My background and the strange world of "total work"

Mentioning “total work” earlier today has me thinking again about how strange our contemporary work culture seems to me. Strange, I think, because I never really came through the usual acculturating institutions. A bit about my background. I come from a working class lineage, through my grandparents and beyond. Well, that’s being generous about my dad’s family, which might be better described as “working-when-not-drunk class.” There are some professionals here and there among the aunts and uncles and cousins but my direct line is all laborers, secretaries, and cooks (not chefs!

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Prestige dramas are too much work

Adam Smith, “The Work of Leisure” (Local Culture, Fall 2025): For Snyder the main obstacle to the rebirth of leisure is our devotion to work. We’re so devoted to work that even our play is workaday, since play for us is recuperation for work, and “we are still toiling when we are watching television,” as Snyder notes. Watching TV is a necessary evil, like work. It’s “like recovering from an injury.

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Sally Fallon Morell talking about scrapple, a breakfast food made from pork bits. I actually came across this at an Amish grocery store recently but couldn’t remember the name until I came across this article. Has anyone had it?

The Haunted Smart House Lights turn on and off randomly; speakers in different locations of the house start blasting the Everly Brothers. And none of us knows how to fix it.

Memory verses for localists: “And that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you; that ye may walk honestly toward them that are without, and that ye may have lack of nothing.” (1 Thess 4:11-12)

Rachel and I are watching the X-Files for the first time. (We were around in the 90s but were busy being crazy fundamentalists.) We just watched “Beyond the Sea” and, wow, that was great. When weird stuff started happening to the guy who played Major Briggs in Twin Peaks it caused some flashbacks!

I’ve had General’s Cedar Pointe pencils on hand at home for years now, but today I’ve started using them at work, mostly so I can use them more regularly. No idea where I first heard about them. I like the texture, the black eraser, and–above all–the scent.

Garage cleaned and arranged! A pickup filled with trash! Some good, free stuff on the front lawn (come and get it!)! Whew, so happy to get that done. It’s been bugging me every time I pulled into the garage this past winter.

We watched The Mask of Zorro tonight for the first time in many years. What a stone cold classic. I don’t care if it makes me sound old: they don’t make movies like that anymore.

Who else imagines Peter Thiel corrupting the normally ethically-bound Claude AI into a Pentagon murder machine, like Morgoth torturing elves into orcs?