Observation - September 11th, 2026, Friday

it is hot and windy

the bright sun striking like a feathered hammer

a man with his daughter walk along the beach

            bare feet dragging though the water

 

Labor Day

Today is Labor Day, our great national holiday, a day set aside for the American worker, a day to celebrate the ordinary citizen, the men and women whose blood, sweat and tears sustain this country.

Today is meant to be a day of rest, a day of repose, a day of respite; today is the day to honor laborers, it is a day to honor work, a day for convivium and victuals.

This year the labor market is stagnant, our work-force participation remains stuck; workers are seeing shrinking against inflation, which is high and the banks are taking their cut in the form of higher interest rates, tight energy supplies are allowing the producers to gouge…they are taking in record profits and the worker is paying price.

When it comes to real-wages the American worker has seen this cycle before: two steps forward and one step back, or one step forward and two steps back.  

I spent most of my life working in the hospitality sector. Now I am employed by a food distribution company. I am in purchasing, my vendors are gourmet producers and importers, a lifetime of working in restaurants has given me the knowledge to manage these portfolios.

I have been working for this company for over four years, it is the longest job I have ever held, and my first foray into the corporate sector…there are benefits, they have HR.

I have found it strange to find myself in this role, in this place so late in life which causes me to reflect on the scramble I am engaged in to pad a retirement account with savings, while having such little time remaining in my working life!

The American worker needs more guarantees than an annual holiday in their name. We need a fundamental reorganization of the social-safety net; we need national healthcare, a single-payer-system, health benefits should be guaranteed by the state, not negotiated through labor contracts that ultimately deflate the worker’s actual wage.

These costs should be removed from the balance sheet of the employers, so that the costs of labor are clear and predictable and not entangled with the machinations of pharmaceutical companies, medical device companies, insurance providers and phony non-profits like hospitals.

We need education reforms: we need to return the tools of critical thinking and logic to the classroom; we need to teach language arts and arithmetic, music, culture and civics should be in the public-school curriculum; we need industrial arts and mechanics.

We need to support the American citizen in order to enable them to reach their greatest potential, we need this so that we may all get there together, because the more the worker succeeds, the more America prospers.

We need housing reform, and we need it now; we need affordable housing for every family, and the security of knowing that our fellow citizens: our sisters and brothers, our daughters and sons, our mothers and fathers are not living in the street.

The American worker needs these things, and the investor class needs to give it up; if American industries are unwilling to reinvest in their workforce, facilities and equipment, then we should take their profits from them in the form of higher taxation...this is the way it is, and this is the way it has always been.

Do it yourself, or we’ll do it for you…Happy Labor Day!

 

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien – Author, Poet, Hero

I learned how to read novels by reading J. R. R. Tolkien.

My mother had a beautiful edition of The Hobbit on one of our many bookshelves; it was the hardbound edition, that came in a green, it was embossed with gold leaf, it had gilt pages; there were lovely illustrations inside, with maps drawn by the author himself.

I pulled it that book from the shelf and read it when I was in the second grade; when I was finished, I began reading it again and also The Lord of the Rings, followed by the Silmarillion and the Unfinished Tales (a volume of stories that had been edited and published by his son Christopher after his death). I read these books eight, nine, ten times over, I continued to read them into my early thirties.

Reading and re-reading Tolkien put the idea in my head that I wanted to be a writer. Reading his works over and over again gave me a deep appreciation for the care and craft he put into the construction of his fantasy world.

I can recall a sensation I had on my third time through the Silmarillion; I believe I was in the seventh grade at that time. My reading list had expanded considerably by that time, coming to include more genres than fantasy and science fiction. I read other literary classics, poetry, history and mythology as well as scripture. In addition to these I had begun to read reference materials related to Middle Earth, the culmination of those studies culminated resulted in my having a heightened sense of understanding for the stories being narrated; my vocabulary had expanded,  I had become a better reader, making it so that I was able to comprehend more of the material I was engaging; the picture was fillingin. I was able to grasp more of the world that Tolkien had created; it was coming to life for me in new and different…more fulsome way.

I read a biography of the great man himself, which was probably the first piece of non-fiction I ever read (other than histories that had been so mythologized that they felt like fiction).

In that same period of time I found reference books compiled by other authors about Tolkien and Middle Earth: The Tolkien Companion, the New Tolkien Companion, along with various encyclopedias, bestiaries and anthologies depicting the arms and armor of the men and dwarves, of orcs and elves that inhabited his amazing world.

I added his smaller—lesser known works to the corpus of material I was consuming, while still in the seventh grade I read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which resonated with my another of my reading interests: Arthurian Lore, and through Tolkien’s Beowulf I was introduced in a literary way to the Viking sagas and the epics of those heroic figures.

Through Tolkien I came to have an early appreciation for the power of myth, as well as their malleability, and the potential we have as creative beings to fashion our own myths and communicate them to the broader world.

Through his writing Tolkien dramatized the basic conflicts he saw at work in our civilization, conflicts between the bucolic and pastoral life (which is where his heart was), with the forces of industry that seemed to be destroying the planet (even in his day he saw this happening), he illustrated the disasters of modern warfare and the suffering they visit on the world, which he experienced first-hand while serving as a signal man in World War I.

In my opinion the collected stories of Middle Earth do what all great literature does, they represent a serious social critique of the twentieth century and a prophetic view of the perils enmeshed in the twenty-first; they are more relevant to the human race ever…we would be wise to be mindful of his wisdom.