Nerves

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

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.

69 thoughts on “Nerves”

      1. And the pudding heads, the sob sisters, the envious, the evil, are willing to go along with it and pile on.

        A beautiful summary. Preach it, Sister!

        (Since I’ve got five years on you, should I say Little Sister?)

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  3. I’m turning sixty four, the Mathematician assures me.

    Shouldn’t a proper husband-mathemetician-and-software-guy explain that you’re turning 40???

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    4. I had my 47th birthday earlier this year. Next year I’m getting candles that say “30”. Even better if I can find a candle shaped like an x, then I can get candles that say “0x30”. (For the non-programmers, “0x” is the standard prefix for writing numbers in hex in most, not all but most, programming languages).

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  4. Hebrews 13:5-6

    I was laid off in August, diligently looking for a new job, not finding one yet; but at 68, it’s a bit different…  My wife said just concentrate on writing, so I might.

    Very thankful for this community.

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    2. I don’t mention that, in the post or in general, because AGAIN we should be perfectly fine. But there are decisions to be made, and things will change, and right on top of a house move it’s…. nerve inducing.

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  5. Well, there’s nerves, and there is heightened situational awareness, and there is Psyops, and also all that caffeine you just ingested to wake up because you couldn’t sleep from the nerves, heightened situational awareness and psyops.

    Or maybe its just my brain on overload from all the conflicting sensory organ dysfunctions challenging it from various cranial nerve disorders. Say, what is that lump on my back?

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          1. I usually wear a shirt of varying sleeve lengths under said vest. But then in the Mohave desert I tend to stay indoors or in the shade when the glowing fireball is going its thing. I too an tired of my dermatologist flaying me slowly.

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      2. The driver alone in their car wearing a mask in 2026…

        Look, I get there are actual immunocompromised folks out there, but surely not this many, toddling along in the daily commute.

        “You are correct to be suspicious. And don’t call me Shirley.”

        Heck, the medical industry folks whose work makes them wear a mask have it shoved under their chin most of the time when not in active close contact with a suspected infectious case.

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        1. “Kathy, I’m lost,” I said, though I knew she was sleeping.

          “I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.”

          . . .

          They’ve all come to look for America.

          I always liked that song.

          “America” by Simon and Garfunkel

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  7. Thank you! Succinctly put, and dead on.

    I’ve had the same sense since at least 9/11 – the constant shrieking to not be an “islamophobe” and slow trend toward “da Joos are at fault”…

    … which fractured groups I had previously felt generally comfortable about, some/many jumping at warp speed to xenophobia.

    Ah well, In God We Trust: everyone else, keep your hands where we can see them…

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    1. In am not an Islamophobe. A phobia is an irrational fear or hatred of someone/something. When someone states that they want to overthrow the current government, and will make me pay a special tax or kill me if I do not convert to their religion, it is not irrational to view them with a gimlet eye. Same for the Green Nude Heelers. As stated before, I took an oath 4-1/2 decades ago, and it’s still in effect.

      I messaged my GF at lunchtime yesterday that I had a weird feeling of impending tomfoolery. The juxtaposition of the anniversary of 10/7, and the fact that some people like to commemorate events with similar events, with noticing in the morning that the crescent Moon and Jupiter just before sunrise lined up much in the way that star and crescent symbology decorate the flags of several Islamic states was concerning. I noted that nothing had happened yet, but the day was only half done. Got off work that evening and went to dinner, where I learned that the FBI had foiled a plot for a mass shooting terror event at the Temple of Commerce (Mall of America) here in the Twin Cities. And the alleged would-be jihadi was of course Somalian. It sounds a little like one of the FiBbIes’ Shake ‘n Bake terror plots (apparently the AK-style rifle and ammo were sold to the perp by an FBI agent), but still . . .

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      1. Bravo Zulu FBI, again, but of some concern, but does that mean if a totally random nonspecified ethnicity and religious beliefs dude with ill intent had just gone to the local guns-R-us and filled out the forms, he would not have reflected any energy to show up on the feeb’s radar plots? We can’t depend on all of them continuing to have teh stoopids.

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  8. something shattered in me in 2020, right around the time they went from telling me I was a racist because I was concerned about the WuFlu to telling me I was a murderer because I wouldn’t wear a mask after them telling me masks didn’t work, but now they were mandatory. I suppose it was the realization that they were both malicious and incompetent and that many of my fellow citizens were sheep, vicious sheep, but still sheep.

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  9. “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””

    In Canada it was more the realization that I’ve been surrounded by these @$$h0les my whole life, and they have -always- been that way. I just didn’t notice, because I’m an autistic weirdo. But they most certainly noticed ME, and no wonder I’ve had such a hard time getting along with people.

    I’m the idiot who wants to know why on Earth you’d pretend to be a Nazi, and they allllll shuffle away.

    Yesterday was Oct. 7th, and in honor of that atrocity universities across Canada had little vigils and demonstrations honoring the fallen. Yeah, they honored fallen HamAss terrorists.

