Pip: Ghost Dog is a site where history shows up unannounced, sits down at the table, and refuses to leave quietly.
Mara: Today we're covering a piece by Benn Bell that reconstructs a single, devastating day in 1944 Louisville — a story where a house call ends in triple tragedy, and the world outside keeps turning anyway.
Pip: Let's start with the doctor, the family, and the November afternoon that became a newspaper headline.
The Curious Case of Dr. Benjamin Franklin Woolery
Pip: This segment is about what it looks like when a routine moment — a doctor attending a birth — collapses into catastrophe, and how a newspaper account from 1944 preserves the human wreckage in plain, unsparing language.
Mara: The post draws directly from the Louisville Courier Journal, November 3, 1944, and the dateline sets the scene: "Dr. Benjamin Franklin Woolery, age 64, of 815 Cecil Avenue, a general practitioner here for thirty-five years, was stricken by a heart attack and found slumped over the woman's body at 2:30 pm at her home at 3130 New High St."
Pip: So the physician dies mid-delivery. The patient, Bessie Ford, is under anesthesia — she doesn't know he's gone. Her ninth child is born dead. She dies that evening at St. Joseph Infirmary.
Mara: Three deaths in one afternoon. Jess Ford, Bessie's husband, describes the chaos in his own words: "After the doctor died, I was running around so much I don't know just what I did." He called the police, the hospital, the infirmary, and an ambulance service in rapid succession from a nearby grocery store.
Pip: That detail — running to a grocery store to make four phone calls — is the whole texture of 1944 in one sentence.
Mara: The ambulance made the run in four minutes. A crowd of children gathered in the dirt road outside. The post also notes Dr. Woolery had just met his son at the station — a Coast Guard musician home on furlough — before being called to the Ford home.
Pip: The post doesn't editorialize on that timing. It doesn't need to.
Mara: What gives the piece its full weight is the coda. After the local tragedy, the post lists what else was happening that week: the first bombing of Tokyo, the first open-heart surgery at Johns Hopkins, the Battle of the Bulge. And then the author's note — Dr. Woolery was his great-grandfather and namesake.
Pip: History as inheritance. The archive as a way of saying: this person existed, and here is the proof.
Mara: One newspaper clipping, one family name, and suddenly 1944 is not a history chapter — it's a Tuesday afternoon with a crowd of children in a dirt road.
Pip: Next time, whatever Ghost Dog surfaces, I suspect it will land the same way — quietly, and then all at once.
Pip: Ghost Dog is back, and this time we're loading up the White Whale and pointing it south toward Galveston — which, as a destination for spiritual renewal, is either inspired or deeply suspicious.
Mara: Benn Bell takes us on a road trip through Arkansas, Texas, and the American Dream — or what's left of it. Let's start with the journey itself.
Fear and Loathing on the Way to Galveston
Pip: This piece sets up a classic road trip premise: two old friends, a cooling friendship, and a deliberate choice to drive toward something they've both lost. The question underneath all of it is whether you can actually recapture the past, or whether the road is just an excuse to try.
Mara: The destination is framed right at the top — "We were going to Galveston to recapture our past and rekindle a friendship that had cooled off over the years."
Pip: So this isn't a vacation. It's a repair job with a full tank of gas and a road trip playlist. The stakes are personal, even if the scenery is just highway.
Mara: The traveling companion is Daniel "Buddha" Hildenbrandt — a community college communications teacher with a philosophy he repeats to his students: "the main problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place." Which does raise a question about how the friendship cooling off actually happened.
Pip: A man who teaches communication and cannot communicate. That tracks.
Mara: The first night lands them in Hope, Arkansas — Best Western, no working TV, no working phone, and a maskless desk clerk who keeps asking whether they want one bed or two. The pizza takes an hour. The whiskey argument is brief but intense.
Pip: The whiskey standoff is the emotional center of the piece, honestly. Two men who drove hundreds of miles to reconnect, and they nearly come apart over whether Ezra Brooks is better than Jack Daniels. The post notes, dryly: "We drove the rest of the way in silence."
Mara: By the time they cross into Texas, the landscape opens up — wider roads, longer horizons — and the post turns outward. Trump signs line the highway. The narrator reflects on the 2020 election, the insurrection, Ukraine, and a million COVID dead. He writes: "If you look back and squint your eyes just right, you can almost see where the crest of the wave finally broke and rolled back."
