Going into Memorial Day weekend, I had an intention to write down all of the amusing things I overheard while out and about, and make a column out of the best of them. Either I wasn’t paying attention or simply went to the wrong places, as by the end of the day on Monday, I had very little material. Well, no, that’s not quite right; I had exactly one quote.

It was therefore a good thing that I happened to take a walk in the Amagansett lanes on Friday evening. These narrow, straight streets run roughly south from Amagansett Main Street. They were where my friends and I did our Halloween trick-or-treating when our ages were still in single digits.

At the time modest ranch houses and four-squares built in the early postwar period dominated. Every place had plenty of lawn, with breathing room between it and its neighbors. Not anymore. With money to be made maxing out every available inch of a house lot, developers and people looking to build and flip are replacing the old ranches and four-squares in batches.

Standing in front of a house under construction on Miankoma Lane, I saw something I had not noticed before, which marks the new style: its side rooflines. Unlike those on earlier houses, today’s roofs appear to point directly at the property lines. That is, if you imagined a line parallel to the plane of the roof, it would hit the ground right where the privet is planted. This is no accident.

In East Hampton, building plans must conform to a so-called pyramid law and not exceed it. This is a line on paper that extends upward at an angle from the property’s margins. Builders seeking the most floor area have the houses extend side to side as far as possible, leaving headroom for decent-height ceilings and pitched roofs. 

The effect is a surprising conformity in the scale and shape of the new houses. I do not care for it, but then again, I am not directly in the business, although pretty much everyone who makes a living on the South Fork’s boat is floated in one way or another by building, real estate, and the related trades.

I walked on, thinking about that one thing I overheard, which I mentioned at the outset, a derisive “They have phones in Monaco!” from a man on a cellphone. He no doubt had come from one of those big new houses.

I applauded James Clapper, the former C.I.A. director, the other night when I heard him say he thought Russia had won the election.

He said it with finality — I had on these pages in mid-April merely wondered if it were true — and Judy Woodruff, his interviewer, said it was a stunning conclusion if so.

As I say, you don’t know what to believe anymore. Nothing’s out of bounds. What John McCain said in “The Restless Wave” about our founding principles almost sounds elegiac. 

It’s all for one and all for one now. You wonder if ever again there will be general agreement as to a common purpose in domestic and foreign affairs aside from enriching the rich at home while sucking up to myriad capricious dictators.

I would go so far as to include in that number the National Football League, which this week took a stand on standing when “The Star-Spangled Banner” is played. This may well be the land of the free, though the millionaire minions whose heroics and brain-scrambling collisions delight us each Sunday in the fall apparently are not. Presumably we are not to be reminded when the national anthem is played of any divisions that may exist in this fissured country.

What were those principles the senator cited? For one, that this is “a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle that all men [and women] are created equal.” And that our great cause, the cause that binds us, lies in defending the dignity of all human beings and their right to freedom and equal justice.

I didn’t find it undignified when the N.F.L. players knelt and locked arms. It seemed right, as if it were more an act of supplication than protest. After all, it is what is done in church every Sunday, in humility and adoration.

Linking arms and kneeling is, in fact, the best way, I think, to celebrate this country’s strengths while praying at the same time that its wounds be healed — our slavishness to mammon perhaps being chief among them, an addiction that can bring many to heel.

Sociopaths and narcissists frequently use gaslighting tactics, a form of manipulation aimed at sowing doubt in an individual or in members of a group to make them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. 

I know this to be true, because I read it on the internet.

Sociopaths, Wikipedia continues, transgress social mores, break laws, and exploit others, but typically also are convincing liars who consistently deny wrongdoing.

I’ll return to this notion, but first will acknowledge a small measure of satisfaction that Alex Jones, a contemptible huckster and apparent confidant of the president of the United States who trumpets conspiracy theories to an audience of profoundly confused Americans, is the subject of three lawsuits. The Times reported last week that Mr. Jones, who has asserted that the 2012 mass shooting in which 20 first graders and six adults were murdered was a hoax, staged by the government as a pretext to confiscate firearms, has been targeted by families of those slaughtered on that December day in Newtown, Conn. 

Naturally, the self-styled courageous crusader, now that he is in the crosshairs, so to speak, equivocates. After lawsuits were filed last month, according to The Times, he claimed that he “very quickly . . . began to believe that the massacre happened,” this despite “the fact [sic] that the public doubted it.” 

