On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year

 A decade or so ago, when this blog was in its relative infancy, I remember reading through some collection of Lord Byron's poetry and being reminded of the existence of one piece entitled (or sub-titled, in some editions): "On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year." 

The thought briefly occurred to me: "Someday, when I turn thirty-six, I should use this line as a title for a post." 

Year of Blood and Madness

 Now that we have reached the last day of 2025, more than one person is commenting on what a truly awful year it was. And indeed, stepping back and beholding the entire thing in retrospect, it is plain just how rotten it was from the standpoint of the human spirit. We can see this most clearly by comparing how things stood a year ago with where they stand today. 

This time, a year ago, 150 innocent people had not yet been abducted from their homes and deported—in violation of a U.S. court order—to a secret torture prison in El Salvador. The man who masterminded this atrocity and willfully chose to breach court orders had not yet been rewarded for his efforts with a lifetime appointment as a federal circuit judge. 

Year Zero

 Eight years ago, I posted a far-from ebullient "Toast for Inauguration Day 2017." It featured a quote from the poems of Anna Akhmatova that I thought was particularly apropos for the occasion of Trump's first installation as president. I drink to our demolished house,/ the poem reads, To all this wickedness/ The coarse, brutal world, the fact/ That God has not saved us. (D.M. Thomas trans.)

At the time, I hoped there would never be an occasion to quote the poem a second time—at least not on the day of a second Trump inauguration. And when Trump went on to lose the next election, it seemed we would indeed be spared that fate. Yet, eight years later, here we are. Trump Inauguration 2.0. So, I offer the same toast again—to the wickedness, the brutality, and the repeat failure of divine intervention. 

In Quotes: Talking Turkey After Four Years

"Twas just this time, last year, I died," quoth the bird, accusatorially (citing Dickinson -- more on this practice below) -- for indeed, the third anniversary of Six Foot Turkey came the previous June and went, I fear, unremarked by me, such that it feels almost as if it might never have happened. And it seems in some way that its spirit did evacuate this mortal realm on that occasion, and hasn't been with us since. The blog has ceased, especially in recent months, to be the primary creative outlet in my life and has become a kind of mausoleum of poems and repostings that didn't have a logical -- or decorous -- home in the pulpit but that I wanted to stick somewhere, since I'd gone to the trouble to write them.

The Turkey Turned Two And We Didn't Celebrate (What Kind of Parent Am I?)

I know, I know-- and I can't even pretend that I forgot the poor bird's birthday. No, the two-year June anniversary of this blog's creation passed by with my full and guilty cognizance that I was letting it go unacknowledged. I offer the following as explanation, if it does not quite pass as an excuse: I felt I could only permit myself the distinctive pleasure of the anniversary post if I was in the mood for self-congratulation, and while such a requirement did not prove any barrier last year, when this blog and I still had a love that sprang eternal, this year the June anniversary arrived at the end of the bleakest period in this blog's young history, and I didn't feel I had it in me at that moment to celebrate its life. This post tells the story of how that came to be. It thus takes you behind the scenes of the weekly production of this not-so-well-known blog.

The Turkey Turns One

This week marks the one year anniversary of the first post on this blog, and I figure a year's worth of weekly posts is enough to earn me the reward of the following entirely self-indulgent exercise, in which I talk about the story of this blog up to this point rather than anything that's happening in the outside world-- assuming, of course, that this isn't essentially what I do in every post on this blog, but more on that later.