My hopepunky space-opera novelette Bearly Believable is now available at Hexfiled. When the Volpex Picnic Park ranger and his owl companion need a biological android to offer a fire-safety program, it’s gotta be a bear, right? Enjoy!

I wrote a bit about it when it was accepted for publication. I’m really excited that it’s finally coming out! But I wanted to share a few more details of how it fits into the other stories I’ve written about the setting. And some of the other characters that appear in the story.

Bearly Believable is set on Volpex, a planet that was first introduced in The Better Angels and the Very Scary Halloween. That story was originally released in 2022 as a Halloween promotion for the Truck Stop at the Center of the Galaxy and subsequently included in Better Angels: Tour de Force. It’s a terraformed world that has a single developed continent with the rest of the world left fallow to provide ecological services and replicator feedstock harvesting.

I’ve written more about the ecology of terraformed worlds in You Can’t Change Just One Thing that features my characters Totemo Isogashii and the NeoBoxer Lambda. They first appeared in The Better Angels and Lambda and Tau, in Better Angels: Tour de Force, but they also appear in Bearly Believable where they play a small, but crucial role.

In 2023, I wrote a story about a group of girls who run a cooking show on Volpex called The Butter Angels. The humor of them getting mixed up with The Better Angels is played for laughs a time or two, but it was the beginning of several ideas I’ve explored over several stories. The Butter Angels also appear briefly at the beginning of Bearly Believable, so this is their public debut.

The Mayor was just arriving in a SkyStretch with a large police escort. The SkyStretch landed while the police vehicles orbited the site.

When the door opened, a bodyguard exited first, carrying a compact railgun, then the Mayor, and then they were followed by a crowd of young women wearing some kind of costume.

The young women were all matching: cute red tops with long, open sleeves; short, checked skirts; and patterned bandanas to tie back their hair. Plus each had a pink ribbon tied crosswise to hold back their sleeves. They chattered cheerfully among themselves, self-evidently excited to have gotten a ride in the Mayor’s luxurious SkyStretch.

The Mayor led them forward to the ribbon where attendants handed each a pair of scissors. The crowd caught sight of the women and someone yelled, “It’s the Butter Angels!” A huge chorus of shrieks and cheers erupted from the crowd. The Angels offered broad smiles and waved to their fans.

I wrote the original story about the Butter Angels that I had hoped would be published as part of a Truck Stop anthology and, when the publisher proposed doing another Halloween promotion, I wrote a little piece of flash fiction to go along with it. It was around that time that the publisher stopped developing the Truck Stop series and so the stories were never published. I set them aside and turned my attention to other things.

Since it doesn’t appear the Truck Stop is coming back, I’ve started shopping some of these stories around to other outlets. But the Halloween promotion story doesn’t seem like it would ever fit anywhere else, so — since it’s almost Halloween anyway, I’ve posted it separately on my blog: An Anomalous Aggregation of Angels.

I hope you enjoy the stories. I look forward to sharing more stories from Volpex in the coming months and years.

A Better Angel

“Oh, where are they?” Deckman said, pacing back and forth. He was really beginning to sweat. The Better Angels were signed up for a Halloween benefit appearance and they were nearly late. There was already a long line of fans in costume outside the door and all the way down the hall that lead to the Delphian Ballroom in the Blue Sector of the Truck Stop at the Center of the Galaxy. Then he heard loud girlish laughter approaching in the corridor.

Charging out, he quickly clapped his hands and called, “This way, Angels! This way! Everyone’s waiting!” And, without looking, he turned and waved his hand, directing them into the room.

After a moment of consternation, the Butter Angels followed him. The Butter Angels were minor celebrities on Volpex where they did a cooking show. But they were vacationing on the Truck Stop and just happened to be walking by. They found the grand Ballroom organized with velvet ropes and decorated with banners and elaborate backdrops for fans to get a signed photo with their favorite Angel. Deckman turned and did a double-take when he saw the Angels.

“Amazing! Those costumes are simply amazing! I love the aprons!” he said. “You almost look like completely different people!”

He directed them to each stand by one of the backgrounds.

Then he looked around, checked everything over one last time, and finally opened the doors exactly one minute early.

“Welcome, fans! Welcome! Don’t push!”

The first little girl entered, wearing a pink-and-blue Better Angels costume, complete with rainbow ribbons.

