cement certain understandings. It should do enough to discredit Elites to protect us from the worst of them for another hundred years or so, at least until the sharp recollections of this disturbing time have left us. Let the histories of this time show that Elites proved themselves incapable of governing again, like they did every previous time. And may the immature notion that our past greatness might somehow qualify as a noble objective in our future stop haunting us again. All of our prior greatnesses came before some fall, often prompted by the very pursuit we imagined might produce another imagined greatness. We reduced ourselves whenever we relied upon Elites to guide us. We not only reduce ourselves, but we apparently reduce the Elites, too, since they always seem to disappoint us and themselves in practice. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Awakening

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-16T06:04:04-08:00

The question of when our incumbent might start to seriously bleed supporters has been prominent in the minds of his many detractors. For us, and I consider myself a prominent detractor, it was always unthinkable that anyone might even imagine supporting him, for he seemed simply vile. His incoherence alone rendered him unsupportable since nobody has ever successfully parsed even his simplest utterances. Still, he seemed to possess some hypnotizing power, an astonishingly strange attractor, that reliably attracted and retained what he labeled his base. His base seemed at least aptly labeled, for they seemed to follow their leader beyond the depths of conventional political depravity. ... He’d famously insisted that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue in New York City and shoot somebody and nobody would raise an eyebrow. ...I see some promising signs that his long-somnambulant cult followers have begun Awakening. The backstory couldn’t qualify as believable fiction, but I’ll accept it if it contributes to this clown’s downfall. Some of his most virulent supporters have long contended that our society has been infiltrated and corrupted by a ring of elite Democrat pedophiles who prey upon vulnerable children. In its original telling, spread by a shadowy entity referred to as QAnon, a far-right political movement founded in 2017, Hillary Clinton led this pedophile ring, which periodically met in the basement of a pizza parlor in suburban Washington, DC. This story broke into public view when a deluded young veteran traveled to DC with an assault weapon to confront this ring in their pizza parlor headquarters. He scared some children and was arrested and later sentenced, but managed to unearth this rumored conspiracy in the process. Of course, Hillary or any Democrat has never been proven to be linked to any movement even remotely resembling the one QAnon had predicted. Still, that very lack of evidence seemed to encourage the notion for many that she was probably guilty as suspected. ... Absent evidence further encourages speculation, which can lead to something more closely resembling unshakable conviction. Our incumbent embraced these conspiracies, seeing in their followers just the type of gullibility his viability had always relied upon. He had already established himself as a mythical successful executive while his company suffered from a seemingly endless series of bankruptcies. ... He had always talked bigger than he ever appeared, and a surprising many heard and followed. The incumbent had been charged, convicted, and fined for a serious sexual assault before he was reelected. Further, he’d had a shadowy relationship with a fellow who had been convicted of trafficking young women, who’d died under curious circumstances while in prison pending prosecution. But he left a record of his innumerable indiscretions, naming names and situations. Our incumbent was prominently mentioned in those archives, including phone records, flight logs, and personal effects. Furthermore, the incumbent had made a campaign promise to release that material once he’d been reelected. He learned soon after being sworn in that the materials in question prominently featured him performing in a role that could be properly characterized as the one QAnon had accused Hillary Clinton of fulfilling in that mythical pizza parlor basement. The documents apparently show the incumbent as a pedophile assaulting underage women. QAnon’s conspiracy seems as though it would have more truthfully characterized that pedophile ring as Republican and led by our incumbent. ...The incumbent shut down the government to prevent the release of those indicting materials. ... The realization seems to be spreading among even the longer-standing cultists that their leader has been steadfastly scamming them. How they avoided noticing this years ago escapes me, but these latest revelations have been landing like breaking news to them. They’d apparently never imagined their leader a scammer, even though he’d been convicted of perpetrating innumerable scams in the past. Also apparent to them were the revelations that he was not precisely the ladies’ man he’d so proudly characterized himself as, but more into little girls. Many of those on the “religious right” might have never held many scruples, but they seem to have finally found their gag reflex with these latest revelations. Our incumbent has come unhinged, and he was never properly described as being well-hinged in the first place. He seems increasingly unable to maintain anything appearing like a stable countenance. He has taken to calling his loyal followers “stupid” and has lost the support of some of his most stalwart congressional leaders, including his QAnon queens. The incumbent has always gaslighted, though he often managed to keep his flames focused on defaming his feared Democratic opponents. He’s started second-guessing his base, telling them the kinds of lies even the thoroughly entranced easily see through. Do not, under any circumstances, argue the price of eggs with someone utterly dependent upon them. Never insist that prices have fallen when they clearly haven’t for anyone. His tariff tantrums seemed destined to blow up in his face, and they’re reliably bringing our economy and world standing to their knees just in time for the holidays. It’s taken the political equivalent of firing a cannon in the hallway to finally Awaken our incumbent’s most ardent admirers, and many, even farmers he screwed over again in this second administration like he had in his first, finally hear the din. We seem likely to experience a self-inflicted Great Depression-quality economy over upcoming months. We can reliably expect our incumbent to increasingly focus upon his ever-growing list of irrelevancies, each seemingly crafted to alienate further and anger his long-vaunted base. It seems inexorable now that he will be impeached following the midterms and that his base will continue eroding as his lame-brained schemes increasingly undermine the American Dream. This will be a lesson for the ages, assuming we survive to remember it. The fever dream of making America Great Again had all the makings of a perfect nightmare. Let us, please, remember that American Dreams emerge from Awakenings. The next one coming true will follow after this most recent nightmare ends. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

EvilPeople

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-15T06:19:35-08:00

William Sharp: Evil (18th century) "…never in sufficient numbers to succeed, thank heavens." A promising dispatch from the front lines of The War On Decency reports an apparent sharp decline in the ready availability of additional EvilPeople to populate the ranks of the administration uninterested in administering anything’s many anti-Decency programs. Reports indicate that hiring and performance bonuses have proven inadequate to attract sufficient numbers of eager candidates. Further, a reassuring swell in voluntary resignations has only added to MAGA’s staffing problems. It seems that officials grossly overestimated the number of Americans who would voluntarily stand against their fellow citizens. This shortage was reportedly the deciding factor behind our incumbent ordering National Guard troops to be mobilized into our cities. Adequate numbers of volunteers refused the assignment. Now, though, with courts refusing to permit our incumbent from deploying the National Guard against citizens, the whole movement seems increasingly imperiled. Their naive belief that we would not prove to be Decent people under pressure has apparently bitten them in their collective ass. Initiative after initiative has crumbled quickly after initiation, given the inability to muster sufficient numbers of cynical, evil people to carry out the inevitably indecent and illegal orders. One cannot carry out a successful insurgency employing those acquainted with Decency. It’s proven impossible to see innocent parties as guilty and to manhandle families into the backs of unmarked vans if Decent hands raised you. Not even those deprived of family relationships in their childhood were immune to the influence of caring teachers and friends. It was a shockingly tiny minority who failed to be influenced by Decency, and not even all of those would agree to engage in active warfare against those who were so influenced. Very few grew up to hold an adequate grudge against Decency that they would agree to help eradicate it from our society. Some who enlisted early learned that they couldn’t participate in their assignments. Others enrolled under false pretenses, believing that they would be deployed against hardened criminals, only to realize that they were always mustered against innocent families. Detaining a five-year-old with cancer proved to be a greater personal challenge than trying to capture an international terrorist. Even a thug has to find ways to live with themself after. Further, there are some things—many things, actually—for which money can never adequately compensate. It’s one thing to get filth under your fingernails and quite another to get it under your soul. Furthermore, the MAGA plans failed to anticipate the need for a moderate approach to succeed. They were extreme and presumed they would be confronting snowflakes instead of satirists and comedians. Most conflicts were, literally, no contest. It’s probably too early to confidently predict this movement’s early demise. Its leaders exhibit many of the tells that they are clueless. They fail to acknowledge that their approach was wrong-headed and could never have succeeded. Their enlightenment will likely require much more humiliation before it’s secured. Several seem unlikely ever to experience enlightenment, for they seem too overly invested in the dark side ever to find value in any other side. Even when clearly defeated, their kind will continue to harass around the perimeters of Decency, for they know no other way and have dedicated themselves. EvilPeople tend to be insistent, especially whenever encountering anything Decent. Still, the signs seem clear. We have far too few EvilPeople for the War on Decency to continue far beyond the end of this year. I see some clear signs that what started as an unprovoked assault forcing Decency into stunned defensive positions has begun turning into a series of offensives that should leave the MAGAs stunned and discouraged. They might well lose their curiously charismatic leader, leaving them without a chief hypnotizer. The cabinet will surely start bleeding members as they discover they will never successfully loot the treasury. Those who were always only in it for the money will take their blankees home without too much of a fuss. A few will require more forceful discouragement. They were all, always, only cowards, and never in sufficient numbers to succeed, thank heavens. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 11/13/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-13T17:08:29-08:00

Vignette with a group of actors inside an ornamental frame with musical instruments and masks and two monkeys with zots hoods, holding books and documents with stamps. ...As usual, I set off on this adventure not understanding the purpose of the excursion. ... If I planned beforehand or (shudder) outlined the trip before I took it, I sense that I might have leached most of the eventual potential out of it. I entered naked and, right off the bat, I hit at least a double into the corner with ThanksTaking. In this venial season of political degradation, it made perfect sense (and I make no overstatement suggesting this) to downgrade the usual, familiar Thanksgiving celebration to the level of the typical druid appreciation: roasted gruel with a side of sour cide, instead of the usual turkey with trimmings. I then entered into a short series of side-explorations, considering the relationships between Decency and Disgrace, Disgust, and Misdirection. I then slipped into a half-remarkable question: What might be the MotiveToDecency, given that it offers no clear evolutionary superiority? I ended this writing week admitting that I've been increasingly resembling one of my old nemeses, whom I had always considered somehow beneath me: the venerable and disturingly similar to me, the ever-Decent Mr. Magoo! ...Land where our father’s tried to live genuinely Decent lives, protect us by thy light, let freedom ring!“ This Decency Story reports that The War On Decency has targeted Thanksgiving, plotting to replace it with ThanksTaking this year. The Decency Story argues that the administration’s recent actions have deeply damaged the tradition and spirit of Thanksgiving by cutting food assistance to the vulnerable and creating dysfunction in public services like air traffic control, threatening both the sense of abundance and the ability to travel home: ThanksTaking. I connect these actions to a broader erosion of Decency and our already meager social safety, primarily criticizing Repuglicans for undermining American optimism and communal values. By recalling the holiday’s origins and the resilience of earlier generations, I call for a humble, reflective observance focused on Decency and future gratitude, rather than on material excess. ...This Decency Story discusses how indecency and disgrace seem closely linked, suggesting that one often conceals the other. Indecency serves as a mask for shame or disgrace, emerging under extreme circumstances and seeking secrecy. ... Shame might be the most damaging emotion, prompting people to engage in indecent acts just to avoid acknowledging feeling it. Public figures may use indecency as a diversion from their hidden disgraces, highlighting how denial and misdirection delay justice. Ultimately, wherever one finds an indecency, check for some hidden disgrace being denied. ...Roman consuls are sent under the yoke of Samnites and are exposed to disgrace {Primae Decadis Liber Nonus p. ...It feels odd to notice that Disgust and Decency have once again become closely associated. I discuss how expressions of disgust now seem common among decent people, particularly when observing societal and political decline. Disgust and decency must be interlinked, as those with moral sensitivity seem more likely to notice and become upset by troubling behavior or changes in standards. ... These conversations can become a quiet but persistent form of protest, often reserved for trusted company to avoid backlash. Pieter van den Berge: Disgust (1675 to 1737) - A man, and face, sitting on the ground, his legs and arms rejecting to the left. ...In this Decency Story, I argue that decency and indecency are not true opposites and often overlap. ... Illustrating this idea with a story about the recent government shutdown, I describe how Democrats seemed to lose but actually shifted the focus to a future debate over health care subsidies. This story suggests that decency can prevail by letting indecency undermine itself, and that their dynamic seems less about strict competition and more about layered interaction and perception. ...For something that doesn’t seem to offer any evolutionary advantage, Decency sure seems sacred to me. ...In it, I contemplate why Decency persists even though it provides no obvious material advantage or reward. Decency doesn’t translate into wealth, safety, or survival advantages; decent people can still suffer and are sometimes taken mean advantage of. Yet, Decency clearly seems widespread and forms the unspoken baseline for the bulk of human interaction, fostering trust and cooperation. ... I strongly suggest that the true value and motivation for Decency seems intrinsic: it maintains the social fabric and has become a default value for human coexistence, even when it’s unacknowledged or lacking economic reward. ...This Decency Story employs Mr. Magoo, a cartoon character known for his oblivious innocence and near-sighted blunders, as a lens to examine my own recent continuing confusing experiences and mishaps. I describe incidents where my appointments were missed or misbooked due to misunderstandings and technological challenges, drawing direct parallels to Magoo’s continual misadventures. In reflecting on these events, I acknowledge a growing resemblance to Magoo and find comfort in embracing this harmless, well-intentioned way of being. The story concludes with a realization that wisdom and empathy come from seeing oneself in those one might have previously mocked. ...A month ago this week, I sliced off the tip of my left thumb in a standard supper preparation accident. ... The doctor who tended my wound the next morning at the emergency care facility introduced me to a novel therapy. It involved some 3M technology that closely resembles simply wrapping the wound in plastic wrap and replacing the dressing every five days. He warned me that some nasty stuff might accumulate beneath the bandage, but that I was not to take that stuff seriously. ... Changing the bandage proved to be about as difficult as playing a zither one-handed, but I managed, spraying Bactine® on the wound and gently swabbing it with tissues to absorb the seepage. That doc had said that it might take three or four weeks to effect a complete healing, and it has taken a little more. I feel grateful that I didn't become a cripple from my carelessness, since that hand operates the fretboard part of my guitar. Today was the first day since the accident that I went without a bandage on that thumb. ... I am reminded how delicate I am and how much faith and persistence even a minor kitchen accident requires to heal. I hadn't noticed how much I depended upon my left thumb until it was rendered useless for a time. ... I had to invent two-handed replacements for preconscious functions while my formerly invisible thumb took center stage. ... I've retained my thumbprint, which seems like an awfully meager payback for a month of discomfort. Back to where we were might be better than any of us ever deserve. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

MrMagoo

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-13T05:57:39-08:00

"Wisdom comes from noticing the ridiculed other is us. ...Quite the opposite, he was, by all accounts, an innocent, guilty of perhaps, at worst, naivety, at best, a tenacious ignorance. He never knew what he didn’t suspect, and he apparently never suspected anything nefarious about anybody, including himself. His sole sin, if, indeed, this could be counted as a sin, was his steadfast refusal to wear glasses. Being extremely near-sighted, this insistence produced hilarious results as he continually misidentified virtually everything he encountered. He could have easily qualified as The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, had he been married. He was not ‘touched in the head,’ as was often said in his day, but tenaciously ignorant of the world he inhabited. ... It was as if he carried a guardian angel on his shoulders, or one carried him on hers. In my youth, I watched MaGoo’s antics as portrayed on a cartoon series. I considered him to be old and dottering, though I lately realized that he was probably younger than I am now when I saw him. According to his legend, he was independently wealthy, having inherited his tycoon grandfather’s wealth. He still drove his grandfather’s car, a twenties-era Maxwell, in the early freeway era. ... He’d often end up driving out onto a steel I-Beam suspended from a crane by a wire, though he’d somehow never crash his car. The I-Beam would reconnect to something at the last possible minute, allowing him to drive on unaware of the peril he’d just survived. ... MaGoo inevitably made it home in plenty of time for supper. I have recently been noticing a disturbing convergence between MaGoo’s existence and mine. I’ve been encountering a series of MaGoo-quality experiences that leave me baffled. It seems as if, after a lifetime of relative congruence, I lately can’t always figure my way out of a laundry basket. ... Last week, I arrived at my dentist appointment precisely on time. I walked through the door at the very moment I’d believed my appointment was scheduled, except the receptionist had no record of my having a scheduled appointment. I’d just worried the day before that I’d overbooked a car appointment into that same hour, because my calendar had shown a conflict. ... There was no entry that hour in my phone’s calendar. Granted, my new and “improved” iPhone features a new, hostile, counter-intuitive user interface, but still, I thought I could rely on my calendar. Yesterday, I arrived at my windshield replacement appointment, sixty miles from home. I’d wrestled with scheduling the appointment because the company relied on an artificially intelligent assistant to schedule all appointments. After an hour’s effort, I felt confident that I’d successfully scheduled the session. I even received confirmation, and, later, The Muse complained that she’d suddenly been inundated with reminders about a windshield replacement appointment. The receptionist at the windshield shop had not received the memo from their artificailly intelligent assistant. ... Just as well, I learned, as a technician stopped to review the situation. What I’d imagined was a broken windshield seal was actually a bit of loose trim the manufacturer had sent out a maintenance notice on, recommending a drop of superglue as the resolution. I’d had no appointment, and it turned out I hadn’t actually needed one. ...Halfway there, he found himself behind a state trooper at an intersection where he needed to turn left. ... MaGoo interpreted that move to mean he was pulling into the weigh station just to the right of the intersection. ... When he didn’t, MaGoo pulled up and made his left turn, whereupon the trooper pulled in behind his stuttering Maxwell/Subaru and turned on his lights. The trooper said that he had been fixing to make that left turn, and that MaGoo had undercut his move. MaGoo explained that, as he tried to find the latest version of registration and insurance information, the trooper had fooled him. He’d never seen anyone pull to the extreme right to set up for a left turn. The trooper apologized for the confusing move and explained that he’d stopped MaGoo to determine if he was driving under the influence. He wasn’t, though he had been recently unconsciously suffering from some benign early-onset MaGooism. ...The lenses others insist must be necessary to properly perceive what’s happening around us don’t exist for our genuinely hapless MaGoo. He does no damage, except, perhaps, to his already terminally wounded reputation. He’s of an age where reputation becomes meaningless for maintaining an eternally optimistic self-esteem. He will be the butt of others’ jokes regardless of whatever he does. Nobody can say he’s not Decent, an innocent doing no damage as he passes by. He never notices when he’s made the butt of others’ jokes, and he wouldn’t care if he knew. He already knows he’s not going anywhere, just toodling around here. He must understand empathy in ways he couldn’t as a child. ... Now, he recognizes that he’s him, and probably always was. Wisdom comes from noticing the ridiculed other is us. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

MotiveToDecency

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-12T05:40:53-08:00

"It's me, mustering my own Decency for its own sake. ...It doesn’t seem fair that Decency doesn’t bestow special privileges on those who practice it. The Decent get sick and die at pretty much the same rate as the indecent do, so Decency might not provide any evolutionary advantage. Likewise, we see Decent people being taken advantage of, despite their good records. Decency also seems like a difficulty when compared to its alternatives. Just appearing upstanding can prove exhausting, and maintaining a Decent reputation can sometimes seem life-threatening. Those who cut corners without remorse might seem to inhabit the most advantageous universe. Someone else absorbs their overhead costs while Decency spends extra resources dotting their ‘t’s and crossing their ‘i’s. ...I do not for a second understand what moves me to strive to land on Decency’s side, but I do. ... I have not accumulated anything like a king’s ransom of goodwill as a result. My Decency has apparently been something I engaged in for its own benefit. It has not produced a leverageable asset. Were I to take my accumulated Decency to the bank, I could not secure a loan with it. It doesn’t pay my mortgage. Nor does it directly contribute to putting any food on the table. ... Whatever my Decency might be, it’s not easily replaced with any other substance, however notional. I know more about its presence than anyone else ever has, and should anyone mention it, I respond with a blushing, “Ah, shucks.” I hardly acknowledge any personal knowledge of its presence. There’s no tangible return on Decency. In a capitalist economy, it should rightfully be about as rare as hawk teeth, yet it seems common. ... Generally, if I rely upon the Decency of my fellows, I’m only rarely disappointed. The default value of human interaction tends to be Decent. We are not mongrels trying to eat each other, but Decent beings striving to protect each other instead. ... We pray for protection from evils that hardly exist, but neglect to explicitly appreciate all the freaking Decencies surrounding us. Nobody’s checking to see how current our Decency might be when we meet. We presume it’s active, and rarely depart disappointed. ... They seem to operate with impunity, possessing an annoying immunity to consequences. Most of us can’t imagine how they live with themselves, because Decency, however intangible, nonetheless serves as foundational in our lives, especially in our relationships. We quite literally couldn’t thrive without it. ...We dimly perceive how essential it proves to be, despite apparently bestowing no tangible evolutionary advantages. We notice it most when it goes missing because its absence leaves a glaring hole in our existence. The Great Again crowd takes advantage of Decency’s inherent blindness to its own absence. We’d grown complacent in its reliable presence. It alarms us when it fails to manifest. We can’t quite imagine indecency’s presence. It easily takes mean advantage of us. ... Indecency seeks dominion more than it ever pursues communion. ...The MotiveToDecency might be the evolutionary imperative. Experience should have taught us that indecency poorly serves our survival, that it undermines necessary social fabric. We need not behave like dogs seeking to devour one another. We should have grown beyond that self-destructive so-called survival strategy. I choose to see this brief suspension of forward evolution as the final confirmation that we’ve grown beyond such notions. Certainly, there will likely always be pockets of indecency, but the future bodes poorly for any future attempts to organize indecency on a threatening level, or so I hope. I’m not the praying kind, though, because I believe I know the source of Decency, and it’s no heavenly inspiration offering anybody eternal salvation. It’s me, mustering my own Decency for its own sake. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

MisDirection

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-11T05:57:20-08:00

"Why, then, does Decency so often prevail?" Contrary to popular misconception, Decency is not necessarily in a competition with indecency. They might both exist on some imaginary continuum, but that line bisects dimensions as well as linear space. It’s more diagonal than level, and not necessarily a straight or narrow line connecting the two poles, which cannot be adequately characterized as opposites without ignoring some rather obvious similarities. One continuing challenge stems from the straightforward-seeming notion of good and bad, beneficial and evil. Decency isn’t necessarily without sin, and indecency doesn’t always qualify as even a venial sin. Decency might satisfy convention while offending with pretension. Indecency might occasionally be absolutely necessary. Let he without indecency cast the first stone. Indecency might seem to lack the discipline necessary to fully abide by the rules. It often seems sloppy in execution and, therefore, lackadaisical. Decency might pretend to be more pious, sometimes to seemingly take advantage of the rest of us. It’s not above resorting to MisDirection to achieve some end. It’s capable of pretending to lose so that it can succeed. It need not show all the cards it’s holding. It’s perfectly acceptable to encourage a competitor to assume whatever they please, especially if that provides a Decent advantage. Indecency seems to be so busy imagining ways to break the rules that it never occurs to it to see if they’re making a fool of themself. Decency sees that success sometimes seems a simple matter of letting indecency take advantage of themself. Give the greedy bastard the gold he desires, but cannot swim away carrying. The Parable of the Government Shutdown showed Decency engaging in MisDirection. After forty days and nights of stalemate, seven Democrats and an Independent proposed a resolution. The Repuglicans had been adamant, following their insistent incumbent’s vehement instructions, that they would never agree to anything the Dems proposed. They wanted a so-called “clean bill,” one without any changes. The shutdown, though, was taking its toll on the Repugs more than on the Dems, who had been just as adamant about continuing Affordable Health Care Act subsidies as the ‘Pugs’ had been about devastating the economy. The Dems mustered a MisDirection, superficially giving in to precisely one of the Pugs’ demands. They’d forego renewing the health care subsidy if the Pugs would agree to fund food assistance. The Dems would agree if the Pugs conceded to reopen the government and agreed to reconsider funding the health care subsidies in January. ...Every Repuglican senator and representative had to agree to change their non-negotiable strategy. Seven Dems did, all lame ducks or secure in their future electability. The Dems roared, not in victory, of course, but in apparent defeat. Many called for the minority leader to resign, as he had not been able to keep his party members in line. However, tellingly, nobody on their side volunteered to become the replacement Senate Minority Leader. The deal preserves and amplifies the blatant insult that the lack of health care subsidies will represent. Furthermore, it focuses exclusive attention on that issue after the impact of the missing subsidies trickles down to the kitchen table level over the Christmas period. Bernie Sanders, ever the reliable shill, served as the outrage amplifier, while the Dems carefully continued promoting their curated myth that they are rudderless—a perfectly Decent ploy. Decency shouldn’t be above letting indecency occasionally have its way. Indecency often serves as the most effective advertising against its own position. It might at first appear that indecency enjoys unfair competition, until the effects of competing against itself are factored in. Until then, it often seems the world is tilted against their opposition. ... It’s not indecent to insist that even the indecent be precisely who they always aspired to be. It’s not necessarily any skin off Decency’s back for indecency to lack the insight to see that they’re usually the author of their own misery. Nor is it a sin for Decency to gloat sometimes, even self-satisfyingly. The competition might be eternal, but it’s never necessarily fair. Indecency often seems as though it holds the inside rail. Why, then, does Decency so often prevail? ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Disgust

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-10T07:00:17-08:00

Pieter van den Berge: Disgust (1675 to 1737) A man, and face, sitting on the ground, his legs and arms rejecting to the left. "We bring the conversation around to less upsetting topics before the dessert course gets served to aid digestion." I feel odd mentioning this, but I’ve been noticing Disgust being expressed whenever Decent people gather these days. I’d never before closely associated Disgust and Decency, but upon deeper reflection, I suppose it makes sense that they might commonly appear together. You see, the Decent possess a palate capable of sensing the sorts of dysfunction capable of producing Disgust. Some seem to be able to engage in most any lowlife activity without turning their stomach, while others find revolting displays entertaining. Those who find cage fighting diverting, for example, probably aren’t the same ones who attend symphony concerts. I understand that the standards by which audiences judge performances have changed over the generations; nobody gives a second’s thought these days to watching a bloody murder mystery over dinner. Some core discerning Decencies remain. The rapid descent of our presidency from Decency into perversion has rightly shocked much of the polity. We might have thought we’d seen the worst, or if not personally witnessed, we felt we might have at least imagined it, but we hadn’t. Each morning, a fresh perversion of justice emerges. Each night, another batch of incoherent ramblings gets posted. Every damned day, another public embarrassment intrudes. Decent people refuse to acknowledge his authority to violate our Constitution with such impunity. It’s, frankly, beyond me to believe that anybody finds the least of his stories believable. I understand that he’s probably presuming that feeding his constituents a steady diet of horse shit will mollify their concerns, but he seems to turn more of his base into his opponents with each new shenanigan. The Decent seem to grow ever more Disgusted. Back when Nixon thought he was king, it was considered de reguier to revile him whenever gathering with colleagues or friends. We’d renew our common bond by acknowledging our shared Disgust with what was happening around us in our otherwise good name. This was a slight rite of passage intended to confirm our common association. We were declaring ourselves members of an In Crowd, those who hadn’t been fooled into complacency, ones who sincerely desired for him to no longer hold our presidency. When visiting more conservative territory, we’d grow stealthy. We wouldn’t be quite so enthusiastic about disclosing our Disgust. We didn’t want to put off our parents, who, for whatever reason, had not lost faith in his incumbency. We were also self-preserving, for everybody had at least one Deliverance-quality story about what had happened after they’d disclosed their Disgust in the wrong company. We had all been accused of being hippies and communists by those who clearly didn’t understand what either designation meant. We went on to become those the current conservatives revile as “elites.” In truth, there’s damnably little elitist about us, other than that nagging sense we haven’t been able to leave behind us. Perhaps our sensibilities are delicate. Maybe we are snowflakes or canaries in a coal mine. We can’t seem to help ourselves when we see what’s happening in our steadily eroding names. So, the dinner table conversation, at least once each evening, turns toward a subject that turns our stomachs. We seem to innocently stumble into that mousetrap again. No evening can seem complete until we’ve savaged the idiocracy and sealed our identity as opposing the present perversions. I sometimes feel like a persecuted Early Christian drawing a fish shape with my toe in the dust, disclosing an otherwise deep and dangerous secret. I’d prefer to be waving broad red flags from the paraphet, but I almost secretly share my Disgust instead. We bring the conversation around to less upsetting topics before the dessert course gets served to aid digestion. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Disgrace

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-09T06:41:34-08:00

Anonymous Italian, Venetian: Book IX.5. Roman consuls are sent under the yoke of Samnites and are exposed to disgrace {Primae Decadis Liber Nonus p. ...Series/Book Title: Illustrations from Livy, Decades. Venice, Philipp Pincio, September 27, 1511 ..."Wherever Decency seems endangered, some Disgrace is being denied." Indecency seems to be somehow related to Disgrace, though I’m uncertain which serves as the chicken and which as the egg. Does indecency follow Disgrace, or does Disgrace trail indecency? I sense that Decency does not know Disgrace intimately, if at all, and that Disgrace often accompanies a fall, again, as either cause or effect, perhaps either. What does it matter? I’m toying with a proposal that indecency often accompanies Disgrace and seems to be frequently employed to attempt to cloak its presence. A fear of Disgrace might frequently justify indecent behavior, such that where indecency thrives, Disgrace appears to be hiding nearby. In this sense, indecency serves as a tell that some potentially embarrassing truth might be lurking. What might seem like run-of-the-mill cruelty, for instance, might distract from some deeper depravity. Certainly, where indecency seems to thrive, depravity seems to follow right behind, or perhaps it leads. I do not believe indecency necessarily stands on its own as a valid lifestyle. It does not serve as a form of diversity, a choice among many, neither black nor white. Indecency always means something nefarious or notorious. It’s gangster behavior, never proper, always an error. It requires some extreme conditions to encourage its emergence. It tenaciously keeps its secrets, though, and jealously seeks allies. It offers permission for those inclined to complicate their stories. One need not necessarily insist upon straights and narrows to decline its opportunity. Have you noticed how the indecent seem to need to move in packs? Cults are often founded on the need to engage in some indecency and may be only there to distract attention away from an underlying Disgrace. David Hawkins insisted that shame is the most damaging force in the human arsenal. To “be shamed” might be the most debilitating experience. We fight like Hell to avoid experiencing shame, and will willingly engage in the most indecent behavior to avoid recognizing it or being designated shameful. Those who seem to lack the ability to experience shame might be the most invested in deflecting it. The seemingly shameless seem more likely to be actively misdirecting because no human has ever been immune to shame. We will work hard to avoid acknowledging it, though, and I believe that this must be the underlying source of perhaps all indecent behavior beyond the utterly inadvertent. Those who engage in concerted efforts to polish their appearance must have something to hide. Authenticity never needs make-up to be present. I’m learning to wonder what Disgrace must underlie an indecency. Our incumbent’s term seems to be almost entirely comprised of misdirection. He labels each fresh truth Fake News. He escalates his indecencies with each revelation, and I easily imagine that he’s feeling shame breathing fire on his heels. The more supposedly shamelessly he behaves, the greater the secreted Disgrace. If the whole truth were known, the MAGA grift would be blown. The arc of history, still bending toward justice, bends exceedingly slowly lest it inadvertently grind up innocents. Injustice can meanwhile grind up innocents every day without apparent recompense. Justice rides the slowest horses while indecency scoots around on motorcycles. Denial might remain the first stage of acceptance, but acceptance seems to take forever to finally settle in. I try to imagine the Disgrace all this cosplay conceals before concluding that it must be considerable. Wherever Decency seems endangered, some Disgrace is being denied. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

ThanksTaking

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-08T05:39:37-08:00

Series/Book Title: Seven Deadly Sins (17th century) "Our fathers grant to thee, expanding liberty, of this we sing. Land where our father's tried to live genuinely Decent lives, protect us by thy light, let freedom ring!" Continuing their War on Decency, the administration, utterly uninterested in administering anything, continued eroding our foundational liberties by severely wounding one of our most treasured traditions: Thanksgiving, and defiling it by denying food assistance to the most vulnerable thirteen percent of our citizens, thereby eroding the sense of plenty usually accompanying the harvest season, replacing it with a deepening sense of dread. Further, the Federal machinery began dismantling our air traffic control system by withholding air traffic controller paychecks, prompting them to call in sick in record numbers, resulting in a spate of near misses, clear signs of an overloaded system. The administration began shutting down pieces of that system, cancelling service, thereby threatening the usual migrations homeward common to this season. Thanksgiving has this year been subsumed by a deepening sense of ThanksTaking. Who thought it possible that anyone or anything could deeply wound our native optimism? It was unthinkable, just a year ago, to imagine that Americans would feel unable to authentically celebrate our Thanksgiving holiday. Our traditional gratitudes have been supplanted by platitudes from unfeeling conservatives intent upon dismantling much more than merely our social safety net. Thanksgiving was originally proposed in a presidential proclamation made by Abraham Lincoln in eighteen-freeking-sixty-one! Lincoln, we might recall, was the President who started the whole Lost Cause movement by freeing enslaved people and defeating those defending slavery. This act of supreme Decency has been a source of frustration for those who disagreed that it might have ever been the business of our Federal government to insist upon Decency for “those” people. Their progeny have been fighting that Decency ever since, usually to little lasting effect, though they have remained persistent. Adding further insult to the eternally festering injury, Franklin Delano Roosevelt codified Thanksgiving into a formal Federal Holiday in the first year of World War II. Through the horrible war years and better ones since, the fourth Thursday of November has been formally observed as a day of thanksgiving, whether or not we’ve had a successful harvest. It was always in our citizens’ character that we could see through a single disappointing season to celebrate upcoming successes, even when success seemed to temporarily evade our grasp. We’d mortgage one year to celebrate the next, and these celebrations sustained us. It makes perfect sense that those still carrying their great-great-great-grandfather’s grudges would target Lincoln’s and Roosevelt’s holiday first, and seek to replace thanks with a particularly virulent form of Avarice. Cut food assistance for those most vulnerable among us. Publish plans to replace a significant part of The People’s House with a Gomorrah-class temple to excessw. Launch plans to undermine what has passed for national health insurance. Send our National Guard to harass innocent citizens. The list of insults seems never-ending. I feel moved to “celebrate” the usual fourth Thursday in November this year by serving up steaming bowls of gruel to commemorate the past we once sought to leave behind us. Our ancestors did not merely endure their lives. They knew Decency and joy, along with their unimaginable suffering by modern standards. In their time, too, self-proclaimed conservatives rallied against so-called improvements. Vaccine deniers railed against smallpox prevention and cholera-preventing public health standards. However, our intrepid forebears figured out how to live and even celebrate despite the extraordinary complications they faced. We were born blessed by comparison, though too many of us seem to focus on those blessings as if they were damnable curses. Jealousies drive some to commit social atrocities. Grudges encourage retribution against utterly innocent citizens. Power madness persists and continues to fuel capricious decisions. On this upcoming ThanksTaking Day, the first and probably not the last one in our history, let us remember our blessings past and consider what blessings we might choose to bestow upon our progeny in the future to fuel their Thanksgivings. We will undoubtedly seek to vanquish the present outrageous outbreak of indecency, which has grown into an obscenity and a tragedy. We hold a sacred responsibility to do what we can to transform each emerging obscenity into an absurdity. Replace the turkey with a huge serving bowl of gruel. Spoon it into simple bowls with an enormous serving spoon, with all the pomp and gravitas of any Norman Rockwell rendition of our proud tradition in action back then. If we’re the praying kind, we might offer thanks that we have not been personally consumed by Avarice, but retain our senses, though the world around us suddenly seems crazy as crypto. We will humble ourselves, hunched over our simple bowls of Decency, retaking the thanks they tried to wrest from our Decent and deserving hands. Damn them, bless us. Anyone for seconds? Our fathers grant to thee, expanding liberty, of this we sing. Land where our father's tried to live genuinely Decent lives, protect us by thy light, let freedom ring! ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 11/06/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-06T17:11:55-08:00

Inspired by the Swiss philosopher Johann Kaspar Lavater, the artist believed a person’s character depended on the animal he resembled. As Tischbein wrote in 1796, “I have undertaken another [series of drawings] in order to learn more about man. To make this study easier it is necessary to begin with beasts, since they are easier and their characters more evident.” Traditionally busy animals, these furry beavers exhibit human expressions as they focus diligently on the difficult task of stemming an exuberant waterfall. This writing week brought an end to Daylight Saving Time, ushering in my overlong season of early darkness and gratefully earlier sunrises. I was going to be up anyway, so I appreciate early daylight almost as much as I revile early dusk. This writing week also marked the end of the overlong baseball season, a national pastime that consumed more than its fair share of my time toward the end of the Series. ... I explored the metaphor of Decency as Dust. I found it surprisingly satisfying before delving into barking Madness, not as metaphor but as practice, as presently practiced by our increasingly hapless incumbent. I explored the proliferation of what I labeled ‘UmUrgencies,’ ineptness-caused emergencies invariably responded to ineptly, too. I found some solace in writing about Derision’s generally impotent attempts to discourage Decency. Then I ended this writing week by reminding myself and my readers that Decency almost exclusively comes in remarkably small packages. ...“Let tradition bring us through those times when we feel most threatened.” This Decency Story sees me fleeing into the security rituals and traditions bring in times when Decency seems most wanting. I reflect on the comforts I found in Halloween rituals, noting how modern celebrations differ from those in the past. Kids today wear unfamiliar, pop-culture-inspired costumes, and the tradition of Halloween pranks has nearly vanished. ... I relish maintaining the holiday’s protocols, from prompting kids to declare “trick or treat” to complimenting them on their choice of costumes. Our evening was marked by a warm fire, familiar warmth, and a feeling that these traditions temporarily restored Decency. ...This Decency Story employs the metaphor of dust to describe how Decency quietly exists in everyday life, often unnoticed and appreciated only in its absence. Decency, unlike its opposite—indecency, which is likened to unavoidable, conspicuous mud—operates quietly in the background and rarely attracts attention. Acts of Decency tend to be small and subtle, overshadowed by the spectacle of indecency, but their influence persists. Ultimately, I suggest that neither Decency nor dust can be the sole focus of life; both shape our environment in essential but unheralded ways, and their presence should not be measured by attention or counted acts. ...This Decency Story explores what tends to happen when Madness subsumes a society. ...This Decency Story examines how societies go through brief but impactful periods of collective madness, where rationality and Decency are temporarily abandoned in favor of chaos, emotional rule, and self-destructive behaviors. During these times, leadership can spread the madness quickly, the average person has fewer choices, and reform efforts struggle against prevailing disorder. Recovery from such episodes tends to be slow and difficult, with people often failing to fully learn from their own past mistakes. Ultimately, sanity does return, but only after much suffering and uncertainty, leaving future generations the real beneficiaries of hard-earned lessons. ...This Decency Story sharply criticizes the current administration for its ongoing cycle of self-made emergencies and inept responses, contrasting this with earlier, more competent and better-prepared governance. I note repeated, predictable failures, a lack of learning from mistakes, and a tendency to make each situation worse while claiming success. I portray the dysfunction as stemming from the leader’s nature and native lack of Decency, which seems to infect those around him, leaving observers embarrassed for the administration’s incapacity. ...This Decency Story speaks to an eternally unfair competition where Decency, unless discouraged, almost always ultimately wins. This Decency Story argues that indecency often employs derision and distraction instead of substance, targeting those who act with Decency, which can be difficult to maintain in the face of such Derision. Decency often gets discounted as naive or weak, but its strength lies in persistence and faith in itself. Indecency, lacking real strategic strength, deploys noise and intimidation to mask its vulnerabilities, but these ultimately don’t pose a real threat to someone who continues to act with Decency. Over time, Decency’s staying power and resilience allow it to prevail, while indecency is undone by its own irrelevance and excess. Pieter van den Berge: Spotting (1675 to 1737) A standing man with his tongue stuck out and his right hand pointed raised. ...This Decency Story finally reveals one enduring truth about Decencies: They almost exclusively come in small packages. ...While wealth and grand displays have their place, they can distract from what’s truly meaningful. Simple, thoughtful acts—like giving a handmade gift or showing good manners—carry more weight and impact. Decency isn’t measured by financial means or scale, and it’s invisible to those who only seek grand results. The true experience of Decency comes from small, quiet contributions rather than the pursuit of big, impressive acts. ...Gallery Text: Sheet with 6 representations of different kinds, including representations of a man who finds a sick boy on the street, a traveler who eats his bread and a man who makes wooden dolls. ...For the MAGA movement to dominate in the long term, it will have to reverse centuries of success of the most popular concept in the world’s history so far. Further, while Democracy might seem to be at a distinct disadvantage when competing against MAGA forces, like our first responders appeared to have been at a disadvantage against the rioting January 6th insurrectionists, and in those horrible moments, they were. ... Of course, the MAGA forces’ next move involved pardoning those criminals, though few seem to understand that those people will just violate the law and be arrested and jailed again because that’s who they are. ... We are cursed or blessed to live through these times when the forces of history are temporarily out of balance. This has not significantly influenced the inertia of history, though, which continues inexorably, further encouraged by recent obscenities. MAGA has been busily creating powerful memories of what happens when anyone attempts to stand in the way of history’s inexorability. ... It’s a lost cause, as was every similar cause against history attempted before. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

SmallDecencies

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-06T05:54:32-08:00

M.E. Edwards: Full of worries (1892 - 1905) Gallery Text: Sheet with 6 representations of different kinds, including representations of a man who finds a sick boy on the street, a traveler who eats his bread and a man who makes wooden dolls. Between the images, verses in book print. "Decency seems to reliably visit only those not desperately searching for it." It might be way past time that I clear up one possible misunderstanding: Decencies almost exclusively come in very small packaging. I’m not denigrating grand gestures, for those most certainly have their place. Nor do I badmouth the occasional excesses which add that certain celebratory spirit to life. The grandiose and even the gross definitely have their places, but neither proves necessary nor sufficient to induce the genuinely Decent. Decency almost exclusively appears in tiny sizes, and even when it seems to appear in one of the larger ones, it tends to be some attribute of the thing that carries the Decency within it. The balance usually turns out to be packaging. The often disappointing attempt to produce grand changes tends to be entirely overshadowed by the tiny, thoughtful gift —the kindergarten artwork, rather than the Hope diamond. We seem to imagine great wealth as a necessary enabler of significant Decency, as if grand-scale philanthropy were somehow essential to reliably produce it. It would doubtless prove easier to pay for solutions to the more massive and tenacious problems if we were only wealthier than Croesus, though Croesus, with his wealth, was anything but benevolent. He subjugated his subjects, hardly a Decent occupation for anyone, king or peasant. Wealth seems more burdensome than liberating, more demanding than forgiving. It brings certain imperatives that seem to dwarf more ordinary considerations. It seems too distracted to engage on any truly human basis. Wealth appears to belong to that class of possessions no one ever freely gives away, and freely giving serves as the essential soul of Decency. Most of these contributions necessarily come in small packages. One key to living Decently involves continually scanning for little opportunities. This activity almost guarantees the proper focus. Scanning for the grandiose easily blinds the best of us to the existence of any tiniest. Peering and planning into any far distance obscures our present. Decency exists in tiny presents, where a small gesture carries more than its weight in even fool’s gold. Decency depends upon this leverage. It seems to work best at almost an atomic level. Maybe Decency represents quantum energy, invisible but incredibly powerful, and abiding by rules other scales can’t sense or make very much sense of: black holes, strange attractors, quantum entanglements. Those who focus on the more macroscopic world can never experience the magic embodied in the more micro ones. Some insist that manners don’t matter much, that they’re vestiges of privilege and therefore worse than worthless in this age. They argue that freedom includes infringing upon neighbors’ undefended spaces; they consequently defend to the death of Decency itself, it seems. Some imagine they’ll become Decent once they’ve won the race to some presumed prosperity, when they will finally be able to afford the cost of sharing. Others insist that Decency doesn’t really exist because it rarely affects the almighty bottom line. Decency isn’t capable of justifying itself, but never really needs to. It’s an experience only appreciated by those engaged in it. It’s invisible to all others, existing beyond their meager imaginations and experience. They might attempt another grand gesture, then wonder why they still feel so goddamned hollow inside. I will not confide the secret, but only because I do not know it. Decency seems to reliably visit only those not desperately searching for it. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Derision

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-05T04:23:49-08:00

A standing man with his tongue stuck out and his right hand pointed raised. "…indecency exhausts itself with its own irrelevance." Few compliments seem less complementary than Derision, but it tends to be the praise of choice when passed from the indecent toward the Decent. The indecent hold limited resources, certainly less vast than Decency ever commands, so they compensate by making loud noises and dramatic gestures that signify little and mean even less. In any odd moment, their advantage, if only represented in volume, might appear to be overwhelming. They do the lizard dance where they stand tall on their skinny hind legs to appear much larger and more powerful than they actually are, relying upon startle reflex to balance what they not mistakenly understand to be uneven scales. Decency learns not to take those threats too terribly seriously, however otherwise terrible they might seem. Decency learns this lesson in the oldest of the old-fashioned ways. ... The message seems oddly familiar to the one your imposter syndrome whispers in your inner ear. It’s intended to feel discouraging, to dull your most potent weapon, to convince you to quit before you yield Decency’s many powerful benefits. First, Decency tends to seem like a dream, an idealized aspiration, perhaps comforting but probably unrealistic. Realism seems the more powerful perspective, wielding Real Politics and harsh lessons. Decency’s idealism looks rather flimsy in comparison, the very antithesis of steely. ... They sure seem capable of winning any competition. Indecency seems less inhibited by limitations imposed by good conduct. Heck, indecency’s free to resort to anything while Decency’s arsenal seems inadequate and limiting in comparison. “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win,” trade unionist Nicholas Klein. First, indecency might ignore you. Then, it might deploy derision before even beginning to engage in anything resembling competition. It will attempt to tilt the playing field to its advantage first. By the time it finally gets around to competing, it has already spent much of its potential on distracting avoidance. ... Indecency can’t compete by logically arguing points. If it can’t win by the time it resorts to Derision, it can’t win except by brute force, and brute force tends to be the most self-destructive option of many almost equally ineffective ones. However, brute force can certainly intimidate Decency and force it into an ineffective defensive crouch. Decency can cower with the best, preserving its potential until a more promising moment presents itself. ... Its Kryptonite tends to be discouragement, which might be why indecency tends to deploy the Derision card early and often whenever any seriously Decent competition threatens it. Decency seems to be almost entirely a faith-based initiative. It succeeds, when it succeeds—and it doesn’t always succeed–when it’s accompanied by an almost completely irrational faith in its relevance. The more unshakable this foolish belief, the less powerful indecency’s Derision seems: water off that proverbial duck’s back. The contest seldom goes to the person who scores the most reasonable points. It might more frequently go to whoever makes the most noise, at least in the shortest run. Decency somehow manages to hold on until its vindication rides in atop what might have been one of the slower horses in the race. Fortunately, it was never really a competition because indecency cannot compete beyond meaningless clashes. ... Its Derision is a form of defensiveness. Its offenses tend to be defensive moves fueled by a deeper sense of vulnerability than ever seems apparent to any Decent opponent. ...Decency promises nothing more or less than its own reward, though that reward, once achieved, seems to more than adequately compensate one for their troubles. It demands a thicker skin than ever seems obvious. Derision might seem to utterly defeat it at times. Indecency, though, is always cruising for an eventual bruising. Its inherent brutality and inhumanity render it unlikely to ultimately show all that well. In the short run, indecency might seem to have already overrun the place. Don’t be surprised when Decency rears its resourceful head again, out of what were presumed to have been ashes. Once serious competition starts, indecency has already ceded whatever advantage it once imagined it possessed. Anybody can successfully survive indecency in almost any short run by merely ignoring its poisonous presence, certainly by not taking it nearly as seriously as it insists you should be taking it. In the longer run, indecency exhausts itself with its own irrelevance. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

UmUrgency

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-04T05:23:12-08:00

“Nobody ever better deserved one of those handbaskets they say we should order.” Never a day slips by or an afternoon recedes without another crocodile emergency appearing. The indecent house of cards our incumbent and his regrettable cabinet have constructed continually threatens to crumble. They have 911, or its equivalent, on speed dial. It’s always the same pattern: someone tried, or usually actually managed to hoodwink them into believing, but it turns out they were misled. Another hasty response was absolutely necessary lest some situation threaten to get resolved. Each intervention only serves to deepen each dilemma until the administration, which never had any intention of administering anything, feels forced to administer something. Their disinterest seems most manifest then, for their proffered solution always makes the situation worse, often much worse. Then they declare another unqualified success, by which I mean another action in no way qualified to be classified as successful. Then, action properly defended to their own satisfaction if no others, they return to parade rest until another inevitable UmUrgency interrupts their distraction again. The rhythm of these disruptions has become perfectly predictable. How the administration manages to continue surprising itself seems to be the only mystery. They apparently never see even the least of these events coming, while their audience sits spellbound by another Kabuki Theater, a slow-motion train wreck they see coming from a hundred or more miles away. The mystery seems to genuinely baffle our incumbent, as if he weren’t confused by virtually everything he encounters. Either he was uniquely unprepared for the everyday challenges of government service, or he’s set a new standard for ineptness, or perhaps both. It’s not entertainment if everyone tuning in has heard the jokes a thousand times before and repeats each punchline more confidently than their most practiced performer. It’s not entertainment for anyone but the troupe, who regard themself as uniquely blessed to be so frequently cursed by “random” happenstance. I recall before times, when Decency himself inhabited the Oval Office. ... Often, some contingency plan kicked in with few feathers and even less dust disturbed. The press conference exuded confidence that the situation was well in hand. Emergency services had usually already arrived after being staged in anticipation. The odd genuine tragedy would occasionally visit those presidencies, but not so regularly and never so ineptly addressed. It’s almost as if our present incumbent has been uniquely cursed, for unlike each of his predecessors, this one in this time remains steadfastly overwhelmed with curiously embarrassing urgencies. Evidence that he’s not learning anything, his urgencies continue to multiply, while even his most beset predecessors eventually came to seem less endlessly indisposed. A Decent administration would, in addition to holding sincere intentions of administering something, would successfully subdue their otherwise unmanageable futures. No plan alone can tame the vagaries of statecraft, but the absence of anything resembling a coherent plan nearly guarantees an endless string of UmUrgencies, hair-on-fire occurrences routinely repeated daily. The surest tell that someone’s headed to Hell comes from what befalls him along the way. Those who complain of dog shit wherever they stand have usually forgotten to check their own shoes. Those whose houses continually catch fire might not be observing even the most basic fire prevention practices. Those whose hair continually catches fire might reasonably consider different headgear. Those whose fate constantly concerns them are rarely merely unlucky. The repeated punishments eventually become the crime, and the crime, every time, is self-inflicted. My heart goes out to those who, even due to their own actions, seem beset with UmUrgencies. I feel their embarrassment even when they can’t. ... No fool can fool a fool like that fool himself can. Still, it’s not merely passive victimhood or a lack of luck at play. If I didn’t know better, I’d blame karma, if only because nobody seems more deserving. No, it’s almost nobody’s fault our incumbent bumbles so. It appears to be his nature. ...Furthermore, his superpower appears capable of infecting anyone in proximity to him. ... Any association at all increases the likelihood of another Um-barrassing surprise. If only our incumbent were capable of embarrassment. His audience provides the shame he’s incapable of sensing. This, for us observers, proves embarrassing enough. Nobody ever better deserved one of those proverbial handbaskets they say we should order. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Madness

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-03T05:46:55-08:00

"May Decency preserve us until this Madness crumbles." Occasionally, in the course of human affairs, sanity becomes an impossibility, so Madness takes over for a spell. These periods tend to be brief in the scale of any country’s history, but memorable in terms of lessons learned, or, if not necessarily learned, then lessons experienced. These lessons become uniquely memorable, in part, because they produce devastating results: stock market crashes, wars, famines, and the occasional pestilence and plague. It’s almost as if success became unbearable, so voters opted to try failure for a while. ... That they brought it on themselves complicates responding in any otherwise reasonable fashion, so squabbling consumes what might have been a crisp reply. Countries do tend to eventually achieve recovery, albeit a chastened one. Then comes the painful period where they try to learn something from their experience. Much blame changes hands, and eventually, what will pass for a fresh sanity takes over. During the period of degradation, Decency becomes a stranger. It’s a dog-eat-dog world then, ruled by the most primitive emotions. Those still clinging to reason speak exclusively to partisans or, more often, deafened ears. Before the Madness becomes unignorable, the abuses seem like so many odd rumors. It seems evident that nobody in their right mind would ever choose to embody the hinted-at policies, so they seem fictitious. Later, it will come to light that it was much worse than this, and without even indecent reasons. ... It demotes reason to the role of trash collector. Madness might be the most communicable condition humans can contract. When present in a leader, its spread renders wildfires envious. ... Those still sane in insane places receive little benefit for their effort. ... When the baseline proves crooked, every other element of the construction gets affected. ... Reformers are multiple times more likely to get corrupted than they are to reform. Even the average person, if such a person exists, gets affected, as their choices shrink and their options disappear. After a carrot lands in the pea soup pot, it becomes pea soup more than carrot. It was never destined to transform that pea soup into carrot soup. Madness moves like this through even the otherwise most Decent populace. While it seems urgent to address such Madness at the earliest, even inconvenient possible moment, it must run its course. Madness tends to be a self-correcting infection in that it works hardest to undermine its own position. It cannot construct robust support mechanisms, so it relies upon rather flimsy, jury-rigged ones. ... It becomes at best the sum of its contradictions, and often, some wild exponent of them. ... It plays with each game it attempts to play, rendering even friendly competition impossible. ... The question becomes, “What’s left to build back from?” ...Some portion of the vanquished throng will continue to play along as if everything hadn’t changed forever. They will never understand and will very likely continue to oppose Decency even when it benefits them and their family. Those who come to see will assume Prometheus’ role, or Sisyphus’. Neither role will seem particularly uplifting except in the longer run than most who build it will be alive. Recovery is for upcoming centuries more than today, and Decency gladly sacrifices to avoid revisiting recent history. Sanity might not necessarily be more alluring than Madness, but it’s usually longer-lasting. Who knows what will stumble our present spate of Madness? Many of us see multiple crashes coming, any one of which could flip the switch, but none of which guarantees it. We try to keep the faith, even as the temple walls crumble around us. We might be fortunate to feel the craziness more than those consumed by the Madness ever will. ... Lessons experienced hurt more than any lesson learned. The insanity should persist until it can no longer continue. Every day seems as though we might be getting closer to a tipping point, and every damned day seems even further away. May Decency preserve us until this Madness crumbles. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Dust

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-02T06:10:09-08:00

The re-voting in Groningen (1897-06-27) "Ditto and more so with Decency." Think of Decency as Dust, as a sometime annoyance and occasional inconvenience. In this country, Dust is ubiquitous, present regardless of cleanliness habits. It’s probably never not there, but its presence isn’t usually prominent. It’s most appreciated in its absence, for the necessities accompanying its presence tend to inconvenience. It shocks when it finally comes into focus, almost always unexpected. Annually, the knick-knacks get attended to, and a deep sense of significance and gratitude always gets left behind. The Dust was never as rare as was the shocking awareness that it had always been there. Decency seems the opposite of Dust, that reviled presence that tends to sneak up on us. Decency seems clean by comparison, but think of indecency as mud. Mud accumulates, impeding progress, then dries into almost impossible-to-remove residue. Dust remains eternally fluffy and relatively easily removed. Its presence adds a patina of depth to some objects, a shadow against which an item displays its deeper dimensions. I rarely see Dust, especially when I take my glasses off. I found that if I didn’t want to see Decency, it would visit me very infrequently. I could too easily fail to find Dust when housecleaning. The Muse would review my work and immediately perceive what I’d missed. My sense of accomplishment would evaporate the instant she pointed out to me what I’d overlooked. I took to cleaning house with my glasses off so that I could achieve at least a temporary sense of accomplishment. Decency can be damnably difficult to perceive, especially when we’re poised to see its opposite. Indecency’s mud tends to be damnably difficult not to see, while Decency seems at least equally difficult to catch. Like a thin patina of dust, it blunts the sheen of showier pieces without rendering them as invisible as Decency usually seems. Decency puts little cats’ feet to shame. It creeps through insidiously, not even trying to catch a spotlight. It prefers to operate in shadows and seems embarrassed ever to take center stage, as if its performances might somehow embarrass those involved. Indecency loves the spotlight. It revels in making itself into a spectacle, its impact only occasionally overshadowed by Decency’s subtly insidious Dust. I imagine Decency utterly encompassing me, though I cannot often sense its overwhelming presence. My eyes more often notice its opposite in action, casting alluring shadows. I hear distant rumors of Decencies only after the fact. These rarely carry the impact even mediocre indecencies impart. Doomscrolling revels in attention. Decency doesn’t. It seems unseemly to even imagine scrolling through serial Decency videos, like a misuse of the self-inducing morphine plunger temporarily used in recovery. Decency thrives in small doses and revels in the most minute ones. Little fanfare ever accompanies either Decency or Dust; both sift in as an inescapable feature of existence, but neither really qualifies as an exclusive diet. This existence was never properly characterized as a competition. Keeping score rarely properly accounts for impact or influence. A single Act of Decency could overshadow scores of serial indecencies, and a single indecency might discourage even a concerted search to catch even some minor Act of Decency in action. Decency sifts in when we’re not paying attention. Indecencies seem to be in the business of dominating attention. Indecencies trade in prurient interest while Decencies seem more prudent, perhaps even prudish in comparison. It’s damnably difficult to put on airs when your furniture shows that fine patina only Dust imparts. Ditto and more so with Decency. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Treating

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-11-01T05:54:25-07:00

Yamada Hōgyoku: Bat and Moon (1830s) "Let tradition bring us through those times when we feel most threatened." I take refuge in traditional rituals when Decency wears thin. I had forgotten how important Halloween has always been until that first goblin rang the doorbell to threaten me with tricks if I didn’t deliver a treat. The current crop of kids passed muster, mysteriously dressed as current characters. I have to ask what each one ‘is,’ because I don’t get those memos anymore. I wore a vintage Felix the Cat costume in my time, though I doubt any of this year’s crop of costume wearers ever knew to remember who Felix was. One came bare-chested in the chill. One wore an inflatable T-Rex suit that probably snagged on the rose bushes that line our front walk. Many forgot to declare, “Trick or Treat,” and needed to be reminded to fulfill their part of the performance. I felt like I inhabited a Norman Rockwell painting or a vintage Walt Disney movie, experiences I had been in sore need of believing in again. Kids these days don’t much go in for tricking, certainly not on the scale kids did in my grandfather’s youth. He never tired of retelling the stories of tipping over outhouses when someone was inside and laughing when they’d peek out the hole. He sometimes stole outhouses, hoping someone would fall into the hole in the dark. He’d even join in to make a bonfire out of stolen outhouses, like any half-decent goblin would do in those days. Now, the threatened Halloween Tricks ring hollow. Nobody in the current generation even seems capable of dreaming up something as traditional as that old familiar flaming bag of dog crap left on the welcome mat for the inhabitant to stomp on to put out the fire—none of the classic tricks translated into our current dialect. Parents often accompany even the middle school-aged ghouls these days. My folks would have no more gone out with us than we would have consented to them accompanying us on our rounds, for Halloween brought illicit thoughts of rampaging. I would imagine myself transformed from a relatively mild-mannered young gentleman into a potentially dangerous prowler. I’d creep down alleyways seeking ways I might distinguish myself as a criminal, rattling a garbage can or startling a cat. We’d go as a gang, thinking ourselves genuinely threatening, though we never once engaged in anything even distantly resembling genuine mischief. Oh, we’d have stories to tell the following morning, largely fictitious, and a stash of candy that might successfully see us through halfway to Christmas. All of these memories and more washed up and over me as I repeatedly answered the door. I always asked who each person purported to be and complimented them on their fashion sense, even when their fashion choices made little sense to me. If a ghost tried to reach into our candy bowl, I’d lightly chastise them for breach of protocol. They were tradition-bound to threaten, and I, to pay them off, with no shortcuts or self-service allowed. I thanked each one for gracing our porch and even wished them “Happy Halloween,” though I have no idea what that even means. I’ve noticed a certain erosion of holidays in recent years. Now, it’s “Happy” for every holiday. “Happy Veterans’ Day,” “Happy Martin Luther King Day,” when I suspect that most don’t even hear what they’re saying, let alone understand what those greetings might mean. I imagine that, just through reflex action, we will one day take to wishing each other “Happy Funeral!” We had a Happy Halloween, whatever that was supposed to mean. I built a fine roaring fire. A World Series game was on the AM radio. The Muse made a fine Bucatini Puttanesca. We opened a modest red wine. The cats would startle at the instant any ghoulish footstep landed on the porch, and we would rise to open the front door even before the doorbell rang, to replay the ritual again and again. It seemed like Decency visiting, even in these days when cruelty appears by far the more common currency. The courtesy to unseriously threaten me from the security of my own front porch, and to understand that nobody needs to take such threats seriously. Freedom and liberty both seem to be embodied in such silly rituals. Let tradition bring us through those times when we feel most threatened. The mauraders left us with only a small Snickers and a half-dozen carmels. Happy Halloween, indeed! ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 10/30/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-30T17:09:10-07:00

This author found his stories to be successfully Reassuring thanks to the old and always reliable DoingSomethingDifferent. I found myself writing what, in retrospect, seems like a series of introductions to Decency, as if I needed reminding of its nature and appearance. I noted that Decency tends to be eminently Self-Interested but not self-obsessed. It surprisingly shuns Moral Highground if only because that often violates Decency's first principle, which insists that we're all created equal. I decided that I have been submitting Dispatches from the Front Lines of the War on Decency. I ended this writing week with a different introduction, this one to Decency's Edges, which are many, varied, and not always entirely as expected. ...I admit to feeling finite, and I question my motivation for seeking evidence of Decency in life and society. I admit to struggling with my intermittent interest, and I wonder if my search might be little more than an attempt to reassure myself. Observing Decency, or its absence, has an emotional impact on me. I question whether this inquiry brings actual value, or if it’s more about the act of searching itself. As my inquiries progress, they have become less about experiencing optimism and more about dealing with uncertainty and the search for reassurance after losing my innocence. ...…I’ll get to rediscover, for the umpteenth time, this self-same tactic for creating lasting change…” This Decency Story reminds me that I already know the universal strategy for resolving dissatisfaction: DoingSomethingDifferent. This Decency Story explains how I tend to instinctively force myself through difficulties using an automatic, habitual tactic that brings only a temporary solution and underlying dissatisfaction. I don’t tend to consciously choose this strategy, which doesn’t address the root causes, leading to repeated exhaustion and deepening frustration. The real remedy, discovered after wearing myself out, involves trying something even slightly different, often overlooked because it seems too simple. ... I admit that this pattern seems so ingrained that I regularly forget the lesson and revert to my old, unreliable habits. ...This Decency Story serves as a short meditation on the enlightening Self-Interested. This Decency Story explores how decency and self-interest often tangle. Genuine Decency involves some self-sacrifice but steadfastly refuses to abandon fundamental self-preservation. I suggest that errors and even indecency frequently result from accident or misjudgment rather than malice. Overly self-centered individuals become isolated, missing vital connections with others, so that what might have started as innocent self-interest devolves into a state of ignorance. Decency might be a fragile, often imperfect, but persistent aspiration rather than a constant state. Its essence appears to lie in the ongoing effort to reach toward Decency, even knowing perfect consistency will always prove to be impossible. ...This Decency Story takes to task those who inhabit MoralHighground and insist they’re someone’s betters. In this Decency Story, I express strong contempt, perhaps paradoxically, for people who act morally superior, especially those on the religious right who use their perceived righteousness to judge and demean others. I argue that true Decency requires humility and that public displays of virtue or privilege, such as first-class status or loyalty programs, undermine the principle that all people are created equal. I warn that America’s downfall could stem from collective self-righteousness, leading to the persecution of those with differing beliefs, a fundamental betrayal of Decency. ...This Decency Story amounts to a Dispatch from my front line position in this War on Decency. In this Decency Story, I share personal reflections on living through what I call the “War on Decency,” describing these stories as localized dispatches that highlight narrow experiences in a larger societal conflict. I argue that the true battleground is psychological, fueled by anticipation, paranoia, misinformation, and symbolic acts of aggression rather than open violence. I characterize this “war” as incited by illegitimate actors and heartless policies, resulting in expanding distrust, illegal detentions, and economic hardships. Rising costs and reduced access to basic needs affect daily life, but these struggles reinforce community resolve and faith in Decency. I express hope that resistance to indecency will ultimately make society stronger and more principled. ...“Decency can be a reliable partner but makes a lousy co-conspirator.” ...Decency can be an unreliable co-conspirator because he just won’t do some things. ...Short-sightedness disgusts Decency’s sensibilities, for he thinks almost exclusively in possibilities. ...As our never-ending porch remodeling project neared completion, the typical Asymptosis settled in. Each completed task spawned another smaller one in what seemed sure to become an ever-expanding infinite series. ... It took me two full days to acknowledge that I'd actually finished painting, though touch-up work remains. It took Kurt, our painter, a week to return and fetch his sawhorses, and we lingered an hour in the driveway, savoring our sometimes frustrating relationship in the warming sun. ... Both cats, Molly and Max, stopped by to sniff his hand and acknowledge his acceptability, even though he smells strongly of cigarettes. I carted trash wood into a burgeoning pile I promised myself I'd cut into fireplace-sized pieces for kindling. I have accumulated enough kindling to last me through a dozen winters. I've accumulated enough learning to last me until the next time I'm struck ignorant, which won't be long in coming. I tore off the construction cardboard to find the porch boards fairly intact and little worse for the eight months of construction work that occurred over them after they were installed. Our master carpenters, Steve and Marco, finished and took their leave, and our contractor and carpenter, Jesse, puttered around to finish up the final caulking and glue scraping. Jesse had promised we'd be able to use the porch for Halloween, and he delivered on his promise. It will be more treat than trick this year after me having to sit on the front sidewalk last year to prevent any goblins from falling through the absent porch deck. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Edges

