By Eric Scheske in Scrolling Blog — 17 Dec 2025

Welcome to the Internet's Longest-Suffering Blog

TDE features essays for the restless mind in a crumbling age. This scrolling blog is a throwback to its early days in 2002.

If You Got the Email Post Today . . .

My apologies for the egregious clerical mistakes at the bottom of the post. It totally ruined the ending.

Oh well, the running joke these days is that the surest way to catch clerical errors is to click "publish." Sigh.

It's corrected here.

To the left hemisphere, any answer is better than no answer.

Monday at TDE

Monday at Substack

A nearly-identical version of this essay appeared here (at TDE) last week.

That is my current approach: I write essays here as often as possible, then select my favorite to run at Substack the following Monday.

A new essay will run at TDE later today. I will be explaining my new "TDE philosophy" and why its essays have taken such an, ahem, aggressive turn.

Simple Santa Hack

If your child is getting older and suspicious about all the Santas he's meeting, tell him, "They're not the real Santa."

BYCU

Latest

💡

A FOIA request to the CIA is like asking a Mafia don to move his car.

Just Discovered This Young Man

The Dry Holdouts

Mapped: Where are America’s Dry Counties?

Monday Essay

Closely-related to my intro: That's why they say a good venue contains a big gathering area where the extroverts can metaphorically chest pump all that energy into one another, but also has small and semi-secluded areas where a guy can escape the whirl.

Happy Thanksgiving

I don't know if this was a real ad. It's hard to believe, but the Ad Council is a coalition of Mad Men who volunteer their time to promote the government's narrative on social issues, so anything this fraudulent is believable.

Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup

Chicken from a 3D printer.

Viktor Frankl was Inmate 119,104

He got to Auschwitz late in the game. Don't tell the Groypers or they'll use it as proof that fewer than 200,000 Jews were sent there (smile).

This is one of the most unintentionally hilarious things I’ve ever seen

pic.twitter.com/rz5khySnfN
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) November 23, 2025

WHY🤣 😭 pic.twitter.com/mMetITMKpa
— Sara Rose 🇺🇸🌹 (@saras76) November 18, 2025

True?

The mere fact that it could be true should be enough to disband this LSD-pushing, Mafia-tied, file-destroying, torture machine that conducted "Operation Midnight Climax" on unsuspecting johns in San Francisco in pursuit of their mind-control games.

I mean, it was fun when the CIA did such things to foreigners but . . .

The Return Eudemon

My first trip behind the Iron Curtain. Budapest, Prague, Krakow . . with a Vienna kicker. I'm still gearing up new things for TDE but right now, I'm still stymied by tech problems. Stay tuned. TDE isn't dead, not by a long shot. Weak, ineffectual, and lame? I suppose, but I'm committed to changing that. For now, I'll just continue with the TDE way: brutal honesty to the point of self-deprecation, in hopes honest prose connects with readers.

Mark Your Calendars

December 16 is the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. Of all England’s great writers, she holds the most attention. The reason is simple. She invented the modern novel in order to answer fundamental questions about how to be good, happy, and flourishing in a commercial society. She reigns supreme because no-one else invented so much or had so much to say to readers about their lives.

Books are Tactile

Monday Essay

Could physical books have saved the Zizians? Beats me, but I think maybe, and no matter, they’re a cautionary tale for the rest of us about online reading.

Eric Scheske's Outside Modern Limits Subscriber Chat

This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.

Join chat

How to get started

Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

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Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

Monday Substack

It's a riff off perhaps the best essay in the current issue of County Highway: "Everyone is in a Cult." Subtitle: Welcome to the schizophrenia factory, which is significant: siloed left hemispheres and schizophrenia exhibit some serious Venn. One of McGilchrist's favorite reference points is Louis Sass' Madness and Modernism, which looks at mental illness and modern art. I'm halfway through it, and it's been great, but at the same time, it's one of those books that seems to make its point compellingly in the first 75 pages. After that, it feel like a case of "piling on," so it's back on my shelf for now. I have hopes of finishing it later, but alas, many bookmarks in similar books in my library stare at me every morning.

