Ukraine < my personal sense making efforts, > and some who's-who to begin>> Kaja Latest Ukraine links GOOD Book on UK: If you are a pro-Russian ethnic Russian who feels trapped in Odessa, wait out the war and do what you need to do to move to Russia. You’ll preferably want to have a job lined up with a reputable company before you make such a move to avoid you and your family falling victim to the active criminal elements within Russia or to homelessness as a result of a fruitless job search. A lot of military aged men were killed in crippled in the war with Ukraine after being forced to sign for the Russian Army under duress after being abducted from their civilian jobs, so there will be a lot of job openings available (truck loaders and unloaders for shops and markets were particularly hard hit by these coercive tactics). Avoid trying to make contact with Russia right now as doing so may place you under suspicion of being a Russian collaborator in the middle of a war with Russia, and thus subject to being imprisoned erroneously. Russia will be unable to reach Odessa because they don’t have the capabilities necessary to hold Kherson, take Mykolaiv and then advance further west to take Odessa. They started the war with too little of their Naval assets in the Black Sea to carry out an amphibious assault on Odessa before the Montreux Convention locked out the rest of the Russian Navy from entering the Black Sea. Their airborne assault units were left to die trying to take and hold overly ambitious objectives during the Kyiv campaign, and their reconnaissance capabilities have been too severely degraded by Russian corruption in the military to be able to track down and engage the HIMARS platforms currently severing their supply lines deep behind the lines. They now struggle to isolate and engage Ukrainian Partisans and Commandos operating deep in Russian held territory, resulting in the crippling of Russia’s remaining aviation capabilities and Air Defense. The Russian Army is doing nothing to take Odessa because they can do nothing to take Odessa. You are better off just going to Russia than trying to invite Russia to come to Odessa. And frankly, much of the tragedy in this war could have been avoided if Ukraine and Russia could have agreed on opening the border to ethnic Russians moving back to Russia than for Russia to try to use Ethnic Russians living in Ukraine as an excuse to try invading. And if the Russians deny you the opportunity to move to Russia… they probably never actually cared about you as anything more than an excuse in the first place.
What a Grand Trainload!
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America, whose outlook is moulded by the Protestant tradition and a century of pioneering, believes in the individual fighting his way by his unaided efforts from poverty to affluence. In imagination he is supposed to be fighting the wilderness like the backwoodsman; if in fact it is against human competitors that he fights, that is not a matter upon which it is necessary to dwell. Nor is it good form to stress the fact that he will be probably all his life a slave as regards the expression of opinion, winning material comfort by the sacrifice of mental integrity. The opinions which he must not express are obviously undesirable opinions, and to compel him to hold his tongue about them is only to exercise a whole- some restraint upon anarchic impulses. By the time he is middle-aged he himself is in complete agreement with this point of view.
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I think every human being
eventually has a moment
where they are standing outside in sweatpants
that have lost the will to be pants,
holding a trash bag, a divorce, a parking ticket,
or some other receipt from the universe
that says, “surprise, this too is part of it.”
And then the sky bruises purple.
And the air touches your face
like it knows your whole story.
And suddenly you realize:
all the real is actually unreal.
The dirt.
The breath.
The weird little bones in your hands.
The fact that we are here,
on a floating rock with pollen counts,
paying bills,
missing dead people,
loving living people
who say “leaving now”
while still fully naked and looking for socks.
And still,
the moon clocks in.
No applause.
No benefits.
No note from management saying,
“Great work being ancient and luminous again.”
Just the moon,
working nights
like a single mother with no applause,
packing silver lunches
for every dark thing
that still has to rise.
Tell me that isn’t holy.
Tell me there is a better word
than sacred
for the way light keeps returning
with no guarantee
we will actually stop and take note.
I know people who believe in therapy,
probiotics,
tarot,
twelve-step meetings,
manifestation journals,
and waiting exactly eleven minutes
before texting back
so they do not appear emotionally available,
even though their whole nervous system
is standing in the driveway holding flowers.
