I know I'm in a good place mentally if I am willing to take on difficult tasks. There have been depressive stages in my life where the simplest things, like shaving or just taking out the trash have been overwhelming. I can remember standing in front of the sink, just looking at my razor and shaving cream, and being furious that picking them up and putting them to use was so difficult. Thanks to the miracles of modern pharmacology and a lot of lived experienced, I haven't had a prolonged episode of that kind of living in a couple of years. KNOCKING ON WOOD.

When I'm on the upside of my mood cycles, the sky can be the limit of what I'll attempt. In days gone by, the desire to do hard things would often come in the form of physical challenges. They weren't competitions against other people, just attempts to better my own previous records or to keep some activity trend upwards. I like data, so I've always kept records of how far and how fast I've ridden my bike or walked. When I was power lifting, I was constantly trying to break my personal records. If I couldn't do that for a one-rep maximum, then I would try to lift more cumulative weight. I will measure anything and attempt to improve upon it. I've done it with the number of books I've read and the number of words I've written. Setting goals works for me.

Speaking of goals. I know that some people dislike the concept. They say that you should read a book for the joy of the experience, not because you want to put another tally mark on a sheet. The thing is, everyone has goals, whether they write them down and think about them or not. Some people have a goal of watching as much TV as possible and doing as little work as they can. Of course, they'd deny that to be true, but the proof is in the doing. I just find that I tend to do better when I consciously set goals and make plans, then when I drift. I am a poor drifter.

My current voluntary hard thing is setting up self-hosted services on my home server. Since retiring, I set up a Linux laptop and messed with it enough to discover that I enjoyed the process. Swapping out the hard drive and converting it into a server was the next logical step. Despite a longtime interest in tech, I've never gone down the self-hosted rabbit hole before, So I don't have a ton of experience to draw from. I do, however, know smart people on the Internet. Some of them have said, "Please let me know if you need any help." That's an offer that I'm taking seriously, whether they know it or not.

I'm also doing some things in a few of my relationships that take some effort. My Dad and I haven't ever been real close. We've been estranged a few times, although not in the last few years. He's struggling with the reality of aging and the toll it takes on you physically and mentally. The hardest thing for him though is being the caretaker for his wife of 43 years, who has Alzheimer's. He is one of the few people she still recognizes, and my whole family admires how patient and gentle and loving he is with here, even when she gets confused and angry. Dad shared with me how lonely it is to live like that. I resolved to spend more time with him as a result, and now we meet for lunch every week. I love being able to cheer him up over a plate of food. He does his best not to mention touchy subjects, which I appreciate. I do the same for him.

These days, I try to have a routine. Since Wonder Woman is still punching the clock, I'm doing slightly more around the house. I have to-do lists and I cross off tasks as I knock them out. My tech projects and writing take up most of my days, and the evenings are given over to making home cooked dinners and spending time with Wonder Woman. I'm grateful for long stretches of good mental health, always hoping that I've finally beaten the black dog for good. Who knows, maybe I have.

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My brother is moving back to North Carolina. He hasn't lived here for nearly a quarter of a century. It will be good to have him available for doing brotherly type things.

Although I am 20 months older than he is, we were only a year apart in school. He and my Dad share a birthday that's special for another reason. It was the cutoff day to start school. If either of them had been born a few hours later, they would have had to wait another year to begin their education. As it was, they both went through 12 years of always being the youngest person in their class. Both of them are blessed with plenty of smarts, I'll get to that in a minute, so they didn't suffer any developmental issues as a result.

My brother and I had slightly irregular childhoods. Our parents were teenagers when we were born and got divorced just as I started school. I left home at 14, after having already lived a couple of years apart from he and my mom and sister. I left because I needed a fresh start away from a step-father I didn't get along with and a school that asked me not to come back over the issue of a little weed I had in my pocket. My brother left home to attend one of the most prestigious high schools in the US, the North Carolina School of Science in Mathematics. We didn't get to hang out much as teenagers, just a week here and there at holidays or in the summer.

