Dear Reader,
At the end of a recent car ride, the kid started to get loopy. Soon he was asking about dreams. What are they? Why do we dream? I took the occasion to tell him about Zhuangzi’s famous dream of the butterfly: is Zhaungzi dreaming the butterfly, or does the butterfly dream of Zhuangzi? Isn’t that crazy to think about?
He thought about it for a second, then gave his inevitable next question. Why do butterflies dream?
The “why” game—play it long enough and earnestly enough, and you’ll end up in some weird territory. Why do butterflies dream, indeed? The question takes a shopworn bit of philosophizing and looks at it through a child’s kaleidoscopic gaze, hyper-focused and surreal. The question enters koan territory.
There’s another question I think about all the time. This one comes from a brief clip of man-on-the-street interview in the documentary I Love You Now Die. The crew is interviewing a woman who is idling in her car in front of a Connecticut strip mall. She’s offering her take on the terrible death at the center of the documentary when she intones in a deep Connecticut townie accent, “Why does evil exist? I don’t know!”
Me either, sister. Me either.
Wherever you are, I hope you’re finding time to ask the big questions. In this most hairy of years, 2026, the small questions simply aren’t cutting it any more.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
– Jasper
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We went to see Fuzz play a rare hometown show at the Bellwether. In response to their technically hypercompetent, psychedelia-inflected punk stylings, the crowd exuberantly moshed and crowdsurfed. With everything happening out in the world, it felt good to be out with everyone else, earplugs in, rubbing shoulders together, all moving with the music.
(Also, check out Ty Segall’s kick drum. More of this, please!)
Community Is Wherever People Care
Another way I like to feel connected to other people is to root for a sports team. Being a fan means sometimes giving yourself over to ecstatic celebration, other times sharing in a collective sorrow. If you do it right, you care inordinately about a game defined by arbitrary rules, played by people you’ll likely never meet. The key is doing it together.
As a fan of the Golden State Warriors, the past decade has given me plenty of sports nirvana (four rings!) but also some gutting setbacks (Durant’s Achilles tear, Klay’s ACL tear, Draymond’s nut-shot and punch, James Wiseman, etc.). I’ve shared all of these ups and downs with my brother, with my partner, and also with the writers and commenters on the many fan-blogs I follow. Whenever a big piece of Warriors news comes out, I’m immediately curious how other people reacted, what they thought, how they felt.
Two weeks ago, our second superstar, Jimmy Butler, (for whom I was ecstatic that the Warriors traded) tore his ACL. This has mostly sunk our chances to make the playoffs, let alone win a championship, this season. And with Greatest Warrior of All Time Steph Curry now 37 years old, it may mean the end of what has been a glorious run.
To process this, I of course turned to my two favorite blogs: Golden State of Mind and Dub Nation HQ. There was plenty of openhearted, thoughtful writing in both the blog posts and the comments. I especially appreciated this meditation by a guest blogger named Riley Gaucher. Gaucher writes openly about their own tendency to be a fair-weather fan, riveted when the team is winning and tuning out when they suck. (Honestly, same.) This leads them to some deep places:
Mortality. For me, watching athletes get injured always makes me confront my mortality. If this whimsical escapism with wholly artificial meaning can be threatened by reality, what does that say about my real-world life? And what is the point of giving so much of my time and energy and hope to something that hurts so bad and now seems so hopeless? Without any realistic chance to compete, how do I keep the same passion for this team and sport? Will I be able to defeat my fair-weather tendencies or will I let the Warriors be a smaller part of my life now?
A week after Butler’s injury, the Warriors’ plans were again thrown in disarray—but this time it was because of our increasingly fascist moment. They were scheduled to play an away game against the Minnesota Timberwolves the same day that federal agents murdered Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. The league ended up postponing the game by a day.
This was a small disruption, in the scheme of things. But not knowing what else to do, I checked the sports blogs. And I found that the post about the postponement was offering a vital space for the site’s regular commenters to share their grief and fear.
One comment in particular struck me as one of the smartest, and scariest, warnings I’ve seen about the wave of authoritarianism that’s currently breaking against our political system and communities and neighbors’ bodies. It came from the commenter ScottWarrior, whose comments I’m very familiar with. ScottWarrior posts on Golden State of Mind after almost every game. He’s opinionated, informed, and verbose. He often engages in back-and-forths with other commenters, engaging in spirited conversations about which players deserve more or less playing time, coaching decisions, moments that swung the game, etc. I always appreciate reading what he has to say. So I was interested to know what he would say here.
The whole comment is worth reading. It offers the perspective of an emigré from an authoritarian state—Belarus—discussing how that regime operates and answering the question “How does it work so that the people of Belarus can't get rid of him for so long?” The part that most interested me was about how the security services work:
At 18, the male half ends up going to the army instead. All male population has a compulsory 2 year army service. What do they do after that? The options are going back home, stay in the army in some capacity or get a job with police. Police and army are the top priorities by the dictator. He builds free accommodation for them in the cities (get a job - get a flat in the capital), pays top salaries, have their retirement age at 45 y.o., etc. No special skills is needed and any village boy can have an above average life in a city. But the most important thing is that no matter what the policemen do, the dictator never throws them under the bus. They kill opposition leaders on his behalf, kill protesters on streets or torture thousands of them in prisons, but they know one thing for sure - as long as he is in power, they won't be ever brought to justice (the court is under his control too, obviously). Per capita, we have 10 times more police than the neighbouring Poland. Dictatorship always needs armed protection by loyal forces.
