Carrying the Bags of Colonial America’s Humourist

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“Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth.”

—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Irish playwright, novelist, critic, and a master of wit, paradox, and social satire.

Humor means different things to different people.

Sometimes it appears when something almost goes wrong but doesn’t. The tension releases, and everyone exhales at once.

Sometimes the biggest laughs come when someone names a behavior we all recognize but rarely admit—family habits, social pretenses, small vanities we pretend not to see in ourselves.

Humor lets people say risky things safely. We soften criticism with a joke. We test opinions indirectly. We disagree without declaring war.

Sometimes humor does something even simpler: it lets strangers feel briefly aligned. People who laugh together feel, if only for a moment, that they belong to the same world.

I can relate to all of those kinds of humor.

But lately I’ve been tapping into another kind of humor. Laughing at myself.

Because here I am, at this stage of life, carrying the bags of a Colonial American writer who performed behind his own joke for nearly 275 years.

He wrote in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1753 and 1754 under the pseudonym The Humourist. I eventually identified him as Alexander Gordon—antiquarian, playwright, former operatic tenor, Egyptologist, and Clerk of His Majesty’s Council—and published the essays in my book Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina.

Right now, I’m laughing out loud as I finish typing that last paragraph. It captured all the necessary details in so short a fashion that a reader who doesn’t know about my work might think it was easy.

It wasn’t and that’s no laughing matter.

I started working on these pseudonymous essays in 1973, and it took me decades of on-again-off-again research to solve what was the greatest mystery in all of American literature. Who wrote the essays that were right up there with Benjamin Franklin’s?

I solved the mystery by giving the essays a close reading and by developing a precise profile of the pseudonymous author.

He shows deep classical learning; fluency in music and theater; detailed knowledge of colonial legislative procedure; access to the printing process; and—most strikingly—specialized antiquarian expertise, including repeated, highly technical references to Egyptian mummies.

That last detail matters—hold on to it.

Serendipity helped. While combing the South Carolina Gazette for anything that might name the author outright, I stumbled on an obituary for Alexander Gordon, Clerk of His Majesty’s Council. The obituary didn’t identify him as The Humourist, but as I dug further, Gordon’s life and learning aligned almost point for point with the profile my close reading had built—especially the mummy trail.

Egyptology was not casual learning in colonial Charleston. Yet the essays speak in depth about mummies, and Gordon’s will independently inventories Egyptian paintings and drawings and an unpublished manuscript on Egyptian history. When the essays and the archival record illuminate one another so precisely, alternative candidates disappear. The mask does not merely fit. It belongs—and suddenly the performance comes into focus.

With Gordon restored to authorship, the essays change. They stop being a curiosity and become something far more interesting: a sustained experiment in humor and performance inside the colonial newspaper itself.

Attribution reveals design. What once appeared as scattered satire resolves into a deliberate experiment—using humor, performance, and print itself to create a conversation between writer and public.

Recently, I explored that angle for a talk at the South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in a paper titled “Pleasure, Play, and the Colonial Press: Unmasking The Humourist in Eighteenth-Century Charleston” — I realized something unexpected.

The real story is no longer the mystery.

Now that the mystery has been solved, the authorship established, and the essays restored to print in Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina (2025), readers can finally approach them not as an attribution puzzle but as a serious contribution to colonial American literature — and to eighteenth-century humor itself.

What emerges is humor doing real cultural labor.

Gordon deploys mock-serious moralizing, feigned modesty, fabricated correspondence, and theatrical self-presentation to probe colonial life. He stages debates with himself, parodies authority, and moves constantly between sincerity and self-mockery. Humor here is not decoration or diversion. It becomes a way of negotiating civility, reputation, and power in a city both ambitious and anxious.

Just as important, the humor is local. Charleston is not London or Boston. Gordon writes within a transatlantic essay tradition, yet his satire is tuned to a specific press, a specific readership, and the particular pressures of a provincial colonial capital learning how to see itself.

One of his most sophisticated devices is fabricated correspondence. Figures such as Alice Wish-For’t, Urbanicus, Calx Pot-Ash, and Peter Hemp enter the newspaper as letter writers, each occupying a recognizable social position. Alice Wish-For’t blends patriotic seriousness with playful irony, turning courtship into commerce as she urges Carolina to favor its own “manufactures.” Urbanicus performs civic refinement, respectfully cataloguing Charleston’s dangers until earnest reform quietly becomes satire. Calx Pot-Ash and Peter Hemp speak as commodities seeking settlement, reducing questions of empire and policy to negotiations among trade goods.

Equally telling is where these voices write from — England, Sweden, Russia. Distance lends authority while keeping Charleston firmly at the center. The newspaper becomes a stage upon which local life is judged through transatlantic eyes.

Of course, Gordon writes all the letters himself.

Yet the illusion matters. Humor manufactures sociability, creating the sense of an engaged public responding in real time. The newspaper becomes not a lecture but a space of play, populated by voices entering and exiting as if directed from behind the curtain.

That play extends even further — to authorship itself. Rather than locating comedy only in scenes of leisure, Gordon repeatedly turns writing into the joke. The Humourist exists entirely in print, negotiating with readers, printers, and critics while never stepping outside the role he has invented. Apologies, promises of reform, threats of retirement, and editorial decisions mimic literary authority even as they quietly undermine it. Print culture itself becomes performance.

At moments he turns this playfulness toward authority directly. In a mock proclamation issued by Apollo, styled “King, Ruler, and sole Arbiter of Parnassus,” poetry is regulated like civil law, offending writers condemned in language borrowed from official decrees. The humor lies not simply in exaggeration but in recognition: authority, literary and political alike, depends on performance.

By this point, the pattern becomes unmistakable. The newspaper has become a stage. Voices circulate, authority performs itself, and meaning moves through print while a hidden author directs the scene.

The experiment reaches its height in the Humourist’s carefully managed disappearance. His farewell dramatizes authorship itself, insisting he will never again “enter the Lists of Authorism.” Timing, posture, and voice — the very tools of authority — become part of the joke he appears to control.

Here humor shifts away from events and toward the performance of authorship itself, as the writer gradually becomes part of the joke he has created.

Once we recognize that experiment, we can finally ask a larger question:

“What, exactly, did my scholarly research really recover?”