County Highway is a Freak-of-a-Classic Publication

I'm on my third issue. It's a literary magazine disguised as a newspaper. The front page features a handful of articles that entice the reader enough to prompt him to accept the prompt at the bottom, "Continued on page X." You turn to page X . . . and see the first 700 words on page one was merely the iceberg tip, like the essay I finished reading this morning about Lord of the Barnyard, which clocked in at nearly 8,000 words.

But the prose is superb (as far as I can tell . . . I guess it's arrogant of me to think I'd recognize great prose . . . the "like knows like" phenomenon, quietly applied to pat myself on my (oh-so finely tuned) literary back). The subject matter is varied and interesting and always--freakin' always--totally alien to me, like I've been living under a rock for the past 30 years (maybe I have been, but the rock is called "earning a living to support a large family).

Anyway, it's Friday, so here's a drinking excerpt from that "Barnard" essay, about the anguished author, Tristan Egolf, who wrote the great American classic that no one in America knows about, being told by his French publisher that he'd written one of the great novels. Vindication after years of tortured self-doubt. What's he do? He continues his anguish, burying it under more cigarettes and booze.

He was waiting for publication, he wanted to meet his French translator, but nothing was happening. He grew impatient. Illness stalked him, he became convinced he had lung cancer, complained of severe chest pains. He smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, drank more than he should have. He sometimes banged on James and Shelly’s door in the middle of the night, after walking down to Montparnasse from the heights of the eleventh arrondissement. His apartment was something of a pigsty, dead bottles littering the ground, ashtrays ringed with cigarette butts overturned on the bed. Gradually, abetted by alcohol, he slid into delirium. When Marie checked in from London, he raved over the telephone. He was agitated, thought he was being watched, followed, but by whom? Nightmares filled his head, he was trapped in gruesome imaginings.

He later wrote a second acclaimed novel, then, unsurprisingly I suppose, killed himself before publishing his third.

That "essay," incidentally, is apparently an excerpt . . . from a "novel"? A nonfiction novel? I'm cornfused . . . the literary world keeping one (or twenty) steps ahead of me at all time.

A Vivid Reminder of Why Amazon Shouldn't Modify Kindle Books Once They're Downloaded

But of course, the Digital Elite don't much care what we all think.

I prefer to read books that are page-stoppers, that cause me to stop and contemplate a striking idea, an elegant phrase, an admirably constructed sentence. A serious reader reads with a pencil in hand, to sideline, underline, make a note. Joseph Epstein

Peace Through Air Power

From Peter Brown's Journeys of the Mind

In an interview with the Khartoum Times, Air Marshal Italo Balbo (1896–1940), the creator of the Italian air force, insisted that air power was the best guarantee of world peace. No nation would dare to go to war, knowing that its women and children, its wives and mothers, would face destruction from the air.

Monday Column

Readers will notice a theme these past few weeks: reading. It'll continue for a few more weeks. My hope is to assemble them into a Kindle book before the end of the year. We'll see.

And Just Like That, I Win the Debate with My Wife About Whether My 3,000 Books Take Up Too Much Room

Free Copy for TDE Subscribers

If you subscribe to TDE newsletters, you will be receiving an email with a free PDF download of Western Civilization: Ten Dates in Ten Minutes.

I have also changed the price of the book to 99 cents. I didn't understand the pricing policies when I selected "$2.99." So wait a few days and the price should adjust to 99 cents.

New Book at Amazon

Musk slays me.

I gotta go back and watch Tropic Thunder. I remember that I gave it a "5," but maybe it deserved better.

From Civil Rights Tranny Terrorism

The splendid stylist Kuntsler lays it out.

I'm back. Due to a death in the family and other vigors of life, TDE was nearly abandoned for two weeks. I still have plans to rejuvenate TDE, so patience is welcome even if not deserved.

For today:

I think my Substack essay is one of the more compelling things I've written this year. Low bar, that, but I offer herewith . . .

Monday Substack

Smooth is the enemy of body, soul, and mind.

Bonus observation for TDE readers: Micro-exertions irritate the hell out of the left hemisphere. That'll be the topic of a future post.

Five Minutes

Heaven help the time-conscious when the person they're waiting for says "five minutes."

