Issue 3 of Howie’s Everything Club Newsletter is going to be fun I think. I don’t know if I’ll keep numbering the issues though.

Anyway, here’s what’s in this issue:

I have a few trains of thought I want to explore and see if I can tie them together. We’re all going to have to see where it goes. There are a few pieces of media that I consumed this week and weekend that have me working on some things in my head about what it means to be a good person. That’s a big topic, right? I’d be really curious to see a man on the street kind of interview where we asked a lot of people what that means, then follow up with searching questions about whether the person being interviewed things they themselves measure up.

It’s maybe a harder question than it sounds like. So let’s introduce the first thing I watched, which was the show Midnight Mass. If you haven’t seen it, this is a horror series set on a tiny island where a Catholic priest shows up shortly before Easter and starts doing miracles. I will not spoil the larger beats but since it’s a scary show I don’t think it should be a surprise that things go awry. There are a lot of flawed people in this town. Some folks do terrible things for the right reasons, and justify them with scripture. Others do the right things, but because they aren’t members of the predominate religion, their actions are cast in doubt. Others seem simply lost. I think there’s only one real villain, though this person would not hesitate to call themselves the only truly “good” person there.

This character is an exaggerated version of someone we have probably all known in real life. Bigoted, but from a standpoint of righteousness; insisting that others follow the code they have elected for themselves; completely justified in whatever actions they take because of the ultimate prize at the end; driven by the idea that there will be punishment for the “wrong” people. When the stakes are as high as this character believes they are, there is simply no such thing as “too far.”

Midnight Mass is broad in the evils it portrays, and by the end it’s an almost deliciously over-the-top climax of bloodshed. It’s not a subtle argument: any atrocity can be justified with scripture. There is kindness between those pages for a kind person, and there are militant ones for someone with that predisposition. People going through a tough time are going to seize on to someone who tells them they have the answers, and by the time it’s obvious they don’t, it’s too late. This isn’t a new story, but it’s one we can stand to learn again.

But while the horrors shown in the ultimate episode of Midnight Mass mirror some things we see happening in the United States today, they are more allegory than reality. Which brings me to Claire Keegan’s novella Small Things Like These. Here we meet a humble coal seller in a small Irish village during the severe recession of the 1980s. On his deliveries he encounters a horrible thing happening in his own community, one perpetrated by the Catholic Church. These are Magdalene laundries.

Magdelene laundries have existed since the 1700s and persisted well into the 90s. They were homes for so-called “fallen women,” though often they were children. In Ireland they finally fell under scrutiny when a mass grave was found at one site. The remains of 155 women were eventually identified. These could have been women arrested for prostitution, or young pregnant girls (bear in mind that 27% of girls 15 and younger are victims of rape by men on average 8 years older than them), or it could just be young girls and women who didn’t want to obey the rules in their household. At the laundries the girls were malnourished, worked for long hours in laundries while exposed to harsh chemicals, and often punished to the point of torture.

Bill Furlong in Keegan’s beautiful novella is an orphan himself, rescued by his own teen mother’s kindly employer who by all accounts raised Bill like her own son. He, his wife and five daughters are scraping by this Christmas season, but they are doing much better than many of the rest of the community. The bitter cold of the winter keeps them busy as the sole purveyors of warmth, even when debts are slow to be paid. Furlong knows that his comfort comes because his own mother was saved from the very laundry he delivers coal to, one who gives him a bonus so generous as to cover the cost of his family’s Christmas meal. A Christmas Carol is referenced several times, and I think this story serves as something of a counterpoint to the Dickens classic.

Ebenezer Scrooge is wicked because he is surrounded by suffering and could remedy it with little to no impact to his own standing. We know these guys. Our country is currently ruled by them. Misers who sit on treasure hordes while people starve around them. In 2 days we will see 40+ million Americans lose their ability to buy food so that a small handful of the wealthiest (and, frankly, most annoying) people who have ever existed on earth won’t have to pay as much taxes as they used to. Elon Musk, if his “value” were liquid dollars, could fund the entirety of SNAP benefits single-handedly for 5 years.

These people are insufferable, but there aren’t a lot of Scrooge’s in an average community. What there are a lot of are Bill Furlongs. A lot of folks reading this are Bill Furlongs. Some of us are churchgoers. Some of us were raised that way and having left have retained some of that ethic and supplanted some of our own. Some have an abiding love for their fellow people simply because they can empathize with their plights without needing any external prompting.

