The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity 

and grace, making the best of circumstances.—Aristotle

That’s Stan Foreman. I found him in the June 2016 alumni magazine from The University of Washington, Columns. Gary recognized him right away. But then yes, I could see it too.

Stan is a part of my family history, though he is (was) not family at all, and might be said to have done as much harm as good. He was a junkie soon after we met and for most of his life, but the story is a little more complicated than that.

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My husband held out our university alumni magazine to me. A head shot fills more than half a page, “Stan Foreman” in the caption, and even I could see it was the Stan we once knew, still alive. He smiles in the photo, but he’s not the Stan I once knew. For many years I told my students a story about Stan, an object lesson about the kind boy who did me a good turn before he turned himself.

In Seventh Grade Art I used my own soft drawing pencil to draw, pressing hard until the paper glinted metallic black. Finally, I put my pencil down and I got up to wash my graphite-smudged fingers. When I returned, my drawing was there on the table, but my pencil had vanished. I searched the floor, turned a backwards circle. Two older boys snickered at a table behind mine. And then, a boy even shorter and slighter than me stood between us and yelled at those boys, “You took Jan’s pencil. I saw you. Give it back!” The ruckus caught the attention of the teacher, and my pencil was returned.

That is how I met Stan Foreman.

We went to different high schools after ninth grade, but our paths crossed because of shared interests and friends. Through high school, I was always glad to see that boy who had stuck up for me when I was eleven. This was the sixties. We all had such pretty dreams of flowers and peace and walks in quiet stillness when we were young. At a time when people still dated, I never dated Stan, but we met up at music concerts, parties, and picnics—Barb and Randy, Janet and Rae, people who also knew Gary, the boy I would love forever.

After high school, I went on to attend the University of Washington and I worked at the University Book Store music department. One busy day, someone came into the store as I waited on a line of customers.

“Hey, Jan!”

I looked up and beamed. “Stan! How are you?”

“I’m great, you still with Gary?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s cool, that’s cool,” he said and moved deeper into the store.

I was busy at the register when he returned to the front and opened the door to leave. “Tell Gary I said hi.”

We waved and he was gone. But there had been something odd about the shape of his Army surplus jacket, the angle of his arm when he left the store. As soon as I finished with my last customer, I walked through the store and found a bin completely emptied of records. Fifteen or twenty record albums gone just like that.

I absolutely knew Stan had done it. He had greeted me as a friend to cover his theft. I didn’t know what I felt was worst—the arrogance or the betrayal?

“Stan Foreman was in the store today and he ripped me off,” I said later to Gary as I took off my coat.

“He’s still alive?”

“What do you mean?” I said. “Of course, and he ripped off the store!”

“Well, yeah.”

“What do you mean ‘Well, yeah’? He stole a whole bin of Hundred and One Strings!”

“Yeah, that’s dumb. He won’t be able to sell them, but Stan he was probably high. You know he’s a junkie. Since school. You knew that,” he said, finally looking at me. “Didn’t you?”

And then the sordid story poured out. Stan was already using heroin in junior high school when we were in Mrs. Ice’s History class and had Mr. Shipman for English. Even then. He had, over the years, stolen money and instruments from friends and family. His father was a mean drunk and beat him. Stan beat up his girlfriend in high school. More recently, old friends did not want him to know where they lived. No one trusted him.

The boy who saved my pencil was no longer one of the good guys.

This is not the end of the story.

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Years later at a party before Gary and I moved to Oregon in 1979, someone commented, “I saw Stan Foreman the other day.”

Three people simultaneously turned their heads and said, “He’s still alive?” I was one of the three.

He had been spotted trying to steal audio cassettes—that same old pattern. Stealing music to pay for his habit. It is terrible to say, but no one was relieved at the news of Stan’s continued existence. There was no thank-goodness tone in our remark, no how-cool-is-that?-relief. We were merely surprised he hadn’t overdosed yet. The way you might be surprised to learn the cucumber you’d forgotten in the crisper for a month had turned fuzzy but not dissolved into moldy slush.

#

In the late 80s, Gary’s brother Eric said it again: “I saw Stan Foreman the other day.”

