Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

*Sorry for the long hiatus. Things are still not… normal.  And I don’t mean just getting used to a world without Greebo, which is bad enough, but trying to finish reflooring the house before the snow flies.  Three rooms to go but one is the family room, which is going to be pure hell, just in terms of moving furniture around.

So: *For the previous chapters, please go here. These are posted first draft, as the brain dictates to the fingers which are remarkably stupid. Also there will be inconsistencies because until September or so, the timing on these is wonky, and I’ll forget stuff between posts. Eventually it will be cleaned up and fixed just before page is made secret/taken down and the book is published. At that time I will take lists of typos or volunteers to proof read. For now, it’s written in a hurry, usually an hour before it goes up. And, let me remind you, it’s free – SAH*

Complex

Albinia was mortified.

She’d read novels — to be truthful mostly because Mama had forbidden her from reading novels.  In those works, it seemed that whenever a young lady brought home a suitor of higher status or magical rank or fortune, the young lady’s family would conspire to unwittingly embarrass her mortally.

Albinia had read with great amusement a hundred such scenes of the character being mortified by the behavior of her relatives.

Fine, so Lord Michael wasn’t her suitor, but still! He was the son and brother of a duke, and here was Geoffrey behaving as though he’d been reared in a stable… or worse.

She scratched at her nose, as he promised to explain everything and how everything was so complex.  It wasn’t so much that her nose itched, as that she felt something was very wrong, but couldn’t quite figure out what.  Other than the fact that her brother apparently could change shapes and become a swan and that papa might be the werewolf they had smacked on the nose.  She was trying very hard not to think of the implications of this, since papa had never met her. If she understood the timing correctly, he had left — disappeared — around the time mama was approaching her confinement with Albinia.  How terrible to first meet one’s father with such an unfilial action as smacking him on the nose.

Scratching at her nose was what Albinia did when she was confused and trying to gain time.  Usually trying to gain time to think of something not quite a lie to tell mama in order to stop her asking inconvenient questions.

Geoffrey made a big show of being offended by Lord Michael asking perfectly reasonable questions, then crossed his arms on his chest and said,

“Very well. We’re under a geas, you see, when none of us can be human at the same time. So I was trying to say my piece, because I don’t know–” Suddenly his voice shook, which to Al was the scariest thing of all, because she thought Geoff was going to break down and start crying.  “I don’t know if the others might have need of changing at any time.”

More to ward off his possible tears — she knew from when they all lived together how much any of the boys hated crying — than because she was incensed, she said, “What do you mean by that, Geoff? Surely you could leave each other notes and plan your human–”

To her horror this made things worse. Geoff’s lips trembled, and his eyes shone, and he said “W-w-we d-d-d-did f-f-f—”

And Al realized what had been bothering her.  Geoff hadn’t stammered at all through the previous speech, but now it was back, in full bloom. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Lord Michael’s horrified expression and wasn’t sure why, but she reverted to what always worked and said, “Geoff! Deep breaths, and speak slowly.”

This brought a wan smile to Geoffrey’s face.  He said “D-d–  Darn it, Al.  I rarely stammer anymore, because I have had years of solitude to p-p-practice, but…”  He took two deep breaths.  “Forgive me, Lord Michael.” Then to Al, “You see, at first we did just as you said.  We had a big board in this house, and w-we used to have a schedule.  And we also left notes and letters to each other.  That’s how father told us that L-Lord Michael should be able to free us from this geas, and also how he told us to wait until he came of age. B-b-b–”  Geoff took a deep breath.  “We couldn’t wait, you see.  You have no idea how terrible it is to spend years and years really alone.  Though I can see the others when in swan form.”

“Swan, not goose,” Lord Michael muttered under his breath, but Al chose to ignore that ornithological observation. She didn’t suppose that sons of dukes spent much time in the poultry house.

