Seek The Substantial

1. I don’t think I’ve talked about Fallout, but man, this has been a fantastic ride. I told Fitsum that we’d watch it together and this was either a terrible parental mistake or one where I introduced him to one of the more inventive and disturbing shows that I can recall. It’s on Amazon Prime and like I said, it is gory, weird, touching, and a severed head plays a huge part of the story. Everyone needs the severed head. There will be a season 2 and I can’t wait.

2. As we all maybe try to stay off of social media more and more (I know I am trying to do this and having kids helps keep me occupied), I thought this piece by Oliver Burkman was terrific and it’s about how the newscycle is not your life. I think that’s a difficult thing for people to accept, you think that if this happens, this will affect my life in a way that is unmeasurable and the reality is that it will likely not (it certainly could and I don’t want to deny that). But the key is to not live in “that” world as much as you live in “this” world.

The trouble is that human beings can’t really function, let alone thrive, when their primary psychological identification is with things like “the news cycle” or “history” or “the course of world events.” This is the realm in which, pretty much by definition, you exert zero individual control over what happens. So you’re denied the basic sense of “self-efficacy” – of successfully getting things done – on which wellbeing depends. (As mentioned, social media gives the feeling of doing something, but almost never delivers, because you almost never have a real effect.)

To stay sane, you need at least one foot planted firmly in your world: the world of your job and neighborhood, that letter you need to mail, the pasta you’re cooking for dinner, the novel you’re reading with your book group, and that guy on your street who never cleans up after his dog – the world where you can have an effect, even if I’ve admittedly yet to have one with the dog guy.

If you are a normal person and you are posting anything remotely political in the hopes that your one tweet/post will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back to convince someone of a certain idealogy, then I have bad news for you. If you are using social media to uplift and encourage people and make it a happy place, then I think you get what the original purpose was.

3. I don’t know if you’ll be able to read this Wright Thompson piece in the Atlantic about the first map of his family’s home, found in Spain. Maps have so much history, yet sometimes can’t tell the full story of a place.

I’d come researching my new book, The Barn, a history of the 36 square miles of dirt around the place where Emmett Till was tortured and killed in 1955. The barn, which I first wrote about for this magazine, sits in the southwestern quarter of Section 2, Township 22 North, Range 4 West, measured from the Choctaw Meridian. The township has been home to the civil-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer; to the family of the Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest; to farmland owned by James R. Binford, an original legal architect of Jim Crow. It’s borne witness to the creation of the blues at Dockery Plantation; to the erasure of a Native American community; and, of course, to the death of Till. With so much violent history in such proximity, this project almost inevitably became a mapping. That led me on a hunt for the very first map of this land, which was likely drawn in 1544 by a Spanish cartographer named Alonso de Santa Cruz. (There had been earlier maps of the North American shoreline, but none of the interior until this one.)

4. Things that happened to me on Saturday. I was able to get my 10-mile run in before taking Fitsum to his last cross-country practice, the district meet is on Monday. I dropped him off at 7:45 and headed to the grocery store. Checking out from the grocery store, the guy behind me said “Looks like the grandchildren are coming over this weekend.” I had to tell him that I’m not a grandfather, but a father to a 12-year old and 14-year old. I suppose I could have grandchildren and I can’t imagine that. We also went to Fitsum’s band competition in Mansfield and some guy gave us two unused wristbands so we saved $30 today and feel good about that.

5. The header picture is from our drive to the school yesterday morning. Amazing sunrise.