Pip: The road trip is doing double duty. It's a friendship story and a reckoning with forty years of American decline, all moving at highway speed toward the Gulf.
Mara: And Galveston is still ahead.
Pip: Recapturing the past while the present is actively on fire — that's the tension the whole trip runs on.
Mara: Whether they find what they're looking for in Galveston is a question the road hasn't answered yet. More to come.
Pip: Ghost Dog, where we read so you don't have to — though today's post makes a reasonable case that sometimes you shouldn't bother reading at all.
Mara: Today we're covering a book review from Benn Bell — one that sits at the intersection of craft, politics, and the particular disappointment of a writer you admire going badly off the rails.
Pip: Let's start with the book itself — David Mamet, Recessional, and the question of what happens when a genuinely talented writer loses the plot.
Book Review: Recessional by David Mamet
Mara: The tension here is real: Mamet wrote Glengarry Glen Ross. He wrote The Verdict. His dramatic work is undeniable. So what do you do with a collection of short essays that flatly contradicts the intelligence behind those plays?
Pip: The review doesn't bury the lead. The verdict on the essays is that they are, quote, "loaded with misinformation, lies, and incorrect conclusions."
Mara: And that framing matters, because the review isn't dismissing Mamet wholesale. It's making a distinction — the playwright versus the essayist. The craft that produced great drama is simply not present in these three-and-four-page pieces.
Pip: Which makes the moments of genuine agreement more interesting, not less. There are quotes in here worth sitting with. On screenwriting: "The script exists to describe to the cameraman what to shoot and to tell the actors what to say. Everything else is besides the point. The nature of a script is a recipe."
Mara: That's a clean, useful definition — and the review accepts it as very sensible. There's also real warmth for Mamet's line about Beckett being the greatest dramatist since Shakespeare, with the addition of Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee as possible company.
Pip: So the review is doing something careful: holding the good lines and the bad arguments at the same time rather than throwing the whole book out.
Mara: Right — and then the politics arrive. Mamet argues the left is the tyrannical force in American life, that the left tried to steal the election. The review pushes back directly: domestic terror attacks, January 6th, Bill Maher calling Mamet out on his own show, Mamet responding with "skip that page."
Pip: "Skip that page" is not a rebuttal. It is, however, an accidental summary of the review's final recommendation about the book as a whole.
Mara: The review lands there too — suggesting we might skip the entire book. But the craft observations survive. The Aristotle and Campbell references Mamet cites as essential drama reading even make the reviewer's own TBR list.
Pip: So what we're left with is a writer who can still identify the right tools — he just stopped using them.
Mara: The craft holds even when the argument doesn't — that's the tension the review keeps returning to.
Pip: Next time, more from Ghost Dog on whatever Benn Bell reads, watches, or decides to push back on. We'll be here.
I have been reading Nietzsche again lately. He is sort of a guilty pleasure. I read him early of a morning with my coffee. This morning, I ran across this bon mot, “Intestinal morbidity.” He famously claimed at some point, “The spirit is like a stomach”. In his view, intestinal morbidity represents the failure to digest reality.
To Nietzsche, a healthy person can “swallow” even the most painful truths (the death of God, the cruelty of nature) and turn them into a strength. A morbid gut suffers from resentment. It’s a spirit that takes in experiences but can’t break them down. Instead of being converted into action, the experience sits and rots, poisoning the host with bitterness and envy. Here, I think, is the crux of the matter. Here is where I take my inspiration. It is better to live a life of gratitude than a life of resentment. But, to do this, it requires a life of intestinal fortitude.
I wrote a play called The Burden of Freedom. I wanted to explore this theme a little more and the connection to free will, evil, and God. I was discussing with a friend about the Inquisitor in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Karamazov Brothers, so I had a little chat with Chet, my AI guru over at Gemini, to bring him into the conversation and gain a little more insight. Here is what he said.
The Inquisitor from Dostoevsky’s Karamazov Brothers argues that Jesus made a mistake by giving humans “freedom of choice.” He claims that humans are too weak to handle such a burden and only wants to be told what to do and be fed.
The Inquisitor admits that the church is no longer working with Jesus, but with Satan, because only by taking away human freedom can they make the masses happy and manageable.
Ivan argues that man is a failed experiment that needs to be controlled.
The priest Zozima argues that humanity is redeemed through active, humble love. His philosophy is that “all are responsible for all.”
