It’s one of those days where all thoughts are a jumble, so I’m just going to surrender to it and throw out a disjointed blog post:
- If I were still in the business of political messaging, I would be advising Democrats to refer to Trump’s tariffs as the “Republican national sales tax.” Because that’s really what it is — a massive fluctuating national sales tax with some bullshit about trade attached to make it seem patriotic to pay. And it’s not just Trump’s tax, because Republicans have the power to stop this any time they’d like, they’re just too afraid to do it.
- Staying on politics, the Trump White House seems to be making a calculation that a recession early in the administration will be worth it if it allows them to enact all of their policy goals and also achieve lower interest rates, a rationale for corporations to switch employment away from people and towards AI, and an opportunity for the wealthy to snap up stocks at discount prices once the middle class has bailed on the market. What they aren’t thinking about, however, is that recessions tend to have market consequences on the front end, political consequences on the back end … and even if this recession only increases unemployment a couple percentage point, the fact that those jobs will not be coming back will haunt Republicans at the polls in 2026.
- Turning back to me and this project, I don’t know if anyone in the world noticed, but I restored dozens of blog posts to this website over the last couple weeks that have been erased and forgotten long ago. I’m at a point where I’m just owning all of my past writing and trying not to judge it. I’m not able to recover everything, I don’t archive my writing, so if it’s not on the Internet Archive, then it’s lost to me forever and probably completely forgotten as well. But I find something liberating in this — I don’t really need to embrace or disown the thing I’ve written in the past, I can just accept them as snapshots in time, evidence of my own ever-evolving nature.
- I just occurred to me today that I first moved to Chicago in February 1995, meaning that I’ve been a resident of this city for 30 years. Or to put it another way, I’ve now lived in Chicago a majority of my life.
- Over the last two years, I did quite a bit of travel around the world, but so far in 2025, nothing. I do have a work trip to Canada coming up in a couple months, and I might extend it afterwards, but honestly, it’s not really exciting me. If there’s ever been a time where I really wished to be out of this country for as much time as possible, it’s right now. Maybe I should just find a couple free weeks midsummer this year and just ramble the world without a plan.
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