That's one way to look at it. Another is "my dumb kid is gettin' into Harvard!!"

Periodically, I'll see this couple pop up on Instagram doing these very stripped down covers of 70s songs ("Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", "Rich Girl", "Movin' Out") with great harmonies. Just last week I saw one again and it actually prompted me to see if I could find any full versions on YouTube Music. Then, Monday, I got an ad for the couple doing a show in NYC. I've never been a huge fan of live music, but I've been more isolated than usual lately, so I clicked through and found the venue was two blocks from my apartment and tickets were all of $20.

I still went back and forth on it, but eventually bought a ticket. Went last night (the couple's band's name is Wendlo) and it was nice. I actually liked the opener even better than the main event. A solo singer-songwriter, Georgia Parker. Didn't get any videos of her, but I really loved the song she opened with: Pit Stop. Sort of stung hearing it; there's a line: "I met someone new he is kinder than you are / But that isn't that hard to do" which I don't like to imagine people I've known justly saying about me.

Full disclosure: this post is largely just to test my improved video upload tools which should also send the video to my Bluesky and Mastodon accounts...

Anyone else read the first sentence and assume it was a Trump quote re: selective service?

I signed up in the last 24 hours, so doing my bit to offset the -921!

When I first built this site, it was an attempt to make something that could be my own personal facebook / instagram / twitter site that I was in complete control of. I even downloaded all of my Facebook and Instagram posts at the time and imported them since the main thing that kept me on Facebook at the time was the "memories" feature.

Later on, I imagined maybe I could build it in such a way that other people could download and host it and add their own name and bio and pictrue, etc... and quickly have their own personal social media.

Then, I imagined that maybe I could give these different sites the ability to connect to one another via some central registry, allowing them to see other sites' posts on their own, and like and share and comment, etc... without ever leaving their own personal domain. But ultimately, social media is only ever as successful as the number of people you know on it, and setting up your own site and hosting it was never going to attract many people.

A couple of years ago, a service called Mastodon came into existence, which had a similar premise. You host your own account (or use one of many, many sites out there, eg. https://mastodon.social) and it can be viewed, liked, etc... by any other Mastodon account.

For a hot minute, when Elon Musk was buying Twitter, it seemed like it might take off, but ultimately I think it was just too confusing for it to ever be mass-adopted.

At any rate, on a whim, I refactored this site to integrate with Mastodon, so if I create a post (like this one), it displays here like it always has, but also publishes to Mastodon (in places like this: https://mastodon.social/@patrick@pg.mccullo.ug) and I have a feed (visible only to me) of other Mastodon users I follow. Unfortunately, right now it's just the creator and a bot that spits out Mastodon stats and analytics. I couldn't find anyone else that seemed very interesting. I got excited to find Stephen Fry, but his last post is from 2023. But it's been a fun distraction from the lingering ache of a breakup...

If you have ever had a conversation of any length at all with me, you know that my father was killed in the Oklahoma City Bombing when I was ten. My line is that I like to lead with that so I can generate sympathy to offset an alienating personality.

It's a good line, and I think it is funny and charming and endearing to people with whom I never develop more than a peripheral relationship, which is almost everyone. But there are a few people in the world who probably do not find it funny.

The truth is that I love having a dead father. He is with me wherever I go. I can talk to him whenever I like, and he always tells me exactly what I want to hear. He asks nothing of me. We never argue. It's for this reason that I've always agreed with the line someone once said: "Tell me what you think of your father and I'll tell you what you think of God."

This is important because I work from home so days will sometimes pass without any in-person human interaction. But I talk aloud endlessly. To God, to Dad, to myself.

For about three years after my marriage ended I dated a schizophrenic. But really, we dated for two months, then she broke up with me based on something to do with the CIA. A few months later she reached out, apologized, and asked for another chance. We met up another time or two, then again, some delusion forced her to call it off. Maybe a year passed and the same thing happened.

When we were actually together, I typically wasn't very happy. She would go into the bathroom and scream at herself, or often just sit crying. But in the gaps when we weren't actually communicating, it was one of the best romantic relationships I've ever had. I figured we would probably see each other again which removed the rare urge to find someone. I already had the box checked. I had a girlfriend like I had a father.

