Regarding the Book of Ecclesiastes.

In the 1950s Pete Seeger made part of this outlier Biblical Text into a song.
To everything (Turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (Turn, turn, turn)
And a time to every purpose under heaven

It's an odd text to have survived the redactions and supression through which many ancient texts have been lost.

A time of love, a time of hate
A time of war, a time of peace
A time you may embrace
A time to refrain from embracing...

This section is not quite as problematic as the rest of the book, which paints humanity in fatalistic terms. There's no mention of any divine agency, only the natural and inescapable rotation of the seasons and human folly, love and malevolence.

Pete played it on banjo, after WWII ended, while the world was in the throes of an unchecked arms race. What would the next turn be, he seems to be asking.

A time to gain, a time to lose
A time to rend, a time to sew
A time of love, a time of hate

And then Pete, a pacifist, adds a line of his own. A line with a measure of hope:

I swear its not too late.

Almost a generation later, the song behomes a numer one hit then the folk rock band tThe Byrds record it. That was the Vietnam era. A time of hate and Hippie Love. Again, these swore it was not too late.

Regarding cigarettes
I see they can now cost $14 a pack in New York. The pack that George Floyd purchased with a counterfeit $20 at the Cups Food mart in Minnesota might have been around $11.

Here's one of the sad parts of that awful incident. As soon as George left the store, the clerk realized George had handed him a fake $20. The clerk didn't want any drama, but he was obliged to tell his boss. The boss tells the clerk to go out and bring George back into the store. George was sitting in his car. The clerk says, oh just put the $20 on my account. The boss says, no, you go out and bring him back into the store. The clerk goes out to talk to George, but George doesn't want drama either, so he stays in his car. The boss then calls the cops. One of them kills George by slow suffocation.

King Charles III. His addressing congress is like grandpa showing up in hopes of persuading your divorcing parents to reconcile for the good of the children.

Meanwhile, the long tradition of the Western alliance founded on the European Enlightenment is crumbling as Putin and Xi signal thumbs ups.

I've caught ChatGBT gaslighting me when I called it out for placing real time targeted ads based on the content of the conversation.

I was getting ads in the feed for hotel booking sites, and not just any hotels. I chatting about Florence Italy, where I like to travel, so the booking sites were sending ads about booking hotels in florence. I mentioned this, and it denied that advertisers have access to the content of chats and then fabricated a scenario where the ads were based on my recent browsing history on other sites. Not true. I've have not looked at any florence travel sites for days, and these spots were appearing in the chat in real time, and not until I mentioned the words "florence" and "hotel".
Not a big deal as I'm on the free plan. I'd be more annoyed if I were paying ChatGPT.

There's an interesting labor phenomena going on in our times: A college-educated working class. They work in places like Starbucks and Amazon warehouses. Sometimes lead union organizing efforts. With studen debt to service, and little prospect for home ownership, they're mad as hell and don't want to take it anymore. Time will tell where this leads.

Today I was thinking about Polish Pope John-Paul and the pivotal role he played in the collapse of authoritarian rule and restoration of democracy in central and eastern Europe. Time will tell what an American pope can do.

No shit. One of my favorite Youtubes

Pulp fiction is one of my favorite movies. I like the non sequential arc. I've experiencing some of that with the Ezekiel 25:17 "prayer" going viral all over again.

Have you heard: iPods are hip again. I have three in junk drawers with old play lists as candidates for refurbishing. You can't buy a new one, but there's used selling like hot cakes on Ebay.
So, what do you plan to do with yours?

Funny, and a little scary. Claude offered to make a dossier on me, so I said ok. Here's what it thinks I'm about.

