Middle Season #15 - 2026

 

image, add daily notes

MS 15

1. Spring chorus 4:59 wakes me up
2. 5:29 2 HBs at once. First one threatened by second who perches for a bit before sipping
3. HB feeder constant like a McDonald’s drive through
4. HB sitting while slurping. Too tired to fly. Just drink
5. 4:06 stringing Cardinal, then sparrow and HB at once. 
6. A single feather is out of place on HV’s sleek coat while perching a bit by feeder for a moment
7. Crane flying over the 600 students in red in silhouette 
8. Several released balloons into the increasingly biting wind. 

Ingvar Kamprad, entrepreneur and founder of IKEA, on making mistakes:

“Only while sleeping one makes no mistakes. Making mistakes is the privilege of the active — of those who can correct their mistakes and put them right.”

Source: The Testament of a Furniture Dealer (1976).

Friday May 22

1. At McDonald’s Lillie’s are blooming
2. Along 294 there are areas of grasses in the field and the grasses have flown and there’s a purple Hayes near the seats
3. Several black birds with bluish head feathers
4. Red breasted, gross beak wobbling Vero eastern warbling Vero
5. Eastern phoebe. All of these on the island. 
6. The sound of the breeze in the cottonwood trees reminds me of water flowing
7. Great crested fly catcher. 
8. Geese in water with line of fuzzy babies. Not small. Football sized babies. 
9. Aerobatic Bird with white chest tan top blue on the shoulders flying back-and-forth along the rapid area on salt Creek
10. The salt Creek is at least 4 feet down based on where it overflows into the Bluff area flood plane
11. Baltimore Oreo, northern house Ren by shelter number seven
12. Two birds in camouflage with big lenses
13. Big bird being chased by two smaller birds followed by a couple minutes of Strnad Jay’s screaming
14. By the little creek pretty yellow iris. 3 main petals
15. The small two leaf of ephemeral is now turning yellow and brown in the forest floor
16. Snowy egret off hunting in middle of salt creek
17. Old man with two disabled middle-aged sons in bathroom with one of them sent the other one back to the car. He’s looking very old in the spring.
18. One flowered broomrape aka ghostpipe.  A parasitic forest plant. 

Sat may 23

1. 4:15. The half moon. Over the roofline. 45* up?
2. Tied up massively blooming wild blue indigo
3. Dogwood still blooming
4. Around town it’s lots of irises. 
5. Most of the radishes didn’t get fat in my garden box. And spinach is already bolting without getting large. 

Wednesday may 27

1. These tiny red leafed shrubs unloved and scraggly. Look handsome in this low 7:14 sunlight. The tops lit up. 
2. 7:26 starling bath time. 

Friday

1. Smell of new cedar fence. 
2. Pretty tiny Lillie’s in neighborhood 
3. Japanese lilac in Gilbert part filled with flowers
4. Lighter yellow maple. On Clausen. Making pretty leaf sounds. 
5. Chipmunk bucket
6. Blooming Wild ginger. 
7. In AM chipmunks won’t shut the ficknup. Alarms drill into head 
8. Birdsong ringing my headache. I close the windows. 

Saturday May 30

1. One of starlings sounds is like a car alarm. Another is Sonora like rhythmic single note. Another cycle — like turning over a drum filled with bingo cards. Another first two notes of a cat call. One is like that kids toy you blow in that must have a spinner inside. It revs up then down. Another is the sound of a rasp going over rough surface. 
2. Blue Jay calls 3x.  Pause. Returning call from South 1x. 
3. Robins at the beginning ripening service berry
4. Very red house finch pulls strands from Coconut hanging basket liner
5. HB has puffy ball on beak… struggles to get it off bc his sword is so long. Can’t drink bc of it. 
6. Brown edged dogwood petals strewn on front lawn
7. A lawn in DG that is almost completely filled with basswood/linden tree petals

Sunday May 31

1. One oak leaf hydrangea blossom is almost ready to open

Report on 3x10 #15 -2026

basement

garden

Dave's Dinner with Andre

Sue G's retirement party today.  20 teachers together making small talk which consists of two questions: how's your family and what are your summer plans.  This is when I hear that teacher X is doing a surprise trip for husband. Dropping kids at parent's summer home and flying to Stowe, Vermont, where several friends will be and she's ordered a chef to cook for them!  She's booked a beautiful house for the week.  Another recently retired teacher is flying back from Italy just in time to meet 5 other women at her second home in Tahoe.  Another teacher complains that teacher X's summer home in New Buffalo is bigger than her own second home in New Buffalo.  