Not just an author’s name. Not just a solved literary mystery.

What returns is pleasure—yhe pleasure of wit, play, and performance in the colonial press.

These essays can now be read, taught, and argued over not as anonymous artifacts, but as the work of a specific and remarkably complex mind. They invite us to reconsider early American literature not as solemn beginnings, but as lively experimentation — writers testing ideas about society, behavior, and power through laughter.

I keep carrying Gordon’s bags.

From Charleston, where he wrote them. To Deltaville. To Pinehurst. And wherever the conversation goes next.

Because if humor helped him speak safely to his own century, perhaps it can help us hear him clearly in ours and remind us that one of the sharpest, funniest voices in Colonial American literature was never lost.

He was simply waiting for the joke to land.

So I keep carrying the bags—following the voice that once spoke from behind the mask, wherever the road leads.

.

Death Watch

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“Life is in the transitions.”
—William James (1842–1910). American philosopher, psychologist, and father of American pragmatism.

I was seven, a skinny, average-height boy standing on the neighbor’s porch. The white clapboard house rose tall, its long windows draped in lace curtains. But at one window, the curtain had been pulled back and the green blind raised, as if inviting me to press my face against the glass. Inside, an open casket cradling an old woman. Her dress, light lavender with a large lace collar. Her waist, small. Her figure, tall and slender. Beyond the casket, the room dissolved into shadow.

I had seen a dead person before, so it wasn’t death that lured me across the road that afternoon. But I had never seen anyone laid out in a casket, all dressed up for a wake.

My mother had talked about wakes. People stayed up all night with the body, neighbors carried in food, and children fell asleep in corners. I never went to one. What I knew came from scraps I overheard—the rustle of women’s dresses, the scrape of chairs on pine floors, the low murmur of prayers. Where I grew up in southern West Virginia in the late 1940s and ’50s, a wake was as ordinary as rain.

I’ve thought about my neighbor’s wake now and then for seven decades. Each time, I return to my seven-year-old self, standing barefoot on the porch, looking in the window, mesmerized by death’s pale lilac gown.

All those years, that was as far as my reflections went until recently when I was listening to “Four Days Late.” Eight words grabbed hold of me:

“The death watch was over.
Buried four days.”

I know the Biblical story. Jesus waited four days before calling Lazarus’s name—long enough, it was believed, for the soul to depart and the body to begin its decay. What followed could only be proclaimed a miracle.

What grabbed me wasn’t the miracle. It was the emphatic statement:

“The death watch was over.”

With that line lodged in my mind, I began noticing how often the idea of a death watch appears, even when we don’t call it that.

In Judaism, the dead are not left alone. There is shemira—watching. Someone stays with the body, for hours or longer, reading psalms, keeping vigil. The tradition holds that the soul lingers nearby for a time, not yet ready to depart. What struck me was not the theology, but the instinct: don’t leave yet. Something is still happening.

In Islam, too, death unfolds rather than strikes. The community gathers quickly. The body is washed, prayers spoken, and the dead oriented toward Mecca. Nothing casual or rushed. The living tend to the dead carefully, attentively, as if aware that departure is not abrupt but gradual, and that presence is a form of respect.

Buddhist and Hindu traditions go further, understanding death as a process that may take hours or days, consciousness loosening its hold slowly. Those nearby are encouraged to remain calm and steady—not to cling or hurry, but to remain present while something completes itself.

Even in the folk practices my mother described, the same posture holds. People stayed. They watched. They waited. Death was not treated as an emergency to be cleared away, but as a threshold to be witnessed.

I wonder what, exactly, those watchers believed they were watching for.

Not for proof. Not for reversal. But for something to finish—or something to begin. Across cultures and centuries there is a shared intuition that death is not an erasure, but a passage. A crossing—something that unfolds just beyond our ability to see, but not beyond our need to attend.

So, we stay.

The seven-year-old boy I was could not have named that instinct. He only knew to stand barefoot on a porch and look through a window. He didn’t understand death or wakes or souls lingering nearby. But he understood—without words—that he was standing as witness at the edge of something mysterious.

Perhaps that is what a death watch has always been—not a refusal of death, but an act of faith in continuance: a willingness to be present at the threshold, to witness a crossing we cannot explain.

Maybe the watching is how we admit we don’t believe it’s over.

Underneath a Jacket and Yaller Pants

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“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly;
what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944). French writer and aviator, best known for The Little Prince, a timeless meditation on seeing, love, and what truly matters.

Two travelers, journeying to the Northern Neck of Virginia, midway between our home in the Shenandoah Valley and our destination, Kilmarnock.

Two travelers with two mid-day choices.

“Horne’s,” Gary read out loud from his phone. “It’s an old-time eatery serving American fare since 1961. It’s a mile or so away.”

He continued with their lunch menu.

“Hmmm. Any other restaurants?”

“Randolph’s on the River.”

About the time he started with their menu, we were approaching Horne’s. Three cars in the parking lot at noon raised some red flags, and the building raised more. It had been something once upon a time, looking back now with one nostalgic backward glance too many.

“Let’s go on to Randolph’s.”

We were there in several minutes. Right on the river with a beautiful view of the bridge.

We drove into the parking lot. One car.

“Maybe they’re closed?”

We both discovered the open door at the same time, looked questionably at one another, entered, and sat by the window on the water’s edge.

We waited and waited and …

“I’ll walk over and get a menu.”

As he did, Gary craned his head toward the open kitchen door.

“It looks really unorganized in there.”

“Maybe we should go back to Horne’s.”

But just as I was on my way to the door, the solo bar customer assured Gary the food was good, as he yelled,

“Hey, Mama. Ya got a customer.”

We returned to our booth.

“Oh, so sorry. I’m the only one here. Nobody else show up yet. Cook. Waitress. Cashier. That’s me. Whatcha want to drink?”

“Water.”

“Same for me.”

In a second, the wizened, chisel-faced Black waitress was back, her hair pulled up tight on top of her head, pulling her taller than her thin frame stood, and 32-ounce plastic glasses of iced water landed gracefully before us.

“What will ya have?”

“Are your oysters local?”

“Oh, yessss. And they big ones.”

“I’ll have the oyster po-boy. You like it?”

“Oh. No. I don’t do oysters, but we sure sell a lot. And it’s on a really big bun.”