“What’s your name?” 

“Madeline,” she whispered, looking down.

“And who do you want to get your picture with?”

“Zaza,” she whispered.

“Where’s Zaza?” Deckman called.

“Did you say Zsazsa?” Zsazsa asked.

“Over there!” Deckman said, pointing.

At that moment, the Better Angels arrived, just in time. They charged in breathlessly, all dressed up wearing their Halloween costumes: Zaza was a perfect Icy Elsa, with Tutu as the Evil Stepmother, and the rest made up as the Seven Androids.

“I’m sorry, girls,” Deckman said, pointing. “You’ll need to go to the end of the line.”

“But…” Zaza said. Then, with a grin, she perceived what had happened.

“C’mon, Androids,” she said. “Let’s wait in line!”

“Beep, beep, boop,” said six of the androids.

“Bebe, beep, boop,” said Bebe.

Madeline got her picture taken with Zsazsa who signed it with a Butter Angels’ catch-phrase, “Keep on cookin’!” Madeline was a little puzzled, but happy enough. And she clutched her picture and the bag of candy she’d received as she headed out.

Other children came and went for two hours until finally it was just Icy Elsa and the Seven Androids left.

“Who would you like your photo with?” Deckman asked.

“Can we get a group photo? With all of us?” Zaza asked.

“I don’t see why not,” Deckman said.

They took the photo, waited for the copies, and then the Butter Angels all signed them together.

“I’m amazed,” Susan said. “We were just here visiting the Truck Stop for a vacation. We had no idea that anyone had set this up. Who knew we were so popular out here?”

“Right?” Zaza asked, with a wink. “What will you do now? Would you like to go trick-or-treating?”

“Oh, that sounds like fun,” Susan said and then added, regretfully. “But I don’t know what we’d wear as costumes.”

“How about Better Angels costumes?” Zaza said. “I know where we could get some.”

“The Better Angels?” Booboo said. “I’ve heard of them!”

a foo dog

Community is important for writers. Today, Cory Doctorow talked about the need for writer community in Critique and Writing. Especially for new writers, “[b]eing part of a group of writers who expect you to regularly turn in new work adds a very useful bit of external motivation that augments your still nascent self-discipline.” So it was with me.

I struggled largely in isolation until I found a publisher that was interested in my work. Perhaps as important for my growth as a writer, was a bi-weekly Zoom meeting where authors with the publisher got together to talk about what they were doing. They just called it the “Virtual Writing Group” but I called it the Island of Misfit Toys. We were all so different. And odd. And we each brought different strengths and weakness to the group. It was very helpful as I struggled to get my feet under me as a new writer.

For four years, we met regularly to discuss things. We talked about writing and publishing. We planned for upcoming conventions. We shared triumphs and sorrows. It felt like a helpful, supportive community to me.

Then, suddenly — without announcement or discussion — after the Seattle Worldcon in August of 2025, the publisher abruptly cancelled the meetings. We haven’t met since.

As I had described, I had a mixed experience at that Worldcon due to an unfortunate interaction with another author. Did that event contribute to the collapse of the writing group? No one has ever told me.

From my early days as an author, my writing community has broadened considerably. I belong to several writing communities now in SFWA and Straw Dog Writers Guild. I started attending the SFWA Writing Date. Then I started my own group, Straw Dog Writes. Most recently, I was invited to join the Procrastinating (aka Bearded) Writers Group.

For the past year, I left the recurring event for the Virtual Writing Group in my calendar wondering if it would start back up again. Every couple of weeks it’s reminded me of the community of people that I once belonged to. In August, I watched the anniversary of the last meeting come and go. But tonight decided it was time.

Tonight, I removed the recurring event for the Virtual Writing Group from my calendar. I don’t understand what happened. But it’s time to quit dwelling in the past and look forward.

Bryan Harvey stending in front of Puffer's Pond.

Shortly after I moved to Amherst, I saw a map that marked the area around the Mill River in North Amherst as “Factory Hollow.” There are no factories there now. Most of the area is conservation land and some has been re-developed. But there are a variety of tantalizing features still remaining to show how it was used historically.

I had spent a while looking years ago to see if anyone had written a history of Factory Hollow, but had come up empty. I was delighted when I found that the Amherst Historical Society has organized walking tours of the Lower and Upper Mill River to talk about the history of the factories and mills that were present. And the people built and worked in them.

