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Trump’s 20-Point Gaza Peace Plan Devotes Seventeen Points to Trump

Nash Grayson
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Trump’s 20-Point Gaza Peace Plan Devotes Seventeen Points to Trump

WASHINGTON — A U.S.-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took hold Thursday morning under the terms of President Trump’s much-touted twenty-point peace framework, of which seventeen points reportedly concern the personal greatness of President Trump, two concern hostages, and one is a hand-drawn arrow pointing at the Nobel Committee’s mailing address.

The framework, distributed to negotiators on White House letterhead bordered with what aides described as “victory laurels,” opens with the binding clause “Whereas no one has ever done this before, and many people are saying that,” before getting around to the cessation of hostilities on page eleven. Point 14 is simply the word “TREMENDOUS” in 48-point font. Point 19 instructs signatories to “call him and tell him.”

“It’s structurally unusual but diplomatically functional,” said Renske Halloran, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Heartland Project who has reviewed the document. “The actual ceasefire mechanism is buried in a footnote on point seven, and the footnote is also about Trump. But technically the guns stopped, so by the only metric the President accepts, it’s working.”

Hostage families, who learned of the breakthrough via a Truth Social post that misspelled three of their relatives’ names, expressed cautious relief. The post was reportedly point 8.

State Department officials, speaking on background because they would prefer to keep working there, confirmed that the President spent the morning of the ceasefire’s implementation not on follow-through but on a phone call to the Norwegian ambassador in which he asked, three times, whether the Nobel medal could be made bigger. He is said to have inquired about “a sash, like a beauty pageant” as a backup.

Israeli and Hamas negotiators, who have spent two years unable to agree on the shape of a table, reportedly signed the framework after being told they did not have to read points 1 through 6, 9 through 13, 15, 16, 17, or 20, all of which are about Trump. Negotiators were permitted to focus exclusively on the twelve sentences that constitute actual policy.

The President addressed the nation Thursday afternoon from the Rose Garden, where he spoke for forty-one minutes about the ceasefire and approximately ninety seconds about the region. He referred to Gaza as “that place” four times and to himself as “the only one who could have done this” eleven times, a ratio aides described as “on-message.”

Asked by a reporter whether the framework included any enforcement mechanism, the President said the enforcement mechanism was him, personally, and that anyone who broke the ceasefire would have to deal with him, personally, and that he would be very disappointed, personally. He then introduced his son-in-law, who introduced a slideshow.

Critics noted that point 20, the only operative clause concerning long-term governance of Gaza, reads in its entirety: “To be determined by President Trump at a later date, possibly during a rally.” Supporters called the provision flexible.

By Thursday evening the ceasefire was holding, the hostages were being processed, and the President was on the phone with a medal engraver, asking whether “45 and 47, Peace” could fit on the front, or whether they’d have to put some of it on the back.

Comey Was Arraigned Wednesday. We Talked About the Lamb.

Margaret Thorne
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Comey Was Arraigned Wednesday. We Talked About the Lamb.

When did the arraignment of a former FBI director become the part of the evening you skip past to get to the entrée?

James Comey pleaded not guilty Wednesday in a federal courthouse in Alexandria, charged with lying to Congress, and at Eliza’s table that night in Georgetown the news arrived between the soup and the salad, by way of a phone glance, and was received the way you receive a weather alert for a county you don’t live in.

“Oh,” Eliza said. “Yes. That.”

The bipartisan lobbyist seated to my left — I will say only that he has lobbied for things and against them in roughly equal measure, sometimes in the same fiscal quarter — examined his cufflink and observed that “the institutional thing here is interesting,” which is what he says when he has not yet decided which side pays better.

I want to be clear about what was strange. It was not that no one at the table had an opinion. Everyone had an opinion. Each of us had arrived already holding the opinion we were going to leave with, fully assembled, like a casserole brought from home. What was strange was that no one was willing to set it down on the tablecloth where the rest of us could see it.

