Whether I have any readers for whom this is an observance, I am uncertain, but, being aware that where I live used to be Mexico and having been raised to regard those who cast off colonial rule as heroic, and being aware that I am late to the Grito de Dolores, I may still raise such voice as I have in acknowledgment and celebration of the independence of Mexico from Spain. And I do!

It’s not like I’m any stranger to marking such holidays, as I’ve shown (here, most recently). But given my background and what’s happened in my part of the world in the past couple of years…I’ll say that I hope for dry weather for my southern neighbors, or if there is rain, in even measure and at a steady, unhurried pace.

That’s it, really: just a thing I remembered and thought worth noting. I offer my small celebration here, as I do on most holidays; others, doing more, I hope will find joy in it and make things all the better for doing so!

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Twenty-five years have passed since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a quarter-century in which things have been different here than they were before, more like they are there, and with many saying that it is a good thing that they are as they are now rather than as they were then. I do not know that I agree; I remember many of the calls for measures that, had they been in place, might or might not have hindered or halted the attacks, I remember many of the arguments against them, and they seem to me to be echoed quite closely in a lot of commentary that has slightly shifted topic but has never really stopped. I have to wonder if they oughtn’t’ve worked by this point, but I also have to wonder what I do not know, which I know exceeds what I do.

Once again, no picture

I have written about the anniversary before: here, here, and here. I still recognize that I regard it from a place of privilege, frightened as I was on the day it happened, and I still think it the duty of those who are thus privileged to mark the occasion, to reflect and remember what happened to others and maintain some sense of mourning for them. I still maintain that there is some sense in the event carrying less emphasis now than before, with so many other wrongs occurring in the world and crowding it out of daily consideration. Having, as noted before, spent my entire adult life in the context of 9/11 having happened, I have a sense of before even now, but that before is conflated with childhood, and so as I think back on things, I have trouble untangling what of that before is only the change of childhood ending and what is, in fact, a result of the terrorist attacks. But that’s just me, and that’s little enough.

So, once again, I mark the day, and I do what all who were not there must do: move ahead with the days that are mine. How fitting a tribute to those who have no more days, whose days were ended on that day, that can be, I do not know, but there is no other path open to me. All I can do is the best I can do, and I struggle enough with that as it is.

No ad, either.

The time has come once again* for me to muse on work while I sit in my home office, in the air conditioning, doing little heavy lifting. How much work that can be, my typing things up and reviewing emails and treating bank feed data coming in (because all that does need done despite the holiday), is an open question, and I am well aware that there are good-faith arguments to be had about what work is. (I’m also aware, thanks to an undergraduate education many might well argue makes me useless for actual work, that there’s a collection of poetry titled What Work Is. It’s been since undergrad that I read it, however; I don’t remember how well it addresses its titular topic. Perhaps another rereading is in order.) There are also a lot of bad-faith arguments had about it, dividing workers in fields from each other and inhibiting their abilities to organize to effect.

Although it is the case that I am currently management (technically; I don’t have a staff, working a largely seasonal business as I do for my day-job), I remain sympathetic to labor unions, having benefited from being in one (UAW Local 2110) and from growing up in then-current and formerly union households. I know well what a union contract can mean for a working person and for the family of the working person, and while I can readily acknowledge there are problems in unions as there are in any human organizations, I have also spent a long time working in at-will states without contractual protections, and I’d happily take the union problems over the other set.

(For reference, my day-job is a family business, and my parents are the owners. While it’s technically at-will employment, it would take a lot for me to walk away from my folks on this. The dynamics are different, and I acknowledge that my current situation is atypical; I do not expect to stand as a standard for anyone else’s experience. Just so it’s said.)

Given my union experience, I tend towards a broader view of labor, if only because it does allow more effective unionization. As noted above, I was a member of UAW Local 2110; I was not and never have been an automotive worker. Through some historical quirks, the entire working staff of a school at which I taught in New York City was represented by that union; everyone from the janitors and kitchen workers through administrative assistants and faculty up to the teaching heads of departments was part of a single collective bargaining unit. Only upper administration–deans, the provost, the president, and the like–stood outside of it. Accordingly, when it did happen that the contract needed renegotiating, it was a supremely unified effort at the school, and we did end up getting pretty decent deals for ourselves while I was on the payroll. Again, for me, it worked well; looking back, I could have and should have done more than I did with what I had at the time, but so much is true for a great many things in my life.