Today, I attended a tour of the lower Mill River. It was led by Bryan Harvey, a former administrator at UMass Amherst who I’ve known for many, many years. He did a fantastic job pointing out where various structures were, how they were used, and what evidence remains today. He also pointed out a number of names of families that were involved: Puffer, Dickinson, Jones, Wheelock, Roberts, Hobart, and others, many of whom have roads or features named after them. A few are still active in the area.

We began at Puffer’s Pond. There was an ice house at the site of a current beach used recreationally by families today. Steve Puffer, who was still active in town when we arrived was (I think) the grandson of the men who created the pond that was used to power many of the mills. He was also instrumental in getting much of the land conserved. His grandson was in attendance for the tour and told a number of stories, including that a driving force behind conserving the land was that his wife was “the original NIMBY” and was opposed to having more people in the area.

We walked downstream from Puffer’s Pond and went by the elegant Wheelock house. It sits right on the edge of the dam and is the only house with frontage on the pond. It was originally built by one of the textile mill owners. It is currently owned by Cassandra Clare, a best-selling author.

An oak tree on the property was recorded as the largest in Amherst in 1845, with an amusing story behind it. Supposedly, the owner wanted it cut down, but the son (perhaps on orders from the wife) drove iron spikes into the tree making it infeasible to fell.

The Wheelock House
the dam at Puffer's Pond

The dam that creates Puffer’s Pond is probably the third dam constructed at that location. Earlier dams were probably made with timbers. Although you can’t see it in the picture, there is a round pipe visible at the left side of the dam through which water flowed for a penstock that powered the mills in the hollow below. There were also two mills that were originally situated at the dam: a sawmill on the north bank and a grist mill on the south. In 1863, the dam failed and the resulting flood destroyed most of the mills in the hollow.

The mills in factory hollow were mostly on the north side of Mill River. Currently, this area has been rebuilt as housing, with a set of apartments and a line of single-family homes along the street. When the mills were present, there was a canal along the north side of the river that powered the mills. Little remains of the canal now, except a depression in ground where the canal ran. In some places some stonework can still be seen, but it was not visible from where we were.

The mills sprang up largely due to trade issues related to the Napoleonic wars. In response to British interference with shipping — and impressing sailors to serve on British warships — the United States passed the Non-Importation Act in 1806. The Act was ineffective, but caused the price of textiles to rise. Local entrepreneurs saw an economic opportunity to make a profit and the first mill opened in 1809. After the war of 1812, the Act was repealed and many of the textile mills became unprofitable.

We walked the Julius Lester trail (named for another local author) that runs through conservation land on the south side of the river to the recreation area. There we looked at a water control structure that directed water into a canal to power the Old Grist Mill on Montague Road, one of the only historic mill buildings still standing in Amherst. Evidently, past this mill there was yet another mill farther down. I know there is a Mill Road in Hadley that is also along the same river probably had yet another mill.

Water control structures at Mill River Recreation Area

At the conclusion of the tour we walked back to the starting point. I’ve registered for the Upper Mill River tour on November 1st. There is another whole set of mills on the streams above Puffer’s Pond. I’ve walked this trail before and seen the remains of foundations and water control structures. It should be fun!

leaf scars on a tropical tree

This morning, I saw a young man driving a truck. Something about his appearance or expression reminded me of myself as a young man. He had a scruffy beard and was wearing a plain jacket. He looked at me and we locked eyes for a moment. He looked dispirited and unhappy.

When I was a small child, I was riding in a car with my grandfather, father, and brother. The topic of conversation was what you would want to be when you grew up. As I recall, my grandfather said he wanted to be an eccentric millionaire. My father said he wanted to be a young man of independent means. I didn’t really understand what that meant, as a child. But it made a big impression on my brother. (I remember being more inclined, like my grandfather, to be an eccentric millionaire).

As I thought about the young man in the truck, I reflected on my own youth.

I was not particularly happy. Those were not “the best years of my life.” I had poor judgment. I did foolish things. And I suffered for it.

I never felt very attractive. I was short and pudgy. I self-conscious and overcompensated, trying to appear happy, funny, and clever.

I was not athletic in my youth either. My efforts to play team sports were not rewarded with either success or encouragement. I did have periods of time when I did some individual sports: running, weight lifting, and cycling. Being more fit however, did not — as far I could ever tell — make me more attractive. One hundred times zero is still zero.

