Chamblee54

0904-0904 – 1473 words about last weeks walking, Truth Greater Than Reality, is now available wherever you get your reading material. … The walk today was on time. It lasted 38 minutes, with no foot dizziness. I was joined by a friend, who surprised me by showing up at 8 am. She had to “take the better part of valor” after 20 minutes, leaving me to do the last three laps by myself. It was nice to enjoy the path without the canned entertainment funnelling through my ears.
0905-1044 – This was not a good day. I got a late start, and the heat caught up with me. The two podcasts I listened to were boring. I wound up listening to music, and did my 36 minutes.
0906-0934 – The walk today was a return to form. I got out early enough to beat the heat. The feet were not dizzy, even if the right knee was objecting. The two podcasts were nourishing. Sometimes God/Allah/Satan/FSM is good to me.
The first show was Hisham Matar Reads ”New Shoes” on The New Yorker: The Writer’s Voice. TNY has been on a roll lately. It is only a matter of time before they have a story that stinks. Today’s episode was about a man from Cairo who lives in London. He misses his family, and goes home once a year to see them, always dressing to kill. The man … I don’t think we ever hear his name … buys a pair of shoes for £800, and feels guilty about it.
Sometimes a story allows you to peek into another life. Suddenly, Cairo is more than a spot on a map with an eight digit population. Meanwhile, I am walking back and forth on the path, watching the sunshine dripping through the leaves.
The second show was EP:60 – Soviet America on Darryl Cooper & Scott Horton – Provoked. DC & SH discussed the recent debate between Dave Smith and Alan Morton Dershowitz. Octogenarian AMD was talking about ww2, which is like me talking about Vietnam. Both conflicts were over before Darryl was born in 1981. We might as well be talking about the Napoleonic wars.
DC: “I don’t do debates, because I know I am not good at them. …. I’m just not built for debates. I’m coming off the top of my head. … I avoid them. I just don’t like doing them because I’m afraid that I won’t adequately represent an issue that I care about.”
There is a difference between wisdom and clever bullshit. So much of today’s discourse is duelling rhetoric, with both sides preaching to the choir. Darryl’s strength is thoroughly researched history. If you do history correctly, you will see both good and bad things on both sides.
DC: “He needs to thank Dershowitz for waiting, until everybody knows this war has been a complete and total disaster, to debate you on it.” Actually, Bibi’s dream war is only a 30% disaster at this point. I shudder to think what the complete version will look like.
0907-1009 – The walk today was overcast. The cloud cover is a welcome change from sun bombing. I did 1.88 miles in 1:00:35, with no foot dizziness. The show was the rest of EP:60 – Soviet America on Darryl Cooper & Scott Horton – Provoked. Part two was not as entertaining as yesterday. Scott was talking about the Oklahoma City bombing. You can only be interested in so many things.
The utter insanity of sending a million US troops into Iran was discussed. Especially for a war where the “Secretary of State says we only got into because Israel was about to attack, and Israel peaced out months ago. Like they peaced out and we’re still fighting their war for them.”
Scott sells bumper stickers. “I got all these great stickers and they’re for sale. Just go to libertystickers dot com. Like for example this great one, Lockheed Martin. Every time Israel kills a child, we make 50 bucks. Then you could drive around, and show people that in traffic, and make them mad at you.” The Lockheed plant in Marietta is a large employer in Georgia. That’s a lot of people to have mad at you.
0908-0915 – The lawn was cut today. There was no walk.
0909-0900 – The walk today was retroactive. I felt mild dizziness at the start of the first lap, and thought this might be a bad day. As it happened, there was mild dizziness for a couple of laps, and a sense of general unwellness. It never got any worse, and I finished the 36 minutes.
On the day after labor day 2024, I had a horrible walk. The night before, I walked around Little 5 Points, and felt great. On Tuesday, I had felt brain fog all day. The foot dizziness had been very bad in spring and early summer, but seemed to be getting better. On this day, the dizziness got very bad after about .4 miles. I decided to cross a road, but my legs gave out under me and I fell. I made it back home, fell again in the front yard, and realized that I had a problem.
The first show was A View To Deceive: An Artist Goes Undercover To Expose The Uber Rich on Chameleon. “While posing as an apartment-hunting Hungarian billionaire, Andi Schmied accessed and documented Manhattan’s most exclusive high-rise properties.” Once the agent left for a minute, she would take pictures of the view for an art book.
Chameleon ran an ad today for Crimes Of Reddit with Sabrina Deana-Roga & Alexis Linkletter. I downloaded an episode, and will see how it goes. I don’t really need to be following another podcast, but free content exists. The scarce commodity in this equation is my listening time. … I listened to CORWSD&AL Thursday night. I am unlikely to download any more episodes.
The second show was Nick Offerman on Talk Easy. I had about 10 minutes when the first show ended. I decided to listen to Nicholas David Offerman, an actor I didn’t know, talking to Sam Fragoso, a podcaster with no middle name. The conversation was fun to listen to, with two intelligent men speaking in an atmosphere of friendliness and respect.
NDO “That’s why libertarianism can never work. Like on paper, the ideas are great, but it’s going to just lead to anarchy, because everyone is then open to interpret things. and whoever has the most guns ends up winning. And that’s a dumb idea.”
NDO: “If you’re wearing that (MAGA) hat, we think you’re announcing that you’re racist. Like, the world thinks you’re evil. Like, you’re announcing that you’re down with the Nazis.” … SF: “You saying, “I bet you are a good person to the people who don a MAGA hat.” I can hear them going, “Who are you to determine that I’m a good person?”
NDO: “It was really weird to wear a MAGA hat for a role. It was really upsetting. I was in Savannah, Georgia, and when I would step outside between takes, I would put a Cubs hat on over the MAGA hat. I didn’t even want to imagine somebody across the street getting a picture of me.”
0910 – Today’s walk was 44:26 of the escalation/de-escalation cycle. The feet were well behaved. The entertainment was the rest of Nick Offerman on Talk Easy.
NDO admired Wendell Erdman Berry, who died between the taping of this show, and the broadcast. NDO read “Questionnaire,” a poem WEB wrote. NDO read the second verse twice.
NDO: “I was going to preface it by saying, I was going to write a joke about this, but Ben Shapiro questioned my masculinity, and I can’t write a better joke than that.” … SF: “I was thinking about Shapiro’s comment about masculinity in the bathroom.”
NDO: “It brings to mind Leonard Cohen’s wonderful lyric, the rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor. Because I’m very aware that I am wealthy, and on those channels, and also infuriated by those channels at the moment. At the moment I have to subscribe to five [ __ ] channels to watch the Cubs. If I want to see every Cubs game, I need to subscribe to at least three or four channels.” This is a first world problem.
For more information about my walking problem, please read The Path Journal. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. Jack Delano took the social media photograph in November 1941. The image shown today is a detail. “Mr. and Mrs. W.T. Hembry, he is a worker at the Mary Leila textile mill in their company house in Greensboro, Greene County, Georgia”
©Luther Mckinnon 2026 · selah