Geoff looked at Lord Michael and the wan smile became more pronounced, even if still wan, “Right. Swans. My step mother got the idea from some old tale or other. But seeing each other as swans doesn’t help much, as there’s a limited degree of what you can communicate by body language.  And Papa–  Well, it is best at any rate for any of us not to meet papa when he’s a wolf, since he becomes quite a ferocious beast.” He paused for a moment. “To be fair, even as a human, he used to be ferocious if we interrupted him while he was working, though at least as a human devouring people was not in his range of ideas.”

“I imagine not,” lord Michael said, drily and stepped back till he sat on one of the chairs.

“But as I said, we grew impatient. And we had some idea of how to break the spell. Or at least–” He paused.  “Papa thought it involved taking the path out the back door and meeting the challenges. He just thought the challenges required g-g-g-genius. And he said none of us had it to that degree… So the others–”

Albinia knew her brothers too well not to know what was coming next “They took the path?”

“One by one,” Geoff said.  “Till only I was left.”

She opened her mouth, closed it. There was a cold feeling of dread in her middle.  “And none came back?”

Geoff shook his head.  Now he sat on one of the chairs as well, and his hands were visible trembling. “Till only I am left.”  He looked at Michael.  “And if you won’t help us, I’ll have t-t-t-to go myself.  Only if none of the others could do it–  And papa doesn’t know. I didn’t dare leave him a note telling him what happened.  And, oh, Al, it’s been hell.”

And Al fell into the role she’d had all through childhood, when she — incongruously — tried to look after all the boys, “There, there, Geoff, it will be well.” But she didn’t dare ask Lord Michael to help. They’d already put him to so much trouble.

She looked to the side, where he — under the grime and dust of their adventure — looked very solemn.

Well. Never mind. If he wouldn’t, she’d have to do it. Even if she wasn’t a genius. Not even as much of a genius as the boys.

When I was fourteen I read Desmond Morris “The Killer Ape” [I’m reliably informed Morris wrote The Naked Ape, which if I remember also went on about how violent we were, though maybe not uniquely so. There was however a “The Killer Ape.” I just don’t remember the name of  the authors. It’s been 44 years, okay?] and because I was fourteen and virgin of any real history, anthropology and/or psychology, particularly animal psychology (to be fair, so are college graduates in those fields. In fact, college has become a way to cultivate and preserve ignorance and misconceptions, sort of a bell jar over the mind that lets no contrary facts in.)I thought it made a good point.

Since then I’ve read a lot of books about people who observed actual animals, and not only are we not the killer ape, but we have nothing on chimps, who flip on a dime from friendly to stone cold killers and will kill babies in their own pack.  In fact, our frenzies, our occasional mob behavior is probably a return to that part of the brain that comes from our deep ancestry.

And yet the idea is still out there that we’re humans because we’re the worst of the worst.  For the record, btw, every mammal goes to war.  Mostly territorial or subspecies war. I rather suspect some birds might too.  It is the way of the animal to defend and expand territory, and yep, mostly for those who are like them/close relations.

Yesterday I came across one of those pages that come up with “news” (if you intend to read only the crazier left, meaning this always annoys the heck out of me) when you bring up firefox.  I didn’t read the article, but right there, on top was an article about the ape and the mushroom, according to which we became humans because we ate a lot of magic mushrooms — man! Trippy! — and in my head canon I want you to know every sentence in that articles ends with a variation of “have you ever looked at your hand?”

Like the idea  that men were the killer ape, this seems, at best misguided.  Anyone who has lived with cats knows that every mammal tends to get stoned given a chance (Well, actually Greebo wasn’t fond of it.  Catnip seemed to have no effect on him besides a mild attractant. He loved the catnip rat a friend made for him, but I think because it was a toy his size.  The little catnip mice disintegrated under the onslaught of his claws. And Valeria completely ignores catnip.  And toys. She’s a little, broken cat. We won’t talk about Havey, though.)  We know that apes eat fermented fruit full of alcohol. I very much doubt they don’t eat other things that make them high. (Some of us hate being out of our minds which must serve as my excuse for not even liking to be drunk. Fortunately, genetically, I almost never am. OTOH I moderated my drinking considerably as aging seems to have made me more susceptible.)

So, magic mushrooms made us human, uh?  I wonder what the person who came up with that thesis was smoking.