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-30T06:15:39-07:00

John La Farge: The Dawn (1899) Gallery Text: The Dawn is based on a preparatory drawing (also in Harvard’s collection) for the decoration of the New York City residence of Cornelius Vanderbilt II. Although that composition was abandoned, it must have captivated the artist, for he returned to it almost twenty years later in this painting. Indebted to the work’s initial conception as a mural, the arching, elongated figure of Dawn has a bold, linear quality that can be easily read from across a room, while the creamy peach, purple, and turquoise tonalities are decorative without being overpowering. La Farge’s interest in light effects and color harmonies had already inspired his invention of opalescent — also known as “American” — stained glass, which the artist used in numerous commissions, including the translation of The Dawn into a window for the Brooklyn residence of philanthropist Frank Lusk Babbott in 1903. "Decency can be a reliable partner but makes a lousy co-conspirator." Decency can be an unreliable co-conspirator because he just won’t do some things. When co-conspiring, things tend to work best if the conspirators can maintain as much latitude for action as humanly possible, and Decency can be relied upon to feel squeamish at inconvenient times. Indecency cares little for propriety and easily oversteps boundaries. It can inadvertently wander into ethically dangerous territory in the passion of some pursuit, while Decency will more likely notice when he loses his moral compass heading. Even when a rule’s unjust, Decency’s less likely to try to bust through it, and will more probably find some way to discreetly weasel their way around it instead. All that said, Decency will not agree to do just anything. Decency maintains high standards. Decency believes it matters how the game gets played. Winning and losing can always be sublimated to higher purposes, and whether one wins or loses, Decency remembers the manner of play more than they ever remember any final score. This focus can anger the more partisan supporters who won’t mind bending rules to secure a win that Decency couldn’t live with themselves after. Guilt plays some part in respecting such Edges. It seems as though Decency believes somebody’s watching even when nobody could possibly be. It’s as if a guardian angel hovers nearby, protecting him from himself, and Decency never loses his awareness of that presence. Decency’s always chaperoned and therefore never free to roam just anywhere. He tends to stay close to the straight and narrow. Decency decides to take one for the team. He’s rarely mean, though he can be damned insistent, especially when innocents are endangered. He will not tolerate hate, whatever the espoused justification. He can revile something without relegating it to eternal damnation. He believes salvation can manifest for anyone, regardless of their sin, and insists upon justice irrespective of the crime. Decency believes that everybody deserves a chance and also that everyone automatically owes some modicum of respect to everyone else, regardless. Short-sightedness disgusts Decency’s sensibilities, for he thinks almost exclusively in possibilities. He believes that limits inevitably increase creativity, that Edges tend to improve their content, and that rewards should match contributions; also, that punishments should fit the crime. Decency struggles through demolition phases because he can always see alternative uses for almost everything discarded. He’d spend more time than warranted to see that unwanted obsoletes were successfully recycled. He’d rather inhabit a circular economy. Decency cannot tolerate intolerance or forgive malice. He’s likely to disappear from any initiative offending his necessarily delicate sensibilities. He can use brute force but only against genuine brutes, and remains capable of fighting with more ferocity than any half-dozen bullies. He expects respect and withholds his own only after he senses disrespect from another. He’s likely to mention his dissatisfaction before withdrawing if he senses any possibility for resolution. Otherwise, Decency’s unlikely to say anything as he quietly withdraws in disgust. Decency judges harshly, but he always judges himself first. Decency can be a reliable partner but makes a lousy co-conspirator. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Dispatch

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-29T05:58:58-07:00

Gallery Text: Discouraged by what he believed to be the conservative tastes of the French art establishment, Géricault traveled to England and exhibited his work in London in 1820–21. Received with critical acclaim, he engaged with the local manner, which included an embrace of naturalistic compositions and a more muted palette. Here he depicts a weary uniformed postman receiving a drink from a waiter outside a roadside inn. He focuses attention on the horses, contrasting their detailed muscular frames with the summarily rendered figures and landscape. The inn’s sign, which translates as “White Horse” even though a black one is illustrated, locates the scene in France, possibly outside Paris, explicitly alluding to Géricault’s mingling of British painting conventions and a French context. "How long before we become the bastion of Decency again?" These Decency Stories have been serving as Dispatches from what passes as my front line on The War on Decency, which began long before our incumbent’s current term, though he has been a chief, if not exclusive, aggressor. A Dispatch amounts to a letter intended to inform its receiver of the conditions the dispatcher—the letter writer—experiences in the receiver’s absence, often sent from the front line of some conflict. It never even pretends to be a comprehensive report, for no position on any front line provides adequate perspective for any observer, however otherwise objective, to fully experience any conflict. A Dispatch must necessarily represent only a narrow, local view of what usually proves to be a much broader engagement. I have created my Dispatches in the belief that my local view might not materially misrepresent broader perspectives and might instead reflect a more universal experience. That said, I believe the front lines of any conflict necessarily reside in the chests of the combatants. Not just those presently being assaulted, but all those wondering if they’re next. This anticipation might be the most insidious part of any conflict, for there’s little defense against it and no real confirmation that it’s warranted. ... The War on Decency has necessarily been mostly waged psychologically, anyway, with misinformation intended to confuse and brutality carefully staged to avoid explicit confirmation of its commission. It’s a conflict featuring more rumor than substance, though this characteristic might make it little different than any widespread conflict. ...It largely features nearly invisible mercenaries who creep around like thieves in the night. They dress like eight-year-olds playing war, as if to downplay their menace. Easily angered, they deploy what sure seems like chips on their shoulders against those who seem perfectly innocent in comparison. In this way, they seem like toy soldiers. It’s genuinely difficult for anyone to take them very seriously, and they gain no respect. It’s not law enforcement if they have to break laws to accomplish it, and so these poor clowns attract detractors who have taken to literally chasing them out of neighborhoods by simply yelling at them. The Decent seem to be more than holding their own, though an untold number have already been illegally detained, with some deported to countries within which they will always be aliens. They might eventually be repatriated, but the reparations will probably prove ruinous. I foresee many, many millionaire aliens eventually living among us. The heartlessness seems to be the primary purpose of this War on Decency. I can’t see what they hope to gain by their treachery, other than to encourage distrust. If that was the purpose of this exercise, it has so far succeeded far beyond what anybody imagined. But its success amounts to little more than the same rumors it seems to rely upon to engage in the first place. The War on Decency still seems abstract, as it hasn’t actually wounded many. ... The seven million-plus who on No Kings Day demonstrated their opposition to this sorry administration were only the beginning of a continually growing throng. Most people know this War on Decency is wrong. The following week should bring this realization home to more, as millions lose essential food assistance and health insurance premiums become generally unaffordable. ...The price of eggs remains so high that I’m glad I stopped eating them last January. I am seriously considering permanently replacing beef with tofu in my diet, given that beef has become unaffordable, too, and our soybean farmers could use my support. The Muse complains of phantom aches and pains, though we both understand they’re not phantoms. They come from the continuing assaults of the very Decency upon which this country was founded and long aspired to perfect. A perverted incumbent won’t ever manage to vanquish that. Until he’s jailed, though, we all have some unwanted coping skills to integrate into our daily existences. We’re understandably resistant to acknowledging the necessity of adopting these practices, not wanting to give indecency any legitimacy by shifting our focus. If anything, these unwarranted aggressions have steeled our resolve. If we had ever wondered if we were deep down decent people before, there’s now explicit confirmation that we were, however flawed. Compared to the indecencies daily visited upon us by our ersatz king, we were essentially saints before. This realization fuels my faith that I might be Decent again, even that I still might be Decent, however buffeted my practice seems by current undertakings. I suspect that this sorry administration and their unwarranted and psychotic assaults on Decency itself will spark a backlash that will guarantee that we maintain the highest level of Decency from now on. What Decency’s foes imagined would be world-changing might prove true, but in ways that they will only find deeply disappointing. How long before we become the bastion of Decency again? ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

MoralHighground

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-28T05:44:30-07:00

Mary Cassatt: Reading the Newspaper, No.2 (c. 1883) "…Decency itself falls far beneath us." Few behaviors disgust me more than sacrosanctity, that self-important quality affected by those insisting that they’re our betters. It doesn’t matter to me upon which basis this flaw manifests; each seems adequately disgusting, but at the peak, for me, stand those who deign to claim sole possession of some certain Moral Highground. Whether priest or heretic, the arrogance off-puts. It seems to negate whatever favorable inference their morality might otherwise make. Those who feel the need to advertise their goodness seem fundamentally dishonest. Decency suggests that good character needs no promotion and might only thrive in more humble circumstances. To promote it is to undermine it. I hold the so-called “religious right” in particular contempt, for their brand of righteousness seems to rely upon them standing on some people’s necks. They exhibit extreme contempt for those who, in their arrogant eyes, have fallen short. They seem to want to make a federal case out of every shortcoming and a sin out of every difference. They treat those who worship different gods, or even no gods, worse than lepers. They puff themselves up with pious self-righteousness, which seems terribly wrong to me. I contend that anyone who thinks themselves superior automatically disproves their point. Decency’s first principle insists that all people are created equal. Inequality lies exclusively in the eye of some beholder and seems fundamentally indefensible. That old American Express advertisement insisting that “rank has its privileges” was indecent. Frequent flier miles likewise serve as an enticement away from Decency’s sphere, where some people get treated as special due to some entirely superficial attribute. Those in first class seem much worse off than the poor devil sitting next to a cranky baby in the last row, where the seats don’t recline. Those who can’t hold out for a beverage until reaching cruising altitude were lost before they entered the aircraft. They might have been created equal, but they headed downhill from there, especially if they tout their privilege while preening. If this American experiment ever fails —if an autocratic regime ever replaces it —it will likely have failed because it insisted that Americans held some Moral Highground. We will come to believe ourselves righteous in ways that no Decent person ever has, and we will seek to vanquish those refusing to worship our mammon. We will, of course, only assault Decency to save it, in the same way that we will believe we have been saved. Our heaven on Earth might well seem like Hell for those inhabiting moral low ground, those sporting pronouns and supporting their right to abortion. The sin will come from denying liberty and justice to anyone who doesn’t share our Moral Highground. The crimes will come with public prayers and crocodile fealty. We will conveniently forget our history in favor of more popular fiction where insurrectionists are the best Christians and Decency itself falls far beneath us. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Self-Interested

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-27T05:46:44-07:00

Berthe Morisot: Self-Portrait (c. 1885) "…its purpose lies in its reach more than in its actual grasp." Decency appears to be tenaciously self-interested. Not self-centered or self-obsessed, but definitely and, occasionally, defiantly Self-Interested. Decency considers self-sacrifice to be at best a minor obscenity, if, occasionally, an absolute necessity. It will not cede much of its Self-Interest even when agreeing to sacrifice some of itself. It will retain enough self to regain whatever it might agree to temporarily contribute to a cause. Decency jealously guards itself as its principal. It holds no interest in bartering away the very source of its ability. It strives to remain congruent whatever might befall it, and, believe me, it is prey to every imaginable calamity. And the choices rarely seem clear. Thieves burgle Self-interest’s home, too. It’s continually surprised by what transpires. It also startles at strange noises in the night. It sometimes lives in fear and fright. Indecency might often be nothing more or less than inadvertent, an oversight, an accident. Who hasn’t stumbled into something that turned out to be different from what was initially imagined? Who flawlessly foresees every outcome? Nobody ever has and nobody ever will. We each stumble and sometimes fall, which might be why Decency learns never to go all the way in, by which I mean, all the way out of themselves, disregarding their Self-Interests. The self-centered build indefensible fortresses against their perfectly understandable fears. They err in insisting that they must always remain satisfied with every decision and every direction. They insist on feeding themselves first and frequently forget that others are continuously sharing their table. It’s indecent not to offer some of yours to others. The self-obsessed can’t quite see beyond their foreheads. They fail to perceive relationships. They insist they are islands when they’re not even isthmuses. They ignore their connections. They inhabit an imaginary universe that ultimately serves their interests poorly. What might have been innocent Self-Interest becomes an indecent ignorance of others. Decency was always a delicate balance, its very delicacy its divinity, not necessarily easy. Decency might mostly be an aspiration —an insistent intention rather than consistent practice. The variations experienced need not undermine the underlying purpose. Decency tends to be trending more than consistent, waxing, then waning, sometimes feigning existence. Decency doesn’t forget: it’s very remembering —its essence. Its reach might almost always exceed its actual grasp, but it almost never forgets that its purpose lies in its reach more than in its actual grasp. It might at times exceed ninety percent reach without losing its defining presence. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

DoingSomethingDifferent

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-26T06:38:37-07:00

Stuart Davis: Study for “Something on the 8 Ball” (1953) "…I'll get to rediscover, for the umpteenth time, this self-same tactic for creating lasting change…" When my inquiry into Decency began to dissatisfy me, I instinctively knew just what to do. That this was precisely what I always do when following my instincts reliably failed to inform me that this strategy had never once worked for long. Oh, it worked well enough in the moment. I shoved myself through to whatever stood in for the other side of that particular difficulty, like always, though it failed to address any underlying issues. Heck, it failed to acknowledge that any underlying issues might even be present. It took it on face value that the difficulty was probably no more than face deep and reacted as if it was just a flesh wound, a superficial complaint. How did I respond? I put my head down and shoved my way through to completion that morning. As usual, that action propelled forward momentum, but it was motion featuring plenty of friction. The following morning, a little more effort was required. A week later, my efforts were reliably creating sparks. Still managing to nudge me through to a fresh completion, but with ever-increasing dissatisfaction. This tactic must have been learned early because it’s essentially preconscious. I am never even aware of making the decision to invoke this technique. It’s automatic. It works to the extent that it resolves a blockage, though it rarely, if ever, affects the cause. The source of my dissatisfaction grew even stronger under this tactic, like it always has, and that’s where my automatic invocation of it so often turns tragic. It seems like magic in the moment it first propels me beyond a blockage. Later, it exhausts me as it appears to increase gravity’s insidious influence on the proceedings. My dissatisfaction transforms itself into a kind of depression through my repeated invocation of a technique never intended to satisfy me, but only to push me past a stall. On the other side of straightforward dissatisfaction lies a universe of unexplored possibilities. I usually choose to wallow in the dissatisfaction instead, leaving it untreated while I repeatedly attempt to shove my way past. I usually discover, once I’ve almost thoroughly exhausted myself, that the cure for such a state has always been simple, nearly as simple as shoving my way through another spate of it. The apparent blockage to forward momentum represents a choice point—an often-unwanted opportunity to do something different or to do the same old thing differently. DoingSomethingDifferent might be as close to a universal prescription for treating incipient depression as I’ve ever found. It usually seems, though, that I need to apply some more forceful increase in dedication instead. Simply DoingSomethingDifferent seems too simple to be profound. This might be why this suggestion tends to come only after relatively lengthy bouts of shoving wear me down. It’s not until I’m more thoroughly exhausted that I can ever see the logic in my simply DoingSomethingDifferent. This something need not be anything significant. Quite the opposite. Strategies that call for wholesale changes rarely persist long enough to change anything, perhaps because the protagonist is already exhausted when it finally occurs to them to stop doing something that has been failing them. A tiny intrusion might work best then, a shift that barely qualifies as anything at all. This might not even be something physical, but rather something psychological. Heck, “just” a change in attitude might prove adequate. Think small. I am not offering advice to anyone but myself here. I am clearly not qualified to prescribe for myself most of the time, for I’m the physician who seems to need to fail before stumbling upon a strategy that works. I remain a hesitant learner. I am capable of learning, however, though I seem to be much less capable of retaining whatever it was that I thought I was learning. Next time dissatisfaction haunts me, I’m pretty much guaranteed to address the difficulty by attempting to bull my way through to some imagined other side that never exists. This tactic will seem successful until it doesn’t, at which time I’ll get to rediscover, for the umpteenth time, this self-same tactic for creating lasting change: DoingSomething (Anything!). Different. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Reassuring

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-25T06:08:45-07:00

Clément Pruche: Fameux Jury de Peinture. Salon de 1841 ...Salon of 1841] (1840, reissued 1841) "…as if recovering innocence might prove Reassuring." I am not a bottomless font of positive energy. I am not an infinite anything, but a painfully finite being, present without obvious purpose, faking it as best I can. I identify as a man, though I do not align with many of the expectations that come with that designation. I am not very mechanical, for instance, and never cared much for motor vehicles. I am presently engaged in analysing Decency in concept and practice, though my interest in the subject has recently been flagging. As with any search, I wonder how I might tell if I’m succeeding before I’ve finished. In the middle of anything, progress might not seem all that evident. Even at the end, the seeker might be left wondering. Searching seems no different from any occupation, except for the presumption of it ending, of reaching some conclusion. Considering Decency has increased my sensitivity to both its presence and its absence. Finding evidence of Decency reassures me, while noticing its absence discourages me. ... Am I considering Decency in the hope that I might see more of it and thereby reassure myself? Must finding it missing or noticing it diminishing discourage me? Could I not find any observation reassuring that I’m at least occupying my time with an enjoyable activity? Do I need to find Decency for my query to satisfy me? In what other realm might a similar pattern emerge? Did I start my search in hope of somehow discovering a motherlode of Decency that I could find continually Reassuring? What’s with all this apparent need for reassurance? Have I been struck insufficient? It’s hardly headline news that the present administration exhibits little in the way of Decency—quite the opposite. I could occupy myself failing to find a single instance of Decency in any policy or proclamation this administration has produced. What might that inquiry buy me? What would I have produced as a result of that effort? I might possess definitive evidence of what was obvious before I began studying the situation. I would very likely find myself no wiser, for wisdom springs from different kinds of research than producing proofs supporting the obvious. It might be that I undertook this inquiry into Decency purely for primitive reasons, perhaps in the belief that I might somehow encourage Decency to manifest more frequently as a result of my investigation. Maybe I was merely salting an imaginary mine, hoping to coax out a vein of Decency. My motives seem downright superstitious. This doesn’t mean that they might not be helpful for something, just that they’ll probably not prove to be useful in the way I innocently expected them to be. I could seek snipes just as productively, and it was probably always up to me to find satisfaction in whatever I chose to pursue, or in the seeking itself. Searching for Decency or confirming its absence might prove equally satisfying, depending. Depending upon whether I find the activity Reassuring. Now, of course, I’m lost somewhere near the beginning of the second third of the planned effort, which suddenly doesn’t seem to be Reassuring me. This seems to be how inquiry works. It starts in an optimistic blaze, its own reassurance, before progressing into more profound, potentially more significant questions. The initial innocence cannot persist through very much practice. ... Deeper questions demand ever deeper purposes, producing inevitable shortages and accompanying crises of confidence. I didn’t start out seeking reassurance. Initial innocent motivation made reassurance unnecessary then. The innocence lost after asking the question a few dozen times pines after whatever it lost. It seeks reassurance as if it were its lost innocence then, as if recovering innocence might prove Reassuring. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 10/23/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-23T16:53:20-07:00

I doubt that there could be a better allegory of what's happening in this country than the illegal, unpermitted destruction of the whole East Wing of our White House to construct a wholly unnecessary trailer trashy gilded ballroom for billionaires to gather in and gloat. While, by the end of this month, 4/5th of the people receiving food assistance in this county will lose it due to Repuglican indifference. ... I experienced an emotional low point in the absurdity this writing week, wanting to turn off the endless insults to my patience and intelligence. ... I'd heard of indecency before, too, but these clowns recalibrate that scale. too. I feel a little reassured that the pathology predicts that our incumbent's Self-Saboteur Syndrome can't rest until it utterly destroys its host. He's aching for the retribution his mommy and daddy couldn't give him, and for the public humiliation that not even three of the more skilled wives could provide. ...I insisted that I experience more than a mere A Decent Night every night on four or five hours of sleep. I plumbed the Origins of Decency and admitted that I've mostly been Cheerleading for Decency in this series. ... Even the dedicated Cheerleader sometimes experiences hopelessness and knows that it can't help but show through the performance. Thank you for following along and witnessing my personal struggle to promote Decency, the one essential element in our society's periodic table. ...This Decency Story tells of a competition featuring only one competitor who always loses. ...Decency might be rewarded only rarely, and it may require facing criticism and disappointment, but it endures for its own sake rather than for external recognition. It cannot be accurately measured by popularity or in competition, but rather by staying true to itself. Indecent actors seek to undermine and attack decency, treating it as a competition, but their hostility ultimately proves self-defeating. Decency demands patience and resilience from its practitioners, resisting urges to retaliate or lower standards, and ultimately succeeds by not competing in indecency’s contest. ...This Decency Story speaks of a sense of plenty unknown to the indecent. ...This Decency Story contrasts the decent, who feel a sense of sufficiency, with the indecent, who often operate from a perception of scarcity. Those overwhelmed by a feeling of lack may justify indecent actions as necessary, while those who feel safe seem to behave more thoughtfully and decently. Effective problem-solving sometimes requires being willing to lose or listen to minority opinions rather than pursuing narrow wins. ... I reflect on a peaceful protest, noting the powerful camaraderie that comes from collective decency and the empowerment found in mutual respect without needing to demean others. ...“I will have experienced more than A DecentNight’s sleep, I guess, but A DecentNight nonetheless.” This Decency Story questions the concept of A Decent Night’s sleep, concluding that there are other ways besides sleeping to achieve a nightly Decency. In this Decency Story, I push back against my doctor’s suggestion that I join a sleep study, believing four to five hours of nightly sleep to be normal enough for me, despite warnings about possible sleep apnea. While The Muse notices my snoring and possible sleep disturbances, I feel no negative symptoms and steadfastly refuse to even consider sleeping with a vacuum cleaner strapped to my face. Instead, I defend my nightly routine as Decent enough—waking early, enjoying solitary contemplation and writing, time with my cat, and using the early hours for thoughtful leisure. Despite acknowledging other treated health issues, I insist on keeping these hours sacred, valuing the freedom night provides for my creative and reflective practices. ...This Decency Story considers the difficulty of defining where decency comes from, with theories ranging from innate human nature to religious or philosophical roots. I describe Decency as both passionately sought after and mourned when absent, with doubts about whether it can be taught or remains situational. I try to tie the concept to societal functioning, wealth, and leadership, suggesting that Decency might be essential yet unevenly distributed, making it difficult to obtain. I ponder the authenticity of anyone’s own decency and whether freedom depends on it, expressing skepticism about whether those who lack shame can ever truly attain it. ...This Decency Story finds me reflecting on my role as Decency’s Cheerleader. In this Decency Story, I liken my role to that of a Decency cheerleader, focusing on encouragement and morale rather than directly influencing outcomes. My task has been to inspire hope and spotlight Decency, even when my personal faith wavers or the odds seem poor. I often find this supportive stance exhausting since it largely depends on forces beyond my control, highlighting the limits of influence while reinforcing the value of persistent encouragement. Ultimately, my mission here might be to help others believe in the possibility of Decency, regardless of immediate results. ...This Decency Story doesn’t have an ounce of Decency left in it. ...In this Decency story, I contend that despair, not indecency, truly opposes Decency, with Decency serving as a foundation for hope. As Decency fades—particularly in the current political and social climate—despair takes over, creating a vacuum in which both sides suffer increasing desperation. ... Chaotic media cycles add confusion, inhibiting understanding and justice, primarily driven by a failing administration’s attempts to obscure its failures, which they recognize better than anyone else does or could. I feel beset by anxiety, isolation, and a lack of self-determination amid societal collapse, but remain aware of efforts—internal and external—to restore Decency and hope, even as uncertainty looms. ...Many decades of authenticity training have left me little more capable of honestly representing my internal state. Apparently, I assimilated my earliest training, received long before I understood that I was being trained by people who, as far as I ever knew, never understood that they were training anybody, in FIFO fashion: First In, First Out. My subsequent heartfelt studies took their place behind what I'd previously learned and so remained almost irrelevant. I knew, or I thought I understood, what I'd later learned, but in practice, nobody would notice that I'd ever experienced anything different. ... I can deny the obvious on an Olympic scale, if there were such a competition. ... It might be that nobody ever gets better than some grade of hypocrisy. I tend to disappoint myself first, long before the dedicated forces set to disappointing me ever find me. ...I have been sticking to my long-established ritual, just as if nothing's changed when everything seems to have shifted. I have continued publishing my stories, however irrelevant, and have persisted in convening my PureSchmaltz Zoom Chat every Friday morning. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Despair

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-23T05:38:54-07:00

"I'm frantically seeking an exit." I am learning that indecency was never the opposite of Decency. ... Decency represents the difference between hope and Despair, rendering Decency a rough equivalency to hope. Decency provides a context within which hope might thrive. When Decency disappears, Despair rushes in to fill the void, rendering it even emptier than it had ever seemed before. The miscalculation the MAGA crowd made might have been neglecting to factor in what happens after all accustomed hopefulness disappears. It’s not a win if the reward amounts to a vacuous void. It’s not a win if you leave your opponent with nothing left to lose. Then’s when the opponent becomes most dangerous. ...They have no recourse, either, but to resort to Despair. Their plans assumed conditions and powers never evident. Their fantasy tussles with a more tenacious reality, too, and probably even more desperately. They induce desperation in their opposition by engaging in it as an offensive weapon. The clueless engage in stunningly stupid stuff, shit nobody could have possibly dreamed up. Their offensive becomes a moving accident, a default—their fault, but not their intention. ... The effort to deny acknowledging the depth of the resulting catastrophes encourages ever greater calamity. If this doesn’t seem ridiculous to you, you’re not paying close enough attention. If you’re suspecting that you might be the crazy one, you might be paying altogether too close attention. The counterintuitive response might involve averting my gaze. I cannot continue to invest my days failing to stay informed of what’s not going on. The news might not be fake, but many of the activities reported seem less than genuine. Rumor prompts more investigation than genuine suspicion used to. The following day’s news begins by debunking what had been previously reported as probably occurring. ... Something much worse might well have happened instead, but it’s too late by then to avoid the resulting catastrophe, though that outcome, too, happened differently than initially reported. ... No volume of information will resolve the perpetual confusion, much of it deliberately sown in abject desperation by the failing administration. ...Thank heavens we don’t subscribe to cable, so we avoid any temptation to subject ourselves to cable news networks. The noise we experience seems plenty bad enough, with little space left for hopefulness. ... Have I become a desperado in response? No telling what any cornered cat might do. When even going to the grocery store takes on life-or-death shadows, I’m moved to stay locked in my room. I swear I’m gonna blow up my phone! I should not be left alone, yet I want nothing more than to be left the fuck alone. I no longer seem to own my future. ... I feel like Charleston Heston raging against whoever produced this Planet of the Apes. ...I feel as though I might have forsaken her, though I know conditions beyond my control have been actively trying to smother her. My Decency generator’s wounded and its spare parts are backordered. I’m uncertain when, or even if, necessary repairs will be completed. Will I need to exist without its reassuring presence? ... Have I lost my courage or merely misplaced it? Will Decency ever again serve as the currency of our social interactions? Will the future ever again seem even distantly attractive? Despair has no future, only a past. That past has been amplified under a false flag posing as greatness —and greatness again —on absurd premises. The opposite of Decency is nowhere, the place where only despair thrives for both sides. Now that I’ve arrived, I’m frantically seeking an exit. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Cheerleading

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-22T07:10:09-07:00

Jack Gould: Untitled [band and cheerleaders] (1958) "…I have no particular influence with The Gods…" I feel as though I have been Cheerleading for Decency’s team since I began this writing series thirty-one mornings ago. The playoffs finished this week, and the World Series begins two nights hence. I have stood steadfastly on the sidelines, rooting for the home teams to win. I have called no plays or engaged in any games I’ve witnessed. I’ve perhaps just made a fool of myself, gesticulating on the sidelines in front of the stands. I’ve not pitched, hit, or scored a single run, nor could I. I have not broken my leg on a questionable 4th-period Hail Mary play. I’m part of the second string contingent on the varsity bus, there for atmosphere rather than substance. I haven’t once forgotten the unwritten rules of engagement here. I’m present to draw attention away from myself and toward the play on the field. Like any cheerleader, I’m not here to embody anybody’s idea of masterful play. I more often try to point out the obvious and encourage holding faith when the fates seem to turn against us. I need not necessarily embody Decency myself to encourage anybody else. I dispense faith, especially when things seem most hopeless. I reminded the assembled of what could happen if we keep our faith, rather than what might happen if we don’t. My job involves promoting beliefs I might not even possess to preserve hope, especially when winning seems most unlikely. I could choose to be unscrupulous in my pursuit of this end. I might deliberately misrepresent the gravity of a situation, for instance. I might pretend that we’re likely to win even in the clear absence of supporting evidence. This represents the Cheerleader’s magic, their true contribution to their team’s successes. That unshakeable faith can inspire a tired and spent team to try just one more time again. Even if these efforts never change the outcome, the contribution improves something. Even a spare ounce of faith might enhance the quality of any experience, however fleeting, and might leave fans and team still believing in themselves, even when, especially when, losing. Decency seems to demand such behavior from someone. The team clown can always fill in when the cheer team’s not around, but for the big games where something important seems to be on the line, the team needs practitioners —people who have practiced putting on their game faces and understand how to move a crowd’s emotions. I am an unabashed fan of Decency. My role here involves cheering it on when I see it occurring and reminding others that it still exists when it seems to have gone missing. This has been exhausting as well as exhilarating, and overall, more wearying than enlivening. I’m growing to understand that the outcome must necessarily remain out of my hands, perhaps out of anyone’s hands alone. It demands more luck than I’d ever before appreciated, and I do not every morning feel all that fortunate. Yet I clearly understand I must suit up each morning, even though I’m not pitching, quarterbacking, or point guarding in this competition. I understand that The Gods remain more in charge than anyone else. The championship team almost always relies upon mysterious forces to win. It’s inevitably a mystifying convergence. The coach mostly makes the right calls. The players seem to read each other’s minds. The sun and shadows provide just the right balance of blindnesses, and the umpires and line judges make the proper calls. Each game contains its share of mistakes and miracles. The Cheerleaders engage to remind those assembled that they assemble on more or less hallowed ground, a place where miracles routinely occur, if not necessarily always for the proper team. As Decency’s Cheerleader, I’m here to help focus attention upon those impending miracles, even though I have no particular influence with The Gods to make them appear. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Origins

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-21T06:19:21-07:00

Félix Vallotton: La manifestation (1893) "I might have been fooling myself then." I might just as well argue about the Origins of chickens and eggs as consider Decency’s Origins. Some say it’s an innate human characteristic, while others say it emerged from religious influence. Some swear it’s at root philosophy while others insist it’s physiology. Nailing down a definition seems dangerous, even though it seems like such a mild sense on the surface. I can get passionate about it, especially about its absence. I seek it and mourn it, and at times, I suppose, I even fear it. I do wonder, though, how one comes to possess it, or does it choose who it possesses? Is it possible to school someone who seems deficient? Do penitentiaries offer Decency courses for those convicted of indecencies? What does the presence or absence of Decency even mean? Surely the Origins of Decency must be evolutionary. It must have eventually become obvious that it was required to prevent us from destroying ourselves, yet we still engage in wars. If anything, Decency seems inconsistent and situational. Were the people comprising the President’s cabinet once Decent, or were they born nasty and descending downhill since? Are they likely to ever become enlightened like Saul on the road to Damascus, or will they continue, inexorably, downhill for the balance of their already sorry existences? Was there a point where anyone roaming beyond it without having acquired at least a working knowledge of Decency was doomed? (I’m asking for an enemy and a friend.) If Decency were merely a philosophy, then only those unopposed to philosophy might practice it. For me, living without philosophy seems impossible. I understand that others find even imagining living with a philosophy at least equally unimaginable. A Decent society must be introspective enough to at least tolerate a philosophy or two. Likewise, that philosophy really should be robust enough to tolerate considerable scrutiny, though I understand that some feel indicted by even the most innocent inquiries. We are not always as naturally tolerant as I usually wish we could be. Decency might demand no less, but the indecent couldn’t care less. What supports the wealth of nations? More than international trade relations and gold bullion, the wealth of nations teeters on an edge of Decency. Those with wealth without Decency do not seem terribly wealthy to me. They seem pitiful, poor little rich girls, lacking more than they’ll ever possess. Could they purchase the Decency they so obviously lack? How much might that asset set them back? I feel pretty confident Amazon can’t deliver that by tomorrow morning. Those without shame, the shameless, might be incapable of holding even Decency’s hand, let alone conducting anything like an adult relationship with it. Will Decency, like The Truth, set anyone free, or does freedom demand something different to emerge? At my most indecent, I still considered myself to be a Decent man. I might have been fooling myself then. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

A DecentNight

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-20T06:23:13-07:00

Jan Saenredam: Night, or Woman Sleeping by the Fire (1595) "I will have experienced more than A DecentNight's sleep, I guess, but A DecentNight nonetheless." After I’d confided that I slept four or five hours each night, my internist asked if I might be interested in enrolling in one of the sleep studies conducted by our local Sleep Center. I wondered why I should agree to that, and he responded that it might allow me to experience A DecentNight’s sleep. I asked what made my solid four or five hours indecent, and he replied that people generally require more than a solid four or five hours to maintain a decent life. He spoke briefly on the insidious effects of sleep apnea. I responded that I exhibited none of the symptoms associated with sleep dysfunction, and even if I did, I would never consent to wearing a vacuum cleaner on my face in bed. I consider my sleep needs evidence of a biodiversity and not some syndrome requiring therapy. My internist has not mentioned the subject since. The Muse, though, reports that I snorkel and snore, evidence that I might be exhibiting the presence of some dysfunctional sleep disturbance. How would I know? It seems indecent to consent to treat a disorder one can’t quite believe in. I have plenty of so-called silent killers stalking me, without my sleeping practice being called into question. I actively treat my heart disease I cannot sense, and my chronically high blood pressure that never once produced physical evidence of its presence, and high “bad” cholesterol, which seems to have run in my family for generations and maybe even did in a few of my forebears. I stand by my decision to refuse to wear a vacuum cleaner on my face in bed. Besides, there are many more uses for night than sleep. A DecentNight for me involves hitting the hay early, around nine PM, and sleeping until well after one the following morning, when I’m apt to spontaneously wake up feeling adequately refreshed. I’ll sometimes lollygag around until my two AM alarm sounds, then stifle the three and four o’clock back-ups before rising for good. I head for my thinking chair, the one overlooking the street out front, and commence to consider my world. Our cat Max will have been dozing contentedly on the couch, and I will have stopped to appreciate his presence on my way across the vast front rooms. He often shows up shortly after I sit down, to collect a few head scratches and curl up in my lap to provide reassuring background sounds. This is how I start most mornings. I feel free to contemplate to my heart’s desire. I seek a theme to write about, but there’s no ritual or process for successfully discovering that. I roam and ramble in my head, tangling myself up in almost senseless questions. I meditate, if only to continue the ritual I’ve performed every morning since the early seventies. I actively procrastinate, figuring I have almost all the time in the world before the sun comes up and I’m imbedded in territory only I ever inhabit. These hours are mine and I profligately waste them as if they were infinite. I sometimes doze, awakening with enough of a start to startle Max, who might return to his much more comfortable couch. I will stumble upon a theme then slowly rise to brew myself a massive cup of decaf before wending my way upstairs in the dark to my writing desk. I rarely turn on lights when I’m roaming around through my early morning. The next hour or so I go functionally unconscious. I’m writing, and so actively listening to the little voices in my head that I am dead to the rest of the world, at least until Max slips in through the back window to yowl beneath my chair, complaining that I have neglected to feed him that morning. I will briefly break away to escort my chief complaintant down to where he can discover his breakfast already laid out there, waiting more patiently for him than he’s ever waited for it. By the time The Muse awakens, I’ve circumnavigated my universe a couple of times and often feel moved to lie down for a few minutes, as if to recover from the excursion. I will have experienced more than A DecentNight’s sleep, I guess, but A DecentNight nonetheless. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Lose

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-19T06:50:34-07:00

"…with ample domain to rule with Decency if I chose." The Decent possess a superpower the indecent can’t imagine: enough. Indecency might most often emerge due to the presence of some mysterious and overwhelming sense of insufficiency. Everyday temptations can become compulsions under this sense of absence’s malign influence. It might be an illusion either way, the delusions of plenty and scarcity being opposite sides of some self-same coin. Yet the sensation each conviction compels couldn’t be more different. Scarcity, even when (and, perhaps especially when) delusional, easily becomes definitional. Those without enough seem capable of justifying any action with an explanation that it was either necessary or essential rather than merely consequential. Those with plenty, or that innate sense that they possess it, might likewise characterize their actions as necessary or essential, though their effect seems the polar opposite of those ruled by the insidious scarcity mindset. I’m not suggesting that starving people, for instance, aren’t also capable of Decency, just that those who feel as though they’re suffocating from a sense of want might more easily justify the minor odd indecency, or even justify that lifestyle. Whenever some experience seems like a matter of life or death, something significant does seem to die inside. A sense of impending doom supplants one of possibility, and one might naturally turn more miserly in response. Be wary of those who routinely inflate their choices into life-or-death ones, for they tend to be the most dangerous to themselves and others. Safety, even if it’s “just” a sense, resolves more crises than any other single source. When The Muse and I were consultants and had to facilitate another “difficult conversation,” we’d seek first to make the space safe for thoughtful consideration. Threatening those already overwhelmed never once worked, for it only amplified the sense that there was not nearly enough to go around. One key for experiencing Decency comes from understanding how to deliberately Lose in order to gain an experience of a different order. The herd mind might seek an ever-elusive safety, one that can’t emerge around so many panicky animals. The choice not taken often proves to be the one most likely to lead to a sense of salvation, but majority voting tends to steadfastly avoid that choice. The minority opinion, the one that usually loses elections, offers options beyond the obvious, but one must choose to Lose to experience them. The apparently most pleasing or obvious solution often ignores otherwise avoidable externalities. They succeed only in a narrow short run, or they transform a potential win/win into a zero-sum. Either one of those transformations sidesteps an opportunity to inject Decency into the proceedings. Sure, they might produce a straightforward resolution, but one that poorly serves some constituency, so it more easily falls apart. Choosing to Lose often proves to produce longer-lasting Decencies. The whole concept of Lose and Win seems questionable when considering Decency. As I outlined yesterday in Win, Decency easily gets chased away in competition. Competing can subtly (or not so subtly) encourage throat-cutting, cheating by any other term. Those who cheat at solitaire not only take advantage of themselves, but they also train themselves to tolerate shaving hairs. They reengineer their self-esteem so that it only depends upon winning, whatever the cost. The cost tends to be considerable and always unaccounted for at first, perhaps unaccountable for then. There’s rarely a good enough reason not to cut that corner in the moment the idea to cut that corner hatches. The counter-argument gestates longer than the impulse and depends upon some sixth or seventh sense in the instant it might contribute any good to this world. It’s an innate, nurtured sense of plenty, as if you could well afford to lose plenty and still feel wealthy beyond imagination. That sense reliably produces Decency in this world. Yesterday was the second No Kings celebration all around the world. All reports proclaim that they were peaceful “protests” without much hint of violence. One woman in our march was screaming her fool head off with grievance. It was clear that she had reached her maximum tolerance. She floated F-bombs enough to sour the atmosphere immediately surrounding her, and I felt pleased when she hung back at a busy intersection to scream at passing traffic. The rest of us marched, occasionally mouthing protest rhymes, though most of us were Decently silent, as if our presence might have been enough of a statement. I felt that deep sense of camaraderie that reliably emerges when like-minded Decency appears. We proclaimed that there were no kings while separately and together modeling our own kingship of sorts. ... We didn’t require anybody to be humiliated to successfully navigate our route. Rather than No Kings, I left with a sense that I was a king myself, with ample domain to rule with Decency, if I chose. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Win

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-18T06:44:22-07:00

The Attributes of the Arts and the Rewards Which Are Accorded Them (1766) Gallery Notes: This picture may appear to reproduce the casual clutter of an 18th-century tabletop. ... A palette with brushes, placed atop a paint box, symbolizes the art of painting. ... An ornate bronze pitcher alludes to goldsmithing, and the red portfolio symbolizes drawing. ... B. Pigalle's Mercury, an actual work by a friend of Chardin's, stands for sculpture. The cross on a ribbon is the Order of Saint Michael, the highest honor an artist could then receive. Pigalle was the first sculptor to win it. So this painting sends multiple messages: it presents emblems of the arts and of artists' glory and honors a specific artist, Pigalle. A still life (or painting of objects), which is composed from scratch by its creator, can be used to convey complex meanings. "Decency doesn't rise to the bait that indecency always hides its hook within." ...Anyone could complain about “times like these,” for every age has harbored indecent actors who have risen to influential positions, and Decency never seems to hold an overwhelming hand. It goes about its work humbly, primarily for its own sake, if only because it’s its own reward and other approaches seem unthinkable. If popular support doesn’t define Decency’s success, what does? I argue that a different metric determines a Win when considering Decency. In any standard competition, the simple accumulation of acclaim determines a Win. Decency, though, doesn’t quite qualify as a competitive sport. It remains a choice and sometimes seems most effective when administered too sparingly ever to accumulate enough points to win any standard competition. ...Further, counting points seems distinctly beside the point of any Decent practice. Motive might not ever consider how popular a Decency might be, and focusing there might steadfastly miss any vital point. True Decency appears to lose by most measures, being steadfastly uninterested in competing. ... One might wonder why indecency overspends on media, touting alternative perspectives. These often try to reframe Decency into some more aggressive form and complain about the lack of patriotism or passion the Decent bring to what they can’t see as competition. A curious “game” results, one with only one team competing with themselves and, even more curiously, usually ultimately losing. ...If pushed, they will disclose that they’ve never heard of it. Even when they have heard of it, they will feign ignorance to amplify the utter insignificance of Decency’s influence. This phase will last until it becomes more convenient for the indecent to start making fun of Decency, for it does things differently. It will never matter what they decide to choose to criticize; they will always be trumped up charges, more true about themselves than about anyone else. The contradictions swarm, however, as they equate Decency with its more prominent opposites and villify what’s obviously better behavior than in which they’ve ever been accused of engaging. ... They equate being Decent with being a traitor. ...They fight with unnecessary ferocity against an utterly imaginary enemy. ... They bring out their biggest guns to defend against their invented phantoms. It’s as if they’re embarrassed to be so starkly contrasted. ... They try to goad Decency into engaging in what for them would be routine indecencies, and beneath the pressure they exert, some will find they cannot help themselves from retaliating as indecency hoped they would. Indecency will tout that one turned soul as exemplifying Decency as a whole, and amplify their media message. So much noise: First, they ignore, then they denigrate, then they attack, and then THEY lose. It was a competition of their own invention, mainly occurring in the vast space between their ears. There was never more than one competitor involved, and they lost. ...It requires a thicker skin and a more tender soul than indecency ever does. Don’t get me wrong, Decency sometimes aches to get even, as if parity might even be possible with Indecency competing with itself. ... It inhabits a win/lose universe where it’s destined to fail. Decency, though, was never destined to win, for when it enters into competition, it enters alien territory unfriendly to its kind. Decency must mostly let Indecency define the terms of engagement, for they’re the ones framing their existence as competition. They never suspect their tactics predispose them to lose, for they can see no further than win/lose, and they seek only Decency’s humiliation. Decency succeeds by being incapable of humiliation, by understanding that the best indecency can muster is an inevitably losing strategy. ... Decency doesn’t rise to the bait that indecency always hides its hook within. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 10/16/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-16T17:22:41-07:00

This intimate drawing was completed over April 5-6, 1888, while the artist was staying in Rome on the Via Claudia near the Colisseum. This sensitive figure drawing helped to prepare Klinger’s most important painting of those years, The Crucifixion, 1888/1891. In an almost autobiographical reflection, it depicts the scribe who unemotionally documents the world’s greatest tragedy that rages around him. This writing week, I focused on themes of Truth, Justice, and The American Way as mediums for describing Decency. I insisted that Truth need not be an absolute to prove helpful in this tenaciously relativistic world. I visited the near-distant future to see our present as precedent in PosseCognito, which was by far my most popular posting in a very long time. ... I introduced Questioning into the conversation for it has always been a source of Decency in every discussion. I then introduced a part of me that I don't often own up to possessing: LittleOldMe. I ended this writing week insisting that we're not so much seeking a more perfect union as an ever-more Decent one. ...“Those who live in opposition to truth end up with what they deserve.” ...This Decency Story insists that Truth doesn’t need to be absolute to matter. ... Lies, while sometimes temporarily thriving, ultimately prove unstable and require enforcement to be sustained. Decent people trust and expect honesty, and can be especially vulnerable to deception. When those in power build their structures on lies, branding dissenters as enemies, those structures become inherently fragile and fated to collapse. In the end, living without truth brings inevitable downfall for those who perpetuate lies. ...This Decency Story peers into history from the perspective of a few years into the future, after we’ve regained Decency and Democracy thanks to us choosing to locally stand up on our own hind legs again. This Decency Story observes our time from a point in the near-distant future: By the mid-2020s, frequent federal violations of constitutional rights, such as masked agents using violence against citizens and illegally detaining them, led states and cities to pass PosseCognito laws. These laws made it a felony for law enforcement to conceal identities and mandated clear local certification, leading to many arrests and convictions. The Supreme Court declined to challenge these laws, which grew into a nationwide movement, forcing agencies like ICE to withdraw and leading to the prosecution of top officials. ... As authoritarian policies were uprooted, peace, prosperity, and progressive values returned, restoring pride and self-determination. Armando Posse: Procession (1955) — Artist Biography: Armando Posse was a self-taught Cuban artist born in Havana on December 4, 1917, who specialized in engraving, screen printing, and drawing. He co-founded the Taller Experimental de Gráfica in Havana in 1962 and joined the Asociación de Grabadores de Cuba in 1964, where he won an engraving prize. ...This Decency Story discusses the DissEnting that our Decency sometimes demands. We are not merely a country of Decency, but one comprised of clowns. This Decency Story recounts how Portlanders responded to an intrusive federal presence with humor, costumes, and absurd displays, using irreverence to deflate tensions. Instead of meeting force with resistance, they mocked the agents, making serious confrontation difficult and minimizing risk. This approach aligns with American traditions, where clever ridicule has protected freedoms and prevented tragic escalations, defending constitutional values through laughter instead of violence. ...This Decency Story explores one of the foundations of Decency: Questioning. ...This Decency Story argues that authoritarians dislike questions because they undermine authority and demand engagement. Questioning seems essential to democracy and decency, as it encourages equality, respect, and dialogue, even when answers are elusive. ...This Decency Story speaks of Decency deployed, insisting that it’s never better targeted than when it’s aimed at the giver, when LittleOldMe treats himself Decently This Decency Story discusses the difference between how people expect themselves to treat others with decency and how little expectation there seems to be to treat themselves the same way. I reflect on my own patterns of self-sacrifice and self-punishment learned from my family, especially my mother, who often diminished her own presence. I acknowledge how easy it can seem to neglect or punish my own needs while recognizing the importance of extending decency to myself. ... Still, I see value in sometimes prioritizing self-care, suggesting that everyone, no matter how unworthy they may feel, deserves decency too. Pieter de Jode (II): Landscape with the Three Graces (1628 - 1670) — The three Graces of Greek mythology were Aglaea, Euphrosyne, and Thalia. ...This Decency Story recalls how it was to grow up in a demonstrably less Decent society. It serves as a strong statement against reinstating indecencies of the past as somehow being Greater than the MoreDecent union we’ve crafted since. This Decency Story recalls growing up under repressive social and educational systems, where survival often meant enduring cruelty and suppressing individuality. ... I portray attempts to return to past norms, Like Making American Great AGAIN!, as damaging and regressive. I value social progress, and I advocate for continued openness and resistance to nostalgic authoritarian impulses. ...I managed to lob off the tip of my left thumb in a regrettable supper preparation accident. This event instantly retired me to a seat before a roaring fire where I sullenly listened to yet another in an almost insufferably long series of post-season baseball games. These days, the postseason lasts nearly a month and features more than a spare few opportunities for somebody's world to end. The following day, I visited the Immediate Care facility, where I was introduced to a futuristic treatment for such injuries. I spent the balance of the week with an oversized thumb splinted up against injury while I continued trying to finish painting the final components for our porch remodeling effort. Some days were too cold for painting, but I painted anyway, paint spreading like putty on reluctant surfaces and refusing to completely dry. ... I'm learning how important my left thumb was, now that it's essentially immobilized for the next month. Even though I never texted with it, I unconsciously used it plenty when typing these stories. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

MoreDecent

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-16T07:04:44-07:00

"We, The People, seek an ever-MoreDecent Union here." I, and everyone else in my generation, was raised under a remarkably primitive and repressive regime. We learned to maintain a modicum of Decency despite the pockets of absolute obscenity surrounding us. We discovered potentially useful coping methods that helped us maintain some semblance of sanity when everything around us seemed crazy. It was easy to spot crazy in those days because our fathers and their fathers before them came from even more repressive times, times when whole generations barely survived state-sponsored deprivation. My grandfather was raised in a world where his leaving school after third grade was considered in no way exceptional. He had work to do and a way to find through the world. ... His family needed him to labor more than they needed him to graduate high school. When I was five, several blocks along West Main Street, the primary thoroughfare through town, was set aside for prostitution. Bars and pool halls also lined those sidewalks, with discreet entrances for “hospitality services” relegated to the back alleys. Prominent merchants owned those buildings, the same ones who donated to support the churches, of which there were many more than a spare minimum. My high school was an armed encampment of the United States Army featuring mandatory Reserve Officer Training Corps classes for the boys and an optional auxiliary for enterprising girls. We tolerated unreasonable searches daily and humiliating scrutiny of what we today call bodily autonomy at the whim of anybody in the administration. We learned how to behave like gulag inmates, skills we despised learning every bit as much as we despised learning Geometry, though those experiences would later come in handy. We are subsequently not unaware of how to live in a less Decent society than the one we built in the generation plus since we left high school. It was sometimes a one step forward and two back slog as we worked hard to adapt into more Decent times. The enemies, as we advanced our civilization, were never in question. The forces worshiping earlier repression as somehow sacred: Conservatives incapable of dealing with emerging social equalities, Christians who embraced the Old Testament, and the terribly wealthy who seemed paranoid about losing their status. The forces arrayed in favor of the future seemed straightforward. It seemed as if it included everyone else, representing a massive majority in favor of expanding Decency in this society. What did we learn by inhabiting such a shameful past? We learned not to take any unreasonably meted out punishment personally. Those punishments always spoke loudest about the punishers themselves, who always seemed to have been unable to outgrow some indecent adolescent urges. The cruel can never become enlightened, and they must always array themselves against Decency at the risk of losing the only identity they’ve known and grown to rely upon. Theirs was never survival of the fittest, but of the shittiest, justified as a struggle for their simple survival. Even in high school, the innocent were most often punished, usually for the grave sin of daring to be different, especially if they couldn’t realistically help it. To be born gay in those days was to be born in leg irons. It seemed that everybody, later in life, disclosed that they’d been harboring a “shameful” secret during those times. It might have been true that everyone suffered from the original sin of individuality. The decades since had dramatically improved the possibilities for those who previously suffered for their inescapable selfhood. Children and grandchildren seemed to have it better after. The absurdity of focusing upon making anything greater “again,” discloses a troubling obsession with the past. We inescapably only live forward, either learning from and improving upon our unavoidably ignorant past or worshiping that otherwise escapable ignorance. Making greater “again” cedes the possibilities living and learning entail. It amounts to the greatest cruelty anyone can ever visit upon themself. It stifles the self and, by extension, if it gains authority, it stifles society or tries to. Those of us who grew up in the gulags of the past understand what’s lost in such transactions. We know how to pass, how to protect our essences beneath carefully tended bushel baskets, but we’ve grown too old to bother too much now about the consequences of being found out. We’ve still got mouths on us, and if we learned anything growing up under repressive regimes, it might have been that we could have spoken out more often than we did. We colluded with the regime when we kept our secret selves hidden. We have little left to lose but generations of progress. The indecent proposals to deconstruct our Decent government seem destined to ultimately fail in some spectacular fashion. We’re all paradoxically nostalgic until we re-encounter the tragic circumstances we were forced to live under then. Then we remember, and the flood of memories wakes us from our reveries. We became better than we were, and damned if we’re gonna sacrifice our Decency to satisfy anybody’s dark imperial fantasy. ... We, The People, seek an ever-MoreDecent union here. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

...

LittleOldMe

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-15T05:37:53-07:00

Pieter de Jode (II): Landscape with the Three Graces (1628 - 1670) The three Graces of Greek mythology were Aglaea, Euphrosyne, and Thalia. Aglaea symbolized splendor and radiance, Euphrosyne represented mirth and joy, and Thalia embodied good cheer and bloom. "Even LittleOldMe might well be worth it." It’s one thing for me to treat others Decently and quite another for me to treat myself that way. Even the sparest rules of comportment demand that I treat others Decently, but no such strictures exist defining how I should treat myself—quite the opposite. I expect to sacrifice myself for some imagined betterment of others, as if I weren’t quite worth the effort to respect. And we hold in esteem those who do sacrifice themselves, even when nothing particularly useful or helpful comes of it. And we’re proud of these efforts ourselves. My ego swells when I tell others how I very narrowly avoided serious injury when engaging in some otherwise completely pedestrian activity, or even how I injured myself. It occurs to me that almost nobody really runs marathons to torture themselves. Yet, it seems as though every veteran of them shares harrowing stories of their personal punishments when running their races. My mother would discount her own presence by referring to herself as “Little Old Me.” She’d deploy this gem when disclosing some self-sacrifice to which she knew she wasn’t supposed to admit. It was her way of saying that she might have deserved better, an ironic statement meaning almost precisely its opposite. My mother was never a Little Old anything, even when she grew little and old. She was a memorable presence and always a force to be reckoned with, but even she occasionally felt much smaller than she knew herself to be. She was even capable of punishing herself for her shortcomings, of treating herself much less than Decently when under stress or duress. Like anyone, she could punish herself more than anyone else could ever punish her, and she sometimes made good on that tacit threat, treating herself much less than the Decently everyone deserves. I apparently didn’t fall too far from that tree, for what I know about her, I know because it’s also true about this LittleOldMe, too. I do not always choose to treat myself as Decently as I might deserve, usually because in the moment of commission, I don’t see myself as worth very much attention. Maybe I’m embarrassed that one of my poorly hidden vulnerabilities became visible. Still, I have proven myself fully capable of responding least generously to my own needs, to quietly or noisily discount them as signs of intolerable weakness. Deep down, I believe that I really should have been an exception, that the aches and pains considered par for the course have been wrongly allocated in my direction. I seem to punish myself most vehemently whenever this LittleOldMe commits something human. I have no prescription, no all-purpose homily intended to make this sort of behavior okay. It’s one of my many frailties. I know myself to be a deep-down hypocrite when it comes to dispensing Decency, holding one ethic for myself and quite another for pretty much everybody else. Far be it for LittleOldMe to figure this out, other than to acknowledge its presence. I am sometimes capable of intervening in my own interest in the moment of commission, or relatively quickly thereafter, but this was never a native skill. I learned to subtly punish myself for committing any sin that confirmed my humanity. Neither God nor much of an exception, LittleOldMe always seemed to have been cursed to be me. I might have been a BigPowerfulMe instead, though I might be wise to dread that self-image more than I fear my LittleOldMe. Decency demands that I sometimes deploy my best for me, though this expectation seems galling. None of us turns out to be half as powerful as we sometimes seem to be to others. Gratefully, few of us are as powerless as we might most often seem to ourselves. We’re capable of Decency regardless, whether powerful or powerless, because Decency appears to be the great leveler. It elevates those of us accustomed to thinking of ourselves as gutter inhabitants. It likewise tempers the arrogance that tends to attract itself to the most powerful. Decency might seem to be the great leveler, but never greater than when it’s deployed in favor of its giver. It’s a Put On Your Own Oxygen Mask First proposition. LittleOldMe might be eternally unworthy of Decency, though that might be the very reason it’s essential that even the littlest and oldest Me dispense and receive it. Even LittleOldMe might well be worth it. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Questioning

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-14T06:41:23-07:00

Ignaz M. Gaugengigl: A Difficult Question (19th century) " …We abandon our cross-examinations when we grow weary of discovering…" Authoritarians despise questions. They try to vilify questioners. They try and usually fail to insult questioners’ intelligence, as if asking were somehow threatening. They understand that there can never be any such thing as not answering a question, for even silence screams its response. Questioning can constitute a potentially healthy back-and-forth, a functional resonance. It’s almost impossible to maintain arrogance in its presence, for it tends to level every playing field. I suppose it’s little wonder why our authoritarians find it so upsetting. It renders it almost impossible to remain seated on any high horse through any barrage of Questioning. Democracy seems at root a questionable practice, for it leaves many answers unresolved. It prescribes degrees of freedom as the ultimate treatment for most illnesses and defends most stridently the idea of equality. Nobody is above or below those laws; that’s the way a democracy is supposed to be. Neither money nor position is supposed to give permission to ignore the law. When questions come up, as they will, we’re all enjoined to at least try to answer them as if the questioner held Decent intentions and as if those questioned should feel gifted by the question. “Thank you for asking,” begins the proper response to most questions, never, “How dare you even imagine asking!” Decency, like democracy, seems to demand an extended As If, where each citizen’s expected to sustain a belief in some useful, obvious fiction. It’s not so much that we were all created equal but that we’re better off when we behave As If we were. This encourages routine displays of mutual respect, without which we’d all be pretty much screwed. Nobody can successfully govern a country convinced that half the people are complete idiots or that only a select few qualify as geniuses or that only the rich can understand, or only the poor. Especially if half the people actually are complete idiots, does the concept of “as if” begin to make sense. I know that statement doesn’t make sense without slathering it with a generous swath of As If. The obvious tends to be the most useless; that’s why we rely so deeply upon each other’s Questioning. Questions provide premises for discovering what we might actually understand together. Those answers utterly depend upon a premising “as if”. The true benefit of every doubt lies in the questions it elicits, even when those questions cannot reveal their answers. Acknowledging ignorance of even the barest presence of an answer holds the key to a wisdom that transcends knowing. The Why? Loops, my then five-year-old daughter used to subject me to, frustrated me because they challenged my presumption that I might know even half of the answers. They also highlighted the absurdity behind the belief that Questioning might settle something once and for all, for every question unavoidably opens more than it closes. It creates possibility more than it chokes it off. There can be no definitive response to even any finite question, for resolution insists that everyone involved move ever closer toward the infinite. Every Yes or No begets a why?, and every response to every Why? inspires a quest for even deeper understanding. We abandon our cross-examinations when we grow weary of discovering, not when we’ve asked every possible question or feel satisfied with that last answer. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

DissEnting

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-13T06:05:08-07:00

Théodore Géricault: The Mutiny on the Raft of the Medusa [Historical Background](1818) "What better way to preserve our actual Constitutional order?" Portland greets the illegal and insulting invasion of poorly-trained Federal “immigration enforcement” agents with irreverence because that response best represents the American perspective. What better response to an absurdist intrusion than an even more absurdist one? Self-respect demanded some sincere sarcasm. Hell, Decency demanded it. As indecent as I’m sure these acts of silliness seemed to the intruders, any serious response might have been too easily interpreted as a serious one, one to be taken way too seriously, probably with fierce opposition, potentially leading to injuries or deaths. Better to offer them a target difficult to take so seriously, one that might even be ungenerously interpreted as silly. It’s difficult to muster much belligerence from even the most immature Federals when confronting them with people wearing inflatable dinosaur costumes and riding bicycles naked in the rain. It was not quite civil disobedience but rather dissent, with particular emphasis on the “Diss” part of the description. The protestors deliver less protesting and more contempt. They deliberately chose to disrespect their opponents’ disrespect by not showing it the fierceness it so richly deserved and likely expected. They brought the constitutional crisis down to the kindergarten level, leaving the intruders looking like the silly bullies they actually were. Had the people greeted them with some form of force, it might have reinforced their intention to appear as though they were some humbling force. Instead, the crowds mostly stayed away in force. Those who did show up to exercise their right to complain wore costumes difficult to take very seriously, like the guy in a chicken onesie with a cape, as if he were attending a five-year-old’s birthday party, which, in some ways, he was. Our incumbent rules with all the wisdom of a typical five-year-old. I mean no insult to the many fine five-year-olds who would never dream of behaving so abysmally, but a cranky five-year-old reverts to about the average mood lability of any two-year-old, transcending their age group’s hard-earned maturity for want of a nap or a snack. Uncontrolled emotion rules both our incumbent and that cranky five-year-old. Some adults should know better than to follow our incumbent’s directions when they so clearly violate our Constitution—five-year-olds rarely if ever even attempt to go that far. Responding to people following clearly illegal orders seems to require something beyond simple resistance. It demands a response that acknowledges the juvenile nature of the context in which such situations occur. Send in the clowns to engage with the unconscious clowns. Perhaps a circus will awaken those invaders from their terrible trances. If not, the protestors find a reason to dance. They’re not so much blocking traffic as executing a spontaneous block party. Yes, the neighbors will complain of the noise in the street, but that noise that so annoys them is the sound of freedom in action. The freedom to encourage our enemies to feel like fools represents the very best tradition of what it means to be a citizen here. Even resident aliens come to understand that Americans prefer to be seen as weird. We sincerely believe ourselves to be exceptional comedians, and in several important aspects, we are, though we often can’t quite see what others find so funny about our perspectives. We have always been notorious clowns, from that ridiculous imaginary Revolutionary Army that improbably managed to win freedom from the British Crown to the out-soldiered Union Army retreating from Manassas, we have cast rather silly shadows as our legacy. We’re more the land of silliness than the home of the brave, but few acts require more courage than to stand up to a band of thugs while wearing an iridescent inflatable frog suit. Such opposition’s difficult to miss. Our history seems to be almost completely comprised of people taking serious situations altogether too seriously. These almost always turned out tragically. It might be personified wisdom and damned courageous to refuse to take some serious matters nearly seriously enough, to render unto Bozo what rightfully belongs to Bozo, to not rise to that historically almost inexorable bait. To flatly say, “No!” to the incited violence and refuse to play into the supposed-to-play tragedy. To take careful aim at the center of the opponent’s self-importance, and let loose with a well-aimed volley of irreverence, as if their seriousness was silliness, as if their threatened violence didn’t ruffle a single one of our ripstop nylon inflatable feathers on our cockatoo costume. Show them we’d rather be the kind of Americans who’d rather make fun than war. What better way to preserve our actual Constitutional order? ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

PosseCognito

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-12T06:50:44-07:00

Artist Biography: Armando Posse was a self-taught Cuban artist born in Havana on December 4, 1917, who specialized in engraving, screen printing, and drawing. He co-founded the Taller Experimental de Gráfica in Havana in 1962 and joined the Asociación de Grabadores de Cuba in 1964, where he won an engraving prize. He was known for his graphic production work. "We, the people, regained the upper hand." By the mid-2020s, Federal overreach had become intolerable to states and citizens. Routine violations of Constitutional Rights by executive branch-directed agents threatened Decency and civility in targeted municipalities. Among the many particulars: °The Writ of Habeas Corpus was routinely suspended, °Masked and armed Federal pseudo police routinely descended upon vulnerable communities °randomly deploying tear gas in peaceful crowds °detaining and even arresting and disappearing citizens on mere suspicions or less °Refusing to identify themselves or their association ...To respond, municipalities, counties, and states began passing what became known as PosseCognito Laws. The title was an abstraction of a Latin phrase meaning “recognizable people.” These ordinances outlawed law enforcement from masking while in the performance of their duties. They further typically required that any enforcing individual be separably licensed and certified by the locality. They required that each agent clearly display a picture ID and share that information if requested by anyone. The agents also had to swear to uphold not only the Constitution but also the local laws and ordinances. Violations of these laws were treated as felonies, with penalties ranging from severe fines and a few months to years at hard labor, typically serving as farm or other heavy labor under the municipality’s direction. PosseCognito laws were meant to blunt the effects of essentially lawless Federals terrorizing citizens. They further defined the behaviors considered illegal and punishable under the Domestic Enemies clause of the standard oath of office. Previously, the promise to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic, had been rather indistinct, with specifics left to considerable personal interpretation. Under these laws, specific actions were strictly forbidden regardless of directions given by superiors. Whole classes of orders were thereby rendered locally intolerable and therefore illegal. Federal jurisdiction could agree to defend those detained under these laws, but they could not legally order subordinates to violate without exposing them to severe personal consequences. The Supreme Court, long a champion of States’ Rights, refused to hear the administration’s complaints about these laws. PosseCognito began the long process of citizens uniting against the corrupting effects of Citizens United and other unjust laws passed over decades by increasingly corrupted Republican Congresses. Congress itself finally began negating its own constitutional authority, a situation many states refused to acknowledge. As a direct result of PosseCognito laws, ICE’s presence in places formerly defamed as Sanctuary Cities essentially disappeared. The Secretary of Homeland Security was jailed and sentenced to five years picking cherries on a Willamette Valley orchard, then deported as a domestic terrorist. Many former ICE employees abandoned their jobs and simply disappeared. States slowly consolidated their positions vis-à-vis PosseCognito, with Florida and Texas the last to join the by then overwhelmingly national movement. By then, Congress had regained Democratic majorities in both houses, and courts had been purged of formerly crooked judges appointed over time by a corrupted executive and Congress. A period of peace and prosperity descended upon the nation, similar to that which defined our former finest hours. The Department of Defense, briefly, if illegally, relabeled Department of War, was formally renamed the Department of Reconciliation, and we began purging our society of the misbegotten notion that we were ever a Christian or anti-DEI nation. We started participating as global citizens again because we refused to submit to the overreach Repuglicans visited upon us. Our history became a notch prouder for our efforts. Our crops were successfully harvested. Immigrants began improving our nation again. Even farmers, turned into welfare queens and terrorized by tariff mania, became a powerful force in progressive politics again. We declared peace with our neighbors and trading partners and learned that even with open borders, fewer people chose to move to this country than anybody ever expected. They’d been driven here by tyranny until we began exhibiting even greater tyranny against our own citizens and visitors. Those who promoted those policies became permanent political pariahs. The rest of us regained the self-esteem that only comes from standing tall on our hind legs. We, the people, regained our rightful upper hand. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Truth

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-11T06:43:49-07:00

William Sharp: Diogenes in Searth of an Honest Man (18th-19th century) "Those who in live in opposition to truth end up with what they deserve." Truth need not be absolute to prove useful. It might be essential that we not get altogether too tangled up in absolutes if we expect to live in this relative universe. Still, the difference between truthiness and falseness seems clear enough under most circumstances. The old Superman aphorism “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” imprinted itself on many in my generation. We came to believe it was downright un-American to deal in untruths and injustice, equating those with our foes’ tactics. In practice, living lies provides faulty foundations, whatever the means employed or the ends pursued. Lies work like phony geometry, for they unreliably characterize level, parallel, and angle. They demand much more maintenance than even the most complicated truths, and ultimately require some form of authoritarian enforcement in order to stand. They cannot ever stand on their own. Eventually, the castles constructed out of lies must crumble. No force known to exist in this universe can reverse this inexorable tendency. In the short run, entire cities can be constructed, necessarily with dizzying immediacy. Bedrock might even seem to bend in their presence, though it actually doesn’t. Lies are at root illusions, utterly dependent upon clever omissions and the Decency its victims insist is necessary for them to live congruently. Philistines do not observe such rituals. They do not wash their hands in reverence before meals, leaving themselves open to otherwise preventable infections. The Decent possess little natural defence against dedicated deception. They seem more willing to take others at something resembling face value. They don’t double-count their change, making them more likely not to immediately notice when they’ve been shortchanged. One of the curses Decency provides includes perhaps its most prominent blessing. Decency does not live suspicious of others’ intentions, believing that generous expectations and interpretations serve as their own reward. Decency must seem like a rube to those for whom ends always justify every means. Decency eventually wonders after the purpose. Why would anyone choose to use such crooked geometry when everybody should already know it produces only short-term useful results? The answer to this question must be irrelevant if only because answering it wouldn’t likely advance anybody any closer to any Truth. In a world employing crooked geometry, everything eventually seems crooked. I am slandered daily. Depending upon the mood of anyone representing this administration, I am at best an enemy within. I might be Antifa. I must hate this country because I’m not Christian, never before considered sin in a nation founded on the idea of diversity being its strength. It doesn’t matter what I haven’t done; I become a convenient cause for even the most imaginary effect. This administration is scrupulous only when it comes to maintaining its fictions. The resulting house of cards grows ever more precarious. It will crumble. It’s not even interesting to wonder how. Piled ever higher and deeper, the BS factor alone dooms its future. Gravity will ultimately bring the whole edifice down. Then we’ll discover it possessed no substance: front with no backbone, hat without cattle, not even qualifying as fiction. Those who live in opposition to truth end up with what they deserve. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 10/09/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-09T16:02:42-07:00

This writing week watched summer leave, replaced by genuinely chilly mornings and lovely sunny afternoons. ... The carpenters delivered the first of the final components, and our painter, Kurt, and I dutifully prepped them for installation. Most afternoons found me listening to baseball playoff games while engaging in one of the more primal human activities: painting prime coats and sanding the results smooth. I began the week writing about this process in Renewal, which inevitably includes considerable destruction. ... I ranted a bit about my permanent outsider status in Insider. I began an extended exposition of the War On Decency we seem to be experiencing. ... I ended this writing week wondering why the presumed most powerful person in the world seems to revel as the continual victim in Hoaxes. ...This Decency Story finds me reminded of how Renewal tends to work. It’s never all a continually reassuring series of improvements, but damnedably destructive, too. This Decency Story shares my front porch renovation experience, highlighting how real renewal often involves unexpected setbacks, messiness, and loss. ... Despite being emotionally and physically draining, the project ultimately progressed, albeit slowly, serving as a metaphor for broader societal renewal. I conclude nothing new, that true improvement rarely comes easily or tidily, yet might lead to meaningful, long-lasting results. ...1878) —- Gallery Text: Paris hosted the 1878 Exposition universelle, or world’s fair, to celebrate France’s recovery after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. For the event, Gustave Moreau submitted a cycle of biblically themed paintings to reflect on the nation’s renewal. The series, which included this work as well as Jacob and the Angel (1874–78; also in Harvard’s collection) and David (1878), marked three stages of human life. Here Moreau celebrates the anticipation and promise associated with childhood: Moses, recognized by the rays emanating from his forehead, floats in his basket on the Nile, surrounded by the ruins of ancient Egypt. In a written commentary Moreau suggested the prophet’s enlightenment, noting the contrast between “this people of mummies, sphinxes, and gods with staring eyes and unmoving gaze” and “this fine human fruit full of sap and life.” ...This Decency Story explores Decency’s dual nature as both a particle and a wave. ...This Decency Story argues that decency exists both as concrete actions (Particle) and as a subtle presence or feeling (Wave), but our awareness of it often depends on how attuned we are to both forms. It warns that focusing only on obvious, visible acts can blind us to more subtle expressions of Decency, especially across different cultures or in noisy, attention-distracting environments. In a world overwhelmed by distractions, we may miss these quieter forms of Decency, and belief in such values may require adopting useful fictions—even without direct evidence—to guide behavior and sustain social bonds. ...This Decency Story finds this outsider failing to become an Insider. In this Decency Story, I repeatedly face obstacles with modern commerce and technology, consistently feeling excluded and confused by processes others seem to find easy. Shopping for something as simple as replacing a toilet seat becomes a multi-trip ordeal due to unclear product distinctions. Technology, like Amazon Prime’s site and texts fromn my pharmacy, prove to be inaccessible or frustrating. These everyday difficulties leave me feeling like an outsider, wishing systems were more inclusive and easier to navigate, leading me to avoid commercial interaction wherever possible. ...This Decency Story begins to tell The War On Decency’s origin story. This Decency Story argues that a decline in cultural Decency began with entertainment’s shift toward coarseness and sensationalism, promoting guilty pleasures and cruelty over thoughtful storytelling. ... Performative morality, especially among nationalistic Christians, fueled this shift, encouraging nostalgia based on selective memory and fostering reliance on conspiracy and spectacle for validation. Many became desensitized and addicted to these influences, leading to self-righteousness, scapegoating, and support for authoritarian-leaning solutions, eroding democracy. True Decency, which requires discipline and the rejection of extremes, seems dismissed by those profiting from this cultural change. ...This Decency Story explains how attacks on decency often involve inventing internal enemies, making it seem as if the problem comes from within Decent people themselves. These Imaginary Enemies Within can’t be proved or disproved, leading decent people to feel confused and self-doubting. ... This tactic focuses on distraction and confusion rather than genuine debate, giving a curious power to those who employ it. Adriaen Collaert: The Enemy Sowing Tares Among the Wheat, from Landscapes with Old and New Testament and Hunting Scenes (1584) ...This Decency Story wonders how Decency got so lucky while our incumbent seems continually surrounded, almost smothered, by Hoaxes. This Decency Story critiques the incumbent who repeatedly claims to be the victim of hoaxes, in contrast to how rare and privately handled true victimhood typically seems. I admit feeling skeptical about the frequency and public nature of these claims, questioning their plausibility and suggesting that genuine Decency doesn’t typically seek attention or sympathy when wronged. The repeated victim narrative seems either self-serving or evidence of an absence of self-awareness, with me noting that responsible individuals quietly address injustices rather than widely broadcasting them. The story highlights the contrast between the incumbent’s misfortune and Decency’s reassuring resilience. Honoré-Victorin Daumier: The Election Hoax [La carotte de l’élection] (1844) — A caricature depicting a politician addressing a peasant family. ...I fled from my desk to the back deck, where a perfectly ambient late afternoon encompassed me. I tuned in to the Dodgers/Phillies game on my phone before settling in to perform my usual Thursday evening ritual: creating my Weekly Writing Summary. Since I changed the layout and format of my summaries last summer, I’ve had to pay closer attention. Before, I could almost go unconscious and still succeed, but now it’s more like playing chess for me. ... The sun was slipping on the other side of the house as I revisited my writing week in renewing circumstances. I have been employing little markers like this, slight changes to my accustomed routines, as if to remind me that I, too, am changing along with my surroundings. ... Two and a half weeks into creating this Decency Series, I finally feel as if I am a part of it. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

...