We don’t have a lot, but our needs are met and we can perhaps help one other person in a meaningful way. Scrooge loses nothing when buying the biggest turkey in the window, but you or I may sacrifice greatly in helping someone else. It may mean we do with less, or our cushion against our own tragedy may be lessened. This sacrifice may even come with social and even financial retribution if we place ourselves between them and people who are being targeted as not deserving of charity. Bill suffers from the guilt not of the sin of harming another, but from knowing that harm is happening and doing nothing about it.

Finally, I watched the lovely documentary John Candy: I Like Me. Candy was by all accounts a lifelong Catholic. He went to Neil McNeil high school, a Catholic school, and said of it: "My success is simply rooted in the values, discipline, and respect for others that I was taught at Neil McNeil." These values are consistently repeated by all the people in the documentary, most of them now legends of comedy. He was a father figure for Macaulay Culkin, who was experiencing massive success while being abused by his actual dad. He was by all accounts relentlessly kind, not just to other performers and celebrities, but to everyone he met. Conan O’Brien, who met him as a student and asked him to speak to the Harvard Lampoon staff, was surprised by how the superstar showed up and gave them the full John Candy experience. In his eulogy, Dan Aykroyd said of him, “There's a word in our language we don't hear much any more, but it applies to Candy. The word is 'grand.' He was a grand man."

When my grandpa died, my uncle gave a eulogy for him that I find reminiscent. Once, after a funeral, Grandpa Ike told his son that when he passed he didn’t want a long speech about him. He just wanted someone to say, “He was a good man.” That would be enough. My uncle gave him a moderate-length speech anyway, but as a conclusion he gathered his thoughts and after a brief silence, ended it with the following words: “Elmer Isaacson, born (date), died (date). He was a good man.”

I don’t have any particularly strong thoughts about Catholicism, and the line that appeared through these three pieces of media was incidental but interesting. I’ve seen religion used as a vector for some of the most beautiful moments of my life and also seen it weaponized to cause almost unfathomable harm. Sometimes the same person who will sacrifice mightily to help a neighbor or fellow parishioner will happily and enthusiastically vote for and defend policies that seize parents from their cars on busy roads on their way to pick up their children from school, or teargas children in Halloween costumes.

I don’t know what judgment will look like after this life. I don’t know if there will be an all-knowing referee in the clouds who tallies up all the balls and strikes and renders a final grade, or if that kind of thing happens in conversations and eulogies alone. Sometimes when a prominent figure dies, one can safely call the response “mixed.” This may be because that person made enemies by doing right and fighting for those without a voice of their own, regardless of the consequences, and we can only hope that things shake out eventually in their favor when hot take ashes have settled. Or one can have spent a life sowing anger and division, accruing great physical wealth in exchange for a legacy of reputational poverty. Perhaps the same person is regarded as both things at once.

When that spectrum is possible, what then is good?

Katrina Amaral spends her days hanging out with trees. As a logger, sawyer, wildlife biologist, and former land trust executive director, she spends a lot of time thinking about how land and woods and wildlife and people interact. When not ID'ing lumber by the smell of its sawdust, she dabbles in photography, goes running with her collie puppy, fails to identify mushrooms, gushes over every bird she encounters, and is currently navigating the wild new world of motherhood. 

This is a tale of two trees. Neighbors in a forest that grew up from abandoned farmland. Both are red oaks, tall and strong, with beautifully spreading crowns. They are the products – and survivors – of previous selective harvests that optimized both profit and future timber value.

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The old farmer who had tended the land had recently passed away and while the farm fields would remain in tillage, the woodlot had been sold to an out-of-state developer.  After a muddy autumn, the ground finally froze and the logging equipment had been mobilized. Soon homes would sprout in place of trees. The woods shook with the rumble of machinery, the crash of felled timber, and the incessant whine of the hydraulic chainsaws. The smell of wood chips and pine sap filled the air.

The old farmer who had tended the land had recently passed away and while the farm fields would remain in tillage, the woodlot had been sold to an out-of-state developer.  After a muddy autumn, the ground finally froze and the logging equipment had been mobilized. Soon homes would sprout in place of trees. The woods shook with the rumble of machinery, the crash of felled timber, and the incessant whine of the hydraulic chainsaws. The smell of wood chips and pine sap filled the air.

