No-Travel January

While other people were experimenting with "Dry January" last month I had a different form of abstinence: No-Travel January. It wasn't planned, though. In fact it was the opposite of planned. It happened because I made no plans. Well, that and Hawk being sick for pretty much the entire month. 😖

I'm defining travel here as staying overnight somewhere. Occasionally I'll give a pass to a day-trip if it's far enough afield, like if we drive 250+ miles round-trip. The farthest from home I managed in January was driving to meet friends for dinner one evening in San Francisco. That's not quite 40 miles each way. The rest of the month I stayed within 10-15 miles of home.

Having a no-travel month is weird for me. Sure, I had a lot of them during the Coronavirus pandemic. But that's hopefully a once-in-a-lifetime ordeal. Prior to this January the last no-travel month I had was March 2024. And that was partly because Hawk and I were saving our energy for a two-week trip to New Zealand in April.

I wish I had plans like that on the books right now. Alas, we haven't planned anything big. All we've got is stretching an upcoming business trip of mine to Las Vegas into a long weekend afterward. At least that's something. It won't be a No-Travel February.

Primary Every Democrat

I saw an interesting essay in my newsfeed yesterday, Primary Every Democrat. Written by former national political reporter Meredith Shiner and published in The New Republic, it distills my frustration about our most senior/most powerful elected Democratic party politicians: they so completely fail to understand the political and media landscape of 2025— or 2015, for that matter— that they're unable to offer any meaningful check against the Constitutional crisis President Trump has created in just his first two weeks in office as he and his cronies engage in rampant illegal behavior burning down government agencies.

The threat of primarying a politician, verb-ing the institution primary elections, is no stranger to Republicans. Donald Trump and the MAGA movement have been primarying mainstream GOPers for years, pushing them to the extreme right or replacing them with extremists in cases where candidates tried to hold on to their scruples of recognizing factual reality and the rule of law. Even now the threat of being primaried keeps the congressional Republicans in line. Trump controls most of the GOP fundraising; and his henchman Elon Musk spent an estimated $250 million of his own money in just the final months of the last election cycle to help elect him. What's a quarter of a billion dollars to the literal World's Richest Man?

Now we Democrats need to do it, too. Primarying, that is. Republicans have shown us they treat modern politics as a knife fight. We Dems have too many leaders who are still playing Pat-a-cake. We need to push out of the way every complacent fossil who still politics like it's 1992. They're failing to represent us anymore.