    I live in a nation surrounded by idiots who support the destruction of Israel by any means necessary. Oh and we import Iranian Republican Guards here too, they keep finding new ones in Montreal and Toronto. As Kathy Shaidle famously said, “Letting Muslims immigrate to the West is like hiding Nazis in your attic during World War II.”

    On the bright side, now that I’ve finally seen it I know what to do about it. As Werner Erhardt said, “The truth will set you free. But first it will p1ss you off.” Just tell the truth in whatever way will wildly irritate the Left the most.

    So yeah, the nerves thing, it isn’t nerves. You’re not imagining it, they really are out to get you. You can literally see them doing it.

    Case in point: October 7th three-year anniversary and Canadian universities are having pro-Palestine rallies? With nice printed signs and all sorts of preparation? Astroturf! Those kids did not pay for all that, they’re fricking broke.

    It’s all fake. It’s a wolf with a sheepskin on its back, and the skin is falling off. A wolf is not that much to worry about when you can see it plain as day, right? The good ol’ Louisville Slugger is going to be good enough for that.

    So I hereby prophesy the following: after the election you’ll never hear Trans Rights!!! again from a politician. You’ll never hear “AI will kill us all!” in the media. You’ll never hear Lindsay Clancy’s name again either. Because the show’s over until 2028, when they’ll start up again.

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    1. I’m dealing with the horrific realization that there are so many very loud voices in the US saying basically that Jews are evil scum and anything bad that happens to any of them – child, old, soldier or civilian is just what they deserve. And that it’s the same for white people, or MAGA voters or just plain old conservatives – that we are evil and irredeemable, and whatever injustice or violence happens to us, is just what we deserve.

      I’ve known that the Muslim world was and is full of that kind of thinking, ever since the Ayatollah took over Iran, reminded incessantly during the various terrorism incidents in the 80s and 90s, and finally – by 9-11, but that there would be so many of them, and they would be so loud here in the US … that is disheartening.

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        1. I tried to read the originally published Stranger. It was so disjointed I put it down. A few weeks later I found the original/resrored version abd read it through. From strange to freaky, but definitely A Great Story.

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  11. Oddly enough, I’m feeling rather mellow right now. Which probably means I’ve overlooked something. That, or the end of the book is in sight, and it will be done by (personal) deadline, and the skin doc didn’t find anything else of mild interest.

    And more monarch butterflies are coming through than I have seen in five or so years.

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    2. I’m pretty chill at the moment. The end of summer got really bad (stupidest tempest in a teapot that resulted in a lot of good people being hurt or attacked for no good reason), but I was not in the room (literally) and I’m out from under it, and subsequent fallout will not land on me or mine.

      Though it was funny today getting told that I looked more stressed than usual, and I had to reply that no, I’m coming off being sick and that’s why I wasn’t facing this person, didn’t want to have tail-end infection spreading, sorry. (Nasty little 24-hr fever upper respiratory infection. Not the worst I’ve ever had, but spending yesterday in bed was a very good call.)

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  12. Not only are the masks off, but it seems the stops on heretofore unthinkable behavior have also been removed.

    That nervous feeling you have is the sensation of the train of civilization speeding ever more quickly toward the Cliffs of Derailment.

    Sophists are running every conceivable facet of society to the point that good is labeled evil and evil good.

    i.e. the people who point out it is wrong for mom’s to murder their children, even if she’s sad, are evil, not the murders.

    It’s evil to say that children should not be mutilated because they got caught up in some social contagion and have become mentally ill. But it’s good to carve them up if they say they want it.

    And, and, and…

    The forces of darkness are increasingly bold and they are out and proud now doing satanic invocations at city council meetings with seemingly no repercussions.

    The train appears to be picking up speed but eventually it will have to stop. Either because some heros stopped it in time or, Heaven forfend, it piles up at the bottom of the cliffs.

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  13. I’ve been getting ‘Voter Guides’ in the mail from various special-interest groups that ‘recommend’ how to vote on the ballot initiatives. I noticed a funny thing. No matter where they’re from, left-wing or (slightly) conservative, NONE of them are for or against Proposition 39, the voter ID initiative. So they won’t support it, but they’re too chickenshit to go on the record opposing it, so they just pretend it doesn’t exist. They skip straight from Prop 38 to Prop 40 (the ‘One-Time Billionaire Wealth Tax’).

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    1. Everyone knows that Voter ID is almost universally popular among the voters (though I did overhear one of my co-workers the other day claiming that it would be a new form of poll tax, since you would need to spend a few bucks to get an ID; I wasn’t in a position to start a “discussion” over it at the time, as I sometimes do with some of the stuff he says). So, discretion is the better part for them. That makes the Senate’s refusal to pass the SAVE Act even more ridiculous.

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  14. The Clancy trial was a similar moment for me, if perhaps not on the same scale. When you have someone in your family, whom you think may be coming around from deep youthful idiocy, casually say in your presence, “Even if he didn’t do it, he did it” … it’s a clarifying moment, but I did not like what became clear at that moment. I haven’t delved into the matter with other family members, because I may not want to know what they, or possibly the virus controlling their brains, think.

    Republica restituendae, et, Hamas delenda est.