I posed the question: Is it not true that God escapes blame for evil by giving man free will?
Chet answered: That is exactly the trap that Ivan Karamazov sets up in the book, and it’s central to the debate in the defense of God’s goodness in the face of evil.
Whether free will absolves God of blame depends on which philosophical lens you use.
The “Free Will Defense” (God is not to blame)
The “Ultimate Responsibility” Critique (God is to Blame)
Ivan says the price is too high. Even if free will is good, is it worth the suffering of a single child? He doesn’t want to enter heaven if the price of admission is earthly cruelty. The question can’t be answered by logic. Dostoevsky suggests universal responsibility. We are all responsible for each other’s sins. By taking on the blame ourselves and acting with love, we cancel out the evil that logic cannot explain.
My own idea is that there is no God, Free Will is an illusion, and evil is a product of man’s actions.
Chet: That is a clean, consistent, and “hard-nosed” worldview. It effectively cuts the Gordian knot of theodicy by removing the supernatural variables.
By removing God from the equation, you eliminate the need to “excuse” a creator for suffering. By viewing free will as an illusion, you move from a moral/theological framework into a biological and sociological one.
Here is how your perspective reframes the “Burden of Freedom” you’ve been exploring:
1. From “Sin” to “Systemic Failure.”
In your view, “evil” isn’t a cosmic force or a spiritual stain; it is a description of harm. If free will is an illusion (determinism), then “evil” actions are the result of a chain of causality: genetics, environment, trauma, and societal structures. We stop asking “Why did God let this happen?” and start asking “What conditions produced this behavior?”
The Burden of “Apparent” Choice
Even if free will is an illusion, the subjective experience of making choices remains. This is what some philosophers call “Compatibilism” or “Deterministic Freedom.”
We still feel the weight of decisions.
We still build legal systems based on the assumption of agency.
The “burden” becomes a psychological one: how do we live meaningful lives in a universe that is essentially a complex machine?
The Grand Inquisitor’s Win
Ironically, your view actually aligns quite well with the Grand Inquisitor’s secret logic. He tells Jesus that he doesn’t believe in Him or the “spirit”; he believes in the reality of human hunger and the need for order.
If there is no God and no free will, then the Inquisitor is right: the most “moral” thing to do is to organize society to minimize suffering and maximize security, even if it requires a “pious lie” or total control.
Me: One must imagine Sisyphus happy, with his face pressed against the rock.
Chet: That quote brings our conversation full circle. By invoking Albert Camus, you’ve moved from Dostoevsky’s 19th-century theological struggle to the 20th-century Absurdist solution.
If Dostoevsky represents the “Burden of Freedom” as a spiritual crisis, Camus represents it as a victory. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus argues that if there is no God to give us a purpose, and we are trapped in a deterministic loop (the rock always rolls back down), we are finally, truly free.
The Rebellion against the “Grand Inquisitor”
Your view—that we don’t need a “pious lie” to be just—is the heart of Camus’s philosophy. He believed that:
The Silence of the Universe: We look for meaning, but the universe provides none. This is “The Absurd.”
The Rejection of Suicide: We shouldn’t escape the absurd through physical death or “philosophical suicide” (falling back into religious “lies”).
The Joy of Struggle: Sisyphus is free because he knows his fate. He owns his rock. When he turns back toward the plain to retrieve it, he is superior to his destiny.
Creating Justice Without a “Why”
In his other masterpiece, The Plague, Camus addresses your point about a “just society.” The protagonist, Dr. Rieux, works tirelessly to save people from a dying city—not because God told him to, and not because he thinks he will “win,” but simply because it is the only decent thing to do. He doesn’t need a “pious lie” to be a doctor; he just needs to see the suffering in front of him.
Conclusion: The “Face Pressed Against the Rock”
When you say his face is pressed against the rock, you’re highlighting the intimacy of thestruggle. Without a God to blame or a Free Will to feel guilty about, there is just the work. The justice we create is ours alone. It’s more fragile because it isn’t divine, but perhaps more precious because we chose to build it in the face of the silence.
It seems we’ve journeyed from a dark cell in Seville to a hill in Greek mythology.
Editors note: This is a story that I have previously published which I have rewritten and revised. I hope you enjoy it.
A few months ago, I had the good fortune to move to Old Louisville. As fate would have it, I moved into an apartment building on Third Street just four houses down from a house I used to live in as a young man during the turbulent ’70s. As a matter of fact, my family actually owned that building and sold it in 1993.