Yes, again, there are problems with the ways many unions are set up and operate. I’m not blind to them; I was on the receiving end of them, and more than once. (Seniority matters, time on task matters, but they are not the only things that do, especially in fields that do, in fact, evolve over time.) But there are, again, problems in any human systems. Self-interest and self-aggrandizement stain human experience, and peccadilloes and perfidies pervade it. I need not rattle off a litany of even this long weekend’s events to show so much. I’ll note, though, that the sometimes severe problems present in a great many systems do not dissuade a great many people from taking part in them; for many, the price of indulging such flaws is worth paying for what is received thereby. How broadly such a lesson might be applied…I suppose it is, for now, for others to say.

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* Oh, yes, it’s again. I mention the observance here, and I ruminate upon it here, here, here, here, here, and here. That the observance always falls on a Monday and I try to post each Monday makes it easy to mark the event.

A couple of years ago, now, I commented on the federal holiday marked today: Juneteenth, the anniversary of the promulgation of the Emancipation Procalamation in Texas and the putative formal end to the institution of chattel slavery in the United States. (I know that the qualifiers in that definition are doing a lot of lifting.) In those comments, I note the ways in which the day’s observance is fraught for me, and, in truth, most of those ways still obtain (although today did not occasion a specific closing of my office; outside of tax season, I don’t generally operate on Fridays, anyway). There is still much the Proclamation ought to have addressed that it did not, or not fully; there is still much subsequent laws ought to have addressed that they have not, or not fully; I still benefit from systems of inequality in which I am enmeshed and from which I see no means of extricating myself that would do anybody any good; and I am and damned well should be uncomfortable, at a minimum, about all of those.

I am, as I have noted on many occasions, both within and without this webspace, generally ill at ease with celebration and observance. This is not because I do not think things should be celebrated or memorialized; there are many things that should. And it is not because I was not raised to feel such unease; the reverse is very much true, and my family still expresses confusion that I don’t really “get into the spirit of things.” They accept or tolerate it, in no small part because I am apt to remove myself from goings-on, but it still…sticks. (Before you think something like “Well, just go along with it and fake it,” these are people who know my tells, and after decades of doing one thing, a reversal would stand out; I can fake it, maybe, but there’s no “’til I make it” for this.) So it’s not necessarily about today’s observance, in particular, although there are certainly some things particular to this observance that prompt me towards unease about it–again, not because it’s not worth observing, but because I recognize myself as a poor observer for it, even as I acknowledge I would be remiss to make no comment upon it at all.

In that spirit, that tension between the rightness and goodness of observing and the knowledge of my insufficiency to the same, the following: For those for whom Juneteenth is meant, may there be joy in it, and may those who still decry its observance have of the day exactly what they deserve of it!

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Once again, a day has come that bandsfolk in the United States do well to commemorate. A bit of a pun, March Fourth associates in some communities and in some times with John Philip Sousa, the March King, long-time conductor of the US Marine Corps Band and composer most notably–though hardly exclusively–of “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” The eponym of a prominent bandhall, of a bridge, of a marching instrument in wide use, and of what is often considered the highest award that can be given to a high-school bandsperson, Sousa continues to exert influence on the musical culture of the United States and on the broader culture enfolding the same.

It is a small thing, to be sure. I do not have the numbers ready to hand, but I’d wager that current and former bandsfolk are in the minority here. (My experience is skewed by having been a bandsman from a family of bandsfolk and by passing that tradition forward; Ms. 8 is a tubist and an award-winning one already.) Bandsfolk are not prominently represented in popular culture; bands are present, sure, but they rarely appear as central groups, their members as central characters. (There are exceptions, I know; Mr. Holland’s Opus and Drumline come to mind, dating me, and The Music Man also suggests itself. But two movies and a musical out of thousands of each…) They are part of the background of the world, as music itself often is, and this does lead to some tendency towards disdain for them. (Again, there are exceptions. I am aware of this. I am also aware of what the word “tendency” means.)