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  16. Or to use another meme, we’ve put the sunglasses on. When Roddy Piper, as Nada in “They Live” announces, “I am here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and I’m all out of bubblegum,” it was necessary to the plot that the bank guard be an alien, or the audience would have lost all sympathy with the protagonist, Nada, when he shot the guard. It’s not so easy when we still see friends and neighbors still going along to get along and thereby putting themselves on the other side of the divide, just to preserve a crumbling façade of peaceful coexistence. Will the frog ever jump out of the saucepan before being boiled to death?

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  17. I was never closer to running out at lunch, across the pedestrian bridge and over to Wright State, then when I saw 2 white liberal middle-aged women over there, going on TV to praise rapists and killers.

    I am still kinda sorry that I did not go on TV to kick their butts, and tell them to stop volunteering to be victims. But I didn’t, because I was on the job.

    OTOH, I definitely underestimated the Coof scare stuff. I should have said something more. And I still miss my parents, who should have lived to be a lot older. I don’t think I will ever be over that.

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  18. What got me to sit up and take notice was how readily the local “officer friendly” big city police department (SJPD) rolled right up past all the stages to being totally okeydokey running active live surveillance on one of the larger local churches, building databases of who and when, IDing individuals and license plates, and running cell traps on the site continuously, recording all comings and goings, TO CHURCH SERVICES, all at the “request” of local public health not-any-sort-of-law-enforcement work-experience-tracking-VD-cases people.

    Oooohkay then. Gotcha. Your position on things is now clear, SJPD.

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  20. “I’d always thought I was cynical and pessimistic about human rationality.”

    This!

    Charlie Kirk’s assassination was like that for me too. It happened at my alma mater; in the county where I live, and my mom was still working for the university at the time.

    Anyone who would cheer for Charlie Kirk’s death would also cheer for mine and it is so demoralizing.

    My only hope is that God is serious when he tells us to fear not.

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  22. Several IT outsourcing firms have been suspended from the Permanent Labor Certification Program.

    This makes me very, very happy. I’m all but dancing at the news. I recognize some of the companies named. I know one of them has been guilty (according to a court of law; no need for an “alleged” disclaimer) several times of immigration fraud. I know another has been guilty at least twice. One of these companies handles the bulk of the tech support at the company that I work for, and they don’t have a single person working for them who isn’t Indian. They’ve taken a program that was supposed to fill in gaps in the US employment force, and used it to push the wholesale replacement of American workers with foreigners.

    Yeah, I’m happy at the news!

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      1. Yup. Adobe is having a very bad week, as someone used an LLM to reverse engineer a PDF reader, and is apparently distributing it for free. Adobe distributes *everything* these days using subscription services. This is deadly for them.

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  23. For over a decade in the 20oughts and 20teens, I served as a national-level piñata for hard-left activists who needed a person to focus their anger on when the “accommodations” they demanded were still in evaluation. Then my first career was shut down when I committed the sin of telling the truth in front of a large audience as an international conference (as my boss put it at the time, “you’ll be allowed to remain long enough to retire.”) After all that, 2020 and all the rest was simply a less-intense continuation of the same sort of sense that anyone can reveal themselves to be an destructive opponent at any time.

    But for some bullheaded reason, I still keep doing what I think is right. Being a slow learner and all that.

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  24. It’s nerves rubbed raw that jump at every [redacted] little sound or twitch of leaves. Doesn’t matter if that was leave or that was the cat, there’s too much that’s upset. So the nerves jump, because fight/flight/freeze is a thing and the threats are still ongoing. They aren’t going to stop. We’ve got to find a way to make them less jumpy so that they still operate as a warning system rather than wear themselves – and us – out too soon.

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  25. Scenario 1: leftists win house and senate; do stupid things win stupid prizes; country harmed; leftists lose
    Scenario 2: leftists win one or the other; do stupid things win stupid prizes; country hurt; leftists lose
    Scenario 3: leftists lose both; do stupid things win stupid prizes; leftists lose
    Scenario 4: pray pray pray pray pray pray pray pray pray; leftists lose

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  27. I’ve been convinced, well before COVID, that I was the only human living with vampires. The moment I showed fear or a pulse; they would eat me alive.

    I thought I was paranoid or ADD or something that was skewing my brain, beyond the fact that most people didn’t seem to have a clue.

    Then the Crow Flu hit.

    And the masks dropped and too many people had fangs and pale skin and were hungry for human flesh…

    Including members of my family. And some of them were clearly high adepts of a faith that would make Lucifer’s rebellion look justified in full.

    That is a revelation that I wish on nobody.

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  28. Sarah’s already put her new cool thing up as the next post and I don’t want to drop an aside clanker vid over there ’cause hers is totally a cool story tease well worthy of the Hun’s undivided attention… so this goes here, a fully formed cinematic short film on YT in the new “Malfoid” Harry Potter branchverse which puts the lie to the “only Hollywood can do visual storytelling” and “AI slop is weird and not entertaining” and “you have to have an HR department to do movies” with a slam bang home run five minutes with everything save a swelling John Williams symphonic score, including a reverential guest appearance by the departed and sorely missed Alan Rickman as Professor Severus Snape. Enjoy:

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