Hoaxes

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-09T06:29:50-07:00

The politician offers a carrot to the family, symbolizing the false promises made to voters. "How did Decency get so lucky? It was probably the result of Hoaxes." Decency might occasionally be subjected to some Hoaxes, though most were probably intended as April Fool jokes. I wonder what it means when someone seems continuously bedeviled by Hoaxes, where hardly any situation doesn’t come with a hint or a suggestion of nefarious Hoaxing. In my own short lifetime, I recall encountering fewer than a spare handful of Hoaxes, and none of those seemed in any way malicious. Our incumbent seems immersed lip-deep in a swirling cesspool of them, with some new one appearing almost every news cycle. I wonder what sort of curse might be behind such an infestation, for I swear I’ve never even heard mention of anyone, not even the most tragic Shakespearean character, more beset with such toils and troubles. To listen to the press secretary, her boss must be the most unjustly accused since Moses, and Pharaohs were notoriously intolerant. It’s one thing to fall victim to Hoaxes, but quite another to publicly proclaim oneself a victim of them. In most cases, serious Hoaxes seem unspeakable. The last thing some rube ever wants to do involves confessing that they became a victim. Most Hoaxes seem transparent when viewed from any distance. Most people fail to see how the victim ever found the false premise attractive. A few might conspire to pull a little wool over someone’s eyes, but vast conspiracies involving large communities seem wholly unbelievable. Who could keep the secret secure until the Hoax went down? Some loose lips would surely result in sinking that ship before it ever sailed, but our incumbent seems to proudly proclaim his repeated victimhood. He’s attracted Hoaxes like flowers attract bees. To hear his stories, he continually attracts swarms. Yet he seems to fall for each one in turn, only later realizing that his lunch money was stolen. Then he reports the infraction not to any proper policing authority, but to the nation. It’s as if he repeatedly nails himself to the same damned cross and then suffers for his faith in public. Why was he smiling when he announced his latest victimhood? ... Shouldn’t anyone so experienced at being the victim eventually see the next one coming? Couldn’t someone with access to vast resources manage to successfully avoid at least a few of the lamer attempts to swipe his lunch? A time comes when the victim seems complicit. If everywhere you go smells like dog shit, consider checking your own shoes next. ...The unscrupulous are in business for the sole purpose of accomplishing that, but Decency rarely seems to become a serial victim. Their victimhood seems noteworthy because it’s so damned rare. Besides, he’s apt to keep even those rare occasions to himself, choosing not to become a spectacle. He might quietly cooperate with authorities to chase down an egregious perpetrator, but Decency never becomes a regular proclaimer of having been fooled. Maybe Decency understands that he ultimately stands alone, responsible for whatever outcome might befall him. Nobody’s victim, Decency stands tall even when—especially when—he might choose to quietly take a fall. An old saying suggests that it might be best to simply be lucky. If this rings true, we might wonder what we thought we were doing when we elected an individual with the most impressive history of unfortunate experiences ever recorded. Our incumbent might as well have been born with a lead boot stuck up his butt, as tragic as he’s been. Though he inherited a small fortune, a series of Hoaxes apparently quickly drained that away. To hear him tell the story, it was a good thing he hadn’t inherited more because Hoaxes would have probably stolen that fortune, too. He was as unlucky in love as he was in business, with each relationship heading south and wives turning into Hoaxers. Business associates, too, took serial advantage of his beneficence. He seems to view himself as a modern-day St. ... Few people in the history of the world were more set upon than our incumbent, our Job of an incumbent. No wonder he continuously lashes out at Decency. How did Decency get so lucky? It was probably the result of Hoaxes. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

ImaginaryEnemiesWithin

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-08T06:41:34-07:00

Adriaen Collaert: The Enemy Sowing Tares Among the Wheat, from Landscapes with Old and New Testament and Hunting Scenes (1584) "..they register every sown confusion as a victory." When assaulting Decency, it’s probably best to first employ the time-tested EnemyWithin. This one carries the benefit of indicting the victim for harboring the criminal. It easily spreads the sort of madness not easily shaken, for, properly deployed, it gets Decency questioning, Decency’s Achilles’ Heel. Decent people easily accept suggestions that they might have inadvertently offended somebody, for they rarely suffer under the effects of the sin of self-importance. They consider themselves unremarkable, hardly worth fussing over, and open to persuasion if not the slightest suggestion. If they’ve violated some ordinance or custom, they’ll want to rebalance justice’s scales as quickly as possible. This agreeable countenance can sometimes render Decency into its own worst enemy. But I digress. The EnemyWithin, of course, does not actually exist. This stands as the best of all purposes for employing it. The InvisibleEnemyWithin cannot be confirmed, but neither can it be successfully denied. Shoving any controversy into the imaginary renders it conventionally unresolvable. Since Decency’s enemies cannot possibly discredit Decency for sins of commission, since Decency doesn’t sin on indictable scales, better to employ innuendo and suggestion, the perfect mediums for ImaginaryEnemiesWithin to flourish. Remember our incumbent’s great blunder of proclaiming that millions of slathering, raping, and murdering aliens were living within our borders. These were clearly ImaginaryEnemiesWithin, but they seemed so closely associated with probable actual people that it seemed reasonable for his administrators to set physically unrealistic bounties. Because there were not even a hundred thousand actual such enemies within, the round-ups of presumed aliens appeared thin. Further pressure to fulfill expectations goaded the thugs to start racially profiling and illegally jailing naturalized citizens, even children. Caution should be taken when identifying ImaginaryEnemiesWithin to ensure they remain imaginary. When employing ImaginaryEnemiesWithin, it remains usually best to stick to abstract labels, especially those with emotional associations. Communists serve as a reliable all-weather enemy, especially the card-carrying kind. Socialists will do in a pinch, since nobody West of Europe has a clue what constitutes socialism, though almost everyone carries a seemingly inbred fear and distrust of it, whatever it entails. Specific brands of abstractions work best when sparingly used: Bolsheviks, for instance, since they haven’t actually existed since the nineteen-teens. Racial epithets must be used sparingly lest they offend current and future trading partners. Entirely imaginary abstractions work under almost every condition: Antifa, Scum, Human Garbage. A variety of designations reliably shields the nascent abuser from too much focused scrutiny. Use some slur, then move on to another. This connotes a sense of overwhelm that even Decency finds empathy toward. The gist, the essence of employing ImaginaryEnemiesWithin, lies in the absence of fingerprints available to prove the offending assertion. The Decent can respond with a consistently self-demeaning “Nugh Ungh,” but will prove unable to definitively discount these assertions. Because there can be no credible witness for the defense, such as a representative from Antifa, available to take questions at a press conference, there can be no defense. The accusations were hollow from inception. Denials seem ever more hollow, too. To even acknowledge the assertion ennobles it into an existence wholly unworthy of consideration. InvisibleEnemiesWithin amount to invitations to wrestle with nothingness, something the indecent absolutely revel in purveying. Their purpose was always to distract rather than engage in substantive consideration. Their least intention couldn’t bear the tiniest scrutiny, and they’re more aware than anybody of their indefensible positions. If they can throw chaff into the face of Decent questions and further demean Decency in the process, they register every sown confusion as a victory. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

TheWarOnDecency

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-07T06:04:15-07:00

"Sadly, they largely prove incapable of feeling ashamed." TheWarOnDecency began with a lessening of standards. Entertainment adopted a coarseness, as if its audience had been struck stupid. Plot and story slowly went to Hell in favor of Soap Operas and, ultimately, something labeled “Reality.” This reality, though, was reality’s archenemy, its theatrical opposite. Intended to titillate, it abandoned formal constructs of entertainment. Audience members were invited to engage in what was labeled as guilty pleasures: coarse language without any clear purpose, cruel lifeboat drill exercises, and endless derision. Some Other or another served as the endless butt of meaningless jokes. Some smartass was elevated to the role of hero, though his character and values remained unshakably shady. Awfulness seemed to be the sole purpose, as if its mere presence signified great success. ... Those who regularly watched truly felt as though they were getting away with something and eventually forgot that they were ever supposed to feel guilty about anything. What began as drama proved so popular that it migrated into sports, news, and even cartoons. No corner of the entertainment space remained safe from this influence. Even those genres traditionally grounded in truths took to fudging their facts. Those who retained their ability to discern fact from fiction were not attracted to this new medium. Those who couldn’t discern, quickly became addicted. Those who developed the Jones abandoned everything they’d known to join the ever-burgeoning throng of folks demanding that edge from their entertainment and, eventually, even their social media systems. They became children of the lie so pervasive they never noticed what they’d lost. They proclaimed their newfound freedom without acknowledging the considerable chain they’d voluntarily agreed to padlock around their necks. It was the performative Christians who funded the movement, those who chose to pray in public and hoped to recreate something resembling a Jim Crow state. They were firmly in favor of public executions if only for the spectacle they produced, while simultaneously just as firmly against even the most therapeutic and necessary abortions. They presented themselves as superior moral authorities without providing substantial evidence to support their assertions. They sure seemed certain in this decidedly uncertain world. Those who yearned for the mythical good old days were drawn to these messages, though it seems unlikely that very many had ever actually parsed those memes for consistency or validity. A swathe of the country became utterly dependent upon cleverly spun lies to feel as though they were in control of their lives. Liberty became conflated with a dedicated dependence upon continual reinforcements, often in the entertaining form of conspiracy theories. ...Once focused upon false equivalences, any story seemed to do. Whether or not an assertion was true grew to seem unnecessary. ... TheWarOnDecency was first merely corrosive before it became decidedly self-destructive. It sought to smother its audience before setting about to smother the very foundations of our democracy. ... The very wealthy suddenly seemed confident to inherit the Earth. ... Finally, might just as well damn Decency in the process. That this began with some guilty pleasures shouldn’t surprise anyone, for Decency has always demanded a particular discipline. Sure and inevitable erosion has always depended upon more than the occasional willing suspension of disbelief, but the corrosive influence of endlessly repeated “guiltless” pleasure. An internal moral overseer, careful to monitor outward behavior, might prevent the occasional behavior from becoming the defining sin. Encouraged to abandon limits to acceptable behavior, people seem to become caustically moral. They become self-righteous before focusing on inflicting their own self-righteousness on others. They might sin with sudden abandon, but they counterbalance that behavior by ganging up on others who are guilty only of imaginary shortcomings. The list of potential Others grows ever longer with repeated practice. Any WarOnDecency requires that perverts be in charge, and they must demand an authoritarian hand. Democracy cannot rightfully support such degradation because democracies, like Decency, tend toward averages, and degradation only exists at extremes. Decency, too, seeks agreeable spaces, avoiding the more raw and caustic. ... It can render corruption intolerable, and that, all by itself, proves unacceptable to those who deal in guiltless pleasures. Those conducting a WarOnDecency should rightfully be ashamed of themselves. Sadly, they largely prove incapable of feeling ashamed. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Insider

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-06T05:58:37-07:00

"…probably plead for help from some Insider." I was always clear that I was not an Insider. I can’t claim to have been deliberately excluded from anything, though it sometimes sure seems as if I must have been. ... I don’t seem to understand how things work, how they’re classified, or how to gain access. I tried four times yesterday to crack the great mystery of how to order something on Amazon Prime®, only to be thwarted each time. It seemed as if Amazon had forgotten my Pastword, though it arrogantly insisted that I’d forgotten mine. I fool their security, though, by never remembering mine. I have software that remembers PastWords for me, so I can never forget them. ... You’d think that if they wanted customers, they would design access to allow even us outsiders inside. ...The plastic hinge snapped, so I stopped by the HomeDespot to purchase a replacement. It wasn’t until I returned home that I learned about the existence of an elongated toilet. ... A handy diagram on the back of the seat box I’d purchased demonstrated how to determine which kind I have. My toilet yielded an ambiguous measurement, too short to qualify as elongated, so I drove back to the Despot to replace the one I’d innocently purchased. I was careful that time to select a round replacement seat. Once back home, I confidently opened the second box only to learn that the seat inside was too short to fit the toilet. I guess mine was an elongated model after all. I’ll return this second one and ask for help selecting a replacement for the replacement. Often, I find that even the simpler DIY jobs require obscure Insider knowledge, the kind that’s never mentioned at any point of sale. There must have been three dozen choices of toilet seats, but no clue that they were subtly organized by type, with Elongated and Round options. I assumed I understood the context provided, only to learn later that I’d needed an advanced degree in toilet seat theory to purchase the proper one the first time. The Despot readily accepts returns because they understand their products were designed not to be idiot proof but to prove the purchaser an idiot. ... One limps across every freaking finish line when simple Decency might demand a more inclusive and thoughtful display and selection process. How was it that I’d never suspected toilets came in round and elongated designs until just before I was standing in the Despot’s Return line? My pharmacy has taken to communicating with me via text message. I consequently miss most of their messages, receiving them a few days after they’re sent. I avoid text messaging because the joints in my thumbs were installed backward, producing what’s labeled a Swan Neck Deformity. This means that I can only text using an index finger. It usually takes me five or more attempts to type a coherent response in a text message. I understand that texting was not created for people like me, but we’ve been offered no alternative. I realize that texting might be the easiest alternative for the pharmacy, but what about the customer? ...I know I should have grown accustomed to the routine abuses commercial transactions force upon me, but I haven’t. Avoidance seems by far the best alternative for people like me. Those of us who find this world ambiguous and are therefore unable to correctly categorize products into recognizable forms are best off avoiding opportunities to engage in commercial activities. I often find myself caught in a paradox, unable to find an exit. Just last night, I was trying to listen to the Mariners’ Game. My MLB app insisted on broadcasting two innings behind what the GameDay app was transmitting, and also differed from what Sirius Satellite was streaming. I spend much of the game hopping back and forth between broadcasts trying to find the current score. I suspect that a secret protocol may have been involved. I try not to feel deliberately excluded, though I know I have been. Every few weeks or so, I wake up full of myself and attempt to consummate an Amazon Prime® purchase again, only to find a fresh twist I’m unable to successfully navigate. ... Further, it doesn’t seem to offer a space within which to respond. I fiddle aimlessly for a while before deciding that I didn’t really want whatever I had been considering ordering. My work shirts are in tatters after a summer spent painting, but I continue wearing the shreads since the prospect of ever purchasing replacements seems ever more distant. I am a man who remembers how I used to buy things and cannot seem to adapt to my own future. I’ll make a third attempt to purchase that replacement toilet seat later this morning, but I’ll attempt it without relish and probably plead for help from some Insider. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Particle&Wave

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-05T07:41:58-07:00

Fukushima Ichirō: Wave in Chiba (Shōwa period,1926-1989) "Perhaps our Decency utterly depends upon such useful fictions." Decency, like matter, simultaneously exists in two states: Particle and Wave. As a particle, it appears as recognizable acts, physical incarnations of what might otherwise be nothing more than some psychological state. As a wave, it exists as more of a felt or abstractly felt sense, a ‘vibe’, if you will. Some Decency seems incredibly easy to see, obvious, while other Decency seems utterly invisible, yet still decidedly present. It’s incredibly easy for us humans to get so focused upon one of these two incarnations of Decency that we fail to see or sense the other. This phenomenon might explain the recent reports of Decency seemingly disappearing. If I overlook all but the most obvious and tangible Decency, I should excuse myself for failing to notice all the tacit Decency remaining. Or, perhaps both forms are now threatened. It has been proven possible to extinguish an experience by simply failing to notice it. Expecting green, it appears yellow and thus slips by the watchman unnoticed. Decency, like pretty much everything, can occur in a wide variety of guises, from familiar to strange. Depending on how strictly I adhere to my preconceptions, I might overlook the more exotic forms that manifest. Certainly, when visiting other cultures, I misinterpret many of the behaviors I witness around me, for I lack the understanding to properly interpret what I experience. Some cultures more exuberantly embrace, for instance, in ways that surely seem downright indecent to me. Even closer to home, familiarity can induce situational blindness, where kindness may not even register as present and countable. We might have been lately suffering from a form of Decency blindness. The foreground noise sometimes completely blocks the subtler backdrops. If we are competing for attention, the flashier forms can overwhelm our ability to register the more subtle ones. The unamplified guitar cannot be heard above the headbanger group’s Marshall stack. We’re all sometimes standing back, further from the center of attention on stage, and, like with any blindness, we don’t lose a piece of our visual field to an absence, but experience what seems like a complete and accurate portrait of the space surrounding us. None of us ever experiences the full richness surrounding us due to the various and sundry blindnesses that routinely visit us all. A generous interpretation seems necessary and essential to experience reassurance in times like these. With headlines and chyrons screaming, it’s no wonder that we feel as if we’re engaged in extended screaming matches. We carry our amplifiers in our pockets now and have become accustomed to the volume. Quiet disquiets us. Waves seem ever further away, perhaps non-existent under the present barrage. They seem too subtle ever to draw the requisite attention to go truly viral. Maybe we must actively imagine Decency’s waveform, which might only appear to exist as an as-if. We are inescapably native to particles, and only later, depending on individual training and interest, do we even encounter waves. They seem like an article of faith since none of our five primary senses can reliably perceive their presence. We come to acknowledge their influence without the customary confirming experience. We even imagine that we can become more or less sensitive to their presence, even though we possess no capability to sense them. For better or worse, we live within a dualistic universe. Half seems obvious, while the other remains largely invisible to us. We must adopt some useful fictions if we expect to productively cope with our existence. We must, it seems, believe in some things without insisting upon confirmation of their presence. These must include those self-evident rights otherwise unsupported by physical statute. We believe in these because they cannot be physically observed. We adhere to their principles because we consider them essential, regardless of how invisible they may seem. They sustain us even in their conspicuous absence. Maybe Decency belongs on the shelf next to these, as something we fervently believe in regardless of whether or not our primary experience insists they’re present. Maybe holding such a curious belief determines who’s Decent. Perhaps our Decency utterly depends upon such useful fictions. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Renewal

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-04T06:24:37-07:00

Paris hosted the 1878 Exposition universelle, or world’s fair, to celebrate France’s recovery after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. For the event, Gustave Moreau submitted a cycle of biblically themed paintings to reflect on the nation’s renewal. The series, which included this work as well as Jacob and the Angel (1874–78; also in Harvard’s collection) and David (1878), marked three stages of human life. Here Moreau celebrates the anticipation and promise associated with childhood: Moses, recognized by the rays emanating from his forehead, floats in his basket on the Nile, surrounded by the ruins of ancient Egypt. In a written commentary Moreau suggested the prophet’s enlightenment, noting the contrast between “this people of mummies, sphinxes, and gods with staring eyes and unmoving gaze” and “this fine human fruit full of sap and life.” ..."That's just how Renewal works. ...I think of Renewal as a positive, uplifting experience, forgetting in the moment that considerable destruction often accompanies it. I always find the demolition parts of the operation particularly upsetting because I inevitably overlook the underlying price of the improvement. Our current front porch Renewal began with a series of disappointments, each of which seemed to preface eventual disaster. Our first concrete contractor proved unreliable. He poured a sample sidewalk to demonstrate his abilities, and that sidewalk failed. Furthermore, he disappeared with some of our advance, saying he needed to buy materials. We later learned he’d gotten into drugs and had been cut off by each of his suppliers. He left us with a cracked and crooked sidewalk, squandered funds, and deep disappointment. A year later, we found the courage or foolhardiness to restart our search for a reliable concrete contractor. We found one, but even his considerable enthusiasm could not prevent some setbacks during construction. He proved Decent enough to make good on his shortcomings, and we had a solid foundation as a result. However, I had imagined that we might replace that foundation while leaving the porch deck in place, but this would not be the case. Imagine my shock and surprise when the first stage of preparation for pouring the new porch foundation turned out to be the utter demolition of the deck, which hadn’t really needed replacing. A series of discouraging and disheartening experiences seasoned the following stages. The cost expanded with each fresh discovery. We had to hire an engineering firm to draw up plans for supporting the porch roof to comply with the code. Beams needed to be bought and installed. Each stage took longer than I’d imagined and, of course, cost more. I tried to contribute by painting components, but even that meager contribution saved little beyond some turnaround time. I ultimately needed to hire painting help when I quietly overwhelmed myself. Who knew that I would experience just how young I’m not anymore by Renewing our front porch? Resolution was withheld as each stage opened into another, none of which left very much that looked very finished behind. ...Renewal might be completed by first snow, two years and more than a quarter since we first started the effort. The resulting Renewal will outlive us by a century, maybe more. I will always remain humbled by the unanticipated effort that was involved. Now, as our incumbent runs rampant through what most days seem like a destruction effort, I am freshly reminded how Renewal actually occurs. It’s mostly a mess. I confess that my faith flags on some days, yet I recall how the world tends to work. Indecency usually introduces a fresh appreciation for Decency, but first in its absence. Absence might well make the heart grow fonder, but not even the fondest hearts can immediately clean up any mess, and transitions tend to be incredibly messy. I usually feel moved to confess that every improvement stands as a testament to my lack of faith that it would ever manifest, for I’ve never been able to hold that mustard seed with great conviction. I only see my world crumbling. That porch deck that I never wanted replaced inevitably becomes the first victim. My well-worn-in used-to-be becomes the first victim. Their replacements seem less substantial than daydreams for the longest time. I suspect that we’re presently experiencing something akin to a massive porch remodeling project, one that should result in a more perfect union. I suspect that once the Democrats regain decisive majorities in both houses of Congress and retake the presidency for the following two generations, a golden age greater than any prior one ever imagined will replace the disgrace our incumbent has inflicted upon us. Decency should prevail after a way-too-lengthy period of travail. That’s just how Renewal works. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 10/02/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-02T15:36:16-07:00

This second week into this still-new Decency Series, I sensed myself settling into a fresh context. Few experiences better reward my choice to write than this sensation of settling into another perspective. It might seem as though I'm transcribing here what I already understand, but my persistent readers already understand that I rarely know what I'm going to write before it appears before me. I set an intention, then wait for the universe, The Gods, or chance to show me how they intend to manifest it. ... My movements in this world inevitably tend to become part of my stories, not through clever scheming, but through something infinitely more confounding. I am employed in precisely this way, not by a benevolent employer who pays me cash for my trouble, but by synchronicity, who reliably forgets to pay me with anything other than insights and experience. Curiously, I feel a more dedicated and reliable employee now then I was back when a paycheck reliably appeared at the end of every other work week. I feel infinitely more productive now than I ever did then, though I earn something quite different than taxable income. ...This Decency Story amounts to a soliloquy, a noisy meditation on the subject of Decency deployment. When might it be best to exhibit and when not? ...This Decency Story examines whether decency should be applied only in certain situations or universally, acknowledging the significant ambiguity surrounding its appropriate use. I question whether everyone seems worthy of receiving or capable of delivering decency, and whether extending it to the wrong person could even prove to be harmful. I also struggle with moral guidance, especially in competitive or business contexts where exceptions to decency are often glorified. I reflect on how fear and my desire to remain inoffensive lead to public invisibility, making openly decent behavior seem risky. Observing a cultural shift toward cruelty, I express deep concern that fundamental decency has become increasingly rare, perhaps because people consider it too risky to practice. Ultimately, the piece questions if anyone can communicate unconditional decency and whether withholding it out of fear or self-protection leads to its further disappearance. ...This Decency Story seems to be demanding something of me, something I might not be capable of producing. This might be the chief dilemma facing everyone attempting to live a Decent life. This Decency Story reflects on my constant struggle to understand what decency requires in this time of divisive and dishonest leadership. I acknowledge the provocations and falsehoods that seem designed to elicit indecent responses, and I express frustration with the erosion of shared values and the crushing oppression under current leadership. Drawing on my upbringing, I contrast my values with those of the incumbent leader. I conclude that decency requires each person to continually question their actions and motives, especially when the answers are unclear, because abandoning this questioning can lead to unconscious and potentially compromising behavior. ...This Decency Story finds me visiting Portland, Oregon, while ICE melts down to nothing in the persistent mist. This Decency Story explores the recent protests in Portland, Oregon, emphasizing the contrast between the performative aggression of ICE agents and the calm persistence of protesters. I depict ICE agents as ineffectual, hiding behind masks and acting out fear-driven intimidation that fails to deter or subdue the citizens, who meet violence with non-resistance and a stubbornly reassuring adherence to decency. I argue that harsh tactics only undermine the enforcers, while decency proves inexhaustible and remarkably resistant to corruption. Portland’s misty atmosphere symbolizes the citizens’ steady resilience and unique history, suggesting that persistence and decency prevail over attempts at control or violence. ...This Decency Story explores the struggle between Decency and Deceit, focusing on Decency’s commitment to honesty and integrity, even when Deceit attempts to manipulate and seeks only to undermine Decency’s success. While Deceit might win short-term advantages and take pride in getting away with transgressions, it ultimately accumulates consequences that overwhelm it. Decency, though it may appear to lose repeatedly, plays a longer game—focusing on principles, long-term legacy, and refusing to adopt deceptive tactics. This story highlights the discipline required to remain decent amid the temptation of easy, yet unsustainable, deception. ...This Decency Story finds me uncharacteristically admiring admirals and generals who embody Decency and Discretion as a matter of honor and tradition. This Decency Story highlights the contrast between our society’s focus on provocation and the disciplined restraint our military leaders exhibit. Describing an incident where generals and admirals do not react to political speeches meant to incite, the story illustrates how decency appears measured, unprovoked, and avoids overt displays. These leaders, shaped by tradition and hard-earned caution, embody a professionalism resistant to manipulation, viewing ethics such as war-waryness and peacekeeping as paramount. I present their non-reaction as wisdom in the face of cultural and political inanity, underscoring that authentic authority lies in reflection and self-control. Unknown Artist-East Asia, Japan: Decorative Sculpture in the Form of a Grasshopper or Cricket (Late Edo period, 1615-1868, 19th century) ...“We deserve to live in a land of the Decent and the home of the Thems!” ...Since The War On Decency seems to characterize Democrats as Them-ocrats, I self-identify as a Them and recognize our beleaguered Democracy as, gratefully, a Themocracy. This Decency Story argues that the current political environment misuses the idea of ‘decency’ to divide Americans into exclusive groups of ‘Us’ and ‘Them,’ increasingly portraying Decency itself as something held only by a chosen few, and used to vilify everyone else. I criticize leaders who act by personal whim, warning that this undermines both societal decency and effective governance. I point out that democracy was created to empower those historically excluded from power, not the elites, and that a healthy democracy (‘Themocracy’) emphasizes shared opportunity, inclusion, and care rather than privilege and dominion by a select few. Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita): it can be said of them (1969) —- Inscriptions and Marks: Signed: l.c.: Corita — (not assigned): Printed text reads: it can be said of him, as of few men in like position, that he did not fear the weather and did not trim his sails, but instead, challenged the wind itself to improve its direction and to cause it to blow more softly and more kindly over the world and its people. the New Yorker inscription: l.l., in graphite: 68-69-81 ...I went on to explore this fresh Decency perspective without much more in the way of directive. Decency, held as an intention, might be its own best reinforcement. I considered that Decency might be Situational, but that we might best live as if it were unconditional. I reminded myself that Decency has always been demanding, and that I, or anybody who ignores its imperative, suffer. ... I reported on what happens when Deceit encounters Decency. ... I noted the silence with which our defenders greet a concerted attempt to compromise our values. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Themocracy

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-02T05:20:53-07:00

Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita): it can be said of them (1969) Inscriptions and Marks Signed: l.c.: Corita (not assigned): Printed text reads: it can be said of him, as of few men in like position, that he did not fear the weather and did not trim his sails, but instead, challenged the wind itself to improve its direction and to cause it to blow more softly and more kindly over the world and its people. the New Yorker inscription: l.l., in graphite: 68-69-81 — "We deserve to live in a land of the Decent and the home of the Thems!" One under-appreciated aspect of the current War on Decency involves continually Themming Decency. Our incumbent characterizes Democracy, until very recently seen as a common element governing American life, as Themocracy, something ‘those other deplorable people practice.’ Anything not actively undermining Decency must be characterized as evil, even, especially, Decency itself. The Repuglicans refer to The Democratic Party as Themocrats, and insist that none of ‘us’ should be caught dead collaborating with ‘those people.’ I have even begun self-identifying as a Them, since that label clearly distances me from the apparent source of the problem. If ‘us’ stands for what he espouses, I gladly see myself as a Them. Us, once so inclusive, has become exclusive in a way that some wealthy golf retreats might seek to distance their members from all others. In this way, they’ve already successfully seceded from our union. So much the worse for ‘em, and good riddance! Yet our union remains strong if wrongly characterized by those dedicated to undermining Decency. The very need to accomplish things by extra-legal means demonstrates a certain contempt for Decency and the society that supports it. If a chief executive can manage by whim, the organization can’t help but become hopelessly lost. Those who characterize such cheating as winning have lost the judgment necessary to govern anything, most especially themselves. They conflate winning a round with winning a contest, and gloat on over-leveraged borrowed time. They will find few allies once the Thems become the majority party again, and their tactics seem most effective at transforming formerly all-in us-es into thoroughly disgusted Thems, thus renewing our presently beleaguered Themocracy. Democracy, you see, was initially intended to represent society’s Thems. Monarchies and duchies, and such, served crowned heads well enough, but tended to underrepresent the majority of the people they governed. Given voice, the majority’s inherent diversity became a strength, regardless of the unsupported, firmly held beliefs the elites adopted opposing DEI. They believed in a social evolution that was wholly unobserved in nature but well-represented in the literature. It tried to convince those who’d never held power that they were naturally incapable of managing it, that it required some genetic predisposition. They believed in many fictions that the Thems had always questioned. Until the United States of America came into being, those fictions had been pretty much unquestioned among the so-called ruling classes. When Thems govern, things tend to get messy. Deliberation replaces decisiveness, and care supercedes an inevitable cruelty. If the executive frames every decision in terms of what’s suitable for ‘me,’ he cannot possibly properly represent anybody but himself. He was never supposed to be anything more than the people’s representative, servant and steward rather than an indecent king. Kingliness is naturally anything but regal, for it must ultimately rule by cruelty, defining policy and forcefully enforcing it. Otherwise, s/he might be perceived as something other than wise. Wisdom seems overrated. Thems prefer a mix of Decency and naiveté such that we more appropriately represent the aspirations of the masses. A properly run Themocracy eschews privilege other than that enjoyed equally by everyone, as opportunity rather than inheritance, as birthright instead of dominion. Democracy, Themocracy, attempts to make good the notion that the meek might inherit this earth, that those invested in taking mean advantage should not succeed. It might be easier to accumulate wealth without any rules for comportment, but every man cannot abide by such lawlessness, for we require a more level playing field. We need to subsidize each other to prosper. Nothing works otherwise. Those who wish for domination were never native to this nation and qualify as immoral aliens, suitable for immediate deportation. Let them flee to Ariby or someplace more friendly to shieks. We deserve to live in a land of the Decent and the home of the Thems! ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Crickets

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-10-01T05:51:38-07:00

Decorative Sculpture in the Form of a Grasshopper or Cricket (Late Edo period, 1615-1868, 19th century) "The crickets said more than words in response." Decency makes no discernible sound. ... It will not easily rise to provocation. It holds its cards closest to its vest. If you want to know what Decency thinks, ask, then wait for an interminable-seeming time, for Decency will never be in the business of disclosure, and it demands deliberation time. It will not move with the wind and does not require much ego gratification. It understands that very little is ever about it and takes very little terribly personally. It already has plenty and does not desire to accumulate much more. It avoids appearing unseemly at pretty much any cost. It does not do surly. A large room filled with generals and admirals, brought together to rile them up, remains silent through speeches that were intended to burn barns. You could have heard Crickets. ... Every attempt to ignite passions cooled their heels in a placid pool. Generals and Admirals are diplomats first. They are well-used to being sphinxes. They never forget their underlying strategic intentions. They do not produce or otherwise engage in pep rallies. They understand the difference between bullshit and the bully pulpit. They could not be incited. What did they really think? Read the Oracle of Delphi if you dare. Nobody who was there could dare decide what those leaders heard. They were witness to the performance, not critics. They were called there to fill seats, and they by God filled some fuckin’ seats. If there will be heat to be taken for their less-than-enthusiastic reception, they will remain inscrutable. If some are called to secretly disclose what all those generals and admirals were really thinking, they will quite honestly report that they have no idea what their fellows were thinking. If asked what they personally thought, to a person, I suspect they’ll report that they found the gathering “interesting,” or some equally opaque response. If threatened, they’ll remain nonplussed. They understand that we need them a whole lot more than they will ever need us. We find ourselves inhabiting an inciting culture, one where it sometimes seems as if everyone’s employed to either try to elicit a rise out of others or to provide a rise to some enticer. We are implored to abandon our discretion and sin as an expression of our God-given freedoms. We are continually reassured that we can do no wrong because we are the chosen people. We receive invitations to engage in what was traditionally unspeakable, let alone undoable. Each of these accepted invitations further degrades ourselves and our culture. We engage in endless races to the bottom without once wondering what might happen to anyone who wins. Our generals and admirals remain professionals. They inhabit, by training and long tradition, the highest ground, higher even than that maintained by any elected politician. These are the best of what we aspire for ourselves, selfless and steady. They might be ready for war, but their primary role has always been to preserve the peace, if at all possible. The times when we’ve strayed from that ideal have become real learning lessons, and they have not forgotten the price of their own belligerence. Vietnam and the War on Terror are not fondly remembered in the ranks, and they serve as cautionary tales for everyone holding flag responsibilities. That our incumbent and his odd secretary believed they might recruit the admirals and generals into insurrection against themselves counts as naiveté in extremis. The crickets said more than words in response. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Deceit

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-30T06:01:57-07:00

Trompe l'Oeil with Prints and a Butterfly (1766) "Not even that frenzied moment will last forever." Perhaps the truest test Decency ever encounters occurs whenever it tangles with Deceit. ... If Decency strives to be on the up and up, Deceit insists upon the down and down. Deceit distorts its position, which effectively negates the possibility of successful negotiation. Deceit doesn’t care so much about winning any particular engagement as long as its opponent loses. ... It shamelessly defames, deliberately leaving Decency in a lurch. Each violation serves as another invitation for Decency to let down its defenses and compromise itself. Deceit wins when it successfully recruits Decency into its ranks. Each invitation might serve as a successful seduction if Decency were in any way similar to Deceit. ...Still, it’s difficult for even the most disciplined Decency to quietly sit by while Deceit sways public opinion again. Deceit doesn’t mind lying; in fact, it takes considerable personal pride in whatever it can successfully get away with. Its ends always more than justify its means. The sins or crimes it commits to dominate a situation seem to provide it with great satisfaction. It seems genuinely proud of itself when it cows another Decent opponent. It forgets or never knew any notion of Karmic retribution and firmly believes that it actually gets away with stuff it doesn’t. ... Down never actually ever becomes up, and misbegotten fortunes eventually tend to erase themselves. Decency steers a steady if temporarily disappointing course. He’d prefer to appear to reliably score winning points instead of so often limping away from another disappointing encounter. He counters with seemingly even more of the same old same old. Even dedicated supporters often wonder when Decency might appear competitive again, but he’s playing a longer game. He doesn’t engage in finite play where simple wins and losses determine success, but in more infinite games, where success most often comes from transcending the usual rules of play. In an infinite game, a player can conveniently encourage an opponent to misrepresent, understanding that the resulting free lunches will ultimately exact a price. This works in the same way that a retailer might make a profit by losing a little on each transaction but recouping those losses with volume. Of course, this doesn’t make sense. ...Decency plays its own game, whatever game an opponent might say they’re playing. Accumulating points seems pointless when viewed from an alternate perspective. What if the true purpose of playing was never winning? What if losing mattered less than how one plays the game? In the long run, we might ultimately be dead, but in the meantime, we forge our heritage. Were we at least Decent, or did we descend into Deceit to appear successful? Appearances seem much shallower than skin deep, and Deceit produces superficial successes that tend to quickly crumble. ... Decency might be the most potent material imaginable, though Deceit won’t ever disclose that they also know this poorly guarded secret. Mark Twain suggested that the jackass is superior to humans because there are some things a jackass won’t do. Yet some people manage to maintain a more disciplined existence than do the run-of-the-mill deceivers. Honesty has probably always been the best policy, though it will almost always initially appear to disadvantage. I cannot overstate the discipline demanded to remain Decent when surrounded by Deceit. The promise of some satisfying short-term successes makes nicotine addiction seem manageable in comparison. It might be that Deceit was always an addiction, a shortcut route to some unsustainable satisfaction. I might longingly gaze at a cigar smoker’s evident self-satisfaction without remembering the months of torturous withdrawal I suffered after I decided to quit deceiving myself. Decency seemed impossible until I finally outgrew my juvenile urge to immediate physical satisfaction. Deceit promises quick rewards, but Decency sustains its promise. When in the middle of some disagreement, the seduction to Deceive seems most prominent. The reward Decency offers in that moment should always seem lame in comparison. Not even that frenzied moment will last forever. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Persistence

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-29T06:29:02-07:00

"Will we persist with our damning decency even then?" From A Threatened Portland, Oregon, On The Morning It Appeared Our Incumbent Relented Before His Assault Could Begin, Realizing He Couldn’t Possibly Win. The ICE agents look like children engaged in pretend war games. Armed with ridiculous-looking paintball weapons loaded with pepperball ammo and wearing silly face coverings, they appear anything but threatening. They scream without provocation, thereby disclosing just how terrified they must feel inside. Their opponents bring Persistence to the game rather than pretend weapons. They take their licks as administered by the undisciplined troops. ... They go flaccid when assaulted, rendering their attacker powerless to influence. ... It slowly becomes evident that the scare tactics aren’t working; the protesters seem unaffected by the vague threats and meaningless curses, which fail to carry much evidence of underlying malice. ... Nobody is willing to suspend their disbelief, not a freshly installed officer or a vastly more experienced protester. Everyone knows who wins these kinds of confrontations. The ICE agents might just as well be punching pillows for all the difference they’re making on the peaceful and royally pissed-off citizens. ... It cannot be successfully intimidated. It might be jailed, but it will wound the jailer much more than the prisoner. The poor devils who have to travel home incognito lest their neighbors discover the role they’re playing seem less free than the least of their incarcerated counterparts. What’s with the masks? Even lies go bald-faced, but not these officers of lawlessness. They must mask, I suspect, to preserve their delicate self-esteem. They know what they’re doing is wrong, and not just misdemeanor-quality error. They intend to inflict terror, but can’t quite manage to succeed when their sworn enemy turns out to be Decency. ...They cruise around looking for situations in which they might take mean advantage. ... They wreak havoc while the meek quietly inherit the world they’re far too distracted to defend. They undermine their own position to punish the innocent. ... It cannot ultimately be resisted. ... It accepts the punishments unjustly inflicted, yet still remains Decent. ... Futility becomes the purpose of inflicting punishment. The fact that it doesn’t work only deepens each officer’s despair. There never was going to be any there anywhere in there, anyway. The enemy is always an unwitting ally. ... Their mistake might be your blessing. Their apparent successes sow seeds of imminent losses. The conflict never ends until it does. ... It often arises from apparent defeat, when conventional measures fail to reveal underlying significance. The present insults could kill us, but when they don’t, they ultimately render us ever less vulnerable. Our Persistence in the face of even the most obvious losses might ultimately prove to have been critically significant. Our shameful opponents will one day require more mercy than they ever imagined they’d need. It will only be Decent to offer them whatever they require in homage to the times when we were hungry and they denied us sustenance, and we were cold and they turned up the air conditioning, and when we were exhausted and they gave us no rest. Will we persist with our damning decency even then? ...It seems relentless, heartless, and desperately Decent. ... It begs for a decent cup of coffee and a cozy chair. ... It was always different here, which’s what makes it the same, despite continual changes. ... The Gods shed more than our fair share of grace on us. We never expected you to understand or even appreciate us. We cannot be successfully second-guessed. Our Persistence was always our Decency in deepest disguise. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

DecencyDemanding

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-28T04:28:10-07:00

"…those of us daily struggling to live decent lives in these extraordinary times." What does Decency demand of me now? This seems to be the question reverberating in my head most mornings. ... If I were a martyr, I might more easily find such a response, for I would know without a doubt that Decency desperately desired me to become a victim to whatever provocation I might encounter. But Decency does not seem to want me to be placating situations. It wants me to be true to myself, too, to stand up for something. It sometimes seems that my Decency and I are witnessing especially horrible provocations, ones specifically engineered to elicit something approaching my very worst responses. ... They do not appear above outright lying just to bring out my worst responses, and, believe me, I have been frantically sorting through alternatives. The Decency question resonates even more strongly the longer I consider my options. The eight-year-old in office has mastered nothing more interesting than fabricating. He seems to live in a fantasy world of his own making, one within which untruth and injustice exemplify The American Way. Our allies a little too readily agree that they’ve always seen these tendencies in their relations with us. We’ve apparently always seemed a little too self-centered, a little too convinced of our own righteousness, of which, they agree, we have not always been wrong. We did not always take our victory laps humbly, and sometimes attempted to impose our perspectives on other countries that could never have experienced what helped us shape ours. In this way, we could sometimes seem gaseous and self-righteous. We were not always what they considered to be perfect allies, and yet, allies we were in most circumstances. They would manage to bite their tongues and hold their breaths, hoping for the best, which sometimes even came after a sometimes lengthy period of discomfiting duress. Now, we have foisted that presence upon ourselves. We have an incumbent that seems to embody the very worst that liberty and freedom have always had to offer. Both liberty and freedom demanded considerable forbearance from our incumbents, discipline to prevent outright despotism, for despotism also appears on the same spectrum as all the other freedoms, and so it demands certain discernments to avoid a leader’s freedoms from oppressing those who should enjoy coequal ones. Now we experience unreasonable oppression, the side effects of continual regressions, ever further away from our accustomed means. Between outright lies and shady assertions, we feel the oppression growing. We rightfully wonder when that terrible attention might point in our direction and prove uninterested in truth or justice for us, but apparently seeking nothing more inspiring than spitefulness. We have a poorly tempered eight-year-old in charge. And so I catch myself asking myself, dozens of times each day, What does Decency demand of me now? That Decency seems to demand anything of me identifies me as someone who, to my mind, might have been raised right. I was not raised by bullies or ego maniacs, but by more or less humble people who wished pretty much everyone well, even those who had more than once trespassed against them. They held no grudges and were uninterested in even thinking about getting even. They’d both inherited a deep sense of their place in the world. They believed that if they worked hard and maintained a reasonable moral code, they’d receive an adequate reward. ... I was not raised to become a cut-throat competitor. Now I witness an incumbent who seems to crave conflict, one who appears incapable of operating within anyone’s law, even his own. Injustice seems to be his primary motive, and he seems indifferent to whatever collateral damage he inflicts with his ineptness. While I agree with our allies that these behaviors seem disquietingly familiar, I still can’t seem to hold myself back from continually asking, What does Decency demand of me now? ... It administers exams that seem, on their faces, impossible to pass. Further, it often appears that no satisfactory answer could ever exist for many of her disquieting questions. Decency demands something of me. I believe it surely must demand similar things from everybody, even our continually erring incumbent. However, I suspect that he’s lost track of his still, small voice capable of asking him this most crucial question. Decency demands that we each ask ourselves this question, that we not forget our sacred responsibility to keep asking, even when—ESPECIALLY WHEN—we only seem capable of mustering pathetic responses. The Decent might not answer this question any differently than anyone else might. Their difference lies in the fact that they remember to ask this often unanswerable question before they go off half-cocked and spill something important down their shirtfront. It might be that asking this troubling question makes no physical difference in the average person’s response. People will still fly off the handle sometimes, but they will not have gone completely unconscious. For the true danger we face from these ideologues comes when we stop asking ourselves unanswerable questions and begin believing that we’ve found the definitive answer to this and all our other fundamentally unanswerable questions. Their relative unanswerability says nothing about their underlying power and importance to those of us daily struggling to live decent lives in these extraordinary times. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

...

Situationalism

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-27T05:57:55-07:00

Patricq Kroon: Musch and Bouwmeester (1900 - 1924) The actors Jan Musch and (Louis?) ... Design for a cartoon in the newspaper. "Perhaps I should be indicting myself." Maybe Decency should only be exercised situationally. Perhaps it’s a Sunday sort of behavior. ... One might not want to waste any on enemies, for instance. Perhaps only certain people are qualified to receive it, and maybe not everybody’s fully certified to properly dispense it. Maybe it requires some skill to properly deploy. Should rank amateurs even be allowed to engage in it? What if they were to accidentally extend some Decency to someone unqualified to receive it, someone, for instance, who couldn’t properly appreciate it? Couldn’t the resulting misunderstanding leave the world worse off for the experience? Might indiscriminate Decency cause real and lasting damage, not only to the practitioner but also to the unwitting receiver? What if we inadvertently spoil some hapless receiver into expecting to always receive Decency in a naturally hard and increasingly indifferent world? ...What if Decency couldn’t possibly be situational? What if it could never be out of context? What if it served as the baseline unconditional extension, one offered regardless of extenuating circumstances? You say that might damage some competitive advantage? Must every encounter be reduced to competition? ...I might believe that all people are created equal, that we exist together on a vast level playing field, but then begin making exceptions, but only for the very best reasons. I might gleefully engage in so-called “cut-throat competition,” and firmly believe that it’s my moral obligation because competition serves as the first principle underpinning free market capitalism. I might usually be decent except when engaging in serious business. I say, “It’s only business,” as if that explanation provided an adequate exception. What other exceptions do I routinely apply? I try to pass as if I might be in danger should a stranger or even a friend discover what I believe in. I try to remain neutral in public, avoiding eye contact as if invisible. I tell myself that I’m only being agreeable, striving to stay inoffensive, but perhaps I’m pensive to a fault. It’s tough to stand up for anything when I’m invisible, and even more so when I’m safeguarding a secret self whenever I venture out in public. What might scream my downright Decency? What might clearly communicate an intention to be unconditionally Decent to everybody regardless of position or prejudice? I don’t know how to answer to this question. I suspect that many have been grieving the apparent disappearance of Decency. I suspect that it’s just gone to ground in the belief that it’s too risky to spread too much of it around. I cannot be found guiltless simply because I didn’t vehemently weigh in on the side of Decency. A particular passion might be necessary for Decency to seem as if it’s not disappearing. What outward sign of my inward Decency might more clearly demonstrate my fealty to it in ways more explicit than my public invisibility? If I don’t expose myself with potentially risky behavior where will my Decency lie? I can’t insist that Decency must be unconditional. It might well be situational, though I’m failing to understand the damage profligately extending Decency might inflict on me or on anybody else. Decency might even serve as its own defense, better able to deflect than any alternative form of engagement. I do know that it’s suddenly become stylish to be routinely cruel, to jeer, and so-called make fun of others, especially toward those who seem to so deeply deserve our animosity. Maybe I could stand opposed without withdrawing some level of Decency, for who might I become should I lose the ability to extend Decency for mere lack of practice? It might be that we believe Decency has been depleted because we don’t readily recognize it in practice, perhaps because we’re rather out of practice, ourselves. Can I disagree agreeably, or must I at least attempt to savage every apparent opponent? ... Perhaps I should be indicting myself. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 09/25/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-25T18:26:20-07:00

They can only ever be conquered by other means, often through cognitive means. This means that those most likely to conjure up Imaginary Enemies usually prove to be the ones least able to vanquish them. They escalate defensive measures far beyond reasonable levels instead, often inflicting greater damage upon themselves than any enemy, imaginary or actual, could ever manage. Failure to deflect the imaginary only rarely uncovers the illusion, for only clear victory could convince the thoroughly deluded, and Imaginary Enemies wickedly withhold such clarity. ... The afflicted slowly suffocate in their own ambiguity, chasing shadows of their own activity, unable to distinguish between actual and imagined. A grave injustice might prove to be the only means by which Imaginary Enemies are ever vanquished. ... Nobody will convince the imaginer that they committed the infraction, that they were just as guilty as charged, if not even more so. ...Our incumbent, proclaiming himself the most popular in history, curiously also appears to suffer from the largest number of Imaginary Enemies. ...This FollowingChapters Story acts as a comprehensive series summary by gathering the introductory sections from each weekly writing update and providing direct links to every story in the ninety-some-part series. I employed this summary to reflect on my writing routine and question its purpose and outcomes, acknowledging that these questions did not yield clear answers. I began the FollowingChapters series as a continuation of work that previously explored future predictions and hope during our political transition. ... While I remain skeptical about our leadership’s stability, I hold a cautiously optimistic belief that society’s inherent, if aspirational, decency and justice might ultimately prevail. 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) ...This FollowingChapters Story, the final one in this series, attempts to identify “the best” story in this series, and even finds a nominee without definitively deciding which story was really “the best.” I question whether I can meaningfully name any one FollowingChapters story as “the best,” noting that writing and revisiting my work often proves noisy. ... I usually resist ranking my pieces, preferring, instead, to write as a way to reflect on life. ... One story, “Unamerican,” though, stands out for disclosing an overlooked aspect of American identity, suggesting that true threats to American ideals come from those who undermine inclusivity while striving for mediocrity. Ultimately, I see my work as ongoing, driven more by a search for authenticity than for accolades or scores. ...This Decency Story marks the beginning of a new series, which I’m calling Decency. ...In this first installment, I critique how public officials’ claims of decency sometimes clash with their actions, such as deporting people without due process. I argue that genuine decency might be rarely found in grand gestures or public spectacles but most often exists in unseen private interactions between individuals. While the current climate seems dominated by cruelty, I insist that decency persists on small scales and remains essential. I commit to further exploration of the topic of Decency, emphasizing the enduring necessity of it regardless of presently prevailing public behaviors. ...“Curious how there’s so much more effort expended trying not to do something than there ever is to simply repeating it.” In this Decency Story, I propose replacing my Doom Scrolling with something less focused upon catastrophe, D-Scrolling. ...I describe doom scrolling as a compulsive online habit of consuming overwhelmingly negative news, which proves addictive due to the way our brains respond to catastrophic content. While social media algorithms tend to feed more dramatic stories, uplifting content seems rarer and less satisfying. I compare this addiction to my experiences quitting caffeine and nicotine, highlighting the effort required to abstain but also the benefits, such as greater self-esteem. I conclude the story with the idea of seeking more positive online experiences, while acknowledging the difficulty in breaking the doom-scrolling cycle. ...This Decency Story describes how I suspect that the indecencies around me have rewired me. I re-dedicate myself to more explicitly representing my previously underlying Decency to everyone around me. I discuss how pervasive ideological influence—whether through direct exposure or conscious avoidance—seem to have affected my thinking and behavior, leading to an involuntary shift in perspective, or “ReWiring.” ... Ultimately, I urge openly standing for Decency and warns that correcting societal norms may require disruptive action, referencing a personal alignment with Antifa as a symbol of anti-fascism and principled resistance. Lee Russel: Trailer of itinerant electrician near Pharr, Texas (1939) Farm Security Administration Photographs — The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. ...This Decency Story finds me searching for Decency and experiencing great difficulty finding it in the news. ...I searched for examples of Decency but mostly found commentary on its decline, especially in online and political contexts. Despite news coverage focusing on the erosion of Decency, few sources define or showcase Decency itself. Attempts to highlight positive actions, like the Good News Network, exist but attract relatively little attention or seriousness. I compare decency to healthy eating—people endorse it in theory but often abandon it in practice, especially in restaurants.. Ultimately, decency seems too-often overlooked, hard to define, and seemingly practiced, lost amid a cultural focus on negativity and conflict. ...I completed my FollowingChapters series and initiated a new series focused on Decency. It seemed to me that Decency had become scarcer and that focusing my attention in that direction might help me see what had recently appeared to become less present. I might be encouraging nothing more than my imagination, but I sense that this exercise might well constitute a significant improvement in the quality of my experience. On my way away from FollowingChapters, I slowed long enough to nominate one of those stories for special attention. ... Decency will be my 34th series in this series of series. ... I considered trading in my Doom Scrolling in favor of DecencyScrolling in D-Scrolling. I next suggested that I might have been ReWired by the explosion of indecencies I have been trying to avoid. Avoidance might not serve as an inoculation from their effects, but instead induce some of the disease. I ended this re-initiating writing week searching for Decency only to find reports of its absence dominating the news. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

SearchingForDecency

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-25T06:01:38-07:00

Antonio Tempesta: Canens Searching for Picus (1606) "It seems likely to be taken down by defensive friendly fire." Hoping to gain a better understanding of Decency, I initiated a Google search for “Decency In The News.” I received in return references and explanations that didn’t even attempt to define Decency, or even to provide current examples of it in action. I found instead lengthy descriptions of what Decency isn’t, how it so often seems missing from online conversations, and how Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has done little to encourage Decency in online forums, though it has successfully shielded platform owners from lawsuits for such offenses as third-party slander and copyright infringement. “Reports about ‘decency’ in the news consistently focus on its erosion in politics and society, though the Communications Decency Act also remains a topic. Current conversations often frame a decline in decency as a symptom of deeper societal issues like incivility and political polarization.” One deeper societal issue, aside from the obvious incivility and political polarization, might be the apparent unspeakability of Decency. I’d expected a raft of fuzzy bunny pictures and so-called human interest stories gleaned from recent publications, but I received none of that from my query. Even when I invoked the much-touted AI enhancement to Google’s more traditional search, I received nothing anyone might recognize as Decency, just reports of its absence. This outcome seemed roughly equivalent to not thinking of a rhinoceros, that old parlor trick that reliably disabled one’s ability to not think of a rhinoceros. We seem, as a society, to be so busy mourning Decency that we have no time left to practice it. I wonder if we’d even recognize it if it snuck up and bit us on the butt, after all the time we’ve spent grieving over its demise. Years ago, I attended a conference where I met the founder of The Good News Network. His idea was simple: counteract the decidedly troubling news content with nothing but good news. I hadn’t even thought of him since shortly after we met because, while I thought his idea was uplifting, I didn’t think it had much chance of actually gaining much traction. Good News, as a genre, gains few headlines. Bad news seems so much more serious and vital. Decency seems optional, deferrable, not critical. I was delighted, though, to discover that The Good News Network still exists and contains a nearly infinite supply of Decency, indexed for handy access. It even provides daily notices to remind one that all is not dark and stormy. Still, the site hardly seems serious. I’ve bookmarked it for future access, but I doubt I’ll resort to accessing it much. This admission borders on tragic. Given the choice between something healthy and something not, diners choose what they apparently really want. A friend opened a “healthy breakfast restaurant” in Bend, Oregon, as the city was rapidly gentrifying with Californian refugees. He figured he could please that crowd by offering what no typical small-town Oregon café could offer then. Rather than featuring hash browns with sausage gravy and eggs Benedict breakfasts, he’d feature smoothies and gluten-free choices. He very nearly went out of business before deciding to shift his business model back to the more traditional one. He concluded that people talk a healthy game more than they actually engage in it, and while they might stick to their diets at home, restaurants seem to provide a context within which diets get abandoned. Decency might be of a similar nature. Maybe everyone would easily vote in favor of it theoretically, but it’s considerably more challenging to abide by its premises in practice. I think the world of everyone except that SOB who just cut me off in traffic. Perhaps we’re oversupplied with genuine SOBs these days. Decency seems stealthy. Not even a concerted search might discover its hiding places. It demands an onerous amount of belief and counterbalancing disbelief in the necessary dominion of its opposites. Perhaps it simply has so many more opposites that it tends to get lost too easily in practice. We might not readily recognize it when it gifts us with its presence. We seem wary and ready for almost every intrusion except a sudden and unwanted appearance of Decency into our space. It seems likely to be taken down by defensive friendly fire. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

ReWired

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-24T04:47:57-07:00

Lee Russel: Trailer of itinerant electrician near Pharr, Texas (1939) ...The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. "Trailer of itinerant electrician near Pharr, Texas" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed September 24, 2025. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/8e15f900-c4fb-0136-ce6e-438981b45b1b "…it might take such work to set the circuits straight again." I realize that I have been ReWired. Whether I believe the bullshit or not, and perhaps especially because I don’t believe it, either conclusion could serve as evidence that a successful rewiring has occurred. I wish, and even pray, in my curiously agnostic way, that this situation were otherwise, that my defenses had not been compromised, but I have lately realized that there was no avoiding this experience. Yes, I refused to watch Fox from its inception, except for a few otherwise inaccessible baseball games they alone televised, because I firmly believed that exposure to that poisonous content might rewire my judgment. I had not suspected that just deciding to tiptoe around it was also evidence of its backhanded success. Its premise might have scared me off, but it also motivated me to build a fence around my property to maintain an isolated Dignity, when Dignity rightfully knows no such boundaries. The insidious nature of shriveling morals affects even the morally steadfast. Suddenly surrounded by curious noises, even those who refuse to listen become accustomed to a certain background hum. The quality of experience degrades for everyone. Those who buy into the degradation might experience an uplifting exhilaration inaccessible to those more capable of maintaining their moral standards, but defending sanity and righteousness tends to become an unrewarding occupation. ... It’s a burden, an additional overhead cost extracted without permission. It inflates the cost of even minding my own damned business. I must maintain a certain vigilance, for the indecent always seem to be working to entrap me somehow. They attempt to insinuate their way into my everyday existence. ...It always involves someone presuming they know better than another before attempting to impose their perspective as an imperative. ... It targets customers it characterizes as wrong before attempting to convince them they’ve been wrong, with the expressed purpose of saving them. ... Who elected them another’s personal savior? ... I can see their curiously inflated self-esteem, but I fail for the life of me to see what comparative advantage that confers upon the true believer. It seems a form of self-degradation where one becomes a predator to redeem their victims. These people become experts at ego disqualification and bullying because people despise being told what to believe. Only the severely depleted ever agree to join so they can learn how to disqualify others more successfully. I admit that I have become wary of my fellows. I have not felt free to explicitly express my beliefs for fear that some thin-skinned opponent might decide that I needed a pot shot taken at me for my heretical beliefs. And Decency first demands of everybody a certain level of trust. Those who fear their neighbor too easily justify indecencies. If I honestly believe rapists and murderers are overrunning our borders, I easily justify officials violating due process. Though these are “just” beliefs unsupported by facts, they achieve some of their indecent purpose by disabling my ability to engage with unabashed Decency. If I hide my light under their bushel basket for fear they’ll find me out, I’ve been successfully ReWired. Once I acknowledge this backhanded success, I must accept an unsettling challenge. If I intend to rededicate myself to Decency, I will need to shed some of my dread. I will need to remember how to stand tall on my own two hind legs without assuming a defensive stance. This was never intended to be a competition between good and evil, but rather a place that welcomed differing perspectives. If I can’t or won’t display my deep down differences, how will I ever manage to manifest the Decency I insist I intend? For instance, I am Antifa because it represents Decency. I understand that Antifa isn’t anything like an organization with formal memberships, that it’s a political philosophy. Our incumbent studiously ignores this fact and has declared war on this philosophy that everyone in my parents’ generation followed without question. They knew their fascists in those days, better, it seems, than we know our fascists today. Something inside me aches to be taken away to be jailed for committing some Decency in public. It would take an absolute obscenity to pull this off. I agree that this would be a high price to pay to more clearly distinguish what Decency looks like today, but we’ve been successfully ReWired, and it might take such work to set the circuits straight again. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

D-Scrolling

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-23T06:17:39-07:00

"Curious how there's so much more effort expended trying not to do something than there ever is to simply repeating it." We refer to this activity as Doom Scrolling, the practice of aimlessly perusing online media. The scrolling part of the term seems more self-explanatory than the doom portion. The doom comes from the general content found on social media. It tends to be overwhelmingly focused on the catastrophic. On slow news days, plenty of past catastrophes appear to hold the space. Scientists—real scientists, not the phony ones currently enjoying a resurgence on social media—suggest that each exposure to a report of some catastrophe incites something in our brain to dispense an addictive substance that encourages us to continue engaging in the hope of stumbling upon another similar report. Doom apparently better excites the amygdala suspected of dispensing this addictive substance than do more uplifting kinds of content. Fuzzy kitten and fluffy baby duckie pics work to some extent, but apparently not nearly as well as catastrophe. ...We do not become media vampires because we lust after the taste of blood. No, it's the association biting someone's neck elicits and in no way related to any animosity anybody might feel toward anybody else. We commit these little guiltless crimes against ourselves a hundred and twenty times an hour. Never satisfied with the rushes we've already received, we seek ever more, ad infinitum. There is no apparent saturation or satisfaction point, the perfect drug. It provides a pleasing sensation without ever approaching complete satisfaction. The result seems quite the opposite of satisfying anything or anyone. No, the purpose appears to maintain a relatively steady level of dissatisfaction that nothing can quench. No satiation or tipping point can ever be achieved by continuing to scroll. ...But what if someone were to attempt to scroll for something other than doom? Could Decency stand in as a reasonable replacement? Could the human relationship equivalent of fuzzy kittens and fluffy duckies stand in as a satisfying replacement for catastrophe? I'm unsure how to achieve this end because scrolling doesn't work that way. An algorithm determines what's presented to each user for their review. Well, that and some sense of preference determined by "follows." A scroller creates a follow by clicking a button adjacent to the creator's name associated with a social media item, such as a commentator, lesson, or music video. Not all creators post catastrophic content. ... These can prove satisfying to watch, but they seem to be in a distinct minority. Mostly, social media postings tend toward the more satisfyingly catastrophic. It sometimes seems as though if I were not there to diligently witness every bit of sideways shit, the world might go to Hell in one of those proverbial handbaskets. In fact, my merely witnessing anything couldn't possibly influence any outcome. It doesn't matter who I'm rooting for. The war doesn't care who's watching. ...I chose to go that direction because I held a high-pressure position at the time, and I'd begun to notice how I expended more energy jittering than actually tending to my business. I'd long suspected that I was unusually sensitive to caffeine. ... I'd get headachy when I couldn't get my fix. ... Unlike cigarettes, which I quit around the same time frame, coffee came in decaffeinated form, so I could continue with the rituals I was just as addicted to. Over the following eight or nine months, I experienced my first migraine headaches, Incredible Hulk experiences I couldn't touch with any medication. I was not always uncomfortable during the transition, but I'd never know when I'd be freshly overwhelmed with some extreme discomfort. I made it to the other side, with both the caffeine and the nicotine, and entered into a period when I wasn't addicted to anything. ... I might have gotten a little too big for my britches, but I learned to thrive without those dependencies. I've been considering a similar cessation of my doom-scrolling addiction by replacing the fully-leaded catastrophic content with something more uplifting and reassuring, D-Scrolling. The world and social media might never notice, but I suspect I might. The challenge lies in finding that kind of content. ... I learned that when I quit caffeine, all I had to do was stop, then stick to it. Curious how there's so much more effort expended trying not to do something than there ever is to simply repeating it. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Decency

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-21T21:56:02-07:00

"I will be investigating this notion between now and just before Christmas." We insist that we are decent people, charitable to a fault. We rail against indecency as if it were the obscenity it always was. ... We're currently, under the direction of our administration, which, thankfully, cannot administer anything, deporting people without due process. They're initiating, in our good name, a raft of initiatives Decency prohibits. Yet they're still proclaiming from every pulpit just how deep down Decent they are, and we remain. Maybe Decency is something other than what we've always assumed it was. Perhaps it has nothing to do with high-minded intentions or results. Maybe it can be whatever anybody insists it is, deportations included. No, most of us know better than that. We might not know with much precision, taken to a dozen significant digits, but we understand deep in our guts. We recognize it when we see it and usually even acknowledge when we notice the opposite. Decency doesn't rely upon scale to prove its importance. It might be best exercised at the smaller end of any measurement. Most of the Decency in this universe occurs at such a small scale that most people can't notice it, but then Decency was never intended to be a spectator sport. The most decent seems to occur at only the tiniest possible scales. Person to person, with no story to tell beyond, other than a silent nod of acknowledgement. ... Those attempting to perform Decency at scale usually fail. They produce some spectacle instead, within which genuine acts perhaps prevail, but none of these seem to satisfy the hurdle demanded by those attempting to perform at scale. The quiet little decent movie might not even draw enough box office to repay the cost of producing it, but it changed most of the individuals who saw it, and the universe was a better place as a result. The obscenity presently in office deals almost exclusively in massive productions, large but vacuous. ... Their content, intended as spectacle, proves less than memorable. Shocking revelations hold the shelf life of an electrical shock, less than a second. They alarm and alert the senses without producing anything beyond alarm. ... They produce nothing very lasting, which explains why they'll feel compelled to stage another one tomorrow. Audiences accustomed to sugar plums may feel hungry as they exit the theater and might need to return for more pseudo nourishment tomorrow. Those whom Decency inspires seem capable of making their own way in this world. They do not require continuous direction or reinforcement like evil does. They find opportunities to be the blessing they desire without aspiring to be in any way acknowledged or publicly recognized for it. A healthy economy is not comprised of libertarians, but egalitarians, ones seeking fair trades rather than personal dominion. ... It can encourage criticism and dissent without fear of undermining anybody’s overly delicate sensibilities. A large part of treating others decently involves expecting others to treat me decently, too. I do not need to co-opt any imagined obscenity if I believe that others are also looking out for me. Decency might be no more than a deep-seated belief. Its utility cannot be calculated in hopes of gaining some market position. ... It engages for its own sake, just because it's decent, not because it aspires to gain anything. ...As you can see, I'm feeling my way into this new series. I have chosen to celebrate this long-awaited autumn by investigating this essential if strange proclivity most of us maintain. The headlines and even the footnotes have lately been dominated by cruelty. ... It had seemed to be present before it simply wasn't anymore. The current administration, which has no intention of administering anything, has been waging a war on Decency since its earliest seconds. One might understandably believe that Decency has become an endangered species, but I'm considering that conclusion might be wrong or at least hasty. I see plenty of Decency still around me, if only because I tenaciously cling to its utter necessity in my own life. I reject the permission our present administration, which has no intention of administering anything, daily imparts to me and my fellow citizens, that it's okay to be cruel and petty. My Decency and I insist that it's never been okay and never will be. I will be investigating this notion between now and just before Christmas. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

...

