The Way We Were

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Is it just normal life? Is it “Now we know better?” Or is it … the times we live in?

Can every other generation, every other person catalogue loss of innocence, loss of trust in the world in general — all of the world — through major events?

Something said this week reminded me of the nineties. I’m not going to sell you a fairytale and tell you I was deliriously happy. I wasn’t. I was writing my heart out, sending out manuscript after manuscript after manuscript and getting back standard rejections. And Dan was working at a job he loved that was slowly becoming a job he hated as the organization changed. We were always short on money, overworked, and raising toddlers.

Happy? Yes. I mean, I’ve always been happy since Dan was foolish enough to marry me. How could I not be? What were the odds? (And 41 years last week, thank you so much.) But deliriously, fairytale happy? Well… You know? I was nervous, wrecked, always short on money and extremely tired. I went to bed with a list of tasks I hadn’t accomplished that day in my head, and then added more to them every morning.

And somehow — the things you do when you’re young — I was pounding out a short story a week, writing two or three novels a year, keeping the house spotless and… well, I was always tired.

In many ways, though, in the normal things of life, I’m happier now. Okay, not right now, because I’m throwing all my energy into packing and unpacking and trying to keep the writing (including this) going is hard, because my body gets very tired. BUT in normal life.

I mean I miss the remote-away kid, and heck, I miss the nearby kid when he doesn’t come by every other day. BUT Dan and I are finally getting over the “what do you do with an empty nest” as we pivot to our respective work, which fortunately both of us have always been interested in/liked. And of course tech gave me indie and is giving him the opportunity to do the work of a small coding shop just by himself. Once the move is complete, we’ll be in a place where we can walk every day (the area we used to walk here is public and turned… dicey by two years ago.) and where the physical house-plant is easier for us. (It’s still two floors, it’s just arranged so the rooms we use the most are near each other. Oh, and the church is so close even I can’t be afraid to drive to it (or walk, depending on the time and weather.) Yes, me 10 years ago is giving me the stink eye, but things have changed and right now that’s a great comfort to me.

Which brings us to how things have changed….

It is weird, given the relative positions we were in/are in now for me to get misty eyed at the thought of the nineties. I mean we had friends who are now dead or… not friends, sure. Our life became far more restricted, socially in the oughts, partly because the kids grew up and made up a lot of our social interaction. Why have a writers’ group when you have one every evening around the diner table? But also…

If I look back, the first blow to that misty-eyed golden glow is 9/11. Half of our group went… weird. Weird is a good term for it. (Did you go crazy or did you report, on that day they wounded New York — Leonard Cohen) From truffer illusions to the certainty we’d brought it on ourselves because colonialism (like any human breed ever, and frankly the US less than most, but never mind.

And once the fracture set in, it widened. Ten years later we were polite strangers, keeping up polite chatter when we accidentally met somewhere.

Okay, these things happen. Yeahbut. That was also the first blow to my world view. I’d lost friends before. I mean, you move across the ocean and acculturate, the people back where you came from will find you AT BEST weird, and at worse resent you as a traitor. But this was different–

We all like to think we pick decent, reasonable, smart people to be our friends, right? I mean we might know some of them aren’t too bright, or not as bright as us, but they’re still in every day parlance smart, and definitely decent and reasonable or what’s the point?

What broke me around that time, I now realize, was not losing friends, which happens. It was the first instance of what I would later call “I remember him/her when he/she was sane” which has now grown to hundreds. I.e. it was the way my friends embraced the craziest sh*t rather than simply revise the airy-fairy ideas we had in the early nineties. (Mostly that individual cultures could be overcome and the world could become one large happy, free family. We didn’t put it that way, but that’s what we thought.) they embraced weird, impossible conspiracy theories that involved the west being extra-special evil and therefore needing to be destroyed. Heck, most of publishing did, but that didn’t upset me, as I already knew most of them were at best unreconstructed Leninists and at worse fundamentalist Stalinists. My friends, though? We’d raised our toddlers together. I thought they were…. reasonable people.

Which brings us to all the shocks since, because doing a deep dive into why 9/11 had happened, I arrived at my current perception of culture as an almost living entity that will not be ignored or superseded by wishful thinking and good will. What we drink with mother’s milk, absent a great effort at acculturation (and even so, see for instance how I’m dealing with the concept of being “old”) surfaces in all sorts of ways, good and not, ways that are hard to counter as most people aren’t even fully aware of them.

Then there was schooling. Seeing my kids go through school, arguably as boys of tanitude but still boys (I understand unless you’re outright black, and even then, unless you’re an aggressive black male, all these problems are the same.) Seeing how they were treated and the efforts made by a culture (Micro culture, in this case, the education culture) that had decided driving boys down was the way to make females rise (never was, never will be. That’s not how any of this works. Two halves of a whole) and was willing to destroy any number of innocents for the crime of being born with a penis broke me. Deeply.

I almost prefer the honest cultural stupidity of Latin machismo. At least they’re not doing it on purpose to destroy one of the sexes. It is just what they believe, probably because of deep cultural legacy from the Muslim invasions. At least when I pushed back the reaction wasn’t “must pound harder.” (Or else it was and I didn’t notice, because G-d bless the ’tisms. And since mom and grandma were the same, no problem. by my late teens I’d realized the culture I was raised in was not exactly standard Portuguese. The way my schoolmates interacted with their families would probably have driven me to homicide. Never mind.)

I was particularly disturbed because I can read tea leaves for the future passibly well from cultural trends, and THAT one… Nothing good comes from this path, as we’re seeing in decreasing marriages, fewer children, and pervasive all penetrating patina of loneliness and anomie.

There were other shocks. Poll watching in 2012 was one of those. The absolutely staggering scale of fraud. The fact this goes on and we tolerate it…

Then there was… well, 2020. Electoral shenanigans, color revolution, DC surrounded by razor wire. The evil treatment of the people who took a guided tour of the capitol on Jan 6, the arrest of harmless pro-life demonstrators, the fear of being demonetized just for speaking my mind, the bizarre certainty that if this went on I’d end up shot at the back of the head and in a mass grave. (At least I’d have company, amIright?)

And then the amazing 2024 and since. Which you’d think is great.

To an extent it is. I’m no longer afraid of being demonetized. We can buy eggs — EGGS — without breaking the bank (I won’t lie, it left me broken a bit. Right now we have 3 dozen eggs in the fridge, which is loony. I need to make a few souffles.) We decided to put a knife deep into one of our saving accounts so we could provide the younger set of kids with a safe place to live and so we could move to a place where we don’t have to pay a small fortune for (one acre) yard care, since we found out I’m allergic to everything outside. (Not even kidding, yo. There isn’t a plant or tree I’m not allergic to. Well, maybe grapevines? I seem to be okay with those. But even Colorado wasn’t safe because of pine trees. I’m deathly allergic to EVEN PINE in woodworking form (as I found out recently, while making a “lady’s work table” to keep my crochet and cross stitch safe from the cats.) This new yard (not in that house yet, but–) Dan claims he can handle, but he’s still going to train the electric sheep to do most of it. These are good things. As is finding out I was celiac my whole life. There is less pain and I have more energy. Fortunately. Otherwise I’d already have died, last week and would certainly die these next three (after which we should be okay.)