Eric was shopping at Tower Records in Seattle where Stan was making a mess of stealing CDs. That is, he was in worse shape than ever, but accompanied by a little girl wearing a dirty dress with a strung-out, and much younger woman waiting on the sidewalk. Eric was distressed by that little girl and his breath went shaky in and out as he told the story. He wanted to laugh, but could not quite pull it off. The child was about two, he said, and he recognized her age because he had a two year old daughter of his own by then.

This is where the story I told my students ends. I would describe my dismay and disappointment that a boy I once liked had turned out so badly. I would express amazement that any junkie could live so long so carelessly. I would reveal my shocking lack of compassion for that boy I went to school with and how his life turned bad. We talked, sometimes, about people getting lost.

There were nearly thirty-four thousand students at the University of Washington in the years I attended. Stan Foreman was not among them. He held jobs, never for more than a few weeks, but according to Columns Stan was still alive. He is described as charming and not looking bad for a 64 year old man who has lived the life he has. The author reports that Stan joked how despite his long abuse of drugs, it is smoking that is killing him. The drugs Stan used those days were intended to ease his suffering into death.

The author reports Stan maintains contact with some of his family, an ex-wife and three children. I do not know if one of the children is that long ago little girl waiting on the sidewalk while her daddy shoplifts from a music store. I try not to think about her. I should feel sad for Stan. Glad for the support of family. I want to feel something different from what I feel, which is a fluttering of many things and no desire to call him up and tell him I care. I am not sure I do.

Stan did damage, maybe serious damage to people who loved him. I turn the magazine page to see the close-up photo of Stan, smiling. I have already felt sorry, for years now, about that boy who was kind to me and how he lived long enough to damage a child’s life. I stare and stare at the photos in the magazine, the picture of his tiny apartment, the books he reads, the face that echoes somebody I used to like.

Over the years my schoolmates have found their various lives and deaths. Madora and Toni and Rin are retired. Denise married three times before she found her soulmate. My old friends have accomplished remarkable things, interesting things, the ones who lived. Randy and Janet disappeared from my life. Barb and Don and Tom left forever before I could say goodbye. Kinder and smarter people did not last so long on earth as Stan.

I search in myself for the goodness to forgive him. He would have remembered me, I am sure. Maybe he would have recalled that long ago pencil, that long ago stack of record albums. Or not. Why would he need my forgiveness for stealing a rack of pop music vinyl all those years ago? Compassion struggles in my heart. What wins out in my memory, the boy in the classroom or the man in the store?

Today I return to study the photographs.

An oxygen line runs above his smile. A few days’ beard. I search for some remnant of that brave adolescent boy who befriended me. I search for sufficient virtue in myself, the right to judge. Yes, Stan’s smile charms, anyone can see the once-was sweet boy in the photographs. He tells the reporter he is grateful for the visits of hospice workers. He might have been fifteen when he took a car and drove it through a fence. It did not occur to him that was stealing, he did worse. He did whatever came up as a means to get high, stay high, and stay alive long enough to get high the next day. My husband says he was always stretching the bounds to see how far he could go before things broke. Maybe that is how he got so lost.

The article says Stan liked to tell stories of being a hippie in the 60s. Stan had Dickens and Twain and Freud on his shelter bookshelves, and I think the author of the magazine article, like me, must be drawn by that. We want to care about him, but some of us who wander are indeed lost. When the news comes, it is too late for tears, too late for reconciliation. He has died. I sit and stare at the photograph, unmoved. It is not only Stan who fails at grace.

This isn’t where I thought I’d be.

Everything is increasingly complex. My husband wanted to buy a copy of a Moody Blues CD that he already owned. Except he wanted the one with the half dozen bonus tracks. He’s looked for it in stores. He looked on Amazon and Amazon Marketplace. He found a new copy of exactly what he was looking for on eBay. There was a time when I did a lot of shopping on eBay—right after my mother died and I was trying to shop my way to happiness. (Big hint: That doesn’t work.)

So there is the CD he wants, but he doesn’t remember his passwords. Neither do I.

First I had to reset my eBay password, once I figured out what my account name was.

