Outpost Motel

09/06/2026

On this National Fight Procrastination Day, I gift to you a meme that I feel just a little too much. For those of you in a similar frame of mind? Know you are not alone.

09/06/2026

I was wearing a shirt today with this symbol large and proud on the front. I was not aware she had passed until just now. Let’s all raise a fist for Robin.

Dolly, Gloria, Robin. As a diehard feminist, I must say this has been a rough couple of weeks.

Dear friends, my mother Robin Morgan died peacefully in her sleep early this morning. Surely, she will be remembered for designing the iconic image of the women’s movement (the fist in the circle of the women’s symbol), for her formative anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful, for co-founding the Sisterhood Is Global Institute with Simone de Beauvoir, for co-founding the Women's Media Center with Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda, and for a lifetime of fierce feminism and fierce friendship.

But first and foremost, she was an artist. Her art fueled her politics, fueled her feminism, fueled the way she raised me. She taught me that how one does anything is how one does everything—that the personal is political, and that as she once wrote, “Hate generalizes, love specifies.”

I’ll have more to say and more songs to write about her, but for now, I’ll express my love and gratitude that so many of you knew and loved her as both my mother, and as your friend.

Love,
B

09/05/2026

Jack Kerouac's novel "On the Road" was published on September 5, 1957. He was just 29 years old when he wrote it during a three week period--writing from a series of notebooks--typed on one continuous reel of paper.

09/04/2026

I am kind of obsessed with the English language category of words or phrases that—depending upon context—have opposite or contradictory meanings. I stumbled across contronyms (sometimes spelled contranyms, or referred to as autoantonyms) a couple of weeks ago while looking something up. I remember them from some long ago class, but honestly hadn’t thought about them for years. The list amused me and I figured it might amuse you too!

• Bolt: To secure, or to flee
• Bound: Heading to a destination, or restrained from movement
• Buckle: To connect, or to break or collapse
• Cleave: To adhere, or to separate
• Consult: To offer advice, or to obtain it
• Custom: A common practice, or a special treatment
• Downhill: It is going downhill fast, or It’s all downhill from here
• Dust: To add fine particles, or to remove them
• Enjoin: To impose, or to prohibit
• Fast: Quick, or stuck or made stable
• Fine: Excellent, or acceptable or good enough
• Finished: Completed, or ended or destroyed
• First degree: Most severe in the case of a murder charge, or least severe in reference to a burn
• Fix: To repair, or to castrate
• Garnish: To furnish, as with food preparation, or to take away, as with wages
• Give out: To provide, or to stop because of a lack of supply
• Go: To proceed or succeed, or to weaken or fail
• Handicap: An advantage provided to ensure equality, or a disadvantage that prevents equal achievement
• Hold up: To support, or to impede
• Lease: To offer property for rent, or to hold such property
• Left: Remained, or departed
• Off: Deactivated, or activated, as an alarm
• Out: Visible, as with stars showing in the sky, or invisible, in reference to lights
• Overlook: To supervise, or to neglect
• Oversight: Monitoring, or failing to oversee
• Put out: Extinguish, or generate
• Refrain: To desist from doing something, or to repeat
• Rent: To purchase use of something, or to sell use
• Sanction: To approve, or to boycott
• Screen: To present, or to conceal
• Seed: To sow seeds, or to shed or remove them
• Shelled: Having a shell, or stripped of a shell
• Shop: To patronize a business in order to purchase something, or to sell something
• Skin: To cover, or to remove
• Skinned: Covered with skin, or with the skin removed
• Splice: To join, or to separate
• Strike: To hit, or to miss in an attempt to hit
• Temper: To soften, or to strengthen
• Throw out: To dispose of, or to present for consideration
• Transparent: Invisible, or obvious
• Trim: To decorate, or to remove excess from
• Variety: A particular type, or many types
• Wear: To endure, or to deteriorate
• Weather: To withstand, or to wear away
• Wind up: To end, or to start up

09/03/2026

Each September, NAMI recognizes Su***de Prevention Month as a time to raise awareness, spread hope, and spark meaningful action around one of the most urgent mental health issues. We want to make sure that our guests, friends, families, and other Friends of The Outpost (even those of you who just read our social media posts!) have the tools, resources, and support needed to talk openly about su***de prevention, and to recognize warning signs and seek help. Here is a list of some resources. Please make sure you keep a copy of this somewhere that you can access it if the need arises.

