waider

Over the weekend, I got the news that two members of extended communities that I’m part of had passed on.

Mike Lee, I never met in person. He taught non-classical gung fu—the style developed by my own teacher, Jesse Glover, and there’s a great deal more to that story—in Chicago, and we only ever interacted over Facebook. We had several friends in common, however, from the shared martial arts community of people who knew Jesse, or who knew Bruce Lee. Or both. The man I saw on social media had that mix of genial presence and essential physical confidence that I associate with many of the martial artists and fighters I’ve known. In the memories and stories posted by family, friends, and especially students, I was brought back to the passing of my own teacher twelve years ago—not least because he appears in many of the photos and videos that people shared.

I often say that meeting Jesse was one of the most fortuitous events of my life, even though I didn’t properly appreciate it at the time. He was a remarkable man, an excellent teacher (I borrowed several of his techniques for my own library research workshops), and while I never had the drive and discipline to be a great martial artist, I learned so very much about self-defense, about myself, and about the life experiences of people very different from me. It was one of the few true mentoring relationships I’ve ever had in my life. Hearing about Mike and who he was to so many brought it all back.

Tara I mostly knew from the Mercury nightclub, which for many years was basically my living room. I loved goth music and the goth aesthetic, and Tara would greet me at the door when I’d go there to dance several nights a week. She was sarcastic and funny, and cared deeply about goth as a community, not just as a club aesthetic. I’d played my own part in supporting that community, helping to subsidize a café that operated in Seattle’s Capitol Hill for several years and became a meeting place to socialize, often before hitting the clubs. But after a time I moved on to other things, mostly stopped clubbing, and chiefly interacted with the Mercury by scrutinizing the DJs’ posted playlists for new music. I’d heard in a roundabout way that Tara’s health hadn’t been great, but it was still a shock to see, through a mutual friend’s Facebook update, that she’d passed.

If you live long enough, you’ll come to a time in your life when more people you’ve been close to will have died than will still be alive. I wasn’t close to Mike or Tara, exactly—as I said, I never met Mike in person, and Tara’s and my friendship was more one of shared context than anything else.

But I’m fifty-one years old, and there’s more of these ahead of me.

(Not our actual tractor. Ours looks like this though.)

Yesterday, we managed to get a Kubota tractor—a big one, with a backhoe attachment—stuck in the mud.

Nine years ago my husband and I bought some rural acreage, most of which is unmaintained woodland. The guy we bought it from had been managing it for timber, sort of, but wasn’t very good at it. (No shade, neither are we.) What we have now is early-stage successional forest with some stands of mature trees here and there, mostly around a large wetland and on some slopes too steep for logging. We also have a number of old logging roads slowly being reclaimed by the forest, though I can attest that once you know how to look for them, this particular bit of infrastructure takes a lot longer to vanish from the landscape than you’d think.

Yesterday we were working on a patch of roadway that we’re trying to keep accessible, both to reach the further extent of our own acreage and enable access to parcels for which this road is the only access. (This concern is mostly academic because nobody’s really using those further parcels for anything except hunting, and hunters tend to walk in.)

This roadway runs along the bottom of a steep hill, at the top of which is where we’re having our house built. This is important because all the runoff from the northwestern side of that hill tends to collect at a particular spot along the roadway. What’s more, there’s a seep nearby; this patch of land never fully dries out, even in summer, when it can go for weeks or even months without raining.

I mention all of this to explain why my husband managed to get the tractor stuck in the mud yesterday. The roadbed we were working on is still pretty solid—it used to hold logging trucks, after all—but off to the sides was all soft mud. He was trying to get around some deadfall that was still blocking the roadway and also pass the truck we’d brought down to haul our tools and other gear.

If there’s a Bingo card for suburbanites trying to adopt country living, I feel like getting your tractor stuck has to be somewhere on it. Fortunately for both us and the tractor, several months ago the guy who did some excavation work for our septic system taught my husband how to use the backhoe attachment to help pull yourself out of such situations. I may have had a minor freakout when one of the tractor’s front wheels left the ground during the operation, leaving me to wonder if the seat belt that, yes, I was wearing would really keep me from falling out if the whole thing tipped over. (My husband pointed out later that his seat, back to back with mine while he operated the backhoe, was even more precarious.)

Yesterday was not the day I found out, thankfully.

The guy who taught my husband that maneuver has since retired and left the state, but if I ever run into him I’m buying him lunch. Today, I’m grateful for people like him helping fish out of water like us.

(Originally posted at welltemperedwriter. You can comment here or there.)

I hadn’t actually planned to watch the Super Bowl yesterday. I have a friend who I watch it with some years, because his household gets really into it, and that more or less makes up for the fact that I’ve never cared much about football. (I feel like an 80s hipster when I say this, but it’s true.) But then another friend wanted to go out for dinner, and we sort of wound up watching the game because we’re in Seattle and every place with a TV had it tuned to the NFL.

As a non-football fan—even one living in Seattle, where Seahawks excitement was palpable leading up to the big day—the main thing I kept hearing about the game was the halftime show, and how outrageous some people thought it was that the NFL had booked a performer who didn’t even sing in English. To the point that those people decided to do their own show.

Which, sure, okay, why not. It’s not like we’re living in a Clockwork Orange reality where someone’s going to strap you into a chair and pry your eyes open while they stream Youtube at you. You can watch anything you want, including nothing.

