Mondaugen’s Miscellany

The past is what we make out of it

The future is unwritten

Avoid over-serious people and seek the genuine smile

What have you thought about today?

(A collection of personal essays on travel, life events, and thought experiments, aiming to engage, amuse, befuddle, and inspire)

Archived blog posts are here

August 29, 2026

I watched a lot of TV growing up, mainly Speed Racer, Sid and Marty Krofft productions, and Godzilla-verse movies (Gamera was a favorite). I played pinball and Defender at a video game palace across from the Pizza Hut in Sherwood, WI, chipping quarters off smaller kids in exchange for tips on how to play. I saw Punk take Disco down, and I cheered. These experiences explain my outlook.

As a nation, we are not racing towards a cliff. We have flown off it, and are in free fall.

It’s like the old joke of the man who jumps off a tall building. As he passes the tenth floor, a man calls after him “Can we help?!?!” The jumper calls back “No thanks! I’m doing fine so far!” The rising wind in the jumper’s face can be explained many ways other than acceleration towards the ground. And we’ve been explaining the wind in our faces as coming from everything except, well, the fact this nation is on a collision course with its end.

When I grew up, we all stood on top of that building. We could see the horizon in every direction, and the most important issue to discuss was whether Sigmund and the Sea Monsters caused childhood trauma or not. Now, with the old West-v-East world order broken and not repairable, America giving up its chairman of the board position for a go-it-alone stance, the most important issue is how long do we have before the wolves circle and dismember us? And what will we look like as a nation after that process is complete?

How we got here isn’t hard to see, I don’t think. America has always been a different kind of country. We’ve been a tenuous concept and not an undoubted fact. We began as more of a corporation than a people, a place to come make a fortune, then go back home. Though many of us decided to stay, we never formed a singular concept of who we were as a people. We were always in competition with each other, like gold rushers aiming for stakes in the same valley. Our national mythology was an honorable attempt at forging a national identity, if a bit cardboard. But our founders were businessmen first, so their civic virtue was always easy to poke holes in. Small government proponents really argue for small community, “freedom” is a code word for “we are not in this together.”

That our nation survived for as long as it did was a quirk of history, world events pushing us together. Now, our political leaders are actively dismantling those global forces. It took American business interests a long time, but they finally bought complete political control, in its entirety. Business interests always chewed at the edges, sometimes gained powerful sway, but strains of civic virtue always pushed them back in the end. Now, their parasitic control is so complete, of all three branches, I doubt a pendulum swing back is possible. There is no one left in government who can start the swing.

Right now, those business interests are guiding policy to enrich themselves as fast as possible. Go SP500! But there is no game plan for the nation after this feeding-at-the-trough. We’ve been impoverished of leadership, with only business-funded shills given political power. We have been militarily impoverished by the loss of our global allies. And we will continue to be impoverished socially and communally by our corporations. Try to buy a refrigerator from Best Buy today, tell me what you get for your dollar, from the customer experience in which no employee can do anything, to a product that will last 3-5 years.

The focus on rewiring of our politics towards enriching business interests is so blinkered that no one with a public voice can see it, or warn against it, with any effect. America will never be fully mined by global businesses, the anemic patient will survive to provide what it can to its hosts. It’s what that anemic patient looks like that is my new pressing question. Sorry Sigmund— you were a luxurious question to have growing up.

What comes next, is, well, I don’t quite know. I’m not frightened by it, mostly curious. They say that living in interesting times is a curse. It is far better to live in boring times, which is to say times in which wars, disease, and famine do not overrun your home. I am hoping these interesting times remain interesting without the usual four horsemen.

August 5, 2026

Michael Lockshin’s film adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita will finally arrive on American theater screens this September 18. Mostly written under Stalin before the Second World War, completed by his wife Elena, and finally published in full in Paris in 1967, it continues to be censored in Russia, to one extent or another.

Wikipedia tells us it is a critique of Soviet bureaucracy and atheism. And perhaps the Stalinist and Krushchevian censors blocked it for this. More recently, Putin’s regime apparently censored the movie for its criticism of censorship, which was needed during the Ukraine military thingy.

But none of these are the novel’s real threat, none of these its real power. Were I a leader in the West, with a stake in any current system of governance; were I an orthodox Christian, or Jew, with a stake in maintaining beliefs that align with the Old Testament stories; were I an atheist with a stake in the Rousseauean idea of natural goodness and natural rights, I would fear Master and Margarita like no other manuscript

“Manuscripts do not burn!” (Рукописи не горят) The novel’s peculiar tagline is hard to digest outside of the novel, little easier inside, for Bulgakov imagines a confusing world of naked women presiding over the Devil’s Ball, Soviet artists eating, drinking, and dancing, poets swimming in rivers, giant cats, and a manuscript that reimagines the crucifixion of a Jesus-like character from the point of view of a dog-loving, people-hating, and very thoughtful Pontius Pilate.

Soak in this wild world, read to the end to know the fate he gives to the Master and Margarita, and you will come away with the most profound, powerful, beautiful, and useful rewriting of the Western moral universe from good versus evil, to the truth versus freedom. Imagine a Jesus, the son of God, here to tell us the truth, offer us the truth, and let us choose it or not. Imagine the Devil, here to offer us freedom, and… to punish us when we choose neither the truth nor freedom. Pain, suffering, harm, love, happiness, even good and evil—all of it are found in both truth and freedom. A God of truth answers Voltaire’s criticism, that this could not be the best of all possible worlds, with all its suffering, if God was simply good.