“I’ll have one.”

Gary ordered a tuna melt, with French fries and coleslaw.

“What about you?”

“Hmmm. Coleslaw and collards.”

She beamed. “I makes ’em. They so good.”

She spirited around to head back to the kitchen, turning for a sec,

“If ya’ll need anything, just yell out ‘Auntie.'”

We were amused, and maybe smitten by the rawness of her charm, even when she appeared again, grinning.

“Fish truck ain’t got here yet, so we don’t have no tuna. How about a Rock Fish sandwich? Mighty good.”

“Okay.”

“Broiled or fried?”

“Broiled.”

She sprinted away again, as we continued chuckling about our lunch choice and wondering what the food could possibly taste like in a restaurant staffed by a three-in-one.

But nearly as fast as Auntie had sprinted away, she appeared again balancing two plates of food as wide as her beam.

“Ya’ll enjoy.”

“Gary, look at the size of this po-boy! How will I ever eat it all?”

“Well, try one of these fries. I’ve never had fries this good.”

“OMG. They’re awesome. How did she do that?”

By then, I had started to savor the collards.

“Never in my life have I had collards this good. They’re velvety magnificent.”

Just as Gary could not be enticed to savor the collards, neither could I lure him to try my po-boy that I had just dubbed the world’s best ever.

We sat there, enjoying a lunch that we never expected to enjoy, each of us beaming more that Auntie’s beam that competed with the sun glistening on the river.

“What marvelous food!” I quipped. “How did she pull this off?”

She was back soon to see how we were doing.

“How’d you learn to cook collards like that?”

“My grandmother. Just wash ’em up and down several times. Add some onion.”

“Fat back?”

“No. Just bacon. Cook ’em long and slow.”

“They’re the best I’ve ever had.”

She leaned in and whispered as she headed back to the kitchen.

“Gonna bring you a big bowl to take with you.”

We kept eating. Kept enjoying our culinary surprise. Kept nodding in agreement when Gary pronounced:

“Just proves you can’t judge a book by its cover.”

Not judging a book by its cover is a saying we all know. It reminds us not to measure worth by appearances alone. The phrase has been around since 1867 when the Piqua Democrat put it this way:

“Don’t judge a book by its cover; see a man by his cloth, as there is often a good deal of solid worth and superior skill underneath a jacket and yaller pants.”

The idiom’s insight holds.

Once you notice it—really notice it—you start seeing its truth everywhere.

A green thing pushing up through a crack in the sidewalk. Something so small it could be missed entirely if you’re walking fast or looking at your phone. It shouldn’t be there. Concrete says no. Yet there it is, insisting. Alive. You slow down, surprised by how much you want it to win.

A dog at the shelter. The one not pressed eagerly against the gate. The older one. The one whose eyes seem to say, “I’ve already tried being hopeful.” There’s nothing wrong, exactly—just nothing flashy. You move on, almost without thinking, until something tugs. A look. A stillness. Suddenly you’re wondering what kind of life left that quiet patience behind.

A fixer-upper. The peeling paint, the sagging porch, the smell that lingers longer than you’d like. Everyone sees the work. The cost. The trouble. But every now and then you catch a glimpse of something else—a line of light across a floor, a room that wants to breathe again—and you realize the house isn’t finished telling its story.

Then there are people.

People whose jackets are worn. Whose stories arrive with footnotes. People who don’t sparkle on first glance, who hesitate, who carry loss or age or disappointment a little too visibly. People who have been misunderstood long enough that they’ve learned not to rush forward anymore.

People like us. Like you. Like me.

We all know how quickly judgment comes. A glance. A pause. A decision made before the second sentence. We decide what’s worth our time, our care, our patience—and what isn’t.

Sometimes, though, we sit down anyway.

By a river. In a nearly empty restaurant. With a three-in-one waitress who says, “Y’all enjoy” and means it.

If we’re lucky—if we slow down just enough—we leave carrying more than we expected. A full stomach. A warm heart. And the uneasy, beautiful knowledge that the best things in life often arrive wearing the wrong cover.

I Want to Know Why

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“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”

—George Orwell (1903–1950). British writer and essayist.

Two weeks apart. Thirteen or more shots fired. Two American citizens dead in Minneapolis.

January 7, 2026. Renée Good.
Three or more shots fired, including one to the head.
Bam. Bam. Bam.

January 24, 2026. Alex Pretti.
Ten shots fired.
Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.

Both dead.

I can’t stop thinking about those thirteen shots.

Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.

I hope you can’t stop thinking about them.

I am haunted by the shots. Not by the chaos of the moment. By the decision to use lethal force.

I don’t raise these questions lightly. I raise them because I feel an obligation to do so.

I am appalled by what happened to Renée Good and Alex Pretti. Not because I know all the answers—but because the answers offered so far do not begin to match the gravity of what occurred.

I am outraged by the shots.

Not that shots were fired—anyone who understands law enforcement understands danger. Threats are real. Decisions are made in fractions of a second.

But these shots.

A shot to the head. Ten shots fired after a man had been disarmed.

These are not details. They are the story.

I want to know why:

• lethal force was chosen where restraint appears possible

• a vehicle was not disabled if it was the threat

• a disarmed man required ten rounds to stop him

• “self-defense” is offered as a conclusion instead of the beginning of a serious public accounting

• we lower our voices when bullets have already spoken

Let me be clear: I would be asking these same questions with or without ICE involvement. This is not about immigration policy. It is not about partisan loyalties. It is about the use of lethal force by the government—any arm of government—against citizens, and the obligation that power carries with it.

When a gun is fired by law enforcement, intent matters. When a head is struck, intent matters more. When shots continue after a suspect is disarmed, intent becomes unavoidable.

We are often told that officers do not “intend to kill,” only to stop a threat. But bullets are not suggestions. Aimed fire is not symbolic. The human body understands intent even when language tries to soften it.

I want to know why the federal government can irreversibly take a life without the checks that define a democracy.

Not to inflame.

Not to prosecute from my keyboard.

Not to pretend that complex situations have simple answers.

But because a democracy that cannot answer why—plainly, fully, without euphemism—cannot credibly claim justice.

Silence is not neutrality. Deflection is not due process. Repetition of official language is not accountability.

I want to know why.

I think you should, too.