My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has watched four administrations file things, leaned over and said the part nobody else would: that we have now arraigned, indicted, investigated, or pardoned roughly every senior figure who used to be in charge of arraigning, indicting, and investigating, and that at some point the staffing chart begins to resemble a cast list.

Someone — I think it was the woman from the think tank whose name is two first names — said it was “a serious moment for the rule of law,” which is the phrase Washington reaches for when it would like to sound concerned without being specific. Then she asked if the lamb was from the place on Wisconsin.

The lamb was from the place on Wisconsin.

I tried to remember when an arraignment of this caliber would have stopped a dinner party. Not ended it — stopped it, the way a fire alarm stops one. I cannot remember. I think we have all gotten very good at the small adjustment that lets the meal continue: the polite reach for the salt, the pivot to the school district, the fond joke about the rosé. The adjustment used to be a quiet skill. It is now a credential.

By the cheese course the bipartisan lobbyist had decided that what he believed about James Comey was that the situation was “complicated,” and Eliza, who is fond of him, said “Margaret, please,” in the tone of voice that means we are not going to ruin this with a question we cannot answer before dessert.

Eliza brought out the lamb. It was, by unanimous consent, the only subject on which the table agreed. We called it the lamb course, and we asked for the recipe.

Cedar Street’s 18-Foot Inflatable Frankenstein Now Has an Attorney

Hal Cranston
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Cedar Street’s 18-Foot Inflatable Frankenstein Now Has an Attorney

MOUNT JOY, PA — The eighteen-foot inflatable Frankenstein staked into the front yard of Dale Frommer on Cedar Street has, as of Sunday afternoon, retained legal counsel, marking the first known time this borough’s Halloween code has produced a billable hour.

The dispute began September 24, when the Sherwood Hills HOA issued Frommer a written warning citing the lawn ornament’s “scale, anchoring, and general posture.” The figure sways noticeably in any wind above six miles per hour, and at night casts a shadow that reaches the cul-de-sac.

Frommer, a regional sales manager for an industrial valve company, declined to remove it, and on October 2 retained Lancaster attorney Beth Crannage, who specializes in zoning, easements, and what she described over the phone as “everything people pretend they don’t care about until October.”

“The covenant says ‘seasonal decorations of reasonable size,'” Crannage said. “It does not define reasonable. My client’s position is that Frankenstein, being himself a creature of unreasonable proportions, is being singled out for what he is, not what he does.”

HOA president Doreen Rauschenberg, reached at her kitchen table, said the issue is not Frankenstein per se but “the precedent.” Last October, she noted, a neighbor two doors down inflated a witch that “made a noise like a dishwasher” from dusk until 11 p.m., and the board “let it slide and we are still hearing about it.”

A walk down Cedar Street on Tuesday evening confirmed that Frankenstein, illuminated from below by a generator-fed shop light, can be seen from the parking lot of the Turkey Hill on Route 230. Several drivers slowed. One pulled in and took a picture.

Frommer’s neighbor directly to the south, Carl Vetri, said he had no strong feelings about the figure itself but would like the generator turned off after ten. “It’s not the monster,” Vetri said. “It’s the hum.”

Frommer told this reporter he has no plans to deflate. He has, however, ordered a second unit — a fourteen-foot Grim Reaper — that he says will arrive Friday and be staked “well within the setback.”

Crannage, asked whether the Reaper complicates her case, paused for a long moment. “It does not simplify it,” she said.

Spirit Halloween Is the Only Tenant Paying Rent on Time at $2B REIT

Cody Thompson
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Spirit Halloween Is the Only Tenant Paying Rent on Time at $2B REIT

STAMFORD, CT — In a Q3 update that should have been buried on a Friday afternoon, Heartland Mall Properties confirmed Monday that the highest-performing tenant across its 22-property portfolio is a Spirit Halloween that signed a six-week lease on August 19.

The REIT, which trades under HMPT and once anchored its prospectus on a Sears in Toledo, disclosed that Spirit Halloween is the only tenant currently paying full rent on time at the Westfield Crestmoor location, an abandoned Bed Bath & Beyond in Oklahoma City, and a former Pier 1 in Buffalo that has been listed as “transitioning” since March 2022.