How do you want people to see you?

At Henry's graduation from 8th grade, the (too long) speech from the principal talked about character and "how do you want people to see you"?  It's an interested way at getting speaking about how do you conceive of yourself.  

Gamify your intellectual life

 

threads person @erinmerylstudy shares the idea of gamifying your intellectual growth.  Aim for 10 points per day.

• reading 10 pages 2 pts 
• watching long form and intellectually - 1 pt
• reading academic paper - 1 pt
• writing 200 words - 2 pts
• explaining something you learned today to another person - 1 pt
• staying off phone 90 _ 30 1 pt
• staying off online 60 mins - 1 pt
• short form cardio - 1 pt
• 8 hours of sleep  -2 points

This reminds me of the profile many years ago of the New Mexico governor who had a point system of physical fitness.  It was based on The Dr. Kenneth Cooper Aerobic Points System is a fitness framework introduced in 1968 to quantify exercise by assigning numerical point values to activities based on their oxygen consumption and duration. The primary goal of the system is for an individual to earn a minimum of 30 aerobic points per week to achieve and maintain optimal cardiovascular health and a "training effect"

 Here's a chart for aerobic points from Cooper's book.  BTW and back is 6.5 points.  My normal pace for 2 mile walk in 30 mins is 5 points.

Novos Homo

  Novos Homo

from webster's 

new man : man newly ennobled : arriviste

Today, the phrase or its direct translation (new man, sometimes arriviste) is occasionally used in modern English to describe a newcomer to a particular elite social, political, or financial sphere who has achieved rapid success independent of their family background or pedigree.

from Oxford University Press

Novus homo (“new man”), term used in the late republic (and probably earlier) in various related senses: for the first man of a family to reach the senate, where he normally remained a “small senator” (BAfr. 57); in a special sense, for such a man actually to rise to the consulship; and (although in our sources less frequently) for the first man of a senatorial family to reach the consulship (e.g. Cic. Off. 1.138). The first of these achievements was not very difficult, provided a man had at least equestrian standing (see equites), some military or oratorical ability, and good connections. The last was also far from rare: it was in this way that the nobilitas was constantly reinvigorated. But few men rose from outside the senate to a consulship, and the most frequent use of the term in fact characterizes this unusual achievement. It took unusual merit and effort and either noble patronage (e.g. that of the Flacci for M. Porcius Cato (1)) or a public emergency, as in the cases of C. Marius (1) and Cicero.

Make people excited to see you

 from reddit, stumbled upon..

How To Make People Excited To See You

For the longest time I wanted to make friends, but not just normal friends. I wanted the kind that would run to hug me the second we spotted each other.

I wanted to make people excited to see me.

After a few years of practicing I achieved it, here’s my top 3 tips I use to achieve this consistently when I meet new people.

1. People are just mirrors, give them exactly what you want back.

I wanted people to be excited to see me, so when I met people I started with a simple smile.

The second time I saw them I recalled something funny that happened between us and got a bigger smile.

The third time I see them I’m basically grinning ear to ear.

Then they begin to reflect my happiness to see them back to me, until we’re both like, “HEY ITS YOU!”

Important note, start with gentle happiness. If you come out excited out the gate people will think it’s just you, not that you genuinely like them.

2. Don’t interrupt.

Nothing says, idgaf about you more than cutting someone off mid sentence.

When you meet people, ask things that genuinely make you curious.

Say: “Hey I’m curious how did you get into…how did you choose… why did you…”

Then actually listen to them.

This excites people because there’s few good listeners in the world.

3. Highlight similarities

When I meet people after I ask things I’m curious about, I will focus the conversation on what we share.

You like skydiving too?! My favorite place is over Honolulu, what’s yours?