More to This

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“To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”
—Walt Whitman

Lying on my leather sofa. Scrolling through Facebook reels. My mind is quiet. My heart is unguarded. And then—there he is.

Standing alone on the rocks, guitar slung low, sunset pouring behind him like a benediction. Waves slam against stone, but he’s steady. Rooted. A white t-shirt clings to his chest, a pendant rests just above the place where prayer begins. He looks like someone who’s known both ache and awe but hasn’t run from either.

He strums. And sings.

“I’ve been thinking about dying…”

It grabs me. Grabs me deep. Not the lyric alone—but the way he sings it. Calm. Certain. Like someone who knows not only the shoreline but also the undertow.

I listen to the end. I sit still in its wake.

Later, I call my oldest sister. Ninety. Sharp. Aware. Lucid in a way that startles sometimes. I tell her about it. I play it for her.

Silence.

Then softly, she says, “Play it again.”

I do.

And there it is. The line that undoes me.

“My daughter says we live again…”

A child’s faith. A father’s voice. A goodbye that sounds like a hello in disguise.

She doesn’t ask what it means. She doesn’t need to. Some truths live in the body, not the brain. And some goodbyes don’t speak in past tense.

That’s what struck me about the song—about him—this barefoot man with a guitar and the Atlantic licking at his heels. He wasn’t mourning. He was offering. Not an elegy, but a threshold.

Suddenly I began to wonder—not just about dying, but about the shape of leaving itself.
How often the final word is really the first line of something else.

What I hadn’t yet named—what was already working on me under the music—was the song’s quiet insistence.

Over and over, Mark Scibilia returns to the same plea, almost like a whispered vow:

“Don’t you dare
tell me that there ain’t more to this.“

It isn’t argument. It isn’t doctrine. It’s defiance. He’s not trying to prove an afterlife. He’s refusing a small one.

The line keeps coming back like a tide, not to persuade us but to steady us—reminding us that our lives don’t fit neatly inside a closing. What we give our lives to has a way of exceeding the frame.

When he sings it, it sounds less like belief and more like fidelity: a promise to those he loves,
a promise to the life they’ve shared, a promise that whatever waits beyond this moment must somehow be wide enough to hold them all.

That refrain—there’s more to this—isn’t a conclusion. It’s a refusal to conclude.

What moved me wasn’t simply the lyric, or even the tenderness of a daughter’s faith carried in a father’s voice. It was the way the song refused to close in on itself. More to This doesn’t resolve so much as it opens outward. It leaves space. It resists the neatness of an ending.

I noticed my own response before I noticed the pattern in the song. I didn’t want the ending sealed too tightly. I didn’t want it explained away. I wanted to lean forward, not back.

Once I noticed that, I couldn’t unsee it.

I began thinking about how often endings—especially those that arrive at the moment of death—behave this way. Not declaring an end. Not insisting on finality. But gesturing instead. Toward light. Toward motion. Toward wonder. Toward something unfinished and unnamed.

Literature has long understood how difficult it is to stop speaking.

In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens sends Sydney Carton to his death with a sentence that looks forward rather than back. “It is a far, far better thing that I do…” The line does not tell us what follows. It simply insists that meaning survives the moment.

Fitzgerald closes The Great Gatsby not on death itself, but on motion. “So we beat on, boats against the current…” The sentence ends. The movement does not. Time presses forward, indifferent but alive.

In Beloved, Morrison refuses to let memory die with the body. “This is not a story to pass on,” she writes—an ending that sounds like a warning and a summons at once.

And in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the novel concludes not with extinction, but with a completed gesture. Something is finished, yes—but not everything ends.

Different writers. Different centuries. Different convictions.

Yet we witness the same reluctance to close the door too firmly.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Ivan does not receive a doctrine. He does not glimpse a mapped-afterlife. What he receives instead is recognition—a sudden clarity that loosens fear’s grip. Terror gives way not because he knows what comes next, but because something essential falls into place before the end.

Death happens. But it does not cancel significance.

Tolstoy never argues that life continues. He simply writes as if meaning does.

What struck me, once I saw it, was how consistent this posture is. Literary endings at the edge rarely snap shut. They soften. They widen. They behave as if language itself resists abrupt closure.

Then I began noticing the same thing outside of books.

Real life, it turns out, leans too.

Emily Dickinson’s last words—“I must go in, the fog is rising”—do not explain themselves. No reassurance. No declaration of belief. Just movement. Go in. Not away. Not gone. Into something obscured, indistinct, impossible to chart.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is said to have asked for “More light.” Not an answer. A desire.

Steve Jobs, famously unsentimental about metaphysics, reportedly died repeating: “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.” Awe without explanation. Wonder without commentary.

Claude Monet is said to have murmured simply, “It’s beautiful.”

Different lives. Different beliefs. Different temperaments.

Yet, at the edge, language leans in the same direction—not toward negation, but toward attention. Toward light. Toward something still being apprehended.

What interests me isn’t whether these people believed in an afterlife. Some did. Some didn’t. That’s not the point.

The point is posture.

Faced with an ending, we pause. We soften our language. We gesture rather than conclude. We speak as if relation has not been severed—only altered.

That notion brings me back to the song. To Mark Scibilia standing barefoot on the rocks, Atlantic licking at his heels, singing not a goodbye but a threshold.

Long after it ends, the song keeps playing—not audibly, but somewhere just beneath thought. What lingers isn’t melody so much as stance. The way it opens outward. The way it refuses to settle. The way it leaves me listening.

Perhaps that is the common denominator. Not belief. Not certainty. But attention.

We don’t close the door too fast.

We lean forward instead.

Even after the final note fades, something in us remains listening—
sure, somehow, that there is more to this.

༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻

Remembering
Patrick Allen Duff
March 17, 1960 – January 28, 2021

༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻

The Long Way a Voice Comes Home

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“The meaning of the past is never finished.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975). From her Between Past and Future (1961), where she argues that history is not closed or complete, but morally alive, awaiting renewed attention, responsibility, and understanding.

