Free Refills

Jelena Ostapenko

Jelena Ostapenko turns 20 tomorrow. Pretty nice way to celebrate, playing your first Slam semi-final. I knew nothing about her except that she was young. And then I watched some of her match against Wozniacki and I was like:

Oh.

My.

God.

By the time most top athletes hit the pro level, the joy in their play–the actual play in their play–is gone. It’s a job. Maybe one they love, but a job. But there are players for whom there’s a kind of “Let’s see if I can do this” joyous discovery, something almost childlike. I see that when I watch Steph Curry shoot his long threes. It’s like he’s as delighted by his abilities as the rest of us.

My sense is that Ostapenko’s hitting-the-cover-off-the-ball power is similarly borne on the back of joy. It’s like she’s curious just how powerfully she can hit the ball, and is thrilled every time she pulls it off. It’s a hell of a lot of fun to watch.

Again and again, the pressure of being on the radar has proven too much for the players on the women’s tour, so it is premature to say that Ostapenko is the real deal. But she’s definitely definitely definitely one to watch.

Novak Djokovic

Yesterday, I said about the impending Thiem-Djokovic match, “I predict it won’t be nearly as one-sided [as their match in Rome]. Thiem will come in with a gameplan. He may not yet fully have the tools to execute, but I predict we’ll see no 6-0 sets in this match.” What I meant was that I didn’t think it would be one-sided in Djokovic’s favor. That it might be one-sided the other way literally never occurred to me. I did not expect that Djokovic would play one hard-fought set and then fold. When I said “no 6-0 sets” I meant no 6-0 sets that Thiem was on the losing end of. It never, ever occurred to me that it might go the other way.

Djokovic simply tanked the final set. You could see it. He wore a look of utter shellshock, his mind clearly screaming inside his head, and he was obviously just trying to get off the court as quickly as possible. To think that a year ago he seemed invincible, and now he seems lost, frightened, bereft.

I’m sure by now he is carrying that feeling off the court as well, and I wish him the best.

Now we’re in the meat of the tournament.

Also, my life is pretty much off the rails right now, so it’s a testament to how much I love you that I’m still writing and publishing today. With that in mind, you might notice a little … saltiness in the today’s writing.

The Men

Murray – Khachanov: Murray in straights, three, four and four. Khachanov has a huge power game, but he lacks the finesse right now to beat someone with as many tools as Murray. Khachanov is only 21; expect big things from him as his game matures.

Nishikori – Verdasco: Nishikori wins by the improbable score of 0-6, 6-4, 6-4, 6-0. They showed basically none of this match on the TV, so I have no insight to offer. Maybe Nishikori needed a set to get his legs under him after his five-setter against Chung the round previous?

Wawrinka – Monfils: Wawrinka in two tough sets and an easy final one. There is no player whom I want to punch as much as I do Monfils. He has physical gifts that no one–and I mean no one–else on tour can touch. But he is a goddamn headcase, and it makes me angry to see someone squander gifts like that. Yeah, I know, can you really call it squander when you’re talking about one of the top twenty players in the world? In Monfils case, you certainly can. Every time I see him bend over after a point, as though either winded or else convincing himself that he’s hurt, I want to kick him in the balls. “People would kill for your skills, you fucking baby!” I want to shriek at him.

So fuck him. I’m glad Wawrinka won.

Cilic – Anderson: Anderson retired down 3-0 in the second set. Haven’t seen a moment of Cilic play, but I note that he hasn’t even come close to losing a set. He’s apparently not someone to disregard in the next round.

Nadal – Bautista Agut: 6-1, 6-2, 6-2 to Nadal. Holy crap is he playing well. I watched a little of this, until it became clear that there was no real competition here. I found myself asking, “Can I articulate what it is that has Rafa beating Bautista Agut so handily?” Interestingly, the main thing I can come up with is that Rafa is simply across-the-board better. Which is pretty fascinating, if you really think about it. Bautista Agut was the 17-seed here. Can you imagine being one of the twenty best practitioners in the world at something, and there still being people who are head-and-shoulders better than you? Talk about the far extremes of the bell curve, eh?

Thiem – Zeballos: I saw none of it, but notice that Thiem still hasn’t lost a set, and the 6-1, 6-3, 6-1 scoreline here suggests he’s getting stronger as the tournament goes on.

Djokovic – Ramos-Vinolas: A first set tiebreak, and then two straightforward sets for Djokovic. Can a week or so working with Agassi really have gotten his head back on straight?