The article, “Truth in a Post-Truth Era: Sandy Hook Families Sue Alex Jones, Conspiracy Theorist,” details the regular harassment and threats, including of murder, to the families of the slain children, thanks in no small part to the bloviating Mr. Jones. What a vast understatement to say that for the devastated families, he has added grievous insult to injury. 

I would remind this wearisome loudmouth that karma is the cosmic cash register, seeing to it that no debt goes unpaid. May that debit be extracted sooner rather than later, a la “Instant Karma!” by John Lennon, who was most definitely shot dead in 1980 by a profoundly confused American of an earlier era. 

Mr. Trump has certainly done his part to inject ambiguity and disorientation, appearing on Mr. Jones’s radio show during his campaign for the presidency, The Times notes. The president has called the news media the “enemy of the American people,” a phrase for which Mr. Jones claimed credit, and parroted the charlatan’s bogus assertion that millions of undocumented immigrants voted for his opponent, Hillary Clinton, who, in the world of objective reality, won the popular vote by almost three million. 

Last week, the television journalist Lesley Stahl detailed a 2016 postelection conversation in which the president-elect told her that he continually bashes the press “to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.” 

On Saturday, the president complained, via Twitter, that “The Failing @nytimes quotes ‘a senior White House official,’ who doesn’t exist. . . .” Of course, his claim that The Times was lying was easily proven to be itself a lie, just one of thousands he has told over these last 16 months. Earlier this month, apparently citing that fortress of fairness and balance — “Fox & Friends” — Mr. Trump, a man who for years peddled the lie that President Barack Obama had been born in Kenya, tweeted that “91% of the Network News about me is negative (Fake).” It was, I think, his most illuminating utterance of all. 

“Now that he is president,” Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Maggie Haberman wrote in The Times this week, “Mr. Trump’s baseless stories of secret plots by powerful interests appear to be having a distinct effect.” The president of the United States “is eroding public trust in institutions, undermining the idea of objective truth, and sowing widespread suspicions about the government and news media that mirror his own.” 

It bears repeating: Sociopaths and narcissists frequently use gaslighting tactics, a form of manipulation aimed at sowing doubt in an individual or in members of a group to make them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. 

I know this to be true. 

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer for The Failing @EHStar.

As a kid, I spent a lot of time in the country, where no one was afraid of bugs. When I say country, I mean a part of the world with more fields and farms and cows and chickens than summer residents, rather than “country” with quotations around the word, the way the East End is often misidentified. A quilted barn jacket and pair of Wellington boots don’t make you a farmer.

We would hang around outdoors all day and certainly didn’t worry about creatures with four — or more — legs. (My mother and other female adults were frightened of bats, but that is another story.)

I think when I was a kid we would have expected only a city person to get upset by creepy-crawly things, but I’m a lot less blasé about bugs today than I was when I was 8 or 9. No, I don’t mind spiders: The grandchildren like spiders, and in any event they eat flies and mosquitos. But lately the insect invasion seems to have gotten out of hand. Here we are, in the beautiful Hamptons, and we have to be constantly mindful of the presence of ticks. Now, too, we are plagued with a newer arrival . . . oh my heavens, stink bugs! 

Ticks are hideous whether inching along in search of a host or lying about looking nastily full. And, of course, ticks carry serious diseases. It’s no joke. As far as I’m concerned, though, there is nothing good about stink bugs, either. They don’t have to do anything to be hateful. They don’t even have to crawl. 

I find stink bugs so offensive that I turned the pages of a New Yorker magazine article about them as quickly as possible after reading the headline. The New Yorker feature, in its March 12 issue, tells the story of a couple dealing with a massive stink-bug invasion: “Will we ever be able to get rid of them?” they ask, perhaps futilely.

The brown marmorated stink bug (Halyomorpha halys) is an invasive species “that can upset customers and frustrate technicians,” the New Yorker article says. The number of the little stinkers in the house in question had reached 26,000 at the time the magazine went to press. 

Where did these pests come from? They were unknown hereabouts 10 or 15 years ago. Apparently, stink bugs creep inside in the fall looking for warm places to spend the winter. According to the National Pest Management Association’s fall 2017 “Bug Barometer,” they have been flourishing in the Northeast because the region has consistent rainfall and enough warmth. “Invasive species may start off making headlines, but often level off in a few years,” said Mark Sheperdigian, in a column for an interesting journal titled Pest Management Professional.

