September 19, 2026

Dateline – Seattle, Washington

The weather has clouded over and cooled off which is just fine with me. I’ve live in warmer climates than the one I grew up in for almost all of the last fifty years and I still don’t do heat well. I don’t mind it in the tropics with a beach or a pool constantly at hand but in ordinary daily city living or sightseeing, lets keep it under 75 degrees please. Of course, climate change is not my friend when it comes to that particular desire. The only consolation is that it’s getting easier and easier to grow tropical climate vegetation on my back deck. Mandevilla in particular is very happy out there.

I finished up with what I was interested in attending of the GLMA annual conference yesterday. (There was more today but I figured the ten hours of CME I’m garnering should be enough to put me over the top for 2026 so I was a slug this morning rather than heading out for the light rail after breakfast). I’m glad I went to get a sense of the intersection of the medical profession and the modern LGBTQ community. I’ll never go again as it was enough to reinforce that I have become a dinosaur in terms of modern American healthcare and its debates. Forty-two plus years in and it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the world I was built by and trained for is now ancient history and that the field belongs to a new generation. I know folk that continue to practice from their twenties through their eighties but they must do it by walling themselves off in their own little world. I think retiring and remaining part of the world at large rather than trying to maintain an ever shrinking world in stasis is a wiser course.

Last night was family dinner at my sister’s house. She lives in a turn of the last century fisherman’s bungalow in Ballard where she has been for about thirty-five years. She has created a small urban paradise in her garden which is dominated by an enormous sequoia that someone planted a century or so ago when the house was new and which is now about a hundred feet tall, creating a shade garden around her patio and koi pond. Every time I’m in it, I can’t help but reflect on two parties that were held there. One was my fiftieth birthday which Tommy put together and one, two years later, was our wedding reception after our legal marriage at the King County Courthouse. Being back there with her ferns and her flowering shrubs is always a little bittersweet.

Pretty much the whole immediate family turned out for dinner – father, brother and sister-in-law, both nieces, sister. My sister’s partner being the only one missing as it was Friday night during football season and he manages a sports bar. The extended family includes my uncle, various cousins, and some in-law connections but we generally only get the entire gang together on major holidays as it can be quite the houseful. Everyone appears to be well and we spent the time in a combination of bemoaning the state of the country, remeniscing about years ago, discussing recent books, movies and TV, and catching up on what everyone has been up to recently. Both nieces are now through the majority of their education and into the workforce. Bella, the elder, is a high school physics teacher in the Seattle Public School system and Iris, the younger, is an urban horticulturist working on some sort of additional certifications. I remain here for another couple of days. We may get together again. We may not. They know where I am.

I was gratified to see the population of DMV rallying around the Kennedy Center yesterday, venting their displeasure at Trump’s treatment of the memorial. It’s purely performative and doesn’t really accomplish a whole lot but it does give some nice visuals and soundbites. The whole Kennedy Center fiasco is a microcosm of how Trump has always conducted business, political or otherwise. Barge in and take something over, ensure conditions that will worsen the situation, loudly announce himself as the only possible solution, extract anything of value and then quietly withdraw and let the entity collaspe into bankruptcy or worse.

Given the way our government actually functions, street demonstrations don’t do a lot. As our system ensures that the person or entity that gets 50.000001% of the vote takes all the marbles, it tends to encourage two factions, of roughly equal size, which will continually tussle over the money and the power that comes with an electoral win. Sometimes one will be in the ascendancy, sometimes the other, and the names and identities of the factions will evolve over time but there will always end up being two because of that majority thing and no proportional representation as exists in many other democratic systems. There are really only two ways to affect the outcome and change what’s going on. The first is to turn out those who will more likely vote your way and get a majority of the electorate to vote. (This only tends to happen in presidential elections and even then the turnout is usually only about 62-67%). The other is, unfortunately, to put money into the system on your side given that the system in general now responds to money and not to the needs of the electorate. (Thank you SCOTUS).

If everyone who was at the Kennedy Center went home and wrote a check to a progressive candidate of their choice and made sure, on election day, that one other person who might not make it to the polls, was able to be there, it would do a lot more to push the needle against Trump than anything else. I have no idea how the midterms are going to turn out. The mood of the country is definitely against the administration and the Republican party but there’s a lot of room for manipulation and, as we have seen, there’s little in terms of norms or rules that the current administration isn’t willing to blithely ignore in order to get what they want. Most people vote their wallet ‘(It’s the economy stupid’ being the catchphrase that helped get Bill Clinton elected) and we’re heading for a perfect storm of misery given the failed military adventures in the Middle East leading to spiking fuel prices. People are having trouble filling their tanks and, more importantly, the huge spike in diesel prices is going to lead towards inflation as most of our food and consumer goods require diesel trucks at some point on their route to the Wal-Mart near you..

I’ve got lots of other things I could write about but I’m not right now. Going to get ready to go out to dinner and a show with one of my oldest friends and theatrical partners in crime.