Then people will feel like you naturally understand each other.

Sentences on Sonny Rollins* Why This Word?*

 

1. from NYT obituary.

Mr. Rollins came of age when a new kind of jazz known as bebop was in ascendance, and from the start his playing was suffused with bebop’s harmonic sophistication and rhythmic daring. To classify him as a bebopper, however, would be an oversimplification.

Over the years he flirted with the avant-garde, jazz-rock fusion and other styles. But with his ferocious energy, his penchant for playing the unexpected note at the unexpected moment, and his unusual sound — sometimes harsh and mocking, sometimes lush and romantic — he was ultimately unclassifiable.

Chat GPT:  If I were doing a recurring feature called "The Three Most Important Things About These Sentences," I'd focus on these:

1. Complexity Through Qualification

To classify him as a bebopper, however, would be an oversimplification.

Strong writers often resist easy labels. They make a claim and then complicate it.

You could teach students to watch for sentences that essentially say:

"Yes, but..."

"Partly, but..."

"At first glance, but..."

This move appears constantly in literary criticism and sophisticated argument.

---

2. Form Echoes Meaning

...playing the unexpected note at the unexpected moment...

The sentence doesn't merely tell us Rollins was surprising; it creates a small experience of surprise through repetition and rhythm.

This is one of the deepest lessons in AP Lit:

How something is said contributes to what is said.

Students spend years hunting for themes and symbols. Often they need more practice noticing that syntax, repetition, sound, and structure can embody an idea.

---

3. Contradiction Creates Depth

sometimes harsh and mocking, sometimes lush and romantic

The obituary writer could have chosen one side and given us a neat picture of Rollins.

Instead, the writer preserves the contradiction.

Great characterization often sounds like:

• arrogant and insecure

• cruel and tender

• detached and desperate

• practical and idealistic

The more interesting a person is, the less likely one adjective will suffice.

---

What I particularly like about these three is that they correspond to three habits of sophisticated thinking:

Writer's Move	Habit of Mind
Qualification	Complexity
Form echoes meaning	Attention
Contradiction	Nuance

Those are arguably three of the central intellectual habits AP Lit is trying to cultivate.

You could even make this a recurring classroom routine. Every week, bring in a sentence or two—from an obituary, sports article, essay, novel, review, speech—and ask:

Why This Word?*

Why This Word?

Original Sentence:

Mr. Rollins came of age when a new kind of jazz known as bebop was in ascendance, and from the start his playing was suffused with bebop's harmonic sophistication and rhythmic daring.

Word:
suffused

Dictionary Definition (Merriam-Webster):
"To spread over or through in the manner of fluid or light."

Etymology Note:
From Latin roots meaning "to pour underneath or spread through." The word often suggests something gradually permeating an entire thing.

Near Synonym(s):
filled, infused, influenced

What's Different and Why It Matters:
Filled would simply mean bebop was present in Rollins's music. Suffused suggests that bebop's qualities spread through every part of his playing. The word helps us see bebop as a deep influence that permeated his music rather than a category that completely defined him.

On Sovereignty and the Refusal of the Living Death: 10 TILF about George Bataille

 Claude summarizes a discussion about George Bataille.

