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.

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.”

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.

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.

The meeting room of the East Hampton Presbyterian Church, which is regularly filled by Sunday-school classes and women’s-club suppers, is not exactly where you would expect to go to a Latin jazz concert by a world-class performer. On Saturday night, however, the music, and some tango dancing, took over.

Jane Hastay, the minister of music at the church, who also happens to be a jazz pianist, drew an enthusiastic crowd for a concert that starred Gil Gutierrez, a virtuoso on nylon string guitar with an international following. He was accompanied by Ms. Hastay, at the piano, Peter Martin Weiss (her husband), on bass, and Bob Stern, on amplified violin in keeping with the guitar. 

Mr. Gutierrez is from San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, a place imbued by music. (The Choral Society of the Hamptons’ recent Rossini concert was conducted by John Daly Goodwin, who lived there for many years.)

Long recognized as a star, Mr. Gutierrez has been a soloist with the Minnesota and Florida symphony orchestras and performed at Carnegie Hall and in documentary films. His virtuosity encompasses various styles, including opera, jazz, flamenco, and tango. East Hampton was lucky to have him here.

On Saturday night, his sound brought shouts of joy from the audience when the tunes were spirited and deep sighing when they were quiet or melancholy. 

Over the years, I’ve been quite  tuned in to live and recorded jazz, by professionals as well as friends. But while all jazz encompasses improvised sections and Latin and African influences, what I have listened to over the years has, for the most part, been what could be described as a commonplace North American variety. Many who attended on Saturday were, unlike me, quite familiar with Latin jazz, specifically, and many concertgoers were brought out by OLA, the nonprofit organization that has been an advocate for the eastern Long Island Latino community since 2002 and to which the concert was dedicated.  The concert was a shared activity that engendered a sense of community, and the blend of music and people was heartening.

The Presbyterian Church is only a long stone’s throw from my house, and given my caution about driving at night, I walked over, hoping for a good concert. I had not imagined that I would be delighted by an outstanding concert that was not just a new experience, but a wonderful use of a community church hall that brought disparate members of the community together.

Thank you, Jane and OLA!

My analogy may be a little off, but I think the way into the Art Barge on the Napeague stretch resembles a pound trap, a long track through wetlands leading to the cod end, from which there is no escape. 

It becomes nothing less than Mephistophelian from a driver’s point of view when there is, as there was on Memorial Day eve, a large party there.

Having crept and crept and crept forward, I arrived at a small circle and went to park behind an S.U.V. with a license plate that said “Moon Unit,” but was told I could not. We often do it that way at The Star, and it was a Star party, and, as I told the security guard, I didn’t plan on staying long, but he was adamant.

So, there I was, told to go back, which I began to do, creeping and cursing the while . . . until confronted by an onrushing tank — for that is what I call Range Rovers and the like — driven by a guy who, when I motioned him backward with both hands, refused to give ground, just as I should have done in the first instance. He dismounted and told me that I was the one who should back up to the circle where we would all turn around. Soured on partying by then, I began backing, until, in trying to get around a particularly protuberant van, the driver’s side wheels rolled over a half-sunken log into a marshy ditch.

The guy, in passing by a few minutes later, said he was sorry.

Well underway by that time, the party was loud, and it was all I could do to hear the AAA voice on a borrowed cellphone in the tiny kitchen — an effort interrupted when told that someone with a four-wheel drive, someone whom I knew, would tow me. I ran out to where the car was, but there was no one in sight. Gloomy in the gloaming, I sat on the fender of the lopsided Solara a while longer before returning to the barge again, where a kind woman was to intercede for me with Mary over a landline phone. I was walking up the steps as Jane Bimson, a co-worker, was walking down them. 

“Mary told me to promise only to have one drink and, guess what, I’ve had none,” I sighed, after telling her what had happened.

“Have two,” said Jane.

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.

For four days last week I was immersed in beautiful music with the Choral Society of the Hamptons. At concerts held at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church and the Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Manhattan, we were privileged to take part in a rare and rousing work — Rossini’s “Petite Messe Solennelle” — alongside virtuoso soloists, a visiting choral director, and gifted musicians at the piano and organ. It was an extraordinary experience.