Protests have no chance because it is always unarmed people, a lot of them, against armed police and sometimes army. For the protest to have a chance, one needs at least a small part of armed people, police or army, to change sides or at least refuse shooting people, but it doesn't happen. It doesn't happen because the police is part of the regime. You overthrow the regime and 90% of them would lose their jobs. They know it and they also know that they don't know how to do anything else to get another job. For some, mostly the top officers, the situation is even worse as they would get to prison for what they have previously done as part of the system.
This is bleak stuff, and I feel real sorrow especially for the people of Belarus. It also feels crazy to find some of the more coherent political analysis going down in the comments of a basketball fan blog. But then why would that be so crazy? Community is where you find it, and we can find our best comrades in our regular haunts.
Mass Protagonism
Related: an account of evolving tactics in “Fighting for the future in occupied Minneapolis” by Pranay Somayajula. Loved this bit in particular:
My comrades and I often make reference to the idea of “developing mass protagonism,” a concept with roots in Latin American Marxist thought that expresses an understanding that successful organizing means helping people see themselves not merely as passive subjects of history, but as active agents with the collective power to bring about revolutionary transformation. I have become increasingly convinced that rather than asking people what radicalized them — a familiar question for anyone who has spent time in left activist circles — a better query would be: what protagonized you? Over the last several weeks, whether or not they realize it yet, thousands of people across Minnesota have found an answer to that question.
One of the great tricks of late-stage capitalism is to convince the mass of us humans that we are powerless in the face of the machinery of state power and capital. But in fact it is nothing more than our collective decision to believe in authority and numbers in a ledger that allows these systems to persevere! As Ursula K. Le Guin famously said,
Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality… We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
The Pineapple Vinegar / Sauerkraut Report
When you ferment, you want things to get funky, but not too funky. Since last time we checked in on the sauerkraut and the pineapple vinegar, each had a moment of seeming like all was lost.
With the sauerkraut, one day I checked on it and found that the water level had fallen far enough that a layer of cabbage was no longer submerged. And this layer was developing a suspicious white mold. Oh no! I carefully removed the weights and then even more carefully removed all of the bad cabbage, erring hard on the side of removing too much. Then I carefully cleaned the sides of the crock with paper towels, scrubbed the weights with soap and hot water, and added more brine. I packed it all up and set it back on the shelf, worried that the mold would re-appear and I would have to discard the whole batch. But the mold never came back, and another week later I tasted the remaining kraut. No off flavors, no sense that anything had gone wrong. Instead, just deliciously sour sauerkraut.
With the vinegar, I strained out the chunks of pineapple skin after a week, leaving a cloudy liquid. It first turned to wine (it tasted sharp and wild), then started developing lacy white foam on top. I worried this meant it was somehow infected, so I carefully skimmed it all out. Then I realized: doesn’t vinegar need to grow a “mother” to really ferment? So I stopped skimming, and sure enough it grew a leathery little layer of bacteria and yeast on top—and shortly thereafter it started tasting like—you guessed it—vinegar. Strongly pineapple-scented, wonderfully funky (in a good way) vinegar.
This was my first time making my own vinegar. I found it empowering, getting to track the process from beginning to end. Previously, vinegar was just something I found in the condiment aisle at the grocery store. Now I know how it’s made. The simple mystery (where does vinegar come from?) has been replaced by deeper mysteries (what’s really happening in there? what makes great vinegar great? what else can I transform like this?).
Interviewing the Inventor of “Environmental Grief”
In these days, I think it’s important not to look away from death, grief, and transformation. So I was delighted to get to engage in a wide-ranging podcast interview with Kriss Kevorkian, a thanatologist who holds the distinction of having invented the term “Environmental Grief.” I wrote in my blurb for the episode that “Kriss talks about thanatology, her own work on behalf of the Southern Resident Orcas in the Salish Sea, and how we can harness environmental grief to act on behalf of the non-human world.” A rich vein of thought, and one we don’t discuss enough.
Someone put these posters up in San Francisco:
Future Blooms
This weekend we visited a dear friend who I am connected with because she and my mother-in-law befriended each other in their early twenties. We’ve stayed with our friend many times—she’s a great and generous host—and one of the incredible things about staying with her is that she has lived in her same beautiful house for my partner’s entire life. Each visit is also a return.
On this visit, I took my child out to the back yard and showed him the orchids. These orchids were given to our friend as a housewarming present by my child’s great-grandmother, half a century ago.
What are we planting today that might bloom and keep blooming, decades from now?
I’m so glad to have you as a reader. If you’ve enjoyed this email, have you considered forwarding it to a friend?