Then I had to reset my PayPal password, and I’m still not sure what my account name is under for PayPal.

I had a password to log on when I needed to report an absence at school. I got to choose that one, but it had to be all numbers and I didn’t have an all-number password that I’d used online before. I used the same password I have on my garage door opener. The real struggle with calling in for a sub when I had the flu or appendicitis wasn’t the password, however, it was my username. My “username” for calling in a sub when I was too sick to work was also a number assigned to me, one I never would have chosen, and which relates in no way whatsoever to the rest of my life. Fortunately, I remembered this one because it has also become the number I must use to make photocopies for my students. Even better? I never have to call in a sub ever again.

Usually I use the same password and username for everything I must log in to use online. It’s a great strategy in theory. These coded accounts include my Poets & Writers page; my blogs; accounts with places I buy from including Etsy and yarn stores across the country; the online education journals I comment on; the literary journals I submit to online; Duotrope where I keep my submission records; my original retirement account with the State of Oregon PERS and my other Oregon retirement account that will send me almost three hundred dollars a month for about twenty years since I failed to wait to retire until I was 65; my health insurance account; my email account; Gale; my computer at school; the program I am required to use to take attendance at school; my Clatsop Community College account I use to submit grades; and the Oaks testing website that I never have to use again. My health records seem to be locked and the only way I can get into my internet system at home is to hunt up the  place where Ian wrote it down. I have codes for my internet provider too. Most usernames are made up from my name, but the passwords are messier.

Some accounts I use daily. A few I must use two or three times a year.

All of this wouldn’t be so bad except that each of these accounts, like my school absence account, require special details—All letters with no caps, a combination of numbers and letters or no letters at all, symbols or no symbols, case-sensitive or not, at least eight digits or less than seven. Even if I wanted to (which I do), I couldn’t use the same username and password for every account.

And then, because I am not as efficient as I might be, I occasionally forget a password. And then, like the day ordering Moody Blues, the instant purchase becomes a freakishly lengthy and irritating process as I answer security questions on my laptop in order that Gary can order a $9 + shipping CD on his computer downstairs.

Sometimes I can’t even figure out how to find or change a password. For a while, every time I tried to do a software update on my computer, Apple made me change my password, which must not be like any password I have used with them before, and then informs me that as a matter of security, my account has been locked. When I go looking for a way to unlock my account I find myself wandering about and after about a half hour, I become hysterical and have to leave the room and look at colors for the rest of the evening to calm myself. This has been going on for years.

Yeah, it’s true, I’m an idiot. My memory is going. Ordering that CD from Amazon instead of eBay would have been so easy. I actually remembered my Amazon password even though it’s nothing like any of the others. Except now I do not recall that number. My computer remembers everything, thankfully.

This isn’t how, as a twelve year old, I imagined I would spend my grown-up time.

 

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I need to go lie down and look at pretty colors. A reminder

Before I go lie down and look at pretty colors, maybe a review. I never thought I would clutter up my mind with fabricated names and passwords, that I would spend my time staring at screens

I thought I would visit Arabia and ride their horses across sand. I would wear filmy pants that fell in translucent folds to my ankles. My hair would be black and my eyes dark and my skin would tint toward golden brown.

I thought I would live on acreage and the box stalls would be extra large. The horses all had names. When I was twelve the house had creamy wool carpets and the colors were a split triad of gold, yellow-orange, and navy. Wicker furniture. Teak.

I thought I might marry, but probably not.

The life I’ve had since I was twelve was better than I could imagine. There is a tiny fear in the back of my mind sometimes, that someone might notice and come take it away.

From The New York Times:

“According to the memo, officials laid out a “multipronged rationale” for spying on Mr. Page, including his past interactions with Russian spies, and informed the court of a counterintelligence investigation then underway into the Kremlin’s covert influence campaign.

“Mr. Page, a former investment banker based in Moscow, had been on the F.B.I.’s radar for years, long before his work with Mr. Trump. The Democratic memo reveals that the F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Page as late as March 2016 about his contacts with Russian intelligence agents, the same month Mr. Trump added him to his foreign policy advisory team.