Last week, I found my way to a small library tucked behind a hardware store in Deltaville, Virginia. It was the sort of place you might drive past without ever knowing it was there—a quiet, cream-colored building softened by climbing vines and brightened by a mural where hummingbirds hovered and monarchs drifted above a riot of painted flowers. A sailboat logo and a modest white sign announced Middlesex County Public Library — Deltaville Branch, a name that made the place feel both official and intimate at once. Nothing about it was grand, but everything about it felt intentional. Step through the doors, and you are immediately reminded why libraries endure: they do not shout their importance; they simply keep offering it.

I had been invited to speak about Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina, a project that has occupied a surprising amount of my life. But as I stood there, in a room filled with people who had given their afternoon to books, it became clear that what I was really there to talk about was not a colonial essayist at all. It was about the invisible network of librarians, teachers, archivists, and patient institutions that had made that work possible.

Nothing I have written would exist without them. Not the book. Not the essays. Not even the questions that led me to them.

For most of us, research looks solitary. A scholar in a reading room. A book on a desk. A voice speaking from a distant century. But none of that happens without a vast, quiet scaffolding behind it, made up of people who catalog, preserve, teach, fund, and protect the materials that others one day come to use.

Libraries quietly hold information—sometimes for centuries—without knowing who will need it, or when, or why. They preserve voices long after those voices have gone silent, trusting that someday someone will come along prepared to listen carefully.

That afternoon in Deltaville, surrounded by that small but devoted group of Library Friends, I realized I was standing inside the visible tip of something much larger. A chain of care that stretches across generations, linking a colonial newspaper, a Charleston library, a community college system, and a branch library in the heart of the Chesapeake Bay.

My own place in that chain began long before I knew it. When I was a graduate student in the early 1970s, I stumbled across a series of anonymous essays published in the 1750s in The South-Carolina Gazette. A leading scholar, Leo LeMay, had remarked that they were among the finest essays in all of early American literature and had urged that someone edit them, publish them, and identify their author. The challenge sat there for decades, unanswered.

What allowed me to return to it was not individual brilliance, but institutional grace. I spent twenty-five years at the Library of Congress, learning how archives think and how preservation outlasts any single lifetime. Later, the Virginia Community College System gave me something just as precious when I turned fifty: the chance to become an English professor, a dream I had carried since childhood. And then, when I was named Chancellor’s Professor, it gave me a two-year appointment that provided something more precious than funding. It provided time. Time to think. Time to return to unfinished questions. Time to do the kind of slow, careful work that real discovery requires.

That is why educators and educational institutions matter so deeply in this story. They do not just transmit knowledge; at their best, they grant permission. Permission to linger with a problem. Permission to follow a hunch. Permission to trust that careful thinking is worth the investment.

Being in Deltaville also gave me something I had not realized I was missing: the chance to thank Glenn DuBois in person. Glenn was Chancellor during two important turning points of my professional life. He was Chancellor when the Virginia Community College System first welcomed me into the classroom at age fifty, and he was Chancellor again years later when I was named Chancellor’s Professor, the appointment that made this work possible.

We rarely get to look someone in the eye and say, simply and honestly, “You changed my life.” But that afternoon, in a small library behind a hardware store, I did. It was one of those moments when gratitude stops being abstract and becomes something you can actually feel in the room.

The essays I eventually brought back into the light turned out to belong to Alexander Gordon, a Scottish-born scholar and singer who lived in colonial Charleston. But authorship matters because it allows us to place a voice in a life, a mind in a world, and a text in a tradition.

There is a Jewish folk belief that a person dies twice: once when the body stops, and again when their name is spoken for the last time. If that is so, then archives are a kind of moral infrastructure, designed to keep names from slipping into that second death. Every catalog entry, every preserved page, every carefully tended collection is an act of faith in the future.

So is education. When the Virginia Community College System opened its doors to me in midlife, it did not just give me a job. It gave me a second beginning. Without that second chance, the first version of my curiosity would have remained unfinished.

All of this came together for me in that small Deltaville library. A place without marble columns or grand staircases, but full of the same quiet dignity that animates every serious library anywhere. People had gathered not to be dazzled, but to listen. To care. To take part in the long human habit of keeping stories alive.

Today, Gordon’s voice is no longer anonymous. His essays are no longer orphans. A lost body of work has been restored to its author, and a chapter of early American literary history has been set right. That restoration belongs not just to a scholar or a book, but to the institutions that made it possible—to libraries that guard knowledge, to educators who foster discovery, and to communities that believe the past is worth preserving.

All proceeds from my book go to the Virginia Foundation for Community College Education, which feels exactly right. Libraries and community colleges share the same moral instinct: they exist to hold doors open, not to keep people out.

I left Deltaville with a deeper gratitude for the fact that nothing we do alone ever really is. Behind every footnote stands a librarian. Behind every discovery stands a teacher. Behind every second act stands an institution willing to say yes.

And behind every recovered voice stands a chain of quiet, faithful human hands, passing something forward because they believe someone, someday, will need it.

The Journey Is the Gift

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“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018). American novelist and essayist whose work consistently emphasizes process, patience, and the moral meaning of how lives are lived.

Hopefully, talking about December holidays isn’t limited to December alone, because here it is January—and I’m still talking.

“You and Gary must have had MAHvelous celebrations,” someone, somewhere out there, exclaimed.

Actually, we did. We started early, weaving joy into as long a string as possible. And get this—it’s the week after Epiphany, and we’re not finished.

For real. The trees are still up, their lights burning every evening. Lighted garlands trace the banister and the fireplace mantels in both the living room and the kitchen. Outdoors, lighted deer still prance on the deck, a Snoopy tree shimmers in the lower yard, and shrubs outside the kitchen bid a bright welcome.

Is that wonderful or what? Here we are, still enjoying our holiday decorations—largely Gary’s labor of love—which he began the day after Thanksgiving and created day by day thereafter, with no real rush to get anything or everything done.

Don’t worry. Soon enough we’ll box everything up and unplug the trees. We’ll pack it all away. But we won’t be finished. I’ll still be talking about something simple I learned this holiday.

Come to think of it, that’s exactly what I’m doing right now. I want to tell you why this might have been my best Christmas celebration ever.

I think I know.

Christmases past always felt like a frenzied process leading up to a single day. December 25 arrived. Poof. Done. Over.

Time and time again, I found myself humming “Is That All There Is” made famous by Peggy Lee.