“They wired the deposit. They wired the deposit,” said an HMPT asset manager reached at his desk, where a half-eaten Sweetgreen harvest bowl sat beside a three-ring binder labeled OCCUPANCY — REAL. “Do you understand how long it has been since someone wired us a deposit.”

Internal materials reviewed by analysts at Beacon Strategy show HMPT has begun referring to Spirit Halloween in investor decks as an “anchor tenant,” a “category co-pilot,” and, on slide 14 of a deck dated last Tuesday, “the franchise.” The chain occupies roughly 184,000 square feet across the portfolio and will vacate, contractually, by November 4.

A footnote in the 10-Q discloses that management is “actively exploring” extending the Spirit Halloween relationship into a year-round concept, including a December pivot called Spirit Christmas — a real product launch by the parent company — and an internally proposed “Spirit February,” which the deck describes only as “TBD — possibly Valentines.”

Reached at the Buffalo location, a Spirit Halloween district manager named Ron paused while inflating a 12-foot animatronic werewolf to note that his store was on track to gross more in eight weeks than the Pier 1 had grossed in its final fourteen months. “We brought our own light bulbs,” he added. “Their bulbs were out.”

Other HMPT tenants — a SuperCuts that has been on a percentage-of-sales arrangement since 2023, a tax preparer who pays only in May, and a Things Remembered the REIT has reclassified as a “long-tail seasonal performer” — were unavailable for comment. A Sbarro at the Crestmoor property is currently subleasing its hood vent.

HMPT’s chief revenue officer, on a 4 p.m. call with three buy-side analysts and what sounded like a leaf blower in the background, framed the dynamic as evidence of “a thesis-validating pivot toward experiential retail,” then asked whether anyone on the line knew if Spooner’s Pumpkin Patch was a publicly traded entity.

Shares of HMPT closed up 1.4% on the news, then gave it all back when an analyst at MERIDIAN-3 noted in a 6 p.m. flash that the entire investment thesis was now timed to a chain that sells $39 wigs out of buildings nobody wanted.

I’m Handing Out Date Balls This Halloween and Marlene Already Warned Me

Brooke Ellery
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I’m Handing Out Date Balls This Halloween and Marlene Already Warned Me

I am at the kitchen island rolling date balls in raw cacao at nine on a Sunday night, and Cleo, with the seriousness of a small attorney, asked me whether anyone in the neighborhood is actually going to eat them.

Marlene already warned me. She came over earlier with a Costco bag of fun-size Twix on her hip and said, “Brooke. Honey. Don’t be the date-ball house.” She said it the way you’d tell someone not to stand in front of a moving train.

Reader, I am going to be the date-ball house.

Here is what is in a Reese’s Peanut Butter Pumpkin: fourteen ingredients, three of them seed oils, two of them dyes that are banned in countries with vowels in their names, and TBHQ, which my sister-in-law Lainey, who runs the front desk at a pediatric urgent care and is basically a nurse, says she will not even type into a search bar after six p.m. She called it “the one that follows you home.”

My version: seven Medjool dates from the co-op, almond flour, raw cacao, one drop of food-grade peppermint, and a pinch of pink Himalayan salt. Salt is a mineral, not an ingredient. Each ball gets wrapped in a small square of beeswax cloth tied with hemp twine I dyed in turmeric water last August. They look, I will admit, like very small upholstered ottomans.

Wyatt asked if he could trade his date ball for one Reese’s and I told him he could trade it for one square of dark chocolate, 88% or higher, and he sighed in the exact pitch his father sighs in. Brad, for the record, has remained “publicly neutral” on the date balls, which is how Brad participates in our marriage during the month of October.

The Facebook group Whole Mothers Whole Halloween — 41,000 members, very active — has been tracking ingredient panels on this year’s fun-size bars and one woman in Findlay, Ohio found something listed only as “natural and artificial flavoring (contains milk, may contain other things).” May contain other things. That is the actual phrasing on the back of a candy we are handing to children dressed as fairies.