Such professional assessments don’t help very much if you find a few stink bugs at home and decide you have to squish them, however. I don’t advise that you squish them. It might release the famous bad odor, and it really won’t do anything to reduce their numbers. 

Before I disgust all my readers by writing about other unpleasant pests hereabouts, like silverfish, roaches, and termites, let’s hear it for centipedes and caterpillars. Those are sweet insects. And how about another wonderful member of the arthropod world, the cricket, who chirps so delightfully? And butterflies, and dragonflies!

I’m concerned about the numbers of these pleasant insects. Has anyone seen a grasshopper lately? Where have the grasshoppers gone? It feels like the world and the ecosystem are out of whack, when ticks and stink bugs are omnipresent, but you rarely see a monarch butterfly.

First, Second, and Third House in Montauk were so named, one would think, to commemorate the order in which they were built. This is not so. Nor is Gin Beach called that in connection with Prohibition, as is often assumed. In fact, their origins go back to the early 18th century and have everything to do with cattle and sheep, and nothing to do with construction sequences or illicit liquor.

As far back as 1659, East Hampton Town records indicate that men went to Montauk to prepare land as pasture. Once sheep and cattle and some hogs were driven east, on about May 1, the men would take turns sheltering in rude huts to look after them. My grandmother, Jeannette Rattray, in a 1938 history of Montauk printed by The Star, likened tending cattle to jury duty; every man had to go eventually, and no one escaped.

First, Second, and Third House went up, spaced three miles apart, beginning in 1744, and indeed, they were built in that order. However, my grandmother wrote, they got their names because they were the first, second, and third colonists’ structures the drovers would reach as they herded the livestock to summer pastures.

The native people were there, of course, but by the 18th century they were already becoming constrained by economic exclusion and a series of restrictive laws. Even their storehouses, stone-lined pits in the ground called Indian barns, were ordered filled, lest any cattle, sheep, or horses fall in. 

With the livestock, perhaps as many as 6,000 at their peak, came the need, too, for fences, and East Hampton men put them up, using ponds as partial boundaries where they could. One ran roughly north from Fresh Pond in Hither Hills to the bay and south to the ocean near where the state campground is today. Another reached from Fort Pond to today’s Navy Beach, and another from the pond to the Atlantic, somewhere in the vicinity of the Montauk I.G.A. Gates crossed the Montauk road near each of the three cattle keepers’ houses. 

Gin Beach got its name for the gin, a trap-like corral, into which the cattle were driven at round-up time, before they were run, 500 at a time, into the fatting fields. During my grandmother’s time, some of the old folks here still knew the rough boundaries and where the fences had been.

The pasture season ended around Nov. 1, weather permitting, when the livestock was gathered from the swamps and thickets and herded back west. In the early days, Thanksgiving was observed on the Thursday after the cattle were back. There was too much work to do to celebrate before the animals were back in their barns.

At the end of a scary article about freelance genetic engineering, raising the possibility that someone might one day not all that far in the future release a killer virus that would wipe out a lot of us, Lawrence O. Gostin, an adviser on pandemic influenza preparedness for the World Health Organization, said, “There are really only two things that could wipe 30 million people off of the planet: a nuclear weapon, or a biological one.”

“There’s a third,” I said as Mary was recounting what Mr. Gostin had said. “Don’t forget asteroids and comets.”

At least if Neil DeGrasse Tyson, whom I’ve been reading lately (and with no little trepidation), is to be believed. 

Yes, it might not happen for a very, very, very long time, “but when it [an asteroid] hits,” he wrote in “Death by Black Hole,” “it will take out hundreds of millions of people instantaneously and many more hundreds of millions in the wake of global climatic upheaval. . . . And here’s one for your calendar: On Friday the 13th of April, 2029, an asteroid large enough to fill the Rose Bowl as though it were an egg cup, will fly so close to Earth that it will dip below the altitude of our communications satellites.”

“All of which is to say that we’re in a very tentative situation on this planet when it comes to man-made or natural disasters,” I said. (I was, of course, preaching to the choir.) “There are a lot of big rocks out there and a lot of crazies down here, but, for the moment, we’re tilting toward the sun, all is a-bloom, your birthday looms, and even to the edge of doom I’ll plight my troth (however neurotic), and strive never no more to char the chicken.”