The song opens with a childhood fire—flames consuming a house, a father carrying his daughter to safety, the world burning down while she stands shivering in her pajamas. And when it’s all over, the child asks herself:

“Is that all there is to a fire?“

Later comes the circus—spectacle, color, astonishment—followed by a curious sense of absence. Something missing, though nothing is obviously wrong.

“Is that all there is to a circus?“

Then love. Long walks. Gazing into one another’s eyes. And then loss. The beloved leaves. The heart breaks. But still, life goes on.

Even death, waiting at the end, offers no final revelation—only the same unanswered question.

Again and again, the song circles moments that promise transcendence but refuse to deliver a final explanation.

It’s as if the great events of a life—fire, wonder, love, even death—never quite measure up to the meaning we expect them to deliver.

This year, for the first time I can remember, I didn’t find myself humming that song.

I didn’t hear myself asking that question at all.

This year, I didn’t build toward a payoff.

This year, I didn’t measure the season by a single day.

This year, I realized that Christmas lives in the spirit we practice all year long, not in the triumph of a single day.

This year, I learned to take my cue from a slower rhythm—one built day by day, without hurry.

This year, I found pleasure in the making, not the finishing.

This year, the question never came.

Much of that rhythm was Gary’s, and I was wise enough to follow it and learn from it.

It applies to education—
not just the diploma, but the nights spent puzzling, reading, failing, beginning again.

It applies to work—
not just the promotion or the retirement toast, but the showing up, the learning, the imperfect days that add up to a life.

It applies to friendships—
not just the anniversaries and milestones, but the long conversations, the forgiveness, the staying.

It applies to love—
not just the moment we fall, but the daily choosing, the adjusting, the patience, the tenderness that deepens over time.

It applies to vacations—
not just the photograph-worthy view, but the planning, the anticipation, the getting lost, the laughing along the way.

It applies to accomplishments—
books written one page at a time, great rides pedaled one indoor revolution at a time,
gardens grown one season at a time.

It applies, I think, to almost everything that matters.

What I was given this Christmas was not a better ending, but a better way of moving through things. A way that lets the journey matter. A way that frees us from asking too much of a single moment, and invites us to live more fully in all the moments that lead up to it.

And so the lights will come down. The boxes will go back into their places. January will move on, as it always does.

But I’ll carry this with me: meaning doesn’t arrive—it accumulates. With that gift, I found a better way to live inside my days.

Seeing Clearly Comes with a Price

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“New ideas pass through three periods: it is ridiculed, it is opposed, and it is regarded as self-evident.” — Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). German philosopher noted for his unsentimental view of progress and human behavior.

Epiphany! Of course! Tomorrow. One day away. But my mind keeps circling back to something that awakened me earlier, at the very start of December.

My fruitcakes, the last of the season, were in the oven. My kitchen was redolent with the aroma of butter and cinnamon and nutmeg and allspice and peach brandy. I was doing the cleanup of a gargantuan undertaking—fruitcakes that each weighed in at seven pounds, mind you—and I had two of them humming away in the oven. I started putting the mixer away, the hand mixer I used to turn the eggs into a proud, towering foam before folding them into the creamed butter and sugar. It was a choreography I had learned by muscle memory: beat, fold, lift, repeat, hope.

I looked at the hand mixer sitting on the countertop and could hardly believe what I saw. This poor old thing has been with me through decades of batter and holiday chaos, but apparently I had never actually looked at it with eyes as sharp as they were that day. Suddenly the vents and seams—those tiny nooks and crannies no one examines unless a guest baker is coming—were showing off little smudges of dried batter and a faint dusting of past Christmases. Nothing alarming, nothing unsanitary—just the honest residue of a well-loved tool that’s worked harder than most small appliances ever consent to. And I stood there wondering how on earth I had missed all that before.

Just as I was about to recover, I cast my eyes on the spoon rests—newer, used daily, and supposedly spotless because I wash them every single night. And yet, was that dust I saw? A faint constellation of tiny specks clinging to the cobalt glaze like stars that refused to set? My ordinary eyes never noticed a thing, but these new lenses seem determined to reveal every whisper of the world I’ve been breezing past. It’s not dirt. It’s not neglect. It’s just life—settling lightly, quietly, invisibly—until suddenly I was noticing more than I had bargained for.

Frankly, nothing in the kitchen escaped the spotlight.

That’s when it finally dawned on me: this wasn’t about cleanliness, or aging eyes, or domestic delusion. It was about wearing something new long enough for it to start teaching me how to look.

That “something new,” I realized, was my new Meta AI glasses. They’re ordinary enough at first glance. Dark frames. Familiar weight on the bridge of my nose. However, embedded in them is a quiet intelligence: a camera that sees what I see, microphones that listen, and a system capable of answering questions, identifying objects, translating text, and retrieving information without my ever reaching for a phone. They don’t replace my vision. They sit beside it, augmenting my attention rather than overpowering it. Impressive? Yes—but not seamless. Not yet.

In that moment, standing in my kitchen, I realized they’d already begun doing their real work—literally and metaphorically. They hadn’t changed the world overnight, but they had changed me: how closely I looked, how much I noticed, how quickly I drew conclusions. And if I’m honest, I wanted them to be everything to me right then and there. I wanted the future to arrive fully formed, yesterday. I wanted instant mastery, seamless magic, no friction at all.

Of course, great advances never work that way. Even these remarkable glasses come with limits, blind spots, and moments of awkward silence. They require setup. Patience. Practice. Updates. They demand that the human wearing them slow down long enough to learn how to use them well. And that’s when it struck me: what I was experiencing wasn’t disappointment. It was a learning curve.

And that, it turns out, is nothing new.

Every major human advance arrives this way. First, we notice it. Then we misunderstand it. We expect too much of it too quickly, and then—inevitably—we bump into its limits. Those limits can feel like failure, but history suggests otherwise. They are simply the cost of learning how to live with something new.

When humans first began cultivating crops and domesticating animals, the breakthrough wasn’t just agricultural—it was psychological. Trusting stillness over movement felt risky. Seeds didn’t always sprout. Weather didn’t always cooperate. Settling in one place meant betting survival on forces no one fully understood. Over time, though, farming reshaped daily life, social structures, and governance itself. The curve was steep, but what followed was surplus, stability, and civilization.