Carreno Busta – Raonic: No idea. I don’t think I could pick Carreno Busta out in a crowd.

One quick quarterfinal preview: Four interesting matches, but it is the Djokovic-Thiem match that most has my interest. After what Djokovic did to Thiem in Rome, one wonders just what kind of different match we’ll see here. I predict it won’t be nearly as one-sided. Thiem will come in with a gameplan. He may not yet fully have the tools to execute, but I predict we’ll see no 6-0 sets in this match.

The Women

Here I’m only going to talk about two matches.

Mladenovic – Muguruza: If you were wanting to make the case that the women’s game is vastly inferior to the men’s, this would be the match to point to. On paper, it looked good: Last year’s champion versus one of France’s darlings, who happens to be playing well right now. But it was crappy tennis all around. Mugu was barely a factor in the first set, losing 6-1. Somehow Mladenovic managed to lose the second set, mostly on the back of Mugu finally hitting some winners and Mladenovic starting to double-fault by the fistful. But the third set, sweet Jesus. Mladenovic was averaging two double-faults per service game and somehow she managed to win. Really think about that. She was giving Mugu two free points per game on her serve, and still Mugu couldn’t win. Do you have any idea how poorly Mugu had to play for this to be true? Good god. And these are ostensibly two of the best players in the game. Remember when I asserted that some matches, the only reason there’s a winner is that the rules dictate it be so, otherwise both players would lose. Bingo.

Bacsinszky – Venus: Bacsinszky was up 5-1 in the first set and lost the set. I figured this was just one more case of a so-called top women’s player lacking anything like the mental toughness to win, so I gave up on the match. Then she got it together and won two and one the rest of the way. Interesting. Don’t know what else to say about that, because I didn’t see it.

Other thoughts: Halep won 6-1, 6-1. Hasn’t dropped a set yet. Maybe it’s her year.

Venus looked strong through three rounds and not bad in the fourth. Clay is her weakest surface, but grass is her strongest. Serena remains out, the field remains wide open: Is it possible Venus could win Wimbledon?

The Men

Novak Djokovic found himself down two sets to one against Diego Schwartzman and not exactly looking like a champion. Then fatigue and a strained oblique took away Schwartzman’s effectiveness, and he lost the last two sets 6-1, 6-1. Last year, Novak would have dispatched a player like Schwartzman–particularly one with as weak a second serve as Schwartzman–in straight sets.

The other top players didn’t share Djokovic’s struggles. Against Nikoloz Basilashvili, Rafa Nadal won the first 11 games and only lost one the entire match. Basilashvili is a solid player. If the rest of the field isn’t looking at that result and saying, “Oh dear God,” then I’m in awe of their confidence.

Thiem handled Steve Johnson comfortably in three sets, 6-1, 7-6 (4), 6-3. Dimitrov went out in straight sets to Pablo Carreno Busta.

And, sadly, the Roadrunner saw his French Open, and who knows how much of his grass court season, come to a premature end as he slid into the tarp at the end of the court and badly hurt his ankle. Word is that an MRI was negative, that he suffered neither a broken bone nor any kind of severe ligament damage, but it was a shame to see him go down like that. He was up 5-4 and serving for the first set when it happened. I like the Roadrunner. He made the quarterfinals here last year, and looked like he would be making the Round of 16, where he’d likely have met Thiem. Last year they played in the quarterfinals, with Thiem winning 4-6, 7-6 (7), 6-4, 6-1.

Murray battled DelPo through two tough sets before sealing the third with a bagel. Wawrinka beat Fognini comfortably, winning the first set in a tiebreak and then going love and 2 the rest of the way. I haven’t been taking Cilic too seriously but he beat Feliciano Lopez in three comfortable sets and hasn’t dropped a set so far.

The Women

Venus moved forward against Elise Mertens three and one to set up a round of 16 clash against Timea Bacsinszky. Mugu is, kind of to my surprise, still alive, having beaten Putinseva 7-5, 6-2.

Bethanie Mattek-Sands. I asked if perhaps Sam Stosur was beatable. Not apparently, not by Mattek-Sands. Stosur beat her 6-2, 6-2. Stosur’s return-of-serve was simply more than Mattek-Sands could handle.

