SubscribeStar Saturday: Ankle Break

4 November 20233 November 2023 The Portly Politico3 Comments

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive. To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more. For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

On Monday, 30 October 2023, I suffered a very bad fall in my laundry/mudroom. I had an infestation of these little tiny beetles that are, fortunately, harmless; however, I wanted to get rid of them. To that end, I sprayed a lemongrass indoor insecticide liberally throughout the laundry room.

Well, it worked: it killed the bugs—and it nearly killed me! I missed a spot when stepping into the room to take out Murphy, and fell hard onto the concrete floor.

At the time, I just thought it was a bad sprain, as I was able to hobble around well enough. I iced my ankle and elevated it on some pillows on my bed, and struggled throughout a night of pain.

Well, after spending Halloween walking around on my hobbled foot—and borrowing first some crutches and then a cane from colleagues—my foot seemed to get worse. By Wednesday morning, it was clear I needed to see an orthopedist.

Right after the Fall

Another Angle

Stubbed (Broken?) Toe

Halloween Night

Purple!

Well, it turns out I had a broken ankle.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Spooktacular 2023 Preparations

28 October 202327 October 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Yours portly is knee-deep in preparations for the annual Spooktacular, which kicks off tonight at 6 PM. The Spooktacular has become a hotly anticipated event, and while I’ve failed at a number of enterprises lately, the Spooktacular is a marquee event that my students and their families enjoy.

As a longtime dilettante and fulltime slob, I’m not the best housekeeper. My energies are expended on other endeavors, like this blog, my teaching, and my private lessons. The last thing I want to do after a long day of mind-molding is clean the toilet or vacuum the carpet.

My parents’ and grandparents’ generations were neat freaks. They’d scrub the baseboards with toothbrushes and risk their lives to second-story windows. I scrub so poorly, my dentist regularly warns me about gingivitis.

But even I succumb to the overwhelming sense of shame that comes from having company over in an unkempt house, and as I want these people to keep giving me money to touch their kids—and as I hope to avoid my father’s dismayed disapproval at my dirty baseboards—the Spooktacular forces me to deep clean.

I’ve been doing a lot of it lately.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: SC Bigfoot Festival 2023

21 October 202320 October 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Last Saturday I attended the South Carolina Bigfoot Festival in Westminster, South Carolina. The festival is in its fourth year, and it was a bustling, fun event—a good model for how small town festivals should be.

There were some hiccups over the summer, with vendor packets (my own included) getting lost in the mail and the festival’s website disappearing for a couple of weeks. The event organizers weren’t responding to e-mails, and I thought for awhile that maybe the whole thing had been shuttered.

Fortunately, that was not the case, and the festival organizers got everything working again. I paid my vendor fee using some Discover Card cashback, and went up to Westminster after school on Friday, 13 October 2023 (spooky!).

My neighbors went up ahead of me, on Thursday, 12 October 2023, and picked up my vendor packet for me during the day Friday. We stayed in adjacent campsites at Chau-Ram County Park, a beautiful park near waterfalls—and just $25 a night!

I made a critical error, however: I should have taken off last Friday. Because I was unable to attend the festival Friday, the vendor organizer put me down a little side street. I was super close to the main strip, but just far enough away that most folks didn’t even realize my tent was there.

Needless to say, it was not a strong sale’s day. Indeed, I only sold one painting, to a sweet little girl who loves the Loch Ness monster. She purchased a painting I’d done of a strange aquatic animal, which she liked because it resembled Nessie.

I shared my vendor spot with the wife my neighbor’s family, and she was selling really cool crochet hats. I figured she’d do a killing, as the hats were really well done, but she did not make a single sale.

In that regard, the festival was a disappointment. As for the festival itself, though, it was an absolute blast.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: The Hamster Wheel of Productivity

14 October 202313 October 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Americans are obsessed with productivity. Our entire ethos—a witch’s brew of the Puritan/Protestant work ethic and a form of capitalism that sends the message that a person’s value is linked to their ability to produce something(s) that other people will buy—screams that if we aren’t doing something, we’re nothing.

My older brother has covered this topic much better on his Substack, The Highlight Zone, but I wanted to tackle it here. His piece largely examines the curse of productivity from the academic’s perspective, but I suspect its specter haunts us in every facet of our lives.

Before getting to the bulk of my thoughts on this topic, I’ll share another source, from the YouTuber Horses:

Horses and my older brother are socialists of some degree or another. I am not—strenuously not. But if conservatives want to win hearts and minds, we should probably listen to the legitimate concerns our ideological opponents are making, because they are diagnosing and addressing a real problem. Their solutions might not work—they may even be abhorrent—and I suspect no change in the form of government, no tweaking of government policy, will solve the problem, because it’s not a problem of government policy, or even economic policy.

Rather, it’s a problem of the heart, of the soul, of the mind, of the culture. I doubt there is any one solution to this cult of productivity—this worship of the pagan goddess Efficiency.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Pee Dee State Farmers Market Plant & Flower Festival

7 October 20235 October 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Festival season continues apace; ergo, my reviews/travelogues/retrospectives/self-indulgent recaps of said festivals roll on as well. If my use of the word “ergo” hasn’t turned your stomach, read on.