The fellerbuncher reached the first red oak, severing trunk and crown from the stump with a few smooth lever movements. It was gusty and snowing outside but inside the cab the machine operator was comfortable. He was the owner of the equipment and while the specter of monthly payments kept him up at night, at least the heat worked consistently. He rotated the machine toward the second oak and it followed the first, both hitched out of the woods together by the skidder. The trunks were nice and straight and they were cut to log length and piled with their compatriots. Saw logs were stacked in orderly piles while polewood, pulp, and treetops were fed continuously through the chipper to fill the biomass trucks.

Although it hadn’t been apparent while the tree was standing, the second oak had been hiding a secret.

Decades ago, during a neighborly land dispute, a No Trespassing sign had been nailed to the second oak’s trunk. Although the sign had quickly and angrily been removed, the nail had remained embedded. The oak healed and moved on with its life, the nail trapped under bark and many years of new growth. The only indication of the nail was now a blue stain of iron that had progressed vertically through the xylem and phloem of the tree.

The logger noticed, disappointed. While the first oak had one log that made veneer grade and others that were high quality sawlogs, there was no money to be had in a log with metal-stain. Metal destroyed saw blades; the mills would reject it on sight. Snow was plastered onto the end of the log and it was decided that it would be buried in the center of the log truck. Perhaps they would at least get paid sawlog pricing before anyone noticed.

Loaded onto the same truck, the two oaks travelled to the mill together. The sun was bright and it softened the snow on the logs as they sped down the highway. The first oak was picked off the truck by a large grapple, casually admired by the operator who unloaded thousands of such logs each day, and stacked unceremoniously with heaps of other oaks all cut to the same length and neatly awaiting their fate. The second oak was unloaded without its snow coating, cursed at, and flung aside.

A few days later, the first oak – now indistinguishable from the others in the pile – began its processing via commercial sawmill. It was debarked, rolled onto a conveyor, electronically scanned, and milled into computer-determined boards. The lumber scattered, each board sorted by grade and stacked with others of the same type. The cold workers, their breath steaming around them as they sorted boards, could not distinguish individual trees. There was too much wood and not enough time. The stacks of sorted lumber were shuttled through the dry kiln on a five week rotation. They were packed, zoomed around by forklifts, and loaded onto flatbed trailers.

As the first oak became a lumber product, the second oak languished. Slowly it was joined by other rejected logs all with their telltale blue stains. Log trucks with their loads of sawlogs streamed in full and out empty in a continuous river of forestry production. A flatbed motored past, full of finished lumber packs. The first oak was headed overseas.

One spring day a recently emptied log truck stopped next to the reject pile. Permission had been granted to purchase the logs at a much reduced price. One by one they were selected by the grapple, swung over the side supports, and tucked into place on the truck. Strapped tightly down, they headed south, closer to where the two oaks had grown.

After the continuous bustle of the hardwood production mill, the new log yard was a bit of a rural culture shock: only two people, a much smaller mill, stacks of all different species, and one barking dog. The log trucker honked his horn in greeting. He hadn’t been expected, there was no room for the logs. They waited while various pieces of equipment and lumber stacks were moved out of the way. And then they waited some more while the trucker and the two sawyers traded complaints about the weather, the price of new equipment, the cost to fix old equipment, mud season, neighbors, regulations, and various nuisance wildlife. Finally the logs were unloaded.

The two sawyers were busy and didn’t have an immediate need for red oak. The logs returned to patiently waiting, occasionally being used as a squirrel hideout or tested by an optimistic woodpecker. Sometimes the two sawyers moved the logs to a different location. The sawyers were constantly in and out of the log yard, sawmilling, planing, and moving lumber. Their schedule was very weather-dependent.

Finally the second oak, which over the summer had grown a smattering of mushrooms in its sapwood, was selected. The sawyers had been working through the oak pile: the short female sawyer selected a log with the loader forks and placed it where the tall male sawyer could scan it for metal. They worked efficiently as a team, mostly communicating through complicated hand gestures so as to be understood while wearing ear protection. Chainsaws and swearing were frequently involved in the process and many nails were removed - to join the collection of plant hangers and screwdrivers and barbed wire and eyebolts that had already accumulated. The clean logs were placed on the brow of the mill.

The second oak was loaded carefully onto the mill. As they milled, both sawyers admired the lumber – the quartersawn pattern was lovely, look at that ray fleck, the customers will love it. The lumber from all of the reject oaks was carefully stacked onto special sticks that the sawyers had made themselves.  The oak packs, all meticulously banded and labeled, were stacked to air dry for best results. Eventually they made their way to the kiln and once dry were processed into flooring. A local contractor installed the flooring in the home of a young couple who had just moved to the area.

