Among many that I've had, my favorite job title was/is "systems analyst," not really a title but a pay grade, but I keep it and take it seriously. I've done the systems analyst version of thrift store, coffee shop, and library. Last evening the small gathering of our remote worker network turned into real systems thinking stuff. Some attendees: the game/platform reviewer youtube guy, the marketer/musician/AI teacher guy, the chicken farmer/solar installer/economist, the Johnny's compliance person, the regenerative nature organization consultant person, the shipping logistics guy, and me the systems analyst library director. For the first time I put them all in the same room and queried them: what is your title and what do you actually do. The discussion covered solar systems, digital sovereignty, alternate database design, resource sharing. Besides a job title, I have always had my own job title for what I see myself doing, like Agent of Change or Maintainer of Safe Space. I should have asked them about that. The meeting came at the end of my day which included me putting a new book on a vision-impaired patron's library tablet and showing her granddaughter how to up the fonts, and jump starting a patron's car, and of course showing people how to print from their phones.

It is a good sign that the No Kings protests keep growing in size, from two million to 5 million and the last one to 7 million. Nationally, 12 million would reach the 3.5 Chenoweth threshold, but Maine has reached it already. Love to see the small town counts.

In politics there is a kerfuffle about Graham Platner's early Reddit posts and tattoos. I and every other old person who sees the fuss says a silent thank you that they did all their stupid shit before the internet. I'm sticking with him; those who have served and evolved as he has get extra grace.

A huge crowd of friendly, playful protesters in Burlington, and the same repeated all over the country. It prepares us for the harder work of a general strike to come. Other things: the Phoenix bookstore, the efficient Bagel Factory, the window corner at Leunigs, the train ride to Brattleboro through valleys with mountains around and a passing glimpse of a fly fisherman in a stream and the funny conductors, wine at the bar in the high-ceilinged old bank building, the search for non-Tesla chargers,

A middle-aged generic black truck pulled in to Gary's shop as I was going by. It had the license plate "Galoot" which struck me as perfect and recalled every western I saw on Saturday afternoons as a kid, usually in the phrase, Ya Big Galoot. Google shows me the incidence of its use over the years. It looks like its use is spiking again although I never hear anyone but me use it. It's not a harsh term; you could call someone a big galoot and still be friends.

Sugar is an 8 episode series on Apple TV with what the NYT calls a "congenital vulnerability to spoilers." For 5 episodes it is a classic noir detective story complete with Dragnet style voiceovers and interspersed with sampling of nostalgic black & white scenes from famous noir films. An education in noir films might consist of watching every film referenced in Sugar. Then in episode six, everything changes and it's a different kind of movie. There were tiny hints early on, but still, it was shocking. In short, it's an interesting combination of two different genres.

-- "It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist."
-- "It’s come to shape the way I think about every country, every community: Whose nonexistence is necessary to the self-conception of this place, and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever that nonexistence is violated?"
-- "Years later it dawns on me that the immigrant class, which in one form or another describes (or will come to describe, in the looming cataclysmic decades of the Anthropocene) most of the world, is segregated by many things, chief among them narrative. Some are afforded the privilege of an arrival story, a homecoming. Others, only departure after departure."
-- "The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power?"
-- "Alongside the ledger of atrocity, I keep another. The Palestinian doctor who would not abandon his patients, even as the bombs closed in. The Icelandic writer who raised money to get the displaced out of Gaza. The American doctors and nurses who risked their lives to go treat the wounded in the middle of a killing field. The puppet-maker who, injured and driven from his home, kept making dolls to entertain the children. The congresswoman who stood her ground in the face of censure, of constant vitriol, of her own colleagues’ indifference. The protesters, the ones who gave up their privilege, their jobs, who risked something, to speak out. The people who filmed and photographed and documented all this, even as it happened to them, even as they buried their dead"