To create something new, the artist must choose freedom, and be of the Devil’s camp. Can an artist be a good man and create a novel, which is to say a book of lies? Plato had a tongue-in-cheek reply that avoided offering a true answer. Bulgakov, the cheeky bastard, offers us one.

In short, it’s a good novel, well-worth the read. You will be delightfully bewildered.

I hope the movie does some part of it justice (though Christopher’s Nolan’s simplistic and flattened Odyssey gives me pause for any hope).

May 14, 2026

In my book about hand work, The Manual Manual, I recommend that people put the book down and go make something. When offered the opportunity, I often apply googly eyes on appropriate public advertisements and structures that need humanizing. A straight answer in polite conversation is a skill that I cannot master. In short, I have approached the mysteries of life by managing them the way I wish to be managed: given space to flourish, only questions that lead to other questions, a square meal and a warm bed, and a fish.

This is nothing new. My college counselor called me an “intellectual iconoclast”, a refined way to peg me as a little fucking terrorist who wasn’t going to get into any respectable college. And tellingly, I was only accepted at a school that didn’t require an essay. Telling people what they want to hear has never been my strong suit. A sheep in wolf’s clothing, I am not. I am, and thereby am inclined to see things sideways, and without tilting my head, I understand them that way. Quantum physics makes perfect sense to me, because cause-and-effect, matter versus energy, distance and time-as-an-arrow have never made much sense to me. All are googly eyes brilliant scientists have plastered on the universe to try and humanize it, and while their work is very practical (and I am grateful for it!), it explains nothing.

This is not a boast, no matter how confident I present it. It has rather been a burden, leading to strained relationships, depression, and isolation. Except for many many good friends, who give me joy in their mere existence.

The well-reasoned philosophy of absurdity is profoundly misunderstood. If the OED is any help, it would define absurdity as: “Out of harmony with reason or propriety; incongruous, unreasonable, illogical. In modern use, esp. plainly opposed to reason, and hence, ridiculous, silly,” which it thankfully does. If it were more helpful, it would add this editorial: “The ultimate human fear is the fear of absurdity because it reveals the limits of our understanding and control of our world,” but it isn’t, so I have. Christopher Hitchens was a brave coward, for his intellectual, fervent, and rational arguments against a universe of meaning created through a God.

Isn’t that the ridiculously young Ralph Maccio’s refrigerator-magnet wisdom-lesson for us all? That we have to stand balanced on one foot in a strong wind to be able to kick a bandana-wearing bully senseless? Feels scripted to me, but refrigerators are smarter than most of us, so I listen to the wisdom that shines from them.

Please stop looking for meaning. Please continue to contrive it.

When you apply googly eyes to plants so you can relate to them eye-to-eye you’re doing the universe a great favor. Personally pushing against the relentless tide of chaos and eventual universal heat death is really all we’ve got. I mean, that and bacon.

March 15, 2026

I am a big fan of the 2002 TV series Firefly. It hit a particularly perfect balance of humor, action, and social commentary about the value of political freedom.

Even though cancelled after a single season, it strangely enough was turned into a feature film. Serenity, however, did not have the magic of Firefly. In trading Firefly’s just-fighting-to-get-by character for a superheroes-fighting-to-save-the-solar-system character, Serenity lost the plot. Firefly episodes had been another-day-at-the-office in a strange but familiar space Western. The Firefly heroes were little people of beauty, honor, humor, and flaws. The upped stakes made Serenity feel strained.

Even Joss Whedon, much like Ridley Scott, doesn’t always understand the magic of what he makes. What Alien had never made it into Prometheus.

Now, apparently, the former ensemble of actors are trying to bring Firefly back, as an animated series, if I’m not wrong.

Do I want Firefly to return? With all my heart. Were I ever to meet any of the Firefly actors or writers, I would thank them deeply for the characters they brought to life.

But the chances of catching the same Firefly magic are vanishingly small. A new animated series, 24 years on, can only be something else. It cannot possibly have the same heart, even with the original writers, now 24 years older with a different perspective on life.

I wish them well, but fear that in the money-driven, too-many-cooks world of Hollywood, it will just take one powerful idiot to dose the plot with a pound of sugar when it needs a pound of salt.

I will certainly watch if it comes out. I will cross my fingers it is as good as Andor, but with more humor, little super-anxious end-of-world vibes, and just good tales of criminals in an unjust world who do good, sometimes, if they don’t fuck it up.

March 5, 2026

Jackie DeShannon may be forgotten to most of us, but in 1965 she sang “What the World Needs Now is Love”.

As a little kid in the early 70’s, I remember hearing it on the radio. I remember my mom singing along. Sentimental, sappy, naive, even corny and ridiculous, still, its innocent sweetness is hard to criticize. Would the world be worse with more love? I mean, the song isn’t trying to hurt anyone. I’d like to think Jackie and this song would be unforgotten today. Maybe it would help. Curiously, it charted at #1 in Canada, but only #63 in the US (Wikipedia).