The printing press brought a different shock. Identical words, multiplied endlessly, unsettled centuries of authority built on scarcity and control. People feared heresy, misinformation, and the loss of trusted intermediaries. Literacy spread unevenly. Regulation lagged behind invention. And yet, once the dust settled, knowledge belonged to more people than ever before. Public discourse—messy, noisy, vital—was born.

Industrialization asked humans to relearn work itself. Machines didn’t just replace muscle; they redefined time. Clocks ruled lives. Cities grew faster than systems designed to protect the people who powered them. Fear followed—of accidents, exploitation, obsolescence. But so did labor laws, safety standards, and new ideas about rights and responsibility. The curve bent slowly, but it bent.

Even space exploration followed the same pattern. Leaving Earth wasn’t just a technical achievement. It was an existential one. Seeing our planet from orbit changed how we understood borders, fragility, and shared fate. Early failures were deadly. Political tensions ran high. But from that uncertainty came satellites, navigation systems, and weather forecasting. Today, those quiet technologies are woven so tightly into our daily lives that we forget they were once unimaginable.

The digital age repeated the pattern yet again. Invisible files. Disembodied conversations. A world “online” but nowhere in particular. We worried—rightly—about privacy, fraud, misinformation, and attention itself. Still, we learned. We adapted. We built guardrails, however imperfectly. Entire industries transformed, and daily life reshaped itself around screens and networks.

Seen this way, AI doesn’t stand apart from history. Instead it stands squarely within it. What feels different now is simply proximity. This time, the new tool touches something we assumed was uniquely ours: perception, judgment, cognition. No wonder the learning curve feels personal. No wonder I felt it standing there in my kitchen, staring at a hand mixer I thought I already knew.

The common denominator in every one of these moments isn’t the technology itself. It’s us. It’s our impatience, our hope, our tendency to expect the future to arrive fully baked, and our equally reliable ability to adapt once we slow down long enough to learn how to look again.

In reality, though, seeing clearly has always come with a price. But history suggests it also comes with a gift: the chance to notice what was already there—and to decide, deliberately, what to do next. With AI, that choice feels newly charged. The learning curve may follow a familiar pattern, but the pace does not. Our impatience is sharper. Our expectations louder. We want these systems to do more for us now—think better, decide faster, anticipate more—long before we’ve fully reckoned with what it means to share our cognitive space with machines.

Whether we name it or not, we are entering a moment of profound convergence. Tools no longer merely extend our hands; they begin to extend our judgment, our memory, our voice. This will unfold whether we welcome it or resist it. Choosing not to look will not slow it down. The real risk is not that we move too fast, but that we move forward without paying attention—without asking what is being gained, what is being lost, and who is being asked to adapt first.

And so I found myself back where I’d started—standing in my kitchen, my Meta AI glasses still resting on my nose, fruitcakes humming away in the oven, spice and brandy thick in the air. The mixer was wiped down. The spoon rests rinsed and set straight. Nothing dramatic had changed. The room was the same size. The work was the same work. But I was different, if only by a degree or two. Wearing something that asked me to see differently had taught me to pause before assuming I already knew what I was seeing.

That, I think, is what every learning curve ultimately asks of us. Not mastery on day one. Not perfection. But attention. A willingness to see more than we saw yesterday, and to accept that clarity often arrives before comfort—especially when the future is arriving faster than we expected.

As we enter the first full week of 2026, may we resist the urge to demand that the AI future hurry up and behave. May we recognize the wobble for what it is: not failure, but infancy. And may we remember that while we cannot stop this moment, we can choose how fully we inhabit it—eyes open, hands steady, and minds engaged.

Here’s to clearer sight, steadier hands, and the faith that, given time and care, we’ll learn how to use what AI offers us without surrendering what makes us human.

A Banner Year, Gently Told

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As this year draws to a close, I want to thank you for visiting my blog 32,727 times.

That didn’t happen overnight. And it didn’t happen by accident.

This year, more people found their way here than ever before—slowly, steadily, and often by returning. Compared with last year, readership grew significantly, not because anything went viral, but because the writing kept meeting the right readers at the right moment.

Growth, the quiet way,

These pages have held many things:

● 18th-century satire and present-day kitchens.
● Scholarship and softness.
● Books, biscuits, dogs, devotion, memory, love.

Some posts traveled far. Others found only a handful of readers. But every one was written with care—and read with attention.

I don’t think of these as clicks.

I think of them as moments of shared presence in a distracted world.

You made this a banner year.

If you were one of the 32,725:

● thank you for reading,
● thank you for lingering,
● thank you for making this a place worth returning to.

Here’s to a year shaped by patience, curiosity, and generosity of spirit—and to whatever quiet magic comes next.

Wired with wonder,
Brent

Poor Brentford Cleans the Wax Out of His Ears and Finds Meaning in the Noise and Music of Mistakes

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As 2025 comes to its close, Poor Brentford makes his last appearance of the year, offering a final benedictus and inviting us all to lean in, mishear boldly,
and sing in broken harmony “One Lane Zion.”

This is a true story. A confession, if you will. It’s the kind my mother used to make before coffee, after coffee, or frankly whenever the mood struck her to entertain herself and whoever else happened to be within earshot.

She’d sit at the Formica-topped, chrome-legged kitchen table, coffee cup in hand, her pinky raised just so, and say, perfectly straight-faced:

“When the Primitive Baptists sang ‘On Him I Can Depend,’ I was absolutely certain they were singing ‘On Him I candy pin.’”

Then she’d pause—just long enough to make you look up—and add:

“I always pictured the Lord wearing a peppermint-striped robe, a nice big bow, and candy pinned all over Him. It was a sweet, sweet comfort to my soul.”

That was my mother. She could turn blasphemy into blessing before breakfast.

I guess mishearing runs in the family. Maybe it all started with her. As I grew older and older, I swear on a stack of leather britches that everyone all over our little coal camp was mishearing things but making sense of them anyhow. Somehow.

When I was little, I guess I always thought everyone heard what I heard. I mean when our little congregation would launch into that grand old harvest hymn, I was sure as heck they were “Bringing in the sheep.” What else could they be bringing in? Say what? Sheaves? No way. We had sheep in the hollers of West Virginia. I had seen one or two, and I was certain that someone needed to do something with them especially when the cold Sheep’s Rain started to fall. It made perfect theological sense to me that the faithful would gather their flocks and present them to the Almighty before supper, or some hungry days, maybe even for supper.