The information from Mr. Steele was about ‘specific activities in 2016’ by Mr. Page, including suspected meetings with close associates of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia during a July trip to Moscow, the Democrats said.

“The document says that the bureau did disclose to the court that it had made use of information that was gathered through politically motivated means and quotes from the application itself.”

Below, first of ten pages. The entire document is available online.

 

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A little sweet, sand dollars on the deck:

I used to teach a unit on “media literacy” when I had high school sophomores. We looked at how advertising impacts consumers, the varied uses of propaganda, and the growth of social media. It was as much wanting as information. Media is not designed to be fair.

For years, I also forbade juniors from writing on abortion once I had read twenty or thirty hysterical essays. Some issues seem to provoke a sort of blindness that makes a balanced understanding of the problem impossible. For years, essays on China’s one-child policy were entirely one-sided. The girl who wrote her senior paper defending pit-bulls as a breed, cried every time she tried to revise.

Ursula K. Le Guin warned about avoiding hot-button issues. The issues that make us hysterical are rarely good subjects for rational discussion.

Cigarettes smoking was a hot button issue for me. My father and father-in-law both died of lung cancer after smoking Camels for decades. Several neighbors died at around that time, also of lung cancer. Though I was the one in my family who managed practicalities such as the sale of my father’s car, the disposition of his body after death, I could barely stand to think of the disease itself. I got over this emotional response eventually, but the spring after Daddy died I witnessed my emphysemic neighbor stopped at a light, his pick-up cab filled with smoke. I nearly rammed his Ford with my little Honda. He would also die of lung cancer in the following year.

Just as personal experience triggered my emotional response to a friend’s smoking, so too does media. The news about cigarettes killing us is true, but for centuries we believed the media image of smoking as a glamorous adult activity. The truth is that only children and the childish take up the habit these days. Anyone with common sense recognize it is a stinking, unhealthy, and expensive habit they cannot afford.

My future daughter-in-law was afraid for me to know she smoked, and out of respect for her we pretended not to know. I would have liked to celebrate with her when she finally quit, but there, officially she had never begun.

Someplace between what we know to be true and wish to be true, someplace between hating the person and their habit, between what we are warned might happen and common sense about what is possible . . .

Another popular topic I forbade was “media as monster.” These essays invariably turned into rants about imagined conspiracies. And here we are today, with the Russians actually involved in a massive conspiracy to divide our nation. It seems they have been successful in creating only irrational anger where there might be common ground. Instead, I taught students about propaganda, a topic they find far less interesting than whatever narrative they are reading on social media.

Perhaps it is time for me to accept that media is a monster. What can I do about that?

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The sweet.

 

“Better to be on meds than dead.” The psychiatrist was talking about a mutual friend she believed was being improperly medicated. He was depressed and not feeling “right” on his medication, but the alternative was not to be considered. Without medication he was suicidal.

The Lancet has published a review of research concerning antidepressants, a meta-analysis, that indicates they are effective. The Royal College of Psychiatrists claims the study “finally puts to bed the controversy on anti-depressants. . . .  the study found they ranged from being a third more effective than a placebo to more than twice as effective.” Better than the sugar pill is better than nothing. Anything is better than dead.

Here’s what troubles me. Depression is about more than feeling bad. Until the creation of modern antidepressants, human beings experiencing sadness or even clinical depression, mostly recovered with or without treatment. From 1999 to 2014, use of antidepressants have increased by at least 65%. According the a report from the CDC referenced by Harvard Health Publishing, use of antidepressants has increased by 400% since 1988. At best, antidepressants have been found to be effective for 20% more patients than sugar pills, at worst, they are in a dead heat. Some are associated with greater risk of suicide.

During the same 1999 to 2014 period, suicide rates in the United States increased by 24%. If antidepressants were really effective, shouldn’t that rate of suicides go down instead of up?

There seems little doubt that medication is helpful for some mental illness, that medication allows people to function, and that people believe it has kept them alive. Likely it has. But physician Marcia Angell is not the only professional who asks the obvious questions about how we treat depression.