Why One Reads

"One reads in order to asks questions," Kafka once said in a letter to a friend. Manguel, A History of Reading, p. 89.

Save the Em Dash!

It's being unfairly kicked and bully in the anti-AI mayhem. Poor guy never hurt nobody.

Falling Down

Visitor: "What do you guys do in the monastery?"
Monk: "We fall and get up again."

That's meditation, according to Huberman and Majeres.
Meditation is distraction and monastic life is falling down.

Meditation is getting distracted, noticing it, and determining to get back to a distraction-less state.
Monastic life is sinning, repenting, and deciding to sin no more.

Monday Column

The Morally-Decayed People Attacking Big Balls

They hate Trump so much, they can't even acknowlege an obvious heroic act.

BYCU

Old Mission Peninsula is one of the loveliest places in Michigan. Marie and I spent an evening going up and down it two years ago, hitting watering holes.

But it's historically built on agriculture. And then the grapes came with their Dionysian charm. And then the agro-tourism came. And then the tension came: the newcomers who wanted to re-shape it to fit their money-making image and the oldtimers who wanted it to stay rural and agricultural.

The old timers had the votes and their elected officials brought the clout. But then the newcomers invoked the U.S. Constitution to jam its image down the Peninsula's throat: and get a $50 million judgment.

The U.S. Constitution ought not play a role in such matters. The selective incorporation doctrine has tried to make every locality in the U.S. the same and it's awful. But then again, it's nice to have some sort of legal recourse against petty local tyrants who act arbitrarily and capriciously, like I've seen happen so often at the local level.

Anyway, the Wall Street Journal tells the story about the $50 million judgement here (subscription required):

https://www.wsj.com/business/old-mission-peninsula-michigan-winery-604fc216?mod=hp_trendingnow_article_pos3

Excerpt:

Guest events had to be tied to agriculture. “My wife wanted to teach a Spanish class—just sit here and go over Spanish terms and talk about wine and stuff and yeah, like, ‘no, that’s not agricultural,’” so the plan was denied, he said.

Chateau Chantal, a turreted, European-style vintner and bed-and-breakfast with spectacular vineyard and bay views, can host weddings only if all attendees sleep on-site—limiting the size to about 44 people. “That is just not the kind of number most of the clientele are looking for,” said Marie-Chantal Dalese, president and chief executive.

O’Keefe is still baffled by some policies. “We’re allowed to have amplified music, but only ‘mood’ music, no louder than a whisper at the property line,” he said. “We’re allowed to have 75 people for an event, but I don’t know if that means an event outside, or does that include my entire winery?”

A Note to Readers

Please keep popping back in periodically

TDE continues. In fact, TDE is undergoing a revamp. The thing is, I'm still working out what that revamp will look like. I've been assembling material to launch an "all out assault" on Substack, which I had planned for August, but instead of being ready to launch, I put on nearly ten pounds of gin, such are the demands of a large immediate and extended family, as well as a friend circle whose circumference is as wide as I can accommodate without bursting the seems of my pants.

In any event, TDE is alive and, I think, well, even if it appears dormant or dying. In my mind, it holds promise, but that might just be my flawed left hemisphere talking (it leans toward optimism . . . especially when it's not warranted). We will see.

Please stop back periodically and click on this scrolling blog. Announcements and new pieces will be announced here.

Thanks for your patronage over these past 25 years.

Monday Substack

BYCU

Monday Essay

We all need to break out of our rationalist cocoons.

I'm Dyin' Here

Best lede in years.

Monday Column

Who is this Spokesman Guy That Gets Quoted After Every Big Event and Why is He Such an Idiot?

"A spokesman for Walmart said the violence at its store was 'unacceptable'"

In response to a man entering a store in Traverse City and stabbing 11 people.

The Saturday Meme Dump

Substack Monday

When You Let Your College Kids Pick the Wine without Proper Supervision

Monday Substack

First COVID, now Epstein

The ongoing Epstein cover-up is the sex room of the Establishment house.

I'm reminded of these words from Paul Kingsnorth in 2023:

[I]was the pandemic — or rather, the response to it — that changed everything for me. I hadn’t been prepared see, in my allegedly free and democratic country, a merger of corporate power, state power and media power in the service of constructing a favoured narrative, of the kind which had previously only characterised totalitarian regimes.