But Lord have mercy. Wait ’til I tell you what my oldest sister swore she heard when the church sang “Oh, How I Love that Man of Galilee.” To this very day, she swears she thought they were praising Galileo. That works, too. Love is love, after all. I just hope she didn’t think that Jesus had a telescope and a strong interest in planetary motion. He didn’t, did He?

So there we were—a family of devout mishearers, certain our Creator managed sheep and celestial calculations all before breakfast.

Our unpainted cinderblock church sat in a dirt field without a sign or even a sign of grass right at the bottom of Pool Room Hill and by the time a hymn rhapsodied its way out the solitary window that someone painted-shut, it was anybody’s guess what the congregation was singing. The hymnals were worn thin, the pianist kept on keeping on with that clickety-clackety thing she did on the ivories, and half the folks sang from memory or eyesight blurred by coal dust and exhaustion.

Here’s an example as good as plenty. “I’ll Fly Away.” Poor Brentford’s dad who didn’t darken a church door in those days, swore what he heard it come up from below was loud and clear:

“I’ll Find a Way.”

Wouldn’t that make perfect sense for a coal miner like him to hear lyrics like that, especially in a coal camp where folks never expected wings anywhere except outside in the chicken coop or inside on a dinner plate. All they hoped for was a break in the company line, a way to keep supper on the table, and the roof patched till payday. Finding a way was its own kind of flight. And Lord knows he found a way.

But then came “In the Sweet By and By,” which Poor Brentford swore was “In the Sweet Buy and Buy.” He figured Heaven must have a company store too, just like the one in Ashland, only this one sold mercy by the pound and grace on credit. Maybe the angels might even mark the bill “Paid in Full,” but till then, you’d better keep your script handy.

One Sunday, right after his daddy got a payday and got back home from playing cards, he heard the choir swell into “Where Could I Go but to the Lord?” But land’s sake. What do you think reached that poor child’s ears? “Where Could I Go but to the Store?” It landed with hard conviction. In a camp where the store kept both your debts and your dinner, the line between salvation and supplies was never quite clear. He pictured the Lord behind the counter, apron dusted in flour, handing out hope with provisions and trusting somebody somewhere to settle up.

In places like that, meaning bent itself toward survival. Hymns, promises, even Heaven had to pass through the same filter as supper and credit—what will keep us going.

And then came the hymn that nearly undid him: “Holy, Holy, Holy.” No doubt Poor Brentford heard “Holey, holey, holey.” He saw it all: Heaven’s laundry line stretched across eternity, robes and socks waving in a golden breeze, each one worn clean through at the knees.

“Makes sense,” he thought. “If you’ve spent your life kneeling, you’ll come through the Pearly Gates with a few holes to show for it.”

Another time, the choir raised its voices for “There Is a Balm in Gilead.” The Cold War was heating up in his early ears and the green window shades were being pulled down every night to keep the Commies from seeing the riches inside all the rickety little houses in the coal camp, and Poor Brentford nearly dove under the pew, sure they were shouting a warning:

“There Is a Bomb in Gilead.”

He scanned the room for a coal mine to run to for safety and muttered, “Lord, if this is the rapture, it’s poorly timed.”

One song though, hit him so hard it nearly made him shut up. It was when he heard one of the church sisters in Christ singing a cappella as best she could but way off key, “Farther Along.” He heard it as “Father Alone.” For once, the mistake didn’t make him laugh. He saw in his mind a weary God sitting by Himself on a cloud, wondering why His children kept wandering off—singing the wrong words but meaning every one of them.

That was the first time mishearing didn’t feel like play. It felt like recognition.

Years later, long after the hymnal pages had crumbled and the ivories had browned, Poor Brentford decided that maybe he should go away, somewhere far away, and get the wax out of his ears and maybe get some schoolhouse so that he could understand things better. Sure enough. He did. You’d never guess what he discovered?

One day, without even looking for it, he stumbled onto a word for what they’d been doing all along. A real word.

Mondegreen.

Turns out it came from a Scottish ballad, where a poor lady was said to have “laid him on the green,” but someone heard it as “Lady Mondegreen.” Poof! Just like that, the misheard lady was granted immortality. Proof! Just like that, a wrong word, held long enough, can become its own kind of truth.

When Poor Brentford learned about that word he laughed out loud. He had been inventing Lady Mondegreens since the cradle and had gone on to fill his whole durn life with saints and shepherds who existed only in the wax between his ears.

And isn’t that just like all of us? The whole world hums along out of tune. You want more proof? Just take a gander at some pop songs:

Jimi Hendrix cried, “’Scuse me while I kiss the sky,” but half of America swore he said, “’Scuse me while I kiss this guy.”

Elton John pleaded, “Hold me closer, tiny dancer,” but we still see him clutching Tony Danza.

Creedence Clearwater Revival warned, “There’s a bad moon on the rise,” though to many of us it will forever be, “There’s a bathroom on the right.”

Poor Brentford’s verdict on ’em all?

“These all work fine. Kissin’, bathrooms, Tony Danza—whatever gets you through the verse.”

But here’s what caught him off guard. He realized the same muscle that bends words into comfort bends meaning too. We don’t just mishear lyrics; we reinterpret life until it sings in our key.

A miner hears “I’ll Find a Way.”

A child hears “In the Sweet Buy and Buy.”

A lonely church sister hears “Father Alone.”

Maybe that’s not error at all. Maybe it’s hope doing what hope does best—repairing what’s broken. Maybe that’s the thing about mishearing: sometimes, by pure accident, you stumble into truth. Because really, what’s faith if not a lifelong attempt to make sense of what we can’t quite hear?

We catch snatches. We fill in the blanks. We call it belief.

Of one thing, though, Poor Brentford is certain. The holey Holy doesn’t wholly mind. Maybe Heaven even keeps a special choir—the Mishearing Saints—singing merrily off-script but in tune with the heart.

Even now, I reckon meaning still passes through the same old filter—what helps us hold on, what helps us make it through the night.

So listen up. As 2026 trollops its way in, go on and clean the wax out of your own durn ears.

When you do, Lord knows what you’ll hear. Maybe you’ll find out why folks have been laughin’.

Happy New Ear.