On the other hand…

All the fraud, everything Data Republican unearths is so floridly evil it shocks even me. And then there’s the conspiracy theories on our side which we thought were crazy cakes, and…. behold their being proven right. At this point I wouldn’t even be shocked if Big Mike proved to be true. Okay, I would be shocked, but not the shock something like that deserves. Because, holy moley people! Crazier more involved things have proven true.

Including… yeah, the Fauci testimony which is in the process of breaking me yet further. Oh, not because he is a vain little shitweasel. Somewhere in the mountain of posts in this blog, from around that time, (I probably in addition to the acculturation essays which my assistant is editing should make a collection of the Big Break of 2020) are posts saying he was a little nerd dazzled with his own celebrity. BUT I am shocked that what I suspected and was afraid to believe seems to be true. Yes, it was just a flu. Not even a particularly bad flue. All the extra deaths including the abandoned in old age homes in Spain are the result of the panic this evil gnome induced.

And at this point not fully in the open, but I’m absolutely sure of it, I am certain — sure certain — that the entire thing was a ploy to drive the economy down and make the color revolution of 2020 plausible in people’s eyes. Because I remember various writers (and therefore lefty) groups I lurk in, forgotten, ringing their hands about how popular Trump was early 2020 and wishing there was something they could do to tank the economy.

Knowing what I know of electoral fraud, I know they still didn’t win that election fair and square. BUT the ability to pretend they did was enough.

And for that, they locked down the world, traumatized a generation, terrorized older people and the unstable, destroyed the economy and for good measure terrorized everyone in the US (which the rest of the world tried to ape) with memorex race riots, so that the courts would be afraid to reverse their electoral fraud.

ALL OF THIS, all of it, because they wanted power. With no thought of consequences. (I’m half sure the rest of the world locked down because they ape us and are stupidly dependent on their press which makes ours seem honorable. The other half is suspecting this panic was encouraged by our shitweasels for verisimilitude. Note that it only happened in the west. In Africa, India, etc. the Covidiocy wasn’t even a thing.)

I think this last break is the worst. I don’t want to become cynical about the world and people in general.

Listen, you, I never thought that most people were fundamentally good. My husband does because he is. I’m not. I’ve got a broad streak of darkness I fight all the time. BUT–

But… I didn’t know that so called civilized humans could be so… indifferent to the welfare of others and so willing to kill other humans in batch lots, by psy-ops means, to make old people die alone, to interdict funerals even to those people for whom funeral is the final consolation.

And I might never forgive the churches in the west for locking down, obediently. THEIR RELIGIOUS ANCESTORS RISKED DEATH IN THE CIRCUS TO CELEBRATE THEIR RITES. But they locked down to avoid…. a flu. Or being scolded. Whichever. I mean parking lot masses were judged too risky by the church in Colorado. (They remained locked down for a year after we moved. And when we moved the church here was NORMAL.)

This break, this feeling of never being able to trust anything again, of being on unstable ground, and having to be ready to revise every assumption at a minute’s notice? It makes daily life…. fraught.

I wonder if that’s how we become old. Not the aches and pains or the diminished energy (for me that picture is mixed, since I was desperately auto-immune always, and anyway, the energy is better since I cut out wheat) not the occasional forgetfulness… I wonder if what makes you old is all these breaks, all these sheddings of illusions.

And if our generation (broadly all of us who are adults and alive now) is worse than those in the past, because there was such a big lie maintained in the 20th century, affecting every aspect of life, and it’s breaking now, so in a way it’s like all of us moved to a different country and culture. At once. And that’s tough for acculturation. Tough for sanity.

I don’t know. what I know is this: of everything I lost I miss my illusions the most.

97 thoughts on “The Way We Were”

  1. You don’t miss your illusions, Sarah. Illusions are falsehoods, and we have all been stuffed over-full with falsehoods. What you miss, what we miss, is the comfort that those illusions offered us.

    And maybe not being able to reclaim those comforts, either by regressing and accepting the falsehoods or by single-handedly pushing the lever hard enough to move the world to a better place, is what makes people feel old.

    That and our knees. Or our backs, for some people. Your skeletal infirmities may vary.

    Republica restituendae, et Anton Trofimovich delenda est.

    Liked by 2 people

  2. Like leaving a toxic relationship. You say you miss that person. But you miss what you thought that person was. But in this case it’s an entire segment of society that are broken probably beyond repair. If you can truly be indifferent to the suffering your policies (or the policies you support) will demonstrably bring about that’s an incredible depth of evil.

    Liked by 7 people

    1. For of all sad words of tongue or pen,The saddest are these: “It might have been!”

      Yeah, I miss the comfort of those illusions and the belief that those in power weren’t as evil as I now know them to be.

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  3. It is sad, depressing, despairing even to not only not trust your government but now not trust your society, your nation. And that’s where I have come to after the first quarter of the 21st Century.

    It started with the Clinton’s in the tail end of the 20th. century but ramped up under Obama and then skyrocketed with Biden. But it wasn’t just what the governmental types were doing, it was the wholesale propaganda from the media and the refusal by so, so many people to even listen to any discussion that differed from their own firmly held illusions. The demonization of people who didn’t go along with the government line was unprecedented in my life, and that so many people thought that the government trying to silence the dissenters was a good thing was terrifying.

    I don’t trust the government, I don’t trust the schools, I don’t trust most of the media, I don’t trust almost everyone in healthcare, or especially in academia. I hate this but I’m not ready to submit or comply.

    Liked by 6 people

    1. In a similar vein, yes the world is unstable, and likely to become more so. Thus it is imperative that you build your life on The Rock.

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    2. Vanity, vanity, sayeth the Sage, all is vanity. All of wisdom will bring you back to God as the only Faithful One. I have been and continue to be an optimist, but only in the enduring grace and mercy of God. When covid, and its attendant fear, power grabs and idiocity, hit I read 2 Corinthians 4:8-9 “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body”

      There has been and always will be hardships, and these present darknesses are not the evilest in history nor the future. Be not afraid and carry on.

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  5. “Africa, India, etc. the Covidiocy wasn’t even a thing“

    –

    Of coarse not. Both, in particularly Africa, face worse pandemics on the regular. Ones that wipe out entire villages. Ones that won’t export.

    We seem to cycle through friends. College. Early adulthood & work. Our child’s friends families and scouting family. Work acquaintances (these do not overlap). We try to maintain the relationships as we were *taught (at least I was). About the only ones that stick are family. In my case that is not a small circle. But as the common denominator goes away no matter how hard we try to stay in touch, the drifting apart happens. It is hard.

