“While the institution’s independence had been on life support since January 30th, when the bureau’s top career agents were purged in an unprecedented move and the Justice Department announced it wanted the identities of thousands of agents and personnel who contributed to the investigation of the attempted insurrection on January 6th, the final cause of death was the avarice and cowardliness of 51 Republican senators who voted to confirm Kash Patel as its ninth director.”
This is Now, a sort of point-in-time check-in that I learned about from Chris Glass’s blog. Check out other Now’s.
This moment catches me at a moment when I’m a month into my 40s, working fully remote for an org secondarily affected by the Trump administration, and feeling the exhaustion from a predatory President seeking to dismantle our society.
For this Now, I’m going to break this up in the PIES framework I’ve used at work. PIES = Physical, Intellectual, Emotional, and Spiritual (or Motivational).
Physically
Physically, I’m doing well! I’m on day 70 of a 100-day streak using Peloton.
Speaking of Peloton, I feel years late to the game. I now get the excitement during the pandemic! I ride almost daily with my friend Ethan who keeps me at a brisk pace and I connect my Apple Watch to my Apple TV set up to do strength and stretching classes in my living room. As a fully remote guy, Peloton keeps my lunch break active and I have no excuse to put in the work.
I’m also taking a break from alcohol since the Eagles won the Super Bowl. This has done wonders for my sleep, resting heart rate, and energy levels.
Intellectually
My favorite habit I’ve developed is to wake up at 5am and read. I completely failed when I built it in as a nighttime activity. Now I’m already on my fifth book of 2025 and going to significantly outpace my reading in the year prior.
Not only am I reading more, but I’m reading more fiction, and my brain is more awake and focused when I begin work at 7am. Bonus points for the winter season when I brew coffee and get back in bed to enjoy the warmth as long as possible.
On a different note, I’m not as focused as I’d like. I don’t know if it’s Everything Going On, but generally I’m less motivated.
Emotionally
Emotionally, I can put in some work. Once or twice a year I fall into a slump. It’s nothing terrible, and I don’t beat up on myself for it, but in these moments I tend to go more into hermit mode and cancel plans.
I don’t think there’s a single event that triggered this. I think I’m simply in a reflective period and in these periods I prefer to be alone more than usual and will restrict social activities to those in my very inner circle.
I am aware but not concerned.
Spiritually/Motivationally
I have two motivations at the moment.
First, I want to get more engaged in my local community. I’m currently the board chair for RiseUp Community School, a justice-oriented high school that serves students who want to thrive outside of a traditional classroom environment. But ever since my time as a Mayoral appointee I want to get engaged in city-level work. I hope to accomplish this soon.
My other motivation is to focus on my health. I love exercise for managing stress and anxiety and I want to expand my scope to put more attention toward sleep and nutrition. I think once I set specific goals I’ll be more likely to be successful.
What I’m Enjoying
Sci-Fi Renaissance: I’ve been binging — and loving — Severance (Apple TV+), Dark Matter (Apple TV+), and Three Body Problem (Netflix).
Fiction: As I said earlier, I’m reading much more fiction than usual. All Fours, Lincoln in the Bardo, and There,There have been page turners.
Russell Vought, Project 2025 contributor and current director of the Office of Management and Budget and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.
On to my fifth book of 2025 — Tommy Orange’s debut novel “There There”:
A wondrous and shattering award-winning novel that follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.
I gotta say, my new routine of reading early in the morning before work is really paying off. I’m already on track to read more than I did in 2024 by March or April, and I’ve incorporated way more fiction.
There’s no doubt the Trump/Elon-led regime is currently running circles around Democratic lawmakers. And while it’s important we organize, mobilize, and fight to preserve the pillars of democracy, I’m reminded what Ezra Klein told us in his column earlier this month titled “Don’t Believe Him”:
If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.
Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency.
Three headlines from Political Wire reinforce this:
ICE Struggles to Boost Arrest Numbers. “…despite the rapid infusion of resources, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is struggling to arrest higher numbers”
He’s still a dangerous idiot who has learned to better recruit people who will empower his agenda. But he’s an idiot nonetheless and he doesn’t have the discipline, as a citizen or President, to ever go beyond “flooding the zone” to producing a series of tangible outcomes.
Our true north until the next elections is to avoid the dizzying pace of headlines and to remain committed to the cause or causes that matter most to you and that will get you to take action — locally or beyond.
I didn’t pick up John Lewis: A Life by David Greenberg as a protest read against Donald Trump’s impending inauguration. It wasn’t like watching The West Wing to escape reality and imagine a president who aligns with my ideals.
But the timing of my Libby book loan was perfect.
This is an exhaustive biography, and I’m grateful my Kindle hid what must be an enormous physical book. For a couple of months, I woke up early to read before work. Lewis’s life became a balm for the wide-open wound in my heart.
He looms so large in our collective consciousness that it’s easy to forget that as a kid his first sermons were to an audience of his family’s chickens, a young man with a drawl so thick that people wondered if he had a speech impediment, and a n emerging leader whose impulse wasn’t to immediately step in and command a room.
John Lewis became a titan because he tirelessly Did the Work — building an interracial coalition rooted in the ideals of The Beloved Community, transforming society through unwavering nonviolence, and getting into Good Trouble.
Now seems as good a time as any for us to take a page from John Lewis.
Notable Lines
“And remember this: Violence of the spirit is even worse than striking back.”
“I am fully convinced that the true way to bear witness to the Truth is to preach through action also and not by faith alone. I definitely feel that if the historical Jesus were here today, He would be in this jail cell with us for the same cause, the cause of justice and righteousness. Since He is not here, we must do what He would do.”
“It may sound strange,” he later said, “but I think someplace along the way I made up my mind that I would not become bitter or hostile. I think that’s part of the whole philosophy of nonviolence. When you let the nonviolent discipline or philosophy become a way of life, it will control all aspects of your life.”
Miranda July’s 2024 novel All Fours is set to become a TV series on Starz. All Fours is my favorite novel in a while and it’s perfect for streaming. If you haven’t yet read it, I hear the way to go is the audiobook version read by July.
The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along.
Welcome to my commonplace book — a place to record quotes, links, what I’m reading, hearing, and watching, and other miscellanea that accumulate to create a narrative. As Charley Locke writes in her New York Times piece, “if keeping a journal would be a way to look in the mirror and make an honest appraisal of myself, keeping a commonplace book is more like looking at myself out of the corner of my eye.”
Of course, this can also just be called a blog.
I’ve had two before — one in high school and another when I moved to Philadelphia sight unseen to start my service year with AmeriCorps. What I’d give to scroll through these commonplace books now.
Now, at 40 years old, I’m drawn again to make up for lost time and to reclaim a space on the Internet that isn’t feeding me ads and more of what I want to see. I want a place to collect thoughts and ideas without those thoughts and ideas being monetized or at risk as companies pivot, merge, or disappear.