Revisiting

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-21T06:28:38-07:00

Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita): give the gang our best (1966) "…genuinely inept actors." I ask myself which FollowingChapters Story might be "the best" without really expecting anybody to answer my question, let alone myself. The question itself seems irrelevant because I never intended there to be any competition between them. Sure, some seemed better and others worse at inception, but often, the stories that seem the worst to me when creating them attract the most positive attention once I post them. My nose seems reliably unreliable. But then, I do have my favorites, the ones that seem the most resonant and those that surprised me, even a few that delighted me. It's noisy at my writing desk when I'm writing and even noisier when I'm reading through what I've just finished, then noisier still when I'm compiling a series of pieces into a comprehensible whole. And even noisier, though this never seems possible, when I sit down to peruse what I've compiled, reading through the collection for the very first time. How many times might I need to read through the whole collection to pass fair judgment upon the whole, let alone to gain enough traction to definitively choose one story as "the best?" I'm probably better off leaving that work to critics or more interested readers, though they largely remain anonymous or, perhaps, just non-existent. I have not developed a network of dedicated reviewers to choose my best for me, and since I shrink from that work myself, nobody does it. This ain't no tragedy. I never intended to enter any of my stories into a competition. I created them to catalogue my manner of living, which I'm continually perfecting without ever expecting to perfect it. I hunt and peck, shifting my focus as my intuition suggests, posting here primarily for unknowable reasons. In this context, "the best" holds little credence. As I began to read through these collected stories, though, I found myself judging. Few seem to suspect how little I remember later of what I've written. Some stories seem utterly unfamiliar, though I know for sure that I spent a few hours of my life initially creating them. Few of them seem definitive. I didn't carve them in stone or even reduce them to paper. My stories seem virtual in all of the ways they should seem that way. When I print them out, they get underfoot, as I never know where or how to file them. I leave them in their virtual files, in order of creation within each central theme. This story will be the final one in the now lengthy FollowingChapters Series file. I might later reorganize them into a more formal manuscript form. This will require more copying and pasting than anyone should willingly agree to, the least creative and pickiest pastime ever imagined. Most will never be so rendered. All that said, I can nominate one story that stole my breath as I was reading through the FollowingChapters compendium. Note that I have only made it through three of the thirteen weeks' entries as of this writing, but the story titled Unamerican struck me as especially noteworthy. It got me because it pointed out something obvious that I'd never noticed before. Those often prove to be the most shocking. This seems a noble purpose, too, for writing stories, to point out the more unacknowledged obvious. The gist, if one exists, is that no action really qualifies as Unamerican. This melting pot might have invited in every possible human action and witnessed each one. It's not the behavior that erodes the union, or not those alone. Prior insurrections seemed to make us stronger. The concern I discovered in this story was more focused on the anti-American elements, which aimed to undermine our diverse, equal, and inclusive intentions, our efforts to strive for perfection, and our aspiration to settle for what could never be considered truly American, instead embracing mediocrity as greatness. We're seeing that attempted now, fortunately, by genuinely inept actors. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

FollowingChapters: Series_Recap

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-20T06:46:54-07:00

It contains the introductory piece from every weekly writing summary in this series, along with links to each writing summary document, and so provides the ability to link to every story in this series, all ninety-one of them. ...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. ... 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. ...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. ... I acknowledge that our decency has always been more of a tendency than a reality, an aspirational possession more than an actual one. ...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. ...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. ...This FollowingChapters Story contains the introduction to the summary of my writing this week. ...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. ... 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. ...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. ...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. ... 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. ... 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. ...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 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. ...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. ...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. ...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. ... 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. ... 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. ...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. ... 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. ...Our incumbent has amply proven himself to be a first-class nincompoop who cannot seem to act according to his own oath of office. ... 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. ...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. ...This week, I introduce the beta version of a slightly different Weekly Writing Summary, one that contains actual summaries of each of the stories. ...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. ...This FollowingChapters Story contains a summary of my last week's writing. ...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. ...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. ... That place, too, I'd passed by for more than fifty years without ever feeling curious enough to stop. ... 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. ...This is how my thirty-third series ends, as they've all ended, with more of a whimper than a bang. ... 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. ...The process of producing a fresh story each morning began with me bumbling, but by the eighth year, it has become fairly smooth-running. ...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 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.

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 09/18/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-18T17:07:07-07:00

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. ...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. ...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 have not developed a pattern or a method by which I propose a story to myself, let alone how I create the resulting content. ... 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? ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me refusing to accept Invitations offering me the opportunity to behave despicably. I would that many more would have refused the similar Invitations they received. The story describes my confusion at MAGA supporters’ embrace of hateful and vindictive behavior as if they’d been impatiently waiting for permission to misbehave. ..."My presence will be best represented there in the future by my absence." This FollowingChapters Story finds me at a dinner party hosted by a conversational terrorist, one who continually disrupts the "Cadency" of the dinnertime conversation. The Muse and I attended a dinner where each couple contributed a dish, but our hostess ruined the engagement by monopolizing and derailing conversations with constant, irrelevant interruptions. ... We left feeling excluded and drained, prompting me to swear off future opportunities to dine with her. ...This FollowingChapters Story finds The Muse and I Perservering. ...Every late summer, canning becomes both a connection to ancestral practices and a way to reaffirm relevance and self-worth. ... Preserving bridges generations, symbolizing endurance, continuity, and love, with the larder overflowing as a testament to sustaining our past for our future. Tin can formerly containing tweezers: Archival Material (20th century) Aluminum, Dimensions 8.3 x 6.9 x 6.9 cm (3 1/4 x 2 11/16 x 2 11/16 in.) Collection of Barnett and Annalee Newman - Estate of Annalee Newman - The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation - Harvard Art Museums/Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Gift of the Barnett and Annalee Newman - Exhibition History: Barnett Newman: The Late Work, Menil Collection, Houston, 03/27/2015 - 08/02/2015 ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me wondering how to draw some reasonable distinction between Free Speech and Loose_Talk. The story explores the tension between the ideal of free speech and the reality of offensive, careless talk, referred to here as Loose_Talk. It explains that while free speech might be valued, actual communication often pushes boundaries of civility and offense, sometimes unintentionally and sometimes not. ... I identify Hate Speech as a clearly negative phenomenon, though some individuals and subcultures take pride in offensive or ignorant expression. Ultimately, I argue that defending free speech requires broad tolerance, even of speech that we might deeply dislike or find offensive. ...In this FollowingChapters Story, I fail to make sense of the Corrupting influences around me. TI depict corruption by those in power as deeply destructive, damaging both individual character and public trust. I accuse the current administration of flagrant and repeated corruption, disdain for rules, and persistent denial of obvious wrongdoing. I lament that their behavior transforms governance into a zero-sum game, encouraging systemic inequality and distorting both morality and legality. While some hope for eventual accountability, I strongly sense that society suffers as a result, especially when corruption becomes culturally and politically normal. Cornelis Anthonisz: The winged pig in the world (1541 - 1545) — Allegory of the corrupt world: winged pig standing on imperial apple. ...This FollowingChapters Story finally gets around to espousing the underlying purpose of our administration that can't seem to properly administer anything: The proper administration of Irony, an overview of an incumbent's responsibilities. The story humorously describes the absurd requirements for leading an “administration of Irony.” ... The administration thrives on public failures, serious denial, and legal jeopardy, all while believing in their own moral purity and silly infallibility. ...A woman with horse legs and hooves holds in her right hand a stand depicting the crucified Christ and in the other hand a can, a lock on her mouth, a dove on her chest and a snake around her waist. ...As I neared the end of this series, I sensed that I'd missed a few critical points and rushed to include them before the autumnal equinox shut down my efforts. ... The never-ending porch project moved closer to its imagined and long-awaited conclusion, only to discover a fresh twist that would delay completion for another period. ... I wished I could still be naive enough to get angry over the latest delays, but I just can't muster that reaction while keeping a straight face. ...I wondered whether some people had been anxiously awaiting their personal invitation to join the insanity in Invitations. ... I complained about conversational terrorism in Cadency and swore to avoid repeating a sorry performance. The Muse and I completed the last of our seasonal 'putting up' in Persevering. I complained about what free speech seems to have become in Loose_Talk. ... I ended this writing week ironically, posting a job description for the clowns currently in office. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Irony

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-18T05:55:56-07:00

Attributed to Cornelis Anthonisz.: The wise man and the wise woman (1540 - 1545) "Imaginary performance. Man and woman with all their attributes, represent many virtues and biblical metaphors. A woman with horse legs and hooves holds in her right hand a stand depicting the crucified Christ and in the other hand a can, a lock on her mouth, a dove on her chest and a snake around her waist. Man with compass and scale and dog at his feet. Left and right of the presentation text in Dutch." "These lessons will be lost on even the very best of them." The proper administration of Irony requires something other than mere administrative or standard leadership skills. It first demands of its incumbent a sincere dedication to obliviousness. This requires the opposite of focus. One must also be more than merely capable of producing endless streams of serious non-sequiturs, but possess the parallel ability to never once catch just how self-disclosing these seem to everyone else. One must also maintain multiple hidden agendas that remain open to public acknowledgement, ensuring everyone understands their purpose better than their creator. The entirely successful incumbent will pick fights he cannot possibly win, only to pick additional fights whenever it's clear he's lost. He must never admit to any wrongdoing and must convince himself, if only ironically, and nobody else, that he's not the biggest loser to ever hold office. Above all, the obliviousness must be sustained at all costs. Undiagnosed cognitive dysfunction, a definite plus. Sycophancy also seems a must for the proper administration of Irony. A cadre of butt-sniffing, boot-licking admirers who cannot, for the life of the least of them, ever see a serious problem in violating any subordinate's constitutional rights. They must maintain an unshakable sense of superiority, as if equality means they deserve the lion's share of every pie. They must also prove themselves capable of not just telling lies, but of cleverly crafting as many additional ones as might be needed on the fly. No scriptwriters or copyeditors must be employed to ensure the absence of redundancies, contradictions, and omissions, for the presence of these encourages widespread confusion, an essential element in the successfully ironic administration. Each must also prove themselves fully capable of falling apart before both congressional and senatorial committees, and even the odd special prosecutor, should that become necessary. It will most certainly prove to be required, for Irony eventually erodes into inescapable legal jeopardy. The successful incumbent must maintain an unshakable sense of personal well-being. He must believe he was born to lead, without suggesting even a hint of underlying Irony in his proclamations. He must look marvelous in Emporor’s New Clothes! He must sincerely believe himself to be at least an emporor or king. The public will show their satisfaction by laughing behind the incumbent's back. The successful incumbent and his spokespersons will not only not get the joke, but they'll fail to see that anybody was ever joking. They will take each and every utterance with all undue seriousness, thereby turning even the tiniest administrative acts into an absolute parody of such acts. Later generations might cast the incumbent as some sort of boob, but no one in the present administration will believe they're working for anybody less than an absolute genius. They must not feign confusion when confronting dissent, but exhibit sincere disbelief that anyone would or could want to engage in that. In short, the proper administration of Irony requires a perfectly infallible individual accompanied by a cadre of equally infallibles. They must prove themselves incapable of error. They must believe in the ultimate righteousness of their cause. They must interpret faith as unshakable belief. As for religion, they must be Christian, and not one of those more inclusive sects that go around emulating Christ, for Christ's sake, but a properly militarized one armed with the AR-15 of self-righteousness and be unafraid to use it against any and all tenacious unbelievers they might encounter. Each member of such an administration must also freely sign a binding, if technically illegal, non-disclosure agreement to ensure goodness and mercy in their every action. No one will agree to speak candidly with anybody representing any media company on the threat of public humiliation and repudiation. When the time comes, each member of the properly ironic administration, including the titular head, must agree to take a fatal one for the team, for nothing better screams success than a continuing string of embarrassing public failures. These lessons will be lost on even the very best of them. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Corrupting

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-17T05:59:36-07:00

Cornelis Anthonisz: The winged pig in the world (1541 - 1545) Allegory of the corrupt world: winged pig standing on imperial apple. ..."Those who insist upon living in glass houses must restrain their public actions." Few crimes seem more misaligned than corruption. Those to whom trust has been extended betray something more than that trust when they engage in Corrupting behavior. ... Stealing from the public purse seems much worse than any other sort of burglary. Violating simple comportment rules can quickly become complicated. A twisting occurs, first of ethics and later, of respectability. Those who profit from their service are rightly seen as beneath contempt. ... No apology ever undos the well-deserved disdain. Those who believe themselves to be above the law demonstrate only how far below it they've fallen. ...Our current administration conducts a master class in corruption. Everything it touches seems corroded for the experience. They seem to hold even the simplest rule in deepest disdain. When someone notices, they deny the obvious before doing it again, more deliberately, while thumbing their noses in unison. They seem to believe they were somehow born above the law. ... Their up sure seems like down to me. Their straight and narrow seems riddled with switchbacks to my way of seeing. I can't understand how they can stand to be with themselves. ... I pray that one day, those indictments will be filed, and they'll be punished to the full extent of the laws they violated. Trust seems plenty delicate enough, and public trust seems downright dainty. Leaders hold much more than simple obligations to avoid Corrupting. They hold the sacred responsibility to keep operations clean. Only corrupted systems devolve into zero-sum games, where one person's win forces a loss on everyone else. ... They can produce enough for almost everyone to benefit. Underclasses serve as signs of an embedded corruption. ... Winner-take-all systems are not innate to capitalism, but evidence of underlying corruption. I can't understand the attraction. Corrupting seems at root short-sighted, as if there won't eventually be a tomorrow or an accounting. The idea that one might get away with dirty dealing presumes more than seems even distantly reasonable. Even Bolsonaro was held accountable a few short years after he jeered at those who remained respectable. Our incumbent, should he survive, will likely face a similar downfall, as he has proven to be the most Corrupting politician. Everything he touches turns into crypto, an inherently corrupted and Corrupting form of wealth. He sure behaves as if he's above the law. ... His cavalier behavior will ultimately be his downfall. If the world trends toward justice, he's screwed. If it's turning into Pottersville, we'll be the ones who pay the price for his behavior. ...The Whatabouters will always insist that their corrupting behavior is perfectly legal, that those who played within more traditional lines were suckers. That's always been their story. They bring no sense of history into the game, believing that they've reinvented public service to serve themselves. Even the robber barons lived to rue their earlier behavior. I suspect, without much recent evidence, that even Repuglicans might be capable of learning better, though their corrupting activities seem to have become endemic for them. They've spiced it with an odd, reinforcing sort of religion that they even refer to as Christian, though no practicing parishioner would recognize it. Corrupting what passed as a moral authority seems cynical and will likely prove to have been their downfall. Those who insist upon living in glass houses must restrain their public actions. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Loose_Talk

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-16T06:08:28-07:00

Lucian and Mary Brown: Untitled [man giving speech in rain] (c. ..."I just wonder why." This country was founded upon the ideal of Free Speech. In practice, it has always struggled to draw the distinction between Free Speech and Loose_Talk. Free Speech suggests that one might feel free to say anything they care to say to or about anybody. Civil discourse, of course, demands a few dampers be placed upon the full and, dare I suggest, free expression of observations. Likewise, simple civility might also suggest that certain speech be squelched lest someone take offense or choose to be offensive. Mark Twain suggested that while we might have the freedom to speak our minds, however addled, we also hold an overweening obligation not to, or not to very often. The distinction between Free Speech and Loose_Talk resides in the ear of the listener, though most speakers might understand where one begins and the other ends for themselves, if not necessarily for any other. ...It's apparently not nearly enough to insist that individuals must carefully edit their utterances. We don't, as a rule, take much care in our everyday conversation. We can be inadvertently rude. Many verbal transgressions come as inadvertencies, things we never slowed down enough to suppose might somehow be interpreted as offensive. Some, though, use language for its shock and awe value, testing limits they know full well lie well south of what they spew out of their mouths. Fully aware of the ordinance against shouting "Fire!" in crowded theaters, they make a habit of violating that ordinance with feigned innocence, insisting that they never intended to produce the resulting stampede, when anybody should have seen that potential lurking. They damn themselves with feigned ignorance. Feigned ignorance seems to be a common element accompanying Loose_Talk. We dare not insist upon civility, for this very insistence violates some underlying principle of the practice. One must choose to monitor one's own speech for potential violations, and nobody can command that anyone else freely choose. Such choices must be freely chosen, with little more than some warm-hearted suggestions to encourage. One must remain free to choose even a reliably losing position or else forfeit the right to free expression. Not every impression could or should please every listener, and insisting that it should amounts to perhaps the worst possible form of despotism. If I want Free Speech, it seems I must, then, learn to tolerate Loose_Talk, if only because the distinction between the two seems impossible to draw. What's free for me might always seem merely loose for you. I can't see anything else to do but tolerate more than I'd care to. We now have an industry specializing in disseminating what seems to me to be nothing more or less than Hate Speech. I classify Hate Speech as clearly residing over the line beyond which only the clearly offensive falls. It seems a perversion of freedom if it deliberately humiliates another in execution. Not everyone seems equally sensitive to the potential harm their speech might cause. Some seem quite cavalier, as if intending to offend, and shouldn't that be part of Free Speech if we're truly serious about liberty? We might think of freedom and liberty as universally acknowledged goods, but each also harbors an ugly underside. We might hope folks will remain judicious without actually insisting upon it. Freedom and liberty might demand unreasonable levels of tolerance from almost everybody. Hope as we might, some uncouth individuals will continue to use coarse language at even their own grandmother's table. They embarrass themselves more than they ever slander or offend even those with the more delicate sensibilities. Like bullies, they largely manage to defeat themselves without often noticing their self-inflicted damage. The rest of us get to witness their utter humiliation, to which they remain steadfastly oblivious. An entire subculture now thrives on just this sort of jive. ... It insists that nobody ever actually levels with them. They revel in being wrong, with siding with The Dark Side. They seem snide and don't even seem to try to hide their ignorance, even from themselves. Unable or unwilling to fit into a polite society, they have invented an impertinent parallel universe where their freedom seems indistinguishable from coarseness. I can't successfully argue that they aren't, at some fundamental level, free to choose that course. I just wonder why. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Persevering

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-15T05:58:44-07:00

Aluminum, Dimensions 8.3 x 6.9 x 6.9 cm (3 1/4 x 2 11/16 x 2 11/16 in.) Collection of Barnett and Annalee Newman - Estate of Annalee Newman - The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation - Harvard Art Museums/Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Gift of the Barnett and Annalee Newman - Exhibition History: Barnett Newman: The Late Work, Menil Collection, Houston, ..."…still as fresh as they day they were preserved, Persevering." Every Late Summer since we coupled, The Muse and I have practiced Persevering in the form of preserving. I suspect it was no accident that these two terms so closely resemble each other, for the purpose of our preserving has always been Persevering, for we are accomplishing more than merely "putting up" some produce. I always sense myself back in my mother's kitchen receiving instructions on how to slice a pear in half against my thumb—a task I'm still too squeamish to blithely perform, for I fear I'll cut myself, though I never have. The very act of attempting to Perservere preserves something in addition to the fresh produce we will consume through the upcoming winter. We preserve a seemingly fading lifestyle, a passing, nearly past imperative, one that sustained generations before ours. We ache to reprise this dance each year, and so we do. It was always inconceivable for us to miss performing this sacrament. We even hauled our accumulated jars, lids, rings, and canning pots with us when we went on exile, where we found fresh sources of the same old produce. When exiled to DC, we'd drive up into Pennsylvania, Washington Boro in Amish Country, to buy tomatoes at the venerable old, tumble-down Tomato Barn, home to the locally famous Jet Star® variety. The Muse would select three or four boxes of their best, and we'd limp back to our rented digs to steam up the kitchen for the remainder of that weekend. When we resurrected the equipment and began blanching and peeling fruit, we were transported back home then, where our hearts still resided. Long hours slaving over sinks might have made our backs ache, but they made our homesick hearts soar. Those tomatoes reliably transported us home. When we moved to Colorado, we found a produce vendor who drove to the Western Slope twice each week to bring the best produce from the country bordering the Nevada desert. He sold San Marzanos for about the price we'd paid for those Jet Stars, and I admit that we made pigs of ourselves with them. The Muse was so busy some years that I attempted solo performances. We were never disappointed with my results, but we missed the reconnection, fussing over canning reliably produced. Sure, we'd curse and fuss with the best of them, but by the end of those days we'd be feeling closer than we'd felt since the last harvest season when we'd volunteered to punish ourselves for the purpose of Perservering. Our larder groaned as we limped back home again. If I was raised right, and I firmly believe I was, it was because I learned how to torture myself to gain some worthy end. I cannot stand for eight almost uninterrupted hours peeling and quartering tomatoes without my back aching. That ache becomes nearly excruciating near the long day's end, yet I persist. That persistence in pursuit of some far-distant result confirms that I must have been raised right. I know my forebears hoed much harder rows than I've ever faced, yet they persisted. They indentured themselves for years to gain the freedom they desired. They persisted across three thousand miles of primitive Oregon Trail. They cut the timber, fashioned boards, and built themselves crude cabins to house their families before winter set in, then split firewood enough to see them through until Spring. If they successfully accomplished those things, I figure I can probably tolerate a stiff back so we can enjoy a baked pasta supper in February next year. The older I grow, the more imperative Perseverance seems. I dare not decline the sacred opportunity to U-Pick a ton of tomatoes or reject the invitation to spend a September weekend slaving over the stove. I do this in much more than mere remembrance. I perform this dance to reconfirm who I am, to prove to myself that I still exist. I find ever fewer conformations that I have not become utterly irrelevant. This sacrament reliably reminds me that I am still relevant, that I really used to be somebody, and that I might still be someone worthy of counting on. I wash the tomato jars sticky from the water they boiled in and set them into the boxes the jars came in. You might imagine that after so many years, we'd never need to purchase fresh jars, but we seem to add a couple of dozen each season. The larder's more than overflowing. I imagine my progeny will find, as I did in my folks' basement pantry, jars lined up for the better part of fifty years, holding summers we'd abandoned to outgrow our innocence, still as fresh as they day they were preserved, Persevering. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Cadency

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-14T07:00:02-07:00

"My presence will be best represented there in the future by my absence." The Muse and I went to dinner last night with a group from a local alumni association. This group does good works, and our host helps. In addition to their good works, they also organize these suppers where three or four couples gather to share courses and conversation. We were responsible for the appetizer course. The Muse made some fancy crackers adorned with goat cheese and Mirabelle jam. She also made some icy hot gazpacho to serve as soup. Another brought a salad, another wine, and another a rhubarb pie. Our hostess made a casserole with deplorable green beans that were overcooked, leathery, and nasty. Fortified and distracted, we commenced to attempt to conduct a conversation around that table. The conversation did not go well. I'd been to two other dinners our host had attended. In both instances, the cadence of her comments consistently prevented the conversation from developing into something enjoyable for anyone. Her speech pattern seemed most similar to a bull in a china shop, disruptive to the point that whatever purpose that time might have served was undermined. The last time we had been invited to dinner at her house, I'd sworn to The Muse that I would never again attend any gathering there. When she announced last night's pairing, I reminded her of my earlier oath, but I had deferred my final decision until it was too late to gracefully exit before engaging. I prepared as if for root canal surgery. She presents as so isolated that she's starving for attention. If she's not preventing anyone else from getting a single word in sideways, she's injecting another irrelevant question. Someone might be disclosing some intimate thought when she comments on the color of their socks and then begins, without invitation, with a colorful story about the interesting socks she's seen in the past. ... She offers no transitions or translations, and she mentions people she only references by their first names. We might later learn that that was her long-dead little brother, but in the moment, we're speechless and lost. Asking a clarifying question guarantees another unwanted extension or another wild ass branch into an utterly different irrelevance. After an hour or more of being subjected to this patter, my speech clutch shows definite signs of wear. It's not just that I feel left out; I sense that everyone else around the table has come to feel the futility in even trying to be civil with each other there. One might manage to slip in no more than a part of a comment before our hostess interrupts with yet another "interesting" and irrelevant observation. The conversation never finds its rhythm, but only because it can't. We made as early an exit as we could decently affect. I sat up for more than an hour past my usual bedtime, struggling to regain my composure. I felt as if I'd been ridden. The Muse noted that last night was a bit better than the prior time, when our hostess had subjected us to her Bible lesson as we struggled through our dessert. She'd been engaged in a lengthy self-study course designed to help her properly think about her Bible. The workbooks were apparently designed to tell her what the Bible verses really meant, and she had been dutifully memorizing lest she incorrectly interpret something herself. Seated at the opposite end of the table that evening was one of the most vehemently atheist people in town, and she was as offended as if she'd been a Jew being subjected to New Testament lessons against her will, which, of course, she more or less was. She left in a cloud of brimstone, which gave the rest of us cover to ditch before it might have otherwise been decent to do so. I swore I'd never return. Nobody appreciates a know-it-all. Nobody really needs anybody to interrupt their stories. We share much more than supper when we get together, presumably for supper. We come to share ourselves. One suffocating person can suck all the air out of a dining room, and all the attention in the universe couldn't satisfy such neediness, certainly not over supper. I swore again that I would refuse to attend any future dinner featuring her as either host or guest, for the context costs me too much. I have better things to do than sacrifice my presence to listen to her incoherence. A small yet significant decency feels violated in her presence, one she will never understand. My presence will be best represented there in the future by my absence. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Invitations

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-13T06:55:01-07:00

James Abbott McNeill Whistler: Invitation Card (1882) "I am not one of them." I feel baffled by the odd attraction some seem to feel about the Invitations that MAGA characters offer. It appears as though they extend permission for others to engage in whatever truly awful behavior they might have previously felt constrained against, as if they had been impatiently waiting to be offered entry into a genuinely despicable manner of living. I feel no such compulsion, and I cannot imagine any invitation that might convince me to flee into the dark side, but seemingly not so with the MAGA faithful. They immediately start spewing venom with the best of them. Hate speech seems to be their small talk, and bitter accusations, their typical conversation. It looks as though they've been granted grudges as a reward for their entry. They seem to require near-constant reinforcement, as the media machine they subject themselves to repeats the same ugly memes like catechisms. The least of these followers seems capable of mimicking the very worst of these commentators, seemingly without critical reflection. They claim Dems are evil without providing evidence, except for some hyperbolic story based upon some popular fictions. A single word can spark a fresh round of venom. Once invited to hate, it's as if it's suddenly too late to respond in any way kind. Forgiveness, even for imagined transgressions, becomes absolutely out of the question. No benefit results because there's not enough doubt to foster it. A caustic certainty prevails. The resulting behaviors exemplify nothing so much as evil. The continuous hate speech. The oaths promising to get even for things that never actually happened. The threats of employing "second amendment remedies" to redress non-existent maladies. The firm beliefs in the absolute rightness of their twisted perspectives. The similar beliefs espoused about so-called Christian belief systems seem to actively exclude any New Testament "good news." They're like alcoholics who took the oath but never stopped drinking, thinking that since they'd taken the oath, they were thereafter protected from the deleterious effects of drinking because they were saved. They seem to sin with even greater abandon once they accept their camo-Jesus' compassion toward them. They extend no compassion toward others themselves once they accept the MAGA Invitations to live in sin. These don't seem to be serious people. They seem to lack a soul, for instance, and many of the other dimensions essential for an authentically human existence. They seem to be playing roles, engaged in performance, seeking neither human connections nor forgiveness. They seem to consider themselves much holier than thou. Holier than me. Holier than anybody. They worship so-called conspiracy theories that fail to exhibit anything in the least bit theoretical. These appear to contain only impure speculation passed around as proof, conjecture masquerading as evidence, lies extended for the apparently sole purpose of protecting over-delicate egos. These are not people of faith, but of belief. The price of admission seems to be complete and utter submission. To think for oneself is to commit the one truly unforgivable sin. I am not one of them. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 09/11/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-11T17:12:30-07:00

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 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. ...This FollowingChapters Story describes what I do to myself when in the presence of CrazyPeople. It's never what the crazies do to me but what I do to myself in their presence that produces the complications. This story considers the stress and pain accompanying dealing with a family member whose issues profoundly affect me. I suspect that everyone has at least one of these bats in their belfry. ... The difficulties revolve more around my own emotions and inabilities, rather than anyone else’s actions—those who remain deeply unaware and unable to acknowledge the impact of their condition or the offered help. Repeated conflict, disappointment, and chaos make it clear that maintaining distance remains necessary for my own self-preservation. Ultimately, I conclude that authentic love and caring, in this context, manifests by maintaining distance rather than proximity, because closeness only causes pain and continued misunderstanding. ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me Grieving a world I failed to fully appreciate before it evaporated. This story expresses my deep frustration with current political and religious trends, condemning public displays of religiosity and the attempted merging of church and state as fundamentally immoral. I reflect on better opportunities in the past, such as affordable education and greater economic fairness, contrasting them with today’s wounded system shaped by Reagan-era policies favoring undeserving elites. I express grief over the loss of genuine aspirations for justice and equality, replaced by hypocrisy and cruelty from current leaders and their so-called conservative supporters, whom I portray as manipulative, insincere, and morally detached. I show my mournful side here, nostalgic for a past that seemed to value progress, integrity, and more authentic freedoms. ...This FollowingChapters Story focuses upon the irony our current incumbent never senses and the absurdity that had been helping me while GettingOver this latest instantiation of serious foolishness. In this story, I vehemently argue that authoritarian leaders and political movements eventually devolve into self-parody and lose credibility, prompting a collective sense of relief when their influence ends. I draw parallels to past mistakes, such as the War on Terror, warning that such cycles of grand but misguided ambitions repeatedly waste resources and cause real harm. ... I advocate for a more ironic, less earnest approach to politics and history, recognizing the absurdity and the limits of striving for utopian transformation. ...This FollowingChapters Story speaks to the guilt I inevitably exit summer feeling, for I once again fell short of the ideals I hold as to my Stewarding responsibilities I left unfulfilled. Everyone holds a shared responsibility as a steward, more fundamental than any job description or act of mere ownership. ... Ownership does not excuse us from our obligations; rather, it intensifies our Stewardship responsibilities. I report on my personal struggles with these duties, especially when falling short, and I see the cycle of the seasons—especially autumn—as a time for me to make amends and reset for the future, knowing stewardship could never be perfected and always remains temporary, passing from one person, one generation to the next. Urs Graf: The Parable of the Unjust Steward (1511 - 1515) - The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me disappointing myself with my innate inability to properly interpret predictions. Anything other than a 100% Likelihood of rain here apparently means that it's probably safe to plan an outside picnic. I express frustration with my repeated inability to correctly interpret weather forecasts, noting that anything less than a 100% likelihood seems safe to ignore. I explore how probability and likelihood often falsely suggest certainty, but in practice cover multiple possible outcomes, making predictions seem simultaneously precise and vague. I, of course, extend this argument to broader philosophical themes, equating mathematical probability with concepts of fate and even divine randomness, ultimately accepting that mathematics might be only an interpretive tool rather than an absolute truth. I conclude with a resignation, recognizing that despite formal predictions, the weather remains tenaciously unpredictable, and anticipation often leads to disappointment. ...Senator Tim Kaine’s recent statement asserting that rights come from laws caused a backlash from conservatives, who argued that God grants certain rights, as stated by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. I consider how the concept of God-given rights varies with culture and history, particularly questioning whether rights like gun ownership, seen as God-given by some, actually align with principles of life, liberty, and happiness, and find them wanting. I argue that rights in the U.S. had better ultimately be established and interpreted through laws, not divinely, and that these interpretations can change over time. I acknowledge the consequences of regarding certain rights as untouchably God-given, especially considering the societal harm linked to some, like gun-related deaths, challenging the logic of attributing such rights to any higher power. ...Unknown Russian Artist, Tula: Flintlock Fowling Piece Given by the Empress Catherine II of Russia to the French Ambassador (1745 and 1763) ...This writing week proved to be no less curious than even the least of its predecessors. ... This world does not seem to be as it was advertised. I might most reasonably question the advertisers, well-known and fully acknowledged liars, but, like everybody, I first blame myself. This serves as an indicator of underlying decency rather than any indictable shortcoming. In dystopian times, decency sure seems like an indictable offense, and “they” will try hard to characterize it as such. ... I will never believe our incumbent decent unless and until he successfully portrays himself as a Saul of Tarsus, a reformed version of the criminal he earned his reputation as. Let's say this writing week involved its share of ranting: I began by reporting on the CrazyPeople I contend with. These rarely get advertised as an integral part of any family, yet they still exist and deeply influence. I next admitted that I had caught myself Grieving a world I failed to fully appreciate before it evaporated. ... I admitted my tenacious inability to properly interpret weather forecasts in Likelihoods. I ended this curious writing week decomposing the notion of God-Givens: rights, privileges, and ownerships. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

God-Givens

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-11T06:16:22-07:00

Unknown Russian Artist, Tula: Flintlock Fowling Piece Given by the Empress Catherine II of Russia to the French Ambassador (1745 and 1763) "So much for God's matchmaking skills, and others." Recently, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine sparked controversy when he stated the seemingly uncontroversial opinion that rights come from laws. Conservatives, spear-headed by the ever-pious Texas Senator Ted Cruise, publicly disagreed, insisting that none other than Thomas Jefferson himself declared that people are bestowed by their creator certain inalienable rights, namely: the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, accusing Senator Kaine of disclosing the "Democrat" agenda to ascribe God-Given rights to laws and thereby enabling them to be rescinded upon a whim. House Speaker Mike Johnson chimed in, insisting that while this was the well-known "Democrat" agenda, they weren't supposed to say it out loud. Here's The Hill's report on these exchanges. This might seem to amount to little more than another vacuous gotcha game exchange between partisans, but it got me thinking about what constitutes a God-Given. God has been popularly described as the bestower behind everything from talents to rights, though, unlike the above-pictured fowling piece, no maker's mark could have been affixed to even the least of these. They have been various and seem dependent upon culture. What seems inalienable for some does not quite rise to breach that barrier for others. In this culture, many insist that the right to own and bear arms—gun ownership—came directly from God, as if a mere extension of the pursuit of happiness clause or the life and liberty insistences. Yet, gun ownership has been shown to stand in opposition to the preservation of life, liberty, as well as the pursuit of happiness. One person's pursuit of their own happiness can produce incalculable sadness for others, directly violating another's constitutionally guaranteed right: the protection from another's rights infringing upon one's own. Kaine's position seems perfectly defensible if you're considering laws. There are no laws guaranteeing the right to pursue happiness, as it exists more as an underlying principle. I cannot sue you for violating that particular right, even though Jefferson insisted our creator had bestowed it. Kaine correctly points out that Sharia Law allows the prosecution of such offenses against God, but that our system insists upon enforcing only laws. Principles might influence the passage of laws, but nobody seriously believes in prosecuting anyone based upon their violations of principles not substantiated in law. Well, nobody except the odd Nazi and our current incumbent. The conservatives speak disparagingly about those of us who believe that laws bestow our rights. The Second Amendment was no more a given from God than were the first or third. To say otherwise seems absurd. None of those amendments mean anything without some interpretation that hones their meaning, and those meanings change over time. Once upon a time, not that long ago, the so-called God-Given Right to bear arms was severely limited by practical considerations. Since changes in human interpretation withdrew those practicalities, that same amendment contributes to the most significant cause of childhood deaths of any nation in the world. If the right was God-Given, were the consequences, too? Yesterday, a so-called conservative commentator was killed when someone exercising their God-Given right very nearly blew his brains out. That commentator had held the opinion that a few gun deaths were a fair price to pay for the fundamental freedom gun ownership represents. The fundamental difficulty with any God-Given anything seems to come when considering who holds the right or responsibility to rescind that right when it proves unworkable in practice. The defense, of course, has been that guns don't actually kill people, that they're just a tool. People kill people with a variety of implements, including firearms. Why take out our ire on the God-Given one? This question seems especially stupid and cruel, but stupidity and cruelty are not unknown whenever people start ascribing to God something only man could ever bestow. In the protestant wedding ceremony, the preacher ends the service by declaring, "What God has joined, let no man put asunder." Almost 50% of all marriages in this country end in divorce, so much for God's matchmaking skills, and others. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Likelihoods

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-10T06:05:58-07:00

Ben Shahn: Untitled [exterior of home, probably Arkansas] (1935) "It almost seems as if I disappoint myself on purpose." I survive the final fortnight of Summer by focusing on what I clearly do not understand. Weather predictions indicated a possibility of rain early this week, but this promise was barely fulfilled with a brief gust and a few scattered drops around sunset the day before yesterday. Another possibility appeared in yesterday's report, but that one also failed to produce. A forty percent chance of rain rarely results in very many raindrops here. Another part of the region must attract the weather through this season, because we don't, or we haven't. This might have something to do with the very nature of Likelihoods, which by their name seem to suggest that a stated outcome will prove likely. We might as easily classify these as Unlikelihoods, connoting the production of an absence, since Likelihood doesn’t always promise the mentioned outcome. A 40% chance of rain means that there's a 60% chance of none. Even labeling such a prediction a "probability" connotes that something will "probably" happen, and it reliably does. The probability suggests that what's predicted will happen, but the report isn't predicting rain. It's a prediction of both rain and no rain, depending upon what cannot be predicted. This back-handed precision seems self-fulfilling, similar to declaring that something will either happen or it won't. Assigning Likelihoods ensures the projection always sums to one hundred percent probability that it will happen, either/or-wise. Even if it should rain over 60% of the region, it still fulfills the predicted 40% threshold. If it rains nowhere near, it can declare that it got that 60% part of the prediction right. It's said that random selection fuels evolution. Probabilities determine which organism succeeds or fails, and evangelicals have complained for nigh on to two hundred years about this characterization. They take offense at randomness, insisting that God, their designated creator, doesn't roll dice. Yet, his much-vaunted "mysterious ways" in which he purportedly works seem the very soul of such randomness. No other phenomena seem to more accurately model their God's apparent capriciousness. His actions seem similarly understandable, like even the more pedestrian weather prediction, which also appears to exclusively work in equally mysterious ways. One might even insist, without seeming altogether too obnoxious about this, that probability might even be that God we struggle to envision. I learned when in my fifties that probabilities and, indeed, all of mathematics, had always served as a metaphorical language intended to describe physical phenomena. I had believed from my first brushes with numbers that they were somehow more immutable than that, that they contained truths rather than similes, facts rather than shadowy suggestions, but the mathematicians I'd known insisted that my notions seemed childish to them. They had mastered mathematical manipulations because they understood that their intuitions couldn't provide as helpful a portrait as their calculations could. They could consider phenomena that reliably baffled our five senses, even when they labored in concert. Nobody accurately intuits exponentiation, for instance, and those who try reliably appear to be fools. (Notice how I'm not mentioning members of our current administration here.) I wait unrequited, still setting sprinklers after I'd expected to be retiring them for the season. No reason other than the misfortune of the draw determines where the rain falls here. No incantation reliably attracts cirrus clouds. Nothing but freak changes in wind direction ever result in Pacific storm systems funneling in. The predictions require considerable interpretation, and even then, I tend to get my expectations up over nothing. There seems to be a continuing high Likelihood that I will continue with my fruitless anticipations into the absolutely unforeseeable future. It almost seems as if I disappoint myself on purpose. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Stewarding

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-09T06:04:11-07:00

Urs Graf: The Parable of the Unjust Steward (1511 - 1515) The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. ... The Parable of the Unjust Steward Retrieved from https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/9dfc8bf0-a38f-0134-34b1-00505686a51c "My conscience should leave this season aware of my shortcomings and successes." Everyone in this world has the same job, the identical responsibility that transcends their occupation, profession, and "real job." Likewise, we hold responsibilities before and beyond mere ownership, however much or little we might manage to accumulate. Rich or poor, high or low-born, we remain steadfastly equivalent from birth until we die. We are each first and foremost Stewards. Ownership might be an encumbrance to stewardship, since it suggests some forms of authority over property. Still, property holds superior authority over its owner, and subtly holds that owner responsible for answering to the property's higher requirements. Of course, an owner might choose to despoil his property, thereby violating his Stewarding responsibilities, and nobody might hold that deficient owner responsible for his desecration, but he has not escaped scot-free. The purpose of Stewarding was never intended to serve as an excuse to punish, but to serve as the template for constructing and maintaining a well-formed conscience. A well-formed conscience serves as the underlying jurisprudence in this universe. It tells us what's right and what isn't. ... Hell is defined as the state operating without a well-formed conscience. ... Our obedience to any conscience depends upon a particular discipline, an ability to forego certain hungers, to defer gratification rather than approach our world ravenously. The garden I own retains certain rights, among them, the right to water and reasonable tending, including the right to be weeded. I struggle sometimes to live up to this ideal, though it seems perfectly reasonable. Nor is it contingent upon my necessarily feeling like engaging. Stewarding amounts to a form of self-imposed abrogation. ...Decency, for me, means attending to my Stewarding, whatever other obligations might have managed to elbow their way into my queue. It's what I do. It's what I'm doing when I get up in the middle of the night to consider what I should be writing that morning. It's the overriding reason I cannot stay in bed without suffocating in guilty feelings. This responsibility isn't to or necessarily for anybody. It's merely my inheritance and my legacy. It's what I do, whether excellently or poorly. I enjoin myself to attend to my Stewarding, understanding that my tenancy will inescapably be temporary and somebody else will step into my place once I leave. I hold a responsibility to that somebody else, whoever they might be in whatever guise they arrive, though my world, this world, will no more belong to them than it ever belonged to me. ...The bank might hold title to my property pending repayment of the mortgage, but I do not deceive myself into believing that I'm purchasing more than the right to inhabit this place for the purpose of practicing my Stewarding activities. These are the sorts of practices I have no intention of perfecting, for, properly engaged in, they should leave me feeling like a novice. This place keeps trying to teach me about myself and about its needs. I usually feel guilty when, as summer recedes, I can so clearly see my Stewarding shortcomings surrounding me. The afternoons, so blisteringly hot that I successfully argued myself out of weeding. The mornings when I couldn't bring myself to get on my knees. The evenings when I neglected to sufficiently tidy up the place before retiring. ...Autumn tends to be the season of atonement—the time when the sum of my shortcomings require redressing. The gardens will be reset to back just before the beginning, pruned and stripped bare of their most significant shortcomings. The deep freeze should cauterize the wound, once the leaves have been carefully removed and the remaining yard shines through, naked. The porch remodel might be finished by first frost. The construction clutter in front of the garage should be fully resolved before first snow. Lights might cast shadows upon spaces seemingly preserved by grace. I will have worked off whatever guilt accumulated over the overwhelming summer. I will rest fitfully, over-anxious to please whatever deity oversees my Stewarding. My conscience should leave this season aware of my shortcomings and successes. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

GettingOver

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-08T06:00:03-07:00

David Rees: Cannonball Press Get Your War On (2004) "Aspiring for the impossible never makes it happen." Eventually, the tin pot dictator's proclamations take on the distinctive scent of irony, irony utterly lost on him, of course, but, increasingly, not lost on almost everyone else. He becomes the parody he always was, finally even in his former partisans' eyes. His plans seem absurdist and not only because they virtually never turn out as announced. Eventually, few, if anybody, can even imagine how they might have ever worked. When the advertised revolution can no longer quite qualify as believable fiction, society widely releases a collective sigh, clear evidence that we can begin GettingOver another sorry chapter. We have had many sorry chapters to get over in our past. Why should our present and future be any different? Nobody fondly remembers 2004, when the so-called War On Terror was being waged as if victory might still be possible. A relatively simple misconception burned through trillions in treasure and what was once considered to be an inexhaustible reservoir of goodwill. We sought to redraw ancient maps and force acceptance of absurdist plans then, but only managed to kill way too many people and fuel an ennui that haunts us to this day, and might have even been responsible for the emergence of the newly absurdist MAGA movement. There's always another one waiting in the queue. Real people get killed and wounded. This first seems inevitable rather than merely necessary to maintain belief in the underlying fiction. War somehow seems more real than peacetime. We firmly believe in the transforming goodness of our wars. If you don't believe me, go see what we built along The Mall in Washington, DC. You will see cathedrals constructed in homage to our secular religion: organized killing. From the Civil War Freize at the foot of Capitol Hill to the Lincoln Memorial on the Western end of the Reflection Pool, each war is remembered in turn. People go on vacation to walk the length of this sad history with nary a wary ounce of irony when passing by. Each war, though, eventually became a parody of its originating intention, engaged in less to save civilization than to insult it. Those who worship war seem bound to engage in it. Those who see entertainment in war, like our current incumbent, who imagines himself fierce but whimpers in the wee hours, seem most likely to produce absurdist engagements. He dropped the biggest bomb to little effect, making up for destructive results with a fresh public relations blitz. He seems like a kid strapped into a car seat that has a small steering wheel attached. He actually believes he's driving. Those who do control stuff will never confide in him, for their power utterly depends upon extending his delusion. Most of those who thought they might personally benefit from their association with him have already joined the throngs of his victims. They belong to a mutual victimization society, most decidedly including the guy who firmly believes he's the victimizer. I'm GettingOver taking any of these clowns very seriously. They probably deserve to be taken almost as seriously as they take themselves, but that could only multiply the absurdity. It's absurd enough without us pretending to be serious, too. Our dialect must reflect the irony of our times. We must make jokes in response to such seriously unserious business. Yes, I know that people are getting hurt. My own feelings have been deeply wounded. But I no longer expect to get even. The Karmic load has already been aiming at the protagonist-in-chief, and her aim tends to be true. The silliness will continue until it collapses beneath its own absurdity. The damage done will not necessarily ever be recoverable from, but as long as we collectively believe in political salvation, we will very likely continue to inflict such absurdist damage upon ourselves. Maybe if we sincerely sought to make America mediocre again, we'd initiate a greatness few evangelical Repuglicans could ever envision. Aspiring for the impossible never makes it happen. We could more easily GetOver that urge instead. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Grieving

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-07T07:13:22-07:00

William Holman Hunt: The Triumph of the Innocents (1870-1903) "They will fail, but they sure enjoy being cruel." I believe evangelism constitutes a much greater sin than paganism, but then I do not believe paganism qualifies as sin. I believe the separation of church and state has always been a moral issue, as linking church and state constitutes an immoral act. Prayer breakfasts exist so hypocrites can enjoy debasing themselves at public expense. Prayer in schools seems roughly equivalent to enforcing public pooping since it demands public performance of the properly private. I believe the urge to punish debases the punisher much more than it punishes the perpetrator. When I was fifteen years old, I held an after-school job that paid me the equivalent of $21/hour in today's currency. I was able to pay for my books and tuition when I attended university with a small Pell grant and the proceeds of my after-school jobs. I graduated debt-free. I grieve for a world I failed to appreciate fully, before genuine pieces of shit took office and overran the Republican Party. Before Reagan, who extended permission for the members of his administration to ignore precedent and the law and commit self-serving felonies without remorse. He encouraged people to think less of themselves and their government so that his cronies could take mean advantage of them, primarily by stealing their wages and pensions. We now inhabit a broken world, one where billionaires are deathly scared of taxes they never pay, anyway, and rank-and-file people are increasingly certain they will never get ahead or even manage to get even. I grieve for the good old days before I knew how good I had it. I grieve for the goddamned Age of Aquarius. The pieces of shit that now constitute the majority in both houses of Congress disgust me. The incumbent stands so far beneath contempt that his crimes seem insignificant in comparison to his ethics, or their absence. He evangelizes immorality, and his followers swallow his incoherent incantations, each more illegal than their predecessor. They will have to build a whole new wing in Hell to house whatever's left of his soul once he arrives. The devil's got his signature on a contract he signed when he was about nine. He's lived a life exceptional for the fact that he's fucked up everything he's ever touched. He's much more than merely touched in the head, and much, much less. I am of an age now where my primary occupation has become disengaging. My irrelevance has been growing exponentially and appears to be extending ad nauseum. I grieve for a world that welcomed inquiry, though never all that comfortably. I grieve for a world that still strived for equality and justice for all, though forever falling short of fully realizing its aspirations. At least it still aspired to be greater than it had been, rather than mouthing oaths made meaningless through mindless repetition. I grieve for the times that self-professed conservatives cannot seem to remember, times that actually existed rather than fictional ones conveniently created to justify tyranny. The MAGAs are the new Tories, people fearful of liberty and in desperate need of a king. They fear thinking for themselves, but they fear more that others will think for themselves. They worship a free market and do everything they can to manipulate it. They revere the Second Amendment and abhor every other sentence in our Constitution. They pray for emoluments. They believe we possess infinite resources. They firmly believe that Jesus is in the wings and will return in their lifetime, just like every previous charlatan in history so far. They believe in predestination, that people deserve whatever fate befalls them, especially the poor and displaced, who should feel ashamed for being so irresponsible as to get themselves born poor or of color. They believe in the separation of morality and action, so that they can do whatever they damned well please because they think they've already been saved. They're damned and headed to a Hell of their own making, bound and determined to drag everything holy down that hole with them. They will fail, but they sure enjoy being cruel. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

CrazyPeople

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-06T05:02:08-07:00

"They possess only the strangest of strange attractors." It's never what they do to themselves or to me that bothers me so, but what I tend to do to myself in their presence. It's as if their superpower lies in compromising better angels, defying reason and logic to garble even the worst of intentions. ... I feel furious before I acknowledge that they cannot help themselves, that that's the crux of their disease. They cannot help themselves, and I cannot help them, either, so I'm rendered helpless. If I didn't care, this couldn't ever hurt me so much, but I can't seem to help but care. Therein lies the whole game, with me competing on both teams. I wrestle with myself, with my own damning demons, while they seem blithely unaware of the calamity surrounding them. ... If charged, they can't help but plead not guilty. ...They cannot see what their presence does to others or what it goads them to do to themselves. They are the beneficiaries of ten thousand little charities, but they cannot see or even acknowledge these attempts. They must remain oblivious, tangled up in their own surreality, which does not seem to conform to anything I can recognize as real. ... Their convictions seem wholly justified from their perspective. Even their perspective fails to qualify as recognizable as such to anyone else. I feel steadfastly and cruelly ignored in their presence, as if I didn't exist, just as if I didn't matter. It's all about them, but it also becomes all about me to me when they render me invisible in their presence. ...It seems an affront to decency more than any simple inability. ... It's never merely a matter of anything; nothing resolves the continual churning. Yes, the universe might well be out to get us all, perhaps especially you. No, my imminent demise does not usually keep me up nights. The threat seems muted to me and apparently immutable to you. You cannot seem to turn those feelings off, so you can’t even enjoy a supper. ... What was intended to celebrate togetherness blows up in our faces again. The bitter accusations seem to come from nowhere, blindsiding me and my bruised better intentions again. You will be inconsiderate during and inconsolable after, and never get around to apologizing for ruining another's might-have-been. ...The distance might not resolve anything for you, but I am coming to believe that I can do nothing for you. I once thought that your survival might depend upon my protecting you. I would hover, watchful and wary, seemingly ready to deflect any threat. ... Your imagined enemies never mustered any actual threatening activities, yet your reactions to their absence seemed to confirm their presence, though they never were actually there. Your defender was left opposing air, for there was never anything tangible there for me to protect you from. I eventually caught on that you inhabited a wholly different world and that your physical presence was little more than illusory. You no more stood before me than I could stand before you. You seemed capable of seeing right through anything I might perceive, and I proved myself just as capable of being unable to perceive anything about your world. Distance might be the only effective medicine. ... I never had the medicine I needed you to need from me, and that misconception's all on me. I was never your Don Quixote, though you most certainly might have always been my windmill. Lord, preserve would-be saviors, for their hearts seem too big for their bodies and therefore useless in this world. They might most benefit from studying heartlessness, lessons probably best delivered inadvertently by their CrazyPeople. ...One of the strangest can be easily mistaken for indifference. It was always one of the hardest won, gained only after many trials and even more errors. It appears to be a withdrawal, but it contains more intimacy and understanding than any of the more readily recognizable kinds. It no longer features heartfelt poems or roses or chocolates, or even best wishes, in the knowledge that even the least of those too easily turn into their opposite when encountering CrazyPeople. This love might be best measured by distance, for separation defines the hard-won depth of feeling and the only resolution capable of containing its caring. CrazyPeople and their families best relate to each other on quantum levels, their connections unperturbed by distance. They possess only the strangest of strange attractors. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 09/04/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-04T17:01:55-07:00

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. ... 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. ... That place, too, I'd passed by for more than fifty years without ever feeling curious enough to stop. ... 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. ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me ReStarting our Never-ending Porch Remodeling Project. ...Our never-ending porch remodeling project restarted after a long pause, with significant progress made over the summer on fabricating and painting railing parts which were inspired by The Muse’s historical research. ... Our master carpenter, Marco, began precise fitting and installation of the railings, focusing first on sections with the tightest fits. Final steps still include cladding and painting posts and beams, and building some back stairs, which should keep the work ongoing through September, I suspect. I expect the finished result to last for generations and I remain actively engaged in the process. ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me deep in Contemplation, my most unlikely superpower. ...I describe a twice-daily meditation routine lasting about 45 minutes total, maintained for over fifty years, as a defining personal practice. I describe this routine as a unique advantage, not a competition, for I believe contemplative time essential and necessarily purposeless—providing a pause from purposeful pursuits and helping me manage the mental friction of daily life. I find meditation particularly beneficial before difficult challenges, providing me access to insight and enabling me to face obstacles with less anxiety. ... I compare this regimen to tending a rose garden, requiring consistent attention for satisfaction, and, ultimately, I consider the intangible benefits of this habit to be the true measure of my wealth and personal development. ...I describe how a self-imposed tradition turns writing birthday poems for my grandchildren into a complex and stressful obligation. Each year, I wrestle with doubt and creative block, feeling pressure to make every Bag Poem unique and relevant to the child’s current life. Inspiration arrives gradually, with ideas transforming from scattered phrases into a complete poem, which—once begun—flows quickly and needs little revision. Although the process feels fraught with anxiety and humility, the final product puts the grandchild at the center, serving as a keepsake for their special day. This story closes with a poem excerpt, celebrating a granddaughter’s style and marking her birthday moment. ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me driving through a neighborhood I used to be a part of but am no longer. I consider how ‘home’ has been more of an emotional space for me, shaped by many previous moves and difficult transitions. Every residence, regardless of how long I occupied it, left a permanent mark on me, creating a growing bittersweetness. Revisiting old homes or neighborhoods brings both familiarity and alienation, underscoring that while memories and attachments remain, the physical spaces and sense of identity tied to them inevitably change. Attempts to improve or maintain these homes were never futile, just extraneous, recognizing that the actual ‘home’ lies in my personal history, not in the bricks and mortar left behind. ..."…The Muse isn't certain what she wants to do with the furniture the new treasures will displace." This FollowingChapters Story finds The Muse and I HaulingAssets with rented equipment. I describe the experience of renting a U-Haul truck for a move, finding delight in the challenges and mishaps that come from driving a large, unfamiliar vehicle. I recount challenges like navigating narrow streets, a prolonged hunt for breakfast, altered routes due to GPS alerts and road closures, and ultimately, a breakdown that required a tow and extended our journey to fifteen hours. Despite the setbacks, the experience created memorable stories, highlighting how most people are out of their element with moving trucks, making such moves both stressful and entertaining. ..."…acknowledging just how first-order stupid even the brightest of us can seem." In this FollowingChapters Story, I acknowledge how stupid I can be while acknowledging how damaging those who tenaciously remain stupid about their own stupidity (SecondOrderStupidity) can seem. I argue that a deepening societal malaise isn’t simply caused by incompetence, but by a pervasive ignorance of one’s own ignorance—termed “SecondOrderStupidity.” ... I warn that while such thinking seems self-destructive, its effects unfold slowly and inflict considerable damage on society at large. Both political leaders and citizens, rich and poor, are caught in this cycle of denial, seeking satisfaction in ways that only reinforce their foolishness, with no quick remedy in sight. Gregorius Fentzel:* The Three Orders of the Human Race - Alternate Title: The Combination of Church and State to Govern the People - Series/Book Title: The Triumph of the Four Cardinal Virtues (17th century) - *[Gregorius Fentzel was a German copperplate engraver active in Nuremberg during the mid-17th century. Few details of his life are known, and his works are primarily based on the designs of other artists, most notably the Flemish painter Maerten de Vos.] ...This writing week felt like a return to ordinary times, though little shifted. Our never-ending porch remodeling project Re-Started, moving from a fabrication and preparation stage into actual installation! By the end of the writing week, five of sixteen porch railing segments had been installed. ... I found reason to explain (again) my long-term pattern of indifferent Contemplation, my secret superpower. ... The Muse and I broke down in a relatively isolated corner of Oregon in HaulingAssets. I ended this writing week reflecting on SecondOrderStupid, which is to stupid as genius is to regular intelligence. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

SecondOrderStupidity

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-04T06:31:04-07:00

The Combination of Church and State to Govern the People Series/Book Title: The Triumph of the Four Cardinal Virtues ...*[Gregorius Fentzel was a German copperplate engraver active in Nuremberg during the mid-17th century. Few details of his life are known, and his works are primarily based on the designs of other artists, most notably the Flemish painter Maerten de Vos.] "…acknowledging just how first-order stupid even the brightest of us can seem." ...Previously, I recall reassurance as a nearly constant reminder that civilization was not crumbling around us. However, nobody needs to go to all the trouble to become a pessimist to experience a continual sense of doom stalking them now. Some insist that this sense comes from a dramatic increase in the sheer number of stupid people. Where we used to produce people capable of brilliance, we now churn out vast numbers for whom even a basic level of competence seems unattainable. Authorities cite increasingly poor performance on standardized tests as prima facie evidence of the cause of our downfall, but I disagree with these questionable authorities, for they seem to suffer from the same disease as their studies' subjects. ... In this instance, they exhibit abiding ignorance about their own ignorance. The lens through which they pass judgements seems cloudy beyond their personal embarrassment, rendering them decidedly worse than merely clueless about their condition, but SecondOrderStupid. The SecondOrderStupid cannot conceive of their own more than obvious-to-everyone-else stupidity. They swallow innuendo as if it were an obvious fact. They base their conclusions upon utterly baseless evidence. They trust those with obvious conflicts of interest. They don't assess anything skeptically, with the possible exception of facts that might undermine their a priori conceptions. They engage in inquiry to prove their preconceptions rather than to upset them. In fact, they consider any information that contradicts their own convictions to be self-evidently erroneous. They do not believe that they believe in conspiracy theories, but rather in self-evident facts that elites refuse to acknowledge. Over time, the SecondOrderStupid might well extinguish themselves. Between vaccine denial and the profligate use of herbal remedies, they might well ultimately bring themselves to their knees. Unfortunately, though, such evolutionary remedies work only on time scales requiring generations to accomplish their inevitable ends. It's no consolation, then, to understand the ultimately self-destructive nature of SecondOrderStupidity because it works far too slowly to affect what seems to ail so very many of us today. Nor will there be any talking anyone out of this proclivity because their SecondOrderStupidity precludes them from meaningfully intervening in their self-interests. They seemingly must self-destruct, even though they ensure significant collateral damage in the process. ...I am told that some believe our incumbent continually exhibits brilliance. This must be a form of intelligence I never learned to perceive because to me he simply seems SecondOrderStupid, working hard to invent a ThirdOrder superior in every way to the SecondOrder variety, vacuity my meager mind cannot even remotely conceive of understanding. We were once a society separated from our mother country, England, by a common language; now, we're shockingly similar. Their SecondOrderStupidity gifted themselves with Brexit. Ours encourages us to exit the world stage to squabble over policies that couldn't achieve a positive impact if iterated forever. The evidence seems self-evident unless, of course, you've been blessed with the increasingly requisite SecondOrderStupidity necessary to sanguinely support civilization's undermining. It might be true that a society's destruction can only ever come via invitation. No hostile takeover could ever succeed like an invitation to a Tea Party might. The idle chatter over bone china cups ultimately proves undermining. The austerity insisted upon could only ever be the absolute blood enemy of prosperity, except for those for whom prosperity no longer matters. The very wealthy complain of taxes as if a tax had ever once threatened their competitive advantage. They complain so others can relate to them. Those who can't quite make it from paycheck to paycheck blame their situation on the taxes their uncaring government loads upon them, just like the billionaires do. In this way, they hope someone will do what nobody could ever deliver to anyone else. ... The billionaires: because they genuinely cannot imagine enough, never having experienced it. The paupers, because they've never once experienced that magical state, either. Each seems SecondOrderStupid, tenaciously unaware of just how stupid they surely behave. Enough can never come from accumulation. Enough begins by accepting the way things are, by acknowledging just how first-order stupid even the brightest of us can seem. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

