Good morning. Hello. How are you? To everyone except Putin. Fuck that guy. I gotta say, though, I do not think he is a tactical genius, and I think his comment that the fighting “will soon be over” is laughably naive. But what do I know I guess. I certainly never expected any of this, and I already fully knew how awful Putin was. Or I thought I did. I’m struggling with my default assumption of assuming competence to figure out why we decided exempting fuel and agricultural products from the otherwise very clever and strong sanctions. I can only assume Western Europe wanted it that way, that they are going to keep giving hundreds of millions of dollars a day to Russia even as it invades their continent. That.. is somewhat hard to grasp. But I guess they don’t have any other choice.
This is bad, this is all bad, China is sitting over there watching how we handle this, their eager eyes turned toward Taiwan. The various countries reaction to this whole ordeal really is a convenient cypher for figuring out who secretly wants to invade someone.
What is there to even say. People are doing very good writeups. This is not my forte. I’m having a hard time writing about it. It’s too awful. There is a difficulty where working through possible scenarios feels like catastrophizing. Like there is a very thin line between “okay here’s how things could play out let’s think this through” and “well this is how the world ends” is vanishingly thin. Don’t like that one bit, nope, nope. And of course that line has already essentially vanished if you live in Ukraine.
I had forgotten that in 1994 Ukraine gave up its nukes in exchange for… a security guarantee from Russia.
This war is in an inconvenient time zone, for me, personally. I deeply dislike waking up with the desparate sense of the unknown, not sure what has happened while you were alseep, how much the political order of the last thirty years has crumbled while I dream.
The way Biden talked so much about what the response would be if Putin entered NATO countries, after being so dead-on with the intel about Putin invading was somewhat worrying. Of course it seems insane for Putin to invade a NATO country but… it seemed insane to invade Ukraine! Who knows anything anymore! My Ukrainian coworker says that it has always been all about Ukraine. That Putin’s obsessed. That he told us so last July in a 7,000 word essay. It is cold comfort to think he might stop — no comfort at all to Ukraine. But please, please, I hope he fucking stops.
Anyway. I am not adding anything productive to the conversation. I will move on. I took today off to go run errands, and Jane is at Grammy’s, so I am going to attempt to go to Lowe’s and get them to cut a piece of plywood for me. Everyone says they’ll do it, but I am scared and convinced they will not, or they will judge my masculinity. I took today off last week, before this war, but I am glad I did. The meetings I did have yesterday seemed so dumb. Everyone I talked to, we just spent the first thirty minutes talking about the war, not that any of us are foreign policy experts. No one knows whats going to happen, everyone has different theories about the whole thing, people just seem to be grasping for a silver lining but, of course they’re not finding one. Also going to go to the garden center, god, it’s so dumb to talk about this stuff. What are we supposed to even do, though, sit around and do nothing? Keep America Rolling, right? Oh god, that was a terrible joke, that ad was so bad.
I read more about my grandfather last night. They got back to Fairbanks, lived off of College road, bought and built the Fabric Cache, where my grandfather had an appliance repair business, while also being the only CAA-certified flight dispatcher in central Alaska, while he worked to convert Wein airlines from a charter service to a scheduled service, while they bought the Tamarac Inn and ran that. Three times through the years, someone bought the Tamarac Inn from them, couldn’t keep up the payments, and they had to take it back, fix it up again since every time the owners let it fall apart thinking that it was just going to be passive income and they didn’t have to make the hotel nice. They started their tour company, Inside Alaska Tours, my grandmother Millie was on all sorts of boards and charities in Fairbanks, ran the Ice Carnival and Miss Alaska Pageant, named the Golden Heart, named the Boatel, when the whole family took over and ran the Sternwheeler Nenana, the boat they originally took when they moved from Rampart to Kotzebue in 1938. It was parked where the Boatel is now, which was part of the establishment. The Nenana is, of course, still with us, at Pioneer Park. Jack and my Dad both worked on it for a good while.
Because they were travel agents, they started getting free posh trips from Northwest Orient and the like, and because they ran the Alaska Visitors Bureau, they would organize these Alaska cultural trips, with blanket tosses and native art and the works, and take them on the road to Europe, Las Vegas, places like that. They stayed at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Second Imperial Hotel in Tokyo before it was razed. They stayed at the Penninsula in Hong Kong in the early 1960’s. They escaped Hong Kong as a typhoon was coming on August 30, 1965 on the last plane out of Hong Kong, which was Malaysian and flying to Kuala Lampur, and was coincidentally the first plane to ever fly into Subang International, where the plane was greeted by the Yang di-Pertuan Agong of Malaysia, the constitutional monarch. As they flew to Malaysia from Hong Kong, they flew at a safe distance from Vietnam, but close enough that the pilot let them all get a good view of the bombing, thus, of course, immediately bringing me out of my escapist history back into grim reality.
My grandma seemed amazing, I am sad I never knew her, though I have a portrait of her hanging in my library, drawn by a street vendor on a trip to Mexico. When she unexpectedly died of a heart attack, my family was very spread out, since they were running a far-flung tourism company at that point. My grandfather was in Seattle running that branch. My dad was in Juneau running that branch. My uncle was in the Air Force Academy in Seattle. My grandpa’s brother, Dwight, was also in Fairbanks, though, so when Millie passed, he was there to arrange things. Her friends Eve McGowan and Grace Schiabel were there too.
When Millie died she was in the middle of a campaign running for a seat in the Alaska State House. She was still on the ballot, even after she died, and she still did quite well. She seems to have been a very widely liked woman.
Okay, well, that’s all for today, I don’t want to spend my day off in front of the computer. I hope you get through today all right, especially if you have friends or loved ones in Ukraine.
Mix of almost all new stuff today, except for Mark Lanegan because… Mark Lanegan.
All right. Have a good weekend. Be safe, be healthy.
as i told a friend yesterday, putin's a cretin, and i wish him the worst.
sending hugs.