If I had been “of independent means” I don’t think I would have been any happier. I would have still been foolish and had poor judgment. And if people had been attracted to me because of my wealth, well… That sounds like it would have been potentially disastrous.

As I’ve gotten older, however, I’ve come to value such wisdom as comes with age. As a retiree, my means appear adequate to my needs. I can now look back at my squandered youth with equanimity. I can accept the physical limitations that come with age having few or no regrets.

This isn’t to say I don’t still do foolish things. Or make mistakes. But I’ve become a lot more comfortable in my own skin, warts and all.

Would I want to be a young man of independent means? No, thank you. I would still rather be an eccentric millionaire.

distorted image of girl's face

A few weeks ago, I got a private message from someone I didn’t recognize on Discord. They’re a member of the Western Mass Writer’s Guild Discord server. I don’t normally chat with random people on the Internet but I thought I’d see if they were a local writer or what. We exchanged a few messages. They said they were an artist and asked if I wanted to look at their portfolio. They had a dozen or more pieces of digital art where you could see both the original line drawings and the finished, full-color artworks.

I’m not sure why they messaged me. I think they may have seen the posts about starting Elegant Lich and hoped that maybe we would be in the market to purchase artwork. They never really said.

We exchanged a few dozen messages during the following weeks. I made it clear early on that I wasn’t in the market to purchase artwork. But, during the conversation, I also was trying to suss out if they were a human being or a bot.

I asked how they were. “Sad” because they didn’t have any commissions. I asked what they were going, “Nothing much. Trying to get some work.” I made a point of sharing public aspects of my life: the same things I was posting to social media: hanging out with Tanuki, getting a flat tire fixed, getting vaccinated, etc. They said nothing to suggest they had any kind of human life.

Finally, I admitted that I was trying to tell if they were a human being. They haven’t contacted me since.

This was all before SFWA ran their panel discussion today: I Swear I’m Not a Robot — How Publishers Are Handling the Pressure to Confirm Human Authorship. It was very helpful and I took careful notes. The panel included a number of editors that are struggling with the problem of identifying AI-generated manuscripts.

They pointed out that the problem is not just manuscripts. The entire ecosystem is under attack. It includes reviews and artwork and correspondence. “In every space there might be writing, people are using these tools to conduct scams” — M.L. Clark.

All of the editors reported a significant amount of trauma over the experience of having accepted, nearly published, or published AI generated manuscripts — and only learning they’d been scammed through reports from readers. It’s a struggle to extend and maintain trust — especially with new authors who most need to find a receptive, supportive community. What is the community’s role? What is the responsibility of the staff? Where does the buck stop? What do we do? “Dealing with not being able to know is the challenge” — Michael J. Deluca.

There is a substantial debate about the potential role of using automated tools to identify AI-generated manuscripts. Some of the tools seem quite good right now. But it’s an arms race between the AIs and the tools. When do you use them? As a first line of defense, to protect your slush readers? Do you really trust the machine to make these decisions? There’s not a clear answer.

One editor said they might engage the author in a series of questions about their writing process, e.g. “Why did you use this PoV?” I thought, “Oh, no. I’m fucked.” I don’t know why I write the way I do. I’ve never taken any writing classes so I don’t even have the language to talk about why I write the way I do. But other people were careful to point out that the burden of proving they were human should not be on the author but on the editor. Still, retaining artifacts of the writing process, like outlines, rough drafts, revision histories, could all be useful to help demonstrate human authorship.

The moderator commented that Yog’s Law should still hold: Authors should certainly not have to pay to prove that they’re human.

There were a few encouraging points. First, Gen-AI is not good at generating long manuscripts. It can write good flash fiction but, the longer the manuscript, the less likely the AI is to be able to develop and maintain a complex narrative. Many of the people using AI are fundamentally lazy: simple checks can catch many of them. Also, current models are being funded by venture capital. As the true costs shift to the users, it may well not be economically viable to generate AI for the meagre pittance that short fiction writers earn, and discourage scammers from pursuing the “market.”

In the end, the recommendations were for editors to educate themselves, talk to each other, and build stronger networks of human connection. All good recommendations.

a fawn boxer dog

People who follow me on social media are already familiar with my characters Totemo Isogashii and Lambda. Lambda, of course, is a NeoBoxer.