    (*) In my case our wedding reception had more neighbors, mom & dad’s friends, dad’s work friends, than either hubby or I had college friends. (Not counting extended family, my side.) (We were married at the in-laws small home on the Little Dechutes river south of Sunriver & Bend, in the middle of December; snow on the ground. Wedding was immediate family, including grandparents, and roommates. Reception the next day at my parents, in Eugene. Not any bigger house. But no snow.)

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Also, many Africans reportedly get regular doses of hydroxochloriquine (sp?), because it works well against malaria. And as was revealed early on, it also worked well against COVID-19.

      And this fact bugged someone enough that they hired an outfit to create false data “showing” that HCQ didn’t help against COVID-19. The Guardian figured it all out, iirc. It was amusing reading an article about how the argument against HCQ was based on false data, and on the exact same web page that had a giant ad proclaiming that you should support them to help fight against President Trump.

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      1. Ivermectin is also consistently used on tropical and subtropical areas where internal parasites are endemic. You take your weekly dose as a matter of course.

        Pour-on is often used for children who won’t or can’t swallow a pill.

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  6. But… I didn’t know that so called civilized humans could be so… indifferent to the welfare of others and so willing to kill other humans in batch lots, by psy-ops means, to make old people die alone, to interdict funerals even to those people for whom funeral is the final consolation.

    I believed it before the lockdowns, but it was intellectual. Living with it as reality…I think that’s responsible for a lot of things I’m still struggling with. I am 100% certain it is why Millennials and Gen Zers are suffering from high anxiety (or that it is a big part of why they are so anxious). They had their ENTIRE LIVES yanked out from under them and they couldn’t do a thing about it.

    The anxiety they are experiencing, according to something I read a while back, isn’t: “Ah! The sun is too bright! I’m a delicate flower – turn it off, I’m melting!” Rather, their anxiety is focused on: “If something goes wrong and I can’t fix it or survive it on my own, then I’m DOOMED.” Which, as I recall from previous posts here, is what the backbrain that remembers needing the tribe or band to survive passionately hates and wants to avoid. Because it means your survival is negligible at best.

    Everyone picking on “kids these days” needs a serious mirror to reflect in, because a lot of them put the kids in this position. Six feet of distance, no ball games, no recitals, take the clot shot or you can’t see grandma – oops, Junior died playing track, how did that happen…?

    Yeah, I’m cynical and bitter. But if the alternative is mad conspiracies like “it was a missile that hit the Twin Towers”? Maybe the cynicism can be turned to healthy skepticism. It’s worth a shot, right?

    And I might never forgive the churches in the west for locking down, obediently. THEIR RELIGIOUS ANCESTORS RISKED DEATH IN THE CIRCUS TO CELEBRATE THEIR RITES. But they locked down to avoid…. a flu. Or being scolded. Whichever. I mean parking lot masses were judged too risky by the church in Colorado. (They remained locked down for a year after we moved. And when we moved the church here was NORMAL.)

    God help us on that one, because we need religious and laypeople en masse willing to avoid that next time. We had too few last time. And yes, there will be a next time. There always is in this old world.

    Liked by 6 people

    1. Oddly – or perhaps not – I think this has led me to writing more characters with faith, even if nonstandard faith. People who believe there is something greater than themselves, that real ethics, good, and evil exist, and that defending what is right is worth dying for.

      And it’s even more worth living for. Being an example, just by “here I stand, I can do no other.”

      But it did break me a bit, because… well, growing up I thought I was just unlucky, and attracted those with ill intent. Which does happen, but the extent of ill intent and pure indifference to other human beings is… shocking.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. I’m beginning to think my interest in traumatized characters is paying dividends I did not anticipate, though I do worry about being a one-trick pony. I can only hope the sappy romances which come with many of the stories carry forward and help as well, since we desperately need that as well. There are a lot of people who are hurting. Figuring out how to reach them is tricky….

        Liked by 1 person

    2. The lockdowns worked well enough for their purposes last time, why wouldn’t they try it again? I hope it will prove futile if they attempt it again though.

      Liked by 1 person

  7. Just a thought about Trump’s first win.

    Might it been a matter of the Lefties underestimating how poplar Trump really was?

    IE “Nobody that I know would vote for Trump”.

    Liked by 5 people

    1. I’m pretty sure it was (for what little that’s worth). They didn’t take him seriously, and the GOP establishment didn’t like him, so it would’ve been hard for most people in the machine *not* to deeply underestimate how many people actually wanted to vote for him.

      Liked by 4 people

      1. Wrong.

        Trump 1.0 they underestimated how many hated and despised Hillary that much.

        Then they had to go insane and fraud Biden in. Round 2 (because they did manage to overrun with fraud), er round 3, it was them underestimating enthusiasm for Trump 1.0, the disgust of Biden-poopy-pants-fraud, and cackles-herself.

        Thank God for the miracle. Even the states that managed to pass anti-fraud voting in time for the 2024 November vote, is a miracle.

        In a way, looking back, having Biden/Kamila is a lesson learned. Trump is sure taking advantage. Go President Trump Go. Run with it!!

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Aha, yes, I was forgetting about the Shrillary effect. Even my wife, who had never not voted Democrat, couldn’t bring herself to vote for that evil hag. Maybe we can meet in the middle and call it a both/and?

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          1. That certainly was a WEIRD election. My wife still insists she is and always was a ‘staunch Republican’. She would razz me for being registered Democrat, when I only ever voted for Dems in the primaries. I kept explaining I was trying to have at least SOME effect on the corrupt party locally, in hopes a grass-roots improvement might have a positive effect. I couldn’t bring myself to vote for Trump the first time; he hung out with SO many Democrat ‘stars’. She LOVED his shows and thought he was great, but thought he couldn’t POSSIBLY be a good president, and kept saying she was gonna vote for Hillary. [ Which I will NEVER let her live down! ] In the end, she didn’t vote at all, and I went in for the Libertarian candidate, even though I didn’t really trust HIM, either. And then, somehow, Trump happened, and began working hard to actually keep his promises, even the ones I didn’t like very much. And they tried to assassinate his character ( which I thought was funny, since my wife and I both had questions in that area BEFORE he got elected, and he was doing a far better job of answering them than the Democrat imbecilic libels ever would ). After four pretty amazing years ( yeah, I know, we hadn’t seen ANYTHING yet… ) they screw Bernie AGAIN, and fraud in Biden, who “wins” in the MOST unbelievable way. I IMMEDIATELY changed my registration to Republican. Even being sort of associated with that party in hopes of helping it was just TOOOOOO embarrassing. And my wife keeps bringing that up in arguments, which is a BAD tactic, because I always just reply “But you were going to VOTE for Hillary; I was NEVER THAT bad!” to which she has no good answer.