My plan was to watch the royal wedding from an ironic distance. I got out of bed at 4 a.m., I left my cowlick-afflicted hair uncombed to create the illusion that I had donned a sort of cut-rate fascinator, I adjusted my Twitter feed to receive the snark aimed at the event, and then I turned on the television. 

Since I was looking to remain unengaged intellectually, I tuned in first to the coverage from the American networks. CBS had a countdown clock to the ceremony, a CNN camera zoomed in on a dog wearing a Union Jack bandanna, and NBC had an expert weigh in on whether Prince Harry would tie the knot bearded or clean-shaven. (Note: The expert was wrong, the prince kept the scruff.)

Having tired of sitting through commercial breaks, I flipped over to the BBC News channel, which, while dedicating most of its screen to the day’s pomp, stuck to its more serious journalistic mission via a news crawl that relayed information about the North Koreans who had defected, the school shooting in Texas, and the plane crash in Cuba.

The BBC high road did offer slightly more captivating views — particularly the chats with people who worked at charities supported by the prince and his bride-to-be, Meghan Markle — but I was still in no danger of being roused from my ennui. 

That is, until a black Mercedes van pulled up in front of St. George’s Chapel and out stepped William and Harry, the brothers I had watched publicly mourn the death of their mother almost 21 years ago. 

There was something about the sweet interplay between the two — the sly smiles, the whispered asides, the gleeful camaraderie — that seemed universal to all siblings who have ever attended a family event in fancy clothes they didn’t want to be wearing. I suddenly found myself projecting a gamut of feelings onto them: grief, triumph, brotherly love, a blistering desire to change into sweatpants.

Once the cameras ventured inside the chapel, I was soon flooded with a surprising sense of patriotism. It seemed as if Ms. Markle, an American actress with a mixed racial heritage, had tossed all staid royal wedding plans aside and let loose with Yankee abandon. A rollicking sermon from Bishop Michael Curry, the first African-American to head up the Episcopal Church in the U.S., likely left many Brits in attendance feeling as if their Sunday services were hopelessly ho-hum. A rousing rendition of “Stand by Me” by a British gospel choir proved that, Pachelbel be damned, American songwriters create the best wedding anthems. The medieval chapel, which was filled with a cross-section of humanity that ranged from a yoga teacher with a pierced nose (the bride’s mom, Doria Ragland) to the Queen of England, had been transformed into a new world melting pot. 

Yes, there was also an abundance of romance. The flowing gown, the carriage rides, and especially the sweet nothings the groom cooed to his bride at the altar: “You look amazing. I’m so lucky.” But the most memorable and touching thing about the ceremony was its aura of inclusiveness, its sense of bridging the divide.

Ultimately, I found myself agreeing with the Twitter scribe who wrote, “it seems that after shootings, plane crashes, natural disasters and threats between nations, the world needed a royal wedding more than it realized.”

Jamie Bufalino is a reporter for The Star.

For as long as email has been an everyday occupation, I have been in the habit of trying to rid myself of unwanted electronic communications by labeling incoming junk as “junk,” and vaguely sort of expecting and hoping that my laptop email program would eventually catch my drift and start recognizing and blocking the senders. I thought I was exercising the patience of Job as I waited for the email program to learn to do this. Somehow, the computer never did catch on, but I’ve been doing this for, oh, maybe 20 years now. Don’t laugh.

Some of my misapprehension about how these things work relates to the fact that, oddly enough, I actually was an early adapter of computers in the workplace, and I still apparently have one foot in the distant digital past, when anything seemed possible and none of the commands used were really intuitive. About a million years ago — could it have been the 1980s? — we started using desktop computers here at The Star for what we used to call “word processing,” a term, now that I think of it, that has just about gone into the graveyard of antiquated words like “hose” for stockings or “valise” for suitcase. The program was called XyWrite, and I remember distinctly how I had to convince my colleagues because some thought we would never be able to edit copy without typewriters and grease pencils.

How long ago that now seems; today, computer programs are so much smarter but also exponentially more complicated, and the truth is I have become computer-challenged.

It took a friend, who happens to be an excellent teacher, to set me straight about unwanted emails. Although I hadn’t asked for help, she noticed that I seemed to be crushed under an avalanche of spam and ads and junk newsletters, and explained that the way to avoid recurring them was to “unsubscribe.”

