Tag: life

So far in 2026…

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, Teaching1 Comment

The older brother of a kid in my building was murdered by the police.

A former student was shot a couple of miles from school and may be paralyzed for life.

And just yesterday another former student was arrested for murder. Despite being a minor the police are releasing his name all over the fucking place.

Oh, and another younger brother of former students who would have been one of mine in a couple of years got airlifted to a hospital in Indianapolis today for unspecified reasons and is expected to be gone “indefinitely.”

I have a doctor’s appointment in a couple of weeks and she’s going to ask me about my mental health. I’m going to have to lie.

Eighteen years

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

It’s official: my marriage is a legal adult. I continue to be amazed and surprised that she’s put up with me all this time.

Adulting!

On By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

Took the old garage lights to the dump— did I mention we installed new garage lights?– got our taxes done, and knocked a couple of test holes in a wall today for a “weekend project” we have in mind that no doubt will take six months to finish. I feel like that’s a Saturday, right?

I have four letters of recommendation to write tomorrow, all for the same scholarship, and the building can only nominate one of the kids who apply to the next round. I am supposed to send the letters directly to the school counselor and I am genuinely tempted to write a real letter for the clear best choice and have the rest of the letters say “I choose that other kid.” I’m not going to do that, of course; I’ll make the best case I can for each of the kids, but I think the choice is pretty clear at least among these four. I think the world will forgive me if I use a common framework for the four letters, though. Hopefully. After that I have a week of lesson plans to write– for some reason I really want this week settled before I get to school Monday morning– and after that a combination of threats and prayers toward nature, because apparently despite it being nearly 70 degrees earlier this week we have a winter storm headed our way again? And, no. There are not going to be any more winter storms. Indiana had tornadoes yesterday, and it is an ironclad rule of the universe that tornadoes and snow cannot coexist in the same week. Just … no. I threatened to kill God on Bluesky the other day and it received a startlingly positive response; nobody wants to make me follow through here, right?

Today is the 61st anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination, and while I freely admit that I did think when I purchased the above book about Malcolm X that I would read it during Black History Month, specifically starting it today was a happy accident. I could tell you without looking it up that Malcolm was killed in late February of 1965, so I knew it was soon if we hadn’t just missed it, but if I’d gotten the 21st right it would have been a lucky guess. I’m startled at how fast February has flown by; I have about 30 books I need to read in the next seven days, and my wife and I ought to figure out what we’re doing for our eighteenth anniversary at the end of the week.

Yeah. Eighteen years. I am so old that I have been married for eighteen years. Madness.

Reading and relaxing

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

We got a lot of work done around the house today, including installing new lights in the garage, which is brighter than the surface of the Sun now. I have decided my goal for tonight is to finish this John Lewis biography. It’s a good plan, I think.

I suppose it was inevitable

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

The boy wasn’t feeling well today, so we both got to stay home since my wife is out of town until Friday morning(*), and … blech. I tend to spend all day gaslighting myself when I’m home because I’m sick, and when I am absolutely not sick at all and home anyway the feeling is powerful indeed. Like, I’m union; I get family sick days and frankly no one gets to challenge me on my sick days one way or another anyway. But I’ve spent all day being twitchy and nervous for no goddamn reason at all.

I, uh, don’t really have anything other than that. Today didn’t suck nearly as hard as the rest of the week has but that’s not exactly a difficult bar to clear. Hopefully I can get through tomorrow without any illnesses, car accidents or people getting shot. We’ll see.

(*) Because my schedule means I leave before he gets out of bed, and because my wife has a job where she can work from home effectively any time she wants at the drop of a hat, she is nearly always the one who stays home. Not because hurr durr sick kid is Mom’s job.

I need a higher class of opponent

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, life1 Comment

I have spent far too much of today arguing with deeply stupid people on social media, and my God, y’all, the literacy crisis is real. The literacy crisis is real and I am not very bright, but I am stupid in a different way from, for example, someone willing to argue that there are only white people in the town I live in, or someone who wants to argue about what a legal disclaimer means but clearly hasn’t actually read the Goddamned thing. I am stupid because I am unable to simply block these fools and move on with my life, or better yet, avoid activities that cause me to be exposed to them in the first place.

In my defense, at least one of them started it.

Like, there weren’t even any opinions involved today. Text can be interpreted, sure, but phrases like “in perpetuity,” “throughout the world,” and “for any reason” have a fairly plain meaning, and demographic data exists. I sometimes like to pretend I still live in a world where at least semi-objective reality exists, and I’m too old to adapt to a post-truth existence.

The internet was a colossal mistake, is what I’m saying here, along with virtually every single other thing that has happened to society since, oh, Ronald Reagan. I use the words “everything is going to get worse all the time forever” fairly frequently, but I don’t really believe it, because the depth of dumb out there keeps managing to surprise me.

I am not watching the Super Bowl, in accordance with my standard practice, and I am not watching the halftime show either. I watched Kendrick’s show live last year, after spending far too long fucking with streaming platforms, and I just don’t care about Bad Bunny enough to fuck around with it this year. I admit that I’m curious whether anyone at NBC or whoever the hell is broadcasting the thing is smart enough to know to bleep “chinga la migra,” but I assume anything interesting that happens is going to be all over TikTok tomorrow so I’m not going to worry about it.

