Coming in September 2024
Hints At What’s on Deck for September 2024
I’m leading first with some images. As I have expressed before, sometimes a song will create a theme, sometimes an image will grab the eye and hold it, and the ideas flow from that point. Below are a few runners up for September’s theme. From the images you can perhaps guess what that will be.
Coming Up On Sunday Nights Radio
The close of August has been pretty tumultuous, more hectic than previous years that come to mind. Both my kids, 22 and 19, are their way to leaving the nest, and my son is doing his young blood thing with a day job in recruiting and evening / weekend gigs as a bartender and first mate on a small cruise boat on the Detroit River. His summer has been very different from mine when I was his age, I’m glad for that as he’s had adventures like getting to know a port with one of the last remaining Speakeasies from Prohibition here in Detroit. Not too many of those in the Catskills where I grew up. He’s taken ownership of his journey with gusto, like I did when I was his age.
My daughter is Danger Girl, and still loves impromptu road trips with Dad where she surprises me not only by having many of my favorite songs on her playlist too, but also with her wide array of music she’s discovered for herself. She’s so different from her younger brother, energy and drive manifesting in different ways. They both run the ball and love what they do.
Both recalled their end of summers with me, out of the blue. It’s sparked in part perhaps by the festival Arts, Beats and Eats that consumes our ramparts for the entire weekend. Set up begins early in this last week of August, with the barriers going up slowly like the wall around Berlin and signaling the end of the summer for kids. We know we have until the Autumnal Equinox, yet even at 58 I feel the pangs of summer’s end just like when I was 10.
But my daughter triggered my theme for Sunday Nights Radio when I was taking her to an appointment this week. “Dad. Do you remember when we would wait until Monday evening to sneak into Arts, Beats and Eats so we could beg for freebies as the food vendors shut down? I remember feeling so sick as we pigged out, then ran to the next food stand to get more.”
After putting up with the traffic and noise, noise, noise the entire weekend, my idea to take the kids trolling before the festival shut down was a summer ritual we couldn’t miss. Even if we were up north and returned Monday evening, if we had time the three of us would head downtown and see what we could scrummage up. My wife ignored the deep fried snickers bars my son coveted. His last hurrah before school on Tuesday.
While I’ll leave it up to you to guess what “Haervest-Monath” means, summer-end rituals are the theme for this Labor Day weekend Sunday Nights Radio. Light hearted this week, with music and good old nostalgia for simpler days.
This Week On CC
“Do We No Longer Recognize Leadership and Stewardship” marked our last release for the August 2024 edition of Cultural Courage. Lighthouses are beacons for vessels on chaotic waters, and we seem to have forgotten our duty to be lighthouse keepers of liberty and honor for our youth. There are many ways up the mountain, but in the end as parents and mentors we need to fill in the gaps if we see failings in our institutions. And we also need to repair the damage at these institutions - there was a time when they worked for us, and quite well at that. Abandoning them completely is not the answer, we have to rebuild, perhaps from the ground up, but we have to start there first.
We appreciate your support on Substack, but there are others ways you can support us too. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed out lighthouse theme this month, and Orange designed some wonderful whiskey glasses that will help keep away the chill. Engraved with “Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains to bring it to light.“, it’s a reminder to be the light for others. The link or the QR code below will bring you to our store.
OZFest Recap
I will be the first to admit that OZFest Morning Mission this week was a bit chaotic. Currently House Humanzee (yeah, I feel that is a Games of Throne-ie way of saying it) is under renovations, so I am all over the map between what we’re doing ourselves (too much on most days) and farming the other stuff out. Apologies up front as I had to interrupt the live stream to keep answering the door.
I run the freaking ball, many times without shoes or even looking where I’m going, and as luck would have it, our water was out that morning with our plumber arriving in the middle of the live stream, the counter guy a half hour later, and our cabinet guy right before noon. ATT finally brought fiber to the neighborhood so naturally I scheduled that for 1 PM on that same day.
I do thrive on chaos at times, and guilty as charged, I haven’t learned my lessons yet.
The live stream is a mish-mash and I left it up. Warts and all. The topics are solid: concerns over election laws being adopted at a premature time before our laws allow, panic over mosquitoes, yes, mosquitoes, while ignoring Lyme Disease, and how the clean energy plans are proceeding in our state of Michigan. I share my sister’s battle with Lyme, as it’s instructive when you think about how hyper-focused we become on many things of little consequence.
SC Podcast Release
There is another episode of the Severed Conscience podcast available. This week we address the failure of Big Tech to meet their clean energy goals, and it raises the question of whether we will be pushed into an inferior energy infrastructure while they have privileges to access the energy they need to support their data operations, AI and application access.
You can find our podcast on Apple, Spotify and Spreaker. Many times the ideas we present here as articles find their genesis in our preparations or discussions on our podcasts.