Call:

• 911
• 988 (24/7 Su***de and Crisis Lifeline)

Online Help:

• https://988lifeline.org/
• https://chat.988lifeline.org/

• https://www.crisistextline.org/
• https://suicidology.org/
• https://www.dougy.org/ (National Center for Grieving Children and Families)
• https://www.mirecc.va.gov/visn19/talk2kids/index.asp (How to talk to a child about a su***de attempt in your family—Rocky Mountain MIRECC)
• https://jasonfoundation.com/
• https://jedfoundation.org/
• https://mantherapy.org/
• https://mhanational.org/finding-help/ (Mental Health America)
• https://theactionalliance.org/
• https://nowmattersnow.org/
• https://pflag.org/
• https://su***desafetyplan.com/
• https://www.save.org/
• https://sptsusa.org/ (The Society for the Prevention of Teen Su***de)
• https://sprc.org/ (Su***de Prevention Resource Center)
• https://www.thetrevorproject.org/
• https://tylerclementi.org/
• https://www.veteranscrisisline.net/
• WoundedWarriorProject.org

Also visit your:
• Primary care provider
• Local psychiatric hospital
• Local walk-in clinic
• Local emergency department
• Local urgent care center

09/02/2026

I know more important and noteworthy things took place on this date in history, but when is the last time you thought of the movie "Being John Malkovich?" It has probably been a minute. It was September 2, 1999 that it premiered at the Venice Film Festival.

09/01/2026

Week #35

"The Kiss" by Gustav Klimt

08/30/2026

Young American singer-songwriter Christopher Cross completes a meteoric rise from obscurity when his hit ballad “Sailing” reaches the top of the Billboard pop chart on August 30, 1980.

Released in January 1980, Cross’s self-titled debut album was one of the biggest soft-rock hits of all time. The first single was “Ride Like The Wind,” which featured a memorable backup vocal by Doobie Brothers singer Michael McDonald and rose to #2 on the pop charts the following summer. “Sailing” was the follow-up single, and it rose even faster and higher, hitting #1 on this day in 1980. It also transformed Christopher Cross from a complete unknown to the biggest name in pop almost overnight, propelling him to a still-unmatched sweep at the 1981 Grammy Awards, where “Sailing” won Grammys for Best Record and Best Song, Christopher Cross won for Best Album and Cross himself won for Best New Artist. Cross would have another #1 pop hit later that year with “Arthur’s Theme (The Best That You Can Do),” co-written with Burt Bacharach and Carol Bayer Sager and winner of the 1982 Oscar for Best Song. But Cross’s next top-10 hit, “Think Of Laura” (1983), would be his last.

08/29/2026

Around dusk on the evening on August 29, 1970, a group of 23 Native American activists climbs to the top of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. Renaming the landmark Crazy Horse Mountain, in honor of the Lakota Sioux leader who famously resisted white Americans’ incursions into the area, the protesters are there to reclaim land they believe to be rightfully theirs under the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which guaranteed Indigenous people the right to all of Western South Dakota. The occupation lasted for two months, beginning a new chapter in Native American activism.

Signed at Fort Laramie in the Wyoming Territory, the 1868 treaty was meant to end hostilities between the United States and the Lakota people, Yanktonai Dakota and Arapaho Nation. The treaty allocated the Black Hills and adjacent lands west of the Missouri River—roughly half of what is now South Dakota—to Indigenous peoples. But it tried to incentivize Native Americans to give up their traditional way of life in favor of farming. And it was designed to assimilate Native Americans into white American culture, with U.S. courts, not tribal ones, given jurisdiction over the reservation.

In a sadly predictable turn of events, the United States broke the treaty within a decade. After George Armstrong Custer’s expedition found gold in the Black Hills region in 1874, white prospectors and settlers rushed into the region, leading to the Great Sioux War of 1876 and American occupation of most of the land promised to the Lakota.

Nearly a century later, the political and social fervor of the 1960s led to the birth of United Native Americans, an activist group founded in San Francisco in 1968 with the mission of fighting for the rights and welfare of Indigenous peoples. It was members of this group that climbed 3,000 feet to the top of Mount Rushmore on August 29, 1970. The site, a memorial to four American presidents that symbolized the advance of white “civilization” into lands considered sacred by the Natives who had lived there before, was an obvious target for the activists.