10 Things You Should Know About Georges Bataille

1. He invented a godless mysticism. Bataille believed the ecstatic, dissolving experiences mystics describe are real — but God is not their source or destination. The experience is available to us; the theology is not required.
2. Everything he wrote is a war against "the project." The project is the subordination of the present moment to a future goal. Work, saving, planning, even most spiritual practice — all corrupted by instrumentality. Bataille's entire philosophy is a revolt against this.
3. Sovereignty is his central idea. Sovereign moments — laughter, eroticism, poetry, sacrifice, festivity — are ends in themselves. They serve nothing, go nowhere, and cannot be justified. That is precisely their value.
4. Sovereign experience undoes you rather than fulfills you. This is not authenticity or true selfhood. It is temporary self-dissolution — the bounded, defended self briefly comes apart. You are not enriched. You are emptied.
5. You cannot engineer sovereignty. The moment you pursue it as a goal, you have already lost it. It can only be received. The most you can do is cultivate openness — which is why he is suspicious of meditation, ritual, and technique, while quietly acknowledging their necessity.
6. He replaces Nietzsche's will to power with the will to chance. Not the mastery of contingency but its radical embrace. To will chance is to open yourself fully to what cannot be controlled, predicted, or possessed.
7. A life without sovereign moments is a living death. Pure servility — existence entirely subordinated to function and utility — is for Bataille the quiet catastrophe of modern life. Festivity, eroticism, poetry, and even intoxication are not luxuries. They are necessary expenditures.
8. He and Gabriel Marcel are closer than they appear. Both diagnose the same illness — the closed, armored, project-driven self — and prescribe the same medicine: permeability, openness, availability. But where Marcel's openness orients toward God and the irreducible other, Bataille's opens onto groundlessness and the void.
9. His writing enacts his philosophy. The fragmentary, contradictory, unfinished quality of his books is not a flaw. Systematic philosophy is itself a form of the project. His prose keeps the wound open deliberately.
10. The question he leaves you with is simple and devastating. Is your life organized around accumulation and function — or does it make room for moments that consume without return? Not as a program. Just as an honest inventory.

Georges Bataille — Inner Experience & Sovereignty

Bataille's central project is a godless mysticism — the recovery of ecstatic, dissolving experience without theological justification. Against the modern world's subordination of everything to utility and future goals (what he calls the project), he posits sovereignty: moments that are ends in themselves, serving nothing, going nowhere.

Sovereign moments share a common structure:

• They involve a loss of the bounded self — you are temporarily undone
• They are non-instrumental — they cannot be pursued as goals without being destroyed
• They are excessive — something overflows the container of ordinary life
• They are contagious — shared between people at the level of bodies, not meanings

Examples: laughter, eroticism, poetry, sacrifice, festivity, weeping, intoxication.

The opposite of sovereignty is servility — a life in which everything is subordinated to something else. A life without sovereign moments is, for Bataille, a kind of living death.

He draws on Nietzsche, but replaces "will to power" with will to chance — not the mastery of contingency but its radical embrace. To will chance is to open yourself to what cannot be controlled, predicted, or possessed.

Structurally, Bataille and Gabriel Marcel share a diagnosis: the closed, armored, project-driven self is the disease. Both prescribe permeability — Marcel's disponibilité, Bataille's sovereign openness. But where Marcel's openness orients toward God and the other as thou, Bataille's opens onto groundlessness and the void. Marcel flinches at the last step; Bataille insists there is no last step to take.

The cure, for both, is the same. What lies on the other side of it is everything.

Don't Let That Horse . . . by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

 

Marc Chagall "Equestrienne" link

Don’t Let That Horse . . .

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Don’t let that horse
                              eat that violin

    cried Chagall’s mother

                                     But he   
                      kept right on
                                     painting

And became famous

And kept on painting
                              The Horse With Violin In Mouth

And when he finally finished it
he jumped up upon the horse
                                        and rode away   
          waving the violin

And then with a low bow gave it
to the first naked nude he ran across


And there were no strings   
                                     attached

Middle Season #14 - 2026

 

just opened driveway lily, pale blue wild hyacinth  in Bemis forest floor all over, clematis blooms loudly by end of this MS, wild blue indigo in the front landscape.

MS 14

Monday May 11

1. Cardinal eating from garbage can 
2. Another poppy opened. Some petals from first open one strewn in dirt
3. Watched mom and dad starling looking in front yard for stuff to feed chicks
4. Small crescent moon to south on my ride to school
5. Nothings briefer than the smell of lilacs while riding your bike downhill
6. Watered all the garden seeds. Garden is full now. 