When I graduated, I went into the military. When he graduated, he went to study astrophysics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland on a scholarship. Unfortunately, being far from home and in cold ass Cleveland wasn't good for his mental health and after a couple of years he came back to North Carolina, where he was accepted to the state’s flagship university in Chapel Hill. He changed his major to English, joined a crazy literary fraternity, made good enough grades to make Phi Beta Kappa and graduated on time. I visited him up there a on occasion, including once on my 22nd birthday where we ingested hallucinogenics and stayed up all night walking around in the snow visiting his friends, who all seemed to be aspiring poets.

He became a technical writer and married a nice woman from Chapel Hill. He eventually decided to go to grad school at the University of Georgia to get a degree in wildlife biology. He completed all the course work and did field research and hit the world's tallest mental block while working on his thesis. He ditched it, ended up getting divorced and moving to California to go to work for the World Bird Population Center. He is a bird expert of some repute to this day. He moved on to other jobs centered around wildlife, met and married a beautiful, smart woman from Marin County, They had a couple of kids. He worked for a good while at the Buck Institute, which studies aging, before heading back to nature related jobs in and around Pt. Reyes National Seashore.

I only managed to make one trip out west to see him in all that time. I actually went out more than that but weirdly enough, I had a trip to San Francisco the same week he had one scheduled to be in NC, so we missed each other. Now, as it happens, he's hit a rough patch in his personal life and he and his college - aged daughter are driving across the country in a few weeks so he can start over again in the east. I want to spend some time with him and do what I can to assuage the personal anguish that this kind of upheaval brings about. Our parents are both in their late 70s now, and I'm glad, as his he, that he will get to spend some quality time with them.

One of the things my brother is excellent at is maintaining relationships. He is still close to the people he went to high school and college with and has made time to go and see them on many of his trip home over the years, Hell, he's still friends with the kid who lived across the street from us when he was in the fourth grade. They used to collect comic books and make up their own superheroes to draw.

Luckily, we have the same outlook on a great many things. We're both non-religious, progressive and inclined toward writing the odd poem now and then. We both love the outdoors. Not only that, but we may end up getting a chance to get to know each other better at this advanced age than we have since junior high school. At least, I hope so.

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There isn't much sacred in my family. By that, I mean that practically anything anyone has ever done at any time in their life, ever, is fair game to bring up and use against them for a laugh. It's never done in a mean-spirited manner. I'm not saying that the butt of the current joke is always happy about it. It's just that they know their day will come. What goes around, comes around. I don't remember consciously making this a requirement that Wonder Woman had to meet before I married her, but she met it anyway. And how. Even my step-daughters who were both adults when I met them are also ruthless teasers of their saintly mother and their own offspring.

Today is our Elizabeth's birthday. In the text I sent her this morning, I related an entry from my journal. Five years ago, I answered a prompt for the daily entry. "Who is the funniest person you know?" My answer was "I’m going to say Elizabeth, followed closely by Jennifer. Lizzie has that understated absurdist sense of humor that I identify with. The time she explained that the older boys thought that Will and Aiden were going to McDonald's EVERY DAY because they found trash in the car ONE TIME is still one of the funniest observations I’ve ever heard a parent make about their kids. It was just her delivery and the believability of what she says."

My oldest daughter is not ashamed of one of her finest legalistic moments, eating cereal from a mixing bowl to get around my "one bowl rule." And my son is still the same sweet person, who once got mad at his sisters when they were children. the meanest thing he could think of to retaliate was to threaten to buy two boxes of Junior Mints and then refuse to share with them because that would sure as hell show them who was boss.

Jennifer, the youngest of all five of our kids, can be pretty scathing when it comes to recalling her Mom's finest moments. Wonder Woman often gets the short end of the stick when it comes to food at endurance events. She has celiacs and can't eat wheat, which rules out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and pop tarts and other assorted sweets that race organizers offer. Jennifer loves to tell the story of her Mom yelling that she "Didn't want another fucking banana" once at a race having grown sick of that being the only thing she could eat at aid station after aid station.

