About not being pathetic. Stay busy…a little too busy. Here’s where I am with that. In a discussion with myself about what causes/activities arouse my slumbering do-gooder passions enough to actually incorporate them into this lackadaisical lifestyle, I came up with the following: 1) the plight of refugees/displaced/homeless persons, 2) a brand-new political involvement, and 3) a more active writing presence that incorporates Window Seat. My life-long obsessions with books and travel still exist but they aren’t keeping me quite busy enough—pathos could creep in.

The unhoused people of the world. They are, to me, the most tragic of all vulnerable populations. Whether refugees fleeing their homeland or internally displaced, or the localized homeless of the planet…imagine…do it…close your eyes and imagine not having a single safe spot for yourself anywhere. Imagine, your small children with you, your elderly mom…no place to keep them safe. No warmth, no privacy, no rest, no help. Imagine.

For starters, I printed out the 2024 Global Report from UNHCR (United Nations High Commission on Refugees) and started scanning it. At least 129.9 million forcibly displaced and stateless people globally. Another 150 million or so homeless in their own regions around the world. A total 1.6 billion may be without adequate housing. Although most of these figures come from the United Nations, just driving around Albuquerque, New Mexico USA suggests they are probably low.

I next attended a zoom forum from UNHCR. The three people leading that discussion were, to me, worth any ten or twenty millionaire/billionaires or politicians. One point made was that in the last decade refugee numbers have doubled while the budget has remained the same. (So, let me not think about the 1%, the wedding in Venice, the Mar-a -Lago snake-pit, the profits from the maiming, killing, destroying weapons creating ever more members of the bloodsucking class as well as ever more refugees… or I will go mad.)

Meantime, I’ve made my initial proactive move of pulling every book, fiction or non-fiction from my shelves, making a tidy pile, and declaring I will read each and every one for a full understanding of the urgency of the actual situation. The problem is—I am very good at making study plans but often less purposeful about follow-through. Therefore, I’m committing right now to reading while doing. This week’s assignment: to make sufficient contacts to find a place where my small service offerings might make a difference. In other words: ‘put up or shut up.’

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I’ll describe my other two “passion projects” next blog because here I want to be sarcastically disgusted as the US proves once again that our ability to bluster and bomb and bare super boobs all at pretty much the same time is unsurpassed.  

You may have noticed we bombed another country last week. True it was another country with a leadership as dysfunctional and corrupt as our present regime. I mean it’s not like we bombed Canada or New Zealand, right? The question of whether the rest of us have the right to kill off bad regimes or even damage their killing potential may never be fully-resolvable—and at the present time in the good old USA, it’s probably best not to dwell on it—hypocrisy might rear its smirking head.  

The week also brought us a press full of Jeff and the Boob-bride, and an excellent take on how that particular bride-of-oligarch look has emerged, courtesy Emma Brockes/Guardian/June 25, ’25. People with money can make poor choices about cosmetic surgery too, of course, but the uniformity of this particular look – so heavy on the filler, silicone and Botox as to make its wearers seem not younger, but weirder, and in a state of constant discomfort – suggests something closer to design. If you were the type of person to make liberal references to The Handmaid’s Tale, you might even speculate that this aesthetic has been tailored by the world’s richest men to symbolise just how completely – almost derisively – they can control the bodies of the women around them.

It seemed a disjointed week from the dangerous to the ridiculous—with stern talks to myself about life and meaning in between. I do believe it continues the theme of the unsettling dichotomy of our days. Death raining down here and there, while I’m pondering how to stay useful-while-old and also queasily chuckling over the tawdry insipidness of the new gilded age.

P.S.

Melissa Hortman, Minnesota state legislator, and her husband Mark were buried last week too. I’ve written about this a little before, but can hardly stand to contemplate the whole tragedy, because it’s a murder as close to actually being committed by Donald Trump and his minions as possible without one of them directly pulling the trigger. Who did it? The fascists and god did it.

My inability to even read much about it at this time is due to the fact so many of my neighbors, my fellow citizens, also had their fingers curled around that trigger. If I think too much about that right now, I must go live in a cave with only a cat who doesn’t like humans that much for company.

Melissa Hortman, her husband Mark Hortman, and their dog Gilbert, were killed in their home, on 27 June 2025. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images