Halep went through in straights. Cici Bellis’ run came to an end against Caroline Wozniacki. Though Cici won the second set and got to 3-3 in the third, it seemed at that point like she was saying to herself, “Damn, I’ve got a chance to beat a former world number one,” and then her head exploded and she went meekly out the rest of the way.

Kristina Mladenovic’s match against Shelby Rogers was the match of the round. By the third set, Mladenovic looked beaten. She had won the first set 7-5, but then Shelby Rogers upped her first-serve percentage and was able to take the second set 6-4. It looked like Shelby was going to knock Kristina out. After Rogers held serve to start the third set, we saw three straight breaks to give Rogers a 3-1 lead. She held to 4-1, held again to 5-2, and got to serve for the match at 5-3. And then the wheels came off. She got broken at love, somehow held after Mladenovic evened things at 5-5, but then got broken at love again, now spraying unforced errors. In the final game she kept playing into Mladenovic’s strength, the forehand, to lose the match.

It is our observation that most people (in America, at least–we can’t speak intelligently about the rest of the world) are unhappy most of the time.

It is our further observation that it just doesn’t have to be this way. Life doesn’t have to be this hard.

Now, we’re making no claims that these observations are in any way unique to us. The Buddha said the same things 2,500 years ago.

If the Buddha (and Jesus, and Muhammad, and whatever other enlightened sages you’d like to point to) couldn’t teach people that they don’t need to suffer, why are we so arrogant to think we have anything useful to add?

In part, it’s that every voice that offers a path to any level of awakening is valuable–maybe one of those voices will speak to you. (I’d practiced both Zen and Vipassana meditation prior to meeting Jerry, but it was the simple practice of centering that unlocked the door for me.)

It’s also that modern technology can serve to amplify a voice in a way that has never been possible before. (Unfortunately, as we’ve seen through such phenomena as online bullying and fake news, this cuts both ways.)

But more than anything, it’s that we feel we’ve been called to help, and believe we can help.

The Men

No Major Upsets. Nadal, Djokovic and Thiem all got through comfortably in straight sets, as did Wawrinka, Cilic, Nishikori, Dimitrov and Lucas Pouille. Murray, Raonic and Goffin needed four sets to advance.

Kyrgios. Up a set and a break against Kevin Anderson, serving at 4-2 in the second … and then he won three games the rest of the way to lose in four sets. I was going to call him “Infuriating Nick Kyrgios,” but in his post-match press conference he admitted he’s been feeling a lot of grief since the recent death of his grandfather, and I know grief well enough to understand that it absolves him of an awful lot.

The Women

Far Less Carnage Than I Expected. Most of the remaining top-16 seeds won. Exceptions were Pavlyuchenkova, whom I thank for losing so I don’t have to type her name again, and Madison Keys, who started spraying so many unforced errors (6-1 in the third), it was downright strange. Pressure?

Petra Kvitova lost to one of my favorite players, Bethanie Mattek-Sands, in two tiebreaks. Hard to see that as that bad of a result for Petra. These were her first competitive matches this year; she’s allowed to be a little bit off.

Bethanie Mattek-Sands. I’ve liked her ever since I watched her play Serena in the 2015 US Open. In that match, she came out serving and volleying, and for a while Serena was a little off-balance. She also has the most fun fashion sense of anyone in the women’s game. For reasons I can’t quite figure out, she’s not much of a singles player, but she’s sure fun to watch. She plays Sam Stosur in the next round. Perhaps Stosur is beatable?

About a year ago, I asked this question: “How do you guide yourself through the tournament so that you maximize your chances of seeing something remarkable and, if not remarkable, at least beautiful?”

I’ve watched a lot of tennis tournaments since then, sometimes obsessively, and my answer is that you guide yourself by the storylines you witness going into the tournament, extrapolate from there into the way you tell the impending story, and then temper your answer by your own sense of aesthetics.

What do I mean? I think of the storyline as the emergent cultural narrative going into the event, that is, what the sport’s commentators are in aggregate talking about. Then you create your own guiding narrative, which may or may not agree with the aggregate conversation. Something like, “Tina the Llama is the one-seed, but I think she’s overrated right now, still floating along on her results from months and months ago, so instead I suspect that Yertle the Turtle is more likely to win.” And then you bring your aesthetics into play. You might choose to ignore what you see as the key storyline if what it points to doesn’t really appeal to you. That is, even you’ve worked out that Yertle the Turtle is most likely to win, you might instead watch Gretchen the Gnu because you like her game more, even though she’ll find a way to lose by the fourth round.

