Don’t tell me Dolly Parton wasn’t political

I keep seeing people making the claim that Dolly Parton was a non-political celebrity. See, the word they’re thinking is partisan.

Dolly wasn’t someone who actively campaigned for a political party, but she was absolutely someone with a desire to help others and solve societal problems.

She helped fund Moderna’s COVID vaccine. And she’s spent money establishing a non-profit children’s hospital in her home state of Tennessee and continued to fund it to improve pediatric care.

She donated to disaster relief multiple times, including directly giving cash donations to families trying to rebuild their lives, with no strings attached.

As of 2025, her Imagination Library had donated over 300 million books to children across the country (including my kids). But this wasn’t her only educational contribution. She established scholarships in her home county to encourage kids there to finish high school. Employees at Dollywood were able to get tuition covered to further their education.

She was also a consistent LGBTQ ally, and made a point to ground that support within her overall belief in the goodness of people as well as her Christian faith.

She acted to care for her fellow people. She believed that neighbors struggling with disaster need support, that kids who need a boost to stick with their education should get it, and that health improving the health care of others isn’t a burden solely carried by each individual. That everyone has a place at the table, and no one should be cast out for being who they are.

Those are all ideas about how we should live together as a society. How we should care for each other.

The problem is that people see politics as a profession, or as a partisan blood sport. As a kayfabe entertainment where talking heads argue on camera and get drinks when they think no one is watching.

Dolly was political, but not a politician. Dolly was political the way Jesus was political. Dolly thought the world would be better if we took better care of each other and gave each other more respect.

If she saw a way she could help, she did. Call it charity, kindness, philanthropy. Call it punk af. But that kind of radical kindness was absolutely a political act.

Commonplace Book 2

As the philosopher and writer Paul Valéry explained in 1938, “A poet’s function is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others.” That is, his job is to produce work.

— Ego Is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday

Your job as a writer is making sentences.
Your other jobs include fixing sentences, killing sentences, and arranging sentences.
If this is the case making, fixing, killing, arranging how can your writing possibly flow?
It can’t.

Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.

A writer may write painstakingly,
Assembling the work slowly, like a mosaic,
Fitting and refitting sentences and paragraphs over the years.
And yet to the reader the writing may seem to flow.

The reader’s experience of your prose has nothing to do with how hard or easy it was for you to make.
You’re not writing for a reader in the mirror whose psychological state reflects your own.
You have only your own working world to consider.
The reader reads in another world entirely.

— Several Short Sentences about Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg

One is from my previous career as an electronic musician doing live shows: Every time the DJ drops a new track, it feels louder than anything else that you’ve heard before, which is actually not the case! What happens is you drop a new track, and then over the course of three to five minutes, you make it ever so slightly quieter. And then the new track comes in and it’s back at the level where the original one started, and then everything feels so loud.

So, that is one solution. The other one has something to do with my biggest hobby, cooking. With a ten-course meal, you start somewhere, and you a leave a palate behind in your mouth that wants to go to the next step. The same with wine tasting, where you start with a certain wine, and you build your way up to the bolder ones. That knowledge really comes into play when you want to create an arc over an action score with almost continuous music: In the first twenty minutes, you set a palate.

—Tom Holkenborg (JunkieXL) (interviewed in Blood, Sweat & Chrome, Kyle Buchanan)

“Simplicity is not an end in art, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, in approaching the real sense of things. Things aren’t difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state to make them.”

— Constantin Brancusi

Commonplace Book 1

In the beginning, we believe that there must be someone in order for the breathing to be possible. There must be someone in order for the walking to be possible. But in fact the walking, the breathing is enough. We don’t need a walker; we don’t need a breather. Think of the rain. We’re used to saying, “the rain is falling,” or “the wind is blowing.” But if it’s not falling, it’s not the rain. And if it’s not blowing, it’s not the wind. It is the same with breathing and walking with the Buddha. We begin to touch the reality of no-self. There is only the breathing going on; there’s only the walking going on.

— Breathe, You Are Alive!, Thich Nhat Hanh

Lots of people want to be the noun without doing the verb. They want the job title without the work.

Let go of the thing that you’re trying to be (the noun), and focus on the actual work you need to be doing (the verb). Doing the verb will take you someplace further and far
more interesting.

— Keep Going, Austin Kleon

Now for the interesting question: If you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your system, would you still succeed? For example, if you were a basketball coach and you ignored your goal to win a championship and focused only on what your team does at practice each day, would you still get results?

I think you would.

The goal in any sport is to finish with the best score, but it would be ridiculous to spend the whole game staring at the scoreboard. The only way to actually win is to get better each day. In the words of three-time Super Bowl winner Bill Walsh, “The score takes care of itself.” The same is true for other areas of life. If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.

— Atomic Habits, James Clear

Mastery has no end game, I discovered. It is a goal of coarse. Yet there is no turning point felt and reached. There is no singular moment when something happens and all becomes clear. Of course we who work with our hands consider becoming a master. A master of wood, of clay, or paint. A master of welding or hammering metal into shapes. Mastering the violin, the fiddle, the bow on the saw. However redolent the smell of the goal of mastery may be at the beginning to an acolyte, it doesn’t seem real once you get down to the work of the thing, the practice of it. Then it’s just your striving every day to get better while staying alive.

— Handmade, Gary Rogowski

Selected highlights from my therapy notes (YTD)

  • When negative self talk happens, ask “What is this trying to protect me from?”
  • Awareness ≠ Control. Knowing about something terrible doesn’t immediately make it less terrible.
  • Find closer milestones when relief feels far away.
  • The goal is not to stop negative thoughts, but to not let negative thoughts stop you.
  • Building new neuropathways is like tramping down a path through snow. It takes repetition over many times.
  • Treat a first draft like a site survey, not like a blueprint.
  • We have to relearn things imperfectly. Not everything can be picked back up as if no time has passed.
  • It is always better to try.

Hinge doesn’t determine my value

From “The male mind cannot comprehend the allure of Tony Soprano” by Catherine Shannon:

We were unanimous. Some of these women were practically squealing with delight just thinking about it. “Wait—he’s literally so hot and I don’t know why!” said the twenty-three-year-old. (Haha.)

“But he’s fat.” A male colleague inserted himself into the discussion. “And balding.” We looked up at him with annoyance and pity. This is when I realized: the modern male mind simply cannot comprehend the allure of Tony Soprano.

It’s a great read that takes shots at how toxic masculinity hurts men and feeds off their insecurities like a chad-chinned vampire. It points out that loving women and liking women are two completely different things, and you can’t get the love right if you’re unable to do the like.

It also points out how men as a species have such a low bar to clear, and yet they still think they’re in a limbo contest. Tony Soprano is a criminal who does some horrible things, but the article points out he genuinely pays attention to the women in his life.

This was a helpful read for me to check some of my worst internal criticisms. I was not anticipating being single in my 40s, and assessing myself at this point is a lot different than any assessment I would’ve given myself 15 years ago.

I’m just hoping that therapy and experience can help me have a less distorted view of myself now, compared to back then. If I’m going to feel like shit about myself/my potential attractiveness, I’d at least like that to be an evidence-backed finding, thank you very much.