Otto Piene: Untitled
(bleed-through of previous page, left page);
Untitled (notes with design for stage and screen, right page)
Series/Book Title: Sketchbook:
"Retrospective of Inflatables"/"Tobago faces"/Landscapes
(1984)

So Much For The Speeders' Experience
If I could wish everyone one experience, I might choose to bless them with a leisurely toodle through The Palouse in Spring. Much of the year, The Palouse seems an unlikely wish to bestow on anyone. In High Spring, though, anyone might readily understand the blessing. It's green where most of its year knows only buff beige. It's surprisingly yellow as farmers have increasingly embraced Canola seed culture as an antidote to abysmal export wheat markets. It's lonely highway, two-lane blacktop, when you might have been convinced freeways had conquered and ruled every worthwhile route to anywhere. It's the slow way there, uninteresting to anyone still striving to get there first. Oh, there are plenty of drivers who haven't read the memo, passing on blind turns, apparently more anxious to arrive on time than alive, but those have always been there and are easily tolerated by anyone tenaciously insisting that they always win. I pump my brakes to ensure they can return to their proper lane before they execute the Wylie Coyote they seem insistent upon manifesting. Every second I slow prolongs my primal experience. This was never a race. I suspect that The Palouse might be best experienced at the speed of a walking horse, the way my ancestors traveled. They could breathe in the scents that only ever manifested that one week in Spring, and for the duration of their passage, they were in the center of every possible universe. So much for the speeders' experience.

——

Weekly Writing Summary

This CHope Story finds me considering the Trappings of power and how one incumbent seemed to have mistaken Trappings for power, an inevitably humbling mistake. Gold-plated bullshit smells the same as the unadorned kind.

Margaret E Price: Princess Furball attends the royal festival adorned in her golden dress (1921)
" … deserve to ultimately be humbled by their surroundings."
—
This CHope Story finds me breaking in some new tech and recalling what tech tends to TEaCH me. I aspired never to become more than a naive user and have largely succeeded. My new machine can process 38 trillion operations per second, many more than I will probably ever need, which seems barely enough.

James Gillray: The Graces in a High Wind published May 26, 1810 published by Hannah Humphrey
"I hope never to become its master."
—
This Chope Story discloses my most private musing, the one that occasionally considers Surrendering to the seemingly unending assault on reasoning itself. Which successes are not seasoned by a series of unsuccessful Surrenderings?

Anonymous Germany, Anonymous Italy: Book XXXIII.10 Macedonians pretend to surrender {Quarte Decadis Liber Quartus p. CXCVIII verso} Series/Book Title: Illustrations from Livy, Decades. Venice, Philipp Pincio, September 27, 1511 (1493)
" … to continue contemplating a Surrendering I'll never accomplish."
—
This CHope Story tries to make some sense of Emoluments. It's clear that some public servants do not believe in public service, but rather expect to become wealthy from their office. This expectation seems destined to ultimately become another impeachment indictment. Nobody can purchase character.

El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos): Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple (c. 1570–75)
"I suspect his first impeachment indictment will focus on his many violations of the Emoluments Clause."
—
This CHope Story finds me not seeking Venge. I'm nobody's avenging angel, and avenging angels inevitably tend to turn themselves into devils. Vengeance is properly nobody's business, especially not our current incumbent's.

Adrian van de Venne: The Donkey Laden with Food, from Emblematic Figures of Animals (1633) — ABOUT THIS ARTWORK — Prints of animals could be accurate and fanciful simultaneously. This finely engraved yet slightly caricatured scene from Aesop’s Fables depicts a donkey laden with fine food and wine who nonetheless happily gnaws at a prickly thistle instead. Moral interpretations of the text have ranged from “One man’s meat is another man’s poison” to a critique of stinginess. Though unsigned, this humorous image of feast and famine set off a chain of copies, ironically ending with a dozen Aesop roundels that decorated the back of trenchers, wooden plates used for the final fruit and nut course in England
"It's probably nobody's friend and certainly everybody's enemy."
—
This CHope Story, Weaponizing, might amount to me poking defensive sticks into darkness. Still, it elicits some sense of hope and so amounts to a useful coping mechanism. I view the incumbent's ongoing assaults on our democracy as more emblematic of defensive crouches than strategic actions, with reliably predictable results.

Gustavs Klucis (Klutsis): Turn Your Weapons Against the Soviet Bourgeoisie — Original Language Title: ПОВЕРНИТЕ ОРУЖИЕ ПРОТИВ СВОЕИ БУРЖУАЗИИ (c. 1924)
"We might as well believe ourselves blessed to have elected just this sort of incumbent to remind us who we always were."
—
This writing week was not a week destined for writing. I felt as though I needed to force out the stories because I was distracted. I always claim to live near the center of this universe, where gravity actually works right, but only one week each year does this assertion prove to be one hundred percent true. One week in mid-May, the promise reliably becomes a reality. The lilacs bloom in synchronized order. The snowball bush threatens the entire North face of the place, twenty feet tall and still enthusiastically growing. The front parking strip displays scores of irises in every hue from nearly white to almost midnight black, and practically every color in between. The scent alone distracted this writer, encouraging him to breathe deeply and without reflection.

I wrote this week's stories in predawn darkness, with the cats out surveying our territory. I began by considering what power does to some, how it sometimes distracts enough to convince that the symbol is the force rather than the costume. I successfully migrated into a new generation of technology this writing week without disrupting my delivery schedule. This amounts to a near impossibility, since Technology disrupts by nature and improved technology virtually always initially degrades capability. I admitted to harboring feelings that I should be Surrendering while acknowledging that most successes amount to a series of failed Surrenderings. I investigated the concept of Emoluments, an archaic term with fresh relevance, thanks to our greedy incumbent. I chased another antique term, long out of practice, renewed by our paranoid President: Venge, the root of vengeance. Vengeance never belongs to anyone employing it. It's an orphan for damned good reasons, and a weapon that almost always blows up in its user’s face. I concluded this most disconcerting of all possible writing weeks by considering ‘Weaponizing,’ whatever that might mean in practice. Those who respond to life's challenges as if they were under continual assault seem paranoid, but only because they are. Thank you for following along as I strive to fulfill my promises here. Happy Spring!

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #CHope , #PureSchmaltz