For the last week there’s been no lecture prep and no lectures. Just tests to make and give. It should have been easy, and it was. Even so, after the last one today, there was a real rush of relief. It’s now down to nothing now but a fast hot grading run and a couple of warm-body social events.

Toward the beginning of this spill incarnation and in large part because of it, I was motivated to minimize distractions. To practice sitting for the four minutes of the french press, and so on. In the event I’ve not been so pure. I’ve needed the distractions and their quality has been wildly uneven. This morning I ended up spending too much time at a blog article with 342 fat comments. The subject was an internecine religious fight among buddhists. Supporters of the Dalai Lama versus those who would point out His flaws, best I could tell. Neither germane nor relevant to my interests. Pure distraction.

The Larry Sanders stuff ended abruptly in a bunch of videos that wouldn’t show up due to copyright strikes. I couldn’t even get the final episode. (Not that I tried very hard–I didn’t poke around for a torrent or anything.) After that I did some sixties TV. It stuck like a bone in my throat, and it ended for me when I read a comment on a ‘My Favorite Martian’ episode that might have been written by my father, praising the simple times and the good clean humor, utterly unaware of just how pointlessly counterrevolutionary it all was.

So I swung to the opposite extreme. In the past I collected box sets of really good shows and binged on them in the context of a relationship. The Wire. The latter incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, like that. And of course Twin Peaks. It turns out that in 2017 David Lynch made a third season of it, following many of the same characters 25 years into the future. There wasn’t going to be any point in trying to find full episodes, so I watched a bunch of YouTube theorizing about the shows instead. Not dumb fan stuff, but thoughtful artistic critique from would-be film critic types.

Spoilers aside, I was glad to have experienced the episodes that way instead of cleanly consuming them, which would have been expensive and far too absorbing.

It’s a meditation on the linked nature of modernity and evil.

So too is the Spill i think.

Tonight I came home and napped hard in the early evening, and woke just now to an interview with one of the House freshwomen, Rashida Talib. During the interview she broke down crying over her father, a Palestinian refugee, and they had to stop for a while.

This is not the world I grew up in.

It’s ultimately neither better nor worse. It’s very different.

This person would never have been a representative when I was five, and that much is progress. A lot of people are pissed off that she is, and I’m glad they’re pissed too.

A whole lot more of that will be necessary for the progress to become a definitive trend, a sustained howl that means anything.

Let us pray.