If antidepressant medication were effective in “curing” depression, why are 1 in 6 Americans on these drugs today? (One in four women my age and race.) Why have more than 2/3rds of them been on the medication for years? Is lifelong addiction to antidepressants the best answer for almost 17% of the US population? If antidepressants were entirely or even mostly effective, why is suicidal ideation one of the risk factors associated with taking them? (You’ve seen the commercial: “Speak to your doctor immediately if you experience suicidal thoughts . . .”)

“Americans are awash in pills. The use of antidepressants has increased 400 percent between 1988 and 2008. They’re now one of the three most-prescribed categories of drugs, coming in right after painkillers and cholesterol medications.” The Atlantic 

Are antidepressants another opioid-epidemic crisis in the making? Have we evolved as a species incapable of emotional stability without drugs?

Perhaps medication would be more effective if we also made lifestyle changes and were actively taught how to manage our psychic pain?

No one gets through life without suffering. The old lie about “every happy family is alike” conceals a bald truth: So-called “happy families” are either better at hiding their suffering or have learned to deal with it more effectively than you have.

They do more than take pills. They commit to all the more challenging behaviors known to help us feel better emotionally. They drink moderate amounts or no alcohol and avoid other drugs, limit or give up caffeine, take regular daily exercise, sleep 7-8 hours a night, stay off screen time as much as possible, they read positive novels, they stay in contact with other people, and they contribute to their communities.

Family members and many of my teenaged students are on antidepressants. They do not seem “fine” to me. Most consume a lot of caffeine or alcohol or marijuana, sleep badly, never exercise, focus primarily on themselves, and spend up to eight hours a day online. They are teenagers or unemployed—two life situations most people find “depressing.” The are lonely and sad and isolated and confused. They read dystopian novels and play violent video games. They believe they need their medication, but without addressing the health of their whole lives, they are not getting healthy. They are barely hanging on as if they were taking opioids for the pain but go right on walking on a broken leg without cast or crutches.

At the end, feeling good, doing well, and being healthy requires more than popping pills. It requires living. Part of therapy for depression should be helping us do what we resist—changing our behavior for the better.

 

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a little sweet

Well, here’s my problem: A prominent author a editor declared that photo at top “depressing.” I find it beautiful—maybe that’s because I am chronically depressed?

From yesterday’s The New York Times “11 of the Most Dramatic Moments in a Day of Confrontation Over Guns”:

‘What is your definition of a well-regulated militia?’

At an intense town hall-style meeting Wednesday night, Diane Wolk Rogers, a history teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., confronted a spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association over the Second Amendment. How did allowing the 19-year-old shooter in last week’s massacre to own an assault rifle represent “a well-regulated militia” as is written in the amendment, she asked.

“Using supporting detail,” Ms. Wolk Rogers said to thunderous applause at CNN’s “Stand Up” town hall, “explain to me how an 18-year-old with a military rifle is well regulated.”

The “using supporting detail” is a teacher-basic direction for making a convincing case, whether your goal is a speech or persuasive essay.

And from The Washington Post, the revelation that Trump needs notes to remind him to say “I hear you.” My husband thought I was reading the satirical Borowitz Report.

Trump’s notes captures his empathy deficit better than anything?

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A little sweet.

We often see snow on the peaks of the Coast Range in winter, but this is more than we have seen in over a year. This is Angora Peak, just a little over 2600 feet and about 2 miles back from the shore. It is what I can see from my bedroom window, over the tops of my neighbors’ homes.

BELOW: We rarely see snow on Tillamook Head, about seven miles north of us. In fact, I cannot recall the last time snow dusted trees all the way to the headland. I slipped on the deck but did not fall when I went back out, wearing Gary’s shoes, to take this photo over our neighbor’s hedge. It’s probably hard to see in the photo, but the pale stretches are not bare soil or brush or leafless branches. That is snow and frost on hemlock, spruce, and Douglas fir.

The slopes of Angora were clearcut around the time we moved to the coast in 1979. I recall saying that the good news was it would not be cut again for 30 years. I was off by almost a decade. Our surrounding forests are being logged off. I look forward, in a decade, to these barren slopes showing baby forests again. I will be gone before it is next cut.