But while I was thinking about it, I related it to the stuff above, and came up with a weird thought: We’re not the ape who kills. All apes do.  We’re not the ape who gets high, all apes do.  We’re the ape who loves.  We’re the ape who loves so much we take — and took, even when our life hung on a knife’s edge of need and scarcity — creatures of other species to our hearts and make them part of our band, our pack, our family.

If you look around, that’s pretty weird.  Sure, some species have symbiotic relationships, and sure, man and wolf/dog hunted together.

But if you think about it, that’s different form the mutually exploitative relationship of other symbiotic species.

Oh, we make use of our friends, but also as far back as we can remember or find evidence, there’s marks of affection.

And anyway, we’d never have started hunting together if we had eaten those wolf pups — tender meat — we found in a cave, instead of keeping them and training them and teaching them to ENJOY being around us, enjoy being petted, to defend us as if we were members of their pack, because we defend them like members of ours.

Cats, even stray cats we feed at the door, bring us kills, trying to support us as we support them.

What I’m trying to say is on both sides there’s a volational step to love those who are utterly different from us.

And that seems to be what made us human.

Sure you can say we’re horny apes.  You can presume that the traces of other human races all of us carry around are part of being horny and “humans will screw anything” and you can assume it was all rape.

It’s hard to tell, that far back in pre-history, before records, but I’m going to bet you it wasn’t all rape.  I’m going to bet you, because of course, if we can love cats and dogs (and bunnies, mice, snakes, fish, even monkeys) as children, we can surely love things that look more like us closer/better.

I bet you there were mixed couples. I bet you there were childless couples taking to their bosom orphans found in the forest. (There are enough legends about that, and those are sometimes the most reliable accounting of our ancestry.)  I BET you there was love.  Love is what made us what we are, a hybrid species that we find, more and more, carries genes of many others, and are better for it.

This is also, btw, no matter how much bigots on both sides of the isle howl, there is no such think as a pure race human. Yes, I know what gene analysis says, but bah, it’s early days yet.  I remember when the earliest gene analysis made us basically chimps. THP.

Humans love.  Humans love across species, across race, across what should be the unimaginable gulf of phillum and clade.

If we go to space and find aliens, I give you a couple hundred years, tops, before some human is trying to get a scientist to help him make a child with his smart octopus girlfriend.

How did that make us human?

Well, besides the obvious and improbable genetic mix with other human species some as yet unidentified (We’re in very early days of the field) and hybrid vigor, it forced us to develop empathy and imagination.

Cats, dogs and horses, our closest, most faithful companions, do not talk.  We had to bridge the gap.  We had to communicate with them, understand how they were communicating, and carry the relationship.

Which in turn made us more capable of understanding humans who weren’t like us, humans far away, humans in the past.

And, by giving us empathy, as a trained trait, (Perhaps a neo-natal trait that persisted because — as someone said in comments, tribes with cats kept more grain, and therefore raised more children.  My reading on the brain indicates mirror neuron and structures babies possess allow one to integrate and avoid being killed. I think our domesticating animals/being domesticated by them makes use of those.) they made it possible for us to live in cities, in large groupings, and thereby to develop civilization.

If we go to the stars someday (please) it is because some neolithic hunter didn’t kill a litter of wolves, but brought them home and made them his children/his brothers.  Because some hunter-gathering primitive didn’t strangle the kitten and put it in her sack, but fed it and petted it and made it part of her circle, raised with her children.

We are the ape who tames itself.  But our taming started with love across species barriers, across the gulf of misunderstanding, across the vast chasms of different self interest.  And that’s why we’re human.

Which might be worth — maybe — the occasional writer who gets all mired in grief at the death of her curmudgeonly, protective black cat.

Now I’m going to go help son put his doors back in and install floor transitions: me and my broken heart.

And I know the broken heart is the price for doors, for floors, for civilization.  And yes, for empathy and stories as well.

I wasn’t going to write a post today, but I’m not always given a choice. And I woke up thinking I should write this.