Lehman Brightman, a UNA member and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, chartered a bus for him and his students after hearing about the protest and became a spokesperson for the protesters there. “The federal government said this land would belong to us as long as the grass grows and the water flows and the sun shines,” he told one reporter. “Then they turned around and took this land from us.”

With supporters running supplies up the mountain, protesters continued the occupation until winter weather forced them to withdraw in November. Throughout that time, the monument remained open to tourists, although the occupiers draped a flag reading “Sioux Indian Power” from the mountaintop and greeted visitors with protest chants. Native Americans from around the country also visited during this period, which Brightman said he hoped would be a “spark” for further native activism.

Indeed, protesters took to the mountain again the following June in a brief action that led to 12 arrests. The activism of the 1970s received new attention in the 2010s, when protests against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline took place at the Standing Rock Reservation, a remnant of the original Great Sioux Reservation established in 1868.

08/28/2026

In August 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was visiting family in Money when he and his cousin Curtis Jones went to Bryant’s Grocery some local boys to buy candy. Accounts of what happened next are still disputed, but some versions claim that Till whistled at 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, who owned the store with her husband, Roy Bryant, 24. She later testified that Till grabbed her hand and asked for a date. In 2008, however, historian Timothy Tyson said that Carolyn admitted to him that her testimony regarding Till’s verbal and physical advances was false. Till’s cousin Simeon Wright, as well as a second anonymous source, claimed that while Till spoke to Carolyn, he did not make any inappropriate comments, and he paid for his items and promptly left the store.

When Till and the other boys exited the store, Carolyn retrieved a pistol from her car. Though the teenagers left the premises upon seeing this, word of the incident spread quickly, and Roy Bryant soon caught wind of what happened. Immediately seeking revenge, he questioned several young Black men who came to his store. After Bryant learned where Till was staying, he was overheard talking to John William “J.W.” Milam, his half-brother, about abducting Till.

Roy, Carolyn and Milam took Till from his great-uncle’s home in the early morning hours of August 28, 1955, and tied him up in the back of a pickup truck. After dropping off Carolyn and picking up two Black men who worked for Roy, the men took Till to a barn in Drew, Mississippi, where they badly beat him. Till was also shot before the men threw his body into the Tallahatchie River, weighed down with a large fan blade they’d stolen from a cotton gin.

Three days later, two boys fishing in the river discovered Till’s n**e and badly disfigured body. Till had been shot above his right ear, and his face had been beaten beyond recognition. The fan blade was secured around Till’s neck with barbed wire.
Till’s murder attracted national attention. The NAACP called the murder a lynching, and Mississippi Gov. Hugh L. White promised the organization’s national office a full investigation. Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, had his body sent back to Chicago and demanded an open-casket funeral so that attendees could see her son’s mutilated body and understand the extent of the harm done to him. Photographs of Till’s body were published in newspapers around the country, including two Black publications, Jet and The Chicago Defender, and spurred public outrage at the treatment of Blacks in the American South.

Roy Bryant and Milam were indicted for murder, and five attorneys from Sumner offered to defend the pair pro bono. The trial took place in September 1955 in Sumner at the Tallahatchie County Courthouse. Lasting only five days, the trial attracted spectators who filled the courtroom. Though the defense attempted to discredit Till’s great-uncle Mose Wright by saying that he could not identify Bryant and Milam, Wright courageously testified that the two men had identified themselves to him and that he had seen Milam clearly. Wright’s testimony marked the first time a Black man had testified to the guilt of a white man in the state of Mississippi. On September 23, the all-white, all-male jury deliberated 67 minutes before acquitting Bryant and Milam. Jurors later admitted in interviews that although they knew Bryant and Milam were guilty of Till’s murder, they did not think imprisonment or the death penalty were appropriate punishments for white men who had killed a Black man.

Emmett Till’s murder became a symbol for the horrific treatment of Blacks in the American South. Rosa Parks attended a rally for Till in Montgomery, and she cited his murder as one of the reasons she famously refused to move to the back of the city bus. Parks said, “I thought of Emmett Till and I just couldn’t go back.” Mamie Till Bradley toured the country telling the story of her son’s life and death as part of a successful NAACP fundraising campaign. Three documentary films about Till’s murder have been produced, and memorials in Till’s honor have been created all over the country, including in Denver, Chicago and Montgomery. In 2007, Rep. John Lewis, a leader in the Civil Rights Movement, sponsored a bill called the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act to investigate and prosecute cold cases from the civil rights era.