Lainey said the date balls are “basically medicine,” and I am not going to argue with someone who has been within fifteen feet of a vaccine fridge. She also said dates have natural fiber, which is “essentially the body’s broom,” and I have written that on a small index card I am taping to the bowl on our porch so parents can read it while their kids assess the situation.

I am aware that some of the date balls are going to end up in our boxwoods. I have made peace with this. The boxwoods are the compost. Beeswax cloth is fully biodegradable and turmeric-dyed hemp twine breaks down in roughly ninety days. Compare that to a plastic Smarties wrapper, which is going to outlive my granddaughter’s granddaughter and probably become the object a future archaeologist holds up on a podcast.

Cleo, who has been quietly watching me for forty minutes, asked if she could put one tiny sticker on each ball, a little ghost. I said yes, because the sticker is paper and the adhesive is plant-based, and because a ghost on a date ball is, I think, the closest I am going to get to making this look fun for a six-year-old in a butterfly cape.

Marlene just texted me a photo of her candy bowl. It is the size of a kitchen sink. She wrote “last chance.” I sent her back a picture of one of my date balls, ghost sticker centered, twine just so. She replied with a single thumbs-down emoji, which I am choosing to read as encouragement.

Vermont B&B Owner Securitizes 14 Days of Peak Foliage, S&P Rates It BBB-

Cody Thompson
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Vermont B&B Owner Securitizes 14 Days of Peak Foliage, S&P Rates It BBB-

STOWE, VT — Maple Eaves Inn proprietor Marian Holcombe closed Friday on a $4.2 million asset-backed note collateralized entirely by the projected color of fourteen sugar maples on her property between October 7th and October 21st, making her, by most measures, the first innkeeper in North America to securitize a tree.

The notes pay quarterly off room-rate cash flows — $389 a night, two-night minimum, no children, no dogs that have ever been described as ‘a lot’ — and are sliced into three tranches by week, with the senior piece priced to a leaf-peeper occupancy assumption of 94%. The prospectus is typeset in Garamond and includes a four-color insert of last October’s canopy that one underwriter described as ‘frankly, lickable.’

‘The credit risk isn’t demand, it’s chlorophyll,’ said Pell Whitcomb, a climate-correlation analyst at the policy desk of a Big Four firm, eating a turkey sandwich over a printout of GDD anomalies. ‘Warm Septembers are pushing peak color into the fourth week of October, which is outside the bond’s collection window. We’re modeling a 1-in-7 year where she’s selling rooms against a tree that is, technically, still summer.’

Holcombe has hedged the exposure through a foliage swap with a counterparty inn outside Sherbrooke, Québec, whose maples historically peak roughly twelve days earlier and whose owner, in turn, is hedged against an Adirondack property running a week behind. The chain, three deep, is held together by a single shared spreadsheet and a Vermont attorney named Dale who answers email between 6 and 7 a.m.

Bondholder Henry Forman, a retired endodontist from Short Hills who took down a $25,000 slice of the Class B notes, said he was attracted to the yield and also that he had separately booked Room 4 for the weekend of October 11th. ‘I’m long the inn and I’m staying at the inn,’ he said, in a sentence his financial advisor has reportedly asked him to stop using.

Moody’s, which has not yet rated the structure but is observing it with what one source called ‘professional curiosity bordering on a hobby,’ has a junior analyst stationed on the roof of his Subaru Outback in the Stowe Walmart parking lot with a NIST-certified colorimeter, taking daily readings off two reference maples and uploading them to a Bloomberg chat called LEAF-1. As of Friday afternoon, the trees were registering what he described in the chat as ‘mostly still doing a green thing.’

S&P assigned the senior tranche a BBB- rating with a negative outlook, citing climate, foot traffic out of Logan, and a single line in the offering memo noting that one of the fourteen pledged maples ‘has a situation with its bark.’ Holcombe, asked whether she was concerned about the rating, said she was more concerned about the muffins, which she had not yet started.