As often, though, I might refer to things many others have stated more eloquently than I: remove music, even as background, from the world, and it is far less good a place. For there to be music, there must be musicians–even in an era prone to AI slop and “good enough.” And for musicians to be, there must be the structures that allow them to be; there must be those who study and teach the making of music, and there must be time and space for the development of the skills and muscle memory–because the performance of music is a thing of muscles–that allow enough proficiency that the notes can be known and hit, again and again.

On this day, as much else goes on in the world, no little of it worth mourning, it might be well to reflect on such things and to work towards an existence that does more to promote them than to offer yet more over which to sorrow. Those who are grieving have their right to do so; I do not say that they should not. But those who are not grieving might find good use for their thoughts in such things. And perhaps both might well be done, there being elegies and requia and dirges aplenty.

There are worse things for which to wind a horn.

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Today is, of course, the anniversary of the declaration at Washington-on-the-Brazos of the independence of the Republic of Texas from Mexico. It is something I acknowledge, of course, and not only because it is good for me as a professional to do so as a signification of my participation in the broader community of this state (despite not being a native, which disqualifies me from being a “True” Texan). Despite the many negative stereotypes about the state and its people–and there are reasons the stereotypes exist–I do continue to claim my Texanness, to assert that I am and belong here.

And why should I not? I have lived more years than not in the Hill Country; it’s where I grew up, it’s where my family is, it’s where my name is on the walls and where it remains spoken. It is where I have worked these many years, and it is where the work I do conduces to the health of the broader community, including children, the indigent, business leaders, and visitors in and out of season. It is where I have put down roots once again and from where I picked them up a time or two. And while there are problems to be found in it, as there are in all places, there is also much good, and if it is to our discredit that the bad is often elided or ignored, it would very much be to our discredit were we to set aside the good that is (and for nerd communities, no less; Texas has given rise to no few artists in several genres on whose work much hangs).

At its best, Texas–like many other places, to be sure–is a promise and an endorsement. Nobody is always at their best; I certainly am not, and I do not think it would befit for me to expect the state of which I am a part to be such if none of us who live here can claim to be so. But, damn it, I and others try, and even trying, we can do a damned lot of good.

(Just so you know, I’m not abandoning the Robin Hobb reread; it’ll resume next week. Too, yes, I know this posted later than usual. It was busy. But I didn’t forget.)

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Here again, I find myself thinking about a national observance in the United States and thinking back about what I have said about it before. (I do that a lot, as those who have read me at any length can attest. One of the better things about such informal publication as I get to have is that I have the luxury of building on ideas over time, something that more formal venues do not always allow or encourage.) There’s been a lot of change in the year since I wrote on the topic, so much that it’s often hard to track; even the more limited set of changes that I address in my primary line of work take a lot of doing to keep abreast of, and I rarely have time to look much further afield than that.

Some of that, of course, may be ascribed to my personal limitations. I am the man I am, trained as I have been trained and scrambling to adapt to what presents itself to me, both in the day job and outside it; there are things at which I know to look and things I don’t know I need to look at, even if they do bear in on me. I’m not disclaiming my responsibilities in this; I acknowledge my limitations.

That much noted, I find myself once again of mixed mind regarding the observance. It’s not just this observance, of course; I have a long-running unease with such things, being not much of a celebratory person. While it is the case that I do have an appreciation for ceremony and pageantry, it is also the case that I like to watch it from a distance rather than to be immersed in it; I’d rather quietly observe than participate. (I suppose so much is true for a lot of things in my life, for better or worse.) At present, I am in the middle of my busy season; that I am makes it hard to pay attention to things that are not right in front of me. (There is some wiggle room in “in front of me,” as might be imagined. But some isn’t a whole lot, and it’s certainly not all.) At most, this time, there’s a slight variation in the course of my week due to the federal holiday; things being closed that are does force some adaptation. But it’s only some; for the most part, I have to go on like it’s any other day.

I doubt I’m the only one for whom so much is true.

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