The reason I'm writing all this out is because eventually, this past September, on a whim, I decided to try to find someone. The only reason was because a friend took a picture in which I thought I looked sort of handsome and figured maybe a girl would think so too. So I made a dating app profile and met someone and within a week was certain I'd be with them forever.

I don't have the emotional capacity to rehash everything that happened, but a couple of weeks ago after a few lesser abortive efforts, I finally managed to sabotage it entirely.

Now I'm back in that comfortable solitude, hoping to never venture out again. Surrounded by imaginary friends and family who never require consideration or compromise; able to love anyone purely and wholly, provided they are never around.

I play hangman with Sammy in the church bulletin during services. This is one he made for me yesterday which am keeping on my desk as another work week begins.

Have had a miserable couple weeks; all of it (as always) first-world problems that gnaw at me until I manufacture genuine crises. Then, having it out of my system, I crawl gradually back into the quiet life of dull daily habits which I remind myself is a life 99% of the world would swap for.

In the midst of the crawl-back, I reluctantly return to a daily Bible reading. Of course I know it's critical. Of course I know it's the answer. But I never think I'll get anything from it, especially since my current reading plan is a survey of minor prophets.

Just the same, I picked back up today and it was the Book of Jonah, which every kid who ever spent a day in Sunday School knows since he got eaten by a fish or a whale or something. But that's really a pretty minor detail.

The real story is that God tells him to go save a group of people he hates and he tries his best not to. When left with no choice, he (sort of) does what God tells him to do, it works, and Jonah is incensed because he does not want them to be forgiven; they don't deserve it.

Ultimately God tries to give Jonah an illustration by providing him shade from the sun then killing the thing that provides the shade. Jonah is upset and God asks essentially whether he should care about the loss of the thing shading him more than a group of people who did not know any better than to be the sort of people Jonah hated.

It's a nice lesson about having compassion for enemies, but I've never really struggled with that. I forgive everyone everything because:

1) I tend to avoid situations where anyone could wrong me, and
2) I don't think I have sufficient value that it would be anything other than absurdly self-important to hold a grudge.

But this morning, I saw the story through the prism of when the enemy is yourself.

I could go on, and I usually do, but I'd just encourage you to read it (the Book of Jonah has only four, very short, books--maybe a ten minute read).

I'll only say that God does not need our guilt or our judgment, He needs our obedience. And even that, He can wait on. Nearly every action of Jonah's is disobedient in this book. And in a sense he recognizes it, and believes that God's just response should be to kill him. He has himself thrown into the sea, and eventually commands God to just kill him outright.

But his justice is not God's. And ultimately, he is left with a much greater challenge: to accept God's compassion.

For me at least, that feels easy to do unto others, but when I see myself as the wicked people undeserving, and also myself as the person demanding divine punishment, I find the real challenge.

The thing that comforted me most is in the last verse when God asks why he should not spare a city full of people who "cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand".

When I hate myself, I think I ascribe a certain importance. It reminds me of crying once when I was very little when my dad opened a present that had been labelled as coming from me, when in fact I hadn't done anything to help getting it. I didn't even know what it was. As a father now, I know that sort of response from my child would make me sad.

Today too, though I consider myself a wise, mature person much more culpable in his sins, I believe that I am still, in God's eyes, a child who "cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand".

I need to update this antiquated site to make it easier to share TikTok / Instagram / YouTube videos, but who has the time?

As a kid, I used to be much more interested in publicizing myself than creating any work worth publicizing (eg. in high school, my friend and I decided to make an independent film, and our first order of business was making film-branded t-shirts).

Getting older and looking back on it, I felt so embarrassed, I swung the other way and worked on things and never told anyone about them.

But now, I'm trying to land somewhere in the middle, and in the midst of a constantly shifting publishing-ecosystem, I figure its worth taking advantage of the egalitarian entry point of social media, so I've (cynically) started a series of mini-videos snarkily reviewing the first lines of novels.

Hopefully I can build up some kernel of literate followers that might make it easier to pitch myself to publishers.

You can check out the first entry in the series (Reviewing the opening lines of novels) at:

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@pgmccullough/video/7536000328789921054

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNEuSITRAp6/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/00ZtWDz94j8

Would appreciate any TikTok followers...