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I know there will be trouble as soon as they begin handing out three-ring binders. I was a public school teacher for twenty-five years and as every new wave of pedagogy sweeps down from above, there is always a white three-ring binder. If I had not released them back into the wild, I would have a wide shelf of them by now. The binders always include text, dividers, colorful charts, and worksheets and handouts; they are never organized in the order they are used; and every single time, they announce new vocabulary. Not new ideas, just new words for old ideas.

When I attended high school, going on fifty years ago, we called them position papers. Today, The New York Times calls them Op-Eds or Opinion. In college they were analysis or persuasive essays. Recently, papers concerning a controversial issue with a thesis and supporting evidence are no longer called persuasive but argumentative papers. That term feels unnecessarily . . . argumentative. Monday, I learn that I am supposed to label such writing as “proposal and support texts”. Not essays at all. “Tasks” rather than text.  The presenters admit they still sometimes get the meaning of these terms confused.

I merely want my students in Writing 121 to construct logical and compelling essays that respectfully and effectively review a range of credible viewpoints, and convince readers of their own. It is more easily said than done, my educational task, and I still do it imperfectly. I keep trying things to improve. On Monday, I was accidentally reminded about parallelism.

Aristotle’s appeals? Evaluating information? Outlining as an organizational process? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Pish-posh! The very teacher who said to me twenty years ago that I was “ridiculous” to insist on personally writing each assignment I give my students, was part of the team on Monday insisting I should personally write each assignment I give my students.

Presumedly, this person has learned something about teaching, something beyond trusting a strategy merely because it arrives in a large binder with dividers and new vocabulary. Doing the work is essential to teaching others how to do it.

Another teacher, binder open, asked about making bullet points of key features desirable in the assigned writing sample. Would this be a way of clarifying what they wanted from students? They were promptly told, No-no! 

I have always done both. I write the assignment and then identify what students must, should, or might include in their writing. I am always particularly pleased when students include some perspective or connection I had not discovered in advance myself. Bonus for that in student writing. Needless to say, this possibility of students out-thinking their teachers’ giant white binders did not come up. Despite a program that ostensibly insists on a “gradual release” of agency to students, we are already shutting it down.

In the mean time, we are asked to learn a new vocabulary that is not what is used in popular media or academia. This program asserts itself by renaming existing pedagogy.

This new system or approach is not worse than others I have seen in the past. But it is not any better. It is relabeling and renaming what has been known for decades. I figured it out years ago and I am not a genius. The program is packaged and involves training “leaders” and selling products. Despite having a nonprofit website, this is about sales. People are being paid and boxes are being checked off. There is money changing hands, public funds.

I do not say there is no need for teachers to better understand how to design curriculum and teach analysis and writing. Certainly, teacher training does not cover everything a teacher needs to be effective in the classroom. I am also not so foolish as to think I have nothing to learn. I am merely weary of being offered the same old meat in a new wrapper.

I am not sold.

Unlike some systems, this one is careful to cite research supporting their claims about how we learn and develop as communicators. What is missing? Respect for people as more than employees, genuinely innovative working structures, and the newest research on how we think and learn and develop as people.

Just one example: Human beings learn through stories. The presenters of this “new” system know this. Or they should. They used personal stories themselves in making their points about the need for this program. It is odd, then, that the words “story” and “narrative” were not listed in that binder. They seem not to exist as terms. Recent research makes clear how the human mind gravitates to story. It is as old as speech, this desire to convey ideas and values through narrative. Yet all the recent “innovations” from Common Core to this misguided program I attended, deliberately ignore how narrative informs our lives.

As bees dance to share the pathway to nectar, human beings share stories to explain their pathway through existence.

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And some sweet.

The eagle pair have been here for years. Three flew yesterday—the pair and last year’s youngster all grown now and white-headed. This photo is from another year.

The Russian Are Coming, the Russian Are Coming. And these are not the nice ones from that movie who only wanted to return home safely. These Russians had an agenda, false identities, and they saw success.

The Russians were here, not only on Facebook and posting lunatic comments almost like Americans, but in person, on the phone, via Twitter, from Russia and more locally, calling people to rallies and reminding us again and again that Trump was the answer to everything that ails our nation.