I’m not alright.  Of course I’m not alright.  My older son says that there are things that break you and that it’s a proof of your humanity that you are broken.  Events after which we’ll never be alright again, if alright is understood as what we were before.

Of course you also grow through breaks.  I’m not even at the point of seeing that yet.  Today I CAN think for longer than 30 seconds at a time. OTOH I feel like I’ve been deathly ill and am just recovering.  In fact, as close as I can tell, I feel exactly like when I woke up five years ago after major surgery.  There’s no specific symptoms, I’m just extremely tired and out of spoons.  I.e. any endeavor, even looking at the shower  pan to see if it needs replacing or just re-sealing/re-finishing is way too much for me.  (The walls will need to be replaced.)

I told (younger) son I’ll try to do it tomorrow, because the wall system once ordered will take two weeks to arrive, and — you know — it would be nice for him not to have to trudge upstairs to the guest shower.  BUT I think I’ll have to treat myself as I did after the surgery (which is STUPID. It shouldn’t feel like this) and work two or three hours, then  call it a day.

Weirdly, I got where I am by son distracting me with work from 11 am to 10 pm yesterday.  Look, it wasn’t even that much work and I should have been done much sooner, but I wasn’t processing.  He probably did the most of the work, and I don’t know if he meant to snap me out of the funk, but what happened was, as I was trying to hide in a corner and pull the world in after myself, he told me I had a lot more experience and he needed me, so he dragged me to finish some honey-dos.

When I was done I could actually sleep.  I still feel awful, but I can think, and I think I’ll be okay.

However, what I wanted to write: This has been an exceptionally BRUTAL year.  It started at the end of last year, when our friend Charlie Martin moved out of state. Yes, I totally get why he did it, and it’s been good for him and hell, he lived two hours away, so we saw each other twice a year… BUT he was nearby and in the same time zone, and we used to talk a lot. So, that was a change.

Then the changes kept coming.  Some of them are good, such as the stuff with the kids (supposing younger son manages to get university to actually you know officially graduate him. [It’s all bureaucratic, but it’s a mess due to shutdown.]) But it changed the … texture of daily life.

Some of it was sudden and catastrophic and shouldn’t have been an issue, except it was, because the car died and left us stranded without a car, and we had to buy one, and since we’d had the previous car for 21 almost 22 years, it was a huge change.

Some was long overdue.  We should have eased Euclid over long ago, but … we have trouble saying goodbye?

Then there was the lockdown and that’s a kick in the pants destruction of a routine I LIKED.  (Work like crazy all week, take sometimes lunch special at Pete’s on Thursday, or lunch with son in springs during the week, but always take Saturday off and do fun relaxed day with husband (sometimes after cleaning house, if not done on Friday.)

Then….  Well, then I lost my shadow.

So it’s been a time when there’s no foothold to establish “normalcy” which is making me feel as crazy as when we were moving again and again and again over a year, till I felt homeless and like I had no roots.

Honestly, part of the issue is that I’m now in fear.  What will be taken next?  Havey?  One of us?

BUT….

Okay, here’s the thing: love them while you have them.  Kids, cats, dogs, husbands, ants, dragons, fish, friends, routines.

Just take the time off, take a deep breath and be grateful for what you have.  Be aware of what you have and that it’s good.

I know this is sometimes really hard.  It’s hard to appreciate your bratty, messy toddlers.  But take time, LOOK past the exhaustion and do so.

There is one thing I can promise you: everything passes. Everything changes.  Love what you have and enjoy while you have it.  And find something to love in the changed circumstances.  Even when it’s hard.  I’m having trouble with Havey wanting to sit on me ALL the time, and having to reach over him to type.  BUT he’s warm, he’s fuzzy and he loves me.  Could be WORSE.

Find a foothold of love as things change. Take comfort in things.

The human nervous system HATES change.  I’ve heard moving, because of the change in routine, is stress enough to precipitate as many heart attacks as divorce or death of a partner.

And I swear to you, 2020 is trying to kill me.  Over and over and over again.

But I’m not going to let it.  I hear gratitude and love help.  So I’m going to try that.