The kids love to tease me for the times when I failed to rise to the manliness some occasions seem to have required. We had wiener dogs when the kids were in school, miniature ones. We were in front of the house with one of them this particular night when a massive Rottweiler entered the yard and began to menace our pooch. My son was there with me. Instead of dealing with either of the canines, for some reason, the only thing I could think to do was to begin yelling at my teenage boy "Get the dog! Get the dog!" I was frozen in place, unable to move, commanding a kid I outweighed by a hundred pounds to stare down a Rottweiler. It was not my finest moment.

He also mocks my one and only attempt to engage in his hobby of Japanese kendo fighting. It's conducted with bamboo swords. When I was a kid, and we did play sword fighting, we just tapped sticks together , which is what I thought he and I were going to do. When he announced that the bout was on, I was pretty nonchalant, ready to tap sticks. Not him. He took his kendo sword and proceeded to wail on my bare hands about 10 times in as many seconds. It was excruciating. I yelled, threw the sword down and told him that he was a jerk. But the part he likes to bring up was that I then called him a sadist for his joy in causing his old man so much pain. This was after the Rottweiler incident, so he might have just been paying me back for putting his life in danger.

Good opportunities for teasing never die. The first time I went with my wife to Asheville, we crossed the French Broad River going into town. She misread the sign and asked why they named it the French Bread River, and thus it has been named ever since, much to her chagrin. So, I'm warning you all right now. If we ever hang out, don't slip up because I will never let you forget it.

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Unlike most normal people, I've spent a considerable amount of time with criminals convicted of some of the most heinous crimes you can imagine. I've had conversations with men who killed their children, their wives and police officers. I'm not talking about one-off conversations either. Don Woods killed his wife in front of their son while in a drunken blackout. I talked to Don every working day for years, since his prison job assignment was in the area I supervised. He was unfailingly polite and obedient, never complained, made me a card when my grandfather died and called me Mr. Plummer, even though he was 20 years older than me. And, you know what, prison was exactly where that man needed to be.

I don't think I ever spoke a cross word to Don. But, at the end of every one of his work shifts, I escorted him back to the cell block and I locked him behind the cell bars. I did that because he was a convicted murderer. The state found evidence that he'd committed that crime. They charged him. They convicted him. They sentenced him to prison, as they should have. There are consequences for the actions we take in this world, and every so often that just can't be mitigated.

In January, I closed the Facebook account I'd had for 16 years. I had thousands of connections, years of photos and memories of birthday parties, Christmas celebrations, and the birth of several of my grandchildren. I enjoyed interacting with people on the platform. The problem is that although Facebook didn't do me much personal harm, it's run by a man to whom the truth is not important. It's run by people who openly promised dictatorial governments to inform on their citizens. It's used by the enemies of my country to interfere in our political process. How in the world could I tacitly say any of that was OK by using that cesspool of a website?

When Bull Connor, the police chief of Birmingham, Alabama in the early 60s had the cities firefighters turn their high-powered hoses on peaceful civil rights demonstrators, there were journalists there to take photographs. There were editors with courage to run those photos in the newspaper. Faced with those images and others of police dogs being turned on people, the US finally got to the point it needed to get to. Despite the low opinions many had about "trouble-making Negroes", the average citizen decided that no one should be treated the way blacks were treated in the South. We passed a Civil Rights law. We finally got as close to universal suffrage as we are ever going to get.

I realize that there are many people today who would prefer to live in a nation where there isn't so much political tension. That's understandable. I don't like the tension either, but I'm not going to pretend the solution is silence or the acceptance of beliefs and behaviors that fly in the face of my core beliefs. A political disagreement is when we have different ideas on what the property tax rate should be. When we don't agree that all people are entitled to the same basic human rights, that isn't a political issue. It's an issue of morality and ethics. On that, there is no compromise, nor should there be.

It is not OK to think that anyone who criticizes Israel needs to be deported or that trans women should be arrested for using the wrong bathroom or that it's OK to decimate scientific research or OK to remove references to our nation's African-American heroes from museums. People with those attitudes are immoral and unethical. They are mistaken, and they don't deserve a comfortable life or any effort on my part or your part to respect our differences. I don't care how nice they treat me personally or how many hours they volunteer with the Boy Scouts. They are evil and despicable, and I don't want anything to do with them.

Have I made myself clear?

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