The second oak settled into its forever home. It got trampled by muddy dog prints and scuffed by daily chaos. One day it was nearly stained blue all over again by a school painting project gone awry. The original couple moved out and a new family took its place. They brought with them imported furniture from a big box store. Some of the furniture had red oak pieces stained to look like different species. Some of it was from the first tree. The two oaks became neighbors again.

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The two oaks are fictionalized but their story is common. More and more frequently landowners liquidate their timber assets before moving or subdividing their land. Equipment payments have become so burdensome that loggers must cut more trees just to survive. And due to demand and global economics, a top grade hardwood is likely to travel the world at least once between tree and final product. These have serious implications for the future of the timber industry as well as for our connection to our forests.

Just as food and farming connect us with the land, logs and lumber connect us as well. We can forge a relationship with the forests every time we incorporate lumber into our homes but in most cases it’s impossible to know where the tree was growing or what journey it took to reach your living space. The timber industry is increasingly consolidated and global, relying on uniformity (of both trees and finished products), long supply chains, and extremely tight margins to shuttle lumber across the world at shockingly cheap prices.

There is a growing network of tree enthusiasts that are trying to re-localize wood products. Arborists in cities that work with small sawmills to ensure that downed city trees are repurposed into lumber rather than chipped into bark mulch or landfilled. Foresters that work with independent mills and local loggers to keep the lumber products within their counties. Builders and architects that specify products that local mills can produce, rather than species that are locally unavailable. Much of this lumber doesn’t have any certification - its power comes from transparency and simplicity and being able to talk to a real person throughout the entirety of the process.

My husband and I are the small mill in the story. We buy local logs to create local lumber products for local people. In recent years we have done nearly all of the logging ourselves, creating a supply chain that’s both vertically integrated and dictated by what the forest can provide more than design trends. Each tree has its own past, shaped by weather, land management, location, and chance. Each forest has its own needs for the future, to be resilient in the face of a changing climate. We honor that by treating every patch of woods like the individual it is and connecting people to those stories through the wood that goes into their homes.

Listened to AFI, Burials; Cat Stevens, Greatest Hits; The Smiths, Louder Than Bombs; Mitch Hedberg, Mitch All Together

Read Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan

Reading Against White Feminism, Rafia Zakaria; The Hacienda, Isabel Canas

Watched: One Fine Day

In my attempts to get some complicated concepts to fit into a 3-minute video, I don’t think I was able to fully articulate what I was thinking here. I think there’s some potential but the feedback I got was decidedly mixed about whether I landed the ship. Essentially too much of a good thing can be a bad thing, both in the productivity of an ecosystem and in relationships.

This is about cycles in ecosystems and relationships.

Folks liked this thread I posted on Meta’s crappy twitter knockoff:

“A read a thon where we all bring snacks and a pillow and books and lounge around a huge lodge with a giant fireplace who is in”

I really want to do a read-a-thon again but don’t want to organize it.

Correction (11/5/25)! I forgot to tell you where to add the chicken stock, which is in the gravy after the roux and before the milk. Sorry about that!

This is a cozy chicken pot pie recipe that I have refined on my own to the point that I can confidently call it mine. It started with a recipe that I think a lot of people use because it’s one of the first to show up when you google. I found it to be almost completely flavorless, and after trying a lot of things believe it’s because that recipe asks you to boil the chicken and vegetables and then discard the water. Instead, this time I sauteed the chicken and aromatics together with some additional herbs and stuff. Using soy sauce and hot sauce instead of salt and pepper is a trick I learned from a chicken and rice soup recipe and I’ve started using it whenever I’m doing mirepoix/aromatics and chicken and it’s fun.

What I got was much more flavorful and I’m excited to share it with you all. Making your own pie crust may sound daunting but it’s not as hard as you think (I mean probably, my wife makes that part).

Uploading text using this software is really tricky so these screenshots of recipes aren’t ideal. I’m still working on this but if you would rather, you can find a Google doc version of all recipes so far here.

I am taking any and all submissions. Poems, art, essays. The only request is that the fit into the general vibe of what I do online, these include: ecology, domestic violence and sexual assault advocacy, books, recipes

Also, if you make stuff that you sell online, I would love to feature your products in anticipation of stocking season.

Feedback, chats, questions? Email [email protected]