You try too.

I remember during a particularly “from hell” school year, in 7th grade, I needed a break like you wouldn’t believe.  Portugal has a “carnival” break for four days. (Don’t ask.)
I decided I was going to “stretch” it.
I couldn’t stretch the time of course! Only how I experienced it.  So I concentrated on doing things I loved and being REALLY there while I did them.

I still remember those four days (I read pirate stories <G>) sitting in the sun, reading, pretending it would never end. It worked. It was VERY restful.

I’m going to try the same.  You try. It might not hurt.

Hold on to the things and people that matter.  Even if you know they’ll pass.  While you have them, enjoy them and be with them.

It’s all you can do.

How can someone who weighed 16 lbs in his prime and 10 at death leave the house feeling empty?
How can a cat who was mostly silent, save for purring while cuddling and the occasional rusty-hinge meow when I wasn’t listening to him, leave the house so silent?

I slept very badly and my head hurts.  I think part of it is losing two cats so close together, in a year of tumultuous change.  Even good change is stress.

I will try to resume the blog by Thursday. Don’t worry (too much) about me.

Yes, I know Greebo was just a cat. As was Euclid.

I’m not sure what that means, but I know it.

I’ll go on.  This will pass. And I’m aware I’m probably being stupid. But I feel like I’m thinking through goop.

I’ll be back.

This is not a post I wanted to write.  This is not a day I wanted to live through.

And if I must write about Greebo I want the skill of a bard, to sing his life.

We don’t get what we want.  We get what we’re given.

Greebo’s mom was a stray, dumped in front of our house in the old north end of Colorado Springs, on the day we moved in.  Someone slowed by the u-haul and dumped a tiny little tortie.

I don’t know what they thought was going to happen.  What happened was that she was so terrified we couldn’t catch her.  After a while she started coming to my kitchen window, because I gave her food.

Greebo was born in the crawl space of the house across the driveway from us, in the summer of 2003.  The first time I saw him was with his brothers, nursing in our driveway.

He must have been all of eight weeks, all soft fuzz, and wobbly legs, when a mad feral Tom tried to attack him and his brothers.  I watched from the upstairs window, as he jumped on the feral’s head, tearing him up, till the bad cat ran away and Greebo came back, strutting like a warrior.  That was the day I named him.

Our next door neighbor took him and his brothers, but never socialized them or tried to find them homes.  She kept them locked in the bathroom almost a year, and had them fixed at a “free” place where they cut their ears to show they were fixed.  Greebo’s cut was deeper. He was also bigger than his brothers, which is how I knew him.

Once the neighbor released them (his mom having vanished) Greebo started coming up to my window every morning for food.  Through that year, I sat on the back step a lot, waiting for him to come nearer and nearer.  Eventually, he’d let us pet him.

He liked being petted so much that in the middle of winter, if we opened our door, we’d hear him meow as he ran nearer, basically “Wait for me, I’m coming for pets.”

We set up a little resting area, with a heated pad, in our airlock (Dan says it was really a mudroom, but you know…) with a cat door so he could come and go.

The local wildlife learned to respect him.  A fox took a bite off Maurice’s butt, didn’t do anything else because Greebo…  Well…. he brought us half a fox tail, cut vertically.

If we went to Denver for a weekend vacation, we had to be careful on coming back, because Greebo would build  a pyramid of mouse skulls to our glory on the backdoor rug.  (Actually a semi-circle, three levels carefully stacked up.  No. We don’t know why. But it worked. We always came back.)

For a while he had a baby racoon understudy. (Just before we moved.)  The racoon followed him around, and did everything Greebo did, including looking at Greebo to make sure he was doing it right. I have no idea what became of that very confused racoon.

Perhaps Greebo’s most notable exploit was saving the family from a fugitive.

To explain this one, I must tell you that sometimes, in downtown Colorado Springs, you’d see a floodlight, pointing down, from an helicopter.  We’d learned over our years there that this meant there was a fugitive, either someone who’d just shot a cop (twice) or someone who had escaped from jail and they were trying to find him.