            And we all know what happened in the next four years. GAH!

            So now I have voted for Trump twice, and don’t regret THAT a bit. So has she. And the disloyal opposition continues to make up ever more ridiculous lies about him, and has now taken to trying to PHYSICALLY assassinate him. After all that, THEY have built a pretty resilient shield around Trump, because it would take some pretty overwhelming evidence for me to believe ANYTHING they accuse him of, even if I happened to be aware of evidence that lent credence to the claim. Pretty sad state of affairs.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. The Reader was a registered Democrat for over 40 years although he never voted for one except in a closed primary. This came about because he lost a coin flip with his significant other. When we moved to the county we intended to raise a family in the local government was pretty evenly split. So we each registered with different party affiliation (ergo the lost coin flip) and gave a little money to local (only) candidates on each side every election so we could have access if we needed it for some reason. We used that access twice; once to smooth the approval of custom house plans for the fully accessible house we built when disabled son was 9. The other was to get a meeting with the superintendent of the schools to discuss issues with same disabled son. Worth it.

              Liked by 2 people

      2. They deeply underestimated how many people would have swim through a pool filled with broken glass to vote against Hillary Rodham Clinton.

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        1. $SPOUSE was a democrat up until the 2008 election. She tells of getting a phone-bank call from one of the Democrat entities reminding her to vote for Hillary. $SPOUSE reports the caller was quite nonplussed to get a response of wild laughter. Change of registration occurred slightly thereafter.

          We both voted for the guy who was on the ticket with Sarah Palin.

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      1. True that. In 2016 we knew Trump was a deal maker and weren’t sure what kind of deals he’d make. But he loved the country and free enterprise.
        What Hillary arranged in Libya was evil. Taking a country that was finally staying out of its neighbors’ business and changing it into a failed State with open slave markets was more than just incompetence.

        Liked by 2 people

      2. It would undoubtedly get me killed but I’d ask Hillary if it hurts that Jill Biden was closer to being president than she ever was.

        Liked by 1 person

    3. I knew. Nobody believed me… I said we would vote him in because everyone remembered him from tv and movies and he was rich, would be able to help our country with the bankruptcy that is looming over our heads. I posted it all over Google Plus and was laughed at.

      I didn’t like or trust Trump at that time, but I knew he would win!

      Liked by 2 people

      2. Both of us were fans of everybody but Trump*, though I started to get twichy about how Cruz was politicking. A fair number of moves he did just didn’t set right with me, so by the time Oregon had it’s primary, I filled out the Trump bubble. (We’ve been cursed with mailin fraud since before we moved here. How to take a purple state and make it blue in one easy lesson.)

        (*) Most of whom dropped out early on. IIRC, Cruz and Trump were the only contenders who had been on the “like” list who made it to the OR primary.

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        1. I voted for Cruz. I wrote him in. But after Trump proved he wanted the best for the country and didn’t lie to we the people, I did vote for him the second and third times.

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        2. 2016 I did not vote for Trump in the primary. Figured he was a stalking horse for the Dumocrats. That he was not one, was a pleasant surprise.

          2020 there was not a primary.

          2024 voted for DJT in the primary and general.

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        1. Likewise, and most of the OG bloggers (Daily Pundit, Protein Wisdom, Cold Fury, a couple others) I read also.

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        2. That was part of my thinking and why I stopped supporting Cruz–the moves that pissed me off were more GOPe than otherwise.

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          1. I started out as a Cruz guy. Ironically, the GOPe thought they would rather have Trump than Cruz.

            https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/01/20/bob-dole-ted-cruz-donald-trump/79079408/

            “I don’t know how he’s going to deal with Congress,” Dole said in an interview with The New York Times. “Nobody likes him.”

            Dole, a former Kansas senator, was the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 1996.

            Donald Trump would “probably work with Congress,” though, Dole mused, because he’s “kind of a deal maker.”

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          1. Me also. I was surprised when I saw the election results, 2016, and realized that I was quite pleased.

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            1. Surprised?

              I agree.

              Pretty sure my response was “OMG! He won! Holy S*! He won! Thank the Lord, he won! Thank you Lord, she lost!” Repeat

              At 2 AM PST

              Of coarse Oregon was on the wrong side of this history in 2016, *2020, and 2024. Like the ant in the song, I “had high hope”.

              (*) Yes, Oregon went with the “winner”. Does not mean it was the correct winner that should have won. IMO

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              1. I was less exuberant. The only things I expected of Trump was not being HRC, and making leftists go spare in amusing ways.
                Some leftists did, I grant you, though most went spare in singularly unamusing ways.

                Liked by 1 person

                2. “Exuberant“

                  ???

                  More like shocked. Sure I had to celebrate. He still was not HRC-devil-incarnate.

                  Remember I thought DTJ was a stalking horse for HRC. I figured he would be lock step with the dumocrats. He was a New York Democrat, from a family of New York Democrats.

                  I was wrong.

                  As strong of a case where the beliefs didn’t move, but the goal post did. Causing a wake up call. Triggering a true move to the right and freedom.

                  DJT isn’t perfect. But, as already stated by others, he loves this country and what it stands for. A patriot.

                  Liked by 1 person

  8. What broke me around that time, I now realize, was not losing friends, which happens. It was the first instance of what I would later call “I remember him/her when he/she was sane”

    Didn’t have that happen with 9/11, but it did give me a different perspective on all those leftish people I had thought I mostly agreed with. Although it took me a while to fully change direction, it was an inflection point that ensured I could never make common cause with them. Like you said, instead of reevaluating, they kept doubling down.

    I have a couple of examples of “I remember them when they were sane,” though. Very recent ones. A couple that I loved and trusted and who were very good to my kids…in better days…moved from the red state where we met into the most rabidly leftist area of a blue state, and it ate their minds, and after the 2024 election they turned on me in the meanest possible way.

    Big things, cultural touchstones you took for granted just like gravity, getting not just upended but turning out to have been pernicious falsehoods from day one…in multiples…how many cultures and generations have had to deal with even one or two of those, let alone the steady stream we’ve had in the last couple decades(ish)? I don’t know. And some people I know are clinging to the belief that nothing is really any different with all their might right now because they can’t bear the thought of losing the assumptions they’ve always relied on. I guess I can kind of understand. In some ways, the ’90s were idyllic, but mostly because of what I didn’t know; if I had known then what I know now, I don’t think I would’ve made it out with my sanity intact (it’s been a close run as it is).

    Liked by 5 people

    1. It really started, at least in my portion of fandom (and life), with the 2000 election. And not just on the port side. When you are working on a USAF project and 20 year Master Sgts and Cols/LtCols are saying things like “If Al Gore manages to cheat in FL, he might not get pilots for AF1….”