Yup, exactly.

The Epstein case is the same thing. Corporate power, state power, and media power telling everyone "There's nothing to see here."

Thursday Substack . . . or Not

No Thursday essay today. I'm busy with . . . well, summer: gardening, family, and gin.

But also, I am preparing my assault on the high towers of Substack: memes, short essays, longer essays. Rewriting script from the archives, writing new script from my notebooks. Accumulating material for a launch in August. My hope is to have enough material to last me a few months, regardless of how hectic life is.

Such is that Substack beast, or such is my lack of skill at figuring out this attention economy, I don't expect much to come of it, but that's fine. If nothing else, it's helping me get my Existence Strikes Back/Hemisphere Hypothesis Catholic worldview figured out.

I've also reconfigured TDE. I will host all the new essays I post at Substack: the complete pieces, not just excerpts.

Stay tuned.

Monday Substack

Acts of resistance against the left hemisphere’s hegemony don’t have to be heroic or even particularly difficult.

BYCU

Fourth of July Cocktail:

Red, White, and Blue Layered Cocktail
A visually striking drink with distinct patriotic layers.

Ingredients (per drink):
- 1 oz grenadine
- 1 oz vodka
- 1 oz lemonade
- 1 oz blue curaçao
Instructions:
1. Fill a highball glass with ice.
2. Pour grenadine first (it’s heaviest and will sink).
3. Slowly pour vodka mixed with lemonade over the back of a spoon to create the white layer.
4. Gently add blue curaçao over the spoon for the blue layer.
5. Serve immediately to maintain layers.
Tips: Pour slowly over ice or an upside-down spoon to prevent mixing. Use high-quality grenadine for better flavor.

Some [mezcal] distillers are so particular about their process that they won’t let visitors near the still if they’ve used any perfumed soaps, fearing that even a few fragrance molecules will taint their product.

Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist

We're Number Three! We're Number Three!

According to people all over the world, Switzerland is the best place to live.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-40-best-countries-in-the-world-according-to-people/

Monday Substack

BYCU

Why I gave up golf.

It was killing my liver.

Thursday Substack

The art of loafing has withered. We’re too busy, too wired, too chained to our screens and schedules to just be with one another. It’s no shock, really. Just more late-stage left-hemispherism, where every minute’s gotta be accounted for, every interaction optimized.

Monday Substack

I Would've Thought Baltimore had Bigger Crime Problems

Supposedly, rogue liquor establishments (read: black dudes with coolers full of beer) are selling without the proper license, and it's causing an increase in crime, which is ridiculous. It is, however, undoubtedly hurting licensed liquor establishments who play by the rules and, by playing by the rules, incur significant costs. The government's answer? Increase government action to squash the rogue establishments.

No one asks the obvious question: Why not just eliminate the rules for the other establishments, thereby leveling the playing field?

It kinda reminds me of anti-Communist Frank Chodorov's opposition to McCarthy's Communist witch hunt (well, not really a "witch" hunt . . . there really were/are Communists in positions they ought not be). When asked, "What would you do about Communists in government offices?" he replied, "Eliminate the government offices."

I've Staged a Jailbreak

I bought a new computer, wiped it clean of any Microsoft stain, and installed Linux. I'm free of the MS tyranny: its oppressive OneDrive drive, its relentless pushing of its Internet browsers, its default settings that reset every time they force you to do an upgrade. I'm free! Free, I tell you! Free!

I'll let you know how it goes. There's going to be a pretty steep learning curve. I'm glad my son Max is home from college for the summer

Monday Substack

Thomas Sowell may or may not have a robust right hemisphere, but he keeps his left hemisphere reigned in.

Thursday Substack

Foucault rebelled by effectively committing suicide in the San Francisco bathhouses during the height of the AIDS crisis. You don’t have to go that far. Reading a good novel is an effective form of rebellion.

Monday Substack

Occultists, acid freaks, saints, drunks, scientists, Zen monks: all warring against the left hemisphere.

