Nerves

I’ve been having a heck of a time getting down to work. Okay, there are many reasons: tiredness being the foremost, and also how much of the place still looks like a moving truck vomited all over it.

I had thought, originally, that this would be ready for a house warming party about now, but the truth is we’re barely at the “functional” stage and don’t yet have a dining room (which is important since the kitchen eating area is only big enough for two.) A lot of it was because stuff like putting new flooring down took double the time we expected, and was on top of painting taking double the time. (Painting was probably frivolous, but due to both cats and my breathing, the carpet had to go. And you don’t want me to live in dark green and dark grey. What is with younger millennials and their hatred of color?)

So there is the hangover from moving, the “where the heck is “x” where x is a normal object of every day life that you swear you packed in a properly marked box, but which has done a vanishing act without your permission. Yesterday I cleaned and set up the entire master bathroom because I was tired of brushing my teeth with one of those cheap toothbrushes hotels give you when you forgot your own. We’ve been at the house for a month now, and I wanted my re-fargin toothbrush. That meant unpacking and setting up the closet because the boxes for the closet were piled in the bathroom. Because the boxes for the linen closet were in the master closet. Because the boxes in the linen closet…. you get the point. Those are now in the future piano room, and therefore we have a linen closet, a bedroom closet and a bathroom. The toothbrush was in the box before last. In my defense, it was marked “Open immediately.” Eh.

Also I found I have opinions on drawer pulls — disco ball like things should not be bathroom drawer pulls! — and glass shades on ceiling fan lights (they shouldn’t be frilly white flower like things in the office. No.) Finding out I have strong opinions on such subjects after a near sixty four years (turns out I’m turning sixty four, the Mathematician assures me. Eh) of an unexceptionable life, is a bit of a shock to the system.

Also being extremely ADD I have trouble working in environments that make no sense. Which is why I have to finish unpacking the office, probably tomorrow, but–

There is more to it than that, particularly since the next book of Elly has retitled — Now Strains of Earth because I kept typing Orphans of the Sky instead of Orphans of the Stars, and I’m not crazy enough to steal Heinlein’s title, no — and clarified, and is all but erupting from my forehead, and a short (eh 80k words) Elly mystery (Trade Goods) wants to be written this week pretty please. And I’m having trouble sitting butt in chair more than five minutes and alternate between optimism and despair and wanting to chew on my nails, except if I start it will go all the way to the elbow.

The elections? Undoubtedly that’s in there, somewhere, but … it’s more than that. It’s this feeling of wrongness, of being twisted into an uncomfortable position and not being able to get right. Like… you know your left shoe is half a size too small, but you can’t verify it. Like… you woke up one morning in your beautiful bright green room, but you’re sure it was yellow last night, and you’d like to know how it changed. And is it going to change back?

This is not a new feeling and it accounts a lot for how distracted and strange I’ve been even on this blog. It’s been going on for six years… give or take.

Things like 10/7 didn’t help it at all. It is, with the lock downs, a moment when the world fractured.

It wasn’t even the atrocities, though those should be unthinkable for anyone not living in the Neolithic, but the reactions. As with 2020 the way people acted, the people who–

Look, I was talking in my friends’ group online tonight, and other people pinned it down. It was 2020. It was 10/7. It was a dozen other small events along the way where the same thing happened.

What happened was this: The masks were pulled off.

Some of us who are by nature paranoid and who furthermore worked in fields where the left lunatics were thick on the ground; those of us who stayed quiet through lunchroom discussions but heard a lot; those of us who can read social context, knew we were surrounded by leftists, and that a lot of these people were, by all the norms of civilized people, functionally insane.

But we didn’t expect the soft pudding heads to be raving lunatics, too. And we didn’t expect people nominally on our side, some of whom we thought well of until the crisis hit, to also have massive holes where their logic apparatus should be.

2020 scared the heck out of me. Seeing who went Nazi, so to put it, but more importantly, who said, “No, no, stop talking, not so loudly. Pretend to be a Nazi” scared the piss out of me at a very deep, fundamental level I’m still not fully recovered from. I’d always thought I was cynical and pessimistic about human rationality. Oh, brother!

And 10/7? Just as bad. The idiots, the pudding heads, the weak sisters “You must admit that Israel–” I admit nothing. Israel is a civilized nation beset by barbarians, and far too good for this world. Because if they weren’t on 10/8 they would have taken to killing everyone in Gaza in batch lots. Women and children? Sure. We saw how they cheered! They indulged in behavior that from the dawn of time has seen tribes eradicated root and branch. And they have the nerve to scream “genocide” even while their numbers increase. And the pudding heads, the sob sisters, the envious, the evil, are willing to go along with it and pile on. Because, you know, feeding someone’s face to the crocodile keeps your own face safe. Or because they want to feel special. I don’t know.

And then… all the little breaks along the way. All the psy-ops that some people in our side insist on falling for.

It’s like…. Indulge me in a metaphor: An hostile alien invasion happened, decades ago. The aliens are very good at pretending to be human. Some percentage of them live among us. You probably have one or two in your groups. Maybe one or two in your family. We suspected it, at least those of us with more sensitivity than an anvil.

Then, something happened, and they removed the mask, showed us what they were, demanded we allow ourselves to be herded into quarantine camps, take a shot of their weird mixture, whatever. They ran around forming ministries of truth, cancelling people, and showing that really they would prefer we were all dead.

And the horrible thing: they weren’t just who we suspected. They were the babysitter, grandma, the lady around the corner who brings us a slice of cake when she bakes. All suddenly revealed fangs and red eyes, and screamed they want us dead.

Then they put the mask back on and went back to being themselves. More or less. Until 10/7 when again, they revealed their fanged and horrible countenance and their hatred of Western civilization and longing for barbarism. And it wasn’t even the same set of people. Oh, it was mostly overlapping, but that second uncovered other stragglers that we never suspected.

And then they go back to pretending to be normal….

I don’t know how many of you read Robert A. Heinlein’s Puppet Masters. If you haven’t, it’s the story of an alien invasion in which the aliens are “half a pound of tapioca” in appearance, but they can completely control any human whose nervous system they can attach to. Initially, they ride between the shoulders and you might only see a slight founding of the back. Your only clue.

Until the main characters make it impossible to doubt they’re there, there is a period where they control substantially entire cities, but keep up the pretense of normal human life. This time is called “the masquerade”

There are tells. Closed swimming pools at the height of summer. Men wearing coats. But they’re not massive tells. Our hero, who already knows what is happening visits a city in the masquerade, trying to figure out who is hagridden and who isn’t.

You can read the book yourself. It’s one of my favorites.

BUT that’s what it feels like. Particularly since 2024. It feels like I’m living in the masquerade. People act normal, but there are tells. And I can’t be sure, but all of this daily life and peace feels like an act.

Is it trauma from the years before? Oh, likely. But the question is: is it also true?

I think this is part of what’s feeding the doomerism about the midterms. I think it’s also part of how many of us creatives seem to be glitching. And it’s part of why I’m having trouble settling down and writing.

Nerves.

It’s probably just nerves. But nerves don’t explain 2020 or what followed.

I want it to be just nerves.