Tuesday May 12

1. Sounds coming in at upstairs bathroom window. Hungry starling chicks. Cardinal. Geese. 
2. Starling looking in a new yard for food for chicks?  Do they have a schedule?
3. Strange flight of bird down a downtown street away from me. Pale. White. Hawk?
4. Horaecheatnuts still blooming
5. Coming to the end of tulip season. Tulip time. Poppy time now. 
6. First colors showing at the tops of bulging peonie blossom balls. 
7. Hummingbirds in action at 8:07 PM
8. RWB greets me as I ride in to the school driveway. Old car horn sound. Rising and falling crunchy octaves
9. Another poppy opens this morning. Contrast of new bright and old bloom. From Friday! That’s haggard. Short lived and beautiful for a short time. Then it gets to work. 
10. Lawn under silver maple on 58th st filled with standing up helicopters. 
11. Archery practice set up at school
12. Lilacs now just bushes. Shrubs. Lilac left some brown dried flowers.
13. Oak trees along grant st showing me their pale backsides. 

Wednesday May 13

1. AJ Jacobs. https://experimentalliving.substack.com/
2. 3 suspicious looking squirrels by neighbors front porch
3. 3 sets of newly married ducks in suburban front yards. 
4. 3 robins hunting doggedly along lunchtime walk path
5. JG tells me she saw brunch involving CCL and she’s got a cast on her leg/foot. Or boot?

Thursday May 14

1. 5:59 hummingbird visiting feeder
2. Season of irises. Not just purple but yellow and pastel tan
3. Flowering tree on 294 bridge. White blossoms. Maybe a kind of fat leafed locust?
4. Messy bird nest under the solar panel
5. More scent clouds of lilac on bike ride from school. 
6. 7:45 pm.  Bird bath like a drive through: red house finch, sparrrow couple, starling with characteristic way for dipping body back to swallow. 
7. Front poppy opens!  First time!
8. Dusk at 8:07. Hummingbird. Then Cardinal. 
9. From silver maple. New cheapings from a newly hatched unseen nest. 
10. Wild blue indigo now showing blue in front garden beds. 

Friday

1. Barely enough light to see first hummingbird visit at 5:26
2. Every day a new poppy blooms
3. Last of standingvmilkweed casing. Handsomely designed. 
4. 3 hawks at school. Over stoplight. Strange to see 3 in a group
5. Carolina wren in Bemis. Baltimore oriole red headed woodpecker several warblers
6. Tennessee warbler red eyes vireo 
7. First flash and song of scarlet tanager
8. Lots of pretty stands of pale blue wild hyacinth with yellow flowers. These have spread a lot since the forest preserve took out all the junk trees
9. Fireplace clematis blooms
10. Recalling that there are “regular places” in Bemis for did kinds of birds - wrens in the forest edge, orioles by the southern end of the go ape, tanagers to the s of the creek by wolf road. 

Saturday 

1. Hummingbird at raspberry bushes
2. Quietly the tulip stems are drying thinning
3. House finch comes for
4. Water while I’m reading on patio
5. Starling chicks are sounding like birds now… when mom leaves the nest she is rasping and goes to a branch for a rest
6. First radish tonigh

Sunday May 17

1. Front yard 2 tiny 3”? poppy open to join his friends. This stem had been looking yellow and thin. I watered over last couple days. 
2. Hummingbird at 5:28
3. All 3 clematis boooming. The one on the fence a beautiful blue  color and big. And exuberant 
4. First peonies open in neighborhood. Many are still tight. 
5. Flowering black locust with bigger leaves than my locust. Flowering profusely some with pink purple and some white. (Like one in park)
6. Compost pile an infinite source of dirt this spring. I take two more 5 gal buckets. 

Monday may 18

1. HB 5:32. Cardinal 5:46
2. HB repeatedly constantly at 4:30
3. Baby bird on driveway. Google lens says a common starling 
4. The new poppies in front yard got pummeled by the thunderstorms today and the orange petals are on the ground. 

Tuesday May 19 

1. Loud dawn chorus at 5:15
2. Daisies blooming along 294 seen from bridge
3. Large fields of clover in spring rock park
4. Black locust blooming strongly , scent included, on the other side of the 294 bridge. 
5. Iris by driveway blooming purply. 
6. So many ant corpses lined up in the HB feeder. 
7. HB at 8:04. 

Wednesday May 20

1. Viburnum blooming
2. Ninebark blooming
3. Backyard clematis fully blooming
4. Starlings above driveway still growing b talking 
5. Red necked green backed HB at 8:11 drinking from. Multiple plastic flowers