BYCU

Canadian provinces kill trade between themselves with barriers. Trump's tariffs are forcing them to re-think this arrangement.

Thursday Substack

Birzer on Sci-Fi

I’m a fan of dystopias, though that’s more of a reference to my life than the genre (deadpan irony background music), so I was pretty excited when I saw the series start. I glanced through the first essay where he listed the writers he’d be covering and I saw no reference to Philip K. Then I got really excited b/c I was going to chastise him with, “Birzer doesn’t know Dick!” but alas, after I read it more carefully, I saw that the High Castle author would get a good hearing.

Anyway, it’s a splendid series. Like much else in this crowded stack of space, it didn’t get nearly enough traction but it’s there for y’all to enjoy.

Monday Substack

The Tao is everything the left hemisphere can’t stomach. The Taoist cranks out paradoxes like G.K. Chesterton on Benzedrine. The left brain gags on paradox. The Taoist rides the flow. The left brain spits on flow, demanding straight lines and checklists. The Taoist’s first move is no-move—wu wei, the art of doin’ nothin’. The left brain sneers at sittin’ still.

BYCU

It has become an annual post: June 1st: Coptic Lemonade Day

Thursday Substack

“These two were the kind of blokes you’d kill to share a pint with. Their letters crackle with wit sharp enough to slice through the fog of our current idiocy.”

Monday Substack

Weather Apps

I consult three weather apps, mostly because I'm a loser, but also because they often don't agree. I've been watching it carefully this year (also the year that I've noticed that they most diverge), and I've concluded:

The Weather Channel app is the best for accuracy, but it loads slowly and malfunctions frequently.
The Accuweather app is best for speed and detailed information (e.g., 15 day forecasts), but it's not quite as accurate as the Weather Channel app.
The weather app that comes pre-loaded with the iPhone is not accurate, but it loads fast and doesn't malfunction. Bonus: its easy-to-find UV index score is nice.

Welcome to Summer

It's been a long Winter and a grueling Spring. Are there any other types of seasons? I guess we'll find out, starting today. I'd be half-tempted to turn this three-day hustle hiatus into a lost weekend, but dang, I have too many good books to read.

Thursday Substack

This is Huge

I might have to reconsider my position on this matter:

Monday Substack

Majeres wants his patients to kill orcs, but he’s begging them to put the blade down more often. If you’re always swinging, everything starts looking like an orc. Every moment is a project, every dream a checklist, every impulse a plan. The left hemisphere never stops scheming, plotting, gaming out the next move. It’s a machine that doesn’t know how to quit.

BYCU

Thursday Substack

Jones’ plan is dirt-simple: hand over a few abandoned parish buildings in Philly, Detroit, or Baltimore to a couple of Benedictine monks. Let them turn those crumbling shells into monasteries, oases where young Catholic couples could live cheap and lean, guided by a 21st-century take on Benedict’s Rule.

San Francisco: Perverse for 150 Years

Monday Substack

I hope to make this a series: two-minute biographies of men and women with robust right hemispheres. Or, to be more precise, "of men and women who appear to have had robust right hemispheres."

I believe every saint could be in this series, but a person doesn't need to be a saint to have a dominant right hemisphere, so this series won't focus on the saints (though a few are already in the queue).

Striving is the sound of your own defeat. Even straining for virtue or goodness is a fool’s errand, a pompous parade of self-aggrandizement. The man who aches to polish his soul is already sneering at what he is.

Thursday Substack

I’d even argue that Montaigne couldn’t have done much more than teach us to unlearn. If he’d started to do anything more constructive, he would’ve cut against everything he was (un-)teaching. In this, he may have been the modern age’s first superfluous man, beating Albert Jay Nock to the skeptic’s modest punch by 400 years.

Monday Substack

I'm talking about more than silence, something more manifest--a presence, a thing with its own existence and merit. Just as the devil is the manifestation of that (otherwise philosophically-correct) notion that evil is merely the absence of being, this thing I'm describing is a presence, a thing with its own existence and merit.

BYCU

Huberman is kinda spearheading the current neo-neo-neo-Prohibitionist crusade against alcohol, which, let’s face it, is crutched by legalized marijuana: “Look at me. I’m sober. More stoned than a groupie at a Grateful Dead concert, but alcohol-free.”