Fast forward to the present.
My friend Victoria was looking for an apartment and I have long been encouraging her to look in Old Louisville. It was a very interesting place to live with a lot of old Victorian Mansions which have been subdivided into apartments. And there was Central Park nearby.
One day she was over at my place and we went out apartment hunting together. She had several picked out over on Fourth Street to look at. It was raining so we took our umbrellas.
We walked down Hill Street over to Fourth and as we were about to round the corner, I noticed a “For Rent” sign in the front yard of a house that I had long admired. I called it the House of Lions and Pineapples. It was a beautiful three-story red brick Victorian with two stone lions and pineapples sitting outside the black wrought iron gate.
I said, “Why don’t you give them a call?”
She did and we were able to see it right then. They had just put it on the market and were in the process of cleaning it and painting it when we went in. Victoria fell in love with it immediately and I did too.
After looking at a couple of other places in the area Victoria decided that the house of pineapples and lions was the one for her, so we called the owner and asked for a meeting. Sure, come on over they said. They lived on Third Street, just a few doors down from where I am living now. They gave us their address and we headed over there.
“Hey! Wait a minute! What’s that address again,” I asked Victoria. “1461? Why I used to live in that house back in the ’70s. As a matter of fact, my family owned that very building back then!”
When we got there and knocked on the door, a little old lady, round and short, answered the door. She was all smiles. I introduced myself and told her I used to live in this building back in the ’70s and wasn’t it ironic that we were here?
“Oh, did you know Dr. Bell?”
“Why yes! I am his son!”
We sat down and had a nice talk. Joe and his wife Arden bought the house in 1993 from my parents. At that time, I was part-owner of the house myself and received some of the proceeds from the sale. Arden gave us a tour of the house.
“I bet it looks a lot different now than it did then,” she said.
Yep, it sure did!
So, there we were. My friend Victoria was about to rent an apartment from a couple who owned the house I used to live in when I was a kid but was sold to them in 1993, the same year she was born. What kind of alignment of the planets was necessary to bring us to this point? By what chance occurrences was Victoria destined to cross my path and rent this apartment in the building of the lions and pineapples?
It put me in mind of a story I once heard when I was living in Philadelphia.
It seems there was this college professor living in my building, The Marine Club Apartments, who sent his servant to the Italian Market for supplies. In a very little while, the servant came back, shaking and trembling. It was clear he had been greatly disturbed by something that had happened at the market.
He said, “Mister Coffer, sir, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd. I turned to look to see who it was and I saw it was Death staring me in the face. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture. I ran from the market and came back here. Mister Coffer, will you please lend me your car so that I can ride away from this city and avoid my fate? I will go across the river to Salem and there, Death will not find me.”
The college professor gave him the keys to his Mustang, and the servant rode away as fast as the car could drive, not without leaving a stretch of burning black rubber behind him as he peeled out of the parking garage. Later that day the professor went down to the Italian Market and he saw Death standing in the crowd and he went over and asked her, “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant this morning when you saw him?”
“That was not a threatening gesture,” she said, “I was just surprised to see him in here in Philly, as I had an appointment with him tonight in Salem.”
Thomas Wolfe wrote in his book, Look Homeward Angel, “Through chance, we are each a ghost to all the others, and our only reality; through chance, the huge hinge of the world, and a grain of dust; the stone that starts an avalanche, the pebble whose concentric circle widen across the seas.”
Although chance may have something to do with our lives and though we might make a move this way or that we are still bound like an ant on a leaf rushing down a river to the sea. And there is precious little we can do about it but enjoy the ride.
Victoria rented the apartment and she is living there now one block away in the building of the lions and pineapples. And if you squint your eyes and hold your mouth in a certain way you can almost see the flapping wings of the butterfly in the rainforest that made it all possible.
Thirteen homeless individuals had taken up living in Camp Hope. This camp was cleared out Monday as part of Greg Mayor Fisher’s new revitalization program. The team is comprised of 67 business and community leaders. Their main topics pf concern are litter, safety, graffiti, and homelessness.
The hotel and tourist industry has been in freefall since the pandemic struck. About two thirds of the city’s 65,000 hospitality workers are out of a job, much of which was concentrated in downtown Louisville.
The city has committed to increasing police presence and adding $1,000,000 to the effort to dealing with homelessness.
Ghost Dog 