It's an old song and we're going to sing it again and again

We did not attend the opening of the casino in Everett last night, though we saw it glowing sulfurously on the other side of the Mystic as we crossed the river on the Fellsway. I don't choose the adjective out of moral prejudice; it's a giant sliced wedge of a building whose lights add up to a luminous smog of the yellow I always pictured for Eliot's fog, rearing like volcanic glass out of industrial stacks and wind turbines. spatch said it looked like an arcology in SimCity 2000. I was reminded of some shots in Chernobyl (2019). We were not enticed nearer. There was a low clinker-pink after-sunset on the other side of the bridge and at least half a dozen swans dippering their bills among the lily pads in the dusk-reflecting river. We were not consumed by clouds of midges despite the midges giving it their best shot.

rushthatspeaks has shared a list of links compiled on Tumblr for the support of immigrants and refugees and the opposition of concentration camps. rosefox's re-share incorporates further links and a useful reminder. For Boston-area people, phi has added two specifically local organizations, ArCS Cluster and Beyond Bond. I appreciate all of it. This Twitter thread also looks germane to me.

The lemon cake went over well at the potluck. I am sticking with my socialist Yiddish chorus another year. It's not like we're going to stop needing partizanerlider any time soon, written then, or remembered now.

I guess I slept all day just so I could be awake right now

My uncle was in the army. Actually a couple of my uncles were in a couple of armies, but I mean my father's youngest brother who lived with us for a few months after he was demobbed from patrolling the DMZ. I was in seventh grade at the time. He was thin, wiry, brown-haired, not much taller than me; he could drop twenty feet out of a tree and land as springily as a cat while I dropped twenty feet out of the same tree after him, landed flat on both feet, and fell over convinced I had just driven my tarsals up through my ankle bones. (My mother yelled at him.) He admitted to knowing some Korean but refused to teach me any of it, which at the time seemed like some nonsensical adult gatekeeping and now I just figure his Korean was either NSFW or sketchy of application or both. He brought me and my brother gifts from South Korea. Specifically, he brought us clothes. My brother got a quilted black jacket with a dragon embroidered on it. I got—I am honestly still not sure what I got. It may not be a traditional garment. It's cut like a bathrobe, it's made of at least artificial silk, and it is peony-pink with red chrysanthemums embroidered on the sleeves and on the back. It would have been a great present for someone who liked and/or looked good in pink, neither of which was me. It spent a lot of time at the backs of various closets.

I am wearing it as we speak. I spent a couple of hours this afternoon sorting mid-'70's fanzines and other sfnal ephemera for a friend who inherited a small archive and the material is fascinating and and invaluable (so much mimeography! so many ditto sheets! so many perzines, genzines, and apazines I had never heard of, not to mention conventions—I want a university to take this stuff before it disintegrates) and I am allergic to dust and everything else you find associated with cardboard boxes that have been in a garage for any length of time. I got back to my parents' house and put my clothes in the wash. That was fine; I had known I might react and the material is worth it. Then it turned out that this quarter-century-old, extremely pink object was the only thing resembling a bathrobe currently in circulation.

My niece observed me emerging from the shower and yelled wide-eyed, "You're wearing pink!" I had to remind myself that she has not yet seen Bringing Up Baby (1938) and therefore responding with "I just went gay all of a sudden!" would only confuse her.