The best part of being an amateur among professional musicians is the joy it brings. The worst part is that it empties the mind of all else . . . which, of course, isn’t much of a downside. It can be a wonderful thing to stop think, think, thinking and be overtaken by the present tense of music. This must be why monks chant as meditation. 

Although the two rehearsals and two concerts took up only several hours each day, between Friday and Monday, the experience was mentally and emotionally overwhelming. Professionals go on with the rest of their lives; with them, even the most beautiful musical effort can become a matter of fact. Amateurs, like me, sometimes have to struggle not to be totally knocked off our feet.

I’ve been in hundreds of concerts over the years, and tears don’t come easily to me. The assembled performers have to be at least close to perfect and the soloists have to be superb. But flow they did during “Petite Messe Solennelle.” John Daly Goodwin, the conductor on this occasion, helped all of us involved share the emotional, and perhaps moral, fiber of the music, conveying authority, emotion, and humor, as the music demanded, through facial expression, body language, and an occasional smile of pleasure. Although biased, I feel comfortable in reporting that the chorus followed his lead well.

It’s hard to compare a musical experience in which many perform as one with other artistic endeavors. The members of a successful theatrical cast or a ballet troupe must sometimes enjoy similar experiences, I suppose. There is something sublime in being part of a work of art that requires the best of many people, a blended community of singers and instrumentalists and conductor. Do those who take part in deep religious rituals feel similar bonds? I bet they do.

Last weekend we were uplifted by four stunning soloists from Mexico as well as the Choral Society’s own extraordinary professionals: Christine Cadarette at the piano and Thom Bohlert at the organ.

For me, worries disappeared and happiness reigned. If any of you out there think you might have an inclination to sing, I can promise you you won’t regret trying out for the Choral Society. It can be divine.

Two small daffodils forced themselves out in the greensward between the sidewalk and a picket fence in front of an old East Hampton house on Main Street about a week ago, and I admire them as I pass by. 

The house never seems occupied, and the daffodils have come by chance, which makes me realize that I admire come-by-chance, ostensibly tough blooms more than cultivated ones, scattered or in bunches. I admit to being pleased that there are several kinds of narcissi now in bloom in my yard, and enough to cut and bring indoors. But I enjoy those that have popped up here and there without help (except perhaps from the weather) even more, including some on the lane in front of the house.

Children aren’t daffodils, but I nevertheless think my inclination where flowers are concerned somehow translates into a metaphor for how I feel about children who have been separated from their parents while being processed at Homeland Security stations along the southwest border. A wall, a fence, a flower bloom­ing where it has been told it shouldn’t . . .

According to The New York Times, officials recently confirmed that about 700 migrant children have been taken away from their parents at the border since October, and that more than 100 of those children were less than 4 years old. Four years old!

The Department of Homeland Security is quoted as saying that families are “not separated to deter illegal immigration” but to “protect the best interests of minor children.” As far as I am concerned, this is not just double talk from the Trump administration, but a dark, dangerous doublespeak that is meant to obscure the truth of a policy that is horrifying and inhumane. Perhaps we would best call it doublethink, to borrow a word from Orwell’s dystopian book “1984.”

Taken from their families, these children will have to be tough to survive. Daffodils don’t need much more than air, sunshine, and rain, but children must be fed, clothed, loved, and nurtured.

At one point, the Trump administration let it be known that it was actually considering taking children away from their parents as a means of deterring migrants from crossing our southern border. I ask: Could our leaders disgrace themselves — and our country, and us, the citizens — more by even considering such a cruel policy toward children?

The Trump administration’s lack of compassion for the well-being and dignity of human beings is a reflection of Mr. Trump’s own narcissism, and this degrading state of affairs should by now be painfully evident to all Americans, even those who have always in good faith supported the Grand Old Party. 

If ever there was a moment for the scales to fall from the eyes of people of integrity who made the mistake of voting for Mr. Trump, is this not it?