Anyway, Huberman first said an average of one drink a day would rot your skull. I shrugged it off, my Friday-night benders clocking in at five or six drinks, neatly bundled, leaving my inner boozehound unbothered.

Then he tightened the screws: four drinks a week, he declared, unless you’re sweating through workouts or chanting mantras to fend off the poison (which I do, thank you—call it my penance). My liver smirked, unscathed.

But then he later dropped the hammer: two drinks, max, and—get this—any alcohol’s a ticket to ruin. That’s when I dug up this old Mencken quote and read it thirty times, each line a shot of defiance against this joyless, meddling age.

Welcome to May

Few places are prettier than Michigan in May. Tulips, blossoms (pink and white), approximately 100,398.78 hues of green, and crisp blue lakes. Bonus: the mosquitoes aren't bad yet. A wonderful place to be.

Thursday Substack

I've tightened and (hopefully) enlivened a feature essay from a few years ago.

Without Johnson’s Dictionary, Jane Austen’s quips, the Declaration of Independence’s fire, and Shakespeare’s tempests would be Beowulfed to us, almost entirely indecipherable, except to philologists and other masochists.

It's May Day

For the Commies. For the rest of us laborers, it's the Feast Day of St. Joseph the Worker.

Monday Substack

I was so excited by this find on Saturday morning that I worked on this essay on and off all weekend.

that I worked on this essay on and off

BYCU

At some point, "craft" crosses into "art." This normally happens for me around the third drink.

Thursday Substack

Wittgenstein, though, was another story. He was disgusted by the competitive uproar, like he’d just been forced to watch a Harvey Weinstein biopic and needed to scrub his soul with lye.

Amen to This

The Pope of Mercy wasn't the Pope of Peacefulness. I long ago tired of squinting through the mess he loved to create.

My parish's former priest would often guffaw and say he liked to shake things up and make people uncomfortable. I thought then, and think now, "Life's hard enough already. Why do you like making it harder?"

Some people make life easier for others. Some make it harder. You can judge which bucket Pope Francis sat in.

Fradd offers a more compassionate take:

Substack Monday

My apologies for not posting this on Monday. Such are the delays caused by the joyous holiday.

Holy Thursday

"[I]n the agony of Gethsemane the ultimate consequences of our sin had their hour. . . . God permitted his Son to taste the human agony of rejection and plunge towards the abyss. . . Gethsemane was the hour in which Jesus' human heart and mind experienced the ultimate odium of the sin he was to bear as his own . . .". Romano Guardini, The Lord.

Thursday Substack

Monday Substack Post

The left hemisphere craves the predictable, the tidy, the known. It’s why we’ve paved over half the planet and turned our cities into sterile grids of glass and concrete. Unusualness—a stranger’s accent, a wild idea, or just some guy in a tattered coat muttering to himself—throws a wrench in the works. It’s uncertainty, and the left hemisphere hates uncertainty like a cat hates a bath.

Even Better Stuff at The University Bookman!

Outlining Sanity in the Garden, by Eric Scheske.

Good Stuff Over at Substack Notes

Well, that's one man's opinion, anyway.

https://outsidemodernlimits.com/notes

BYCU

Intuition precedes rationality and implicit knowledge precedes explicit (McGilchrist). Beauty leads to truth (Balthasar). Emotion drives moral reasoning (Haidt). Reason is the slave of the passions (Hume).

A few stiff drinks after the work week stifles my rationality, lets me see truth, and makes my reason the happy slave of passion. I don't think that's what the Latinists mean by in vino veritas, but it's close enough for me: It's Friday.

Monday Substack

BYCU

I heard a story about a drunk guy trying to ride a kangaroo home from the bar, but I couldn't find it, so I'm guessing it's an urban legend. While searching for that story, I came across this video. I didn't know kangaroos were dangerous to man or animal. I also know that guy who threw the punch isn't, either. He broke his wrist while throwing the punch and dropped his left.

In a related story about a kangaroo killing a man, the People headline says no one Australia had died in 100 years until a pet kangaroo killed its owner. Pretty astounding.