A real-world example: during Djokovic’s Era of Invincibility, the culmination of which was his victory at Roland Garros last year, an era that ended in apparent burn-out soon thereafter, the dominant storyline dictated that it was Djokovic’s matches that were the obvious ones to watch. After all, he was attempting to complete his career Grand Slam, would be holding all four Slams at once, and looked like he’d soon be threatening Federer’s record of career Slam wins. But for me, there was something so inevitable about his success during that time that his matches were only really compelling if he was playing against an opponent whom I enjoyed watching. Otherwise it felt kind of like watching a YouTube video of a train crashing into a giant cardboard box full of other, smaller boxes: Yes, I suppose it was sort of spectacular in its way, but the carnage was a little too obvious and expected to stay entertaining for long.

So where does all that point me this year?

The dominant storyline on the men’s side is resurgent Rafa Nadal’s pursuit of his tenth French Open championship. For me, that’s interesting enough that it will guide much of the time I spend watching. After him, I’ll watch his two most obvious rivals, Thiem and Djokovic. They’re in the same half of the draw as Rafa (and the same quarter as each other), so there’s kind of a void if I’m watching in anticipation of a certain match-up in the final. If I watch someone on the other side of the draw, it’ll be dictated by how the tournament shakes up; because I really don’t think Murray has it this year, there’s no obvious choice ahead of time.

On the women’s side, I’d written off pretty much everyone who isn’t Venus Williams as being worth watching in the early rounds, because with the women’s game being so inconsistent (its champions prefer the term “wide open”), there wasn’t really any compelling storyline going into the tournament to guide my watching.

But thankfully, a worthwhile storyline arose on Friday, when Petra Kvitova held a press conference and announced to the surprise of everyone that her hand had healed sufficiently from the wounds she suffered when she was attacked in her home back in December that she was going to play in the French. No one is expecting her to go too terribly far–she hasn’t played a competitive match since late last year, and anyway grass is her strongest surface. But still, after such a horrible event, and after the initial talk that she might never regain sufficient function in her hand to play competitively again, her early-round matches are clearly worth checking out this year, and also let’s wish her well.

The Men

Few first-round surprises. Nadal, Djokovic, Thiem, the Roadrunner and Wawrinka all handled their first-round matches in comfortable straight-set wins. Murray and Nishikori needed four sets, but prevailed. Dustin Brown’s stunt tennis failed to bamboozle Monfils.

The only major upset was Sasha Zverev losing in four sets to Fernando Verdasco. Sasha at his best can beat Verdasco, but Verdasco was always going to be a tough match-up on clay. Still, in my predictions, I claimed Sasha was a threat. It didn’t quite work out that way, did it?

Not a lot that stood out as remarkable, though Ferrer beating Donald Young 13-11 in the fifth certainly counts. It was a highly entertaining finish to the match. Playing what amounts to a six-set match probably also ends Ferrer’s chances of going particularly far in this tournament. The wear and tear adds up quickly.

The Women

Kerber. Out limply in the first round, and not really much of a surprise. Maybe players should be given the option to decline the one-seed. It might help them play better.

Petra Kvitova. She won her first match back in straight sets. Great to have her back.

The Bowling Ball of Inconsistency Rolled Down the Lane. But to my surprise, it was nearly a gutter ball. Besides Kerber, the only top-16 seed to lose was Konta, seeded seventh.

Who Are You Wearing?

After the brashness of some of last year’s clothes, especially the zebra stripes Adidas dressed its players in, this year seems positively sedate. Adidas has its players in classic-cut white with tasteful green accents. Did last year’s designers get fired or something?

From what I can tell, Nike did not put an X behind Rafa’s bull logo, which is clearly a mistake.

The French Open started yesterday. I wrote what follows before it started. These are the narratives I’m using to guide myself through the tournament this year.

The Men

Rafael Nadal: Though he was soundly outplayed in the quarters of Rome, thereby spanking my semi-prediction of a sweep of the European clay-court titles right on the bum, Rafa remains the overwhelming favorite here. That loss in Rome also meant that he played two fewer matches, suffered a little less wear and tear, and recovered for a couple of extra days, which all together actually increases his probability of winning the French.

A win this year would be his tenth French. With the convergence of speeds across the surfaces in the last ten or fifteen years, it’s hard to imagine anyone will come close to that kind of single-surface dominance ever again. You’ve got to be pulling for him.