HaulingAssets

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-03T06:29:08-07:00

"…The Muse isn't certain what she wants to do with the furniture the new treasures will displace." The pioneer tradition survives with the presence of a thriving wagon-lending industry led by a cleverly-named company: U-Haul. The name suggests that you do your own hauling, much as your post-Civil War ancestors loaded up their meager belongings and hauled their assets the better part of three thousand miles to Oregon. ... Now, it's possible to rent one for the short duration of a modern migration. Who hasn't been shanghaied into helping someone move something or engaged in some shanghaing themselves? We maintain our treasures the same way we tend to acquire them, by carting them all over creation. I remember the time when my to-be first wife and I were able to easily cram everything we owned into the back of a Volkswagen Squareback Stationwagon. That was the last move either of us ever executed that didn't involve renting some wagon. Those who rent wagons and vans tend to be the ones least capable of handling them. In one move, I rented a huge pick-up truck, nearly the size of a Monster Truck, and subsequently crushed the rear side panel of a small sedan parked in the narrow space next to me. I was surprised by the truck's narrow turning radius, so I began that move by leaving a humiliating note under my victim's windshield wiper blade. The Muse says she always checks all the boxes when renting a U-Haul rig because it's just more likely that somebody will manage to get into an accident while attempting to use it. She committed us to purchase some lovely Stickley furniture from an old family friend. This would require a one-way hire from southwest Portland back to nearer the center of the universe, a seemingly straightforward situation. Neither of us had driven a truck in a quarter of a century, so what could actually go wrong with the scenario? ... We requested a ten-footer, but they only had a fifteen-footer available. At our insistence, they located a ten-footer, but we'd have to drive a few extra miles to fetch it. Our friend, from whom we were purchasing the furniture, asked if we might help move some other stuff between her daughter-in-law's father's place, her daughter’s, and hers. She committed to hiring movers to heft the treasures if we'd contribute the vehicle for moving. We spent three hours shuttling between people's garages, with me learning how to drive a high and wide vehicle again, and The Muse leading the procession in The Schooner. Between our early start and the shuttle trips, we'd missed breakfast, so as we headed for the home-bound interstate, The Muse, as leader of the procession, pulled off in search of gas and breakfast. She chose a suburb featuring particularly narrow streets, the kind where van drivers like me tend to hold their breath when passing through. I had not learned quite where the edges of that vehicle lay, so I somehow managed to navigate through several clearly 'no way' passages before surrendering, calling The Muse and pleading for her just to get back onto the freeway. ...I managed to take the wrong exit and direct us back toward town, while still driving a vehicle the approximate size of a double-wide parking space. Again, we found ourselves wending through streets that were obviously too narrow. We were again unable to find a place where we could at least get some coffee, a seemingly unlikely situation in a city known for its coffee culture. Put the potential purchaser in a huge vehicle, and the choices shrink into the infinitesimal. We pulled back onto the freeway heading home, though we pulled off at the last truck stop to finally grab some breakfast around noon. After that, we settled into an easy rhythm with The Muse leading at five miles beneath the posted speed limit and me following her in my vehicle, which lacked cruise control. We found the traveling refreshing, free from the pressure to keep up with and pass slower-moving trucks. ... We'd wasted an easy hour and a half searching for breakfast in town, but I noticed the miles slipped by more easily in a vehicle with bigger wheels. I concocted a story where vehicles with bigger wheels covered any distance in fewer miles than any smaller-wheeled vehicles. ... If I measure distance in wheel rotations, the smaller the wheel, the more rotations it makes. I suspect I was covering at least twenty percent more ground than The Muse was driving in the same distance. Such are the imaginings of anyone trapped in a moving vehicle without their CarPlay, which wasn't working with that van's radio. GMaps was changing our route without notifying us of any road closures, so The Muse, in the lead, chose to pull off and check what was happening. ... The best information I could find suggested a fire interrupting traffic fifty miles ahead, and I suggested heading for a slightly longer and lonelier alternate route. As we headed toward that route, the U-Haul engine began surging, and the vehicle lost power. I pulled over as I watched The Muse pass over the bridge too far. ... I limped into a nearby truck stop lot while the Muse caught up. We sat for two hours before U-Haul’s roadside assistance confirmed that they'd dispatched a tow truck to haul the vehicle to our home. We arrived home fifteen hours after we'd set out that morning, the tow truck driver dropping off our albatross before heading out on his three-hour return trip in the gathering dark. Had The Muse not pulled over to investigate the GMap anomaly, and had I not opted to bypass that bridge, I can easily imagine a more memorable breakdown. UHaul promised to reimburse us for the regrettable dinner we bought while waiting for the tow truck. We spent an entertaining couple of hours watching truck drivers refuel their vehicles. ... This happens because we're so unfamiliar with the vehicles we drive in that context. They might just as well rent those trucks to children, as reliable as most of us are behind those wheels. This rental will likely end up costing U-Haul Central multiples of whatever revenue we'll be responsible for. ... Oh, and The Muse isn't certain what she wants to do with the furniture the new treasures will displace. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Homes

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-02T03:42:54-07:00

Arthur Rothstein: Home of Postmaster Brown, Old Rag, Virginia (1935) "Every past inhabits just such a shadow visible when any prior owner drives past." For me, home has not always been where my heart lives. It has been a place where I could usually rely on finding a clean pair of underwear and a decent breakfast. I considered most of those Homes, twenty-three by my accounting, safe haven for a spell, if not always necessarily comfortable. They included temporary housing when my life was in transition, and permanent housing that ultimately ended up being temporary. Duration of residence seems to have made little difference in how deeply or whether I permanently imprinted on the least of those places, for I imprinted on each and every one in turn. I must have always been a homebody at heart, a heart each home would eventually wound if not necessarily break. I still consider every place I ever lived "my home," even if I haven't set snoot or foot across its threshold in more than fifty years. I'm one to want to at least drive by the place, only to not immediately recognize it, what with all the changes it has undergone in my absence. One of the places I once called home in Portland advertises as an Airbnb now, though I'd never consider staying in the place. Too many semi-sacred memories could be disrupted by seeing its current state. I invested altogether too much of myself, failing to turn that place into a palace. I'd be afraid someone else, better financed, might have succeeded where I'd so obviously failed. Seeing it more fully refurbished might undermine my own memories of the place, which, like occupation, make up the bulk of my remaining relationship with it now. Each one of those Homes remains an implicate part of me and my legend. I can safely drive by and fondly recall, but I dare not enter there. At some level, I attempt to re-enter every time I revisit a neighborhood where I used to live. These experiences seem a combination of familiarity and strangeness, of intimacy and alienation. It quickly becomes clear that I no longer live there, that I am no longer of that place I once found sublimely fundamental to my very identity. Time has always already taken that time away. What was once so familiar that I wasn't terribly aware of its presence, becomes a painfully present awareness that whatever I once so identified with, left little tangible behind when it left. We abandon our lives as many times as we move. Our lives, ever vigilant and constantly aware, move somewhere else along with us. Our former safe haven becomes the oddest strange attractor. Maybe I return just to feel my heartstrings getting tugged again. That time has gone. I cannot mistake the present for any familiar past. The present always seems like an especially dystopian prior, however many improvements intervening years thought they wrought. The unfinished past, constantly yearning as it was, was not completed in its future, but degraded there. There are no such things as improvements, just disfigurements, acknowledging that every part was perfect in its time and place, but that its time and place were never part of anybody's possessions, regardless of the deeds and mortgages that ultimately failed to tie you to that place. Time slinked forward. The neighbor died one evening, and his family more or less abandoned the place next door before selling its side yard to a developer who built a curiously narrow house that completely encroached on the only view our old place ever had. Every past inhabits just such a shadow visible when any prior owner drives past. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Bagging

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-09-01T06:10:42-07:00

"…the world sure seemed to be her oyster." I might be most skilled at creating complications for myself. This tendency never seems more present than when one of my grandchildren's birthdays approaches. Then, I feel compelled to live up to a little tradition of my own making, one that complicates what I might otherwise approach as a genuine celebration. (I reliably transform this opportunity into an obligation, and not just any odd old one, either, but a genuinely impossible-to-fulfill one.) Where I might have penned a small, short poem to the celebrant, tradition calls for a full-blown Bag Poem. A Bag Poem typically covers both sides of a paper shopping bag and runs three or four stanzas. I never know where to start, though I have more than a decade of experience creating these. I've never failed to complete one, but I've also never failed to feel as though I couldn't possibly create another one, either. This reliably delivers a 'want-to, need-to, but can't' dilemma, which I must wrestle to ground to finish the present. This wrestling match always takes me backwards rather than forward at first, as if I might make progress through regression. I am experienced enough at my age to understand that I cannot rely on past success, for each Birthday Bag Poem must be original enough to address current topics. Each must be fitted into the world our birthday boy or girl inhabits, serving as a sort of time capsule that marks the moment in time. Never knowing where to begin seems to be where I reliably start. From there to backward, even though I know I will not find much besides reassurance there, though past successes easily overwhelm my sense of possibility. Maybe I've already used up all the creativity originally allotted me. I feel as if I might have become a has-been. ... The Muse might notice long pregnant pauses in my presence. I sure seem to be spending a lot of time alone with my eyes closed without sleeping. I'm conjuring then, hoping to skip into a groove, for Bag Poetry depends upon a stream of consciousness. Any impartial observer might swear that I just sat down and started writing there, as if engaged in writing prose, but I'm extruding a singular sort of poetry. ...The inspiration had to come first. These often come disembodied: a word or simple phrase with no supporting scenery or characters. I cogitate on those, for I will reject a few before finally choosing, or is it the inspiration itself that chose? ... I catch myself spouting lines as if declaiming some gothic work. ... The disembodied notion begins to take on a life of its own. Then, after a terribly long time stuck, I feel my words flowing again. I begin and am finished almost before I get started. The result edits as easily as it created. Nearly nothing ever changes from the first draft to the final copy. Transcribing it to the bag using a permanent Sharpie tends to be the most challenging part of the process. ...I am saved by then, well on the way to the redemption I hardly deserve. I procrastinated, or, said another way, I waited out that muse, which had always visited before. I practiced being one of those with little faith. This feeds my humility better than it ever feeds my ego. A birthday poem, though, shouldn't ever be about the poet. It must focus upon the story it's telling to the birthday boy or girl as if they are the center of the universe, which they will be when celebrating their birthday. The Bag Poem will be read between distracting cake and more tangible presents. It will get set aside to be resurrected on some odd bedtime in lieu of the usual bednight story. There, it will elicit a moment in time when the listener had just turned ten and the world sure seemed to be her oyster. ..."As the unquestioned Stylin’Queen of this family, I, your grandfather, wish you a very happy birthday, ...the sort of gift one tends to get when dealing with us older humans. ...I cut quite the profile in my youth, ...not all that great when compared to yours.)" ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Contemplation

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-31T05:34:02-07:00

Old man (philosopher) sitting in front of the window, in a dark room, with a spiral staircase on the right. The light falls in through an arc-shaped window on his open book. On the right, a servant tending the fire. "I feel wealthy beyond all reason." ...I spend nearly three-quarters of an hour meditating every day, half in the morning and the balance in the afternoon. I have maintained this routine for more than fifty years, rarely missing a session, for I consider my Contemplation to be my sole competitive advantage, even though my practice never was in any way a competition. (Though I do find the concept of competitive meditation hillarious!) I consider my practice advantageous because I believe it enables me to be, like punctuation enables a coherent sentence to exist. A deliberate stopping for a few minutes seems to pay deep respect for momentum, acknowledging that it never comes from nothing and can be easily over-used if not doled our deliberately. It enables me to be something other than an outlet for kenetic energy, to slow down and perhaps better see the soup I swim through. I hold the purpose of my Contemplation to be a necessary purposelessness. I allow the other twenty-three hours and change to be arrainged for purposeful pursuit. ... I allow the friction building up against my forward progress to disperse. I permit my monkey mind to climb down out of the tree for a few minutes. I set aside my sometimes frantic pursuits, sometimes even at inconvenient times, because that's been my practice. This was not always my practice, though once exposed to it, once I learned that there was nothing for me to learn before I could engage, I became a dedicated practitioner, though I am in no way evangelical about this. I believe that I could not have become who I have become without this practice in my life, though this assertion could not possibly be disprovable. I hold this principle to be self-evident. It need not be that way for anyone but me. I get especially contemplative before engaging in a significant effort. I find it opens me up to stumble upon insights that seem to render challenges less daunting. Rather than rushing into an engagement, I'll hang back a bit before entering the often disabling context within which great challenges always exist. The context resident there can render even intuition and knowledge bare and leave me feeling even more inept than usual, which is really saying something. My imposter, perhaps my most well-developed character, can try on any personna it cares to in contemplation without having to worry about succeeding or failing in actual application. I can even fail to maintain my beginner's mind and still succeed when medidating, and frequently do. When contemplating, whatever emerges during the period counts as successful. If I enter with the intention of emptying my mind and my mind fills up instead and springs a leak or two, that outcome counts as successful because that's what happens. Our here in the non-contemplative world, successes and failures might be easily descerned, but in the contemplative world, every outcome can be properly judged successful because it's what actually happened. It happened that way and so it might just as well have been meant to be. It occurred so it proves superior to every competing non-emergent alternative. One of the innumerable keys to successful contemplation remains the acceptance of whatever happens as success. This sure seems easy to say but might remain a contuing challenge for me until well after my dying day. I tell myself that at least I'm getting practice with acceptance, not that everyone, all the time, isn't. It just seems to me that my setting aside some time each day to expose myself to the possibility of success, especially success on something other than my terms, might serve to build up some resilience to failures. ... I bounce into and inevitably off of my share of brick walls. My life isn't simply a rose garden, either, though The Muse and I do maintain a rose garden out our livingroom window. I think of my Contemplation as similar to maintaining a rose garden. Rose gardens tend to be a pain in the butt because they need tending. Miss a week deadheading and we might just as well have been keeping a windy weed patch. Stay true to this one small intention and the possibility exists to experience the scent of a freshly bloomed Peace rose and to see the brilliant color of a freshly-popped Henry Fonda. I know of no way to undo the influence over fifty years of fealty has given me. I've always secretly considered this intangible to be my sole source of wealth. It was never what I created or the good and bad works I've left behind, but the enduring potential excusing myself twice each day has produced, a value just as inestimable as it is invisible. The most valuable must ultimately be the most intangible. I feel wealthy beyond all reason. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

ReStart

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-30T05:31:37-07:00

Charles Frederick Keller: Swing Shift (1940) "I intend to watch." Our Never-ending Porch Remodeling Project entered a new phase yesterday. In many ways, the effort was ReStart after an extended suspension, though one remote carpenter, our painter, and I had been busy over the summer, even if our chief contractor and carpenter hadn't been. The crew and I had been busy fabricating and painting porch railing pieces, which might not seem like much until you see the detailed design documents. The Muse designed these railings, which represent a melding of key elements from century-old porch railing designs she discovered while researching the history of porch railings. Her design includes passive elements to prevent water from pooling on either the top or bottom rail, as well as elements such as height, which have long fallen out of fashion, if not building codes. The balusters required twelve separate steps to fabricate, and The Muse decided their spacing, again, based upon her extensive research into the history of baluster placement. To compensate for the railing's short height, she included two cables to be strung above the top rail, thereby satisfying building codes without overwhelming the railing profile. (Traditionally, porch railing was never higher than the bottom of the front window when viewed from the street. This produced a reliably clean and uncluttered line, which modern building codes completely undermine unless one can get clever.) The painter ultimately resorted to spray painting many of the components. This used more paint but saved so much labor that I didn't mind buying a couple more gallons of gold-plated paint. With two hundred and sixty-four balusters, hand-painting five sides might have taken forever. He screwed them upright into board bases and spray-painted them in long, uniform rows, ten or fifteen at a time. I'd painted post covers and crown moulding trim by hand in what turned out to be the wrong paint, once the painter came on board. He proposed using a satin finish to prevent dust from discoloring the finish, and this made sense to me, even though the change meant having to repaint some of what I'd already finished. When constructing for the ages, one avoids cutting corners. We painted each piece of the railing with at least four coats of paint. The first coat is a preservative, followed by an oil-based primer, and then two coats of the satin-finish top color. As the railings are actually installed between the newly poured concrete pillars completed a year ago in an earlier phase of this seemingly never-ending effort, the installer applies a quick coat of the preservative on all the cut ends. The railing components were cut to measure to fit between the pillars and posts, with at least an inch of extra length to allow for precise fitting when installed. Marco, the master carpenter, arrived early yesterday morning. I saw him pull up nearly an hour before Jesse, the contractor, said he'd arrive. They surveyed the space, seeking to determine where to begin their labors. They decided four times, with better ideas occurring to them in easy succession, before deciding to fabricate the two front railings first, as they spanned fixed space between concrete pillars. Other railings bridge between a pillar and a post, a pillar and a wall, or a post and another post, and those involve more variability when installing. A rigid context seemed best to pilot the first railing installations. Marco worked for about four hours, fitting the bottom rails and carefully measuring their balusters. He was not nearly finished before the sun chased him off the job that afternoon. Jesse had taken most of the painted elements back to his shop, where Steve, another master carpenter, will assemble railing sets with access to more precision tools than might be set up on the crude sideyard table here. Posts and beams, installed after the concrete foundation and pillars were poured, will still need to be clad and painted. Once Kurt the painter and I had finished painting the components, I felt like we might be close to finishing the project, but cladding those posts and beams should keep the driveway pop-up paint shop in business through the month. This means that I can look forward to dressing in my overalls most every morning between now and autumn. I would rather be engaged and close to the action. This result should easily last through the upcoming century. I confided to Jesse that I expected it to last through at least my next reincarnation and that I would be watching. I intend to watch. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 08/28/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-28T19:15:09-07:00

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. ... Yes, he's very likely guilty of everything he's been accused of, just as he always was. ... 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. ... 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. ..."I will not have heard the news because I wouldn't have been listening for it." ...The Muse turned seventy, a milestone that should evoke serious reflection but instead reveals her enduring vibrancy. While traditionally, this birthday signifies a transition to old age, she continues to thrive, taking on roles such as Port Commissioner and performing in piano recitals alongside children. I was not able to express profound sentiments on this occasion, acknowledging the mystery of creativity that often eludes straightforward expression. Despite the challenges of articulating our bond, I recognized The Muse’s essential role in shaping my identity and my creativity. ... The Muse, while sometimes elusive, plays a vital role in inspiring and directing our creative endeavors. ...I reflect on my return home after a trip, noting how my absence disturbed the routines of both myself and my pets. ... I express a longing for the novelty of travel, contrasting it with the sameness of local food options. I describe a sense of timelessness that comes from traveling, where daily schedules lose their meaning. Upon returning, I experienced a mix of energy and disorientation, struggling to reconnect with the world while finding solace in nostalgia. I acknowledge the adjustment period needed to reacquaint myself with home, recognizing it feels empty compared to the relative excitement of being away. ...This story discusses how project proposals often begin with misleading information, avoiding full disclosure to ensure approval and funding. ... This practice often stems from a fear of revealing too much, as full transparency could jeopardize support. Every project initially justified under these ‘False Pretenses,’ and while this approach may seem unethical, it reflects a common human desire for approval over criticism. Successful proposals often mask their flaws and uncertainties, with the understanding that every project was, at some point, deemed impossible to achieve. ..."Did I mention that beer prices have increased by about twenty percent in the last hundred days?" This FollowingChapters Story finds me struggling to adapt to living in the Third_World. I reflect on life in a deteriorating society, feeling fortunate to have previously avoided the humiliations faced by those living in the Third World. However, rising prices—like a twenty percent increase in the price of beer—signal a troubling decline. ... Stores are closingalong our Main Street, supply chains have been disrupted, and even basic items like paint are increasingly difficult to find and costly. I express my frustration over the plummeting dollar value and the inept leadership that has led to these results. As prices for staples rise, the uncertainty surrounding daily life grows, leading to a bleak outlook on the future. ...This FollowingChapters Story wonders what I'll choose for a next adventure after the current Septuagenarian painting effort finishes. I consider becoming a septuagenarian, noting the lack of a clear transition into this new phase of life. While managing health issues and new medications, I continue engaging in activities like painting, feeling both vulnerable and indispensable. ... As the porch remodeling project nears completion, I wonder what adventures await me in the following chapter, pondering the future as I acknowledge the physical and emotional changes accompanying my aging. ...Here, near The Center of the Universe, I despise the tail end of one season that just seems too Long, Hot, and Dry! Here, near The Center of the Universe, I despise the tail end of one season that just seems too Long, Hot, and Dry! I express a deep connection to my desert home, which currently suffers from extreme heat and drought. I describe the struggle of gardening under such conditions, where watering feels more like a chore than a joy. ... The cats adapt by seeking shade, while I reflect on my mixed feelings about the summer season. I recall the loss of a neighbor and my reluctance to engage in local events, attributing my discontent to the oppressive heat. Despite loving my home, I find the summer ultimately unbearable, reminiscent of the challenging seasons from other places I’ve lived. ...I still rose each morning determined to fulfill my self-assigned obligation, not always for the betterment of anything. If there's such a thing as the doldrums of summer, and I believe there must be, I was sailing through those horse latitudes this writing week. ... I began by trying to celebrate The Muse's entry into what might have been old age, except she foiled me by still being in the prime of her life. ... I am proud of having written that story, especially from the depths of my horse latitudes. I moaned while struggling to accommodate the inconveniences of suddenly living in the Third_World. ... I admitted that I must be older than I feel, wondering where I might find the instruction manual for proper comportment as an unwitting Septuagenarian. I ended this forlorn writing week with a complaint, bordering on whining, about the awfully LongHotDry season I have been struggling to tolerate. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

LongHotDry

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-28T04:45:52-07:00

George Elbert Burr: The Desert (19th-20th century) "…its presence always seems unreasonable, but only because it is." The center of my universe sits squarely in desert, though it claims to be a place of many waters. What was once a place of many waters has become a place of contested waters, as competing interests and a historically dry summer have left our river and streams barely trickling. Furthermore, the weather has seemed unrelenting, with very little moisture and extreme heat punishing even the more hopeful gardeners. ... What should be a pleasure becomes toil. What was supposed to be toil becomes all but impossible. It's too hot to even think about going outside some days and far to hot to imagine accomplishing anything out there, anyway. In here seems little better as closed windows come to feel as confining as jail bars. We try to open the windows overnight, but in late August, the overnight low temperatures remain intemperate, too hot to cool anything down. I sleep on a hardly restful hot pillow. I become fitful, as stir crazy as I get in the depths of winter when freezing fog holds me captive. I am native to this rimrock country, but I'm still adapting to its extremes. It's truly lovely here in spring and fall, and hellishly hot through most of every summer. We've gratefully gotten very little smoke this year. The cats go feral through the summer. They appear early each morning and about six each evening. Otherwise, they hide in the cooler shade beneath the bigger bushes, frequently crouching over the pond to wet their whistles. Their fur doesn't seem to encumber them, however hot it gets. They remain seemingly cool and collected, willing to come inside just long enough to feast before insisting that I open the door for them again. They most often prefer to dine al fresco in the shade of the back deck beneath the planters overflowing with petunia and Black-Eyed Susan. I might sit beside a mister as evening settles in, while supper-making heats the kitchen. I run sprinklers then, trying to bring the backyard temperature down to something tolerable. I love this place, and I despise it for some of each year. I fear Late Summer when the dust appears on the trails, when my old reliables turn back into unreliable companions. I sleep poorly and yawn my way through my predawn rituals. I work at my desk in pitch darkness, with the broad, double-hung window open to the world. I watch the dog walkers maintain their rigid schedules. We lost a neighbor this week, an old acquaintance who founded the third-oldest winery in this valley. The County Fair opened yesterday, and The Muse took her turn as a commissioner in the Port's booth. For the first time in several years, I have no booth obligations this year, so I probably won't attend the fair. It seems too hot out there, and I finally understand it's really for others. Last year, I could not find my favorite ice cream vendor, and the year before, I attended my first rodeo and left appalled after fifteen minutes. I had no idea it was basically Worldwide Wrestling, torturing innocent animals. Besides, I still have painting to do on our never-ending porch remodeling project. This has always been the season of my deepest discontent. In my earliest years, school would start and distract me until it started raining again. When I lived in Portland, the rains came earlier than they ever come here. Portland always was better watered. I have no defense against the worst of this season. It returns and reliably wounds me again. I suspect that even Heaven features one unbearable season. Everywhere I've been seems to include at least one. Some places I've lived featured four fundamentally unbearable seasons, each torturous for its own reason. At least, it reliably haunts just the tail end of one season here, though its presence always seems unreasonable, but only because it is. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Septuagenarian

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-27T04:54:07-07:00

Lewis Wickes Hine: Untitled [Furman Owens, 12-year-old mill worker, Augusta, Georgia] (1909, printed 1929) "…wondering what this Septuagenarian should do for a next adventure." I have just lately started realizing that I am actually over seventy years old, a genuine Septuagenarian. No job description accompanied this designation, and I could not discern any clear delineation that accompanied the transition into it. I continued as I had seemingly always done, though changes had been steadily encroaching on my habits. A decade ago, before I'd even turned sixty-five, I took no prescribed medications. Sure, my triglycerides were alarmingly high, but I lied to myself that I got a bye because I had inherited the condition, just as if everyone else with it somehow hadn't. I hadn't even experienced cataract surgery back then, as I was still a relative spring chicken. Then I inexplicably began aging. The cataract surgery began the upward spiral for me. My blood pressure spiked during prep for that procedure, so the surgeon refused to perform it. The Muse insisted, as only The Muse can insist, that it was time for me to acquire a physician, for I hadn't had one since before I'd turned fifty. That doctor found a few minor imperfections in me, which required him to prescribe certain medications. I instantly became a regular customer at the local drug store's drive-up window, there seemingly every week, since it seemed impossible to synchronize the prescriptions so that they would need refilling simultaneously. The cataract surgery was rescheduled and performed successfully once the lens installed in the first procedure was reattached after it had inexplicably come loose during use. After, I felt exponentially more vulnerable. I was still able to mow my lawn with an antique push mower then, justifying the exertion as decent aerobic exercise. I'd experience some aches and pains, but nothing terribly chronic, though my range of motion slowly became less fluid and more painful. I suffered an inexplicable bout of bursitis from repetitive painting motion and hired a professional to finish a job I would have previously easily completed myself. My barefoot shoes wore out after at least a decade of wear, and I couldn't for the life of me find an acceptable replacement pair. This had become a painfully repetitive feature of my life as my preferred styles went out of fashion. I would still look spiffy in bell-bottoms if I could get them. Gratefully, the American Song Book didn't change even though cRap like Hamilton began taking to the Broadway stage. I am now "of an age," as even I used to say before I knew what that phrase disclosed. I still don't know. I do know that I increasingly feel my age, whatever that means. My painter, Kurt, and I cut a colorful shadow as we work together, two Septuagenarians limping through another procedure. We have been painting porch rail parts for the prior few weeks, finally zeroing in on completion. Kurt mentioned yesterday that if I play my cards right, I might never have to engage in this sort of wholesale effort featuring weeks of making only painstaking progress. With luck, he said, I might have to refinish a window sill or an area around a faucet, but no more scaffolding-assisted productions in my future. I rather enjoyed participating in those productions, even when they overwhelmed my fading capabilities. I had not been hoping for a cessation of those particular hostilities, for they left me feeling momentarily indispensable. How will I express my indispensability in the future? Septuagenarians are said to lack much of a future. Most of us have incurable heart disease. Our prescriptions stabilize our chronic conditions for now, but won't forever. Each of us is failing along rather predictable lines. Even those of us still exercising understand that we hold a fading hand. What once renewed us will eventually become beyond us. I wasn't quite fifty when The Muse and me discovered this house a quarter of a century ago, and I commenced to dig out about half the plantings the prior owners had installed. I chased evergreen roots halfway to China and managed to more or less stabilize the yard. I stripped the house and repainted it twice. Now, the porch remodeling project, over two years since we started it, threatens to finish and leave me unemployed, wondering what this Septuagenarian should do for a next adventure. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Third_World

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-26T05:09:45-07:00

Katsukawa Shunsho 勝川春章: Man Falling Backward, Startled by a Woman’s Ghost over a River (c. ..."Did I mention that beer prices have increased by about twenty percent in the last hundred days? ...I wondered what it might be like to live in the Third_World, though I never felt any need to try to experience it. I felt fortunate that I was born in a place and time where I'd not have to cope with those humiliations. I felt no intimation that my nation might one day choose to join the ranks of the steadfastly downwardly mobile, yet here we are, guided by a self-proclaimed billionaire into despair. The price of beer has increased about twenty percent since he took office because he's so ignorant about international trade. He slaps a tariff on aluminum because we use more than our trading partner, this to encourage domestic production of a mineral of which only others have adequate deposits to support an industry. Similar idiocies abound. Essential services have become optional, often unavailable at any price. Employment has become increasingly difficult for people to find. Prices soar while wages remain flat or falling. Stores have been closing along our Main Street. Supply chains remain disrupted, with some completely broken. The likelihood of not finding something I'm shopping for has become a virtual certainty, whatever the commodity, product, or service I might seek. I called the paint store to learn that I can't buy another two gallons of the paint I need to finish my porch project because the supply truck didn't arrive. No, they have no idea when it might appear. I was hoping to start hanging the railing this week, but without paint, I'll have to wait instead. Oh, the paint costs forty percent more than it did a year ago, too. I wait for a 40% off sale before I buy because otherwise I can't stomach the price: a hundred dollars a gallon and climbing. The value of the almighty dollar has plummeted since these idiots took charge. They've squandered generations of goodwill and devalued the world's reserve currency. Who knows how much longer our former trading partners will stand by waiting for some rationality to come from these clowns? Those of us here, on the ground, have found no reliable source for anything, either. Innocent people get arrested and deported for the crime of being more human than their captors. The war on once-common human decency continues in earnest. Their captors will eventually be arrested, convicted, and receive well-deserved sentences; their Following Orders Defense will be worthless in the face of real justice. In Third_World nations, the rulers eventually become the victims and the victims eventually become the rulers again. Lazy people despair over what the opposition doesn't seem to be doing, as if they could see what was happening. Things are not as they seem. The junta has been steadily losing authority since it took the oath, having never had any intention of upholding it. Each betrayal has resulted in a lessening of power. They're frantic now, frantic and probably even more dangerous, but futilely so. They don't know how they'll manage to retain power for very much longer. They know best how tenuous their hold has already become. We can tell by how little attention issues we really care about get mentioned. Beer costs twenty percent more now than it did a hundred days ago. Milk has seen even greater increases, as has the all-American cheeseburger. I now eat lentils for breakfast, having permanently given up on eggs. The uncertainty soils the day. Will I be able to paint, or will my painter and I sit idle, unable to work because some jerk had a conniption over aluminum? What about those increasingly concerning Jeffrey Epstein files? We all know the truth will eventually come out, and it will prove damning, though the party of pedophiles will probably circle their wagons and muster a collective So What? Their self-proclaimed “Christian” faith seems primarily self-serving. Did I mention that beer prices have increased by about twenty percent in the last hundred days? ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

FalsePretenses

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-25T04:44:24-07:00

Jan Sadeler I: The False Shepherd (c. 1575) "There never were any other options." I was reminded again yesterday, while reviewing a justification statement for a USDA Forest Service project in our watershed, how projects tend to start. They virtually never begin with a full disclosure of conditions and intentions, for revealing those details could only confuse what the author hoped might be a straightforward process of receiving approval of their proposal and consequent funding. Anyone might understand that one must pick and choose rather carefully lest too much disclosure encourage an unresolvable mess. Certain aspects of the effort naturally get underplayed, while others become overemphasized. There's rarely any safety in the middle ground, either, for funding authorities require a relatively simple story with clear objectives, heroes, and villains. The result won't precisely be filed under the category of fiction, though it might just as well have been. Anyone opposing such an initiative always faces numerous potential disqualifications. Focusing solely on the inevitable and necessary oversimplifications might yield far too many objections to be of much use when litigating. Successful challenges tend to find an Achielle’ tendon that closely maps to some universal legal precedent, one capable of disqualifying the whole without necessarily exhuming the entire graveyard of omissions that most proposals try to obscure. One well-placed arrow can kill a bad idea just as dead as an avalanche might. Focus upon finding some path of least resistance. The authors of these proposals are well aware of what they haven't disclosed. The listed risks often appear overly optimistic and rarely suggest any possibility of catastrophe. Part of the art of proposal writing lies in appearing capable of handling any contingency. Mentioned downsides usually exclusively include only the more manageable ones. True catastrophes fall into a tacit category labeled Unthinkables. These are rarely mentioned, and when included, tend to be heavily discounted as if absurd to even consider, given their extreme unlikelihood of actually occurring. One or, at most, two of these can, when properly framed, make the project proposer seem even more capable due to their ability to confidently predict away catastrophe. Those who disagree might be easily characterized as cowards. Most of these FalsePretenses are offered for the very best of reasons, or at least the very best of reasons from the proposer's perspective. The proposer properly fears full disclosure, if only because their project's benefactor is rarely experienced enough to understand the differences between apparent and probable difficulties. In such instances, full disclosure seems equivalent to suicide. One focuses their benefactor's attention on beneficial outcomes and acceptable challenges. The utter impossibility of ever achieving the proposed end should never appear in any proposal, though every effort ever proposed, at the moment of proposal, was, indeed, utterly impossible to achieve. Always was and always will be. The reality that every successful (and unsuccessful) project was initially justified under FalsePretenses says nothing about the project proposer's morality or ethical underpinnings, other than to suggest that they are each quite human. We seek approval, not criticism. We want support, not an inquisition. We conflate approval with success, though every failure began with what was initially considered a successful proposal. This sin, if universal, usually hardly qualifies as a serious infraction. The proposal game has always been questionable, and adheres to intricate and fairly well-understood rules. The desire to accomplish something encounters the desire to avoid catastrophe, and the manner of play seems to inevitably resemble Liar's Poker. Approving the proposal serves as just the first of ultimately innumerable assessments, any of which could spell life or death for this project. The most successful ones are rejected before they cause much damage or manage to maintain their useful fictions until they can deliver something of value. There never were any other options. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

BetweenTimes

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-24T06:56:07-07:00

Ben Shahn: Untitled (Cherry Street, New York City) (1933-1935) "…napping fitfully." The Muse and I returned from our latest toodle to enter into BetweenTimes. We sufficiently disrupted the rhythms that ruled our schedules before we left that we could not merely slip back under their influence. The cats distrust us now, with Max the most vocal. He refuses to leave my side, crying whenever I slip into an adjoining room or outside for a minute. He shows up frantic, seeming to plead for my continued presence. Molly shows her displeasure in other ways but also seems flummoxed, though no more flummoxed than The Muse and I seem. The convenience of being in one place for an extended time seemed most attractive when we were travelling. The country seems, if not exactly a food desert, more like a food isthmus, with limited options that mostly sum to boring sameness—burgers, fries, burgers, fries, followed by even more of even more of the same. We sought inconvenience to disrupt the boredom inherent in any easy-on, easy-off arrangement. We sought to experience the places we passed through rather than merely pass by them. We ached for history lessons more than we ached for convenience. We arrived in a place where we already understand the history. There's little novelty near home. We traded continual discovery for a period of recovery and time zone stability. A sense of timelessness settles into a traveller when their usual cues get disrupted. Meal times become relative. Exercise schedules interrupted. So much gets placed on hold once we leave home; we become ghosts with little substance. We'd come and go without fanfare. We'd arrive to find the reservation The Muse had made moments before waiting for our arrival. We'd fade into and back out of existence, sometimes catching glimpses of ourselves heading the other direction in our rear-view mirrors. Home seems hollow in comparison, however heartfelt our arrival might seem. I felt filled with renewed energy on my first day back, while The Muse desperately needed a long nap with a cat clinging close. By my second day, my system suffered from disorientation, so it was my turn to laze around aimlessly. I managed a couple of errands, one of which even proved successful. I wanted nothing more than to be left alone. I couldn't quite stand to be in my own presence. I lost connection to the news during our absence, and I feel no strong compulsion to reconnect. I'm listening to a nostalgic audiobook instead. I am in my head more than in the world in this moment. I might be withdrawing from an uproar addiction. I feel no need to have headlines scream at me. A time will emerge from this period of relative nothingness. It takes longer to return than it ever takes to head out. Within minutes of beginning our recently ended excursion, we felt gone, and we found the sensation refreshing. Within minutes of returning, the cats started stalking us, seemingly expecting something from us. Food didn't seem to satisfy them then. They probably just wanted proximity and reassurance, the same stuff we all want. I will doubtless become the master of my place in this world again, though maybe not today. I feel too much uncertainty to immediately resettle back into my complacency again. Until then, I expect to be living BetweenTimes, neither here nor there or anywhere, really, napping fitfully. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Seventy

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-23T06:06:46-07:00

Sebald Beham: Moon: plate seven from The Seven Planets with the Zodiacs (1539) "She will say in ten thousand subtle ways which game we play today." The Muse turns Seventy today. This long-awaited milestone must mean something and should by all rights be portentous. Seventy has traditionally marked the boundary between middle and ever-encroaching old age, after which, like wearing white dresses after Labor Day, one does not do a whole raft of things, such as wearing Spandex in public. Her time has passed for dalliances. She should be exclusively engaged in serious business, and is and has been. Unlike most who achieve this milestone, The Muse seems to be in the prime of her life and still growing. She certainly seems to be enjoying herself, fulfilling the role of Port Commissioner and taking piano lessons alongside schoolchildren, even performing at public recitals. She still behaves as if she's ageless or timeless or both. The Muse turns Seventy today, and I find myself at a loss to say anything in any way profound. In the past, I've written a poem or a song for her birthday, never once knowing beforehand what I would perform. The great mystery seems to be that one never knows beforehand. The imprecision involved serves as probably the greatest barrier to entry for any budding poet or songwriter. With will, way might manifest, but will alone won't necessarily conjure anything on its own. Inspiration's involved, and curiosity. I've found that I must embrace the great mystery that seems only to encumber me. There's rarely a straightforward response to any seemingly straightforward question—no crooked response, either, other than what The Muse suggests. Still, some statement seems necessary if not necessarily prudent. I've often enough uttered utterly forgettables when reaching for memorable or even eternal. One tries to accomplish what one can, but often confuses purpose with plan. I have excused The Muse her many trespasses because each was necessary in order for me to be who I am. I fear that I cannot and do not properly reciprocate, for my gifts lie elsewhere if they lie anywhere at all. We travel well together, she the eternal navigator and I the inevitable driver, if only because I'm such a ninny that I cannot countenance anyone else's driving. I don't trust The Muse behind the wheel, even though I always know who's really driving. Seventy should warrant a genuine celebration where family and friends flock in from great distances to revel in The Muse's presence. Who bakes the birthday pie for the master piemaker? Who facilitates the gathering for the facile facilitator? Who plans the party for the planner? Who commishes for the commissioner? Who muses for The Muse? These are the questions whose answers elude us; they double-bind themselves into fundamental unanswerability, much like The Muse. She despises the designation, yet I persist in using it, feeling as though this euphemism best describes how I see our relationship. I know full well who's in charge and whose judgment ultimately decides, but it's no mere act of deference on my part. I insist that I am my own man, but one for whom it's usually better when someone asks me impossible-to-answer questions and insists that I listen, if not necessarily respond. The Muse serves as a deferent designation, not one I intended as a degradation. I intended it to elevate her presence from mere partner to something more insidious, something even more present. Not everyone knows who's driving. When The Muse is in the room, she's guiding, subtly insisting upon having her way. Do not be afraid; the result will almost always be better for her influence. Something special usually happens, though few will notice The Muse's fingerprints on the murder weapon. She works as skillfully with silence as she ever works with sound. Let's say that whenever The Muse is around, she's in charge. She will say in ten thousand subtle ways which game we play today. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 08/21/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-21T18:11:26-07:00

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. ... The sprinklers didn't quite reach as well as we'd assumed they might. ... All the usual plotlines reawakened when we crossed our threshold again, thank heavens. ..."I will not have heard the news because I wouldn't have been listening for it." This FollowingChapters Story catches me playing a role I learned decades ago and replay every time I engage with family again. When family reunions occur, individuals often revert to roles they learned in childhood, transforming into versions of themselves from decades past. ... People may feel the urge to be seen as who they are now rather than the roles assigned to them long ago. While they may come together to reconnect, the dynamics often reveal how much has changed, leaving everyone feeling like strangers. The challenge lies in breaking free from these ingrained identities to acknowledge the present and embrace new possibilities. ...This FollowingChapters Story finds The Muse and I attending a county fair. ...I recount my memories of attending fairs, highlighting activities such as competitions, food stalls, and unique local attractions. I describe how fairs vary in focus—from rodeos to agriculture—and detail The Muse and my visit to the Brown County Fair, which was free of charge and featured a wide array of food options. We encountered political candidates and a public display of an actual sow giving birth to piglets, showcasing the fair’s blend of entertainment and community. Ultimately, the fair serves as a reminder of human connection in a largely digital world, even as I reflect on the changes and risks associated with modern events. ...This FollowingChapters Story finds The Muse and I visiting the few remaining OldFolks in our lives. The Muse and I visit the few remaining elders in her family, exploring our memories and connections. The Muse’s visits to her OldFolks are contrasted with the diminishing number of relatives she has left, including a nun who no longer remembers them and another aunt who shares family stories about her relatives The Muse never knew. We acknowledge the inevitability of becoming OldFolks ourselves, while cherishing the memories and respecting those who shaped their lives. I contemplates the future of family connections as younger generations move away, highlighting the bittersweet nature of these visits and the enduring bonds of love. ...This FollowingChapters Story describes events leading up to my seventy-fourth birthday today. I celebrate my seventy-fourth birthday by visiting the Bighorn Medicine Wheel in Wyoming, a site The Muse and I long wanted to explore. I reflect on our recent road trip from South Dakota, detailing the long drive across the plains and an unexpected encounter with a stranded motorist named Virginia. ... The Muse and I embraced the unpredictability of our toodle, recognizing that the best experiences often arise from detours and spontaneity, rather than sticking to a rigid plan. The Bighorn Medicine Wheel (2011) - The rock circle is about 80 feet in diameter, with 28 'spokes' radiating from a central cairn, five cairns around the rim, and a sixth slightly outside the perimeter. — US Forest Service photo. ..."I will remain satisfied having recalibrated the meaning of a truly happy birthday celebration." This FollowingChapters story finds me recalibrating the means by which truly happy birthdays might be gauged. ...I describe a truly memorable birthday celebrated near Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. Instead of traditional festivities, the day included a hike to the Big Horn Medicine Wheel, where the The Muse and I experienced nature, including multiple moose sightings. Following the hike, the day bookended with a simple picnic lunch and a dinner at a sleezy local sports bar, which added an unexpected twist to the birthday celebration. ...Old male & young (1845-48) — From: The viviparous quadrupeds of North America —- Rare Book Division, The New York Public Library. ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me listening to the heartfelt bellowing of a GhostCow. This story explores the contrasting realities of America’s past and present, revealing a decline in optimism and belief in collective potential. I discuss the town of Kellogg, Idaho, once prosperous due to mining, now abandoned and showcasing the disparity between wealth and local living conditions. I encounter a distinctive cow, dubbed GhostCow, which symbolizes the voicing of dissent and frustration, paralleling my own feelings about social issues. ... Ultimately, I emphasize the importance of acknowledging our shared struggles and the need for vocal resistance against injustices, as the cyclical nature of aspiration and failure continues. Frederic Remington: The Ghost Dance of 1889–1891, depicting the Oglala at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, (1890) ...The Muse and I were on the move through this writing week. These stories were written in guest quarters or motel rooms during early Midwest or Mountain Time mornings. Unlike our toodle back east, our return included more than just two-lane blacktop exploring. We also endured Wyoming and Montana's insistence that traffic might reasonably flow at a designated eighty miles per hour, a speed at which I never feel secure. On edge, we punctuated our journey with picnic lunches and two-lane, long cuts over breathtaking mountain passes. ... While gone, we did our share of Entrancing and spent a FairToMiddling day at a genuine midwestern county fair. We visited the two remaining OldFolks left in The Muse's home country, and I turned Seventy-Four, further decreasing the distance between my youth and becoming an OldFolk myself. We recalibrated the definition of a truly happy birthday by encountering FourMoose and were introduced to a harbinger and provocateur in the form of a GhostCow. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

GhostCow

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-21T05:57:12-07:00

As The Muse and I have traveled on this epic toodle, we have been noticing the various states of this still tenuous union. We have found unsettling realities prominently displayed alongside the various myths of our American past. We were much more optimistic a hundred years ago, even more so a hundred and fifty. We built to dreams rather than to spec, and though the bulk of those dreams ultimately crashed and burned, we seem to have learned little from those experiences, other than to venerate our ancestors. We don't believe for a second that we might be capable of epic undertakings, as they did. We don't believe that the majority can succeed, and we hold this belief to be self-evident. We try hard to keep the playing field anything but level just as if our children and grandchildren posed an existential threat to us and our once-hallowed way of life. Kellogg, Idaho, is the home of the Bunker Hill Mine. It has overseen the largest silver strike in American history, pulling more ore from this unpromising soil than did the famed Comstock Lode in Nevada. ... City Hall is housed in what appears to be an abandoned barracks building. The town seems surrounded by a century of mine tailings, and so it probably should be listed as a Superfund site. Wherever that wealth went, it was not anywhere near there, where it started and where men parted with their lives to extract it from hard mountains. Idaho might be the wealthiest state in the nation, but it isn't. It ranks nearer the middle, and so it's filled with people who have forgotten this nation's founding principles. They have learned firsthand how we were never a citizenry of equals. This betrayal shows in every MAGA Country banner and derelict home. When we were roaming in Wyoming's Bighorn high country, we happened upon a most unusual range cow. When I first spotted it, it scared me because its face seemed as though it had been painted to resemble that of a Ghost Dancer, with Kabuki white features. ... I immediately labeled this animal GhostCow because she seemed more like an apparition than a physical presence. ... It seemed to me that she was really pissed about something and was uninterested in staying very quiet about her feelings. She produced more than Moos, and she incited other range cattle to join her, creating a genuine cacophony around me. The Muse and I were visiting a sacred native site, so this perturbation seemed significant. I might not believe in much, but I believe in ghosts. ...What was that GhostCow getting on about? There's no way for anybody to know, for cows maintain a separate sense we cannot access, but it seemed to me that she was demonstrating something with her antics. She seemed intolerant of the way things seemed to be for her in those minutes. She didn't seem at all petulant, but she sure seemed insistent, like that actor who proclaimed from a New York City rooftop that he was mad as Hell and not going to take it anymore. ... He would no longer remain silent in the face of the continuing insults. We return home with a GhostCow haunting us. Something has been bothering us, too, for the longest time. Maybe we haven't been quite as vocal about the situation as the GhostCow has been. ...It makes home seem much more attractive than it had grown to feel before leaving. I acknowledge upon returning that I have been uncommonly lucky. Had I been born in almost any other place or time, the life I've led could not have been possible, and it was only barely possible, anyway. I was denied opportunities in my time, but I managed to overcome the barriers. I was once a second-class citizen, reviled for what I seemed to represent but didn't. I learned long ago that we are a deeply racist and misogynistic nation and that Christianity here often directly translates into justifying deep prejudice. The haves despise the have-nots, and the have-nots will gleefully resort to self-destruction to get even. This was always an aspiring place, with aspirations manifest into destiny for a while. Those destinies lasted only until severely tested, at which point they almost inevitably failed. The following generation was generally moved to pick up the pieces with remarkably similar results. ... It astounds me that we cannot seem to get along with each other better. Every act of aggression has ultimately proven to be against ourselves. ... There never was salvation in any form other than promised. ... Such belief was never falsifiable and was always, therefore, eternal. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

FourMoose

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-20T06:44:08-07:00

"I will remain satisfied having recalibrated the meaning of a truly happy birthday celebration." My birthday brought a flood of well-wishes exhorting me to have the best birthday ever. ... I'm uncertain if it stands in anyone's power to bestow a perfect birthday on anyone, especially themselves, but I took the wishes with the spirit in which they were given and set about doing my level best to celebrate a happy, if not ecstatic, one. It helped that The Muse and I were mid-toodle, not quite halfway home from some serious roaming. Novelty must be one of the better ways to ensure happiness, for discovery seems to be the sole essential element of true joy for me. I've already done every one of the more traditional and predictable sorts of birthday celebrations: cake, ice cream, party, presents. None of these elements seemed very likely to emerge from my context this year. We were near Devil's Tower, in the Black Hills region of Eastern Wyoming, so we began my birthday celebration by circumnavigating that remarkable edifice. It was one of those National Park kinds of mornings, cool and promising hot, as we parked the Schooner and started our walk. Few visitors were up and out that early, so the hiking trail held just a smattering of others. The walk proved to be a perfect beginning, a genuine leg-stretcher without much exertion. The Muse bought a Christmas tree ornament in the gift shop, and we headed West. The freeway (I-90) through that district is posted at an eighty miles per hour speed limit, but the road surface seems much better suited to a maximum of perhaps sixty-five. The soils through that oil patch are expansive and produce waves in the asphalt road surface. The Schooner wobbles as we attempt to make our way West. We cover the little more than a hundred miles in short time, arriving in Buffalo, Wyoming, where we buy sandwich fixings at a grocery store, then retire to the city park for a bit of a birthday picnic lunch. Turkey and provolone on San Francisco sourdough with what The Muse called "The best pea salad she'd ever tasted." We feasted before turning the car north another fifty miles, where we'd exit onto US Highway 14, and perhaps the most astounding drive either of us had ever experienced. The road, in a series of switchbacks, quickly transported these travelers thousands of feet above the valley below. Inexorably, even though we continued to climb with each turn, we should certainly have reached the summit by then; however, we continued to ascend, the Schooner at times registering up to a seven percent grade. We were climbing to just above ten thousand feet, to the site of the Big Horn Medicine Wheel. I had chosen this place, a National Park, to be where I would celebrate my birthday, although I had no clear idea just how remote and relatively inaccessible it would prove to be, or what such a celebration should look like. We arrived at the trailhead by four-thirty and changed into boots. We face a three-mile round-trip hike, which might not seem like much until I mention that we were at 10,000 feet. ... On the way up to the park, we had happened upon a clutch of cars pulled to the side of the narrow road. People were stopped to gawk at a cow moose and her calf mucking around in some bog. A short way later, I spotted a bull moose trotting across a field and even turned around so The Muse could get a gander and shoot a little video of the blesséd event. We noted that whatever else might happen on this birthday, we would remember it as a three-moose day. ...The hike to the Medicine Wheel proved arduous, but we made it. I found a rock to sit on to meditate on my place in the world and managed to put my genitals to sleep before I'd finished. Meditating on a rock might be a perfect metaphor for life, and it proved memorable, if only for the disquieting tingle it produced in my nether regions. We were back at The Schooner by six-thirty, wondering where we might stay that night. As we cruised back down the access road to the highway, a fourth moose appeared, a smallish female, browsing among the alpine scrub. ... A FourMoose birthday celebration, something I hadn't wished for but with which I had been gifted without my even asking for it! How much better could a birthday get? The Muse began searching for a place for us to stay and found one a hundred and some miles away, back along the Interstate. The drive across the Big Horn Valley was colored with a remarkable pastel sunset that lasted nearly until we arrived. The Muse was also searching for a place for my birthday dinner, but we were in the Montana oil patch by then, and kitchens seemed to close just before we would arrive. She spied one place, but when we pulled up, it looked too low-life for us. We defaulted to the one place that seemed to still have an open kitchen, the Fowl Play Sports Bar and Casino. Every place in Montana seems to have a casino attached. A First Baptist Church and Casino would surprise no one here. Inside, I was treated to my first-ever serving of broasted chicken, which retained the texture of raw chicken while also being too hot to touch. ...I returned my son's earlier call and spoke with him and my granddaughter before tucking myself in, feeling grateful for a FourMoose birthday. I feel as though we've forever changed the means by which a birthday might be gauged. Do me one or more better if you dare. I will remain satisfied having recalibrated the meaning of a truly happy birthday celebration. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

SeventyFour

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-19T03:20:12-07:00

The rock circle is about 80 feet in diameter, with 28 'spokes' radiating from a central cairn, five cairns around the rim, and a sixth slightly outside the perimeter. ..."We dare not ever insist upon sticking to the plan." On the occasion of my seventy-fourth birthday today, The Muse and I plan to visit the Bighorn Medicine Wheel, a Plains Indian artifact and sacred site located high in Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains, just south of the Montana border. This location could not be less convenient, for it seems well off every well-beaten path. Still, The Muse and I have been wanting to visit this place, and it seems fitting that it becomes the object of my birthday celebration. We are toodling home from a family function in South Dakota, where The Muse was raised. After a few days immersed back into her old family trance, the chance to toodle around rural Wyoming seemed attractive. We drove nearly four hundred miles yesterday, first across a saturated landscape of corn and bean fields, then, after crossing the Missouri, across the grassland prairie of the Northern Cheyanne River Rez and into the beautiful Wyoming Black Hills. We lost an hour buying lunch at the only place to eat we'd seen in the first three hours of driving. We took our regrettable sandwiches to that town's park looking for some shade, and found it. The food went down sideways, so we treated ourselves to ice cream before heading out across a vast sea of grass. I was dreading the hours it would take to cross that barren landscape when we happened upon a disabled vehicle with its driver's door open into our lane. I slowed to a stop behind the car, and a young woman approached, saying she needed a jump. ... I managed a U-turn on the highway and nosed into the front of her car. Her grill was secured with baling wire. The Muse noticed the vehicle had no license plates, either. The young woman said the car had just died. ... She concluded that she was probably out of gas. Producing an oversized gas can from her car's trunk, she instructed the young man with her to stay there while we went to get some gas. A short drive took us to a trading post where the gas sold for nearly fifty percent more than it was selling for outside the reservation. She bought ten bucks' worth, and we returned. Filled, her car still wouldn't start; it just clicked when she turned the key. So, I negotiated another U-turn and we hooked up the charging cables again. With her pumping the gas, the engine finally caught and we detached. I followed her for a few miles until she turned into a development. ...When she learned we were from Washington State, she reported that her daughter was stationed there. She didn't look nearly old enough to have a daughter of military age. I don't look old enough to have a military-aged granddaughter, either. She said she owned horses, which were far more reliable than her car. ... They stay close and always come when we call." She complained that her horse eats her flowers and even knocks down the fences she erects to protect them. That whole interaction consumed less than half an hour, but it reset my expectations for the drive across the reservation. I felt as though I knew a little more about what life might be like there than I would have had I not stopped to help. ...We could have, and have in the past, chosen to take some road more commonly traveled. We were on a lonely road, one that could let us glimpse what life was like there, rather than merely facilitating our anonymous passage. We were not placed here to remain anonymous. We are expected to stop regardless of how inconvenient that might seem. We rearranged our carefully packed load to accommodate Virginia and her oversized gas can. Everything that has been rearranged can always be rearranged again. Who knows where our toodling might take us today besides to our objective? The story's not yet written and only just barely planned. We could spend the rest of the week just investigating the Bighorns, but we have obligations at home, and we're already eight days gone. I will compromise on some of what I proposed for routes, and The Muse, our navigator, will insist on what ultimately works. ... We can never know the purpose, whatever we plan. We dare not ever insist upon sticking to the plan. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

OldFolks

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-18T02:03:49-07:00

Henri Koetser: We Grow Old (c. 1900 - c. ..."Not one of us seems to be getting any younger…" The Muse has always visited her OldFolks when returning to her home country. Her family took the biblical ‘Be Fruitful and Multiply’ exponentially, so there was never any shortage of OldFolks to visit. When we first connected decades ago, there were more than a dozen surviving aunts and uncles, not to mention innumerable cousins, for each aunt and uncle seemed to have left behind at least five children. The Muse could remember all those kids’ names, in birth order, too, as well as odd anecdotes about each family: where they lived and how. I had an odd uncle and aunt, both my dad's step-siblings from different remarriages, but The Muse had an almost intact history. She would find her way over to visit them in the way that they would have visited in their time. Then, people would 'just stop by' with little more in mind than shooting some breeze and catching up. Kids in tow, the broods would find something to do while their folks drank coffee and visited. One of The Muse's grandmothers traveled between her kids’ homes, stopping to stay in each for a few days, through her final years. The Muse, too, would drop in as Carol and John's daughter, an adequate credential to gain an audience and their confidence. Now, of course, the choices have been slimmed down to two remaining aunts: one, a retired nun now nearing a hundred years old, and another, the widow of her mother's mischievous youngest brother, over eighty. Sister Jo couldn't remember The Muse, or me, for that matter. Her thoughts were scattered over a long lifetime of service, where she had been the epitome of patience and kindness. She never forgot to send a Christmas card with a personal inscription, and we'd visit her at her nunnery every time The Muse returned "home." Her nunnery was torn down this year, and she'd been moved to a nursing home. We just showed up and asked the staff where she lived, and were directed to a door just off the lobby. Inside, a severely shrunken likeness of the aunt greeted us with warmth and confusion. She remained the sweet and tender lady she had always been, but without a memory. The old family pictures on her wall helped her frame her past, but she never once connected us to anything she could grasp. Her other aunt was in the middle of organizing a class reunion and had a garage full of boxes she was expecting herself to sort through to preserve family history. She wondered who would care what she found there. She invited us to visit on the driveway in front of the garage since her brother was recovering from open-heart surgery inside. "Not an ideal living situation," she remarked before quickly changing the subject. She was lucid and filled with stories about her relatives The Muse had never before heard of. We listened patiently, interested, if only in the cadence and structure of her stories. These were largely tales of times long before ours, of windstorms and a loving father. The OldFolks tend to retreat into their far distant past as their future shrivels. I realised that this aunt was fewer than ten years older than I. I had been wondering where the supply of OldFolks might be refreshed once this diminishing crop of them has disappeared, and caught myself peering into a mirror. I have not quite conceded that I might have achieved OldFolk status yet, though I'm sure that my grandkids see me as ancient, just as I once saw my grandfather when he was younger than I am now. ... We visit our old people because we know we're inexorably destined to become one. ... Before they're gone, though, we can at least show some respect; show up, even if we're not remembered. We fondly remember Sister Jo and reassure her that she's remembered and loved, even if she can't for the life of her remember us. We might have another decade of toodling left in us. More or less, nobody ever knows for sure. It seems likely that Sister Jo will have passed by the next time we visit here. She confessed as much to us with a laugh. Already, The Muse's brother's family has been fledging, with his youngest relocated to The Twin Cities, a destination from which few ever return, and others off to college and their first remote work experiences. Only six remain resident in his old home place. His might be the last generation of his family to exponentiate. Not all of them will choose to procreate. One of The Muse's older sisters celebrated her fiftieth wedding anniversary, which prompted our visit. She promised she would never celebrate a second fiftieth, and she seems certain to deliver on that promise. Not one of us seems to be getting any younger and will, if lucky, eventually become OldFolks ourselves. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

FairToMiddling

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-17T05:08:57-07:00

It was there when my grandfather was a youth, and it has somehow survived well into this post-truth era, though not in any way intact. In my youth, it was an absolutely must-attend affair, one for which schools closed two days after opening so students could attend the opening on Friday, so-called Kids' Day. The farm kids entered competitions to see who'd raised the handsomest chickens, and we townies would attend with friends to haunt the midway and vomit our obligatory corn dog when riding the Tilt-A-Whirl. Later, we'd meet up with a girl and squire her around the place as if we owned it, which, in some ways, we did. I'd wear a paper Rossilini for Governor visor and feel every bit the fully-fledged responsible citizen. When The Muse was coming up, she entered sewing projects in her fair and garnered purple ribbons, signifying the best. She even earned a place at the State Fair one year. Her mother was an enthusiastic Girl Scout leader and sponsored many future farm wives in their first few crafting ventures. It sparked considerable enthusiasm when she discovered that the Brown County Fair would be happening during our visit. ...County fairs might well be universal across rural America, but in my experience, no two are very similar. Some seem more rodeo-heavy while others focus more attention on agriculture. Some seem little more than farm equipment sales events, while others focus more on concerts. ... For July and August bring more than enough Fairs to fill out a traveling schedule. The Brown County Fair didn't seem to involve any rodeo, which seemed understandable, since Brown County sits East River in South Dakota. ... Unlike the local fair at home, parking was free in lightly flooded and swampy lots around the fair's perimeter, and there was no admission fee; the whole shebang came free of charge. We bee-lined for the midway food carts to find the usual collection of offerings: five different shapes of fries —curly, ribbon, fresh-cut, krinkle, and tot. ... The obligatory cotton candy, which doesn't quite qualify as food to me, and a spattering of ethnic food, including Greek and Italian. Lemonaide was offered in sizes up to and including a refillable half gallon, complete with a lanyard string, and ice cream in various guises, including one labeled "Ribbon." I chose a Greekish Gero sandwich as we ambled toward a barn labeled "Home Arts," hoping to find a display of handmade quilts inside. The stumble commenced there, the ambling semi-stroll intended to transport one from here to there at a fair. ... We stumble through the quilts, stopping frequently to comment on colors and styles while I munch my sandwich, using a fork to nudge its pieces apart. The Muse's brother catches up with two kids in tow, so we head off to another barn, this one displaying more commercial concerns. ... One of The Muse's nephews wins a barbecue spatula at the T-Mobile booth. I ask a candidate for Lieutenant Governor if she's a Democrat and get a sour face in response. I notice her campaign slogan includes "Faith" as part of her platform, so I ask her stance on the separation of church and state. ... I point out that the concept is enshrined in our constitution, but she denies it. She claims it's more rumor than practice, mentioned in a letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams. I brought up a handy copy of our constitution on my phone to show her the First Amendment, which forbids the establishment of a state religion, and she was incredulous. She didn't believe it and couldn't accept that her government might forbid what she was promoting with her candidacy. We moved on past yet another anti-abortion "pro-life" booth featuring far too graphic images. We eventually found ourselves in a barn where a sow was on display, giving birth to piglets. ... I found this a tad too Circus Maximus for my tastes, so I sat on an all-too-rare bench to rest my back while the kids watched the pigs before going on to play with baby chickens. I wondered about the wisdom of allowing children to play with baby chickens while bird flu remains unconquered, and decided I might be overthinking my experience. The problem with trying to organize and execute a fair after enlightenment might be that too many questions remain unanswered to justify the innumerable risks involved. Fairs provide the perfect medium within which any virus might spread faster than wildfire, yet they also provide something essential for survival. On our way out, we stopped by the obligatory Centennial Village, a corner of every fairgrounds reserved for paying homage to the county's founders. ... That's also one of the few corners where they allow beer to be served. ... We'd been to the fair, a designation that once elicited visions of a kind of enlightenment available to even so-called ordinary people. Fairs provide the experience of still living in a society that mingles, even though we mostly mingle online today. They give the kids a few concerts and opportunities to stroll through barns arm in arm, as if purposeful. ...In two weeks, we'll be home and attending our own fair and rodeo, the one by which we judge every other fair we might attend. I did not end up ordering any deep-fried Twinkies or candy bars, and I just stuck with that one sandwich, though I couldn't stomach the bread that came with it. I recognized that I had participated, mainly as an observer, in one of the great American myths, and I dutifully appreciated the experience. No, it didn't change my life in any meaningful way. I did not fold to the barker who tried to improve The Muse's face with futuristic collagen treatments. I strolled and stumbled, and felt humbled by the presence of so much variety before me. Where else would I encounter a sow giving birth to piglets while families rubbernecked around the spectacle? Without these experiences, I might be tempted to think of myself as somehow apart from humanity, rather than inexorably embedded within it. Even a deep-fried Twinkie probably mirrors some vestigial and rarely-recognized part of me. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Entrancing

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-16T05:20:08-07:00

Lewis Wickes Hine: Italian Family, Chicago (1910) "Then the subtle and purposeful passion play commences." A toodle turns utterly different once the toodlers drop in to visit family. At every other stop, our heroes remain the very soul of themselves: reasonable, mature, and experienced. Drop them into a family context, though, and they take on distinctly different forms. Roles they learned decades before resurrect themselves and start playing out in real time before them. The Muse becomes Aunt Amy, and I can't help but become the long-lost Uncle David. The family members we interact with, too, dutifully assume the roles they learned through iteration when they didn't realize they were learning anything, even though nearly thirty years might have passed since we first studied for our original parts. It almost seems not a moment has passed since that first performance, for there it is playing out right in front of us. A little (or a lot) of effort might bring the performance to consciousness and allow an actor to intervene authentically, to somehow break the role and be there as they are now, rather than how they learned to be then. A powerful force rules these regions, and nobody could guarantee that anything other than theres and thens might play out through any visit. The patterns were established for good and decent reasons in response to conditions then present, but now long absent. To treat a fifteen-year-old as was appropriate five years before is to deliver a series of subtle insults. Nobody engaging might even notice the disconnect at first, but something will grate on the interaction. It might well seem reassuring at first, a comforting old familiar, but these relations never age well. We ache to be seen as we are rather than as how we once were but couldn't acknowledge. Nobody was ever a fully self-aware ten-year-old; likewise, for any sixty-some-year-old aunt or uncle. We say we're catching up when we're more likely tracking down. We might be coming to grips with stuff we could never seem to previously acknowledge. We were mere innocents then, managing the very best we could, though we always might have managed better. We didn't, of course, and we grew partly due to the shortcomings we embodied then. Coming together again creates the potential for us to recover what we never suspected we'd lost and to more fully acknowledge what we always were but remained unaware of then. Now, the potential exists for things to be different, though the trance proximity induces renders both catching on and catching up a challenge. As humans, we're supremely capable of merely staying in the role we've assigned ourselves or were assigned by others. Some of these personas go back to our earliest childhood. Most were assumed long before anyone involved ever imagined they were even capable of assuming anything, let alone a life role. Others might have once upon a time been deliberately chosen, though their purpose and presence might have been forgotten long ago . Family reunions are opportunities to awaken pasts, futures, and presents. The pasts will certainly visit, for they provide the premise for coming together. The futures might seem more optional in any moment, for the present moments can easily overwhelm. The present shape and form can contradict anticipation, to seem just wrong, and a kind of bartering can almost consume present interactions. With whom do I have the pleasure of interacting? I might find myself wondering and surprise myself when I can find no easy answer. Anyone might slowly come to realize that they are no longer who they once were, validating with experience the notion that we replace every damned molecule of ourselves at least once each year. We might have left as family, but we seem certain to return as strangers every time. We never begin our latest interactions with introductions, but with hugs, as if we knew the strangers who have just shown up. Then the subtle and purposeful passion play commences. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 08/14/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-14T18:27:03-07:00

I this week 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. ... This week, while traveling outside my usual box, I experimented with AI, to see if I could appreciate its summarizing ability. ... I received, after about a second of processing, a crisp and wholly acceptable summary of the story. ...I have been using Grammerly, a popular artificial intelligence app, by which I mean a large language-informed automated assistant, to check my stories grammer and spelling since March 26, 2023. According to a report I received from Grammerly this week, it's checked 8,350,274 words for me in that time. ... It has no sense of rhythm and prefers trivial constructions, but it does catch many of my more eggregious 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, andf some of each summary needed correcting, but overall, I again found the results acceptable, so this week, I introduce the beta version of a slightly different Weekly Writing Summary, this one containing 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.) ...Do I seem to have compromised my integrity in your opinion by inviting AI into this otherwise creatinve space? ... I'm trying to improve my product here and will appreciate any advice you might feel moved to offer on this subject. ..."I will not have heard the news because I wouldn't have been listening for it." This FollowingChapters Story found me preparing to disengage, Unaiming for a change. ...We recognize that losing oneself in purpose can create a sense of hollowness that only purposelessness can fill. ...This FollowingChapters Story found me suspended from my usual grounding responsibilities, On_Liberty for a change. ...While others might squander such freedom, I reflect on the importance of using this time for meaningful experiences rather than trivial distractions. ... This journey highlights how temporary freedom can lead to personal growth and a deeper understanding of oneself. Ultimately, I realized that this liberty is not just an escape but an opportunity to reshape my life upon returning to responsibilities. ...I express concern over the decline of DerelictBarns, which symbolize a rich agricultural history that future generations may forget. Once built with pride and craftsmanship, these barns were essential to farming life, providing shelter for animals and serving as a hub for community activities. Today, modern farming relies on machines that require little to no human effort, leading to the disrepair and demolition of these once-majestic structures. As fewer farmers see value in maintaining old barns, I mourn their loss and reflect on the beauty and significance they held, feeling grateful for having witnessed their fading legacy. ...This FollowingChapters Story, HistoryLesson, finds me dreaming the American Dream and discovering the underlying American reality. ...Desperate settlers, driven by the hope of a better life, often encountered harsh realities that left them vulnerable to exploitation. While some found success, many ended up as laborers, far from their original dreams. Towns built during optimistic times now show signs of decay, with empty buildings and little industry to support the community. Despite these challenges, the allure of the American Dream persists, suggesting that the journey, even one that leads to disappointment, still holds value. The stark contrast between hope and reality paints a complex picture of life in these towns, reflecting both past and future aspirations. Arthur Rothstein: Street in Butte, Montana (1939) - Farm Security Administration Photographs - The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. "Street in Butte, Montana," The New York Public Library Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/32c50bd0-059b-0138-0ab0-4f25bfb71a96 ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me Roading, a lifestyle with which I once was terribly familiar. ...I reflect on my past as a frequent traveler, ultimately choosing to value the comforts of home over the allure of road life. I express how being away makes home feel even more precious, and even in rare moments of travel, instinctive habits resurface, demonstrating my adaptability. While acknowledging the frustrations of travel, I also appreciate how certain experiences, such as finding good food or understanding road protocols, become second nature. Ultimately, the story captures the bittersweet nature of travel, balancing nostalgia with a commitment to home life. ...“Imagine how fortunate I feel to have been able to barter for a few of those…" This FollowingChapters Story, Rx, finds me misplacing something I'm supposed to depend on, channeling my inner Mr. Magoo. The story showcases the value of unplanned experiences in travel, suggesting that some of the most memorable stories come from unexpected turns or mistakes. It reflects on how a single slight deviation in plans can lead to significantly different outcomes, hinting that detailed planning often serves merely as a distraction from the inevitable unpredictability of journeys. An anecdote about forgetting toiletries highlights the complexities of managing prescriptions while traveling, underscoring the frustrations of navigating pharmacy policies and health insurance. The narrative emphasizes the unpredictable nature of life, particularly in healthcare, and my acceptance of these challenges, ultimately highlighting the importance of adaptability and resilience in the face of such disruptions. ...The Muse and I were traveling, "Roading", toodling, visiting unfamiliar territory, which never fails to encourage me. ...I began this excursion by Unaiming myself, thinking that focus and purpose might have become overrated. I then reflected On_Liberty, what it might be, and what it might have never become. I appreciated the DerelictBarns we passed as we drove and fussed about where future generations might receive the sort of inspirations only tumbledown barns provide. I received and passed on a HistoryLesson, one to counter some of the myth we Americans seem so dependent upon. ... I ended this writing week by channeling my inner Mr. Magoo in Rx, making mistakes and recovering from them. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Rx

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-14T04:01:59-07:00

"Imagine how fortunate I feel to have been able to barter for a few of those…" When Roading, the most memorable experiences arise not from planned activities but from inadvertencies: a wrong turn onto a road never intended to be taken, a whim, an obvious mistake. These are the fuel from which the most epic stories emerge and the greatest lessons are taken. If one believes in predestination, it might be easier to insist that some wiser hand guides these, that somebody 'out there' was deliberately teaching you precisely the lesson you most needed exposure to, but these seem more likely random occurrences, with meanings self-imposed, however otherwise profound and unlikely they might seem. ...We might only plan in considerable detail to distract us from the fact that those plans, however detailed, could never happen as imagined. That planning serves as part of the setup for what inevitably becomes another practical joke, bringing more impact than any planning could ever induce. It's sometimes possible to talk oneself out of these detours. In the moment of inspiration, any old wild-ass diversion might seem overwhelmingly attractive, though a little more sober reflection might convince anyone to avoid roads that really should never be taken. What initially appears to be a revelation becomes little more than seduction, with consequent reparations owed. ...I left my toiletries bag at The Muse's brother's place as we passed through on this excursion. ... In even the minor scheme of things, this event hardly seemed consequential, for we had planned on returning to the scene of this minor crime in a scant two days' time. I would be reunited with my prescriptions just a couple of evenings later, so I could probably just get a two-day supply from a pharmacy near The Muse's oldest sister's place. I phoned my home pharmacy to confirm what I already knew: they'd have to transfer every prescription to the interim pharmacy to fulfill my request. Oh, and the insurance company might not allow a refill so soon after the prior refills, this, I suppose, to avoid liability and fraud. I was reminded that drug companies are not necessarily in business for the convenience of the patients dependent upon their benevolence. They more often fulfill the role of potentially vengeful god than lord or savior. One carefully tiptoes around such despots, and emergency two-day refills tend to put the requester on a radar nobody ever wants to be registered on. The clerk warned me that the refills might not be ready immediately, but that she would let me know when they were ready by text message, which is probably the best way to ensure that somebody my age misses the notice. I try to remember to check my texts every few days, but they're not near the top of my usual priorities, and I've not been able to determine how to get them to notify me when they arrive, so they amount to a random means of notifying me, and I suspect, most everybody. Still, the convenience for the sender probably more than outweighs the inconvenience the intended receiver experiences, so in today's odd commercial calculus, texting tends to be how providers inform their customers. I tried to pay attention and found a text notice from them only three hours after they'd sent it the following morning. By then, I'd already missed the prior evening's course of medication, except for the one pill my sister-in-law's husband offered. He had been prescribed the same drug and had a few extras, so we decided to trade. I'll pay him back when we reconvene at a family event over the upcoming weekend. The text notice reported that the refills had been delayed because they were out of stock. It didn't occur to me that the attached message might include more information, but when, a couple of hours later, I found that it had, I learned that five of the prescriptions had been refilled. I headed out for the pharmacy to collect my reward. The prices quoted for the two or four pills requested matched what I'd grown used to paying for a thirty-day supply of each. Except for that one prescription, for which I had been bartering, which was quoted at $55 for four pills. I usually pay $35 for thirty of those, but, I suppose, usury insisted that they charge a premium. I didn't accept delivery of those because, frankly, I'd rather pitch an embolism than pay that king's ransom extortion for that medication. The others, the clerk was able to reduce the price slightly using a combination of supplemental insurance queries and GoodRx. I left only twenty dollars lighter than when I arrived, and felt grateful they hadn't sent me away wearing a barrel, which they could have, and had even tried to accomplish. I told the clerk to cancel the sixth prescription, the one they'd back-ordered. I told her I would likely be gone by the time it arrived, but she insisted that I stick to the plan. I won't be back to collect that one. Then, at the end of the month, I will request that the six prescriptions be transferred to my regular pharmacy for refilling back home. The insurance company, ever-vigilant, will likely question the legitimacy of my request, since I'd just refilled it a couple of weeks previously. That they hadn't anticipated this fairly predictable situation astounds me. ... A procedure to deal with misplaced prescriptions hardly seems like it would be covering anything even remotely resembling a rare exception. ...I'm almost accustomed to the inconveniences that our much-vaunted healthcare system involves. I'm accustomed to the impenetrable patient portals and the routine inconveniences record capturing and keeping entails. I'm grateful that my internist, at least, presents as human. I reward him by scrupulously following his directions, actions he considers nearly unprecedented. I'm healthier as a result, hopefully healthy enough to survive some disruption in the otherwise smooth administration of my several prescriptions. I'd rather not pitch an embolism than pay through the nose for the privilege of avoiding that fate. The pharmacy clerk remarked that the gold-plated drug without insurance costs a thousand bucks a month, and the fifty-five-dollar price for those four pills represented a considerable discount over the full retail price. Imagine how fortunate I feel to have been able to barter for a few of those with The Muse's brother-in-law. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

...