Last Saturday, 30 September 2023 I attended the Pee Dee State Farmers Market, which was hosting its annual Plant & Flower Festival. I learned about the festival from, of all places, YouTube ads, featuring our long-serving Commissioner of Agriculture, Hugh Weathers. Commissioner Weathers has held his office since 2004, and I’ve seen his name most of my adult life on gas station pumps (there’s a little inspector’s sticker that bears his name), but I’d never seen him until these commercials.

That uninteresting fact aside, I needed to pick up some pumpkins for carving, and I figured buying some Certified SC Grown pumpkins was the way to go. There was also the added bonus of taking in another festival on a crisp, autumnal morning.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Festival in the Park

30 September 202327 September 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

‘Tis festival season, and yours portly is living it up. In just a couple of weekends I’ll be hawking my humble wares at the South Carolina Bigfoot Festival, which will be either my Hastings or my Gallipoli.

Before I return to my spot inside the tent, however, I’m enjoying experiencing festivals from outside. The coming of autumn means it is the height of festival season, and yours portly couldn’t be happier.

After a successful visit to the Columbia Greek Festival two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to take in Charlotte, North Carolina’s Festival in the Park last weekend. It is, perhaps, the best festival I’ve attended in recent years.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Columbia Greek Festival

23 September 202317 September 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Festival season is back in full swing, and yours portly couldn’t be happier. Festivals—like everything good, fun, and wholesome—took a hit in The Age of The Virus, but I’m pleased to report they are back with a vengeance.

Yours portly had the opportunity to enjoy the Columbia Greek Festival last Saturday, 16 September 2023 (with some agreeable female company), and it was packed. As I noted to my companion, “I love it and I hate it.” I love seeing the throngs of unwashed (sometimes literally) humanity sauntering around aimlessly in amorphous blobs of sweat and excitement. I also hate waiting in lines and being around amorphous blobs of sweat and excitement.

But it’s encouraging to see people eating gyros and baklava. It’s heartening to see little kids scampering about recklessly. It’s cool hearing upbeat Greek dance music. There was even the Orthodox priest running around, looking like a harried Rasputin, complete with a massive Apple Watch on his bony wrist.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Compose-a-thon II: Movement

16 September 202310 September 2023 The Portly Politico7 Comments

While working on Spooky Season II: Rise of the Cryptids (coming to Bandcamp on Friday, 6 October 2023), I composed a couple of tracks that only somewhat related, “Meandering” and “Plodder.” These were pieces I’d written snippets of in my composing journal, but which were more or less experiments in unusual meters and concepts. “Plodder,” for example, is written to be intentionally muddy—lots of low-end bass notes and tight tone clusters, producing something akin to the effect of a small child or a cat leaning on the low keys of the piano:

I added in tuba and bass clarinet (the latter is quickly becoming my favorite, spooky sound) to drive home that thick, sludgy low-end sound.

“Plodder” fits the cryptid theme of the album a bit better of these two “movement”-inspired pieces. One could imagine Bigfoot or some zombie (are zombies cryptids?; maybe some variations would be considered as such) plodding slowly through the forests, although all the “footage” of “Bigfoot” I’ve seen seems to indicate he’s a fairly fast fellow.

Regardless, I found these two pieces particularly unusual and unorthodox, and opted to share them with you, my faithful subscribers, ahead of the album’s release.

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Supporting Friends Friday: Son of Sonnet on Substack

8 September 20239 August 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Longtime readers might remember the thoughtful, moving poetry of Son of Sonnet. In addition to being a skilled poet, Son is also a gifted orator, and his readings of poetry are always a special treat.

Now you can enjoy his poetry and recitations on his Substack page. He has a consistent schedule of regular posts, so you won’t be wondering when the next post will arrive.

A subscription is just $7 a month or $70 a year—well worth the price of admission. Son possesses an extensive theatrical background, which he uses to great effect in his recitations. He even takes requests, and will frequently write poems on themes that subscribers submit.

I bang this gong a lot, but as conservatives and/or Christians, we need to support our people. The Left gets most everything wrong, but they get this right—they support their creators. On the Right, we’re often too pragmatic, and dismiss art, culture, and literature as impractical playthings.

We couldn’t be more wrong. No one remembers early nineteenth-century German tax policy; everyone remembers Beethoven.

So, consider a subscription to Son of Sonnet’s Substack page. He is worthy of your support.

SubscribeStar Saturday: Behind Every Great Man

2 September 20237 August 2023 The Portly Politico2 Comments

We’ve all heard the expression “behind every great man, there’s a great woman,” or some permutation of it (my personal favorite is Groucho Marx‘s: “behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife”). It’s a familiar expression because it’s generally true, even if not quite as universal as the word “every” suggests.

Just as a bad woman can lead to a man’s swift downfall—or, worse yet, years of misery and then a swift downfall—a good woman can support a man through his trials, and even make him king.

Such was the case of Margaret Beaufort, who, through a combination of skill, diplomacy, wealth, and mother love, guided her son Henry through the complicated and dangerous War of the Roses to emerge as King Henry VII, the first monarch of the Tudor Dynasty.

Her bravery, tenacity, and sheer luck safeguarded her son through a lengthy exile, and ultimately to the height of power. Her grandson, Henry VIII, would become the most powerful English monarch of his age, so much so that modern historians frequently regard him as a tyrant.

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The Portly Politico

One Southerner's unique, erudite, conservative perspective in a hectic world

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Supporting Friends Friday: Son of Sonnet on Substack