A few other links:
Started our series Chasing the Dead: Amateur Adventures in Genealogy. That motive has hovered over me for many years now and Halloween/All Saints Day this year (or Samhain as the Celts celebrated the event) seemed a good time to start publishing in pieces my new book Chasing The Dead. After all, any method — shy of Ouija boards and seances — that gets me closer to that connection of my family that is gone suits me.
This journey started for me fifteen years ago, when my eldest brother John marshaled three of his siblings — Jim, Brendan, and myself — to undertake a genealogical mission to Ireland. Two years later in August of 2012 while recovering from cancer, I drafted Chasing, a digressive account of that trip that yielded discovery of aspects of my own personality, my relationship to my family and its past along with John’s ancestry artifact targets: a baptismal record here, a ruined ancestral cottage there, the bridge our mother walked to convent school.
And we made it onto Jimmy Kimmel in early October 2025 with our war reporting from the front lines in Portland: here’s the full uncensored footage
In this piece on bureaucracy , I note that given my work in theatre, which many of you have indulged by actually coming to these performances and as my mother would’ve said there’s a special place in heaven for all of you — not that you will all be in the same special place because that would be kind of crowded but you will each have your own special place), my time writing should be spent on plays, but I just could not shake the compulsion to point out the insanity of what is currently festering in our federal government. I’m not one of those guys who is trying to get people to pay to subscribe to my Substack or whatever. In this case, however, I would like to get as many people as possible to read this essay. If subsequently they can point out where I’m wrong (or maybe a really terrible typo), that’s always a good thing for me: not done learning yet. But if I’m right, then the essay might convince people of the need for active resistance immediately to the musking of our government. That’s why I’m going to encourage my friends to at least take a look and then if the piece doesn’t drop them into a coma, I hope they suggest to others that they take a look at this piece. (It’s like a literary Ponzi scheme except nobody gets any money.)
I think you would enjoy clicking on the link. And then reading the essay. I mean who doesn’t like an essay of over 3000 words that references Sigmund Freud, Hammurabi, Hannah Arendt, Dire Straits, and Robert Frost?
Thank you for reading this far. I close with the central philosophical statement of my late brother Mike Elliott, “F**k ’em if they can’t take a joke.”
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