Roading

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-13T03:15:33-07:00

Hall Thorpe: Home (c. 1919) "Life continues even when the protagonists are off Roading." Traveling demands a different governing ethic than home ever does. At home, a certain level of control seems possible that traveling renders unlikely. Different comforts satisfy there, too, with novelty and unfamiliarity replacing comforting routine and predictability. For sure, I find traveling enticing, so much so that I have grown to avoid its seduction, insisting that I have pressing business keeping me in my place at home. I contend that I've found my center, and leaving throws me off that balance. I even feign pressing business that might otherwise remain easily deferrable, attempting to deflect the old seduction Roading resurrects. I was once what might have passed as a road warrior, so familiar with airplane schedules that I never had to look them up, gone more than I ever came back. As with most seductions, I eventually awakened from that dream, however enticing it continued to seem. I lost that edge and convinced myself that I should settle, however exciting I once found that lifestyle. I found my place in this world and defended that place with unusual vehemence. Our exile, twelve long dog years when we were forced to continue Roading, however much we sincerely wanted to return home, rendered home more precious than it had ever seemed before. Thereafter, I swore off my former almost addiction and forswore going back there very often. In those increasingly rare times when I begrudgingly consent to leave, vestigial instincts return. After a day or two. I catch myself knowing what to do when I couldn't have possibly known what I would be called to do, a common Roading requirement. I could find the only decent lunch restaurant in a town I'd never visited before and thereby save The Muse and me from another Formica lunch experience featuring more neon flash than taste or nutrition. So few decent lunch places remain that it's almost a fool's mission even to try to find one. I knew I'd found it from more than a block away, a notion confirmed when I saw a map of the country festooned with pins designating the hometown of every prior visitor. Our hometown had not been pinned, so I asked how I qualified for a pin. Our greeter brought me a gold one, which, once stuck in, made our hometown look like the capital of the whole danged country, which, of course, it is for us. We ate lunch at home that day. What might seem like synchronicity elsewhere manifests as a result of embedded instinct in those experienced in Roading. We've learned to take our foibles as givens after decades among the missing. When I left my toiletries bag at last night's stop, I knew how to order a two-day supply of my usual prescriptions to my current location. I am familiar with the protocols of freeway driving, and I appreciate those who diligently follow them. The rookies mistake the exercise for road racing and unknowingly tangle up the flow by trying to go faster than everyone else. They'll never know they cause the clogs they complain about. The truckers who display the discipline to maintain their reduced speed limit allow automobile traffic to maintain their flow without being subject to the vagaries of hills and turns from which trucks can't escape. Properly engaged, nobody ever needs to make a federal case about freeway driving. If only those less experienced could comprehend. Gratefully gone are the days when there was only one place to get a decent cup of coffee in San Francisco. Likewise, the times when a coffee in NYC automatically came with creamer already infused. It remains difficult to find a decent loaf of bread when in wheat-growing country, an inexplicable feature of this country, if no other. I was pleased to notice that sitting in The Schooner feels like sitting at home, even after we'd driven it fifteen hundred miles from there. I could have the best of both worlds, I suppose, remain a homebody yet still go on the occasional extended excursions. I learned long ago that I could never travel alone, for even when unaccompanied, a supporting cast was taking care of my obligations I'd left behind. Sprinklers don't quite live up to expectations. The cats won't consent to just anyone's attention. The never-ending porch project could not be suspended just because the sponsors were absent. Life continues even when the protagonists are off Roading. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

HistoryLesson

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-12T02:52:22-07:00

Arthur Rothstein: Street in Butte, Montana (1939) ...The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. "Street in Butte, Montana" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/32c50bd0-059b-0138-0ab0-4f25bfb71a96 ..."…he very best portrait of our American Dream, and one hell of a HistoryLesson." The history of the American West comes deeply steeped in myth, though even deeper truths become apparent with any visit. This remains a rough and relatively wild place, with poverty its most obvious characteristic. Small towns tend toward something other than the idyllic. The few cities seem displaced and still largely experimental. The highways connecting places seem mostly empty and in need of considerable repair. The scenery remains breath-taking, even daunting. Those who live there still struggle to survive, let alone thrive, for the economy remains securely stuck in some prior century the inhabitants seem quick to defend. HistoryLessons seem perhaps more apparent to visitors than to residents, who have been the serial victims of many previous attempts to prosper. Relatively desperate people settled the American West, people fleeing almost certain ruin on the prospect that they might get lucky, or luckier than their birthright alone proved. Second sons and unlanded immigrants came seeking what became known as the American Dream. There's no more powerful motivator than an unrequited dream. While it remains unfulfilled, it fills the dreamer with potential, possibilities perhaps not yet realized but still seemingly achingly possible. People came West to better themselves. Upon arriving, they often found people worse than they'd ever known ready and willing to take advantage of their vulnerabilities. They swindled and persuaded, enticed and provided opportunities for them to undermine their dreams. Many succeeded in securing some donation land claim only to later learn that the rain doesn't actually follow the plow, and no matter how hard anyone might try to succeed, it took more than will and seed to run a successful farm. The pattern became clearer over time. Initial desperation, or the apparent threat of it, would drive people to take a chance and relocate to places not then domesticated. An ennobling optimism would motivate them to attempt to tame that land. For each successful settler, several would fail. Some would limp back to what so-called civilization might promise, but perhaps more would settle for something less than they'd originally envisioned, becoming a miner, logger, or laborer rather than an owner and master of a domain they possessed. ... They lived in distressed circumstances, perhaps worse than they ever would have faced back home, but they'd come too far to consider simply returning to what could no longer pass as home for them once they'd been inspired to chase their dream. The towns, built during periods of wild enthusiasm, tended to be overbuilt. In Lewistown, Montana, for instance, beautiful terra-cotta-fronted buildings sit largely empty and unused after a succession of panics and droughts left the surrounding area struggling through successive generations. Today, the local chamber of commerce imagines that they might attract festivals and visitors who might come to vicariously experience small-town life. The small town, while beautifully situated in a well-watered valley, looks blighted, with housing stock far out-dated and badly worn, and little local industry to keep the offspring home. No college to renew local skills. Little future but more skids. Small-town life has always been challenging. Unlike the bucolic depictions presented by homesick content providers, small towns struggle to provide what city dwellers accept as their god-given right. A clear pattern of optimism followed by despair hangs everywhere: in the lovely downtowns filled with beautiful, empty buildings, in neighborhoods featuring tumbledown houses and abandoned automobile lawns, in non-union jobs that age anyone quickly, and in opportunities that stopped knocking generations ago. Our small towns are increasingly filled with older people who find an economy their limited income appreciates without really needing it to provide prosperity they found after they'd earlier relocated to a bigger city. Our futures rely upon a certain amount of unbridled optimism. ... Nostalgia motivates every bit as well as does a dreamer's imagination. The American Dream seems ultimately delusional, yet it remains well worth pursuing. The likelihood of succeeding seems exceedingly slim, especially when considered against the backdrop of actual experience. Still, any time lived in enthusiastic thrall seems more than worth the investment, even if it brings perhaps an inevitable fall. We crumble then settle, often mining satisfaction from hard rock luck. The future and the past utterly depend upon our continuing optimism. The certainty of ultimate failure need not significantly color the quality of anyone's present experience. Those nearly derelict small towns steeped in their own questionable histories might just be the very best portrait of our American Dream, and one hell of a HistoryLesson. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

DerelictBarns

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-11T02:40:29-07:00

Claes Jansz Visscher: A Barn, from Landscapes [Verscheyden aerdige Lanthuysen…] (1620) "…as our history continues disappearing around us." I worry some about what will become of the DerelictBarns I have known through my life, for I have grown to rely upon them, and I fear my grandchildren and great-grandchildren might never know they existed. Nobody seems to be building new cathedrals to their critters and hay. Most farmers opt for aluminum pole buildings these days. Back in the day, by which I refer to times long before mine, self-respecting farmers might erect a barn intended to weather the ages, massive edifices with stone foundations and fluted roofs. These proclaimed a deep faith in the future and self-esteem the likes of which seem ever rarer these days. For me, a townie, DerelictBarns held history that utterly fascinated me. One might feature a row of windows just about head high for a Percheron. I'd imagine a team of a dozen or more pulling a Rube Goldberg contraption of a combine across a wheat field, and a crew numbering a dozen or more manning the operation, each with their specialization. My grandfather worked on those in his time. One might whip-sew sacks closed while another hefted filled ones, each secure in their contribution. In fading twilight, they might water and curry-comb the horses before setting them into stalls with those specially-designed windows so they could breathe the night air as they rested from their labors. Then, the barn, not yet gone derelict, served as the center of the operation, the warehouse, toolshed, and animal hotel that served both the farmer and the farm. Now, a million-dollar machine operates with impunity, no crew required to keep it running. A single operator pulls switches and levers, getting the harvest rolling. No need for a building other than an elephant iron to provide cover. No need for windows placed just so. No need for the ego-reenforcement a personal cathedral provides. Without the horses, the hay lofts are no longer needed. Without the workers, most of the tools required to maintain and repair the Rube Goldberg combine fell into disrepair and obscurity. Most would never know what they were intended to do. Throughout my youth and into my adulthood, such as they've been, I could depend upon a reliable supply of slowly collapsing DerelictBarns. Many were easily as beautiful and majestic in their dotage as they must have been when they were the central essential figures of their farms. They were lovely in their mysterious ways: some sway-backed as they aged, others roofless. Obsolescence ages poorly. Always has. What begins as merely quirky eventually crumbles into something resembling dust. So few have built these cathedrals over the last hundred years that the supply of derelict ones has become severely threatened. Ever fewer roadside inspirations remain as The Muse and I toodle across the plains. Ashes to ashes, sure, but cathedrals to dust? As another assault on farmers gathers momentum in the world markets, it's tougher to justify retaining great-grampa's Pecheron's castle on the property. It inevitably became a liability, once its back broke in that storm. The insurance agent refers to it as an attractive nuisance. The spouse says she's concerned that the grandkids might get hurt playing around in there. Finally, during an off season, you dig a big hole with the Cat and shove what's left of that pre-Dust Bowl dream into it and have one hell of a bonfire. One hell of one! Few might notice the absence, but I will. I do, though I know that my time here's winding down just as inexorably as any crumbling cathedral to animal husbandry. I will be finding my inspiration somewhere else, as The Muse and I toodle across the plains, because nobody gets to pick and choose what they lose in this life, or what they gain. I remain grateful that I was able to witness the final shadow of many a fine DerelictBarn in my time, and I will always fondly remember the feelings they never failed to elicit in me. They were history incarnate until they just weren't anymore. I pray for us all as our history continues disappearing around us. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

On_Liberty

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-10T03:10:20-07:00

Irving S. Underhill (possibly): Statue of Liberty, New York (c. ..."…to never be the same again. ...I woke this morning to find myself temporarily off my usual duty. In Navy parlance, this state renders me On_Liberty. I haven't mustered out, and I still retain my responsibilities, though they have been suspended for a limited time so that I might pursue other interests. Somebody else fed my cats last night, a daily responsibility I take most seriously, and they also fed my pond fish. The Muse rigged up water timers and sprinklers to accomplish what I would usually take full responsibility for fulfilling. I left Kurt, our painter, in charge of the never-ending porch refurbishment, and Linda Sue, our longtime friend and house cleaner, in charge of the house. I did not begin yesterday evening crouching around picking up over-ripe apricots I couldn't reach when harvesting that had finally given up and smashed themselves on the driveway. I didn't even cook my own supper, for I was On_Liberty. My nephew, who served a stint in the Navy, though I didn't, explained to me that most seamen waste what little liberty they get. They head for a questionable corner of town on quests they usually fail to achieve. They seek a good time and end up unable to remember what happened after that fifteenth beer. They might have mistaken their liberty for unrestrained freedom —a fatal error for liberty seekers everywhere. One must, it seems, remain especially discriminating when On_Liberty, lest that latitude be wasted on meaningless or trivial pursuits, or worse. Getting good and drunk on freedom seems little different from getting good and drunk on rotgut rye; neither buys anybody much more than a hangover the following morning. Few if any memories will abide. Being On_Liberty might involve even more responsibilities than that on-shore pass ever imagined freeing anyone from. This change of scenery wasn't intended to free anybody from their primary responsibility, that of remaining responsible for the quality of their own experience. Of all the freedoms anyone might experience, imagine investing yours in shooting guns, for instance. Many choose to exercise their Second Amendment rights as if they represented the very height of human liberty, rather than a noisy distraction from it, a hollowness filler. The freedom FROM religion might provide a more enlightening experience for even the most devout when finding themselves On_Liberty. Who might you become if temporarily freed from fulfilling your everyday responsibilities? Might you stumble upon some previously undisclosed higher purpose, or might you prove fortunate enough to stumble into a new and novel form of farting around? No judgment or disparities, I was just asking myself a question. Who might I become when finally freed from my usual grounding obligations? If given the opportunity to engage in something other than pretending I'm making up for already forfeited time or, perhaps worse, trying to somehow save time by becoming a more efficient producer, who might I catch myself being then? When, not if, I catch myself adrift, what might I notice about myself that I'd never catch when focused upon my usual activities of daily existence? What worlds exist in the wrinkles of my usual world? If I could choose anything from an array of sudden unknowables, what might I choose? How might that choice expand or contract my understanding of who I might be and what I was supposed to be doing before I assumed so many super-critical responsibilities? ... When? ...I felt as though I was flying as we toodled up and over the rim of our usual valley. We passed into rimrock country, then up and into sedimentary stone scenery different from that at home. A river moved inexorably in the opposite direction as we headed up into, then over, the sky. Traffic was blessedly light to non-existent. In two hundred miles, fewer than a half dozen vehicles overtook me, and I overtook precisely none. I drove at my own speed, uninterested in maintaining the posted limit because I chose not to live on that knife edge for those moments. We had no idea where we might spend the night because we had no need to know at that moment. We found reasonably comfortable lodging noisily near the Missoula trainyard and delighted in the different sounds we heard throughout the night. Supper was chosen based on an outdated internet posting. We found upon arriving that they no longer offered the trout The Muse had wanted, but she found instead what she couldn't have otherwise imagined. I discovered tomato confit. My life will never be the same again after being On_Liberty this time. Liberty's intended to provide an opening for my life, once I return to its on-board ship responsibilities, to never be the same again. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Unaiming

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-09T05:00:11-07:00

Hans Thoma: The Wanderer [Der Wanderer] (1903) "I will not have heard the news because I wouldn't have been listening for it." I had become too focused, too purposeful, and so had The Muse, whose role as Port Commissioner often seemed all-consuming. We'd start our days by syncing schedules and end them with a late supper. I would rise ever earlier, and she'd come to bed seemingly ever-later, sometimes not quite asleep yet when my alarm was going off. Life can become all-consuming, more obligatory and predatory than freeing and renewing; hamster wheels with vaunted purposes; debts incurred solely to achieve leverage. We went around and around to reach an agreement on the terms of our disengagement, for engagement had become addictive, enlarging responsibilities into imperatives. Achieving indespensibility brings great danger only ever stemmed by deliberate disengagement or unwanted displacement. There are no indispensable actors, ever, especially when you sense yourself becoming one of them. This world has survived the loss of infinitely inummerable indespensibles. That might be the sole purpose of this Earth, this universe. Loss might be the only actual imperative, and recovery the only actual purpose. Everything else can and seemingly must be reversed, and seems born reversible. I must enter the unknowable occasionally in order that I might retain a tiny sliver of understanding. This world—this nation at present—proves far too insane for anyone to maintain continuous engagement. I must, it seems, disengage in order to remain present, one of the more powerful paradoxes presented to each. How I disengage might not matter nearly as much as that I sometimes do, and frequently enough that I can recognize my own vacuity, my '-linities.' Masculinity for me. Another for others. I rediscover myself in unfamiliar places. I seem to lose some essence when too purposefully engaged. Too much mindfulness leaves a hollowness that only purposelessness can refill. I'm not so much packing as abandoning. I will leave ninety-nine and ninety-nine-one-hundredths percent of my stuff behind, retaining only some spare essence. I learned how to leave much of my stuff behind by taking far more than I could ever live with when I left. I used to reserve one suitcase for a subset of my library, lest I be left without adequate reference material as I traveled. I'd take three or four forms of luggage, so much that I couldn't lug it around. I was forever paying for luggage carts. I once even bought a collapsible hand truck, which I would dutifully add to my luggage pile to facilitate relocating it. Now, I'm more apt to deliberately leave something important behind to see how I might live without it. Age and experience have rendered me more of a minimalist when it comes to disappearing. Of course, we have a destination in mind, but we promise ourselves not to lose our minds when we find that destination changing, as it most certainly might. We practice holding purpose as lightly as possible so that alternatives might come into focus before we pass. We swear we will not become slaves to any schedule as we travel. Our purpose will never degrade into making time, for we toodle to insult time, to render it just as irrelevant as possible for a time. I will find my father's ghost insisting that we head out before dawn because that's what he taught me that travelers do. I will clash with The Muse's sense that she should be sleeping in if she's off on a toodle. I will rise at my usual time and try to find internet access, along with my usual mug of decaf. I will not have heard the news because I wouldn't have been listening for it. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 08/07/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-07T16:19:05-07:00

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. ... 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 digestive system barks at me about whatever I consume. ... I've been daydreaming of visiting France and Italy, where sunny days nudged us to ramble aimlessly and fruitfully. ... Over the next two weeks, the Muse and I will be toodling. I will be checking in from presently unknowable locations. ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me teetering on the cynical edge of Jaded. We inhabit an upside-down world at the moment, a continuing challenge to sanity and hopefulness. Dorothy Dehner: Landscape for Cynics (1945) Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of the Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts © Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts "…why they're so confidently leading us into Hell." ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me tracing the source of my ability to become Dedicated to mind-numbing efforts. ..."It's unlikely to kill me now, either." ...This FollowingChapter Story finds me practicing the fine art of DisappointingMyself. Caesar Boëtius van Everdingen: Pan and Syrinx (c. 1644 - c. 1652) Gallery Notes: The nymph Syrinx is on the run, with the forest god Pan, hidden among the dense vegetation, in hot pursuit. Van Everdingen captures the dramatic moment of the metamorphosis as Syrinx implores the river nymphs for help. ... Disappointed, Pan listens to the wind playing through the tall reeds and subsequently cuts his flute from them. "…knowing for sure only that I was DissapointingMyself again." ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me battling with demon vacation while engaging in a spirited round of MsCommunication. Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita): yellow submarine (1967) - Inscriptions and Marks - Signed: l.c. in black ink (ball point): Corita - Inscription: Printed quote reads: MAKE LOVE NOT WAR / VIETNAM / What has it done to the home of the brave? AND OUR FRIENDS ARE ALL ABOARD MANY MORE THAN LIVE NEXT DOOR Lennon McCartney-Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Margaret Fisher Fund-© Courtesy of the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York ...This FollowingChapters Story, UnderGawd, finds me feeling coerced and gnawing the inside of my cheek raw trying to appear patriotic (or idiotic) in public. Unknown Indonesian artist from Central Java: God Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles (9th/10th century) "…no enforcement mechanism other than the usual tacit coercion has yet been codified into statute. ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me PreppingForEternity. Charles François Daubigny: The Boat Studio, from The Boat Trip (1861) - ABOUT THIS ARTWORK - In order to paint the river landscape scenes that accorded so well with his temperament and taste, Daubigny decided to build a floating studio that could be positioned to afford the best points of view and to capture the varied effects of natural light. The etchings that resulted in the series “The Boat Trip” are an early example of the plein-air aesthetic, a practice of working outdoors that the Impressionists would wholeheartedly embrace. ...The most reliable indicator that someone really needs to take a break appears when they become too insistent about how they do not, under any circumstances, need to take a break. ... Whenever an everyday event takes on life-or-death tones, something noteworthy will probably be occurring. This Writing Week was one of those times for me. The Muse was shocked and more than a little disappointed in me. ... I began this writing week working hard to convince myself that I didn't want or need to become Jaded. I then investigated how I happened to become so damned Dedicated to my work. I committed one of the cardinal sins of married couples, initiating some MsCommunication. I then investigated the history of our Pledge of Allegiance, a commonly recited bit of coerced reverence. I ended this writing week by PreppingForEternity, painting on our never-ending front porch project, which is just entering into its second anniversary and still counting, while preparing to leave The Villa Vatta Schmaltz for an extended toodle to the Midwest and back. Thank you for following along even when I exhibit some symptoms of suffering from some sort of social schizophrenia. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

PreppingForEternity

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-07T05:55:08-07:00

Charles François Daubigny: The Boat Studio, from The Boat Trip (1861) ...In order to paint the river landscape scenes that accorded so well with his temperament and taste, Daubigny decided to build a floating studio that could be positioned to afford the best points of view and to capture the varied effects of natural light. The etchings that resulted in the series “The Boat Trip” are an early example of the plein-air aesthetic, a practice of working outdoors that the Impressionists would wholeheartedly embrace. ..."I'll just witness the final installation." Even the idea of being away from The Villa for more than a week unsettles me. The Muse wisely suggests we refer to it as a road trip rather than as a vacation, and to the extent that such a second-order reframing soothes me, this works! I will not undertake this excursion as if it were a reward for diligently working, but as a much more pedestrian toodle a little further afield than usual. ... The Muse was raised just south of US Highway 12 in NE South Dakota. I was raised just south of the same highway in SE Washington State. Between these two locations lies what now amounts to an ancient route across Montana and South Dakota, one trucks abandoned in favor of the Interstates. Twelve hundred and fifty miles of two-lane blacktop: small towns, scenery, and, with luck, some sanity. ...Until we finally manage to install an in-ground irrigation system, we must rely upon water timers, hoses, and standalone sprinklers. I have proven myself incapable of programming water timers because nobody who manufactures them has yet tumbled to the notion that mere humans might be called upon to program them. They each employ their own clever machine language more akin to Sanskrit or Finnish than good Ole American English. The Muse figures out the code and even draws a map of the yard showing seven independent watering zones. We just need to confirm that we have enough sprinklers and hoses to service these zones, test the connections, then leave the oversight to Linda Sue, who will be watching the place in our absence. Something always happens to at least one of the sprinklers when we're gone. Our preparation seems remarkably similar to the work I've been engaging in this week on our never-ending front porch project. I've hired Kurt, my old friend and master painter, to help. I consider painting to be a straightforward process of preparing for eternity. Done correctly, I'll never need to touch up what we're painting for the porch. With Kurt's help, we're building jigs to hold the pieces, which will ease the painting effort. We're applying at least four coats: a sealing layer with a nano-particle product called Guard, which renders the wood permanently waterproof; a prime layer to provide the proper base for the finish coats; and two top coats, one for color and the second for depth. The priming coat must be lightly sanded before the top coats are applied to ensure the satin finish features no bumps or blemishes, since the priming coat dries 'flat,' which means without sheen rather than horizontal. ...To compound that, Kurt directed me to sand down some earlier finish coat work I'd completed before he came on the job. He convinced me that the railings should be finished with a satin-textured paint, and I'd completed earlier pieces with flat paint. I feel as though I've been undoing more than making progress. Kurt promises that it will feel like progress once he pulls out his spraying rig. We'll take way too much time setting up those 264 balasters on a 'jig' before painting them perfectly in about an instant with the sprayer, though that will consume more paint than hand-painting them might have. The labor saved will more than offset the extra cost of the paint. I went to purchase more paint yesterday, only to learn that the price of paint had gone through the roof again. Oil-based primer was going for more than seventy dollars a gallon. The satin finish paint was nearly a hundred. I asked when the next sale would come and was delighted to learn that Friday will bring a forty percent off everything sale. I need three more gallons of primer and five of finish. I will save nearly $300 if the project can hold out until Friday for the paint. ... It's a good thing we're doing most of our work on the broad front porch. What does our Tripping have to do with this painting business? The porch project had served as my excuse for bailing on the Tripping, or had, until The Muse clarified that her invitation for me to go road tripping was not so much an invitation as an insistence. I hate to leave in the middle of preparing the porch parts for eternity, for I will get no second chance to witness this once-in-a-lifetime transformation. I trust Kurt and the carpenters to work productively in my stead, but I still dread my absence. My eventual absence will prove inescapable, and I suppose there will always be unfinished business blocking even the most alluring exits. I prepare for my absence, then, setting sprinklers I will not get to witness working, and painting my porch pieces before the carpenters assemble them. Our chief carpenter came down with shingles this week, so he's bed-bound at the moment. I'd already negotiated with him to hold off assembly and installation until I return. The parts should be ready to face eternity by then. I'll just witness the final installation. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

UnderGawd

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-06T05:28:42-07:00

Unknown Indonesian artist from Central Java: God Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles (9th/10th century) "…no enforcement mechanism other than the usual tacit coercion has yet been codified into statute. Yet." Perhaps the definitive element of American citizenship lies in its relationship to God. (I've thoughtfully included a picture of a prominent god above, the Hindu god Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles so that we can share a visual example of a prominent god.) "Real" Americans believe themselves to operate "Under God," as stated in the amended Pledge of Allegiance to our flag. The author of the pledge originally proposed it as an antidote to the influence of immigration from Southern Europe, which was popularly believed to be threatening to dilute genuine American values. He intended schoolchildren to recite it, and it contained no mention of God. The Federal Government standardized the pledge during WWII, but it still held no reference to God. It wasn't until the second Red Scare, circa 1954, that a Republican legislator introduced a bill to officially include "God" in the pledge. A prominent clergyman of the time, a Reverend George Docherty at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., was said to have significantly influenced President Eisenhower's ideas on the subject. “To omit the words ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance is to omit the definitive factor in the American way of life,” Docherty preached. He discounted the right of atheists to object, arguing that an “atheistic American is a contradiction in terms,” because if “you deny the Christian ethic, you fall short of the American ideal of life.” And so we find ourselves today, still trying to Christianize a state whose constitution explicitly insists upon the separation of church and state. It seems to this observer that some people can't imagine living under anything other than the influence of a powerful despot, for, unlike Genesha, the popularly imagined Christian God, the one referred to as over those pledging allegiance to our flag, is a genuine son of a bitch. "He" seems capricious, vengeful, anything but just, though occasionally reportedly compassionate. He's characterized as withholding his infinite love under certain conditions and also heartlessly damning under others. More often described as a thunder and lightning god than the one overseeing hummingbirds. He's a "you'd better" sort of supervisor people live in fear of. Oh, and you'd better love him unconditionally, or else! What a curious reference for a freedom-loving country to adopt as a symbol of reverence. I gnaw on the inside of my cheek every time someone calls for the ritual recitation of this little abomination. I comply lest I be perceived as something other than patriotic, even though I do not subscribe to the patriotic ethic. Such public displays smack of public prayer, and the coercion involved in demanding that "all rise" probably ensures that some significant portion of those rising will feel coerced and therefore offended by the insistent invitation from which they know they are not free to decline, at the very least, by pretending to engage. Damn them! The notion that we're a Christian nation belies the very foundation of what kind of nation our founders envisioned. Supreme Court cases have repeatedly ruled that it's not illegal coercion to insist that people recite the pledge together in public because those opposed to the practice remain perfectly free to abstain if they choose. Just like every professional football player remains free to kneel during the national anthem rather than reverently stand with their right hand held over their heart. No better thug magnet has ever been devised than publicly displaying a lack of reverence toward our flag. Jehovah's Witnesses believe that pledging allegiance to a flag represents worship, and therefore, they will not worship any flag. I just think it's unreasonably coercive and pretend to comply. I could see myself pledging allegience (whatever that might entail) to the flag of a United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under Ganesha, infinitely divisible, and thereby holding the potential for liberty and justice for all, especially those we might believe do not deserve liberty or justice, such as those almost completely unlike us. There's a Federal law and ample precedent governing this worship of the flag, though no enforcement mechanism other than the usual tacit coercion has yet been codified into statute. Yet. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

MsCommunication

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-05T04:58:14-07:00

inscription: Printed quote reads: MAKE LOVE NOT WAR / VIETNAM / What has it done to the home of the brave? AND OUR FRIENDS ARE ALL ABOARD MANY MORE THAN LIVE NEXT DOOR Lennon McCartney ...-© Courtesy of the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York "Vacation is the final stage of denial." Anyone who has attempted to commit a long-term relationship can attest to an occasional communication problem made more difficult by the anesthesia relationships induce. After a decade or two, even the more self-aware seem likely to persuade themselves that they understand what they could never understand. ... It might even render those infrequent occurrences just that much more insidious. ... One might even convince oneself that one can disclose anything without fear of offending, that one's partner represents a bottomless well of understanding. This could never have been the case, though, for regardless of the length or depth of a relationship, the partners remain different people and prone to the occasional bout of serious MsCommunication. I was never one to subscribe to the notion that women are from Venus and men hail from Mars, though I suspect that gender might engender different perspectives. ... They come unbidden, though we each develop ways to condition them for further processing. ... These mechanisms tend to be so subtle that they often escape even their deployer's awareness. ... Some rarely get invoked and remain capable of surprising even their invoker, who might not have developed any awareness of their occasional presence. I've long contended that vacations serve as a sort of punishment for me. Rather than warmly anticipate them, I find ample reason to dread them instead. I noticed in a story I wrote seven summers ago, the line insisting, "Denial is the first stage of vacation." I try to put up a strong defense, identifying reasons to justify my not going. This dance confuses The Muse, who more warmly anticipates new experiences than this old homebody ever has. Once engaged, once we're on the road, I tend to slip into character again. Until then, I'm so filled with dread that The Muse gets fed up with my attitude. ...Neither of us is ever fully aware of whatever the other concludes about our behavior, thank heavens. ... The Muse gets unusually insistent, as if she could convince me with an act of her considerable will. ... I must seem an unfeeling lout then, and maybe I am, for I am usually feeling overwhelmed just trying to stay ahead of processing my own demons. I must seem especially uncaring and uncharacteristically cold, but only because I'm overwhelmed. I'm apt to resolve my churning internal dilemma by insisting that I cannot go. ... It would be irresponsible for me to go galavanting off somewhere in the middle of a crisis. The Muse might not translate my message as I intended, for she never had access to the turmoil churning within my heartfelt denial. ...After investing decades in the relationship, the best we can manage might be a temporary strategic retreat. She replies that if I'm not going, she isn't going, either. Earlier this year, we were given the opportunity to visit Hawaii, one of the two states neither of us had ever visited. She jumped at the chance while I began my usual vacation denial dance. In that instance, I managed to persevere and stayed at home while she went happily galivanting halfway across the Pacific Ocean. She reported a good enough time, though she would have preferred me to accompany her there. ... This instance was different, and different in ways I could not have possibly anticipated from within my usual denial. I was doing what I always do, gathering stories to justify staying home. What else could I do in the face of such a clear threat of vacation? My mastery of denial has denied me most of the sensibilities others might even mindlessly deploy. I can never accurately anticipate the effect disclosing my internal processing might inject. ... I suspect The Muse might vote for me to return there sometimes, especially when I blurt out what to her seems like an uncaring proposition. In our relative youth, we used to insist that merely speaking the unspeakable held the potential to fix most miscommunication. ... Some unspeakables exist for good and decent reasons, and disclosing those might upset more than mere sensibilities or apple carts. The world remains cold and relatively uninhabitable even after I figure out how I might, just this once, squeak away for a few days. As I begin to move into acceptance, I can see different possibilities than were available to me when I was still deeply embedded in my initial denial. Denial remains my first stage of vacation, if not necessarily the last. Before acceptance can kick in, I must engage in my curious dance. After denial and before acceptance, some anger might kick in as well as some difficult bargaining to concoct excuses capable of counterbalancing my otherwise all-powerful denial. ... It's a wonder I ever survive the preparing to actually get myself gone. Vacation is the final stage of denial. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

...

DisappointingMyself

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-04T05:15:30-07:00

Caesar Boëtius van Everdingen: Pan and Syrinx (c. 1644 - c. ...The nymph Syrinx is on the run, with the forest god Pan, hidden among the dense vegetation, in hot pursuit. Van Everdingen captures the dramatic moment of the metamorphosis as Syrinx implores the river nymphs for help. ... Disappointed, Pan listens to the wind playing through the tall reeds and subsequently cuts his flute from them. "…knowing for sure only that I was DissapointingMyself again." I am perhaps most skilled at DisappointingMyself. Oh, believe me, I remain fully capable of disappointing everyone else, but without intending to disclose even the tiniest bit of personal narcissism, I seem to be most skilled at DisappointingMyself. ... I hold myself to unrealistic standards, refusing to adjust my metrics to emerging conditions. I hold ideals more than I ever hold ideas. I frequently fail to uphold those ideals in practice. I can't seem to visualize modest ideals. ... How might I wean myself of my loftier aspirations? On my better days, I seem capable of accepting that I'm only human; on some days, barely so. Even when I set what seem like reasonable goals, I fail to achieve them. As with any experience, coping's the essence. ... Integrating that event into usable experience might require some radically different focus, such as the ability to stand meta to one’s feelings, for instance, to serve as one's own fair witness. It's damnably difficult to observe even one's slow-motion train wrecks. Perspective narrows whenever we catch ourselves in a frame. It might be that we cannot observe ourselves, however diligent our intentions, that only others can see us, though they will be influenced by all they cannot perceive from their perspectives, too. Perhaps there can be no unbiased witnesses, and whatever we experience merely misleads, so that our conclusions cannot help but misrepresent actual events. The blind leading the blind could prove to be a dramatic improvement. My feelings serve as the final arbiter of my plotlines. If I can't know what actually happened, I can certainly feel the aftereffects of any experience. When I send myself regrets, I get different sensations than when I send myself heartfelt congratulations. I prefer those and tend to judge all feedback, even my own, against my memories of those most reassuring appreciations. I don’t even have to actually DisappointMyself to DissapointMyself sometimes. Merely failing to elicit reinforcement can serve as adequate disappointment. Even feeling hollow or aimless seems to diminish me more than sufficiently. The Muse had insisted that I accompany her to her sister's fiftieth wedding anniversary in South Dakota. This would entail at least ten days to drive the vast distance and visit, dictating that I be away from our front porch project for nearly two weeks, just as the parts start arriving from fabrication. I agreed to do the painting and complete my work before the assembly began. This would require a lot of work to be accomplished in the early morning hours, as the blistering summer weather would allow. A day or two with late starts threw off the schedule. Delayed delivery of parts further knocked a hole in the plan. I couldn't figure out how to balance my obligations with The Muse's expectations. I felt damned whatever I chose, leaving me with only one option: DisappointingMyself. I didn't quite find the words to mention the unspeakable. The Muse was furious, of course, and I suppose I felt just as angry with myself. She can fly, now at last-minute pricing, which will still be less than we would have spent driving. Yes, we'll miss one of our favorite experiences: days of discovering what can only be uncovered while driving together across places like Montana or Wyoming. Lord knows, we could both use some time away from The Villa, but not if leaving threatens completing our porch project, which has already seen two winters unfinished. Not if it means failing to fulfill my obligations to complete the painting. A late start yesterday morning left me roasting when the sun rose over the garage. Blinded by sweat dripping into my eyes behind my fogged sunglasses, I found myself feeling overwhelmed. ... I fled into the cool shade inside to hide out from myself, knowing for sure only that I was DissapointingMyself again. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Dedicated

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-03T06:35:53-07:00

Will Hicock Low: Dedication [for Lamia] (1885) "It's unlikely to kill me now, either." Much of the work you and I engage in fails to feel all that engaging. Much of it seems mind-numbing if not necessarily self-destructive. I realize, now that realizing no longer matters, what my father was doing when he insisted I mow more lawn than any eight-year-old should ever mow or rake more leaves than I ever believed I could. He was teaching me how to become Dedicated to some outcome. He'd come up the hard way, in a broken home during the Great Depression, and he had learned from a stern grandfather and a nurturing mother, as well as from a ne'er-do-well counterexample of a dad, how to set aside his feelings to accomplish something or not. He told many tales of working in harvest: how hop vines raised welts on his forearms, how green beans fill up a sack too slowly, how he'd shown up early in the morning and worked through midday. These were object lessons intended to inform me about how this world works. He was an inspiration. It seemed to me that he could do pretty much anything. Only heights scared him, yet he still found the gumption to replace the roof on our dizzingly tall Victorian. He'd broken his foot in a fall before dropping out of high school, yet he still worked long days delivering mail and never once shirked his responsibilities around the house. He reassured us that even hard work could not harm us, and he demonstrated how to set aside personal preferences to fulfill obligations. He saw that part of his job as a father was to load his sons with obligations and responsibilities from an early age, so that they might someday grow up to be worth something to somebody, especially themselves. This was no more easily accomplished for me than it ever was for anybody, for we are not born to be self-sacrificial. That's a learned response, sometimes taught by tough circumstances and others by a caring parent. I could have sworn he was trying to harm me sometimes, like when I wanted to go swimming, but the lawn needed mowing. I was not always above sabotaging the electric lawnmower by accidentally running over the cord. Then, I might be out mowing in twilight rather than watching TV with the rest of the family. I learned to feel guilty when I shirked. Chores always took priority over leisure pursuits. Still do. I imagine my upbringing gave me character, though it took considerable fiddling for me to figure out what might have passed for work-life balance. I was taught, or I had somehow learned to prioritize work above whatever else might present itself for consideration. I became dedicatedly self-sacrificial, refusing well-earned vacation to demonstrate how Dedicated I was to my job. I sometimes sacrificed more than just myself. I could sacrifice my family, who deserved a vacation, while I was distracted, demonstrating my dedication. This was never a simple or straightforward calculus, and I still sometimes struggle to understand where to focus my attention. However, my upbringing at least left me capable of engaging in otherwise mind-numbing activities, such as painting. The unforgiving nature of such obligations demands completion of the assignment, no matter what, even if I assign the work to myself. I can at least suspend my nature and focus my sometimes meager attention until the job's done. I can work through rain and blistering sun, as well as early morning and sunset. It's as if I'm not there for a while, gone somewhere else for the duration if the effort becomes too painful. I've worked through so much discomfort in my time that I understand that through often proves to be the only way to make it to the end of a job or a day. As unlikely as it usually seems that I might be capable of completing the chore, I know I've accomplished worse before without it killing me then. It's unlikely to kill me now, either. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Jaded

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-08-02T04:03:59-07:00

Gift of the Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts © Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts "…why they're so confidently leading us into Hell." We inhabit a time seemingly tailor-made for cynics. The individuals who comprise our administration, who never intended to administer anything, lead the way by steadfastly failing to fulfill the obligations they agreed to when taking their oaths of office. They tend to do the opposite of whatever they promise. ... His supporters insist that we should take him seriously, but never literally, whatever that's supposed to mean. The party that long advertised themselves as The Party of Lincoln, family values, and economic conservatism behaves like confederates, pedophiles, and economic ignoramuses in practice. My congressional representative makes no bones about who he believes he's representing, and it's not his constituents, whose interests he's betrayed at every opportunity. ...I'd seen cynicism in practice. I was there to be trickled down upon during both of Reagan's terms. I'd already learned what happens when we elect someone lacking moral character to high office, but we continued electing republicans even after they'd proven themselves serially incapable of governing anything. ... Trump's first term proved to be much worse. ... But secret societies continued selling their snake oil and nutraceuticals, hammering away at The American Way and decency more or less equally. It became fashionable to be sloppy, to believe even the most outrageous lies. To insist, for instance, that assault weapons don't kill people and that it would prove possible to identify who might commit mass murder and intervene before they acted, thereby preserving the right for everyone to arm themselves to their teeth with weapons they insists are incapable of killing anyone, in the interest of self-defense: that and similar illogicals. Now we have a genuine child in charge, one who continually conflates power and purpose. He seems to believe in nothing so much as his own grandiosity, which doesn't seem all that grand to most of us. He's the sort to insist upon gold-plated toilet paper dispensers and gold toilets for himself and casual cruelty for everybody else. His most dedicated followers seem to revel in receiving his casual cruelty, for they are victims, too. The news overfloweth with hardly half-truths spewed by a machine desperately trying to compensate for what it knows it cannot achieve. When every touted success comes as the direct result of breaking long-established laws, we can be sure that we inhabit an upside-down world. I feel sorely tempted to become Jaded. There was a time when hopefulness was the underpinning principle of this country. We knew we weren't perfect, but we were working on perfecting our shortcomings. Now we seem insistent upon undermining every attempt to improve our lot. ... We see destruction as success, dismantling as our highest purpose. We're creating a vacuum within which everything seemingly suffocates. We have a madman at the wheel. I have been most impressed at how tolerant we've been at the dismantling. Little distress has been expressed, as he has undermined our best and brightest and replaced them with the dimmest bulbs. Suspending habeas corpus should have been enough for the once-Supreme Court to issue a full stop rather than a cynical slap almost near the offending wrist. In the upcoming months, the economy will crash, as it probably already has. How we haven't noticed the undermining rot astounds me. There's no way, short of some previously unimagined form of economic magic, that we won't have engineered another Great Depression before this administration, proven incapable of administering anything, slips into well-deserved oblivion. I suppose there will be questions about how we managed to become so Jaded. Some commentators will likely conclude that we became spoiled by our successes. Others will insist that it was malign foreign influences. We might ultimately agree that we did this to ourselves. Those of us who refused to subscribe to cable couldn't seem to make a big enough difference to counterbalance all those who chose to subject themselves to the cynical ravings featured on Faux Snooze. It might say something about the American Character or, perhaps, the human condition, that anyone still insists on holding conservative values after experiencing those twisted values in action over the last half century. There was never a more malign influence on any society than the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society. ... Both were radical, pretending to be benign. Both were malign, Jaded, and thoroughly cynical. Their members believe they're going to heaven, which might be why they're so confidently leading us into Hell. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 07/31/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-31T13:40:45-07:00

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. ...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. ... 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 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. ...This FollowingChapters Story explains the source of Our Incumbent's most defining tell. He always insists that "A_Lot" of people agree with him without ever declaring what A_Lot might mean. It's a clear signal that he's lying. Anonymous Germany 1499: Lot's Wife Turned to a Pillar of Salt (15th century) "We know he's lying whenever he moves his lips." ...This FollowingChapters Story found me attempting to plumb the Depth of political appointees. Our nearly universal dissatisfaction with their official performances seems to stem from an inherent shallowness in their chief executive. ..." … the last thing they will have to celebrate until their own assassination." ...I couldn't do better this morning than repost what I consider to be a brilliant essay I first posted on February 22, 2025: Golf. This story properly summarizes the extent and purpose of our incumbent's existence on this planet. It represents one of the sorrier testaments to a life spent fleeing life. ... I'm just heading out to inflict even more of the same.) This NextWorld Story focused on the unserious business our Incumbent engages in instead of fulfilling his responsibilities of elected office. Perhaps the most prominent aspect of NextWorld, Golf seems to be the purpose of the presidency now. ...This FollowingChapters Story found me trying to find reasonable Expectations. ...This FollowingChapters Story found me neither too young nor TooOld to be engaging in whatever activities I choose. ..." …when I was still considered too young to engage in any of this shit." ...This FollowingChapters Story, Haven, finds The Muse and I transported into a subtly magical world right next door. ...This writing week, I responded to 'how ya doin'?' ... In this culture, busy is not usually perceived as a positive experience but as an intrusive one, as if busy were keeping me from what I would have preferred to be doing. It registers as a mild to moderate complaint, as if sheer busyness had been trying to sidetrack attention from more important matters. I have no more important matters, just a set of expectations that occasionally backs up on me, leaving me feeling at least mildly overwhelmed and at worst, frozen in headlights. This writing week, somewhere between A_Lot, where I identified one of our incumbent's most reliable tells, and Haven, where I reported on a respite walk The Muse and I took into a local corner of heaven, I experienced a minor revelation. Minor because it didn't contain precisely new information, but the kind of message that seems to bear frequent repeating. I realized that I'm better off—as in happier, healthier, generally more satisfied—when I'm "busy." In this sense, my reporting that I'm Busy seems roughly equivalent to reporting that I'm doing fantastic, even though I've been rising even earlier than normal to complete outside work before the heat exceeds what I can tolerate. I reported on how I've been working out of my Depth for pretty much all of my life. For the first time since I started writing these story series eight years ago, I one morning recycled one of my stories instead of creating a new one, due to busyness, this one about Golf. I admitted that I have no clue how to set or even identify reasonable Expectations and whether I'm actually TooOld or still too young to be doing all I've been attempting. Thank you for following along, though I know you're probably too Busy to be here, too. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Haven

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-31T03:26:33-07:00

John McWhirter: Study of Wildflowers (19th-20th century) "No camera could have captured what we witnessed there…" The Muse and I feel fortunate to live off the better beaten paths. Despite the difficulties we experience trying to find a decent loaf of bread here, many subtle positive externalities surround us. At our age, this place, this “valley they liked so well they named it twice,” its scale suits us even if the politics and parochial perspectives don't always please. Many of our age have relocated here, imagining a safe haven within which to age, only to find healthcare difficult to access and often unavailable at any price. Furthermore, for those accustomed to the narrow range of weather found west of the Cascades, our climate can prove tiring, with endless weeks of temperatures in the nineties throughout summer and months of dreary fog accompanying each winter. Water seems as scarce as Trader Joeses, Costcos, and Targets. Lately, several old familiar businesses have closed. Our economy suddenly seems to be on a downward spiral. The compensations sometimes seem few and far between, for they remain subtle. Streets shaded with ancient trees and enviable viewsheds. Our local Blue Mountains have never been rated in the same class as a thousand other more immediately impressive ranges, for these might seem like relatively low-slung ridges to anyone familiar with the Wasatch or Colorado's Front Range. Like I said, our attractions remain steadfastly subtle and require some delving to experience. The Muse and I were guided on a short hike up and into the headwaters of our local river yesterday. This tour proved to be a revelation. It seemed to happen in an alternate place and time, not a scant hour from our home, not near the end of a blisteringly dry July. It occurred in a forest primeval, to borrow Longfellow's apt term, a place unimaginable from its surroundings. ...Here comes the part of the story that overflows with gushing superlatives, except it won't. I have no adequate words to describe the visual spectacle we found there, with wildflowers in great variety and profusion. Far from the barren-seeming and blistering landscape we had left behind on the valley floor, this forest trail felt cool, even humid, shaded by old-growth pine and fir, and apparently very well-watered. We followed what began as a seeping spring until it quickly turned into a trickling stream, then into what might believably eventually turn into a river. The water was cold and refreshing, suggesting it had trickled up from shallow aquifer, perhaps fed by more than just last winter's snow cover. This forest seemed, above all, mysterious. Between us, we managed to identify many of the wildflowers. Some seemed curiously out of season as if Spring had somehow survived there until the very edge of August. Bees worked the Monk's Hood blossoms, crawling up and into their cups to almost completely cover up their bodies as they worked. A few of the region's indigenous butterflies floated among us as we greedily fell upon huckleberries and currents in relative profusion. We had been transported up and away from our everyday lives, as if we were taking a vacation to some foreign place, except that so much of it seemed all too familiar. I reflected how dry and rocky Colorado had seemed when we lived up there so high. ` We were considerably lower here, and the trail seemed softly padded. I speculated that the same Loess soil that has been trickling down on this corner of the world since time immemorial had also graced this place, leaving the trail soft underfoot instead of torturous. What curious forest this seemed with its edges sanded so smooth. We happened upon a moose, a lone female who seemed to have been mucking around in a swampy bottom. She appeared slightly offended that we would interrupt her munching. She slipped up the mountainside to give us the stinkeye as we passed. ...By midafternoon, we'd returned to The Villa only a little worse for wear, for we are not regular hikers. The Muse's knees will be screaming at her for the next few weeks, but neither of us will regret this respite for a second. We commented to each other later how much more closely we related to this valley after having explored the source of our rather modest river. We experienced the achingly lovely machinery required to produce its midsummer flow and the delicacy we so utterly depend upon to live here. I already feel like a better steward of this place, having witnessed its water source working. The Muse insists that this place remain a relative secret. She doesn't want to see parking problems at trailheads like those on the other side of the state, but I suspect our wilderness might prove too subtle for those who require rock prominences and mighty rivers to impress them. Native honeysuckles and asters make quiet companions, reassuring, only subtly impressive. ... No camera could have captured what we witnessed there, anyway. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

TooOld

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-29T19:03:57-07:00

Jack Gould: Untitled [elderly women inside old house] (c. 1950) " …when I was still considered too young to engage in any of this shit." For most of my most formative years, I was too young. I excruciatingly slowly outgrew my youth to eventually qualify for many of the activities from which my youth had excluded me. I was granted certain dispensations. I was granted the opportunity to ride my bike six miles uphill every predawn morning, delivering newspapers, when I wasn't quite ten yet. This was because my year-older brother was also vying for a route, and mine would make one less drop for the distributor every morning. Once I began getting granted opportunities from which my youth had early exempted me, I began to appreciate the even then ancient adage cautioning against being extremely careful about what I might wish for. I was proud to have a paper route before I was allowed to have one, but then I was expected to pull my weight as if I had already turned ten. Being old enough didn't provide the payoff I had anticipated. Being old enough brought a few unwanted responsibilities. I could no longer feign youthful incompetence. My dad had me stoking the coal furnace stoker before I could hardly heft the scoop shovel, and fishing out the flaming cinders to spread on the driveway to provide traction in winter, long before I should have been considered trustworthy. I became an inextricable part of the family machine, with each member owning their assigned responsibility, and nobody ever given dispensation to revert to their earlier childhood role again. I became TooOld to get away with begging off performing the very chores I'd once ached to perform. Life eventually becomes indistinguishable from irony. Now I find myself at the other end of the timeline. Rather than being too young for some things, it seems I'm suddenly deemed too elderly to be engaging as I had. I didn't see the restrictions coming. At my advancing age, I'd really rather sit in the shade and sip beers, but certain imperatives continue invading. I learned, once I'd come of age, to squelch my youthful idleness and become obsessed with meeting certain objectives. I plumbed the depths of guilt, imagining punishments for acts never undertaken. I learned to be responsible, a form of guilt intended to keep yards mowed and raked in season. I'd learned what it meant to be an adult, and these lessons do not unlearn themselves. The distance between adulthood and dotage seems infinitesimal and might not be worth measuring at all. There have always been knowings not worth learning or retaining. Now, the questions once framed as Too Young seem to have been reframed into TooOld territory. I know no better what I'm TooOld to be doing than I ever understood or respected what I was once deemed too young to engage in. Truth told, I'd really rather be seated at the kids’ table at Thanksgiving, and I always would. I see no particular leverage in being deemed old enough to engage in anything. It might be and probably remains only forgivable to be deemed too something, then still engage as if either too young or TooOld were mere fantasy. I expect myself to faunch at every artificial barrier to entry I encounter, and barriers to entry only ever come in synthetic forms. None seem credible when viewed from an other than the Too perspective, once framed. I remain too young for any of this shit, yet not too old to be engaging in any of the insanity I still expect myself to satisfy. Maybe I'm timeless or ageless or just as full of shit as I was when I was still considered too young to engage in any of this shit. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Expectations

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-29T05:30:24-07:00

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn: Beggar Man and Woman behind a Bank (1630) "Should this realization motivate me to stop engaging?" I was never able to buy into the once-popular notion of continuous improvement. For me, that concept set utterly unrealistic Expectations because improvement, as well as most other phenomena, never occurs continuously. Intermittent might better describe improvement processes, if 'process' even qualifies as the proper descriptor. Some insisted that the continuous label was affixed for motivational purposes, though this insistence nudged me even closer toward disgust. I was never all that motivated to experience the impossible. How, I wondered, would setting impossible Expectations motivate anybody? Those seemed to create good reasons to not feel motivated, but despondent, and put-upon by whoever presumed the right to expect me to produce impossibilities. So, I early on imprinted on the absurdity underlying much of what we label as process. Between the Continuous Improvement and the ever-curious Systemization Movements, room for modest humans seemed to shrink toward the infinitesimal. I quietly protested against what even I recognized as another inevitability. My professional life struggled to maintain some balance between bullshit labels and all-too-human capabilities available to satisfy ever-inflating Expectations. Performance reviews became philosophical works, explaining how failing to meet bullshit Expectations somehow managed to yield exceptional ratings. The metrics were supposed to satisfy somebody's Expectations, but not the hapless incumbents’ who could bring nothing more clever than second-order explanations to their assessments or their equally hapless supervisors’, who were paid to implement and maintain impossibly continuously improving processes. It should surprise nobody that the business world devolved into dueling impossibilities, with nobody truly believing anybody's explanatory stories. Nothing works quite as expected. Upgrades produce ever-worsening results. Failure finally equaled success. It's apparently all in the assessments. Obscure edges justify expenditures. Nobody's quite as naive as they would have to be to believe the cover stories. We have developed a specialized language that permits bullshit Expectations to exceed themselves somehow while simultaneously utterly failing to achieve. Our incumbent proclaims the most successful first six months in office, while his popularity ratings continue to plummet. He never blushes when acknowledging anything fictional. The world is as he insists it is, without exception. The process of aging seems to be one where Expectations increasingly become impossible to properly register. I can no longer distinguish between reasonable Expectations and their opposites, for I appear to have lost any sense of my own capabilities. I cannot look at a piece of work and adequately judge whether it's something I can reasonably accomplish or not. There was a time, back in my relative youth, when I could jump right in and consider it a challenge. I might not have been able to determine whether I could succeed, but I could routinely fool myself into believing that I could and therefore would succeed. I'd enter with a certain certainty, whether I could be reasonably sure or not. Now, I cannot tell. I understand that I'm older, and so I might not be capable of expending energy the way I once did back in my twenties. I tend to overextend myself and need to take a day off to recover from attempting to exceed my own modest Expectations. I do what I can do. I sometimes manage to accomplish considerably more than I imagined I could, but the days when I could routinely exceed my Expectations seem to have passed. I must, I conclude, satisfy myself with more modest Expectations and motivations. I can do what I can do and little more. It's no longer a matter of picking myself up by my bootstraps if, indeed, it ever was. I must now engage, hopefully, without expecting superhuman performance from myself or anyone else. I apparently get the opportunity to exercise my more generous interpretations toward myself and my performances, understanding that I'm the one most likely to over-estimate my abilities for the curious purpose of motivating myself. One step ahead and two backward might be the best I can contribute now. Should this realization motivate me to stop engaging? ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Golf(Reprint from 2/24/2025)

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-29T05:30:07-07:00

This might be his greatest gift to us." ...I might be tempted to insist that our Incumbent sought the job for the leisure time it provided, for, despite being one of the Quote, Busiest people in the world, Unquote, he somehow manages to spend three or four days each week at one of his golf courses, playing or playing at golf. I might also be tempted to consider this proclivity evidence of more than an idle interest, perhaps an addiction, for few activities more demean high office than time spent on "the links." The game represents the pinnacle of what economist Thorsten Veblen called Conspicuous Consumption. Veblen lost a series of university appointments because he insisted upon writing unpopular analyses of the world he inhabited. He possessed the temerity to propose that the apparent purpose of success in America was to essentially waste the resulting wealth showing off. Few human activities seem more frivolous than owning clubs dedicated to offering well-heeled opportunities to fritter away hours chasing a small ball around a park. Indeed, the most frivolous possible activities involve throwing away irreplaceable time. Kurt Vonnegut believed that the true purpose of human existence involves farting around. While this insight has obvious truth, there might be limits to the practical exercising of even this purpose. The Founders probably never considered the purpose of the office of the presidency to be farting around. When one gets elected to be the leader of the free world, one's behavior should not belie that responsibility. Imagine if I, a month into a new position, chose to spend more than half my time "farting around." ... But when executives engage as if they were frat boys, few eyebrows get raised. We expect that behavior since we knew them to be unserious types, anyway. ... I suppose it could be that the one-percenters who golf away their days are just so damned productive that they desperately need to bleed off some of their time lest they, I don't know, explode into some supernova of results, maybe even breaking the space/time continuum in the process. ... People who spend a lot of time playing golf do not appear serious. We knew our Incumbent was unserious before we somehow re-elected him. ... There has never been a serious person who chose the golf industry to be their best of all possible career opportunities. Golf clubs of the sort our Incumbent owns represent the worst elements of the American character. ... Those who feel compelled to join might be the same types who choose to live in gated communities, inherit great wealth, and feed their egos. They seem to compete with each other to achieve the greatest frivolity, be it a yacht, private jet, or vacation home they inhabit for all of two weeks each year. ... These are not society's leaders but its most dedicated followers. They predictably swarm around whatever's considered popular at the moment. Few achieve anything more noteworthy than a hefty contribution to one of the more popular, uncontroversial charities. Their names appear on plaques in the lobbies of some opera houses. ... Still, they choose to spend their days out in the sun. Roman emperor Nero was said to have played a violin while Rome burned around him. This image represents how most Americans view the class obsessed with playing golf. The golf plays the players, effectively distracting them from what couldn't help but be more critical business. To ignore more important business and effectively shirk sacred responsibilities like Incumbency represents the most conspicuous consumption possible. However, this sort does not gain the general admiration of an adoring public. ... They think, if I was entrusted with such grave responsibilities, would I find time to engage in obviously frivolous activities so frequently? I know, the usual defense involves explaining that playing golf is how they unwind. If one needs to spend more than half their time unwinding, it might mean one's coping poorly with a position’s responsibilities. Most people manage with two weeks of annual vacation that they mostly spend catching up with maintenance around the house. They work fifty weeks straight to spend two repainting their house. The Incumbent's business was never business, though he's always touted himself as a brilliant businessman. He's a golfer who sometimes, in the briefest possible glimpses, focused on some actual businesses, most of which failed. He's consequently mostly what's referred to as a crony, essentially one of those clowns who spends the bulk of his time clowning around with an adoring gang as if they were still in junior high. Clowning around doesn't quite satisfy Vonnegut's interpretation of Farting Around, though. In our Incumbent's case, clowning around primarily involves cracking jokes at others' expense and making threatening public statements, none of which seem serious. He seems to be playing a role he's grown more than comfortable with, one essentially as vacuous as it is meaningless. ... The media might hang on to his every utterance, but the rest of us are too focused on actual challenges to fuss much about his dalliances. ... In the face of all the usual challenges anyone's life entails, he chose to retire in place to play golf while encouraging others like him to follow along. In this sense, and no other, is our Incumbent anything even remotely like a leader. The Oval Office might just as well have a Gone Fishin' sign hanging on the doorknob. ... This might be his greatest gift to us. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

...