The notes mature in 2027. The trees do not.

HOA Skeleton Arms Race Now Requires FAA Notification, Pittsburgh Suburb Confirms

Tara Sparks
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HOA Skeleton Arms Race Now Requires FAA Notification, Pittsburgh Suburb Confirms

WEXFORD, PA — A 14-foot Home Depot skeleton dressed as a Steelers linebacker now towers over the cul-de-sac at Birchwood Court, where what neighbors describe as a “completely friendly” Halloween decoration rivalry has escalated to the point that one resident has filed a temporary obstruction notice with the Federal Aviation Administration.

The notice, filed Tuesday by retired dentist Greg Donnelly, covers the airspace between his split-level and the matching 14-foot skeleton across the street, which is wearing a hand-stitched witch hat and holding what locals confirm is “a real, working chainsaw, but unplugged, probably.”

“It started in 2022 with normal pumpkins,” said Marlene Quist, who runs the Birchwood Court Facebook group and has been documenting the escalation in a 47-post photo album titled Things Are Getting Weird. “Then somebody got the 12-foot skeleton. Then somebody got two 12-foot skeletons. Now Pat across the way has a skeleton on a skeleton, and Greg has hired a structural engineer.”

The structural engineer, Dale Reems of Reems & Son Residential Load Bearing, confirmed he was retained to assess whether the Donnelly front lawn could support a planned 16-foot animatronic grim reaper without “compromising the septic field.” He said he had not previously worked in seasonal decor but that the math was “the same math.”

Tensions reached a new altitude last weekend when Pat Hennessy reportedly rented a boom lift to install a strobe-lit raven on the skeleton’s shoulder, prompting two separate 911 calls from drivers on Route 19 who believed they were witnessing a hostage situation.

Hennessy, reached at his garage where a fog machine the size of a deep freezer was being calibrated, declined to characterize the dispute as a feud. “It’s a celebration,” he said. “Greg knows it’s a celebration. His wife knows it’s a celebration. The FAA knows it’s a celebration now, I guess.”

The Wexford Township zoning board has confirmed that residential decorations are not subject to height restrictions, a loophole that Marlene Quist described as “the original sin.” The board’s October meeting agenda now includes a single line item reading Skeletons (Discussion).

Trick-or-treating volume on Birchwood Court is expected to triple this year, with parents from as far as Cranberry Township planning visits despite the route being, according to one mom interviewed in a CVS parking lot, “genuinely a little upsetting for the under-sevens.”

Donnelly, asked whether he planned to de-escalate, gestured toward a tarp in his driveway covering what he would only describe as “phase three.” The FAA notice expires November 2.

One Maple in Bethel, ME Now Has Its Own Tip Jar and Volunteer Marshal

Hal Cranston
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One Maple in Bethel, ME Now Has Its Own Tip Jar and Volunteer Marshal

BETHEL, ME — The sugar maple at the corner of Mason Street and Paradise Road, long considered the showpiece of the block by anyone with eyes, has this week acquired both a folding card table with a hand-lettered tip jar and a sixty-eight-year-old retiree in a reflective vest directing traffic around it.

The tree, which locals refer to simply as Doris’s Maple, after the late Doris Aldrich whose porch it shades, hit peak color sometime Monday evening and is expected to hold for what longtime residents are calling “another good two days, weather permitting and barring wind.”

By Tuesday morning, three rental Subarus with Massachusetts plates were idling in the road taking photographs through the windshield. By Wednesday there were eleven, a charter bus from Quincy, and a woman from Connecticut who asked Pat Aldrich, Doris’s son, whether the tree was “on the trail.”

“There is no trail,” Pat said. “It’s a tree. It’s in the yard.”

Pat’s neighbor Gus Lemoine, who retired from the Bethel highway department in 2019 and has been described by his wife as “looking for something,” appointed himself crowd marshal Tuesday afternoon after a Volvo wagon nearly clipped a child on a Razor scooter. Gus wears the orange vest he kept from the town and carries a whistle he purchased Tuesday evening at the Aubuchon Hardware on Main.