I write about them pretty often. I’ve just finished a new novelette that features them and, since I’ve been thinking about them a lot, I thought I might offer a little background for fans.

Note: The picture is of my son’s boxer dog Tanuki. For some reason, the description of Lamba is nearly identical.

Three years ago, when I was writing Better Angels: Tour de Force, I wanted to write a story about Tau that was inspired by Lady and the Tramp, I called it The Better Angels and Lambda and Tau. Tau has learned that a girl NeoBoxer, Lambda, has come to the Truck Stop, but he’s depressed because she says she’s too busy to go on a date. The Better Angels and their allies wage a campaign to keep her partner, Totemo Isogashii, occupied for long enough for Tau to put the moves on Lambda. It’s the sort of fluff that led me to call the Better Angels stories fluffy military space opera.

In the years since I wrote that silly little story about Totemo Isogashii and Lambda, I’ve written dozens — maybe a hundred — little bits of microfiction about them. Here’s one example:

“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Totemo said. She and Lambda were laying on the floor in a sunbeam.
Lamba lay on her back with her muppies splayed out. She wuffed, softly.
“I can’t relax,” Totemo said. “I’ve got so much to do and, instead, I’m just laying around here.”
Lambda had persuaded Totemo to sign up for a day-long cat-guided* rest day. Their facilitator was Tama, a fluffy, white cat with blue eyes.
After going out at dawn to hunt voles, they had spent hours just laying in the sun, moving periodically as the light moved across the floor.
Someone rang a triangle in the other room. Tama sprang to her feet and ran toward the sound.
“I hope it’s lunch!” Totemo said.
They arrived in the kitchen where three bowls were set on the floor. Tama was already eating out of one. Lambda took the second.
Totemo considered her options.

*Note: this was inspired by seeing an ad for a “cat-guided field trip” where people would pay money to go follow a cat around in the forest. Really.

Totemo and Lambda also show up in my novelette Bearly Believable, which is scheduled to appear in Hexfiled this month. As I’ve learned more about the characters, I decided to finally write the story of how they meet. It’s set, appropriately enough, on the planet Holufinia, the origin world of NeoBoxers.

I originally wrote about NeoBoxers in the same time frame as some of my very earliest SFF writing, more than twenty years ago. The first working title was “Happiness is a Warm Puppy.” As I was writing Better Angels, I pulled out that old manuscript and reworked it as a Truck Stop story. I added some stuff and cut a lot of stuff, and retitled it Hope is a Cloned Puppy. From that manuscript, here is my earliest description of a NeoBoxer:

Tawny, with a black face, Beta was the NeoBoxer that had been provided to assist the crew. Beta was a dog, but not just any dog. NeoBoxers were the product of hundreds of years of selective breeding and not a small amount of genetic engineering. Created to lend their keen noses and stout hearts to any adventure, they also sought to forge strong bonds of loyalty among the crew. Beta gamboled among the crew members nudging them with his muzzle to encourage bonding.

Pascal admired his ability to work with both sides of the crew and his single-minded focus when he found a problem that was within his range of capacities. Beta could sense that there was division in the crew and he worked tirelessly to bring both sides together into a single pack with a common purpose.

The setting, Holufinia, is a distant world in the galaxy that got cut off after a disastrous civil war took down their advanced technology and the wormhole that connected them with galactic civilization. In Hope is a Cloned Puppy, we learn how the planet gets reconnected to the larger galactic civilization, we’re introduced to NeoBoxers, and we learn the origin of Tau, the NeoBoxer that lives on the Truck Stop.

I offered the manuscript as a story for the Truck Stop. But, after Better Angels came out, the publisher seemed to abandon the Truck Stop universe. I don’t believe any story has come out since. He never explained to me why. I was disappointed because I thought the shared universe idea was fun and wrote several other stories for it, including at least three more Better Angels stories.

The working title of my new story was “Totemo and Lambda Save the World.” The finished title is You Can’t Change Just One Thing. I would classify the story as Hopepunk. The book is primarily about the ecology of Holufinia. The title is a riff on Garrett Hardin’s Iron Law of Ecology, “You can never do just one thing.” Anything you do in an ecosystem touches everything else. We also learn how Totemo and Lambda meet, and the ways that meeting changes Totemo’s life.