Depth

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-27T05:47:11-07:00

Joseph Lisle: A diving belle (1818 - 1830) From the Thomas McLean Collection " … the last thing they will have to celebrate until their own assassination." I have been operating out of my Depth for all of my life so far. I once believed—or prayed—that I might one day "grow out of" my innate shallowness, though I no longer hold out much of any hope for that result. I have grown to expect myself to perform pretty much to my specs, which, while sometimes broad rather than narrow and tall rather than short, have always, so far, tended toward the eminently shallow. I'm uncertain how one develops Depth. Experience alone does not necessarily seem to translate into deepening experience, for one can seemingly dabble in any subject without ever truly delving very much deeper. Many have taken to complaining about the lack of Depth in our incumbent's political appointees. As a class, though, political appointees have never precisely guaranteed much beyond loyalty to the incumbent who appointed them, if that. They tend to be experienced in unrelated fields and frequently commit the unwitting sin of mistaking their present assignment for some former one. These confusions often make for entertainment as a department head attempts to manage the Department of Education as if she were overseeing the World Wide Wrestling Federation's executive operations, for instance. Hapless hardly starts describing the typical political hire, though our present incumbent's administration, dead-set against administering anything, certainly sets a tenaciously higher bar. Hegseth, the so-called SecDef or Secretary of Deafness, rivals Rumsfeld in his public defensiveness. Rumsfeld, you will remember, began the republification of the Department of Defense with his oversight of our post-9/11 self-inflicted war-making. He was the one who famously reported on what he didn't know he didn't know, perhaps the most perfect portrait of a Secretary out of his Depth. He mistook the Defense Department for a graduate seminar on military history and himself for a learned professor, which he was, much more than an experienced warfighter. That said, credentials have rarely supported a candidate's nomination or confirmation, for both activities come as close to pure partisan as any can, if partisanship can even be said to come in anything resembling a pure form. So, the difficulty cannot possibly lie in these Secretaries being out of their Depth. I suspect it comes from a second-order cluelessness about this inescapable fact. Their incumbency transforms into parody due to their inability to perceive just how shallow they are. Perhaps the better ones suffer from twangs of impostor syndrome, but the worst seriously attempt to act as though they were comfortably within their range of competences when even the kiddies can see that they ain't. Those who are moved to make public proclamations because their position allows them to do so usually prove to be the lamest, but seriously, few expect any political appointee to perform competently. They are—and have been, for the most part, throughout history—at best, atmosphere characters, on stage purely to frame scenes for their chief executive. The primary reason this current batch seems so lame stems from the extraordinary lameness of their boss. This batch of cabinet secretaries each chose to make a deal with a devil they couldn't have possibly known. Even those who could trace their so-called relationship—i.e., acquaintance—with the incumbent back generations should have known they were signing on with a character with little character. They should have known their role would be to play contingent cannon fodder, for a time would come when their boss could only appear to save his ass by sacrificing theirs. They would be like caged chickens in the interim, dutifully laying eggs. Their real purpose, though, would not lie in laying eggs but ultimately in making the ultimate sacrifice for their hapless patron. No one will or should ever shed a tear for the fate of any undersecretary, for it was clearly predetermined when they agreed to stand for their confirmation hearing. I swear every one of them should receive a hair shirt and a box for their head as a prize for gaining confirmation. It will be the last thing they will have to celebrate until their own assassination. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

A_Lot

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-26T05:23:32-07:00

Lot's Wife Turned to a Pillar of Salt (15th century) "We know he's lying whenever he moves his lips." Our incumbent, who works hard to emphasize that he never was or will be "Our President," employs a particularly telling "tell." A "tell" describes an unconscious action that betrays an attempted deception. In other words, a tell provides explicit confirmation that he is lying when he lies. He seems to continually employ this specific tactic, which serves to bolster the notion that he rarely tells the truth. He will make some assertion and immediately confirm its accuracy by declaring that "A_Lot" of people agree. Validation by reference to some vague quantity rarely convinces anybody. "A_Lot" could be a dozen or a thousand or a million. He leaves the precise volume to his listener's imagination. He appears to use his title to amplify his assertions, as if holding an office bestowed special perceptive powers on the office holder, when it clearly doesn't. He might be attempting to intimidate opposition by anchoring his assertion, however absurd, to some imaginary majority opinion, as if merely holding an opinion or just being said to hold an opinion might render any odd assertion valid. In his ecosystem, bare assertion seems to often stand in for naked truth. Since truth, clothed or otherwise, rarely seems to escape his lips, he's left with assertion as the sole form of confirmation he can offer anyone. ... He seems to believe that he can render anything true by associating it with a majority, A_Lot. Indeed, he often seems to pretend to govern in just this way. Up becomes down and down becomes up on his mere declaration. Those opposing him might find themselves sued for defamation, as if defaming a liar said anything negative about anyone's underlying character. Later, some judge will declare that "A_Lot" doesn't amount to a legal quantity and declare the lawsuit moot, but the purpose of the legal action was distraction, never satisfaction. Our incumbent will never be Our President because he shows no interest in fulfilling that role. He clearly states who he's for and who he's against. He constantly asserts his allegiances against ours, in favor of another curiously well-heeled minority, never ‘We, the People.’ He sees us as rabble, underfoot for his attempts to dominate our culture. His poisonous presence undermines most everything he attempts, not that he doesn't do damage. Like Lot, that Old Testament character who offered his daughters to visiting angels, our incumbent stands accused of engaging in sex trafficking. He's provided ample confirmation of his guilt over past decades, but now he pretends he is as innocent as an infant. I think the Old Testament Lot must be the one he's continually referring to whenever he gets defensive. A_Lot always agrees with whatever he asserts, though one might reasonably question Lot's bona fides for this purpose. In the Bible story, Lot's daughters declined the opportunity to show hospitality to those angels. ... Later, Lot was warned to flee his home in Sodom before The Lord could destroy the town for its wickedness. His family was warned not to peek back over their shoulders when fleeing, but Lot's wife couldn't resist the temptation to witness the destruction. God, in his mercy or vengeance, turned her into a pillar of salt. Lot and his daughters successfully fled Sodom to somewhere else. Later, Lot went into the opinion polling business, where he is still considered an authority today. Our incumbent, for instance, invokes his name and reputation each time he makes another self-indicting proclamation. A_Lot of people agree, he claims. I can't help imagining Melania turning into a pillar of salt whenever our incumbent repeats that claim. The Lord no longer destroys cities for wickedness. Evangelicals have learned to leverage wickedness under the eternally questionable 'ends justify the means' insistence. They believe their goal to be righteousness, so that justifies whatever wickedness they feel they must employ to gain that objective. Much wickedness has ensued since those dudes began undermining the separation of church and state and insisting they were holier than anybody else. They seek vengeance for imagined violations of fanciful commandments. They seem to revel in wielding truly terribly swift swords, more interested in lobbing off heads than administering justice. A_Lot apparently agrees with their unjust opinions, or at least that's what our wicked incumbent continually insists. We know he's lying whenever he moves his lips. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 07/24/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-24T16:02:38-07:00

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. ...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. ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me StudyingMyself as embodied in my freshly copyedited manuscript aptly entitled Cluelessness. Stanley Anderson, Engraver: Head Study (1908) From: Samuel Putnam Avery Collection ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me finally MeetingMyself. Allart van Everdingen: Rabbit meets Reynard in Field (17th century) ...This FollowingChapters Store finds me worshiping the usually absent god of Moisture, who deigned to visit us this morning. Pieter van der Heyden: Summer, from The Four Seasons (1570) -Published by Hieronymus Cock "I can expect another little insubstantial rain shower along about September." ...This FollowingChapters Story, Paperwocky, reports on perhaps my one eternal gift to my fellow humans, my tenacious inborn inability to successfully complete online and paper forms. Self-publishing seems to be a straightforward matter of failing to navigate what was supposed to be an author-directed series of online checklists and forms. ..."I'm a tad old-fashioned that way." ...This Following Chapters Story finds me catching myself being complicit. Consent often comes from a watchman's inattention, a tacit form of Complicity. Unknown Artist: Portrait of a man (Mid-3rd century CE) - Gallery Notes: The irregular shaping of the wooden board here helps us imagine the original placement of this portrait over the mummy’s face, affixed with complicated wrappings. The portrait is painted using the encaustic technique, in which pigment is mixed with beeswax, allowing the artist to achieve complex gradations of light and shade and sometimes a luminescence that has been compared to the sheen of oil painting. The man’s hair and beard are trimmed short in the fashion of the mid-third century. "We'd rather ride the slow train to oblivion." ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me Indentured as a galley slave for an evening, satisfying one of the covenants governing The Muse and my marriage. ..."I havehave another early call again tomorrow morning." ...This was a renewing writing week, marked by the return of my Cluelessness manuscript from final copyediting. That document held a portrait of myself circa seven years ago, with enough distance that I could discern some real difference by Studying Myself. It seemed as though I was MeetingMyself as the writer I know myself to have become, as I experienced my work as a reader, far removed from the creation for a change. As much of a change as a spot of rain in mid-summer. Moisture, a rare enough occurrence in this valley so near the center of the universe, even a tenth of an inch seems substantial. I encountered forms and checklists that I could not make heads or tails of in Paperwocky. Our attempts to streamline leave people like me behind. I experienced a fresh sour taste of Complicity as I noticed too late to comment about, let alone act to make any difference, regarding an elephant in the room. I ended this writing week with a back-handed complaint about one of the central covenants every partnership experiences: Indenture, when the spouse obligates their counterpart without really asking their permission. I satisfied the obligation with bells on, and I'm back to enjoying regular order again this morning. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Indenture

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-24T06:11:11-07:00

Kahlil Gibran: The Slave (1920) "I have another early call again tomorrow morning." Part of the sacred responsibility that accompanies any family must be the obligation to occasionally Indenture one's spouse. This need not necessarily be in any way ominous, for necessity will dictate the timing. Part of the unwritten covenant between any couple covers cornering them. This might involve volunteering their services without first consulting them or merely informing them, rather than asking. The savvy spouse will accept these assignments without altogether too much grousing because they at least imply that they're still seen as good for something, which might be a blessing, depending. The Muse had this brilliant idea to auction off a couple of dinner parties as part of a fundraising scheme by the local party. I sort of remember her mentioning this idea to me and, as usual, I probably gave her inquiry a firm maybe, expecting a second warning. She knows me well enough to know that I rarely commit to anything without cogitating. So, if she wanted me to agree with her proposal, she'd need to give me ample lead time. But time was tight, I guess, or else I spaced it. It might have been one of those last-minute, feeling cornered commitments. The covenant also covers these. The next thing I knew, she'd already submitted the offer, and it was too late for me to unvolunteer. The offers were accepted in the silent auction portion of the festivities. By the end of that evening, we knew we were officially obligated to produce those supper parties. I believe she also promised a short concert following. She negotiated to determine the date, which ended up being the day after The Muse would return from a business trip and also after a day already filled with her official meetings, which meant that I would be preparing the feast more or less by myself. I've previously pulled off such feats several times, though I feel out of practice. Fortunately, we maintain a deep larder, and I know just enough to be capable of mustering an interesting presentation. This must be something more than a deep baking dish of my mac and cheese, for this supper was purchased. It will require some gravitas. I went shopping for ingredients yesterday. I lucked into a fresh shipment of local Steelhead trout, fat filets that will poach beautifully. My entreé idea involves steaming portions of fish in corn husks. These always produce a satisfying presentation. Scissoring open the corn husks at the table will reveal a steaming piece of fish in a crabapple/shallot sauce with a half fresh apricot on top, seasoned with fresh dill. ... This should provide adequate wow to distract from whatever accompanies. I thought fresh green beans, always a summer favorite, and The Muse will contribute a fresh cucumber/sweet onion salad. Maybe an avocado/chaote salad, too. It is, after all, high summer. There might be slices of melon to start, as well, drapped with transparent slices of prosciutto. ... Dessert will feature The Muse's fresh, house-made Wenaha Black Currant sorbet, from last week's foraging foray up into the National Forest. Fresh, local, and, hopefully, interesting enough. I will spend the afternoon trying to remember how to prepare what I've described here, and tuning up the old guitar. I performed for guests the weekend before last and learned that I had not been practicing nearly enough. My fingers had forgotten some of their tricks. Later tonight, Indenture satisfied, I will be released back into the general population and be free again to make my own commitments. I will not mention this Indenture. It will have been nothing terribly exceptional. I must maintain a reputation as reliable, which unavoidably includes occasionally taking one of these inconveniences for the team. My efforts will be appreciated and rewarded with an offer to clean up the dishes. I'll be in bed as early as I can muster. I have another early call again tomorrow morning. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Complicity

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-23T05:30:12-07:00

Unknown Artist: Portrait of a man (Mid-3rd century CE) ...The irregular shaping of the wooden board here helps us imagine the original placement of this portrait over the mummy’s face, affixed with complicated wrappings. The portrait is painted using the encaustic technique, in which pigment is mixed with beeswax, allowing the artist to achieve complex gradations of light and shade and sometimes a luminescence that has been compared to the sheen of oil painting. The man’s hair and beard are trimmed short in the fashion of the mid-third century. "We'd rather ride the slow train to oblivion." The Muse, in her role as Port Commissioner, asked me to attend the Port's bi-monthly Economic Development Information Meeting (EDIM) in her stead, since she would be attending a commissioner-only meeting convened by the Washington State Association for the Prevention of Port Commissions in a far corner of the state. I had not attended one of these meetings in nearly twenty years. It typically offers a free lunch and attracts a wide variety of interested parties. It usually features a speaker who holds forth on some topic and enough minutiae to satisfy anyone with a severe spreadsheet dependency. I arrived a little early so I could wish the conveners well and grab a choice seat waaaaay up front along one side. From there, I could see almost everybody attending, just as well as the presenters could. I passed on the lunch, not just because it was free. I seldom partake of the free lunch because it distracts from my purpose for attending. I was to pay close attention so I could inform The Muse of anything important she might be missing. I prepared to enter into one of those mild comas one enters when subjected to somebody else's statistics. ...The number of visits to the small business counseling office and the number of jobs saved by their service, as well as the mildly alarming decrease in sales tax revenues —the primary source of funding for both our county's cities and the county itself —over recent quarters. ... The Port's Executive Director noted that some of the data seemed questionable. Everyone promised to stay on top of this trend, and we proceeded to the presentation. A state highway engineer reported on the progress of the four-laning of our primary access highway to our valley. This effort began more than twenty years ago and might be completed in four more years if funding appears. The feds contributed the largest single grant ever given by a rural development administration. It required matching funds, and the combined amount didn't quite cover half of the projected expense for completing the project. The likelihood of additional funding and the timing of its arrival consumed the balance of the presentation. I sat through the following brief presentations that sparked few questions from the audience, and never really noticed the elephant dozing in the middle of the room. I knew for certain that the funding for four-laning our highway would not be forthcoming, certainly not within the next four years. I also knew with crystal clarity that sales tax revenues would continue falling, except at an increasingly alarming rate. No, the data will have been proven correct, though one presenter reported that the Feds had stopped gathering data on "Underserved People", whoever that was. The Port's Economic Development Director reported on a lead that could potentially develop into a green manufacturing plant employing 1,700 full-time equivalents once fully operational. ...Everyone has been asking what they would have done back in the early days of fascism. I suspect they would have done what I caught myself doing, later, in reflection. I didn't mention the missing representative of the local college who had been laid off to cover a budget shortfall. ... Our incumbent in Washington and his representatives have been insisting upon it. There remains precisely no chance, as of this writing, the morning after I attended the Port's Economic Development Information Meeting, that we will not experience a severe Republican-induced recession over the next quarters. One goes broke excruciatingly slowly at first, before, in a shocking burst, it starts going faster than anyone can respond. Faster than anyone can bear to watch, like a house of cards or a glacier birthing an iceburg. ...When it finally does, it will be the first time in history that it has. ... For those who find this notion counterintuitive, this effect probably has much to do with leverage. ... Those who exhaust their time finding ways to cut expenses to trim deficits tend to produce the most unsatisfying results. ... It's the presumed dollar value of the good that the corporation believes it contributes to the world. If our nation's budget carried such an entry, it might have been balanced without all the recent mindless budget cuts. It appears from here that DOGE targeted exclusively what would have been Goodwill. ...Later, over a beer, I caught myself asleep, dozing through that lunch of which I chose not to partake. ... I imagined myself taking the mike and declaring that the next EDIM would probably be the most memorable one ever, and that the one just ending might be the last one, looking at those tired old metrics. By the next meeting, we'll no longer be discussing the possibility of funding but rather the certainty of our local governments shutting down. The situation is more dire than we can imagine, and I'm complicit. I doubt that my declaration at yesterday's meeting could have accomplished anything but pissing many people off. ... We'd really rather ride the slow train to oblivion. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Paperwocky

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-22T06:21:52-07:00

"I'm a tad old-fashioned that way." "I have adjusted your shopping cart to show the custom cover lite. Please send me your final manuscript and the cover art. Please send any notes you may have regarding the cover design as well. ...When you log in, click on the title ID in the active titles box, and you will see a checklist to the right. ... Please click on ‘Click Here for Production Agreement’. ... Please review and then click on the Approve Production button. ...One of the features of self-publishing involves being instructed on what to do rather than being served. I have proven myself to be relatively incapable of following even the more straightforward instructions, such as the ones I copied and pasted above from an email from my Author Representative, Elaine. I interpret her directions as if they were koan-quality contemplation, since I'm sincerely uncertain how to interpret them. ... This company has condensed its entire publishing experience into a tightly nested series of checklists, which an author supposedly accesses by logging in to a portal and then navigating through various non-intuitive levels. I never remember how to log in. I never remember the URL I'm supposed to log into. My Pastword-remembering software never remembers these sorts of Pastwords, either, perhaps because the website was so cleverly designed that it's one-of-a-kind. In our age, we desired to replace paper with online forms. This was supposed to be more convenient and less troublesome to trees. It has turned out to be neither of these. Those of us with form phobias managed to seamlessly transfer our paper psychoses to their online counterparts. Virtual forms seem, if anything, even more confusing than their paper forebears, and, believe me, they always seemed confusing enough to me. They suffer from the same fundamental design error, though their designers probably wouldn't admit to committing any mistake. They produce sequential lists frozen in specific orders, ones which doubtless make perfect sense to them. They commit the original sin of design, which has always been to design for the designer's satisfaction rather than for the user. I admit that designing to my preferences would have severely complicated the designer's challenge; yet, ignoring my needs uniformly produces forms I cannot comprehend, rendering the designer's efforts moot. ...The ideal would be to produce a system so prescient that it wouldn't require supervision. Users could order their own inventory, stock their own shelves, make their own selections, and then check out their orders, while the owners sit back and enjoy an endlessly renewable passive income. ... I'm the character most likely to crash the server, not through any willful sabotage but because I chose one of the unwitting paradoxes the designers inadvertently built into their system. I would never trust myself to try to complete any online form. I find Amazon Prime's ordering system terminally confusing, as if it had been specifically designed to prevent me from successfully using it. And so it is with virtually every online ordering protocol. I might get all revved up to buy something, then I'm virtually always chased off by some question or input convention I cannot comprehend. I leave my virtual shopping card filled, then disappear, probably never to return. ...I'm currently in the stage of completing the self-publishing effort, where I've finished reviewing my copy editor's suggestions, accepting or rejecting each one in turn. I've notified Elaine that I'm ready to submit the completed manuscript, and I even have cover art ready. However, I suspect I'll need to consult with the graphic arts department on the final touches. ... I will sit here for a long while, contemplating whether to log in and how to do so. I figure I'll give Elaine some time to wonder where I've disappeared to before seeking her assistance again. I will ultimately consent to enter the self-checkout station, but I will very likely quickly disqualify myself in there. Ultimately, Elaine will have to accompany me through the system, prompting me with each required entry. I will enter the data Elaine understood, and I never would, then all might be right with the world again. The net effect of automated systems might be to increase the net number of assistants required to accomplish tasks. The adage remains true that you can move resources from one place to another, but never successfully replace them with technology, regardless of the advances touted in technology and design. ... Checklists insist upon strict sequences, an unnatural and ultimately self-defeating convention. The machine would prefer that we adapt to its preferences, and I suppose many of us do. I remain an isolated island of inability surrounded by unnecessarily clever technology. I freely admit that it has outsmarted me, and I might become morose or disappointed if I had ever aspired to acquire some machine's notion of intelligence. I'm a tad old-fashioned that way. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

...

Moisture

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-21T05:44:28-07:00

Pieter van der Heyden: Summer, from The Four Seasons (1570) published by Hieronymus Cock "I can expect another little insubstantial rain shower along about September." Every day for the past month or so, the news has been reporting the most savage series of flash floods I remember. Past summers have not been nearly this tumultuous, with perhaps a narrow tornado season followed later by an equally narrow hurricane one, but this summer has seen a seemingly unending series of record-setting, thousand-year floods following unprecedented downpours measuring in inches of Moisture per hour. As usual, my little corner of this world, the one overlooking the absolute center of the universe, where gravity always works reliably, has seen nothing even distantly resembling these calamities. We've experienced our more or less usual Moisture so far this summer, the negative kind. Through June, we received barely a distant whisper of rain, resulting in a net negative Moisture month for us again. We've been praying for rain, while further east, they've been praying for its cessation. We worship the god of moisture, believing it makes life here possible. People tend to believe most fervently in whatever resource seems most scarce. Those living in cruel circumstances pray to a merciful god, while those who live on the edge of an arid desert pray to a largely imaginary god of Moisture. We've seen rain, but rarely in the season when we need it most. When our forests need a respite, lightning comes in its stead, and then helicopters and airplanes bring Moisture up from the Columbia River to quench the suddenly raging thirst before it spreads. Yesterday morning, I woke before sunrise to the heavy scent of smoke. The smoke smelled like an insult, a taunt, a disgrace. It either means wheat or forest burned and might still be burning yet. These fires are not transitory visitors. Their effects last for generations. Just last week, The Muse and I visited a section of National Forest where we camped twenty years ago. Since then, a lightning fire reduced the primeval to blackened stands of native timber. What had been gently shaded through the summer now lies beneath a relentless sky. The underbrush largely survived. Fallen giants litter the forest floor, rendering it all but impassable, all due to a shortage of Moisture. I'd packed several bottles of water for our excursion, knowing for certain that we'd find no potable water once we left the paved road. The remaining forest has its charms, but they sure seem different. The certain knowledge that we'll never again experience it as it was before the fire leaves us feeling humbled and tired. The missing trees were those rugged hills’ defense against the consistently blistering summers. They held Moisture and offered defenses. I wonder if the bears, once common there, ever returned after their homeland burned. Some say the world will end with fire, and others, ice, Robert Frost supposed. For some these days, their world ended with Moisture, falling in inches per hour onto an impenetrable limestone and swiftly accumulating into a surprise tidal wave. Others blow away on a seemingly indifferent wind or burn in a malevolent firestorm. Fire, ice, Moisture, wind, before coming around to fire again, the common denominator: end. It rained overnight. I woke to a cooling Moisture on my face and that unfamiliar shine on the street out front. Potholes shimmered and speckled in the barely discernible drizzle. I had planned to set sprinklers in the predawn again this morning, but free rain came instead. The wheat harvest will be suspended until midday, when the humidity may rise to a point where chaff can easily separate from the kernel again. Until then, the crew will take the opportunity to grease the equipment and ready themselves for an extended afternoon. Harvest will continue until last light forces the combines to quit. The Moisture washed the smoky scent out of the breeze this morning. I can expect another little insubstantial rain shower along about September. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

MeetingMyself

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-20T06:06:11-07:00

Allart van Everdingen: Rabbit meets Reynard in Field (17th century) "The difference sure feels profound, though…" As a writer, I mostly work through surrogates. It's not precisely that I do not show up for work when I work. It's more that when working, I primarily project. However introspective one of my stories might seem, creating them amounts to an act of extreme extroversion for this extraordinarily introverted writer. I usually speak to someone else when creating, my mythical reader, or the ether. Writing for me has never been a dialogue with myself, or even with the deaf. Even when I edit a fresh piece, it's more of an out-of-body experience than a conversation. I might burgle the opportunity for me to read my writing by the very act of creating it. It seems at least vaguely familiar even on first reading, probably because I just finished writing it. Editing demands a certain cold-hearted distance, akin to pruning shrubs or weeding tomatoes —a certain indifference. It is hardly an intimate act, best done at an emotional distance. So, it was a rare occurrence when I found myself re-re-reading my Cluelessness manuscript, recently returned from final copyediting before publication, and caught myself immersed in what must have been myself. Distanced enough from the creation of the work, and wading through the editor's suggestions, I could not maintain any sense of authorship while completing the job. I expected it to feel grueling, but I was shocked when it didn't. I even caught myself procrastinating to prolong the effort. ... I felt the sense of renewal that a reader experiences when encountering something truly special on a page. I felt moved in ways I rarely feel moved by anything these days. Later, I caught myself being out in the world as an author. I remembered when, all those long years ago, The Blind Men was first released, when the universe seemed destined to become my oyster, well before it became a best seller. Whatever other shortcomings I might have achieved in my life, I'd experienced a pinnacle. I felt sure that nothing could ever diminish the exhilaration. It felt like fatherhood again. I felt certain of my identity in ways uncharacteristic of me, who'd always wondered who he might become should he ever finally manage to grow up. Then I knew and no longer held that otherwise unresolvable mystery. I had finally become me. With whom do I have the pleasure of encountering here? I apologize if I sound as though I'm unfamiliar with you. I do not remember when we last met face-to-face, or if we've ever met each other before. It's a genuine pleasure. No, I cannot imagine anybody else writing this book. It accurately represents your world view, which has always been unlike any other's. The portrait builds until a real sense of your presence remains. What did you say your name was again? ...Authorship is not as intimate an act as even an author suspects. Like wine, it requires some time in isolation, absorbing something other than sustenance from its originating vine. It must be influenced by perspectives never present at any moment of conception. The first pass, the initial post, inevitably tastes like new wine, fine for any purpose except fine dining. A vintage requires great patience and attention to too many incredibly picky details. Not every grower has it in them to become a winemaker. Not every writer could ever become an author. The differences seem subtle until some writer experiences the transformation. Then, he will likely have no ready explanation and be unable to make a coherent distinction between the one and the other. The difference sure feels profound, though, to this writer, lately cum author again. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

StudyingMyself

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-19T04:44:35-07:00

As I announced in Recovery, the episode of this FollowingChapters Series I posted just before yesterday's Weekly Writing Summary, my Cluelessness manuscript has returned from its final copyediting pass. ... I secretly feared that the copyeditor would uncover the depth of my long-secreted impostor syndrome and expose me for my presumptions. I also imagined that her efforts might somehow validate my talents, however modest, and justify my continuing this little vanity on into infinity. I received a bit of both, and also neither of what I'd so fervently hoped and feared. As I reported in Recovery, she’d employed a light hand, preserving what I'd imagined represented my voice while drawing a firm line between what might prove acceptable and what could never pass muster. I characterize myself as more of a feral writer than a trained one. I've skimmed a few ‘How To’ books concerning the fine art of writing, but I never managed to assimilate any body of wisdom or knowledge, such as the rules for comma usage or the avoidance of dangling participles. Truth be told, I do not know my parts of speech and couldn't identify a participle if one were satisfyingly dangling in front of my face. I write by ear, the way feral musicians perform, not by any underlying understanding of key signatures. My ear hears what it hears, and my mind remembers whatever it might remember; neither seems to have any correlation to what was performed out there. ...I hold some curious habits, the most unusual being those I never suspected were wrong. The most embarrassing learnings always come from recognizing some long-standing misunderstanding, some essentially tacit rule everyone else always knew but which never occurred to you. I've noticed a few in my returned manuscript. I use ellipses, those series of dots that designate a deliberate omission. I often use these in my "buried lede," the partial sentence I pull from the end of a piece to grace the beginning. I have always set these off with spaces, one on each side of the…, as if they were words, but my copy editor insists that ellipses are not set off with spaces, so each instance received a note to delete the unnecessary spaces. I figure that my adherence to my imagined convention clearly demonstrates my depth of understanding of my craft. It strongly suggests that I'm still a hack. But had I ever aspired to acquire any finer skills? ... I've always refused to outline before creating, insisting that life doesn't depend upon prescience to ultimately make sense, so why should writing, especially writing that's trying to make sense of living? Plot and story, meaning and significance might best be considered emergent elements, rather than something to be deliberately injected. I'd long speculated this while secretly feeling somewhat remiss for failing to discipline myself into outlining. In re-re-reading this manuscript, though, I do experience a definite sense of emergence. The story doesn't insist upon any particular interpretation. It doesn't have an intended meaning, but meaning nonetheless appears. I believe this must be the reader's purpose, to prize out the meaning where none was originally injected. In this way, the reader has something to do besides peruse a transcription. The reader becomes an implicate part of the creation. And that's the sense I'm experiencing as I crawl through this first-ever re-re-reading of this once familiar manuscript. I fully acknowledge that only I could have written it. ... At the same time, it doesn’t feel too awfully exclusive. I feel welcomed into the little world I created. It seems filled with foibles and curious disclosures. It describes how I interact with the world from my point of view. ... I do not attempt to persuade anybody to change the way they interact with their world. I disclose the otherwise super secret world I know while acknowledging my abiding Cluelessness. Ultimately, I hope I will not have convinced anyone to change the way they live. I might, by example rather than through instruction, perhaps encourage the reader to more fully acknowledge and to even revel in their own inescapable Cluelessnesses. I left yesterday's reading feeling dazed, as if I had spent more than part of my day immersed in that manuscript's world. I felt as though I had been pulled along, intrigued, sometimes mystified, and also entertained. I wasn't sure I could even sit down to supper. I woke feeling a little dizzy this morning, knowing for sure that today would see me work my way through to the ending of this story. I still have a few questions. I sent a note to the copyeditor asking how I can remove the yellow highlighted words that designate echoes, the same words used in close proximity. ... StudyingMyself, I retain a few unanswered questions. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 07/17/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-17T18:34:58-07:00

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'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. ... 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. ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me overseeing the Disintegrating of our incumbent's grand vision for transforming our nation back into the Nineteenth Century again. ...John Martin: Fall of the Walls of Jericho, from Illustrations of the Bible (1834) ...This FollowingChapters Story, Prafussee, finds me criticizing the "God Made Me Do It Defense." I'm offended when anyone attributes their sins to direction from their personal Lord and Savior. It seems equivalent to "The Voices In My Head Made Me Do It." ..."Anyone claiming today that God directs them has forgotten their history lessons, or they might just be a charlatan." ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me watching a CityOfCards implode, and with it the illusions and lies that built it in the first place. ...Lucas Vorsterman: Fighting farmers after a card game, 1619-1675 — Gallery Notes: Fighting farmers, after a card game. One holds a threshing flag and hits the other on the head, while another man tries to stop him. The other farmer has a pitchfork in his hands. A woman holds a jug and is prevented from hitting it by a man holding her wrist. In the foreground, a fallen bench, a jug, and a scattered deck of cards. ...This FollowingChapters Story describes what inevitably occurs as a result of inflicting AntiPolicy on any complex system. AntiPolicy reliably produces only one result, the opposite of whatever it might espouse. ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me focusing on the FalseFlags our incumbent uses instead of truths. He speaks exclusively in mirror images, meaning almost the opposite of whatever he says. ...This FollowingChapters Story tells the tale of how I happened to become a writer and how I found myself Rediscovering a manuscript I thought I'd finished seven summers ago. ..."…the direct eventual result of this writer writing." ...It's never news when I find myself stumped when deciding what to write about, but mid-summer brings a special sort of mystery to people like me. After a long build from Spring, suddenly everything's no longer maturing but inexplicably mature. I suppose everything matures too quickly, like we fall in love too easily for it to ever last. I hustled my sorry butt and pulled a few stories out of the ethos this writing week. ...I began this writing week by noting that whatever edifice our sorry incumbent believed he was erecting has already begun inexorably Disintegrating. He squandered his last chance, thank heavens, and will not be recovering. I next poked at the prophets who also seem too full of themselves to notice they're espousing shit. Anyone earnestly believing themselves to be a prophet might reasonably seek professional help interpreting their sorry Prafussee. I then described the CityOfCards our incumbent has been attempting to construct and somehow preserve. ...I noted that those who oppose as their primary strategy tend to produce the opposite of their intentions. ...I wondered what happens when an administration bases its efforts on FalseFlags. Even The Ancient Greeks understood that this was the reliable recipe for producing the opposite of whatever they intended. I ended my Writing Week to revel in Rediscovery, reading through a manuscript I innocently believed I'd finished seven summers ago, only to find it back and delighting me for the first time all over again. Thank you for following along as I wend my way through this scorching summertime! ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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Rediscovery

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-17T05:54:23-07:00

"…the direct eventual result of this writer writing." Seven summers ago this morning, I was up writing very early, as had been my habit for just over a year by then. I had begun this writing discipline after a six-month-long Dark Night of the Soul wherein I wondered if I had ever—indeed, would ever—become a writer. I quelled my fretting by writing, a simple enough resolution in retrospect, but a serious question when still prospective. I speculated that if writers write, then I could only hope to answer the question of whether I was a writer by writing. I needed plenty of reassurance then, so I began by dedicating myself to daily stints. I'd write early in the morning, before my day could slip away from me. Neither the content nor the purpose mattered then, for I was just seeking reassurance. If I could maintain that modest commitment, I figured I might eventually consider myself to be the writer I aspired to become. In reality, the effort proved to be a little more complicated, since this fresh dedication demanded a level of diligence I'd never invested in anything before. ... By the end of that initiating year, I had gained some sense that I wasn't merely a wannabe writer but an actual practicing one. It would have seemed ingenuous to have written for three hundred and sixty-five days in succession and not come to what seemed like that fairly conclusive conclusion, for I had written. I amended my earlier speculation: a writer writes and has written. The second year demanded something different than what had satisfied the first. It would not do to continue with AnotherAnotherSummer. ... Once an author has written something, its topic seems more or less finished. The practice appears one-and-doneish, such that the writer needs to continually come up with fresh topics and new focuses. Nobody needs the same story told twice, or over and over and over again. A writer must do more than mechanically write and thereby have written; a writer must be continually investigating fresh territory. So when that first anniversary arrived, I experienced a little writer's crisis, knowing that I needed to continue writing and leave writing behind. I also needed a fresh topic upon which to focus my efforts. I’d been working on a manuscript before I entered that lengthy Dark Night of the Soul, which I'd not finished, so I decided to move into that unfinished space. ... My previous work had been intermittent, and perhaps because of that, it seemed incoherent within my adopted daily production practice. Further, I needed something other than an outline to guide my hand, for the topic of this proposed work couldn't tolerate that approach. ... My premise insisted that Cluelessness was not half the problem our tenacious inability to cope with it tends to become. I intended to promote Cluelessness as more of a feature than a problem and, further, feature my own continuing Cluelessnesses as examples. This would not be an instruction manual for avoiding inevitable Cluelessness but an exposé wherein I would out myself for continually exemplifying Cluelessness in practice. I finished that series by the end of that seven years ago summer. I compiled the individual daily production into a manuscript and shared it with a few volunteers. I asked them not to edit the work or write a review, but to agree to have a conversation with me after they'd read the work so that I might get a sense of their experience with it. Those conversations were enlightening and humbling, and I continued, intermittently, to progress the work toward publication, yet another aspect of being a writer I clearly hadn't mastered then. Writers write, they leave writing behind, they find fresh focuses, and they publish. Publishing might largely be a matter of believing, for it requires much exposure of internal details to public scrutiny. This exposure might seem especially threatening to introverted writers like me, who do not write for publicity. ...I struggled to find a niche within which to promote this work. ... I learned that a writer needs to ask for help since no writer qualifies as an island. ... I decided to publish Cluelessness myself, since I was the only one qualified to approve its publication. I searched to find an ethical self-publisher before, in almost a fit of pique, signing a contract. This act created unforeseen complications, not the least of which was the need, even after three complete edit passes, to have the work professionally copyedited. ...This week, the manuscript returned from the copyeditor, and I began re-reading it for the very first time. I had grown so familiar with the material that I had devolved to doubt its viability. ... Still, this material returned by the copyeditor carried an unfamiliar sheen. She hadn't changed much, but she enhanced my voice, the sure sign of an excellent copy editor's hand! She questioned my curious capitalizations and concatenations, but didn't insist that I strictly adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style. She just made sure that I knew when I deviated from the norm, with concern that I not confuse my readers. ... I'm now getting to know my manuscript, my old and lightly abused friend, for the very first time again. I feel a growing confidence that this publication will not humiliate me or tarnish my reputation. It might even prove to be a worthy addition to this writer's legacy, another in an ever-lengthening line of so-called finished writing, the direct, eventual result of this writer (finally) writing. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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FalseFlags

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-16T04:12:16-07:00

Johann Sadeler I: Micaiah and the False Prophets (16th-17th century) "We're not quite there yet." Since the 1930s, DC Comics character Superman has been presented as a staunch defender of "Truth, Justice, and the American Way." These three pillars of the society I was later born into remained reasonably stable until recently, when another ethic began to enjoy expanding influence. Our incumbent, schooled by the fascist gangster Roy Cohn, embraced a decidedly different American Way. His version rooted itself in falsity and injustice, reframing these as the supporting principles of his newer American Way, if I can even properly characterize falsity and injustice as principles. Our incumbent realized that truth could be effectively neutralized for any purpose by merely dispensing lies. These lies could not succeed if they were tentative. The liar would have to be all in if he intended to succeed. He would need to treat Truth as the ultimate enemy of his brand of democracy. He set about creating an alternate ecosystem where lies could thrive. In the paper-rock-scissors game that comprises public opinion, the relative truth or fiction of any assertion matters little to the dedicated practitioner. The effectiveness of a statement in swaying opinion and the innate persuasiveness of the public determine the "goodness" of any statement. Its truth or fiction doesn't even warrant consideration. The public's ability to discern truth from fiction became an inhibitor for the practitioner. Better, from their perspective, that the public remain unconcerned about the relative truth of any assertion, that their taste be cultured toward relative sensationalism instead. Goodness could be gauged by monitoring blood pressure. Whatever aroused an animal reaction could be judged effective communication. Mere truth could not compete in this sort of competition. The ecosystem involved reframing news from reporting various truths into titillating entertainment. Outrage became a prominent component, and dopamine surges became the currency of exchange. Viewers returned again and again like starving hummingbirds anxious for nourishment. They were poisoned, little by little, over time, into requiring that jolt, the provocation that only fiction can properly provide. In a competition between benign truth and addictive fiction, bet on the fiction to prove more satisfying. For those with no particular philosophy, such propaganda became the basis of their values. The prophets of Fox News became the primary conduits of a new truth, a different justice, and a radically different notion of what constitutes the American Way. A shockingly large number of otherwise innocent Americans became addicted to their regular infusions of this public abomination. Our incumbent could never have been elected without this evil ecosystem manifesting. Those not carrying this addiction to corrosive fiction rightly worry about the viability of any system dependent upon FalseFlags. In almost every case, the truth of whatever our incumbent insists hides in the opposite of what he says. ... I wonder how long any society can survive if its leaders define their successes by the number of absolute untruths they can successfully convince their base to believe. Truth submits to myths; justice, to false witnesses and corrupted judges. The American Way becomes a sorry parody of its former self, aspiring only to take advantage without any sense of obligation to repay or help others. Unable to swallow the truth, we consume absolute poison instead. Sooner or later, it seems, we're likely to die along with our dream. Basing any system upon FalseFlags seems precarious. ... Without reasonably accurate forecasts, a system misses targets. ... Beyond that, the fiction can no longer contain the inevitable questions. ... The initial euphoria experienced when exposed to sensationalism erodes and requires even more sensational follow-ons. Failures accumulate on top of former failures until even the seriously addicted begin to notice. Cynicism replaces the false optimism that sensationalism initially imparts. Eventually, nobody believes in stories told to explain the continually disappointing results. Freedom, once characterized as the right to believe whatever one damned well pleases, gets reframed as the liberty to understand what's happening. Truth experiences a resurgence, and society awakens again from the trance induced through studied untruths. We're not quite there yet. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

AntiPolicy

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-15T05:55:34-07:00

Utagawa Hiroshige 歌川広重: A Cuckoo Against the Moon (c. 1843/46) "They are their own worst enemies …" Our incumbent holds no affirmative policy positions. I could insist that he holds no policy positions because those he has, or those he holds in lieu of holding affirmative policy positions, tend to be negative. He seems to be opposed to damned nearly everything, especially anything that even distantly hints at decency. This outlook places him and his anti-administration in a unique position, for they exclusively promote negative space outcomes. Try to envision a result should any of his anti-positions somehow come to fruition, and you will find yourself unable to agree with anybody on how those results will manifest. Each seems to project a strong sense of tangibility until and unless one tries to render them tangible. Asking the innocent question, "And if you achieved that, what would you have?" throws his spokespersons into inescapable disarray. From a wannabe strong man, negative, AntiPolicy positions tend to sound powerful, like any espoused by any odd Old Testament God. In practice, these proclamations turn out to be 99 and 99/100ths percent bluster, if not a little more, for the practical—dare I say tangible?—result could be anything but, anything but that which defines the position. Taking an apparently firm stand against immigration, for instance, says nothing about how that AntiPolicy position might manifest in practice. It might justify the most heinous responses or the most toothless, anything as long as it’s not in any way immigration, whatever that might mean. These anti-positions leave nothing but latitude when it comes to implementation. Anything might be identified as necessary to achieve any AntiPolicy position. Curiously, though, whatever tactic might be adopted, it will tend to produce the opposite of its intended result, whatever that might have been. Steps employed to support an AntiPolicy position opposing immigration most often result in increasing immigration numbers. This feature of AntiPolicy positions was well known to the Ancient Greeks, who even coined a nearly unpronounceable term to represent its presence: Enantidromy, the tendency of things, taken to extremes, to become their opposite. Complex systems tend to be homeostatic, self-regulating. Forceful attempts to disrupt the practiced patterns of such systems tend to produce equally or even more forceful backlashes. The strident reformer produces the same effect as the strident opposer; each encourages their target system to defend itself against their intrusions. So-called progress might seem initially inevitable, as overwhelming force or public support appears to favor success, but the unavoidable excesses ultimately backfire. What sure seemed surefire comes into question over time. The opposed system seems to remember its prior purpose and actions as if held in some muscle memory or DNA. Our ignorant incumbent never pretended to be a systems thinker, so he was always most adept at undermining his stated intentions without ever realizing that he was the one undermining them. His grudges seem exclusively self-inflicted, a perspective that is most certainly lost on him and his hapless lackeys. They actively ensure democracy's continuance with their unreasoning vehemence. They are their own worst enemies, thank heavens, and our unwitting allies! ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

CityOfCards

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-14T04:58:48-07:00

Lucas Vorsterman: Fighting farmers after a card game 1619-1675 Gallery Notes: Fighting farmers, after a card game. One holds a threshing flag and hits the other on the head, while another man tries to stop him. The other farmer has a pitchfork in his hands. A woman holds a jug and is prevented from hitting it by a man holding her wrist. In the foreground, a fallen bench, a jug, and a scattered deck of cards. In the background, a village. " … the future refuses to disclose which castles topple next." " … the future refuses to disclose which castles topple next." Every half-decent charlatan masters the construction of at least one House of Cards. It takes an exceptional one to oversee the development of a Community of them, and a once-in-a-very-blue-moon one to fabricate enough buildings to result in a genuine CityOfCards. The City seems no less tenuous than the original single building, though it's exponentially more fragile if only because of the proximities of similar fragilities. One errant puff of wind, one clumsey addition, and the entire fabrication can crumble. After some point, the marvel no longer comes from the construction, but from the ever more unlikely preservation. The likelihood of catastrophic failure blooms as the charlatan continues adding roofs. He eventually can't stop himself from ever-more-frantically adding roofs. The sure bets ride with failure, but then a second wind, if you'll excuse the expression, comes in to encourage ever more frantic and apparently successful construction. Those who couldn't quite believe the first card hovel, long before he started creating genuine castles, marvel at the astounding resilience. Each morning that finds the CityOfCards still standing leaves its original critics wondering whether the laws of gravity have been repealed or, indeed, if the underlying truth will ever be revealed. The true believers, those whose judgment was originally fooled, remain convinced of the awesome power of their revered leader. No good reason ever seems to emerge from the shadows and noise capable of collapsing the obvious fantasy. The reasonable might even start questioning their historically reliable understanding. Could a CityOfCards actually persist? Eventually, regardless of how carefully or cavilierly the developer manages his investment, entropy starts having her way. A minor element first threatens to fail, creating a small cliffhanger that the charlatan tries to resolve with the usual confident application of bullshit and bluster, the tactic that has always worked for him before. For some unknowable reason, though, this time the patch fails—some of the CityOfCard's foundation splinters. ... He applies even more of even more of the same sort of glue that always pulled him through before, hoping for a few old reliable supporters to swallow the lure, hooks, line, and sinker, as they had so often swallowed them before. But this time, for no apparent reason, a few of the more influential members of his long-time supporters refuse to swallow. They push back with passionate vehemence. They feel betrayed to see that no foundation ever existed to preserve their shining city on an otherwise obscure hill. Those convinced by deception seem to carry the greatest convictions. They were true believers when the charlatan insisted he was building for the ages, that his constructions would rival those of Greece and Rome, and that his construction material was far superior to mere limestone or granite. Constructions of Cards would utterly transform and render all associated great in ways they'd never before experienced. The expanse of the fabrication had to grow faster than that of the actual construction. The lies served as the foundation for the inherently flimsy card construction. Belief so created always was destined to disintegrate in something akin to a second. No dust-to-dust or ashes-to-ashes, just deceptions instantly evaporating, leaving no hint that seemingly grand edifices once filled ultimately vast and vacuous spaces. The CityOfCards leaves few traces save for a few disillusioned veterans of conflicts they can barely recall. They might have once memorized their catechism: the stolen election that was never stolen, the Russia Russia Russia pseudo-investigation, the ten thousand tiny and tremendous fabrications, but once the illusion supporting a single fundamental foundation crumbles, the entire development goes. The usual bluster only further undermines now. The bullshit suddenly smells terrible to even the formerly truest believer. It was never once as he said it was. It was insincere promises and sleight of hand justice. ... What once seemed a great gift to the easily persuadable morphs into another in an ever-lengthening line of betrayals. Grudges freshly honed, the future refuses to disclose which castles topple next. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Prafussee

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-13T04:27:17-07:00

William Blake: Frontispiece for "America a Prophecy" (1793) "Anyone claiming today that they're directed by God has forgotten their history lessons or they might just be a charlatan." News that reports some members of the incumbent's cabinet, public servants, believe themselves to be instruments of prophecy leaves me wondering whether insanity can be employed as a credible offense. Nobody can reasonably claim to be such an instrument, and if true, nobody gets to choose to become such an agent. I seem to remember some biblical figures cursing such an intrusion into their lives, neither particularly proud nor feeling rewarded by such a designation. Further, biblical prophecy so predates our circumstances that it seems much more than merely unlikely that scripture, retranslated innumerable times over many, many centuries, even if divinely inspired, could have accurately and intentionally targeted our times as its purpose. Further still, modern interpreters of such messages appear to interpret them literally, except in those special instances where figurative interpretations seem necessary. They seem capable of justifying anything by claiming scriptural sanction, and do. Heaven help us survive this latest twist on justification. We have suffered before from holier-than-thou politicians, but never ones so indistinguishable from Babylon's Whore. The age-old “God made me do it” defense should have no more credibility today than it ever did. Anyone employing it might reasonably be considered guilty since the truth of the statement seems questionable to a certainty. In any nation of laws, each individual holds the sacred responsibility to obey those laws or willingly suffer the consequences. Jesus doesn't make a credible defense attorney. Those lusting after end times seem to suffer from some self-destructive disorder whereby they mistake their demise for their salvation, or worse, they suffer from a mass-destruction delusion, where they believe civilization can only be saved by destroying it. To admit to be working on this God's side seems to be more a self-indictment than a self-defense. God might even be on their side in the way that he's said to be on the side of every sinner. Since every human seems to have been presumed to have been born in sin, God would be accustomed to defending sinners, since that's the only kind of people with whom he ever interacts. Being rendered in God's image suggests that God must be a sinner, too. So, the old ‘God Made Me Do It’ Defense might be the perfect offense, with adequate evidence to convict with extreme prejudice. If our Homeland Security Secretary is anyone to judge by, she certainly seems guilty of every crime she insists God has instructed her to commit. She does not admit to a single act of personal will. She's apparently merely flotsam driven by the overwhelming will of her heavenly father, who conveniently remains unable to testify in her defense. This self-dealing situation seems to insist that she must speak for God in her defense. This insistence seems offensive. Our Founders bequeathed us a tenaciously secular society because this design, paradoxically, best assured the freedom of religion upon which the religious insisted. Our originating colonies had not been nearly so secular. Sure, many colonists sought religious liberty here, but proved to be damned intolerant when called upon to interact with anyone practicing differing rituals. Maryland was Catholic, and Virginia, staunchly Church of England. Massachusetts was pure enough Puritan that they denied one of my forebears' ship’s landing privileges because they had committed the grave sin of practicing Presbyterianism. They were seeking religious freedom, too, but had to settle for land granted by the more tolerant governor of New Hampshire to enjoy the privilege. Each acted at the direction of the supposedly same God, or maybe they were different ones. Anyone claiming today that God directs them has forgotten their history lessons, or they might just be a charlatan. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Disintegrating

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-12T06:08:03-07:00

"It would never raise a credible head again. ...The apotheosis appears as a trajectory more than a peak. At that point, nothing's obvious yet, though subtle and, in retrospect, not so subtle signs point to an inescapable conclusion. ... It will never regain that height again. It's downhill from there, though not necessarily a power dive. There might be a series of plateaus and even a few apparent recoveries on the inevitable way down, but the momentum is lost along with the surprise that the initiative initially depended upon. Opponents easily anticipate what were once utterly baffling motives and moves. What seemed like magic was rendered barely tragic. ... The outcome will never again find itself in serious question. ... What began as a mammoth traffic jam as everyone tried to arrive before the start winds down with people who paid through the nose for tickets leaving well before the end to avoid traffic or something. ...He only hired the finest people, though his judgment about people had always been suspect. His hired geniuses one by one betrayed him, or they ran into immovable objects easily avoided if they'd had a clue about what they were doing. Their ignorance finally did them in; that, and their malfeasance. They seemed to believe that his incumbency came with a license to do whatever he pleased, and that they also enjoyed the same imaginary immunity. This belief made them careless on top of their native cluelessness. Let's agree to say that they repeatedly "outsmarted" themselves. They began their campaign with a poisonous presumption. ... They presumed that our country was the absolute center of the universe, and that this position rendered us absolutely invulnerable. Our economy was, indeed, larger and apparently stronger than any other. ... They presumed we were an island everyone wanted to emulate. We'd long suffered from a troublingly parochial perspective that seems to accompany our presumption of being better. Our most conservative voices insisted that we needn't abide by scientific consensus, for instance, or enlightened trading practices. They'd insisted that we were free to be anybody we wanted to be and that nobody could force us to be different. We had at times seemed awfully arrogant to our neighbors. They would remember every time we refused to work together. ...Our trading partners had always held a BATNA (Better Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement). Together, they might prove every bit as powerful as their traditional big brother if he ever proved unruly. Our incumbent let his election go to his already oversized head and immediately began making unreasonable demands. His tariff plans seemed insane because they were, and his insistence that he could redefine ‘reasonable’ to his own parochial benefit offended them. ... Other countries found that they could more than make up for any slack when indispensable institutions turned lax. They had standards they were unprepared to lower so the incumbent could take unfair advantage of them. ...Our economy suffered from strategies intended to punish others for their imaginary infractions. The frustrations only expanded from there, until the incumbent, in lieu of answering questions at press conferences, took to criticizing the questioners. "Only a very evil person would ever ask such a question. Of course, I don't know who you are, but you must be a truly evil person to ask such a question." Our emperor preened in his spiffy new uniform, more naked than the day he was born. Not even the courts could prop him up for long. The Christian Nationalists were ultimately less than useless since they had never bothered to study or even understand the system they had sworn to topple. Not even the harshest realities seemed likely to pop their delusional bubble. When Ford announced that it would no longer assemble cars in the US due to tariff-related supply chain problems, the proverbial shit hit the fan. When the EU and all their trading partners disqualified American corn because it wasn't clean or green enough for them to consume, the manure joined the shit hitting the fan. When American pork showed traces of banned chemicals, more manure joined the throng. When ICE was enjoined from assaulting innocent citizens on the street, it seemed unlikely that the mass deportation threats, which had already become less popular than illegal immigration, would escape their fate. There will be more noise in the channel, and yes, more innocents will be damaged, but the transformation to what sane people feared had failed. It would never raise a credible head again. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 07/10/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-10T17:23:44-07:00

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. ... 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 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. ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me pondering what it means to be UnAmerican and what represents what we might each easily recognize as our common heritage. ...A "wet and dry" Map of Temperance Reform in the U.S.: "Wet" and "Dry" Map of the United States, January 1, 1912: Areas shown in white are areas in which the sale of alcohol is prohibited by law. ..."I wonder if we can survive until the curtain rises on our next performance." ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me grieving again for what used to be but came to a hopefully temporary end. The self-described Christian Nationalists have taken power, and there will be Hell to pay. They seem determined to turn us into a 3rdWorld nation, and they may. ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me anticipating an increasing number of Disasters as our MAGA brethren further dismantle our disaster prevention administration. Preventing Disasters produces "dogs that never bark" outcomes while disasters create sympathetic photo opportunities. Thomas Rowlandson: The Double Disaster or New Cure for Love (July 10, 1807) - Published by Thomas Tegg ...This FollowingChapters Story tells the tale of a Tariffied terrorist who chose Tariffs as his medium of terror. He basically baffles his allies into confusion before going off to spend another million bucks on a round of golf where he cheats and always wins. ...In this FollowingChapters Story, I manage to give myself permission to engage in some midsummer hibernation: Lowbernation. ..."All might be right with the world contained within the midsummer guest bedroom walls." ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me rooting out disappointment and remembering that my BrightIdeas! that encouraged me to start something probably won't survive into implementation. ...This was not so much a disappointing writing week as one bookended with disappointing experiences. I am still learning, so my anticipating sometimes manages to get way out ahead of me, leaving me exposed when, inevitably, difference manifests. I might have learned by now that my first expectations tend to be uninformed, so it's usually a blessing when they go unrequited. I persist in investing in futures never likely to emerge, producing fresh context within which to feel disappointed. I am not learning quickly, though I am still learning. I began this writing week on the day following the most discouraging 4th of July The Muse and I ever experienced, pondering on what constitutes UnAmerican activity now that we have a scofflaw incumbent and a spineless majority in Congress, not to mention a mentally-challenged SCOTUS. I concluded that I've been seeing not so much UnAmerican as AntiAmerican activity. I then launched into a lament over how my native country seems to be transforming into something more closely resembling a 3rdWorld one, and all the risks and disappointments attendant with this. I noticed a curious paradox accompanying all the Disasters we've been experiencing since the incumbent took office. Each provides an opportunity for him and his hapless administration, which has largely created the context that encourages these experiences, to enjoy a relatively positive press briefing. I then admitted that our incumbent's whacky and also wildly illegal tariffs have left me feeling Tariffied. They amount to the most significant tax hike in this nation's history, and many more are planned. I tired of my writing week and took refuge in a hot detective novel in Lowbernation. I then ended this disappointing writing week with a paean to BrightIdeas!, the fuel that motivates new beginnings before morphing into fresh disappointments. ... Thanks for sticking with me through this sweaty summer writing week! ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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BrightIdeas!

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-10T05:14:51-07:00

Harold Edgerton: Death of a Light Bulb (1936, printed later) " … the crutial resource I need to deploy to succeed." I learned early in my consulting career that my most successful clients started their projects with the worst ideas. These often seemed initially inspiring but ultimately unrealistic, and rarely survived into implementation. The less successful operations married their earliest notions and spent the bulk of their development efforts trying to avoid divorce. They would end up implementing something nobody really needed to satisfy some urge that hadn't survived the earliest phases. The most successful companies seemed to be most skilled at skewering their originating BrightIdeas! I later realized that all development efforts start with BrightIdeas! They typically seem attractive, often seductive, and easily gain requisite support. On their surface, they usually seem eminently doable. Only after completing some initial scrutiny does their inevitably poisonous nature start to become obvious. What the team chartered to achieve an ultimately unachievable objective does in response defines their success. Those who buckle under and struggle harder rarely produce much of value. It might even be true to say that if the process of developing something isn't satisfying, neither will the result prove satisfying. The quality of the developers' experience tends to be curiously defining, so attending to that one rather obvious element can contribute much to the success of any finished product. Death marches never produce satisfying products. It also seems true that each effort starts anew. It does not seem to matter how many successful or failed products the team has previously produced; they start their next effort with BrightIdeas!, which will inevitably prove somewhat less than brilliant in practice. This fact might serve as a reason to justify cynicism, but that reaction misses a more significant point. ... Nobody's ever crossed previously untrodden routes, and each fresh initiative unavoidably must cross previously uncrossed territory. Therefore, the best anyone can produce at first features what will only later seem like the obvious toolmarks of ignorance. At the moment of conception, they inevitably seem like brilliant innovation. Only experience can demonstrate the difference. Experience appears as disappointment. Those most capable of tolerating disappointment seem to fare better in surviving the inevitable struggle between ignorance and growing experience. You will come to know better. If this experience makes you feel worse about yourself, so much the worse. As the old homily insists: Get Used To Disappointment. It will most certainly be your nearly constant companion if you seek innovation. Nobody gets it right on the first pass. Few do much better by their tenth. The curious notion of continuous improvement amounts to continuous disappointment in practice. If this prospect renders you cynical, so much the worse for you, for cynicism has never successfully vanquished disappointment. It only encourages one to flinch as they release their arrows. New Beginnings have surrounded me in recent weeks. ... My beginning a fresh chapter in my writing experience. I'm of an age now where I can successfully predict that much of whatever made some initiative initially most attractive will very likely disqualify itself before the finish line appears. What seemed as though it should have been easy might well prove to be grueling or impossible to achieve. What I believed might prove to be impossible might have manifested without much exertion. This universe works in these mysterious ways. ... Entropy insists that all BrightIdeas! be brought at least to their knees before their project succeeds. Each will, in turn, prove to be another dedication test, serving up disappointment. I am reminded that my ability to forgive myself and others for the BrightIdeas! we inflict upon ourselves and each other might be the crutial resource I need to succeed. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Lowbernation

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-09T05:31:12-07:00

Edward Clark Potter: Sleeping Infant Faun Visited by an Inquisitive Rabbit (1887–89) "All might be right with the world contained within the midsummer guest bedroom walls." Midsummer brings a lethargy every bit as overpowering as any mid-winter might induce. In both instances, the weather turns inconveniencing, even menacing, introducing a definite reduction in initiative. If I'm not finished with my outside work by ten in the morning, I'm best off just forgetting about making progress that day. When the mercury fails to make it below seventy overnight and has already climbed to eighty before six, its trajectory becomes obvious. This is a performance I've seen before. In my youth, I'd head for the swimming pool and stay in the deep end all afternoon. Now, I head for the guest bedroom to lie beneath a screaming ceiling fan to read another detective novel until I doze. I swear I never know where any of those afternoons go. I later take to the back deck and water the planters. I'm apt to set the tractor sprinkler running on its track in an almost vain attempt to cool the air around me and raise the humidity. I'm still reading that novel, distracted when the cats appear seeking their al fresco supper, and when I remember to feed the pond fish who depend upon me for their sustenance, or so I suspect. I might pick away at preparing supper while taking refuge from The Muse's practicing for her piano lessons. She's a most inspired and dedicated student, and damned well needs to be to stomach playing those ear worm ditties until she almost achieves perfection. I'd ventured out around midday, grateful that my pickup's air conditioning easily vanquishes hundred-degree temperatures. When I park the beast, I cover the inside of the windshield with thin nylon shades to keep the sun from rendering it impossible to touch my steering wheel when I return. I return home a scant hour later, ready to reassemble in the guest bedroom with my detective novel. I seem to be making no headway reading, but the book serves as more of a companion than an impending accomplishment. My purpose on these sorts of days devolves down into accomplishing nothing, or nothing further than whatever I'd achieved before about ten that morning. The rest seems most like a dream. I remember nothing. I was barely there, and that seems to be the underlying purpose: to simply disappear until later. Are humans the only animal that struggles to permit themselves to relax? For most of my life, I never desired to hibernate, or Lowbernate, either. I tried to maintain my performance regardless of the weather, every bit as needy midwinter as I felt midsummer. I always felt as though I was running at least a little bit behind. Lately, though, I've started discovering the simple joy an afternoon nap can bring and how it tends to refresh me for whatever might come later that evening. I still feel as though I really should be more gainfully or meaningfully employed, but I crack that detective novel and allow a few hours to melt away when it's too hot to be doing much of anything outside, anyway. My Lowbernation serves as a back-handed form of liberation, requiring little more than my own permission to engage in. The Muse will have spent her day out in the world, meeting people and cutting deals. She takes her public servant role seriously and never shirks. I have resisted considering myself retired, for I've seen what inevitably happens when people retire. They grow addled and flabby, and I do not want either of those to happen to me, though the flabby seems to be rounding the clubhouse turn anyway. I try to stay busy regardless of how damned tired I sometimes feel because I understand what happens when one loses their gumption. I sincerely intend to keep the inevitable eternally at bay, or usually, anyway. I make special contrition for my mid-season condition when it might be considered essential for my usual discipline to go to Hell. It appears that the heroes will ultimately vanquish the evil forces after all, as the detective novel moves toward its denouement. All might be right with the world contained within the midsummer guest bedroom walls. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tariffied

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-08T05:36:21-07:00

Lucian and Mary Brown: Untitled [baby reaching for typewriter] (c. 1950) "Nobody ever applauds a terrorist." Far from appearing to be a skilled negotiator, our incumbent exasperates his counterparts by continually switching his terms. On trade, he made up a "novel" definition of tariff, one which no economist can make heads or tails of. He promises one thing before reneging, typically delivering some punishing terms to trading partners who've loyally served as our manufacturers for decades. Even where no hope of developing domestic production exists, he hits a former partner with some punishing, seemingly random blow. Nobody knows what he's trying to do. If anything shines through his increasingly thin veneer of sanity, his trade negotiation policies qualify as nearly pure insanity. Or, perhaps, they're only inanity. The two seem indistinguishable in him. The urgent need to seem victimized might fuel much of this theater. Once blessed, the US in his eyes seems uniquely cursed, put upon from every direction at once. Nothing much has changed, except for a narrative that never held much credibility, anyway. One can tell they're dealing with fiction because Faux Snooze embeds reporters after the administration that refuses to administer anything invites them, and no one else. Fair and Balanced as a fat thumb on the scale, these performances amount to acts of terror. The result should properly leave us feeling Tariffied. We will not be riding this one out undamaged. It seems incredible that one person, clearly suffering from delusions of authority, could so easily complicate history. None of his economic schemes appears in any way likely to work. Our docility speaks mostly to our privilege in having grown accustomed to the rule of law, which was mainly beyond reproach, grounded in reason and good intentions. The same principles surrounding irrationality, evil, and inept intentions receive the same presumption of protection, especially when the Attorney General is chosen for her corruptibility. She seems to believe that criminality is merely a matter of discretion. Whatever her incumbent declares legal, she will not investigate. This makes Watergate look like a tea party in comparison. Insanity rules the country now. Our incumbent appears to take great joy in breaking things. He speaks almost exclusively derisively. His domestic allies are always seconds away from being chastized for some imagined infraction that will ultimately sum to nothing. The few who are forced out will feel the most fortunate, as each publishes their scathing bestseller about struggling to retain their sanity amid such craziness. As with all terrorist movements, our incumbent lives mere moments away from being toppled. The stronger he seems to feel, the more precarious his actual position becomes. The bridges he's already burned will no longer carry his traffic. His soldiers already committed virtual mutiny when they sashayed down Pennsylvania Avenue instead of marching. They demonstrated their loyalty to something more inspiring than this President, whose policies seem uniformly abhorrent. We do not yet know who will intervene to prevent the baby from ruining the typewriter. That we have a baby in charge has not gone unnoticed by many. As the ruinous results from his continuing negotiations and TACO responses become inescapably obvious, his already far underwater polling will inevitably worsen. He will try, of course, to hold onto power he never possessed. The people will seek redress for his wasteful, fraudulent, and abusive performance. Nobody ever applauds a terrorist. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Disasters

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-07T05:39:07-07:00

The Double Disaster or New Cure for Love (July 10, 1807) Published by Thomas Tegg " … after the previously almost unthinkables start occurring regularly again." In an apparent contradiction, MAGA governance has ushered in an unprecedented —and indeed, previously unthinkable — number of Disasters. From airplanes suddenly falling out of the sky or inexplicably leaving taxiways on takeoffs or landings, to so-called Natural Disasters, those deemed caused by acts of a somewhat less than benevolent God, the MAGA-verse has seen more and worse than recent administrations. While the incumbent hastily explains that these can be traced to lingering effects of President Biden's administration, no explanation seems entirely necessary. Actual Disasters come from nowhere, are utterly unforeseeable, and provide almost endless potential for sympathetic photo opportunities. Few things demonstrate an administration's authority more than mustering the National Guard to help locate flood victims with their Hueys. This sudden spate of horrible events might have boosted the incumbent's ratings. His incessant budget cutting and reallocating could be seen as at least a proximal cause of this shocking increase in Disasters. A lack of preparation can certainly worsen certain outcomes. Furthermore, safety nets, which might seem like a waste of resources, often appear worthwhile only after they've prevented a catastrophic outcome, producing a dog-that-doesn’t-bark benefit that is not immediately apparent. Nobody ever opens the nightly news with a story about an averted Disaster, for the absence of Disaster never qualifies as news. After the flood washes away the houses, the governor can dispense great wisdom, and the President can extend his official best wishes. Few better opportunities accompany the office's many more onerous responsibilities. Dismantling too much of the social safety net, though, seems unlikely to make the cad a hero. It's a fine art to properly deflect blame, especially when the Disasters keep happening over and over and over again. But on the other hand, a decent disaster displaces innumerable more disturbing stories about insider trading and general ineptness. Disasters carry a definite upside. Dismantling FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Administration, in favor of immigration enforcement seems likely to backfire, especially in a year that has already spawned a remarkable number of tornadoes and floods. The shortage of actual criminals for immigration enforcement to arrest has made their burgeoning budget seem like a bust. It can be a hard sell to tell someone who lost their home that you spent their recovery money sending someone's mommy far away from their home. Enforcement of innumerable injustices, though, can create another kind of Disaster, further increasing the apparent threat level. The canny politician understands that whatever elevates a threat level reduces the scrutiny left over to consider any underlying Disasters present in an administration. This incumbent ensured a high baseline of continuing threat levels by populating cabinet positions with obviously incompetent sycophants. Even self-administered Disasters can successfully distract the White House Press Corps. Eliminating school lunch programs rarely makes the news. We'll know America will have been made Great Again, I suppose, when South Asian schoolchildren start collecting rupees to send to UNICEF to be distributed to starving schoolchildren in Alabama, thereby ensuring that we get our fair share of the world's Disaster relief. Great Again! To say that MAGA is a Disaster is to give it more credence than it will ever deserve. Its presence has already spawned innumerable Disasters with many, many more looming on an increasingly hazy horizon. The State they hate was always better at preventing Disasters than recovering from them, though the headlines only ever reported on their often chaotic Disaster recovery efforts. No system can ever eliminate the potential for Disaster, but only apparently under-appreciated systems can effectively blunt our overall exposure to them. We often learn better as a result of failing. The Johnstown Flood of 1889 spawned generations of state and Federal regulations, as that flood was caused, in part, by administrative failures. The resulting Disaster could have been preventable had an administrative state like the one the MAGAs are dismantling existed during the Gilded Age. It didn't. The Progressive Age featured an alphabet soup of new government agencies, some of which very likely prevented repeat performances of Disasters like the one that occurred in Jamestown. Progress occurs in spirals rather than straight lines. We seem to need to place ourselves in peril sometimes to remember why we hinder some behaviors. Freedom was never the simple concatenation of individual latitudes, but a mindful construction of inhibitors and enablers capable of safely constraining our baser instincts. We often have good reasons for forbidding certain behaviors, but we forget those reasons and bring new disasters on ourselves. Even inhibiting some rights makes perfect sense when the free exercise of them produces murdered schoolchildren. Those who dismantle our safety nets are only temporarily our saviors. Ultimately, they become our killers after the previously almost unthinkable starts occurring regularly again, making America GAPE again and again. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