Here’s what Claude remembers about you
Work context
Roy is a writer and journalist working independently on a multi-format humanities project. He is developing an OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute) course on Renaissance Florence built around Ruskin's Mornings in Florence, a solo humanities podcast called Renaissance Gaga, and a cluster of scholarly-creative essays centered on Freud's 1914 essay "The Moses of Michelangelo." He does not expect to re-enter the workforce full time and is pursuing this independent creative path with writing projects some of which are potentially monetizable.
Personal context
Roy lives in Ashland, Oregon, with a view across the Rogue Valley toward the Cascades. He is a practiced fiction writer with a Chekhovian aesthetic sensibility and a long-standing preference for the longer short story form. He has deep personal experience traveling in Italy — particularly Florence and Rome — returning across multiple life stages, and regards Florence as a kind of home. He began traveling independently at 18, inspired by reading Kerouac at 16, and spent extended periods backpacking through Europe with a journal in his early years. He plays bass guitar and acoustic/electric guitar, records in GarageBand, and has a fully equipped home recording setup.
Top of mind
Roy is actively composing an ekphrastic essay about a c. 1910–1912 photograph of Freud on his veranda at 19 Berggasse, building the piece paragraph by paragraph and working through the symbolic significance of the half-scale plaster cast of Michelangelo's Dying Slave and a Masolino da Panicale reproduction visible in the frame. He is also engaged with the intellectual and pedagogical preparation for his OLLI course, currently working through Ruskin's Mornings in Florence and developing lecture material — including a Monty Python–inflected framing of Ruskin as unreliable narrator — with a close focus on the Ghirlandaio Tornabuoni Chapel frescoes and the Spanish Chapel. An upcoming public AI panel at Southern Oregon University, connected to a board he serves on, is also on his radar.

