Wix Glitch/Wix Feature?

Time it was, and what a time it was, it was

A time of innocence, A time of confidences

Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph

Preserve your memories; They're all that's left you

-Simon & Garfunkel

A lovely, fourteen degree morning out there.

Peg's drive to work yesterday turned out to be far dodgier than expected. For whatever reason the snowplows did not take to the streets overnight--the theory being tossed around is that when they closed the schools, the local governments decided there was no need to plow. The resulting snowy, icy streets, highways, and interstates rendered travel a hazardous undertaking. Peg slid through the first stop sign she encountered, fishtailed onto Denison Parkway, and slogged up I-86 past tractor trailers and pickups stuck on the snow-heaped shoulders. A real mess.

Today it looks like they've plowed and salted, which is good because I have a couple things to handle in town today. Best not to dent that shiny new truck.

The pundits are painting this morning's political news from Tennessee's special election as positive for the non-MAGA crowd. Maybe so. The Trump-endorsed candidate only won by 8.9 points where DJT won by 22 in the last election. Sure that's progress, but it also means nearly 54 percent of voters in that district voted for a party that commits murder on the high seas, calls brown-skinned immigrants "garbage", shows overt disdain for the rule of law, protects racists and pedophiles--I could go on.

The point here is that in years past one might suggest they're just misinformed, but as 2025 draws to a close that pitch becomes harder to sustain. Maybe, just maybe, these voters are truly aligned with a movement that is manifestly evil--I mean, they took the time to go to the polls and pull the handle for MAGA. Doesn't that make them evil, as well? Having Jesus in your heart doesn't inoculate one against being a very bad person.

I stop short of making this a regional generalization, although the electoral map shows that Southerners are overwhelmingly to blame. Maybe we Southerners have just grown too comfortable with the racism, sexism, and Christian nationalism the Rs are selling, given that those things have been part of the fiber of Southern culture since long before Pickett's Charge.

But a peek at the map from yesterday's election shows something that transcends categorization based on the Mason-Dixon line.

Setting aside the obvious gerrymandering one sees here--the Rs carved Nashville into multiple pieces attached to red congressional districts, ensuring a Democrat can never represent that very Democratic city--note that you find blue voters in Nashville, pink in the suburbs like Franklin, and then deep red in the looney countryside. As much as anything, this country is fracturing between urban and rural, the latter being the repository of the left-behinds in this information-driven service economy.

Somewhere I saw (and probably posted) a New York electoral map from 2024, showing essentially the same thing. Out here in the hinterland, Corning and Ithaca and Rochester sit as blue dots in a sea of rural red. The residents on all those picturesque farms on the drive up to Canandaigua Lake are mostly as awful as what one might encounter in rural Alabama, only tidier.

So I'll go easier on the South, I guess. Those same bigots live here--they just don't hold the levers of power because NYC, Buffalo, Syracuse, and Rochester (especially NYC) hold most of the votes, and those places are solid blue.

My personal concern this morning arises from the realization that Wix is holding my life over the last five-plus years hostage. I started blogging here in the fall of 2020, have created something like 1200 posts that largely tell the story of this adventure that began on the farm during the pandemic, and now is on the cusp of taking us to Manhattan so I can finish my LLM in tax. The other day I explored ways to download all of this onto a flash drive, and maybe start printing it out so all those moments don't disappear if my subscription here ever ends. What I found was that Wix technical support offers as the only option not a download, but literally creating screen captures of the posts one at a time, an exercise that would require thousands of captures given my tendency to drivel on for pages. That could take a couple years, if I start imaging a few posts a day, ever day.

I'll try to come up with an alternative. Surely there's a way to avoid losing this rambling, public diary of the best part of my life.