And underneath all of it,
every ritual,
every doctrine,
every smoothie with chia seeds,
the prayer is the same:
Please let me be loved.
Please let me be forgiven.
Please let this strange little life
mean something
before my lower back
submits its formal resignation.
What is going on?
For real tho—What is this place?
This unbearable tenderness
of being alive long enough
to watch steam lift from coffee in winter
like a soul practicing leaving.
To see your friend laugh so hard
they slap the table
as if joy is a mosquito
they are trying to kill.
To hear a child say “pisghetti”
and, for one shining second,
realize language
has finally been improved.
I know I already noted this in the first piece,
but the older I get,
the less use I have for certainty.
Certainty has never made me pull over
because the sunset looked like God
dropped a jar of peach jam
across the whole midwestern sky
and decided to be lazy
and not clean up.
Certainty has never made me gasp
at rain on hot pavement.
Certainty has never found me
in the cereal aisle,
holding Captain Crunch,
suddenly remembering
that everyone I have ever loved
was made from stardust,
hunger,
and a series of decisions
we probably should have slept on.
No.
It has always been awe.
Awe was the first church.
Before steeples.
Before committees.
Before men got involved
and started making rules about skirts.
Awe was there
with its wild hair
and muddy feet,
saying:
Look.
Look again.
Look until looking
becomes love.
Awe, and soup.
Awe, and someone rubbing your back
when you are sick.
Awe, and old couples at Target
arguing gently about avocados,
as if marriage is not one vow
but ten thousand errands
performed beside the person
who knows exactly
how you like the cart pushed.
Maybe gratitude
was never meant to sound elegant.
Maybe gratitude sounds like:
“Damn.
That woodpecker is trying
to beat that tree from itself.”
Maybe gratitude sounds like:
“Thank you, body,
for continuing to drag me through this world
despite the many slim jims
I have done to you
at gas stations.”
Maybe gratitude sounds like:
“Thank you to the dogs
who lose their entire minds
when we come home
as if we have returned from war
and not Walgreens.”
For me, that might be my gospel.
That joy that does not wait for us
to be impressive but only needs us
to come through the door.
Because the truth is,
this life is devastating.
And ridiculous.
One minute you are 22 and invincible,
driving too fast,
eating gas station nachos
with the confidence of a Greek god.
The next minute you are googling,
“Can sneezing cause a hamstring injury?”
and the answer is,
apparently,
“Welcome to the second half of your life.”
But even now—
even tired,
even grieving,
even emotionally held together
by iced coffee, playlists,
and one very specific wolves hoodie—
we keep finding reasons
to stay soft.
We plant tomatoes
even though grief is real.
We bake bread
even though the news is on fire.
We send photos of the sky
to people we love
with captions like,
“LOOK,”
as if beauty is an emergency
and we are all volunteer firefighters.
We keep saying,
“You have to see this,”
because wonder
is the oldest form
of resurrection.
So here’s to the believers
and the atheists
and the agnostics
and the people whose entire theology
is just trying not to cry
in the DMV line.
Here’s to the people clinging to faith.
Here’s to the people clinging to Xanax
and oat milk
and the one group chat
where nobody pretends to be okay.
Here’s to the tender-hearted weirdos.
The accidental mystics.
The ones who can contemplate mortality
for six straight hours
and then become emotionally attached
to a perfect peach.
The ones who know
despair has a mouth,
but so does laughter.
May we never stop being drop-kicked by beauty
in the middle of a Sunday afternoon.
May we never become so polished
that we forget how to stand
in the Starbucks line of existence
with our dumb, gorgeous hearts open,
feeling the enormity of it all
rattle around in our bones
like thunder
looking for somewhere to laugh.
And may we remember:
whatever else this is,
whatever mess,
whatever miracle,
whatever cosmic group project
no one was prepped for—
all’ve it is astonishing.
that we are here.
that we have loved enough to be ruined.
that the moon keeps showing up.
that bread exists.
So pass it on.
Tear off a piece
with your bare hands.
Take it in as you take it down.
And then go outside and look at that moon.
MM
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