One bad feature of the airlock is that the screen door didn’t lock.  And once you got in there, you had all the time in the world to break into the house.

I was cooking dinner and looking out at the driveway, which was empty (so Dan was not home) and the boys were upstairs doing homework, when I heard someone fiddling with the kitchen door lock.  I’d seen the spotlights before, so I was trying to figure out which knife to grab, when I heard a war cry from Greebo, and a scream, and a guy ran out the backdoor, with Greebo on his head, yowling and tearing him up.

The neighbor’s said, he just ran in the middle of the street, and gave himself up. Greebo came back, strutting, and we fed him well that night.

I presume this guy came in while Greebo was sleeping on top of the shelves, and so Greebo decided to attack. I don’t know why. He never attacked our friends, or even people coming in to knock at the door. BUT he was a very smart cat, and I guess he saw something wrong.

When we moved, we figured, like his brothers, he was the neighborhood’s cat and he would stay.  The neighbors across the street had built a glassed in porch with a cat door and a wood stove for their old age, and we figured he’d be happy in his familiar territory.

Only Greebo would sit in front of the house and lament all night, and the neighbors called and told us to come get him.

So, we did.

And he became my editor, my shadow, my dog.  If I were somewhere, Greebo was following along.  As consciousness returned in the morning, he was there, headbutting my forehead and purring.  His happy place was by my side.  He loved for me to be in the office and writing, because he could sleep at my feet, with no other cat or people around.

He’s been losing weight for about a month and a half. And I thought it was the hyperthyroidism returning.

It wasn’t.

On Thursday he wasn’t in my bed when I woke up, and I thought that was odd, but son moved in Wednesday, and his friends helped, and he hated strangers.

I found him hiding in the dining room, and couldn’t get him to come out.  But on Friday, he jumped on the arm of my chair, and I petted him and spent time with him…

And then on Saturday he was hiding in a corner of my room, behind the armchair, and wouldn’t come out.  I called him to the bed, and he wouldn’t come. He also threw up a lot of green stuff.

Then around midnight, I heard him climbing on the bed.  Only instead of sitting by my head, as usual, he huddled by my legs, and stayed there all night, with me waking now and then to pet him, and afraid to hurt him.  Early morning he jumped down, and I heard him throw up.

All of yesterday he didn’t move, and I was afraid he wouldn’t survive the night.

We took him in to the vet at 2:15.  They said his thyroid was fine.  But they did tests.  He had intestinal cancer and it had metastasized to other organs.  And when we picked him up to move, he cried in pain, and the vet said he was in pain.  So much so they didn’t make us wait or schedule euthanasia.  We drove back (we’d left him for tests) and eased him over.

Only this is Greebo. The rainbow bridge would be too tame for him.  In my mind’s eye, he went to Valhalla, where all the warriors stood up to salute him and feed him tuna.

If there is justice in the universe, if there is one dram of justice, I’ll see him again, where cancer and pain don’t exist and where species is no barrier to friendship.

Goodnight, sweet prince, and flocks of angels sing you to thy rest.  Unlike the emo Dane, you were brave and equal to your task.  Your heart, in your small cat body was the equal of any warrior, any king, any immortal hero sang in poem and saga.

We shall not see your like again. And I’ll miss you everyday, until we meet again.

Greebo is still alive, and will hopefully remain so till 2:15 when we have an appointment at the vet.

They don’t think it sounds like hyperthyroidism returning (both the speed of the illness and the fact he’s throwing up great big GREEN spews.)

So it might be an easily curable infection and all this might recede as a weekend that lasted half a lifetime for me, as I haven’t slept much.

Or it could be something worse. Or a weird presentation of hyperthyroidism.

BUT I’ll hope for something that can be cured with antibiotics.  And I’ll hope to get my grumpy old editor back on the job. It’s clear his chosen replacement (TM) isn’t up to it.  Mostly he scolds me for letting Greebo get sick and flops about dramatically being fussy fuzzy Havey.

Anyway, just wanted you to know.