The tip jar, a repurposed pickle jar with the label still partially attached, was added Wednesday by Pat’s daughter Hannah, age eleven, who has so far collected $73 and a Canadian quarter. Pat says the money is going toward a new mailbox, the previous one having been backed into Tuesday by what witnesses described as “the second bus.”

Reached at the Sunday River Brewing Company, where she was eating a chowder, longtime Bethel innkeeper Marjorie Pell said the volume of leaf traffic this year is “the worst it’s been since the autumn the New York Times wrote us up,” referring to a 2017 travel piece she has not forgiven. Pell said her own front-yard maples, which she described as “frankly more uniform in color than Doris’s,” have not received a single visitor.

Town manager Dale Frechette confirmed the town has no formal mechanism for regulating roadside tree tourism and is unlikely to develop one before Sunday, when the leaves are projected to drop. Frechette did note that Gus Lemoine is operating in a strictly volunteer capacity and that the town is not liable for whistle-related hearing complaints, of which it has received two.

By Wednesday afternoon, a second card table had appeared across the street, manned by a teenage boy selling cider donuts at a markup his mother described as “appropriate to the moment.” A handwritten sign taped to the donut table read RESTROOMS NOT AVAILABLE, underlined twice.

Pat Aldrich, asked whether his mother would have approved of any of this, paused for some time before answering. “She would have hated the bus,” he said. “The rest of it she’d have charged more for.”

Shutdown Begins as Congress Successfully Passes Buck Across Aisle

Nash Grayson
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Shutdown Begins as Congress Successfully Passes Buck Across Aisle

WASHINGTON — At 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, the federal government officially shut down for the first time since the last time, with both chambers of Congress immediately taking to cable news to explain that the catastrophe unfolding behind them was, technically, the other guys’ fault.

The lapse in funding furloughed roughly 800,000 federal workers, suspended a long list of services Americans had no idea they were receiving, and triggered the only legislative process Congress has reliably executed on time this decade: the rapid deployment of pre-recorded floor speeches blaming everyone within a four-mile radius of the Capitol.

By 12:03 a.m., a Senate aide was already tweeting a graphic.

“Both sides are operating under a shared bipartisan framework,” said Reed Halloran, a fellow at the Brennan-Voss Institute for Procedural Studies, “in which the framework is that nobody does anything, everybody yells, and the paychecks keep clearing.” Halloran noted that Article I of the Constitution explicitly assigns Congress the power of the purse, a responsibility lawmakers have spent the better part of forty years trying to give back like an unwanted Christmas sweater.

Members of both parties spent Tuesday evening locked in the kind of high-stakes negotiations that produce no agreement, no continuing resolution, and an unusually large number of lower-thirds reading SOURCES SAY TALKS COLLAPSING. House leadership emerged briefly to announce they had been very close to a deal, the Senate had blown it up, and they would now be flying home to their districts to be absolutely furious about it from a Marriott ballroom.

Senate leadership emerged shortly after to announce that the House had blown it up, that they themselves had been within inches of a breakthrough, and that the American people deserved better than this — a sentiment delivered without irony by a man who has been in the chamber since 1987.

The President, asked Tuesday whether he would intervene, said he had been told the shutdown was “actually a beautiful thing” and that the people getting hurt were mostly people he didn’t like anyway. He then signed an executive order he was informed afterward did not legally exist.

Affected workers, for their part, reported the standard mix of resignation and rage. A TSA officer at Reagan National, working without pay until further notice, said he had stopped being surprised somewhere around the second shutdown of his career and now mostly tracked them the way other people track hurricanes. “You see the cone of uncertainty,” he said, “and you just buy the rice.”

Essential personnel — air traffic controllers, federal prison guards, and the staff of the congressional gym, which somehow remains open — reported to their posts as scheduled. Non-essential personnel, a category that pointedly does not include the 535 elected officials whose failure to pass a budget caused the shutdown, were instructed to check their email periodically for updates that will not arrive.

