I find myself in the strange situation that if I want to have any idea of what is going on with my friends and neighbors and community events and local news, I’m going to have to open a Facebook account again. Everyone around here is fully invested there.

I did finally get the finish right on the leaf and now I’m stripping the table itself. I know it’s better to restore than refinish but it really was in bad shape—flaking finish and scratched all over. Besides, this is a working table, not a museum piece.

On a human scale, nationalism is no better than globalism.

I’ve been pretty okay with this whole high school graduation thing but then Rachel sent me this pair of pictures and whew boy.

I’m planning a post on my pet theory about the origins of the religious tradition in which I was raised. In preparation for that, I searched my archives to see how much I’d actually written here about those churches. Passing references, mostly. I gave a bit more detail here.

I still believe the main point of that linked post: purity is a fool’s errand. But I’d like to resurrect another point I made there, especially given the American political situation:

This is not an argument in favor of moderation. The truth does not inevitably reside in the middle. I have opinions that people in the so-called moderate middle would call extreme. What I hope to avoid, though, are opinions that are driven solely by opposition to an “other”, in pursuit of purity.

So often I see people in the political middle, the “moderates”–the rationalists, as they would have it–seemingly adopting the belief that the truth always lies in the middle. They are often rightly disturbed by the extremes they see around them; they then make the mistaken leap to the idea that the fault lies in the existence of the extremes.

For me, however, the problem is that the two main “sides” in American politics are mirror images of each other. The exist in perpetual reaction to and dependence on each other. This weird psychological relationship between the sides only heightens the conflict.

So, despite the protestations of the moderates, the problem we have is not that there are people with ideas outside the mainstream. That’s just part of a healthy society. The problem is that the main sides are in a relationship rotten to its core.

My lovely wife Rachel made a video of our garden this morning. (Yours truly is the cameraman.) I hope she continues doing these. She knows more about what’s happening than I do and—let’s be honest—who wouldn’t rather listen to her talk instead of me?

This, from Freddie deBoer (via @ayjay), is true. I picked up the opinions habit early on because I thought it was what intelligent people were supposed to do. I’m now trying to unlearn it, in part because (as Freddie says) arguing over opinions is deeply unpleasant to me.

For a very large swath of the human population, probably the majority, constantly forming and expressing and fighting over opinions on contentious topics is an unusual and unpleasant activity. It’s not that many people out there just don’t naturally form opinions, on art and culture and politics, the way anyone does. But to think of those opinions as something to constantly bring into a state of contention with others, to argue all the time as a matter of day-to-day life, is intimidating even for many smart and principled people. It’s hard to recall now, but there was a very recent period in which most people had no greater opportunity to share their opinions than to say them out loud at work or a bar or during the fellowship service after church. The truly motivated might stand on the street with a bullhorn or start a paper newsletter or write letters to the editor. Most people never bothered. The cacophony of opinion we live in is very new.

The pileated woodpecker seems to be a regular at our feeders now. She has a distinctive, sharp call as she flies into the yard. Also, we do believe she is a “she”, because she does not appear to have the red cheek stripe that males have.

Rachel’s dad was cleaning out his garage and offered me this rickety workbench. I took it home and built a new top for it out of some salvaged studs from a hundred year old house. I fastened it to the wall and now it’s solid and serviceable.

The honeybees are loving the lavender right now.