      Liked by 5 people

    2. I’ve never been good at connecting with people so I didn’t have friends to lose but the difference with leftwing family members has been the cause of much grief. Even some people I thought were staunch Republicans still voted for the left in the last election and I expect they will continue to do so. My brother saying that he wondered how long it took for the Germans to regret voting for Hitler puts a damper on my desire to spend time with him. My family has always been close-knit so it’s kind of like having the foundation I rely on become shakier over time.

      Like

  9. I never had many friends, so losing them was just something par for the course. I moved every 18 months to two years, as one does in the aviation business at the starting level. So I’d find a place to worship or sing or “yes,” make professional associates, perhaps get chatting-level comfortable with people in a few businesses or the local library, and then move on without trying to maintain any contacts.

    What tipped things for me was that I had read about the panic of March-April 2020 before. It was just like the description of the Great Fear that gripped France in the summer of 1789, but on a larger scale. Combine that with so many pieces not fitting a real epidemic that any faith I had left in government and large institutions went out the window. Now, I look at the woke capture of things like pop-culture cons and so on and just shrug. I’ve been in academia. I know where the lunacy comes from. I fight it in my own Odd way.

    Liked by 6 people

  10. Maybe I’m odd even among odds, but I’ve always felt being alone was normal. It’s just the way I am. Yes, I had Sharon, and I certainly wasn’t alone with her, but together we were alone. Maybe being disowned by my family for telling the truth should have made me feel…, something, but it didn’t. I know it tore Sharon up to have to leave her mother up to the fates because of her mother’s craziness and constant attempts at making Sharon miserable. It also bothered Sharon when close friends of years just disappeared from her life with no explanation.

    Somehow I’ve always expected it. All the electoral cheating revelations anger me, but they don’t surprise me. The glee of the would-be totalitarians when they felt they could control our lives didn’t surprise me or even disappoint me. It just is what it has always been. Conspiracy theories don’t seem to have the power to shock me when they prove true, and they don’t seem to have a hold on me before they prove either true or false. (Can you ever disprove a conspiracy theory to the conspiracy theorists? Not in my experience. The theory just gets broader.) Maybe it’s the historian in me who insists on digging for facts, actual facts, before fully believing something even if I accept and act as if some things I don’t know to be true are because accepting them makes me a better person who makes better choices.

    We are who we are.

    And congratulations on 41 years with Dan! You two are the best!

    Liked by 2 people

  11. I made the comment elsewhere, today, that

    “Making grand plans for the future doesn’t work. If you had told me when I graduated from high school where I would be in 50 years, I’d have laughed at you.”

    Somehow I’ve just managed to get by, all my adult life. Lucked into a great job 32 years ago, never left it, never really looked back. Lucked into a wife and married way above my station, 26 years ago. We have a decent place to live (could be a little bigger, but hey), running vehicles, money in the bank and in retirement accounts, I’m writing books like I wanted to do when I was a teen, and I would never have expected all that being in place at 66 going on 67 when I was a kid. (But I grew up in the ’70s when everything was doom and gloom, and even in the early ’80s it wasn’t great.)

    And you know…I don’t miss the “friends” I lost over 9/11, Trump, and COVID. Because if they abandoned me for those reasons, they weren’t real friends to begin with.

    Life is what it is. G-d is good. I don’t know why He’s so good to a sinner like myself, but He is.

    May He bless you, and Dan, and the kids, forever.

    Liked by 5 people

    1. “But I grew up in the ’70s when everything was doom and gloom, and even in the early ’80s it wasn’t great.“

      –

      Only slightly older than you.

      If someone had told me I’d be writing software for 30+ years, in ’76 (first computer class … it did not go well), I would have laughed in disbelief. No way. I hated, despise, that class. Less than 10 years later, 180 degrees. That is just one aspect of my life.

      We were just starting out during the Carter years. In timber, no less. Both of us. It was not easy. We started out with less than nothing. We had to borrow money to go to work. Living with either set of parents or relatives was not an option (no one near enough). We still managed to put money away for our retirement. Too many have not.

      We talk now how our children working lives are not the same as ours. I guaranty that our generation working life was not the same as our parents or grandparents.

      Like

      1. In 1970, CS101 was the engineering flunk-out course*. Most of the happy fun problems required programming in Fortran IV, with the last PL1. OTOH, my first computer course was in high school, programming a NCR “mainframe”, that had considerably more disk space than my first home computer, but wasn’t much more powerful. Never expected that 90% of my career was going to be dealing with programming computers, ranging from stone-knives-and-bearskins machines to state of the are.

        (*) 2nd semester calculus and differential equations were the sticking point for me. My dad passed away at age 53 just before the calc class, and I was dealing with that. Diffy-Q, seems I needed concrete examples to understand what was going on. Strugged to get a tolerable grade (asked the instructor for mercy over justice). It clicked three months later when we started using the damned things in an EE class. I’ve revisited and walled the text book over the years.

        Like

        1. Said home computer was a Heath H8. 8080 processor, 56K worth of RAM, two floppy disks. IIRC the NCR had a 64K “addon” bay, perhaps 32K originally. Two hard drives. Still took 5 minutes to compile and run an assembler program of 50 lines or so.

          Like

        2. Do not remember the CS# at where I got the forestry degree, we were just required to have one. Teletype instead of cards, which I guess was an improvement. I didn’t think so.

          By the time I was getting the bachelor CS degree they waved the lower *flunk out classes given my already had bachelors and an associates in programming (data management). Mentioned before had to take as many math classes as upper division system design classes. Actually I’d had first term calculus but retook because it had been 10 years. Then second term discrete math was the same as Linear Algebra.

          I am not like some (my husband), beyond basic math, algebra, and geometry, I understand it, while taking it. If I use it a lot, I retain it. If I am not using it, I start losing it. I could not do matrix math now, for example, as it has been 30+ years. Wouldn’t take much of a refresher to pick it up again. But off the top? No. (I did not bother to relearn when son was going through HS calculus, not when his dad could be the one checking results and tutoring.)

          (*) I hate the flunk out classes now and forever. I am a solid middle of the pack. Once straight curve grading was applied my grades improved. Reason I lasted that long is I am too stubborn to quit.

          Like

    2. “…the “friends” I lost over 9/11, Trump, and COVID. Because if they abandoned me for those reasons, they weren’t real friends to begin with.”

      Yes, this. And though (some of us stoutly maintain) it’s always better to know than not, and that information is almost endlessly and insidiously useful in a host of practical ways, there is this:

      It’s not enough that it steals part of (what you thought would be) your present and future; it also steals what you believed was (safely) part of your past. Sadder but wiser, indeed.

      Like

  12. Despite all they got away with, all the crap they pulled, all the cheating, all the prosecutions,a ll the false flags, all the outright defiance of law and Constitution.

    They Failed.

    Miserably!