Of course, I had heard about unsubscribing, but never tried it, I guess, because in my admittedly old-fashioned way of thinking you couldn’t unsubscribe from something you hadn’t knowingly subscribed to in the first place, and I couldn’t remember ever having subscribed to an email list for anything, ever. My tutor explained that every time I buy something online, my email address is added to marketing databases and that the same thing occurs every time I sign an online petition.

And, no, she patiently continued, a computer email program does not simply take it upon itself to accumulate a file of junk clicks and use it as a “please block” list. Social media these days may be keeping detailed records of everything we view or “like,” or do, but that doesn’t mean email systems are programmed to read your mind.

Wow! In the week following her advice, I have been unsubscribing with wanton abandon all over the place. Despite the fact that email marketers seem to be in league to make it difficult by hiding the word in teeny, tiny type, I have become an unsubscribe champion. My inbox has never looked so neat.

This morning I found myself wondering if perhaps the computer was keeping track of all my unsubscribing for me, in some sort of handy hidden list that I could unearth and point to as I bragged about my unsubscribing prowess. . . . Oops! There I go again.

Suddenly, this became dandelion spring. Their pale yellow heads rose one day in numbers like I had never noticed before. Arrayed over the grass on Mill Hill, they appear as stars. They sparkle between the rows at the Wolffer vineyard on Sagg Road. Outside my office window a line of them straggles across the library’s front lawn.

In warmer places, many already have gone to seed. White tufts wait for the wind as younger siblings begin to spread their petals below. 

Last year at about this time, I wrote about the late Matthew Lester, a young man who was a champion of dandelions — and the bees that gather pollen from them. East Hampton Village some time ago adopted more environmentally friendly management of its properties, such as the Village Green, and dandelions are a visible result; a lively Town Pond may be another.

In the past few months, for one reason or another, I have been at Town Pond often or at least I’ve passed it on the road a lot. In addition to the usual pair of swans and handful of mallards, there have been a number of resident muskrats and, lately, an egret feeding on something, perhaps fish or tadpoles, at the west end near the Hedges Inn.

About a week ago, when I was there with some kids to race a remote-control boat, we spotted two turtles known as red-eared sliders, probably dumped there illegally after they outgrew their aquarium. The kids went over for a look, one nearly losing a sneaker in the muck. Native or not, the turtles appeared healthy and content perching on the bank, at least until the mud-footed child startled them, and they slipped into the water.

‘If I ever get arrested,” I said to Tom McMorrow, who was about to leave us for The Independent, “please say, ‘A 78-year-old man from Springs. . . .’ ”

“Or, better yet,” I added, “ ‘A 78-year-old man from The Springs.’ That might cast me in a better light.”

As Henry Haney once said, “It’s all how you look at it.”

My mother, on looking at our house, described it as “a shack,” but she was from the Midwest, where brick and slate hold sway. Their house would have fetched millions here, but it was there, in a comfortable, God-fearing suburb of Pittsburgh, and so sold for $400,000, while, ironically, in Sodom-by-the-Sea, where cleanliness is next to godlessness, our home’s value, if the assessors are to be believed, has soared in recent years by about $20,000 per annum.

“You’re one of the lucky ones,” our eldest daughter, who lives in Ohio, reminds me every now and then. “You bought in in the ’60s, and lived to see your children priced out.”

Just dumb luck. I, a penurious scrivener buoyed by a real estate bubble, had never intended it to be that way. I had always planned, when the kids would cite the fact that the younger generation was not as well off as its parents, to say, “Don’t look at me! I am the exception to the rule. I have made it quite easy for you to maintain your sense of self-esteem. Nothing to envy here.”

Still, I’ve got this conundrum: Should I say, real estate-wise, that I live in Springs or The Springs? Which should it be? For the moment, content where I am, and inasmuch as I like to think of myself as an ordinary, everyday, average human being, Springs has a better ring to it. Scruffy Springs with its scraggly oaks and gypsy moths and pollen and ticks.

Yet, when it comes to one day selling, I might very well sing a different tune. “We live in The Springs,” I can hear myself saying to an inquirer. “The Springs is part of The Hamptons, you know. And The Hamptons is one of The World’s most fashionable resorts.” Yes, I could see myself resorting to that.

“EXCELLENT, EXCELLENT opportunity to purchase one of The Springs’s most adorable abodes,” our advertisement in The Star would begin. “An augmented hand-hewn, amenity-strewn Cape nestled within a canopy of soughing oaks on a well-appointed lane.”

But it’s Springs for now.