It occurs to me you might be worried. Havey cat is. You have to understand, they’re best buddies, and this is ripping Havey apart.  He keeps screaming at me and leading me to Greebo, so I can fix the problem.  Sigh.

Greebo is very dehydrated and sick and I don’t know if he’ll survive the night. If he does, I’m taking him in tomorrow morning, and seeing if they can stabilize him and if perhaps the anti hyperthyroid cream on his ear will keep him… well…. a few more months. Probably not many, but every day is a gift.

In the middle of the night he came up to the bed and curled at my legs (not near my face, because then I might notice how sick he is) and slept there till morning.  Which means I almost didn’t sleep, afraid to turn and hurt him, and waking now and then to pet him.

The reason there was no Witch’s Daughter yesterday is that I was falling on my face tired.  Today there was no promo because…. well, today I have gotten the bedroom in the basement apartment painted and ready for younger son. We still need to deal with shower and bathroom in general.  I wasn’t going to paint the bedroom, just do the floor and varnish…. BUT — but.

You see,t he paint in the unpainted areas of this house (mostly the basement and my bedroom is a chalky white on texture.  That means it’s mostly dirt and cobwebs.  I’m not doing his living room or his dining room, or even the kitchen, but the bedroom was truly horrendous.  So, it’s now painted.  He’ll be able to move into it Tuesday afternoon.  And then he can organize his space and be on his own…. except for the shower, and for helping us do the flooring in the three remaining rooms upstairs.  Probably this weekend.

However, after tomorrow, I should be able to resume A writing schedule.  I have three ideas on the white board to write up for PJ and three novels needing to be finished.  And frankly paint and varnish cost money :-P Not to mention that Greebo — I hope he lives that long — will probably cost us $500 this month.

Also, frankly I have an open letter to Jared Polis, self assumed tyrant of Colorado on his mask order and what it reveals about that pusillanimous disingenuous and self-admiring maggot burning a hole in my mind.  THAT will probably run here tomorrow.

I know he’s admiring himself in his Hugo Boss uniform in his room of mirrors, and I suspect he doesn’t realize that there’ 75% of chance this ends very badly for him.  If his fellow self-proclaimed communists manage to get power, they’ll get rid of him, because he’s too stupid and not connected enough to be the new ruling elite. OTOH if it goes badly for them…  Well, I hope he has plane available to run off to a banana republic.
Of course, I hope the real Americans win.  And I hope we just laugh him out of office. I wouldn’t want any harm to come to him. I want him to live to find out how much we — and everyone around him — consider him a jumped up fool and laugh at him even while we spit, because he’s too vile not to spit after saying his name.

I wouldn’t sully Benedict Arnold’s name by putting Polis’ next to him, Benedict Arnold was a smart and honorable man with a fatal weakness. Jar-RED Polis is a puking mass of weakness, malice and lust for undeserved power in something vaguely resembling a man’s shape. However, it’s possible that future and uninformed citizens of Colorado will link the two names.

Because he’s no Coloradan and no American. His kindred is Castro and Mao and Pol Pot. And while his mask order is a small step in that direction, in the magnitude of how unnecessary it is, and how adversely it affects the state he purports to govern, you can tell it is a step he longs to take, and in his mind he wishes all Coloradans had but one mouth, that he could suffocate us all.

In his heart he knows he was frauded-by-mail into power and that we never wanted him. He spies and schemes for ways to get back at us.

Which proves what a fool he is. Because he has no clue the anger burning in people.  And not just those of us whom masks send into respiratory distress.

I bet you he was the kind of bully who cornered weaker kids in the playground. And we’re all paying for the fact none of those kids ever turned on him and popped him one. He might have learned to be human before the left handed him power he thinks is limitless.

But more on that tomorrow. As you can tell right now I’m just in the grip of the red veil, which does not make for good prose.

I’ll go make dinner and tend my cat.  And tomorrow afternoon, I’ll write.

Mostly because I’ve been sadly remiss with Witch’s Daughter.  BUT right now duty and honor (eh!) call me to laying down flooring in son’s new room.