    -That- is the thing to remember. Because we are taking it back, we are winning, and they blew their last best hope on their idiot Coup De Main and like that failed painter and the would-be-Caesar, they came up -way- short.

    Winning indeed.

    Be not afraid! Be of good cheer! Keep winning.

    Liked by 4 people

    1. Even in California – remember the 4th of July fireworks drone video from LA. The entire sprawling three point eight million population city giving a massive both-middle-fingers-I’d-include-both-middle-toes-if-I-could to muh authoritay.

      And with the circuit split on the new USPS mail vote rules the Supremes will brief this week and decide if antifraud basics get forced onto the Formerly Golden State’s fraud machine.

      Keep winning indeed.

      Liked by 5 people

    2. And for anyone missing that point: imagine it’s 250 years ago. The Declaration has been voted and has indeed just been signed (August 2).

      After all our long months and years of striving, just to get our British government to recognize our rights as British subjects in North America — we get to go out on a limb, mount a rebellion, fight a war (and win) against the globe-spanning British Emprire, on our home soil not its home ground.

      And that’s just to get to the point where we can start to build the sort of country we’d thought we were already living in (more or less for free), as now-former loyal colonial subjects of the Crown.

      Never forget our victories, even while we’re winning them. Many of them do and will and have not come cheaply — but consider the alternative. It’s easy for us to forget the cost of 1776 plus and minus, now; not so much for them, in the middle of things with the future uncertain and invisible.

      “Never give up! Never give up!” said the guy who saved Britain, and then died an (honorary but very real) American.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. And it was 1815 before we really settled the argument with Britain that the USA was a thing.

        Like

  13. Recent decades have been kind of a roller coaster ride. 9/11 was one turning point. The Leonard Cohen line “Did you go crazy or did you report” hit home, because I did a little of both. The covid nonsense is still working its way through the way I look at the world. I think I used to have more friends, but I’m no longer sure how many of them were really friends. It’s hard to even fathom how 1975 me would comprehend today’s sources of international and political chaos.

    Liked by 4 people

    1. Ditto.

      There wasn’t anything I could personally do at the time, except dig into “why did this happen?” Which I did.

      Oof.

      It certainly taught me a lot about irreconcilable cultural differences. And finding out not only was our Defender of Wallachia, Vlad Dracula, perfectly justified, but he was inflicting on the Ottomans the same executions they performed on criminals….

      That’s something that gets left out of the Dracula stories we usually hear in the West: he didn’t come up with impalement. He learned it at court with Mehmed, later called the Conqueror, who took Constantinople and made the streets run red with blood.

      I have a bone to pick with the historians who left that out.

      Liked by 3 people

      2. Indeed. Do not read unexpurgated histories of the wars between the Hungarians/Croats, Wallachians, and Ottomans unless you have a really strong stomach and few illusions about the innate goodness of man or lack thereof.

        There was a lot of “not nice” in the air and water between 1100-1700 in that part of the world. I had to look up the history of certain … let’s call them creative … warfare techniques when I taught a class about the region. Yup, they actually did that. And that, and the other that, although fortunately for my imagination the latter was pretty rare.

        Liked by 1 person

  14. I’ve (productively) become too tired today to have any new thought to respond with.

    I do not think you are alone.

    These sound very familiar to me.

    Liked by 3 people

  15. like Mr Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

    well, I have been punched so many times it doesn’t hurt anymore.

    but I can still write…

    Liked by 1 person

  16. I can understand, I lost most of my illusions about the world long ago (think I was born cynical). Certainly, many of the events we’ve lived through since 9/11 haven’t helped either. So many people seem to be broken, one way or another.

    Liked by 1 person

  17. Yes, the Covidiocy was a revelation, but I (and probably you too) had seen a precursor: the 2015 Worldcon, where right-wing fans were politely, or if that didn’t work, impolitely, shown the door of science fiction fandom, and told to get out. I actually thought the Sad Puppies movement might actually bring fans around. We got an asterisk filled wooden nickel for our trouble. I had been active in fandom since the 1970s; I had found my now late wife through science fiction circles. It was a part of my life, and then we were told go away, we don’t want you. There were signs: I remember sitting at a table in the snack room at the 2010 Nasfic in Raleigh, having a bite to eat and being regaled with how awful right wing fans were by another anonymous-to-me fan sitting at the same table. My wife looked a little upset when, at the end of the diatribe of denunciation, I pointed out that we, my wife and I, were some of those awful right wingers this person had been deriding, and how exactly were we guilty of all those crimes attributed to us? I guess my point is, if fans could turn on fans so easily, why should we expect better from the rest of the world?

    Liked by 3 people

    1. I’m pretty sure it was before Sad Puppies when Cat Faber lectured me online about how I HAD to be a racist, and my black friends were clearly pretend (apparently, they CLEARLY couldn’t have their own opinions and attitudes, but HAD to conform to liberal talking points…) as a way to hide my ingrown racism. And I had started out discussing how there were racist tones in my upbringing, but my father was already working to avoid those sorts of assumptions, and specifically teaching me to avoid those sort of baseless, bigoted beliefs. How serving in the Navy opened my eyes to the fact that “black folk” actually WERE pretty much ‘just like me’. And how some ended up being practically lifelong friends, as well as some coworkers who were also vets, and felt safe confiding in me about painful events in their life. And THAT triggered her into recognizing my dog-whistle laden defense of what were my CLEARLY racists beliefs and bigotry, that I was trying to defend and deflect against.

      Boy, that surely blew my mind. I used to think she was a caring and intelligent person, but jumping to THAT sort of conclusion was pretty shocking to me. Naturally, she ended up on the puppy-kicking side, and I couldn’t even pretend to be surprised. All the other blatantly delusional claims were just WAY too much ‘icing on the cake’. I’ve informed Wikipedia several times now that they aren’t getting another donation from me until they either completely remove the ‘Sad Puppies’ article, or at least add an apology at the front for the blatantly biased and libelous claims they have now let stand for a decade. As long as that steaming pile of drivel remains, I will continue to consider every article they include as at least SOMEWHAT suspect.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Long ago, I read somewhere that (paraphrasing) the racism of the Democrats was to prevent “Rastus and Cletus” from ever “discovering their shared common cause”, and thus casting out the Democrats. (the names stuck in my mind as those are usually not used nicely by other folk)

        Like

    2. Had that happen in several social structures. Helped build it, then tossed out of it.

      Dust myself off, get back at it in other areas.

      One thing I’ve learned (well before COVID) is that nearly every person is willing to join the baying mob if someone disagrees with the group “consensus”.

      Like

  20. “….the entire thing was a ploy to drive the economy down and make the color revolution of 2020 plausible in people’s eyes. Because I remember various writers (and therefore lefty) groups I lurk in, forgotten, [w]ringing their hands about how popular Trump was early 2020 and wishing there was something they could do to tank the economy.“

    There’s a certain amount of (objective) evidence the Grand Covidiocy was “supposed to” change a lot of things for the (progressive) “better.” Including an SF book I’ve run into a few times in stores, called “Make Shift” (rather tellingly), whose introduction really does say the soft part out loud.