Dominic Thiem: In the past few weeks, he and Nadal met in the finals of Barcelona (Nadal won comfortably), the finals of Madrid (Nadal won less comfortably) and the quarters of Rome, when Thiem showed that he has the tools to beat Rafa, at least sometimes. After that match against Nadal, I was quick to declare¹ that Thiem had just thrust himself into the conversation as the only serious rival to Nadal right now, and that we should hope to see them together in the final.

[I wrote this before the draw. Thiem and Nadal drew into the same half.]

Then the next day he got absolutely erased by Novak Djokovic, 6-1 6-0, a beating so humiliating I had to wonder if I was overestimating him. Except check out this quote from his post-match news conference: “I was empty. I was just not mentally on the level I should be against these opponents. It happens from time to time if you play a lot of matches. And if it happens against a guy like Novak, 6-0, 6-1 or a score like this, is the logical outcome.”

So what was the real culprit? The commentators simply raved about Novak’s performance that day, saying it was the best they’d seen him play since the French a year ago. They clearly really want to declare that he’s back. But I argue that Thiem genuinely was fatigued, mentally spent, and had arrived at the match with no clear game-plan–this after putting a great deal of energy into developing a winning game plan against Rafa the day before. Consider: even with Djokovic playing at his very best, Thiem’s groundstrokes and serve would on any normal day guarantee him a couple of service-game holds per set. And I say that notwithstanding that Djokovic presents a match-up he doesn’t like and hasn’t figured out. 6-2 6-2 would be a pretty serious beating too, but on any normal day Thiem would achieve at least that.

Assuming he comes back recharged from his week off, he needs to be considered among the favorites at the tournament.

Novak Djokovic: He erased Thiem in the semis at Rome. The commentators were quick to declare that the old Novak was back. He’s the defending champion, and it just feels wrong to say he’s an underdog. For a period of a year, from Wimbledon 2015 through the French 2016, he was absolutely invincible. It looked like he was seriously going to challenge Federer’s record for most Grand Slams ever. But since he won the French, his intensity has fallen through the floor. He’s a mere shell of himself. Yeah, he beat the pants off of Thiem. Then the next day in the final against Sasha Zverev, he started the first game like this: double-fault, unforced, unforced. He got broken at 15 in that game. He got completely and soundly beaten over the course of the match. It wasn’t even really as close as the 6-4, 6-3 scoreline would suggest. In total points, Zverev won, 64-48. That’s a beating.

Sasha Zverev: While it’s kind of hard to imagine that at 20 years old he has the mental toughness to keep his shit fully together over seven rounds of best-of-five tennis, his title in Rome (his first Masters 1000 win) thrusts him into the conversation of players to watch this tournament.

Andy Murray: Andy will be the one-seed here this week, but he’s shown no evidence at any point this year that he’s the player he was at the end of last year. It’s impossible to imagine that he’ll repeat as a finalist here like he did last year. I expect he’ll exit limply in a middle round. Maybe he can get it together in time to defend his title at Wimbledon.

Stan Wawrinka: Never, ever count Wawrinka out of a Grand Slam. He’s like a freight train. If he gets out of the first week and gets up to momentum, from that point he’s capable of going all the way. His clay-court form has been underwhelming so far this year, so he’s certainly a long-shot, but until he loses, never, ever count him entirely out of a Slam.

The Women

Serena’s having a baby. Maria wasn’t granted a wild card. So that’s the two biggest stars in the women’s game, and winners of four of the last five French Opens. Defending champion Garbiñe Muguruza will be here; she made it to the semis of Rome, about the best performance she’s had in a tournament since she won last year. She’s been wildly inconsistent since her victory in the French, and her chances appear to have taken a real dive after her injury and subsequent retirement in the Rome semis. That means you almost should count her out. She’s shown no ability to handle the pressure since she won here last year, and she’s nursing an injury. Hard to imagine she’ll go real far.

So who does that leave? At one point I called most of the women’s game “a parade of also-rans,” and I haven’t really changed my assessment. While champions of the women’s game like to claim the wide-open field is a feature, not a bug, I disagree. Why? For me–and, I hazard, most sports fans–the interest isn’t in seeing two people who are both incredibly skillful at hitting fuzzy yellow balls across a net to each other. If it were, all professional matches would be essentially fungible, because each and every professional tennis player is simply incredible at what he or she does. What we want, instead, is answer to the question, “Which of these players is appealing enough, entertaining enough, that I’m willing to spend my limited time watching them play?” We’re seeking something almost ineffable, something that might be properly called spark, are we not?