My wife is going to be out of town all week, so I’m on solo Dad duty, which isn’t much of a problem except for the number of tasks it adds to my mornings. My son’s schedule and mine differ enough that he’s generally not even out of bed when I leave for work, and while we have someone picking him up to take him to school my wife generally handles the three hours of reminders and gradually-sterner pokes in the ribs it takes to drag his eighth-grade ass out of bed, not to mention things like lunch-packing and such. He’s going to have to get up earlier so that I can make sure he’s conscious and vertical before his ride shows up, and I’m going to have to get up earlier to make sure everything is ready on time.

I also have to remember to pick him up on the way home from school, also not normally my job. Luckily we live close enough that the one day I slip into autopilot and drive home, I can turn around and go to pick him up and just pretend that I got tied up at work and couldn’t leave right away. Nobody has to know, right?

Anyway, my wife’s train— yes, train— leaves at midnight, so I’ve got some time to kill before I drop her off at the station. What’s that, Nioh 3? Yes, Daddy will be there soon.

I hate to do this two nights in a row

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

… but guess what I had to buy four of on no notice tonight?

The good news: turns out I can afford a sudden low-four-figure emergency! Which doesn’t mean that I want to spend that kind of money, or that it doesn’t toss me into a shitty mood for the rest of the night, especially when it takes just over an hour to get the new tires installed. And especially especially when I can feel my stomach lining eating itself while I’m waiting, which leads to a 3500-calorie Burger King dinner, and I think I’ve already eaten enough in January and February to last me until March.

And it’s going to end up being three nights in a row, too, because tomorrow after school I have my weird little gay kids club and then after that I have TRIVIA NIGHT for probably longer than I think. I haven’t done TRIVIA NIGHT in a while but feel free to read this and this to find out how the last one went.

In which I don’t see any way out

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

This is the 666th day of posting in a row, for those of you who are into nonsense.

Every time I pick up my phone or turn on my computer, the world has gotten measurably worse since the last time I looked. I wish that was an exaggeration. It’s not. Remember when we invaded a foreign country, killed a bunch of people, arrested and kidnapped their leader and brought him back to America for a trial? That was eight days ago. It’s out of the news.

Oh, and it may turn out that it was a coup engineered by Venezuela’s Vice-President, who manipulated the pedophile rapist felon currently running our country into doing what she wanted. He apparently posted today that he was the “acting president” of Venezuela; they can have him. Frankly at this point I’d welcome an invasion. Just make sure you do it when he’s in Florida; DC has Black people in it and they don’t deserve his bullshit. He’s already destroyed half of the White House so if England or Canada or Cuba knocks the rest of it down again I really don’t give a fuck at this point.

The idea that there is nothing that I can do is slowly driving me mad. I mean, I can pretend. I could go downtown and stand in the cold with a bunch of people and yell some slogans; no one is listening. There were protests downtown today and yesterday. They didn’t even make the local news. I could call my Senators and my House representative; they’re all Republicans and I assure you not one of them gives a fuck. All that would do is get me put on a list, and let’s be honest, I’m probably already on a couple of them anyway. I could take the week off and go to Minneapolis and do … something. No fucking idea what.

Weird, to think that living in a red state is actually protecting me to some extent right now. I’ve heard tell of the occasional ICE vehicle spotted around town but nothing has made the news, and I’ve heard nothing at my school about any immigration raids or anything similar. None of my students have abruptly stopped coming to school. Somebody posted on Reddit the other day in a local board asking what we thought we would do if ICE started going door-to-door in our neighborhood. I had to answer that I didn’t know, which absolutely terrifies me. I’m old and fantastically out of shape and I have a son and a wife to worry about. Even if I could convince myself that vigilantism of some sort was the answer I am literally not physically capable of it. Sure, if someone comes knocking on my door I can refuse to tell them anything about my neighbors. They’re actually doing that in MN right now. Literal highway checkpoints, too. I can’t do a damn thing about any of it.

The idea of going out in a blaze of glory gets a lot less glorious once you realize what it would most likely consist of is a couple of ineffectual wild swings and a heart attack. My wife and I have talked about getting a gun or two for the house; we mutually decided against the idea at the time (for the record, just as a reminder, I hate guns. This has not changed) and now I’m wondering if we should revisit it. But, seriously, for what? What ultimately made us decide against the thing in the first place is that there are four people in this house and all four of us are on psych meds and we both know that any gun in the house is much more of a danger to the four of us than it would ever be to any theoretical intruder. Is the idea that I might at least take one of the fuckers with me when they show up worth it? This isn’t the movies. There’s no Red Dawn scenario here. I’m as likely to successfully defend my family with one of the swords that are already in the house as I am with a fucking gun.

What else am I supposed to do if somebody shows up, call the police? The police haven’t chosen the people over ICE even a single time yet. They aren’t going to. They’re not here to protect us and they never have been.

I don’t have a pithy way to end this. It’s all more swearing and fantasies about violence from here on out.

And tomorrow, it will be worse.