From the NYT: “In written answers to questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee, Facebook said some 338,300 people saw the announcements of rallies promoted by the bogus pages — and 62,500 said they planned to attend one. Those numbers are modest against the background of the entire presidential campaign, but they show that the Russians were able not just to attract Americans to their ersatz groups but actually manipulate their actions.   . . .

“A glance at the Russian posts supports the idea that they focus on candidates. Heart of Texas ran an unflattering portrait of Mrs. Clinton with the tag ‘Pure Evil’; posted a fake photo of her shaking hands with Osama bin Laden; and paired her with Adolf Hitler as a supporter of gun control. Mr. Trump was shown surrounded by police officers wearing Trump hats and grinning outside a fake cage with Mrs. Clinton inside.

“While most of the Americans duped by the Russian trolls were not public figures, some higher-profile people were fooled. The indictment mentions the Russian Twitter feed @TEN_GOP, which posed as a Tennessee Republican account and attracted more than 100,000 followers. It was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr.; Kellyanne Conway, the president’s counselor; Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser; and his son, Michael Flynn Jr.

“They have expressed no regret that they were apparently taken in by the Russian operatives. Instead, since Friday’s indictment, Donald Trump Jr., like his father, has pointed mainly to the fact that it did not accuse the president or his associates of assisting the Russian operation.”

Of course, retweeting Russian propaganda does assist the Russian operation.

People do not like to believe they are influenced by commercials and slogans, but we are. Billions are spent annually to promote products we didn’t know we wanted. These companies have done the market research. They are not in business to waste money.

 

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BETTER NEWS*

To change the subject entirely: Rice was brought by slaves to the New World, and it was likely a slave woman who taught Americans how to grow it. I cook brown Jasmine rice grown organically in California, but there are other entirely different strains.

Rice traditionally grown in West Africa and once promoted by Thomas Jefferson because it can be grown in fields with flooding (and malaria), grown by slaves in America, and presumed lost, has been found in Trinidad. Francis Morean, a Trinidadian ethnobotanist, identified the grain.

“The fat, nutty grain, with its West African lineage and tender red hull, was a favored staple for Southern home cooks during much of the 19th century.”

Recently tried by the chef at Junebaby, a Seattle restaurant, and perhaps on the menu in future. What once was thought lost, is found.

*A little sweet at the end.

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First, I turned off email alerts a few years ago. Then I limited my visits to once a day, then to only a couple times in a week. I tried deactivating my account and found that it spontaneously reactivated because of my use of other websites.

It is time to bite the bullet. With some misgivings, I have deleted my Facebook account. FB gives me two weeks to “change my mind”, and I fear it will reactivate accidentally through my use of Goodreads or some other account linked to FB. If that happens, I will likely delete my Goodreads account too. I am abandoning social media as best I can.

Here’s why: I have better things to do than become upset by FB posts. It causes me stress and fuss and worry. Gary insists: “That’s my job—no, I’m kidding. It’s my job to protect you from the jungle beasts. For you, it [Facebook] seems mostly to be disturbing.” There is already more than enough to disturb me in the world.

I am sorry to lose over 1600 “friends”. You were not all genuine friends, but people I knew or know and value. Even if we never met in life, I am sorry to lose these connections nevertheless. I hope family and friends will send me photos and videos of themselves and our grandchildren—Ruby stomping puddles, Logan trouncing about, EV turning pages of a book. I will miss that. I will miss links to projects and writings. I will miss hearing news of former students and friends from as far back as high school. I will miss the artistic community I joined as admirer and comrade. I will miss the photos of Saluki puppies I wish were mine and the children of former students and the stories on new jobs and campaigns and humor and triumph, the opportunities to commiserate at times of trouble and loss. I am so very sorry to lose all of that.

People, you know where to find me if you need me. I have not moved since 1979. My phone number, a land line, has remained the same and listed throughout all the years since. I have had the same Gmail account for at least ten or fifteen years. My Post Office Box has been 1442 in Cannon Beach since past owners of the deli destroyed the Arch Cape Post Office. My old Blogger blog is linked to this new one with the same name. My information is readily available to a Google search. I am easy to find if you look.

I hope you will.