Well, the wild inconsistency of the women’s game means there really isn’t any spark. I and others hoped that Angelique Kerber was going to be the person to finally show up as a consistent threat to Serena, but she’s been a shell of herself this year. The number-one mantle fits her uncomfortably. So who does that leave? Based on play, the only player who remains particularly compelling is Venus Williams. She’s been consistent but beatable on clay this year, which is fair because it’s probably her worst surface. It’s hard to imagine that she’s capable of winning the whole thing, no matter how cool that would be.

The other player of real interest is Petra Kvitova. No one expected her to return from her injuries so quickly. After what she went through, every successful shot she hits is a complete and beautiful story unto itself. It will be a pleasure to watch her play.

So here are my predictions for the French Open women’s side:

1. Seeded players will scatter like bowling pins in front of the rolling momentum of their own inconsistent play.

2. Someone is going to win, because the rules demand it. But otherwise … I think it’s possible that every single woman in the field would find a way to lose by the semis.

3. I predict a seeded player will win. There! How’s that for bold? I have narrowed my field down to one of the 32 players.

4. I won’t bother to watch much, if at all, unless Venus or Petra make a deep run.

---

¹ In my zero drafts, anyway. I haven’t published anything to that effect yet.

If you follow the news at all, this week’s inescapable story was the suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, in which 22 people were killed. After last week’s piece, in which I talked about the negative impact of taking in certain kinds of information, it feels salient to talk about the significance of this story.

As with the kind of story I wrote about last week, there’s nothing useful you can do with information about the bombing, but what’s different is that it almost can’t help but affect you. Coverage was ubiquitous. To filter out a story like this would require a deep commitment to actively avoiding pretty much every news source.

I felt deeply saddened by the news. Maybe it’s that it’s so easy to imagine myself in a similar situation. I know the feeling of leaving a big concert, carrying the glow of having shared a special experience with thousands of others, and so I feel a “There but for the Grace of God” empathy to all those affected by this horrific deed. It’s no mistake that terrorists target this kind of event, not just a place where a lot of people have gathered, but also a place of happiness, of celebration, of sharing the exuberance of life. Terrorism of this nature means to attack the social impulse in our society, to corrupt joy itself.

Terrorism seeks to create exactly the kind of emotional response that I’m experiencing. It is meant to engender sadness, to make the world seem more dangerous, to impose the spectre of itself every time we engage in the sort of aliveness we experience when we attend a concert, a sporting event, or similar. Terrorism means to attack our very sense of the world’s goodness, to corrupt our resiliency and our hope.

And the ugly truth is that terrorism achieves exactly that. Engaging in the act of imaginative empathy–that the people affected are exactly like me–creates exactly the result that the terrorist hopes it will. Furthermore notice that part of what is under attack here is our very ability and desire to empathize. Indeed, my taking the time to write about what happened and to grapple with how to respond is exactly the kind of response the bomber surely wanted. In some ways, my empathy and the response it calls for empowers the hideous people who did this in the first place. But to not feel this sadness feels monstrous. To disengage means dismissing some portion of my own humanity. Surely that is worse. Thus we are faced with the incredible corrupting power of political violence.

From the perspective of what we’ve been writing about here, the question arises, “How do we successfully use energetics to make a difference when this kind of thing happens?”

I wish I had some kind of answer, but I do not. I went into writing about this hoping I’d have something to offer, but I do not. Sometimes the world is a sad place in which people do awful things, and news about those awful things makes its way to us and affects our lives, and I don’t know what to propose to do about it, except feel the sadness because what happened is sad. I wish I could even hope that someday our embodied sense of shared humanity might develop to a sufficient level that political violence of every sort will be seen not as violence against the Other but as violence against ourselves. But even that hope feels empty, because the suicide bomber himself showed quite clearly that he had no qualms about violence against himself.

There’s no easy conclusion here, and that too is sad.

If by that you mean:

1. that the only way to read Free Refills forward, even if you wanted to, is pretty much to scroll all the way to the bottom and then read upwards and
2. that the vast, vast majority of the pieces are in the category, “Uncategorized, So Far,” so that categories aren’t much help

then yeah, I think you’re making a pretty good point there.

I have some pretty clear work to do to bring my declaration about the Not-a-Blogness of Free Refills in line with its formal reality, eh?