I really love the characters. Totemo is an earnest, take-charge scientist. She’s abrasive and hard-driving, always working harder and smarter than anyone else. Lambda is the one with a sense of humor. She’s equally smart and capable, but she is always looking out for her human partner and not above using subterfuge to get her to take better care of herself and attend to her own needs. And she’s happy to have a little fun while doing it.

I keep coming back to NeoBoxers. When my oldest son was in first grade, he had an assignment to write every day. And after he’d written something, he was allowed to illustrate it with a picture. The first day, he wrote, “SUPER DOG SAVES THE DAY!” and provided an illustration of a boxer dog wearing a cape. The next day he wrote, “SUPER DOG SAVES THE DAY AGAIN!” and drew a similar picture. He did the same for every day that followed. Like father like son, I guess.

Anyway, I’m very pleased with the story and will shortly start submitting it for publication. I’m hopeful it will find a home soon and I will be able to share it with you.

chart showing job losses and gains in part due to AI

It’s frustrating how often articles get posted at the NYT that engage in specious, uncritical thinking — especially when it’s in the service of the rich and wealthy. Today’s example is Six Charts That Show Just How Much We Need A.I. (gift link) by Steven Rattner. His argument is that we need AI, not just because it is innovation, but because it will drive innovation. I call shenanigans.

He’s primarily focused on growth. He links productivity growth with higher standards of living. Of course, that hasn’t been true since Reagan. In the 1980s, productivity growth has only gone to enrich the very wealthiest and wages have been stagnant. He can fudge his argument by selectively showing periods on his charts.

I really loved the graph cited above. Yes! All of those “Data entry keyers” should clearly get jobs as “Data Scientists”. Problem solved!

Where he really lost me (if he ever “had me”) was when he started talking about innovation. He describes how [AI] “saved me and my colleague, Will McGrew, many hours of prowling the internet to research this essay. That left us with time to do other tasks.” First, the only reason it could save you that much time is because the oligarchs wrecked Internet search to force people to use their stochastic parrot. It was way easier to find things on the Internet before they broke it. Second, if you outsource your thinking to a robot, then you undermine the most important path to innovation.

Innovation is frequently taking ideas from one domain and leveraging them in another. People can do this when they develop expertise in multiple domains. When you outsource your thinking to a robot, you lose most or all of the ability to do that. You can, perhaps, more deeply specialize in your own domain. But without multidisciplinary thinking, you’re less likely to have the transformational insights that drive true innovation.

Most laughably, was his admission that “Thus far, the gains from artificial intelligence have accrued not to workers, but to investors who have reaped soaring profits from the explosive increase in the value of companies in the A.I. industry.” But there are lots of ways to fix that, he assures us. Please. The only way that’s getting fixed is if people organize and fight back. Like they’re doing. Maybe you could help, dude, rather than whining that we need to let the corporations help us grow and innovate.

Where we may be in agreement is in the need for additional regulation. We need to shut down the A.I. companies and let the research be done in public laboratories until it’s demonstrated to be safe and effective to be used. We wouldn’t let pharmaceutical companies release their beta cancer treatments to the public. The AI companies should not be releasing these untested systems to see what havoc they can wreak on the public until we have safeguards in place, and the assurance that they’re safe and effective.

AI may, someday, be shown to be safe and effective. But we should fight these companies trying to jam it down our throats as if our lives depended on it. Because they just might.

cannon bone of an ungulate

Chronic pain sucks. When pain is constant and inescapable, it preys on your mind, makes it hard to do anything, and contributes to depression. I’ve only had a couple of brushes with chronic pain, but they’ve been no fun.

My first serious experience with chronic pain was after I returned from a trip and strained a rotator cuff in my shoulder. I think it was from pulling a rolling suitcase over rough pavement during a week in Brazil and a weekend in New York City. It hurt all the time: no matter what I did it hurt. I found myself straining the shoulder worse trying to find a position where it didn’t hurt, which only made it hurt more. I got a shot of cortisone, which was totally ineffective (steroids don’t seem to have much effect on me). But I also got a prescription for Vicodin.

The Vicodin was amazing. About twenty minutes after I took it, the pain went away. The euphoria of not being in pain almost made me giddy, but I seemed otherwise completely unaffected and went into work every day like usual. After about six weeks, the shoulder had healed and I quit taking the Vicodin. Then I discovered that I had accomplished essentially nothing in the intervening six weeks. I was “working”, but not actually getting my work done.

Nine years ago, I fell on the ice and injured my knee. It didn’t seem bad enough to require medical attention at the time, but it was never really the same after. I adjusted by taking stairs one a time, especially going down. And I now generally use a “mobility aid” — a walking stick that gives me some additional stability.

Most of the time, it’s OK, but every so often, it acts up. It’s been acting up for the past week or two. It aches and is painful at random times. It makes it hard to sleep. Ibuprofen has generally been enough, but I don’t like taking it if I don’t have to.

There may be some kind of trigger, but thus far I’ve been unable to identify what it specifically is. I’m paying attention to how I stand up and do various ordinary activities. I’ve discovered that coping strategies like this can be very helpful to avoid exacerbating problems. I used to kind of throw myself out of bed in the morning but, when I reached a certain age, I discovered that this was a great way to strain my back. So now I carefully swing my feet over the side of the bed and push myself up sideways. The same with getting out of the car or standing up from a chair.

I remember Philip used to joke that when you hit 30, it was like the warranty ran out. But at 60, you start to run up against the service life of your body’s components. But, like Indiana Jones said, “It’s not the years, honey. It’s the mileage.”

interior of old fort

I was interested in the Ken Burns’ series about the American Revolution, but I have a hard time making myself watch things on television, so I was pleased when I saw the companion volume in the library. As with The Raider, it reminded me of familiar events, but provided a lot of additional perspectives which give me a more nuanced understanding of the events. And, once again, I’m baring my soul a bit here to describe my own naivete because my education in history was so meagre.

I first learned about the American Revolution when I was in public school in southwest Michigan. None of the locations were places I had ever visited or known about, which made them hard to picture or bring into any kind of alignment with each other. But subsequently I moved to Massachusetts and visited many of the other locations — even if only driving through on the highway — which now gives me a lot more insight into their relative location and geography. Of course, I’ve also spent many months on a Caribbean island which — though not a direct player in the American Revolution, was fundamental to the forces that were driving the dynamic of the revolution.

The book has chapters to the major episodes of the American Revolution. The stage is set and then the familiar events are described, often by using short vignettes that highlight particular people — all kinds of people — so you see the war not from some top-down perspective, but through the eyes of individuals: Soldiers, to be sure, but also women, enslaved people, indigenous people, and immigrants. Certainly there is a bias toward the wealthy, as they were the most likely to have left behind a journal or record of their experiences. But there is a clear striving for diverse viewpoints that enriches the storytelling.

In between the chapters are a series of essays that offer supplementary analysis that provides different ways for thinking about the events. One by Stephen Conway, argues that Americans tend to think of the American Revolution as fundamentally about America, whereas to the British, it was but one element out of a complex set of imperial events — and was driven less by events in America itself than changes that Britain was making to integrate their colonial empire around the world.

One thing I had never really understood about slavery was the extent to which it was the foundation upon which almost all of the really large fortunes were made in that time. The super wealthy people that everyone talked about when I was young were the robber barons (e.g. Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc.) who had made their fortunes after slavery. But in the time of the American Revolution, the Caribbean islands produced the truly outsized fortunes for the nations that colonized them. The entire war involved people trying to thread the needle between pursuing “freedom” while keeping people enslaved. The book does a good job of telling that story from multiple perspectives.

The Revolutionary War was also a civil war that divided families and neighbors. This was an aspect of the war that was largely glossed over in my previous education.There were a lot of loyalists who aligned with the British forces and fought against independency. The book has an essay and follows the story of several people who tell the loyalist side of the story. In the long run, things did not turn out well for most of them.

Unlike his series about the Civil War, there were no photographs to draw from to help visualize the scenes. The book uses historical paintings, though most of them were made long after the war and were designed to represent a particular points of view rather than reflect any historical accuracy. Of course, as Werner Herzog has described about the Crimean War, even documentary photographs were often staged for effect.

The book also has historical maps showing the disposition of forces in the various battles. These I found to be more of a curiosity, rather than anything useful as a visual guide. They were often not in English or had the directions reversed, and there was no consistency to how the units were represented. I would have appreciated having interpretive maps of the battles drawn using a consistent style to show how the battles occurred. But maybe I’m just a weirdo.

Reading a heavy coffee-table book was inconvenient. But still recommended. A good read.