    Dating right from the early days of the pandemicraze.

    The explicit, connected and connecting “theme” of the anthology really is, essentially, how to use “THE PANDEMIC!!” to make massive social and cultural changes — tourism to other countires (or other parts of this one) virtually disappears, because Covid and “net zero” — people now socialize mostly via (inherently monitorable) ‘Net connections — most people shop online for most things, same shifty stuff — always in a lefty-friendly way. Not even only a political color revolution; pretty much everything gets changed by their not-fictional “pandemic” and its (anticipated) impacts.

    No, I never bought it; maybe I should’ve (as evidence). But as entertaining science fiction (the few parts of it I could stand to stand there and read), it’s great propaganda. Even in the depths of the Maximum Covidiocy I’d simply never have bought all that stuff, in either sense… and now?

    Round expended in service. Clean miss. Will not go “bang!” if you try to load and fire it again.

    Liked by 1 person

  22. I’m still waiting for the truth to set me free. I’ve read enough history to know there have been similar times of great evil and illusions breaking. Maybe God meant it when He said we only rely on Him.

    Liked by 1 person

  23. The world started to go crazy for me…hm…I noticed it after 9/11.

    Before that, it wasn’t too bad. Yes, the Bush/Gore election was a shit-show within Florida, but man, this is Florida. All the nuts roll downhill into Florida!

    Then 9/11 happened. Things didn’t go crazy…immediately around me. Even by San Francisco standards. I worked in a BDSM dungeon on weekends (they paid cash and the girls were interesting and now I can talk about it because the statute of limitations has expired) and they were happy that Bush had won, because they knew that Algore would have been unable to handle everything after 9/11.

    People started to go crazier, a little bit more at a time. In retrospect, things were probably the best about 2008-09. The Obamamessiah was coming, but he didn’t impress me that much (i.e. I didn’t know everything he was hiding), the world seemed to be working, and I might have gotten another tech job in San Jose.

    Then people started to go really crazy. Cons started to cancel people because of their “Right Wing” (i.e. not to the left of Lenin) politics. People I knew started to do purity testing of their friend circles. Jobs weren’t hiring anyone that wasn’t…”eccentric” (i.e. leftist crazy).

    2010 was when I really started to notice. The Obamamessiah was clearly going down the same arc as Billy Boy-two years as trying to rule as an outright socialist, Republicans coming into power, quickly “triangulating” to the center to avoid further losses. And…it…didn’t…happen.

    In fact, the Obamamessiah became worse.

    2016…Trump vs. Hillary! Honestly, if there was a time when I was starting to think about preparing for civil war, having Hillary! in charge would have been it. John Ringo wrote about several versions of Hillary!, but I think he never conveyed the true nature of the woman…because nobody would have believed him. (Sources were several former law enforcement officers that was around her during Billy Boy’s administration.) Trump wasn’t perfect, but who is?

    Then COVID.

    COVID broke so many people.

    It gave too many malignant narcissists a chance to mess people up (the stories of how many egg crackers were ramping up their efforts during the pandemic alone…). It shattered too many lives. I will blame it for breaking Mom’s health and will, trapping her at home until something finally failed on her. For making us into test subjects for an experimental vaccine that we had to take if we wanted to stay employed (or be employed).

    All for a disease that…outside of a narrow range of specific issues (usually inflammation diseases like high blood pressure and diabetes and immunity compromised people) was only slightly worse than an average flu season. Yes, there were outlier people who died from it (once you dig down and go through the data), but this wasn’t H5N1 or Captain Trips.

    Then…2020.

    I can’t respect anyone who didn’t look at that election and go “there is something hinky going on here. Major league hinky. Insane hinky.” I’ve had people that worked in the accounting fields pretty much say the same thing-the 2020 election was either massively frauded or it was the biggest Charlie Foxtrot ever.

    And people that I knew and respected before (even my own parents) looked at me funny if I even suggested that this was fraud. It was all a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy to steal the election for Trump.

    All to elect a man that…look, Stumbling Joe was never my favorite human being. Wouldn’t vote for him, ever. But considering what I saw, at some point it was elder abuse. Too many signs of dementia and just not being there anymore. Signs that as a legal reporter I would be required to report to higher authorities. Which lead to who was really in charge during the Biden administration (yes, I know-it was the Obamamessiah’s third term with Jill Biden being the Shadow VP).

    If Elon Musk hadn’t bought Twitter…if people didn’t start discovering just how many things were weird and they weren’t alone…if Data Republican wasn’t showing how things were hidden, if DOGE didn’t start breaking things like USAID and showing just how deep the Deep State was…if Biden’s appearance during the debates didn’t mean they had to throw him overboard and try to run Kamalama Dingdong Harris…

    …and everybody I know around me is living in a reality I don’t want to understand.

    The Democratic Party might have the Democratic Socialists of America take over and I have no illusions of what they want. And that I would probably be in one of those mass graves they have planned.

    We have outright jihadists in control of major cities.

    California is trying to make Cuba look tame.

    Immigration enforcement is being ground to a halt.

    …if I have any illusions left, I want to keep them. Unfiltered reality is getting far too depressing.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. To some extent, you can choose your fate. Choose your friends wisely. Choose your way wisely. Choose your “No, I wont” wisely.

      You will not find me in one of those self-dug mass graves. I may be in some shallow unmarked grave somewhere, dead of some last gesture, but I will not be in the big one for the weeping sheeple.

      I said long ago, that, come down to it, I will happily headbutt the hangman. They will fear me if they wont respect me. I will -not- go quietly or gently.

      Liked by 1 person

  24. “But… I didn’t know that so called civilized humans could be so… indifferent to the welfare of others and so willing to kill other humans in batch lots, by psy-ops means, to make old people die alone, to interdict funerals even to those people for whom funeral is the final consolation.”

    Perhaps it is the darkly cynical in me (I blame the ’90s), but that seems to be the baseline of human culture. It’s tribalism. The ones in the right tribe got to go to restaurants, see their relatives in the hospital, and do all the things. They weren’t suffering. The ones below them in that tribe didn’t have those privileges, at least not yet, but at least their enemies were hurting. That gives some comfort to their shriveled, blackened little raisins that they call hearts.

    Tribalism is explicitly and definitionally anti-civilizational. They want their enemies to suffer and die. And then dance on the corpses. There is a bit of tribalism in all of us. For me, I can see full Vlad Tepes as being proper and effective against barbarian invaders today. It may be in defense of civilization, yes, but the impulse is squarely not precisely civilized- one needs a bit of the pointy stick to defend ones borders and all that.