3rdWorld

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-06T05:20:21-07:00

"Nobody imagines us essential anymore." I was born into THE 1st World nation. Others would catch up to become almost our peers, but for nearly all of my years, my country held distinct advantages over every other country in this world. In the early years, this advantage encouraged our compassion. Sure, we still exhibited vestigial evidence of a lingering arrogance, but we were most often seen as benefactor and breadbasket, goodwill ambassadors more than vicious competitors, except with the Communists, of course, but we invented our Communists because we needed the appearance of competitors. We could well afford to be egalitarian, and we befriended everyone we could. We agreed to host the United Nations headquarters, and few could question the reason. We were the original democracy, and we were definitely interested in sharing our social technology, even when, unfortunately, it was not of our target's choosing. We always had a primitive minority who opposed modernity, seeing government programs as reckless intrusions into sacred traditions. They were genuinely offended by attempts to improve health and well-being, seeing these as assaults on personal sovereignty. They thought the civil rights movement was wrong-headed, and fluoridation and vaccinations were seen as infringements upon God-given freedoms. The most extreme even railed against public education as indoctrination, and many insisted that ours was at root a Christian nation and should therefore be ruled as a theocracy rather than a democracy. They elected whack jobs to Congress and funded massive lobbying efforts dedicated to undermining the majority of us. ...With the passage of the largest tax increase and upward transfer of wealth in history, they're feeling terribly successful, with special emphasis on the terrible part. With The Muse and I nearing retirement, we realize we might be inhabiting a 3rd World country instead of the 1st World one we cut our teeth on. ... The markets have turned mercurial, not the sort of material in which one should invest hard-earned savings. A world suddenly safe to trade crypto seems hostile to anyone uninterested in making anything like a killing when investing. Many gentilities that came with 1st World status now seem threatened, and several have already disappeared. Our weary healthcare system was barely holding on without devastating cuts advertised as eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse, but which introduced actual wastes, frauds, and abuses previously unknown. 3rdWorld nations are ruled by gangs instead of coalitions, who loot in lieu of allocating. Essential services eliminated, the people revert to their more primitive natures. What else can we do? They are busily giving away the treasury. It will not be so easily recovered. I remain confident but concerned as we learn the depth of the depravity that fueled this hostile takeover of a once benevolent country. We grieve not for what we've become but for what we used to be, before these primitives began dismantling our sacred democracy. It seems pure irony that the Christian Nationalists rule exclusively through apostasy. They pray in public because they apparently can't pray the old-fashioned way, in private. Theirs is a performance piece, fashioned to encourage titilating headlines. They have no interest in governing except for looting what was never theirs, what was never intended to belong to anyone personally. They exclusively target the public's wealth and lust after owning it themselves. 3rdWorld nations are ruled rather than governed by weak strong men, not women, and most decidedly, never minorities. They promote primitive notions of natural superiority, which remain forever unproven and self-serving speculation. They might assert the natural superiority of their race, for instance, without acknowledging that such assertions always contradict themselves. If they were superior, the proof might have been more self-evident. No amount of public relations can create what was never so, not for long, anyway. ...3rdWorld nations are inherently unstable. ... The will of the people cannot be satisfied by the will of any junta, however temporarily popular. The will of the people is eternal and cannot be long smothered. We might not quickly or ever regain 1st World status. We might have earned time in history's penalty box for violating ourselves, but the unrest will continue long after these clowns have gone to prison for their sins. They will go to prison for their sins. May we find humility in our present degradation. May we gain genuine appreciation for the blessings we've so casually laid to waste. May we find some way to forgive ourselves for all the 1st World sins we committed, especially those we inflicted upon our neediest partners when we withdrew from the rest of the world. Nobody imagines us essential anymore. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

UnAmerican

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-05T04:50:27-07:00

American Issue Publishing Co.: Liquor Problem: United States. A "wet and dry" Map of Temperance Reform in the U.S.: "Wet" and "Dry" Map of the United States, January 1, 1912: Areas shown in white are areas in which ..."I wonder if we can survive until the curtain rises on our next performance." This year's 4th of July, coming on the day our incumbent signed the most repressive bill in American history, didn't hardly seem worth celebrating for many, me prominently included. I moped around the place, grieving for a fictional America I still believed in, for that's what makes me an American. This new bill seemed too gawd-awful cynical to accurately represent actual American interests. It seemed unworthy of even any Banana Republic, and might be evidence that we've finally gone and done it, become the very opposite of our Founders' originating intentions. There was always much contention between the pretensions necessary to maintain governance and what are widely considered to be rights and freedoms. Give an unenlightened person latitude for self-governance, and you take the chance of undermining your experiment, for the unenlightened tend to be at least equally undisciplined. They're apt to interpret figurative language literally and reach conclusions never evident in the founders' intentions. They mistake their interpretations as mirroring the originals. The louder you disagree, the greater the resulting disparities will seem. Common Sense was apparently a work of fiction that helped encourage our revolution. Reading it did not result in instant understanding. I become wary whenever I encounter a reference to UnAmerican, for, as near as I can determine, American rightfully includes every possible variation of human preference. We are not necessarily a noble people, though we have been known to display situational nobility, sometimes to the surprise and delight of our allies and enemies. We never were a melting pot, or, if a melting pot, one that has not yet rendered its contents into any uniform whole. Our pot includes much variation. Whenever anyone declares someone or some action UnAmerican, they're just disclosing in which imaginary America they maintain their belief. We, as Americans, have proven ourselves perfectly capable of supporting the worst imaginable atrocities, and even have committed them on occasion. We might be most skilled, like the children of abusive parents, at not seeing some of what occurs in our name. We might be trauma victims, refugees from oppressive regimes, and veterans of unjust labor practices. Each of our families has known the injustice we each now swear defines UnAmerican, even though much trauma occurred and still occurs under an American label on American soil. Our country used to be no better, although we might have dissociated better in our past. The great gift dissociation brings reinforces our better nature, which sometimes visits us as a direct result. I recently saw an interview with Mel Brooks, who insisted that the only truly American institution has always been our Musical Theater. From The Gershwins through Cole Porter and right into and including Lin-Manuel Miranda, American Musical Theater has represented the America to which each of us deeply relates. We imagine ourselves breaking out in encouraging dance and seamlessly harmonizing slightly ironic lyrics. ... We are inclusive, too, with Snidely Whiplash just as American as Little Eva. We're also Rocky and Bullwinkle, forever outwitting Boris and Natasha. We're suckers for Schmaltzy ballads. Mary Cleere Haran, a cabaret singer who tragically died in a bicycling accident at an early age, very well represented this attitude, to which I believe every genuine American easily relates. This introduction exemplifies what I believe it means to be an American. We can not only make a joke, but take one, too. We're tenaciously light-hearted and just as kind-hearted. We tell our truths as if they were self-evident, and we share our perspectives as if they actually matter. Our current incumbent seems humorless and too easily takes offense. I can't imagine him committing self-deprication. ... He thinks far too much of himself to seem very much like a real American. He lacks more than the requisite humility; he seems to hold no concept of charity. Consequently, he seems the most unworthy incumbent in the history of this country, which never actually was. I wonder if we can survive until the curtain rises on our next performance. The current regime seems not merely UnAmerican, but anti-American in comparison. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 07/03/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-03T14:11:50-07:00

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. ...This FollowingChapters Story, CounterIntuitive, finds me finally realizing that Intuitive User Interface was always a Great Myth. Man/machine interfaces defy intuition and always will. Maybe AI will finally resolve this shortcoming. Jack Gould: Untitled [women lined up in front of counter, seen from behind shop counter] (c. ..."We're destined to become mere observers of our computations." ...This FollowingChapters Story, DaysOff, explores why I don't take vacations. My work must be my play; otherwise, I might feel compelled to occasionally take vacations. Russell Lee: Seaside, Oregon, is vacation spot (1941) - United States. ..."My work, my play." ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me filled with Trepidation while anticipating my copyeditor's feedback on my latest manuscript. Perhaps catastrophize this experience so it will seem better when it arrives. I can't imagine how it could be worse than my anticipation. Alfred Stieglitz: Self-Portrait with camera, tripod, and pistol (1886) "It feels like the thousand deaths …" ...This FollowingChapters Story, Moosenator, finds me describing my pet Moose, who's an integral part of my creative process and an irreplaceable companion. ..." … a little heaven here in The Villa, so close to the center of our universe." ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me hiding in the cool basement from extremely hot and dry Summer temperatures. It's not necessarily the heat or the humidity that gets me, but the Humildity that does me in. ..." … shirts that wrinkle far too easily in such low humidity." ...This FollowingChapters Story finds Cluelessnesses thriving as history's pendulum swings wildly off course. I suggest that Cluelessnesses are not to be fixed, but better coped with. Raphael Sadeler, the Elder: Allegory of Wealth, Lust, and Stupidity (1588) " … some just manage to cope better with its presence." ...Later, we might remember this writing week as the time when civilization, as we once anticipated it, disappeared. While that catastrophe was brewing, though, we went on living as if, for what else could any of us do? I began the week realizing that the concept of Intuitive User Interface was mythical, fictional, never real: CounterIntuitive. I then explained why I don't take vacations in DaysOff. My work has to be my play, or neither my work nor my play works for me. I next copped to feeling a weight of Trepidation on my shoulders as I anticipated the return of a manuscript from copyediting before publication. I then introduced an essential part of my creative team, my cat Max, the Moosenator, who has been my constant complaining companion throughout this writing week, as he has been in all prior ones. I then complained a bit about the infernal summer heat, grateful that I am no longer subjected to high humidity, in Humildity. Finally, I returned to the theme of the returning manuscript, which had not returned by writing week's end, a week late, in Cluelessnesses. A manuscript entitled Cluelessness couldn't possibly pass through final copyediting on time, could it? I woke up the morning after feeling an overwhelming sensation that something had passed, though I couldn’t quite put my hand on what. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Cluelessnesses

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-03T05:20:16-07:00

" … some just manage to cope better with its presence." ...Thy kingdom come, thy will be done ...Give us this day our enriched white bread, ...As we persecute those who seem most clueless to us. ...that we might finally vanquish decency, For thine is the power and the glory We intend to invoke forever and ever. ...When evil arrives, it will be surrounded by Pharisees intent upon enforcing laws for the sole sake of enforcement. The purpose of justice must be to mete out punishment, for nothing asserts power like judicial edicts. The less decent, the better, for respect must be enforced to be deserved. Many must suffer so that the few might more than prosper, for who better deserves to inherit the wealth of any nation than those capable of multiplying that wealth for their own benefit? Those who struggle to merely feed themselves might just as well starve for all they contribute to the collective. ... Whatever we hoard only amplifies our power. Seven years ago this week, I was writing a series that, unbeknownst to me, would eventually be published in book form. I didn't know then if the work's subject matter would age well, for it seemed at least possible that we might come to vanquish Cluelessness in the future. ... While we managed to make real headway after Trump's first term, we backslid considerably in the background over the following four years. However, Biden managed to correct many of the glaring shortcomings of the prior administration. Nevertheless, the underlying media circus had hired and entrained extra clowns. The economy that had become the envy of the world subsequently crumbled after the followers of the imaginary God regained power. Their sanctimony might be their most impressive superpower. They seem invulnerable to reality, however it's served. ... Simple human decency sits complacently as they try to pass it off as mere obscenity. They promote an uncommon indecency instead, thumbing their nose equally at precedent and wisdom. They seem dedicated to stupidity, in all its many varieties. They breathe new life into penny-wisdom and pound-foolishness. They will likely manage to bankrupt our United States and might even avoid lengthy prison sentences for their efforts. They remain, of course, beneath contempt, and they seem bound and terribly determined to bring the rest of us down to their level of existence. ...That book I was creating should be out of final copyediting this week. Entitled Cluelessness, A Book of Mirrors, it contains stories from before this sorry time. In it, I ineptly attempt to live without trying to change this world. I try to learn from it, to appreciate its curiosities, but I do not attempt to correct anything I encounter there. The book might be about coping instead of failing to correct, under Virginia Satir's inspiring premise that the problem is rarely the problem that failing to cope with the problem seems to become. The book focuses on developing coping rather than problem-solving skills, given that most difficulties don't qualify as problems because they don’t come with attached solutions. Yes, this world was always overfilled with those who pray M'Lord's Prayer, self-serving bastards without an ounce of human compassion. They are not there for us to break our teeth trying to convert. They seem more than satisfied with their god, however false he might seem to those of us not so entralled. Roger Williams taught tolerence, a much more difficult lesson than even reformation seems, yet it might prove more useful than a shit-ton of reformations. The truly Clueless will always be with us, and there will never be any way to successfully clue them in. ... I doubt my Cluelessness book will quash the seemingly overwhelming flood of Cluelessness we're currently experiencing. With recent cuts to the National Weather Service, we've lost whatever predictability we might have once possessed to predict Cluelessness' future in that respect. ... What must we do instead? I do not have a clue other than that me and you might stumble into some more satisfactory ways to cope until this latest spate blows itself out again. What they believe will be eternal will most certainly be short-lived, and backlash being what it has always been, the pendulum seems poised to swing further than its historical average. Until then, we'll witness what we daren't ever forget, lest we descend into a counterveiling cluelessness every bit as reckless as theirs. There will always be Cluelessness; some just manage to cope better with its presence. ...©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Humildity

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-02T05:55:22-07:00

Wayne Miller: Heat Wave, August 1947 (1947) " … shirts that wrinkle far too easily in such low humidity." When I was twenty-three, I experienced high humidity for the first time. I could not believe that people could tolerate living with it; every soldier in the Civil War wore a heavy, felt-wool uniform and still managed to move around in that stuff. I promptly contracted a severe case of sun poisoning, a condition I had previously been blissfully unaware of existing. It occurs when bright sunlight filters through extremely moist air. The effect seemed similar to what happens when sunlight passes through a well-focused magnifying glass. I blistered and felt seventh-circle-of-Hell horrible for a week, taking ice baths and slathering ineffective calamine lotion all over my upper body. I had never really bought into the concept of an Old Testament vengeful God until that experience. I wear long sleeves and havelocks through my summers now. Summers here near the center of the universe feature a drier heat, the sort that vacationers to the Southwest use to explain away triple-digit temperatures. They say, "But it's a dry heat," as if that statement alone might lower a temperature by several significant degrees. Our humidity, such as it is, wafts in on ocean breezes or evaporates up and out of the soil. It's rarely above forty percent relative to what would be needed to achieve what Easterners and Southerners accept as baseline normal during this season. Here, it often cools down overnight, allowing us to open every window in the Villa Vatta Schmaltz, place box fans on each sill, and fill the place with refreshingly fresh air. Bugs, which thrive in areas of high relative humidity, hardly bother here. The jumping spiders and cats seem pleased when a few flies gather in their parlor. Outside work in July seems best accomplished before too awfully late in the morning. Some nights, the outside temperature doesn't manage to slip below seventy degrees, and these invariably invite the worst days. I feel dissuaded from venturing outside then, even in the very early morning, for I can already feel the coming scorching sun. On these days, I invent chores in the basement, which holds a wine cellar mid-fifty-degrees temperature year-round. I do not understand how the cats, who still sport their winter coats, tolerate staying outside on those days, but they seem to. They only hesitantly agree to return inside, often insisting upon taking their suppers alfresco on the back deck, too. They might finally wander in through one of the left-open windows around ten in the evening, but leave again before the first morning light. I've been guilty of insisting that it's not the heat but the humidity that kills me when actually, it's the Humildity that does. The bare humility involved in tolerating extreme heat quickly wears me down. I do not consider myself to be especially filled with hubris, either. You will never find me wearing short pants, for instance, especially not outside in the sun, or short-sleeves, either. My mother was particularly susceptible to melanomas. I have not yet spent a minute of my life basking on any sandy beach. If forced to visit a beach in the Summer season, I find some shade and wear my havelock well-draped over my shoulders and the brim shading my face. This June, we here near the center of the universe received .04 inches of rain, a little less than typical, which was accompanied by 5.12 inches of evaporation, for a moisture deficit of a tad more than five inches. Places back in the humid East have been experiencing five inch AN HOUR rainfall. In the nine months since October 1, we received 37.48 inches of moisture, resulting in a net balance of 16.79 inches after evaporation, which is slightly more than usual for that period. (Thanks, Randal Son, for these stats!) We're in full drought this summer, though, and my guilt grows with each day I haven't managed to install that stingy drip irrigation system. I tell myself that I can barely accomplish a single thing at a time, let alone take on parallel projects. I'll hover in the basement ironing long-sleeved shirts that wrinkle far too easily in such low humidity. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Moosenator

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-07-01T05:44:47-07:00

" … a little heaven here in The Villa so close to the center of our universe." I have no more steady companion than our formerly feral male cat Max. Since he became a member of our entourage five years ago, he has accumulated a fair raft of nicknames, if only because he's a member of our family and everybody in our family gets assigned at least one nom de famille. ... Those who ask why I call him moose, I answer by insisting it was because of the antlers. Of course, The Moose does not actually have antlers, which might be my point. Perhaps the finest reason to assign nicknames in the first place involves the creation of an absurdist mythos around the old family unit. I imagine myself a budding Roald Dahl, writing a book about the wholly unlikely adventures of a typical American family who just happens to have a Moose and a Muse involved. I believe that every life requires some air of mythic mystery surrounding it. ...Within the first hour of coming here to our Villa Vatta Schmaltz, he'd figured out how to exit via a second-floor window, down the kitchen roof, hop onto the adjacent gazebo roof, then hop down onto the back deck railing, and from there into our fine backyard. He taught his much smarter but not nearly as clever sister, Molly, how to escape, too, and now that window remains their primary entry and exit point. We installed a cat door in the window, though neither of them has figured out how to operate it. They yowl when they want in or out, though in the summer, we just leave that window open overnight so they can come and go as they please. Clever but not brilliant, The Moosenator is endearing in his cluelessness. He often fails to find his food, for instance, patiently waiting for me to serve it up, only to disappear as soon as I've plated it. I often have to chase him down as if he's never seen his food dish before, or leave it in a place he's likely to happen upon. Five or ten minutes later, he's usually somehow managed to discover it and crouches to appreciatively finish it. ... He's notorious for begging for supper only to leave half or more of it for later. By this time, the neighborhood opportunist cat, one we've labeled Tuxedo, or simply Tux, because he looks like he's dressed in black except for a white bow tie shape across his neck, has appeared and disappeared with the contents. Tux isn't above sneaking in the back door, or even through the cat door, which he knows how to operate. He has a home, yet he somehow manages to empty every errant supper plate and bowl in this place when he can sneak in. The Moose wants to be Tux's friend, and I sometimes see them gamboling around the side yard. They're more often tussling, though, with Moose getting all territorial. ... She bats at anyone infringing upon her space, which is any place within her sight. She even chases off the Moose if he gets close. ... He doesn't seem to take anything very seriously except his early morning attention. Somewhere near the end of my early morning writing session, Max will return from his early morning rounds, looking for attention. He will yowl down the hall and enter my office like he's kicking down the door, complaining every inch of the way. I reach down and scratch his head, and he'll pirouette around for a second and third pass. He'll eventually jump up on my cluttered desk to face me off, standing inches from my face, still complaining. I'll usually stop writing then, and scratch his head, sometimes holding his head in one or both palms. ... I rub his cheeks before he usually sits behind my open laptop to survey the view out the big double-hung window overlooking the center of the universe. Eventually, he'll coerce me into following him downstairs, an enthusiastic steeplechase which, I swear, one day, will trip me and send me tumbling to my death. We arrive in the kitchen where The Moose's dry food dish sits, freshly refilled, which draws his full attention. It's as if he just needed a witness. He eats, indifferent to my presence, so I shuffle back upstairs to finish my writing work. Later, he'll climb to the top of my office's cat tower and curl up to recover from his day so far. He often hops into my lap when I'm sitting up, trying to decide what to write that day, extracting more head scratches and face palms. He follows me closely through the day, but usually disappears around bedtime. Through the summer, he'll overnight outdoors, perhaps in his permanent nest beneath the black elderberry bush, which I admit is every bit as cool as any card table blanket fort I ever built as a kid. He sticks his head out a few times each day to check on my progress and generally monitors my activity more than I monitor his. ...I stick my head out the back deck slider first thing each morning in the summer and clap my hands together twice. That's my signal to let the Moosenator know I'm up and my lap's available if needed. He appears as if he's been waiting for the stage manager to prompt his entrance, and I feed him a few cat treats on top of the kitchen table. I taught both cats to eat on the table when they first arrived. The Muse still complains about it, which might only encourage me further. They need some quirky habits, or those cats can't belong in this family. Truth be told, I need them to have quirky habits more than they probably need to. They're just cats, though they're an integral part of my creative process. I don't think they suspect the world's going to Hell, as usual, this morning, because I've tried to provide a little heaven here in The Villa, so close to the center of our universe. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Trepidation

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-06-30T06:09:14-07:00

Alfred Stieglitz: Self-Portrait with camera, tripod, and pistol (1886) "It feels like the thousand deaths …" This week promises to become one of those weeks that were. So many weeks come and go without leaving many footprints. I recently failed to recall entire quarters where I'd dedicated myself to writing series now lost to memory, if not necessarily to history. I reassured myself that nobody remembers all the books Twain wrote, and he remains perhaps the most popular writer in our history. This week, my copyeditor promised to deliver her completed work on my pending manuscript. I am not warmly anticipating reading her results. Though I firmly believe in the copyeditor's beneficial contribution, I would have preferred to forego this specific stage of manuscript development. I'd asked her last December if she could provide a quick check to prove that my manuscript required her effort. She asked me to send her a few pages. She almost immediately responded that she found five glaring errors in the first paragraph! Humbled into acceptance then, I told her I'd get back to her after some deeper consideration. This part of the publishing process unsettles me. I want to believe that after so many decades practicing, I might have come close to mastering my native language, but copyeditors seem to know better. It may be that they inhabit a different context, so that an author cannot reach an adequate altitude to properly peer down upon their work. The author lacks that particular perspective that prevents embarrassing faux pas from getting published. The whole business feels unsettling, then, since I publish content daily without the benefit of a professional copy editor. I feel as if I'm an inadequate author, one who still needs a nursemaid trailing along to ensure he stays out of trouble. Further, I struggle to read my writing. ... I read each installment I post at least three times. By the time I finally hit the key that will take it away from me and publicly post it, I'm nearly sick of it, even my better pieces. To take up a collection, nearly ninety sections worth, never produces a light-hearted experience for me, especially when I'm proofreading the copyeditor's efforts. Like with the grammar checker, I second-guess every morning, second-guessing proves to be a fussy business. It all relies too much upon context, which shifts. I prefer my copyeditor to make my prose sound even more like I wrote it, preserving my voice. The worst ones produce a product that could only have been written by some chatbot: devoid of soul, flat in texture, perfect, and so out of place in a necessarily imperfect world. I am presently employing myself to prelive whatever's coming. ... I was referred to this copyeditor by people whose judgment I trust, but I still need to catastrophize, perhaps to improve the quality of the experience when it finally arrives. It seems most unlikely that it could be as bad as I anticipate. It seems much more likely that I will find myself pleasantly surprised. Still, I wrote this manuscript seven years ago. Much has changed since I first so-called "finished" it. Several close friends read and commented on it, which, of course, changed the original. I left it sitting for years, where it apparently changed again. I added a preface and an additional addendum as well as copyedited the whole damned thing again before finally finding a publisher and necessitating this copyediting step. ...The birth occurs before the ink ever hits the still-to-be-bound pages. It occurs when the concept finally comes together, when the preparation's as good as it will ever become. When the copyeditor and the writer come together to finally give the work their combined blessing. The rest is mere christening, much ceremony and some fanfare, which will be exciting but not nearly as exacting as the actual birthing work. I am wise to experience Trepidation now. I am poised on a fresh precipice of greatness, where I will finally feel exposed to the full force of a real and trusted professional's judgment about my work. I might even find remnants of myself in there and finally come to understand what the Hell I was writing about all that time ago. Copyediting forces the thousand deaths necessary for any manuscript to get to heaven. It feels like the thousand deaths, though, and so seems best approached with Trepidation. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

DaysOff

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-06-29T06:06:09-07:00

My summertime's filled with obligations that effectively prevent me from leaving home. ... More than that, who would write the daily missive if I went missing? ... If I miss a day, I've forfeited it, never to be recovered. I will never again stand in that place or time. I feel a sacred obligation to keep my nose near to this grindstone. When I have to go away, I take my business with me. I can rise just as early elsewhere as I can rise here, so my production continues even if I'm jury-rigging connections in a tiny hotel room in Paris. I will consent to visit, but I will not agree to suspend my writing for even a day. I do not write for a living; I live to write. I stopped caring whether anyone but me valued my writing when I finally, almost begrudgingly, agreed to become a writer. That agreement was more an acknowledgement than a contract, an admission more than an indenture. I decided to try to become myself, to live up to my highest expectations for what that might mean. It would mean that I would thereafter never be unemployed and that I would agree to work for considerably less than any minimum wage. My work would have to become its own reward. I would need to find something rewarding in it and not expect extrinsic returns. I could share if I chose to, but I couldn’t hold my work hostage to payment. ...I've never felt I was so far ahead that I could afford to take some DaysOff. I could go roaming only after finishing my daily installment. If that meant ignoring jet lag to finish before the day began, so be it. I would find respite within my work rather than away from it. I remain astonished that anyone might find time in their schedule to play a round of golf. Do they not have urgent business to attend to? ...Some insist that a vacation refreshes them, leaving them ready to jump back into production again. For me, I'd return with a deficit of however many days I'd been gone and no way to recover what I lost. I would never know what I lost, of course, because I wouldn't have ever found whatever it might have been. I'd only feel the deficit, knowing full well that I could never erase it. I imagine myself to be a perpetual motion machine. Even when it might appear I'm resting, I'm wrestling with some question in my head. That's how I determine whether I'm dead. I figure that as long as I have unanswered questions, I'm still living. Should I ever manage to satisfactorily answer those questions, I suspect I would expire. The purpose of my existence is not to take vacations. My bucket list extends beyond infinite horizons but includes no finite destinations. I feel no compulsion to go anywhere to see anything. ... I am just a journeyman writer, leaving impressions and trying to avoid drawing conclusions. I do not know what anything means. I'm uninterested in telling anyone, even myself, what I must do. I'm already occupied, anyway, far too busy to take a few DaysOff for vacation. ...As I enter my FollowingChapters, I can't help but wonder if these terms of engagement will continue to seem relevant. Perhaps I might mature into holding a part-time position, one that only works intermittently. I can't see how that sort of schedule might ever work for me. To my mind, I would be deliberately missing opportunities. Forgive me, but I still believe that every morning might prove extraordinary, that none ever qualify as trivial. I'm here to chronicle my experience in each extraordinary morning, as if my existence amounts to an unending string of utterly remarkable experiences. Of course, with iteration, even the most utterly extraordinary might seem as if it were reduced to the absolutely ordinary, though I can imagine worse fates than to so saturate my experience with the absolutely extraordinary that it seems like ho-hum ordinary to me. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

CounterIntuitive

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-06-28T06:31:44-07:00

"We're destined to become mere observers of our computations." A great myth was created at the dawn of the personal computing age. Before then, when computing exclusively resided within large organizations, computer professionals took considerable pride in their ability to work within tenaciously hostile intellectual environments. They were, after all, professionals, so their methods and practices should have, by all rights, remained obscure and mysterious to the general public. These professionals reveled in their status as eggheads and were seen as much more intelligent than the Average "Regular" Person. Many became conversant in what was properly referred to as "machine language" and could think and dream in ways never imagined by Average "Regular" Persons. The dilemma arose when technology advanced to the point where personal computers became feasible. How might a company market a computer to an Average "Regular" Person, someone with no intention or inclination to ever become an eggheaded computer person? Early models were quickly snapped up by computer enthusiasts, those who, while lacking the necessary educational and technical background, were obsessive enough to acquire sufficient skills. New forms of computer languages were created, among them a particularly unintimidating one labeled simply, Basic. In practice, though, few Average "Regular" People could master even a language as simple-sounding as Basic. ...The Great Myth insisted that a computer could be created that required no specialized knowledge to operate. Technology could render the intimidating user interface —the point where the user interacts with the machine —intuitive. An Intuitive User Interface would operate the way even the most naive and inexperienced Average "Regular" Person might anticipate. It would employ simple point-and-click technology, whereby the user would direct the computer's operation using a handheld "mouse," a device that could direct an arrow on a screen to point at things and, using a button or two, instruct that arrow on what to do. ...A complication quickly arose as one manufacturer insisted that one button should be adequate to control a computer, while another insisted emphatically that two should be required. Those who imprinted on the one-button machines would be forever baffled by the two-button ones, and vice versa, since the rules for using the second button were never obvious and therefore failed to provide an intuitive experience. Never mind that the whole concept of Intuitive Interfaces amounted to a myth. Each required some entrainment, perhaps not nearly as deep as traditional eggheads required, but orientation adequate to understand the interface designer's intentions. There were underlying rules for successful operation that users were largely expected to discover and quietly incorporate into their practices. This was never intuition, but the misattribution served to successfully convince most Average "Regular" People that their personal computer could successfully intuit their intentions. ...As with all technology, computers evolved not toward simplicity but toward greater complexity, and increasing complexity inevitably brought the need for ever more convoluted interfaces. Eventually, the whole concept that there might be such a thing as an Intuitive User Interface fell on its face. The Great Myth was exposed as the myth it always was, and naive users like me experienced an existential disappointment. I still believe that user interfaces should be intuitive. Never one to figure out the two-button interface, I understood that some versions of so-called intuitive interfaces never worked, certainly not for me. Throw me on a two-button system and I will be frozen, unable even to point and click, as required for such a system to work. It was as if some systems were designed for specific temperaments. True intuitives were incapable of ever "learning" to operate two-button systems because they were never designed to be intuitive. ...Now, even one-button interfaces fail to convincingly appear intuitive. Today, I cannot successfully pick up my mail, for cripes’ sake. The mail queue on my phone differs from the one on my laptop, and the instructions for ensuring they're in synch might as well have been written in Greek. Passwords are routinely forgotten, even by special-purpose applications designed solely for remembering passwords. (They remember every password ever created for every application, leaving it up to the user to try to remember which one might be the most current.) The operating systems have become like piles of storm-tossed debris, defiant of logical order. Try to identify where you control even the most innocuous component of these systems. You will fail, rendering most of their much-touted power as inaccessible as if they didn't exist. I feel confident that the designers no longer understand what they're creating and maintaining, either. I should have figured this out decades ago. There has never been, and never could be, such a thing as an Intuitive User Interface. Even personal computers have always required an egghead's skills, abilities, and experiences. ... When I can't intuitively figure out how to print a document, she comes to the rescue to inject some eggheaded knowledge into the effort. I point and click, at times even enthusiastically, but now, as I enter my Following Chapters, I understand that my enthusiasm never was, nor could it have been, sufficient to overcome the Great Intuitive Interface Myth. ...We will one day revert to how it was before the advent of so-called personal computers. It seems likely that the primary use of Artificial Intelligence might become the operation of our personal computers. Once The Great Myth becomes more widely acknowledged, we will rely upon AI to do our pointing and clicking for us. It will be tasked with interpreting our naively intuitive actions into a sequence of commands that satisfy our underlying intentions. We're destined to become mere observers of our computations, thank heavens. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

...

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 06/26/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-06-26T18:58:12-07:00

They amuse themselves analyzing Cartoon Physics, the sort to which Wylie Coyote runs sideways. ... 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. ...This FollowingChapters Story contains the first installment of my new series, FollowingChapters. In it, I intend to capture my adventures as I enter into my FollowingChapters. This first installment wanted to be called FollowingMyself. Louis Rhead: I diverted myself with talking to my parrot (1900) — Illustration from 1900 William Taylor edition of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates. ..." … accepting that I'm finally in charge of FollowingMyself." ...This FollowingChapters story finds me juggling Priorities, the lived one, and the orthogonal one reported on. ..."The evil done in our name serves as the greatest evil of all." ...This FollowingChapters Story, DroppingIn, finds me pining after a more seemingly primitive lifestyle, one where schedule doesn't so dominate my days, one where happy accidents seem more likely to occur. I aspire to become more of a Hunter-Gatherer. ..." … not nearly as alone in this world as we could have sworn we were sometimes." ...This FollowingChapters Story finds me more deeply appreciating my Preference, even if I can't always get in touch with what that is. I came close to mastering The Kingship of Self-Control, which means I might be a past master of denial. Russell Lee: Detail of farmer's blue jeans, boots and spurs. This man was once a cowboy and still prefers the cowboy's dress, Pie Town, New Mexico (1940) Farm Security Administration "I expect that I'll always struggle to get in touch with my heart's desire …" ...This FollowingChapters Story admits that I'm surrounded by Broken things. Rather than curse this fate, I chose to embrace it. I suspect that everything was ultimately intended to be Broken, as this seems to be its most natural state. ...B. B. Wellington: The Broken Saucer (c. 1880/90, printed April 1890) ...This FollowingChapters Story, TechTalk, recounts how I noticed a very tech-savvy friend reduced to a disappointed eight-year-old when wrestling with his technology. I began considering whether everyone involved with Tech was as familiar with that experience as I have been. His (and mine and your) reaction might be universal. ...As per usual whenever I begin a new series, I spent this first week feeling my way into my latest topic. Also as per usual, I chose FollowingChapters almost on a whim; the only factor distinguishing this selection from a random whim was the usual intuitive sense that I should follow this without insisting upon understanding very much about it from the outset. It might be a fundamental principle of my writing practice that I not transcribe, by which I mean, I felt no overwhelming backlog of FollowingChapters Stories swelling within me and needing release. It was more like 'it seemed like the right choice at the time.' ... The first week always feels tentative, as if I haven't really committed to this effort, though I know I already have. ... I then slipped in a statement about how I might finally be allowing myself to insist upon certain Priorities for myself. I appreciated a fond childhood memory of my mother just DroppingIn to visit with friends, with her kids in tow, a practice we practice far too little these days. ... I next suggested that I might have reached an age where I could insist upon certain Preferences without constantly worrying about whether I should be attending to others instead. I accepted the fact that I live in a world filled with Broken things. I concluded this writing week by exploring what might be a universal response to disappointment in TechTalk. Thank you for following along as I tentatively nudged my way into this series. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

TechTalk

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-06-26T06:29:50-07:00

Kate Greenaway: The disappointment. (1890) "I will be back at it again tomorrow morning." Technology promised what every innovation has always promised: ease. It has yet to deliver. Not that this failure has chased off many customers. I know of nobody who made good on their pledge to rid themself of their frustrating technology. No, we return with fresh hopes the following morning, only to rediscover the depth of technology's betrayal. It does not seem to care. It seems incapable of giving a damn. We stopped being mere users decades ago, before our technology became this convoluted. Tangle built upon previous tangles to produce a mess whose designers probably don't understand. My technology holds the power to transform me into a whimpering eight-year-old at virtually any time. I thought I might be the only one so affected until a very tech-savvy friend visited. Imagine my shock when I caught him performing the part I had previously thought only I played. But there he was, laptop on his lap, seemingly close to tears in the deepest disappointment. He spoke the familiar monologue: "It shouldn't do that. It was supposed to …. It shouldn't do that twice in a row!" You know what I'm saying because you've probably heard yourself delivering the same lines. I use my technology very hesitantly. I swore, when I first encountered Barbie and Ken Computers, that I'd never learn to program them. I would choose to remain a naive user and not ever even attempt to become a master of the damned things. I would not play games on mine, lest I cast myself as a competitor. I wanted to use mine for business, so it wouldn't do to use it for play, though computer games never really struck me as a form of play, anyway. I would also avoid becoming a power user. I would use the apps to their bare minimum, lest I experience the sorts of troubles that only those who fly too close to the sun encounter. I would remain a minimalist in all things computer-related. In this way, I'd naively hoped to avoid the usual disappointment that naturally accompanied computer use. But it doesn't matter. It probably never mattered. Anyone using one of the damned things will get stung. The disappointment's built in. If I used my laptop as a brick, it would probably still manage to disappoint me. However I might try to sidestep this founding dilemma, I will very likely stumble into the middle of it. I will be reduced to helpless victim again and begin the awful soliloquy, Shakespearian in its simplicity, my character reduced to blathering—my cool, elevated far above comfortable room temperature level. I will call for The Muse to save me from certain damnation. Not even she will likely be capable of saving me. I'm damned and I know it. I negotiate with the most heartless God imaginable, one who promised salvation but delivered only more insidious frustration instead. I will be back at it again tomorrow morning. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Broken

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-06-25T05:56:23-07:00

B. B. Wellington: The Broken Saucer (c. 1880/90, printed April 1890) " … not even duct tape holds anything together forever." I have attained an age where much of what surrounds me seems Broken. I suspect that this acknowledgement accompanies aging, since in my more innocent youth, I seemed surrounded by more operational than Broken stuff. My stove-top espresso maker's handle was missing this morning. It had broken off a few weeks ago when the house cleaner accidentally knocked it off the countertop. I'd fixed it with some superglue, and that held until a few days ago, when it let go. I learned that I'd have to find some high-temperature glue to more permanently fix it, so I placed that need into my ever-burgeoning pending queue. I'll get around to finding that when I finally get around to finding that, assuming I ever remember to. In the meantime, I discovered that two pot holders held just so suffice as a fix until something more permanent manifests. Much of my existence seems to be suspended in just that state: Pending Something More Permanent. Permanence has always been a popular delusion. If age imparts anything, it brings the growing understanding that nothing turns out to be permanent. Everything's transitory. We glimpse completion between creation and dissolution, a moving spectacle, however permanent it might seem at any moment. Reality is, indeed, entropy with little in between. Each respite is at best a temporary rest. If there's never any rest for the wicked, the blessed manage little better. The only permanence gets embodied in change. The only change seems destined for different. One climbs to the top of a mountain to slide down the other side. This condition cannot quite qualify as a problem. It has no solution other than accepting how it always was. Those intent upon changing the world had best acknowledge that this world has never stopped changing. It was on its way somewhere else when it lingered here and will be on its way to somewhere else, probably unintended, before the dust settles. Changing the world seems like little challenge. The impossible would entail trying to keep this world from changing. Hold it still if you dare and see if that gets you anywhere more interesting. I am secretly proud of all my little adaptations, my pot holders compensating for missing handles. Some seem clever, and others seem embarrassing, but each serves as evidence that I have been present and noticing. I do not live a hillbilly existence with derelict cars and farm machinery decorating my front yard, but I some days feel burdened by the sheer volume of Broken things in my life. Some days, I dream of a different world, one where age rewards by mending what was once broken. I imagine myself tottering around the place with a roll of duct tape, finally getting around to resolving every last open item on my life's to-do list. I know for certain that this will never happen. Whenever it's threatened in the past, some fresh catastrophe has distracted me from my mission, prolonging ultimate completion to something more closely resembling the infinite. Life must be at root infinite because it seems to spawn infinities, whatever it touches. What was finished falls apart, producing a future in the process. We create progress through just this infinite regress, always falling further behind lest we lose our premise for engaging. Life seems a process focused upon staying behind. Heaven help us if we should ever actually make progress, for it could produce nothing but a temporary illusion certain to fall apart. Those who hold grudges about these disillusions miss a greater point. We were apparently supposed to feel disappointed, as it serves as a renewing motivation to slap on some duct tape and move forward, hopefully fixing things; fixing things hopefully. Begrudgement only discloses denial. Acceptance learns that not even duct tape holds anything together forever. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Preference

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-06-24T05:51:05-07:00

Russell Lee: Detail of farmer's blue jeans, boots and spurs. This man was once a cowboy and still prefers the cowboy's dress, Pie Town, New Mexico (1940) Farm Security Administration "I expect that I'll always struggle to get in touch with my heart's desire …" I struggle when responding to anyone asking about my preferences. I was raised to be more sensitive to what others prefer than to my own preferreds, a valuable skill in a family with five kids where neediness easily translated into a form of weakness. I learned early the value indifference brought and the cost neediness wrought. I was rarely considered to be a picky eater. Quite the opposite, I was known for my adventurous palate. My dad "preferred" chicken backs so his kids could feast on the meatier cuts. My mom could turn into a genuine Christian martyr sometimes, denying her personal preference in deference to her kids'. Making matters worse, when I was in Junior High School, I found an old Victorian text in the local Goodwill book section, “The Kingship of Self-Control.” I took that book to heart. It was a typically high-minded work that elevated denial to a royal level. My adolescent mind found reassurance that I might easily discover salvation by merely denying something. Years of subsequent practice, and I can hardly determine what I prefer, other than denial. I typically have no overwhelmingly strong preference except, perhaps, in matters of taste. When it comes to food and clothing, I have strong preferences and rarely compromise. I'm pretty easily offended and tend to hold long-lasting grudges. I won't shop at Walmart because I saw the effect their business model had on one of their suppliers, who was promised exclusive access until they became dependent on that business. Then, Walmart began demanding onerous price cuts, which left the supplier cutting staff and benefits, blowing up an otherwise decent place to work. The heartlessness impressed me and prevents me, thirty years later, from casting my shadow across their entryway. I prefer to pay more and avoid overt complicity in such obscenities. I acknowledge that this amounts to a preference rather than a necessity. I could, if I could stand to live with myself, still choose to shop there if I wanted, and truth be told, I've resorted to entering twice since we returned from our exile to a land where Walmart didn't exist. I still feel complicit about those visits. As I've matured, I've found it easier to insist upon certain Preferences. I remain distant from feeling, in most ways, in touch with that aspect of myself. I still catch myself acting in deference to others' preferences, even if they don't quite match what might be my own, but as I've grown, I've come to know better what I want and, more importantly, what I don't. My early training in The Kingship of Self Control still kicks in when I'm called to insist, and my family of origin still contributes when there's only one piece of pie remaining for two diners. I'll almost always defer to my partner, insisting that I couldn't possibly tolerate even one more bite of what invariably was some tremendous pie. I lie rather than disclose a non-negotiable, thereby enobling myself by denial. I'm still learning and fine-tuning as I enter my FollowingChapters. What I didn't perfect through earlier iterations, I might come to master, even as a past master of denial. I no longer always feel guilty when I express my preference. I don't always assume responsibility for making it okay for everybody by insisting upon it not being in any way okay for me. Genuine Kingship's tough to outgrow. Almost a lifetime of experience doesn't evaporate in a day, or necessarily ever; it persists. I expect that I'll always struggle to get in touch with my heart's desire after mastering my heart's denial. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

DroppingIn

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-06-23T06:22:43-07:00

Harold Edgerton: Milk Drop Coronet (c. 1936) " … not nearly as alone in this world as we could have sworn we were sometimes." Most of us live well-regulated lives. This renders us more predictable than we might be otherwise. There is no question about whether we imprinted on hunter-gatherer or farmer behavior. We're definitely farmers. We rise at just about the same time each morning. Through the day, we follow a schedule that defines our edges. We reliably show up for supper at the usual time. We even regulate our vacations, planning routes, stops, and experiences. We try to leave little to chance. Hunter-gatherers, though, left much to chance. When they set out on a hunt, they made no advance reservations. They'd have to prepare for an array of conditions without knowing for certain which might most influence their quality of experience. They might not even know what they were hunting, relying upon fortunate convergence and possibility more than confident certainties. Their reward was that, usually, their overall workload was less than that of a farmer, who had to maintain his tamed wilderness within rather strict boundaries or risk losing his livelihood. The farmstead demanded dedication, while a dedicated hunter-gatherer might laze away more than half their days, since a single hunt's success might sustain them for several days or longer. My childhood was less structured than my current lifestyle. Partly due to The Muse's schedule as a Port Commissioner, I ask each morning about her schedule, which will at least somewhat serve to regulate my day, too. She typically has a few meetings scheduled because she has become involved in numerous initiatives. She's engaged in conversations about water conservation, career creation, and coordinating between various government and private offices and functions. My days might be much less regulated, but I have a modest schedule to maintain, too, as well as a household within which I expect myself to contribute. I take my turns cooking supper, and I have my own work to see to. Our morning ritual attempts to coordinate our schedules so we know what to expect of each other. Who's doing the shopping, for instance, and which car will be available when? We rarely find the opportunity to engage in some old-fashioned DroppingIn. In my youth, my family would often drop in on somebody, usually without calling ahead. It was considered perfectly acceptable behavior to stop by for a cup of coffee and to shoot some breeze, to gain a little reprieve from the day-to-day routine. One wouldn't stop too soon before any meal time and would depart, leaving ample time for meal preparation, but some idle time mid-morning or afternoon was recognized as necessary respite. My mom might drop in on her second cousin Verdeen, who was an able co-conspirator. We'd be left to play with her kids or find something to keep ourselves out from underfoot while they mediated some controversy or other. Moderns don't seem to do that much DroppingIn. In my emerging world order, in my FollowingChapters, I hope to reintroduce DroppingIn as a more prominent portion of my lifestyle, even if I won't necessarily be able to put it on my schedule. DroppingIn seems roughly equivalent to Hunter-Gatherer behavior, hunting for connection and conversation in something other than a schedule's formal manner. DroppingIn begins with no agreed-upon agenda. One or the other might hold some burning issue, but neither expects to completely resolve any controversy. One does DroppingIn to engage in something more like dialogue than problem-solving. Its primary purpose tends to be reassurance that one's not nearly as alone in this world as we could have sworn we were sometimes. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Priorities

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-06-22T06:15:36-07:00

Ben Shahn: Untitled [Washington Court House, Ohio] (July-August 1938) "The evil done in our name serves as the greatest evil of all." Our incumbent waddled off his golf course to fly back to his supposed home to deliver another borderline incoherent rant about something. He sounded triumphant as he spewed his usual paradoxes, pleading for a peaceful end to a violent engagement he initiated. So much for the great negotiator, now reduced to pre-emptive triumphalism. The Muse and I had spent our day harvesting. A friend had reported that his pea crop was threatening to overwhelm him and his raspberries, too, so we took him up on his offer. Old friends were visiting, and we took them along to see his two new Appaloosa colts and to help with the harvest. It had been years since Kim had anything to do with Raspberries. Her grandmother's had been too prickly to comfortably pick. These were different. We left with four pints of berries and some fresh stories we'd shared. Something about harvesting brings out the stories from within. While our futuristic bombers were flying around the world, we stopped for lunch at a place The Muse had been after me to visit since we returned from exile four and a third years ago. I don't get out much anymore. The place passed muster. I had a bowl of cabbage soup made with hamburger. It was delicious! The Muse ordered the last batch of deep-fried asparagus. I didn't care for the batter, which tasted bitter. Banter was the relish over the meal, with an attentive and good-hearted waitress who could recite the beer menu from memory. We'd intended to pick cherries that afternoon, an annual ritual required to keep The Muse's breakfast larder properly stocked. The orchard owner offered a taste of a Black Pearl variety, and we were hooked. We tromped to the far reaches of the orchard only to find it pretty thoroughly picked over. We persisted, cherry-picking, if you insist, managing fine. Kim had never picked cherries, never thought they might grow on trees, but took to the exercise like a duck to water, assuming the duck would have to reach up to swim. The Muse immediately found a ladder and climbed as high as she could possibly climb, for cherry picking serves as one of The Muse's most treasured freedoms. She seems like she's flying up there, eating almost as many cherries as she's retaining. Cherry picking serves as The Muse's Fourth of July. Fireworks were exploding for real just outside Tehran, where B-2 bombers were dropping absurdly powerful munitions as if on a mission from God. Fifty years of thoughtful diplomacy was the intended target, and by all reports, the mission was successful. The arrogance seemed more damaging than the bombs. Our good faith and credit went up in smoke without our incumbent even noticing. He was distracted celebrating his latest chaos. We left with forty-four pounds of Black Pearls picked at their peak. Kim and I would stem and cull the take after shelling the large bag of peas we'd also picked on our outing. The satisfaction settles in as the shelling and culling continue, a cold beer slowly sipped between batches. Fingers stained with evidence of transcendence, The Muse decided we'd pit the fruit tomorrow and enjoy a light meal with our victory that night. We caught ourselves as we were moving into dessert, fresh raspberries on shortcake with freshly whipped cream, speaking of our incumbent, the worm in the cherry, the rot in the raspberries. It's all about priorities, which ones one chooses and which ones one avoids. The insistence that any of this is necessary undermines its actual significance. It's actually all about choices and the voices we respond to. Evil even lurks within a Spring day spent on orchard ladders and bent over a pea patch. The evil done in our name serves as the greatest evil of all. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

FollowingMyself

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-06-21T05:34:57-07:00

Louis Rhead: I diverted myself with talking to my parrot (1900) — Illustration from 1900 William Taylor edition of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates. ..." … accepting that I'm finally in charge of FollowingMyself." Beyond a certain uncertain point, I find I have to lead myself. The trailblazers and popularizers I once looked to for direction have either left the building or proven themselves incapable of further advising me, so divergent have our paths and aspirations become. What early in my careers became an identity struggle has laid down its weapons. My identity is finally no longer a mystery to me. ... I more deeply understand my underlying absurdities as well as my fundamental decencies. I remain incomplete yet almost complacent, satisfied having life come at me, finally understanding and accepting that I never really had any alternative. ...Where I've arrived might not matter. I have successfully surrounded myself with my habits, rituals, and foibles, and I fancy that I can see the center of the universe from my writing desk, and gravity seems to finally work properly there. I no longer hope to become something different someday. I hope for similar things instead, understanding that I'm now at an age where one misplaced step could change my mobility forever. I am not quite as cavillier as I used to be. ... As of this writing, I am anticipating receiving a copyedited manuscript for my pre-publication review. I cannot say that I'm thrilled out of my gourd at the prospect of seeing myself in print again, but I admit to a certain satisfaction at the recognition, even if the project seems more like an experiment than a fruition. I am a writer after all, and writers occasionally publish. ...Back when I was building my careers, I maintained models of those whose work I particularly admired. ... I'd adopt their perspectives and perceive my world through those angles. I'd learn some things and then move on, shedding each perspective in turn. ... I relied upon their insights to inspire, if not precisely guide, my forward footsteps. I felt reassured that I was not the only one holding some curious perspective. I was only trying to belong in a world that often seemed stand-offish if not outright hostile. ... I'm confident that I misunderstood much of what I believed I'd mastered through fevered reading and improvisation. I never felt completely comfortable in my own professional skin. There was always someone else who'd experienced something greater. Every keynote speaker seemed to have personally guided a multi-national project team numbering in the thousands to successfully implement the first revolutionary switching system ever produced. I learned later that these superheroes were the most impressed in the audience, and that nobody, and I really mean nobody, had ever actually personally led any such team to accomplish anything. That speaker embodied a misrepresentation of what leaders and managers do. They always, always, always get to guide themself first. ... Of course, all those multinational team members get to guide themselves, too, however otherwise charismatic their designated leader might seem. They each belonged to a largely unacknowledged community that was leading itself and, perhaps most importantly, following itself as well. Those who sacrifice their place in the performance in favor of another's presence, those who favor following others over following themself, hobble the show. I know, it's popular to follow those exceptional leaders who seem to know what to do next, even when they don't, and especially when they don't. I ultimately learned to skeptically follow whenever I was encouraged to follow, to never surrender my own proven poor judgment for any promise of another's better judgment, if only because that judgment ultimately could have never existed. Take whomever you choose to be your personal lord and shopper, but know that you retain ownership of whatever they might decide for you. ... The supposed genius whom I might have temporarily put in charge of my judgment never owned the result. ...Even when I became enthralled with some genius's perspective, it was always me making those choices. So I shouldn't consider this instance to be terribly different than how it's always been for me, except this iteration seems different. I've lost the training wheels, and even though it seems I haven't relied upon them for years, certain fears emerge as I stoop to finally remove them. I feel as though I'm flying solo for the first time, even though I've been flying solo for years. Habits of decades influenced me in ways I couldn't have possibly been aware of. ... To whom I once felt associated might not matter anymore. I honor the place they held in my identity while acknowledging that I'm more like Robinson Crusoe now. If not precisely stranded on some desert island, I'm working now on accepting that I'm finally in charge of FollowingMyself. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

...

Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 06/19/2025

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-06-19T14:43:29-07:00

I suppose I'm not supposed to understand why anyone might choose not to dedicate themselves to encouraging domestic tranquility. This world remains no less beautiful than its potential ever promised, yet some seem to flee from every opportunity to take it easy, to make it easier. I've been writing about our incumbent, a person who never didn't have a couple of screws loose, as if he might one day catch on and start trying to catch up, but I acknowledge he's incapable; supremely incapable, as I might also be. The tragedy remains that it could still be as it could and should be, but we reject those possibilities, and I suppose we reject the opportunities we receive as poorly-timed or otherwise not quite right. Perfection remains the mortal enemy of good enough, though even good enough has seemed especially unachievable this quarter. So I spent the time coping and hoping, presuming that I might catch myself effectively coping if only I could catch myself unselfconsciously coping, a standard, run-of-the-mill paradox. I might have always been a master coper without knowing I was, simply because I hadn't watched myself enough to catch myself masterfully coping. On some other hand, there might not be anything even approaching masterful coping, it necessarily being an ad hoc occupation, something we engage in out of necessity instead of volitionally; that even attempting to cope better damns the attempt to producing worse results, another paradox. Hoping has been holding my fallback position. I discovered this quarter that I remain capable of hoping, and what a godsend this realization has been. I was always a better dreamer than I ever was at manifesting. I might not even believe in my ability to manifest anything anymore. I retain my faith in my ability to dream, though, and recognize that without even realizing the objects of my dreams, things seem better when I have a head filled with dreams on my shoulders. The bad guys actively conspire to undermine their imagined empires. Our incumbent's Babylon will crumble just like everyone's before. He's been actively trying to work himself out of office from the moment he swore allegiance he had no intentions of abiding by. The worse it gets, the better it might be one day. ...This CHope Story, CHoping, starts summing up this series. ... This final week of this CHope series will look for meaning in this fleeting experience. ...This CHope Story briefly summarizes my experience closely following our incumbent over the last almost three months. My most generous interpretation of his results concludes that his pseudo-administration has Fizzled. ..."Happy birthday to us, they cheered, ignoring the irrelevant incumbent." ...This CHope Story finds me explaining what I have been coping with and hoping for as I have worked my way through this CHope Series, wading through constant streams of Slander&Libel. Thomas Rowlandson: Libel Hunters on the Look Out, or Daily Examiners of the Liberty of the PressSeries/Book Title: Tegg's Caricatures Published by Thomas Tegg (April 12, 1810) "I've been Coping by averting my gaze and Hoping for better …" ...This CHope Story continues my reflections on this nearly finished series, this time considering sarcasm and its effects on author and intended target. ..." … to keep myself company while I watched my potency and influence evaporate." ...This CHope Story finds me describing TheAmericanDisease. ..."We live with our thumbs on the scale." ...This CHope Story, FollowingChapters, finds me spooling down after almost completing my thirty-second series of stories over the last eight years. I wondered if I was done proving to myself that I am a writer, and concluded that I might be, though I couldn't find justification to stop writing more series. ...The final week writing any series tastes bittersweet. The long-aspired-for objective moves within reach and I can begin to draw some conclusions. What began as confusion might not fully resolve, but it sheds some of its former mystery. I never attempt to create anything definitive. I’d much rather chronicle the time as it existed than create anything for anybody's ages, though I inexorably, eventually, do manage to produce something for somebody’s ages, probably mine. Whatever’s written becomes self-portraiture, sometimes as if viewed through a fun-house mirror. This time, I focused more deliberately upon approaching the finish line. What I’d begun as CHope became CHoping as the ending neared. After much dread, I gratefully acknowledged that much of what I’d feared to pass had Fizzled, though I should have emphasized that even epic fizzles can leave casualties. I marveled at how any administration could hope to succeed by committing serial Slander&Libel. Much of what I’d written in this series, I freely admitted, might forever be LostOn those whom I had imagined probably needed it most. Such is the usual fate of any attempt to do anything for the primary purpose of doing someone anything for their own good. ... I stepped out on a limb and voiced what I personally consider to be TheAmericanDisease, and ended the week and the series reflecting on what are popularly known as FollowingChapters. ... Thank you for following along through thirty-two of them … and still counting. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

FollowingChapters

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-06-19T05:37:56-07:00

By my count, I will be finishing my thirty-second series this week. I began writing these during a period of professional despair, when I wondered if I was or ever had been a writer. I figured that if I was a writer, I could damned well write, so I set about writing an essay every morning. By the end of the first quarter, I'd produced a book-length work. I continued the exercise, perhaps only a tad bit more convinced that I might be a writer after all. Now, the end of eight years later, I find myself finishing my thirty-second such series. Honestly, I cannot quickly even list the names of all of them in sequence. As usual, software problems, by which I probably mean 'user difficulties,' have resulted in a small black hole in 2022, so that I've temporarily lost access to a few quarters' stories. Nothing I can't recover with considerable frustrating effort. As I've neared each ending, I've started questioning what I should be doing next. So far, I've justified continuing the pattern of producing some story each morning and compiling them into something like a book manuscript at the end. Managing the resulting manuscripts has become an overwhelming job involving too much copying and pasting, not to mention further proofreading that is perennially to-be completed. I doubt whether I'll ever manage to fully catch up to myself. Between the continually shifting context and other demands on my minuscule attention span, I acknowledge that much of this volume will, like most of my earlier writings, never make it into a coherent compilation. Part of my questioning about what I should be doing next involves precisely this question. If I cannot find the time to properly compile my writings, what sense does it make for me to continue to produce fresh pieces? The sense does not come in compilation, for I created none of these pieces for the purpose of compiling them. No, I produced them for immediate consumption, for the moment in which I created them, because I was trying to prove to myself that I was or might have once been a writer. ... Compiling rightfully belongs to some other profession. My writing's purpose was satisfied the moment I posted each day's result. The ultimate volume of the compiled stories might have never been much more than a vanity, for some self-satisfaction accompanies seeing a pile of paper I personally produced. I found it difficult to read through the resulting compilations, though, as if to confirm that the pieces were not intended to be compiled and read out of their original context. I've now conclusively demonstrated to myself that I am or once was a writer. I rarely miss a morning writing. The practice seems so thoroughly integrated into who I am that I've even taken to introducing myself as a writer. ... Who do you write for? Would I know anything you've written? I have not shepherded a single one of those almost thirty-two manuscripts into publication, even though at least two of the series focused on publishing. The fifth series, originally titled Clueless, is scheduled for publication later this year. It's in final copyediting now after much fussing and procrastinating on the part of its author. I am excited and baffled at the prospect of publishing again and I acknowledge that it's so damned expensive that I might never even attempt to do it again. Am I then a writer who doesn't care to publish his works? I've proven successful playing the part of the field that doesn't rely upon publication to get by. I wrote one bestseller and became neither rich nor famous from the experience. I spent a lot more promoting that book than I ever made in royalties. ... Over time, I lost interest in finding a publisher that might be interested in promoting my writing. Instead, I carved out a niche practice where I publish to a private Facebook Group and Substack, as well as LinkedIn and BlueSky, although I don't fully understand the utility of BlueSky. I've learned that writing's not a viable way for me to make money, so I gave up aspiring to that end. I can leave that to the authors of the self-helpless books, the ones who feel compelled to tell others what to do. I never knew what to do except to keep writing. What will I choose to do next? Oh, I will continue writing, if only because I am a writer and, above all else, writers write. My FollowingChapters will not involve retiring to some place where I'm a stranger to myself and my surroundings. I will continue inhabiting my most familiar territory, here, near the center of the universe, where gravity has the temerity to actually work right. ... I intend to create a transition of sorts, though, from CHope stories, which have successfully reassured me through a dark and terrifying period, into FollowingChapters, wherever they might lead. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

TheAmericanDisease

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-06-18T06:28:56-07:00

Frederic Edwin Church: Our Banner in the Sky (1861) ...Within this vibrant scene of atmospheric flux, an opening within a roiling cloud layer reveals stars against a blue firmament. The barren tree in the foreground doubles as a pole for this celestial apparition of the “broad stripes and bright stars” of the U.S. flag. Following the rapid succession of political provocations that led to Confederate forces firing on Fort Sumter, Church channeled his belief in the divine righteousness of the Union cause into this patriotic visual spectacle. As the sectarian conflict stretched from weeks into months, the oil sketch, with its allegorical river valley resembling the Catskills and the Hudson River, was translated into a popular chromolithograph. The prints were issued by the New York branch of Goupil & Cie as a subscription fundraiser to support the families of Union soldiers. This is one of the few lithographs from the series that Church painted by hand. ..."We live with our thumbs on the scale." ...Something has always ailed us, back to our earliest aspirations. We firmly believed ourselves to be blessed beyond all others. We were seldom humbled in acknowledgement. We took possession and became possessed. Perhaps it was the blessing that possessed us to behave not as if we deserved the blessing but as if we were owed it. Our original sin was greater than many others. We reneged on every promise we made to the natives, who committed the grave sin of treating us like siblings when they were lesser beings. We did what we could for those who were damned from the outset. We took dominion because we were clearly the chosen ones. The first Holy Roman Emperor earned that title by slaughtering more heathens than any previous king. He scared those he didn't kill into accepting Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior, and the Roman Catholic Church as their enslaver and benefactor. Most of the earliest Christians were coerced into their faith. We didn't come to share the land or learn of other cultures. We came in the name of investment, with a debt we'd promised to repay. We mortgaged ourselves to be free. ...We might be the most parochial place on the planet. We pride ourselves on our independence. We presume we're better than others, and, more significantly, that they're naturally worse than us. We are prejudiced in favor of ourselves, which creates the perfect context for endless injustice. We see a potential enemy in every neighbor. We believe someone is trying to take advantage of our advantages, so we preemptively take advantage of them first, but only to maintain balance. We think we're more intelligent than the average bear. This explains why we so often behave as if we are stupid. We believe it is our inheritance that makes us more intelligent. We almost always insist upon the reward without first completing the necessary effort. We believe we're owed. We want others to be dependent on us while we display a beligerent independence. God shed his grace on us, not on them. He crowned our good with brotherhood, too, from sea to shining sea. We read our self-aggrandizing promotional posters and worshiped them. We live so far away from the rest of the world that most of us will never get the chance to meet anyone on their native soil. We pride ourselves on our independence and consider dependence a form of weakness rather than a source of power. We perceive power as emanating from rather than accreting to. We believe it's a sin not to use power possessed. We believe one can possess power without it also possessing them. We firmly believe ourselves to be first among equals. We live with our thumbs on the scale. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

LostOn

david@projectcommunity.com — 2025-06-17T05:53:06-07:00

Albert Sterner: Lost Angel (1932) " … to keep myself company while I watched my potency and influence evaporate." Almost in retrospect now, I perceive that much of the material I produced in this series would have been LostOn our incumbent, who seems especially resistant to much beyond relatively mindless memes. Of course, it's always been the case that those anyone feels really need specific information, prove incapable of absorbing its meaning. This difficulty has troubled geniuses as well as idiots, and might well serve as the ultimate dilemma. It might be that anything undertaken expressly for another's good proves incapable of delivering that result. Sarcasm holds an especially special place in this particular pantheon, for it, above all other literary forms, proves least likely for the one needing its message to receive it. A boss once confided to me that there is no place in business for sarcasm. It might be that there's really no place in this world that's safe for it, either. But then, sarcasm might be a gift only its author can ever receive. Whomever it's addressed to, its author seems to be the only one certain to understand its full intent. It does not come out and straightforwardly say much of anything. It relies instead upon associations to deliver the blow, but to receive that blow, the recipient has to be at least somewhat in the know. Great sarcasm is always first an inside joke, entirely understandable only to its author. Its purpose might not be to communicate anything to anybody other than its author, who easily understands any underlying intentions. The author might intend to make a fool of another, but he'll likely encounter a greater fool in the process. That greater fool might just be the otherwise innocent author who wrote the piece in his unique language, naively intending, perhaps, that another might receive the deeply encoded message. So, this CHope series might, finally, serve as a testament to its author's deep sense of impotence in the face of idiotic governance. This is not a new or unfamiliar sensation for this author or, I suspect, for any other. We each aspire to share our sensations with others. Since there doesn't seem to be any universal sense, there's no way to tell if another ever receives the author's message as intended. Indeed, when I speak with those who read my best-selling Blind Men and the Elephant, the one question that most frequently pops into my head is, "What book did you read?" None seemed to have read the book I was certain I'd written. Each received perhaps the message they needed rather than the one I'd intended. I always feel a little guilty taking credit for having written something I was almost sure I hadn't written or, if I had written, it was largely unintentional. Sarcasm, above all other forms, tends to be LostOn its recipient. I can't say that this doesn't come as somewhat of a Godsend because if the full intent of the writing had hit its intended mark, it could have only proved to be insulting. Anyone receiving sarcasm should feel deeply offended, because offense was most likely the author's underlying intent. He employed sarcasm in the secret hope that his arrow might somehow miss its mark so that the stinging component might be delivered without creating a gushing flesh wound. It might be that sarcasm serves as the most cowardly form of criticism, always disclosing more about the author than it ever does about its target. I imagined, through much of this series, that I might be landing genuinely stinging punches. I realize now that I might have only been punching myself. Our incumbent appears to be securely insulated from almost every moderating outside influence. He seems to be acting as someone's puppet, and it appears likely that he has little control over himself at this point. He has deserved every criticism I've heard leveled against him, for he's truly awful on a historically unique scale. He seems to be wrong about everything, embracing opposing views on seemingly every subject. He seems so easily offended. This fuels vengeful responses. He spools himself up and down, always overreacting. He might be nothing more confusing than a drama queen, and whatever offense I might take or intend to commit, has little effect on his consequent performance. I ultimately wrote my CHope Series for myself, to keep myself company while I watched my potency and influence evaporate. ©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved