Ah – what's been happening. In January, mostly trouble with the government, and then in February, mostly trouble with being sick. The exterior and the interior. Both seem to have receded, finally, like the snow that's melting in my yard. (We're getting more on Wednesday.)

You're reading Mere Being, a newsletter from Nat Bennett that usually comes out monthly unless Nat gets hideously sick at a Super Bowl party and then hideously sick in a different way about a week later.

I don't even know where to start with January. I've been putting off writing this because I don't want it to be entirely about what's happening in Minnesota, but how can it not be about what's happening in Minnesota?

A friend from San Francisco was visiting the weekend Pretti was shot, and he told us he was reporting the situation as, "a lot like March 2020 -- people aren't going outside, and everyone is talking about the same big thing."

The way I've been putting it: We've reached the point where masked men with guns are knocking on people's doors and demanding to see papers, and I'm surprised how much work there is to do.

Easy stuff, too. Give people rides. Deliver food. Keep an ear out for whistles, and go outside if I hear one. Exchange phone numbers with my neighbors.

It's not what I expected, when I was learning about these things as a kid. Anne Frank hiding in floor boards and all that. I expected the resistance, when it got here, to be heroic and frightening. I wondered if I was going to be up to it. Instead, it's -- well, it is frightening, but it's also easy.

It's been a few weeks since I smelled tear gas in my neighborhood, but I don't think this is over. It's going to get better, but it's going to get worse before it gets better. They're building these huge detention centers, ICE is on a hiring surge and it hasn't even started deploying those agents into the field. Who knows how they're going to end up filling those detention centers, once they've got them running.

(If, at this point, you are tempted to write in to tell me that we have to enforce our immigration laws: I don't care. I don't care for a lot of reasons, but the simplest is that there's no"unless Congress fucked up super bad" clause in the 4th Amendment. The structure of US immigration law is a mess and it has been my whole life. It's effectively impossible to "enforce" without mass domestic deportation. That doesn't magically make "mass domestic deportation" a good policy.)

All that said, I'm actually a lot more hopeful about the whole situation now than I was at the very beginning of the year. James C. Scott writes that one of the three elements necessary for a high modernist disaster ("the most tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering") is a prostrate civil society, and what we have, in Minnesota at least, is not that.

Besides all that – football is over, so now I don't know what to do with my Thursdays and Sundays. I might try roleplaying games, or baseball.

I've been reading again.The Red Mars trilogy, a novel called Isaac by Curtis Gartner, a little bit of The Tale of Genjihere and there. (I can't do more than one or two chapters at a time with that one. Too hard to keep track of all the His Excellences otherwise.)

Red Mars is great, but Mars is startling heterosexual. There are exactly two named gay characters in it, and we don't find out they're gay until midway through the third book. Around the same time the viewpoint character acknowledges the existenceof gay people in general, in a single sentence. We never actually see any of this. It's all mentioned in passing.

My other big complaint is the life extension treatments. One of the reasons the book interested me was that it's an intergenerational epic -- a major novel genre that I was curious to see get a good sci-fi treatment. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of the inter part, since all the old characters stick around, getting older and older. Eventually the series loses interest in the "Mars" stuff and becomes entirely focused on solving the memory problems of the ancient. It's handled quiet well for that but it wasn't what I signed up for, you know?

That said: Long, excellent descriptions of landscape, great terraforming, generally good characters. If you like road trips in the American southwest you'll enjoy the book. There's also an extremely satisfying three-book-long love story that you may not actually realize is there until pretty late in the third book. (The characters involved in it don't.)

I co-sign the Bon Appétit Hot Honey-Glazed Salmon. The sauce takes some attention but otherwise the whole thing comes together surprisingly fast.

I've been on a Nordic kick recently. Rotating through brown rice, farro, and sorghum in the rice cooker, canned peaches with yogurt, WASA crispbreads with canned fish. Sardines get a lot of the attention but canned mackerel is excellent.

Anyway – I'm already super late on this, and that's about all I've got for you for now. More soon. (unless I get hideously sick again, I guess. Here's hoping.)