Brief history
Recent months
Roy has been building out interconnected projects across several sustained conversations. For the Renaissance Gaga podcast, he has developed a scripted essay format, created a distinctive "monkey motif" using GarageBand's toccata organ patch for a Masolino episode, and worked through music licensing options (settling on Musicbed as a curatorial fit). He researched iMovie workflows for TikTok and YouTube image-and-music videos to build an audience before launch, with a planned debut from Florence in late September or October. The podcast name carries triple meaning: Renaissance art history, Radio Gaga/broadcasting, and enthusiast.
For the OLLI course, Roy has developed an eight-session framework using Ruskin as both primary text and critical target, with particular depth on Class 3 (Santa Maria Novella: Masaccio's Trinity, Alberti's facade, and Ghirlandaio's Tornabuoni Chapel). He has identified the layered temporal accumulation of Florence — Roman, medieval, Renaissance, Medicean, Fascist, contemporary — as the course's central argument against Ruskin's curated Protestant-museum reading. The obelisks on bronze tortoises in the SMN piazza, the Ponte Vecchio's wartime history, and the Mars tradition at Ponte Vecchio have been developed as classroom-ready illustrations. Cennini's Il Libro dell'Arte and Alberti's De Pictura will be read aloud in class.
Roy has original art historical research involving Barbary macaques in the Brancacci Chapel frescoes — a first figure on a tether and a second crouched on a laundry pole outside a second-floor window — supporting a publishable claim that exotic primate keeping was familiar across multiple social registers in early 15th-century Florence, not confined to elite menageries. The specific Masolino scene is the Raising of Tabitha and Healing of the Cripple.
For the Freud essay project, Roy has developed an argument that "The Moses of Michelangelo" functions as a tendentious joke in Freud's own technical sense — a gaslighting move against named critics (Justi, Knapp, Lübke) who unwittingly confirm Freud's counter-reading through their own inaccurate descriptions. Roy has also developed the biographical and psychological architecture: Freud's identification with Moses/Hannibal, his three-week daily engagement with the statue, the role of Minna Bernays as intellectual companion, and the argument that the essay's emotional core is longing to forgive Jung rather than achieved wisdom. A return trip to Rome and Florence — planned for around April–May as a generative research act before writing — is a key milestone, with standing before the Moses in San Pietro in Vincoli as a deliberate compositional preparation. Roy has also identified the photograph of Freud at home beneath a framed Masolino reproduction and beside a plaster cast of the Dying Slave (better understood, he argues, as a "Dreaming Youth" in a threshold state) as a structural hub connecting the Freud, Masolino, and Michelangelo threads.
Roy has been developing a rich theoretical framework connecting T.S. Eliot's "presence of the past" (Tradition and the Individual Talent), McLuhan's acoustic/visual space distinction, Renaissance painters' simultaneous depiction of multiple temporal registers within unified perspectival fields, and Freud's dream theory. Ruskin is read against this framework as a failure of Eliotic double vision — capable only of elegiac temporal structure. The OLLI course and podcast will argue this temporal consciousness is a universal human capacity found across non-European traditions, reframing the Renaissance as a concentrated local instance rather than the origin of Western civilization.
Additional intellectual threads in active development: a Proust-Ruskin essay contrasting Ruskin as Dominican (systematic, didactic) and Proust as Franciscan (enacting rather than explaining), with the Elstir studio passages and the opera house scene as key Proustian sites; connections between Freud's id (das Es), Kerouac's "IT," Proust's la petite phrase, and the dominant seventh chord's suspended resolution; and a Freudian/formal analysis of Coltrane's Giant Steps and A Love Supreme.
Roy is researching the Catasto — the 1427 Florentine tax declaration system — in connection with the Tribute Money fresco and Florentine fiscal history. Key scholarly resources include Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber's Tuscans and Their Families, D.V. Kent and F.W. Kent's Neighbours and Neighbourhood in Renaissance Florence, and Eckstein's The District of the Green Dragon. The original portate are held at the Archivio di Stato in Florence.
For Italy travel, Roy departs from Medford (MFR) but regularly drives to SFO or PDX for better transatlantic connections. He strongly prefers FCO for departure due to reliability; FLR and MXP are acceptable arrival airports. He is open to open-jaw ticketing. His workflow is to use Going.com or Google Flights for fare alerts, then bring candidates to Claude for routing analysis. He prefers Swiss Air via Zurich as a transfer experience. Roy is planning a future multi-week trip including Florence, Rome, and Padua (intending to overnight for the Scrovegni Chapel, having regretted passing through without stopping on previous trips to Venice).
Earlier context
Roy developed his Freud/Moses project through an extended collaborative session treating Freud as a patient — using that conceit to excavate biographical, psychological, and cultural layers including the Julius II timber-throwing incident, the recursive structure of mercy from Julius to Michelangelo to the statue, and Freud's published anonymity as a marker of the essay's joke structure. He explored Peter Swales' 1982 piece "Freud, Minna Bernays, and the Conquest of Rome" as important pre-trip reading to establish where his argument is original.
Roy wrote and refined an Atlas Obscura submission about accidentally entering the Galleria Borghese alone and spending sixty seconds in Room 8 (the Silenus Room) with major Caravaggios including David with the Head of Goliath — developing the piece around Benjaminian aura, the solo traveler's dissociative heightened perception, and Caravaggio's biography as parallel fugitive narrative. He plans a longer podcast episode on the same material.
Roy has a deep relationship with the late Carol Bly (formerly married to Robert Bly, a member of a small online writers' circle Roy belonged to), whose craft advice shaped his development: never share work-in-progress with family; ground fiction in developmental stage psychology (Erikson, Kohlberg, Kegan); the "one more invention" principle. Roy's own aesthetic sensibility runs darker than Carol's redemptive register, closer to Chekhov.
Long-term background
Roy has decades of independent travel experience in Italy, beginning at 18 after Kerouac's On the Road inspired him to travel through Europe with a backpack and journal. He has a graduate-level humanities background with deep fluency in art history (Florentine Renaissance, Flemish, Impressionist), Victorian intellectual culture, literary modernism (Eliot, Pound, Woolf, Proust, James), psychoanalytic theory, and intellectual history. He thinks in cross-disciplinary connections, prefers exploratory intellectual dialogue over structured exposition, and consistently contributes original analytical observations rather than receiving received opinion. He identifies as both Freudian and Jungian in theoretical orientation. He has personal photographs of Florentine terracotta roof tiles taken from the top of Giotto's campanile, and has had a formative "reverse Stendhal" experience at the Piazzale Michelangelo — outward and collective rather than inward — which now functions as a permanent perceptual lens rather than a repeatable event.