    But for the tribals of the elites as they like to think of themselves, there is no sin in this. And their followers, well, they just follow along. Until recently, that was the rational way to go (from a certain point of view.) You got paid for it, support, and all sorts of things. Being free is bloody hard work most of the time. On the other hand, you can not work and get paid, get free stuff on top of that, and laugh at those that bust their ass every day.

    Even in this, there is farther to fall. Further down the slippery slope are things like casual violence becoming commonplace. You may think it so now, but the rule of law still hangs on enough that it can be told and seen in places. We’re not living in mud huts and raiding the next village for torture victims and young brides. Or worse.

    Most people are neither utterly vile nor saints. Himself knows I’m not the best. Those who could read what goes on behind my eyes would, well, they’d think not good things of me and be right to do so. Most folk are just focused close. Home and family. That’s not a bad thing, all told. I support strong families that nurture and raise the kidlets into strong, smart, moral, and cunning adults.

    In any case, the go-along-get-along is strong in humanity in general. Outside of things that truly effect them, they don’t really do much. And for what does, it needs to be something serious.

    The covidiocy opened many eyes. A lot of folk actually started paying attention that wouldn’t have otherwise. Yes, a bunch cheered it on, the fools. But another bunch quietly looked at the fools cheering while they couldn’t see grandma on her dying day and said “eff this.”

    Liked by 3 people

    1. We were so blessed to be living in an area where the worst of the madness just didn’t take hold. I was carried along for a while, then found this blog. That started me checking my own experience with disease outbreaks (two, though both were digestive bugs, not URIs) and realizing just how off things were. That, and spending 8-10 hours a day talking to people at the tax office until we finally hit a brief span of lockdown…which made absolutely no difference.

      We even traveled in 2020. We had to mask some places, but not always anywere we visited. And no place we went was hard-core lockdown, though some had so many places closed it put a damper on the trip.

      Liked by 2 people

  25. Off topic, but The Lone Star, The Red Banner, and the Rising Sun: Republic of Texas Navy Book 4 by D. A. Brock is available in the Kindle Store.

    And I’ve purchased it. [Very Big Grin]

    Liked by 2 people

  26. “At this point I wouldn’t even be shocked if Big Mike proved to be true.”

    The president of France’s “wife” is a dude for sure. Big Mike has the calluses of much batleth practice, if you ask me. Qapla!

    And the mere fact of not really caring all that much one way or the other tells you what we’ve all been through.

    Like

  27. Lost my illusions about humans as a species a long, long time ago. It was quite bleak for a while – until I matured enough to see everyone as an individual. (And I am neutral with new people until I know enough to sort them.)

    Eggs… the Great Egg Drought did hit this household hard. I buy five dozen every week. Between a half dozen every morning for breakfasts, and breading chicken or pork, or making egg fried rice for dinners, they barely last that long. (Okay, not for souffles – I’ve always been too cowardly a cook to tackle those.)

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Now that egg-desert has disappeared so have the chicken coops in the neighborhood; along with the rats. Not 100%. Pretty sure rats are still around only because the local utility is no longer dealing with rats in the sewer pipes. Plus we have, not one but two, neighbors who do not do yard care like they should. One to the east has weeds (not wild flowers or rugged landscaping, weeds) two to four feet tall and thick. Neighbor to the west is at least trying (she is pushing 80).

      One of the things I’m worried about. Is our yard. It won’t take much for it to go *weedy. We finally have it “easier” to deal with (weed cloth under walk-on-bark-mulch) to stop the worst. But hubby and son still have to mow and spray the rock driveway on the east side. This summer I have been able to do only the bare minimum and that stops next week until next spring.

      (*) Been there. For reasons we couldn’t deal with the flower beds, more than the minimum, for almost a year after we moved in. At least the yard was kept mowed. Here in the valley it takes more than minimum unless you prep properly; it wasn’t, extensive care was needed. It is prep properly now which should keep the worst at bay. We will see. I need to cut my roses back before Monday. Too soon, but if I don’t, it will hurt them worst this winter.

      Liked by 1 person

  28. Since no one else has, the Reader will…

    “The Way We Were”

    Mem’ries light the corners of my mind
    Misty water-colored memories of the way we were
    Scattered pictures of the smiles we left behind
    Smiles we gave to one another for the way we were

    Can it be that it was all so simple then
    Or has time re-written every line?
    If we had the chance to do it all again
    Tell me, would we? Could we?

    Mem’ries may be beautiful and yet
    What’s too painful to remember
    We simply choose to forget

    So it’s the laughter we will remember
    Whenever we remember the way we were
    The way we were

    Thanks to Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman, and Marvin Hamlisch.

    Like

  29. Our friends at the time (27 years ago, 1999) said “you guys threw the best wedding ever!” Not bad for a pair of introverted dorks, although picking Vegas as a neutral site for the wedding was a bonus).

    Looking back, we’ve either lost, lost track of, or had to walk away from most of the guests at that celebration.

    I’ve been a recipient of Alinsky Rule #13 in some aspects of my professional life for decades. It’s been amusing meeting someone and having them say “Wow, you’re not half as evil as I expected.” :) It’s not fun, but you get used to it, and keep doing the right thing even though it’s not the popular thing.

    We’ve had social structures to help in the past, but just about every one of them eventually goes sour. My first career went from wonderful to trying to kill me, our family went from heroes to pariahs in scouts in a matter of weeks, I’ve been chased out of national organizations for the repeated blunder of honesty, walking away from most social media because of flagrant doublepluscrimethink. So we muddle through.

    Our son still wants to help the world ina small way by becoming a social worker, but the over-the-top lunacy of some of his instructors is hopefully inoculating him against the worst of the woke-cosis. We’ll see.

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    1. The Reader believe we need ‘social workers’ to teach self reliance skills. Of course the Reader’s sister, a social worker for 40 years, scoffs at that notion. She is now retired and living in Maine…

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      1. If my raising of him had any effect, hopefully it’ll be hard on the “self-reliance” side.

        I volunteer once a week at a bicycle co-op where much of the clientele is of the Vagabond-American Community. Key directive is not just to fix, but to teach the customer to fix themselves. As you would expect, mixed results (especially in tube patching, where some steps can be tedious and counterintuitive), but some of them are able to do the repairs with the co-op’s tools and minimal intervention. Self-interest can be a wonderful motivator.

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    2. Looking back, we’ve either lost, lost track of, or had to walk away from most of the guests at that celebration.

      Pretty much Em’s and my experience from 2001. Of course, half of them were members of the Atlanta filk community, and were headed over the edge already.

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  30. Been sketching out a fanfic thing in a game I play and have been struggling with what the genre is even supposed to be.

    And it hit me, the core tension is limitations of agency and of information, while still having to fight a great evil, without really being able to know the scope of the evil, or whether any of the individual fights are doing any good. Yet still, they must go on, even without answers.

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