Lawmakers’ salaries, protected by a constitutional provision lawmakers wrote about lawmakers, will continue to be deposited on schedule.

By Wednesday afternoon, the Capitol had settled into the comfortable rhythm of a shutdown’s first full day: empty offices, full greenrooms, and a steady migration of senators toward whichever network had agreed to let them sigh heavily on camera. Aides confirmed the blame tour is booked through Friday, with overflow segments scheduled into the weekend pending ratings.

Asked when a deal might be reached, one senior staffer paused, looked toward the rotunda, and said the honest answer was “whenever the polling tells someone they’re losing.”

JV Coach Opened Practice With ‘Intentions’ and a Spotify Playlist

Duke Holloway
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JV Coach Opened Practice With ‘Intentions’ and a Spotify Playlist

I went out to watch my grandson’s JV practice Monday afternoon because his mother asked me to and because the alternative was sitting in the kitchen while Denise reorganized the spice cabinet by, and I am quoting her here, ‘energy.’ I figured an hour on a metal bleacher was the safer play. I was wrong about that, and I’ve been wrong about worse.

The new coach is named Brennan. Brennan has a clipboard, a fanny pack, and a haircut that costs money. He gathered the boys at the fifty, had them sit cross-legged in a circle, and asked them to share their ‘intention for the session.’ One kid said winning. Brennan told him that was a goal, not an intention, and the kid looked at him the way a calf looks at a gate it doesn’t understand.

Then somebody pressed play on a speaker the size of a small dog and what came out was not a whistle. It was a song. With words. About manifesting. The offensive line was supposed to stretch to it. Coach DiMaggio, who ran our two-a-days in 1974 in heat that killed a man’s lawn, would have walked into the Atlantic Ocean.

I called Ray Kowalczyk on the way home. Ray coached middle school ball in Bethlehem for thirty-one years and now winters in a condo where the HOA won’t let him put up a flag. I told him about the intentions. Ray was quiet for a long time and then he said, ‘Duke, my intention is for you to stop telling me things.’ Ray gets it. Ray has always gotten it.

Brennan, I learned from the program the booster club printed on actual cardstock, holds a certification in ‘Adolescent Performance Mindset’ from an online outfit out of Boulder. He also has a podcast. It is called Inside the Whistle and the cover art is him pointing at the camera in a quarter-zip. I listened to four minutes of an episode about ‘the language of accountability.’ My truck started making a noise I’d never heard before. I think it was protesting.

The practice itself, when they finally got around to it, ran fifty minutes. There was a ‘breathwork reset’ between special teams and seven-on-seven. A kid pulled up with a hamstring and Brennan told him to honor the signal his body was sending. In my day the signal your body was sending was that you were a coward and the response was a lap. I am not saying that was correct. I am saying it produced linebackers.

Here is what gets me, and I’ll try to say it without spitting. The boys are fine. The boys are great, actually. My grandson, Marcus, who is built like a coat rack but mean about it, hit a kid so clean on a crossing route that the helmet sound carried all the way to where I was sitting. He didn’t celebrate. He helped the kid up. He’s a good one. The kids almost always are. It’s the adults who keep finding new ways to make a simple thing weird.

I think about Petey Corrigan, who coached the freshman team at our school for twenty-two years for an honorarium of one ham at Christmas. Petey couldn’t have told you what a ‘mindset framework’ was if you held his pension over a fire. What Petey did was show up at five-thirty in the morning, stand in the parking lot in a windbreaker, and know every kid’s mother’s name. Three of his players went D-I. None of them did breathwork. All of them, last I checked, can still run.

Brennan ended the session with what he called a ‘gratitude lap.’ The boys jogged the perimeter and were instructed to think of one person they were thankful for. Marcus told me in the truck he thought of me, which was nice, and then said he also thought of the kid who runs the snack stand because he sneaks him extra Gatorade. Both of those, I told him, are correct intentions.

Denise is making chili tonight. She says the recipe is from something called the Modern Hearth Substack. I told her I’d eat it. I have my own intention.

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