Once he gets his diploma in order (GRRRR lockdown, universities, bureaucracy, argh!) and gets a job he might very well move across the country, and then I’d have to pay someone to do it, since I can no longer do this stuff alone. (Trust me, gals, after 50 your strength falls off a cliff, so make use of it while you can.)

So think of me with kindness as I deal with the — argh — flooring today.

I’ll try to post this evening.

PS – Greebo is not doing well. At this point I can only ask you join your thoughts and prayers to mine that it be quick and relatively painless.  I’m far more worried about his tendency to hide from me and not come up for pets or to sleep with me. I miss my cuddle boy. I’ve… well, almost reconciled myself to losing him. I know they’re ephemeral. But I’m also somehow losing his affection and our closeness before he’s gone.

Never mind. I’m being maudlin. He’s just… a very good cat.

To make matters worse his chosen successor whom he obviously gave orders to, aka Havey cat, does NOT silently herd me to the office. Instead he laments every minute I’m not in my office. And because the only word he knows is “hello” I’m being bullied by Hello Kitty.  Sigh.

I’ve been thinking of the whole Covidiocy.

I’ve been thinking of it through the framing of WWII, particularly in Britain (though we weren’t wonderful) where strict rationing and also recycling (in the form of scrappers collecting every bit of paper, old signs, etc.)

Speaking of erasure of culture and destruction of statues, that did a lot more damage than even our hordes of simplificators.

And in the end, none of it really helped very much.  No, I’m not sure about the scrapping, but knowing how the rest of things were run, I suspect most of the metal and other things collected ended up not suitable for the intended purpose and basically wasted. Food production got completely divorced of demand and kept up shortages.  And let’s not start in on fabric, etc.

And all the while there were vast fortunes to be made. All of which is basically textbook fascism: tightly controlled economy where the government picks winners and losers from nominally private enterprise.

within a very short time, all of the economy was bent to this purpose, to the “war effort” although not really, and all brought under the government heel.

In the anglosphere (Southern Europe was always… different for both good and bad) this paved the way for all the abuses and intrusions that we’ve been enduring for a century.

Which brings us to….

The way to get people to knuckle under was fear: fear of the big bad Nazi empire. (With reason given their expansionist tactics. Even if they ignored the equally dangerous COMMUNIST expansionist tactics. You can’t have everything. Where would you put it? Who would dust it?)

The threat was commensurate, though.  Remember that in Europe you can’t swing a cat without a passport (yours and the cat. Also the cat won’t like being swung.)  People had family in France and Italy, in Poland and countries under the fascist heel.  They GOT the threat.

And yes, it had to be stopped.

So, while the measures meant diddly for the war effort, it did a lot in psychological cementing and “we’re all in this together” effort.

From the whole “we’re all in this together” and dumb slogans that the left keeps spinning, you know they’re using WWII as the model for the Covidiocy as well as their lusted after Green Nude Heel.

But here’s the thing: to pull the kind of transformation they want, you need the extraordinary claims to have some concrete and immediate BACKING to show that yeah, we need extraordinary measures.

That was present in WWII. Now? Not so much, besides the fact even the dumbest person can tell if the grocery store is safe, the park is safe. If a riot is safe, so is a stroll on the beach.

Which brings us to: this is the reason for the whole masks mandates NOW, and for all the crazy claims that we’re worse than never.

They made a massive grab for power based on claims that were pretty obviously crazily inflated.

They now want to keep piling things on, to keep the return to normal so far future we never focus enough to see how ridiculously exaggerated and insane their reaction was.

In other words, the left has a tiger by the tail.

You can’t hold onto the tail of the tiger forever.  And when you let go, you know he’s gonna eat you.

This is where they are now. Desperately holding on to that tail, and not letting go.

And knowing what can’t go on forever,won’t.

And everything is okay.
Today is younger son’s moving day and I kept watch on his u haul while they were loading it.  It’s not a lot, but I’m glad I could do something.

Unfortunately, since he’s moving from the springs, we had to leave early enough I couldn’t write a post.

This is just the “I”m okay, don’t worry.” post.