The purpose, though, was to make a statement: that’s not American. This is. As outrage marketing goes, I guess it worked, though the Puppy Bowl got more viewers than the All-American Halftime Show.

Bad Bunny, on the other hand, doesn’t need that kind of marketing. Whether you’ve heard of him or not (and I really do not understand “I’ve never heard of X” as a metric as to whether it’s notable, especially for those of us too old to be a marketing demographic for youth culture), the guy is the top-streamed artist on Spotify for 2025.

If anything, the NFL needed him, not the other way around. In 2024, the NFL was quite candid about seeking to grow its audience, specifically among Hispanics. And no wonder: the Super Bowl might top 125 million viewers every year, but the final match of the 2022 FIFA World Cup hit 1.5 billion. American football (as distinct from what the rest of the world calls football) might be a religion for many, but if the NFL has a religion, it’s money.

What’s fascinating to me is how terrifying that is to at least some of the people who decided to spend halftime watching Kid Rock instead. I’m giving a pass to people who genuinely enjoy that lineup better, since in a vast and infinite universe, such people undoubtedly exist. There’s no accounting for taste. The rest, though, seem to feel a need to indicate political affiliation through their choice of entertainment. You can tell who these people are because they criticized this year’s choice on the (inaccurate) grounds that he’s not American, when they raised no such objections about The Who, Paul McCartney, or U2.

There is a shared understanding of the moment going on here, though, and you could see it in Bad Bunny’s show whether or not you understood a word of what he was singing. Visually as well as musically, his performance was crammed full of enough history and symbolism to fuel a raft of thinkpieces, annotations, and reaction videos. Especially if you feel like you missed a lot, go looking for some of those. It’s worth it, in part because among the many things Bad Bunny’s show was about, it was about the shaping of identity and how that happens. It was about the America that I was taught as a child to believe in: the one where we’re unified by our common humanity and belief in self-determination and flourishing for everyone, while honoring the diversity of cultures and histories that brought us all here.

The “All-American Halftime Show” seemed, instead, to be a straitjacket, or a Procrustean bed—something inspired less by possibility and potential, and more by an exclusive and constricted definition of what “American” actually means.

That’s part of this country’s history, too. But if it’s a choice between the two, I’ll go with the one that seeks to welcome instead of exclude.

Poachers turned rangers, complicity in tyranny, the colors of marble, bears > Bigfoot, For All Mankind

Francis Annagu’s “How Former Poachers are Protecting Nigeria’s Vanishing Rainforest” explores the lines of tension, conflict, and resolution in taking a conservation approach to a multiuse ecosystem. Buried deep in the heart of this article is one way—probably the most effective way—to turn hunters into rangers: make the latter a more attractive option, especially in terms of pay. That hasn’t answered every challenge, as agriculture and deforestation continue to press on the forest reserve. But that problem isn’t unique to Nigeria, either. Make sure you scroll far enough to see the forest elephants.

Andrea Pitzer—always worth reading—writes in “Love that is Complicit” that whatever our opinions on immigration in the U.S. (my own is that the government has been kicking the can down the road with regard to just, humane, and consistent policy for most of my lifetime), the current situation requires either looking past an awful lot of cruelty to find acceptable, or very carefully not even knowing that there’s something to look at.

In “These Marbles were Never White,” Danai Christopoulou joins a growing number of Greek commentators on the Anglophone world’s ongoing love affair with Greek mythology, in ways that often obscure that mythology’s vibrancy and cultural context. I’m no exception here, as someone who’s called myself a Hellenic polytheist for almost 15 years, and made my own contribution to the body of stories based on Greek myths and legends. Those were my entry points into a deeper appreciation for both modern and ancient Greek culture and language, but Christopoulou’s piece highlights the cost of receiving these stories stripped of their cultural, historical, and linguistic context—which is the way that those of us in the Anglophone sphere tend to receive them. When I visited Greece in 2008, the museum she describes was still under construction. Some years later I visited the British Museum, where the Elgin marbles are still on display—complete with rather defensively worded signage. Hmm.

Jeff VanderMeer’s “Double Take” is the kind of nature writing I’d love to do. Early in his piece on Bigfoot and bears, he says:

I’m zealous about the fact that we don’t need Bigfoot populating the wilderness to find the natural world mysterious and marvelous. The bears often mistaken for cryptids, for example, already exist and capture our imagination for very good reasons.

This right here is why I became a tracker. VanderMeer goes on to discuss what he’s learned about animals from the trail cameras in his yard—contrasting this with purported Bigfoot images on trail cameras in the woods and how none of them seem to reliably be the real deal. One of his interviewees for the article says that if Bigfoot enthusiasts didn’t have Bigfoot, they’d just get into some other conspiracy theory, not into actual nature. Which I think is true, and also sad.

I recently joked that I watch most movies and TV shows months to years after everyone else has already seen them, which is why I only got to the first season of “For All Mankind” in the last few weeks. It’s out on BluRay, and if you have a player, this really is an excellent way to watch it—the gorgeous visuals are shown off to their best effect. The first season takes place beginning in 1969, and they get the tech and attitudes of the period so right, I’d forget I wasn’t watching a documentary (or maybe Apollo 13) until something obviously ahistorical happened. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like the subsequent seasons will get physical disc releases anytime soon, so I may have to pony up for Apple TV if I want more stuff like this.