Nobody knows anything!

Honestly, this should be the motto for our times.

And it is a shame and a rebuke in the face of journalists.

I’ll be honest, they were never very good at reporting anything.  Particularly in the first heat of the reporting. Any incident I was actually present at, let alone any incident I knew anything about was reported so wrongly all my life, that it might as well be another universe.

This was even when the things reported on were stuff like a school show, the village’s new gardens, or the death of someone who was a marginal public figure and whom my family happened to know.  (They had everything wrong, other than the fact he was male and had once been alive.)

When you add the madness of politics to it, and the fact that the press is not only uniformly leftist, but that journalism schools now teach (I swear I’m not making this up) the highest calling of a journalist is promoting “social justice” you have not only something that doesn’t resemble reality but which is often antithetical or toxic to it.

And people are choosing to believe their lying eyes.

You’d think the press would have caught a clue after eight summers of recovery and stop reporting wholly imaginary stuff.

Ah! we should be so lucky.  They’re sure if they shout long enough they’ll achieve full cooperation.  And to be fair to them, they’ve managed to put any number of raspers past the public by dint of repeating them brazenly.

I see even right wing or unaffiliated publications repeating the nonsense that this is the “Obama recovery.” Which ignores… our lying eyes.  The only thing I can say is that fewer people buy this than the ones who bought that Reagan’s boom was due to Carter and if Carter had only one more term, we’d have been great.  (We gave Carter Junior two terms, I think in part because of that.  And people know what happened when we tried that one weird trick.)

But the left continued pushing.  There was their attempt at selling Hillary.  There is their continuous, made up insanity on … well, everything Trump does.  There is the added insanity of #metoo.  There was the cheering of the abolishing of presumption of innocence over Kavanaugh.  And now there’s the crazy with the boomless bombs.

Look, I don’t doubt this guy is a Trump fan.  But he’s also a multiply convicted fellon, who is convinced chemtrails are killing us, hates Monsanto, and seems to have participated in a march of support for Hillary.  Viewed in that context, he’s just one of the nuts floating in the American punch bowl.  Considering there are three hundred million of us, we can’t help but kick out the utter nutter now and then.  And his support of Trump might as well be a love of My Little Pony of Where’s Waldo. And he might as well have sent the bombs in that context.

Except… except these are still fake bombs.  And things keep kicking up that make no sense, and that might be true or not.  Like, some of the bombs were supposedly delivered by messenger, (is that true or a rumor? who knows?)  Like, the people who received them didn’t act like anyone receiving a suspicious package.  Yes, I’ve got them.  As a minor, almost not-public figure, I can tell you I put it outside the house and call the police, or attempt to verify the sender on the return address sent them to me. I don’t take pictures and handle the thing extensively, and post them in social media, to create a stir.  Because, you know, if they blow up I’m dead, at least theoretically.  None of the recipients acted that way.

BTW IF the packages were delivered by hand, shouldn’t there be security cameras of the packages being delivered?

And then there’s the FBY agent telling us these are not hoaxes and they’re very serious.  Really?  AFAICT (again reporting is unreliable and I wasn’t there) the “pipe” was plastic, which by definition makes it a non-serious bomb.  But also the detonator wasn’t, since the digital clock had no alarm.

If all of this is true, the bombs COULDN’T go off unless the recipients knowingly detonated them.  And if they went off, the most the plastic shrapnel would do is scratch someone.

Are these things true?  Who knows?  It’s not just what we’re not told, it’s the left’s crazy demand for civility when their partisans have actually injured and almost killed people, and been cheered on by the likes of Nancy Palsy, Maxinsane Waters and Cory Spartacus Booker. It’s the press’s obsession with this to the exclusion of the real misbehavior of say…. oh, antifa.

More importantly, it’s the very serious treatment given to the idea that a youtube video called Innocence of Muslims was responsible for the 9/11/12 Embassy attacks and the death of ambassador Stevens. Something everyone now knows for a fact was not only false, but completely and utterly false.

I’m told that 11 people were shot in a Synagogue in NYC Pittsburgh , and that the person who did it is a bearded white male.  Of course, I think the chances he yelled something about a snack bar before that are 100%.  But maybe not.  And maybe it won’t be reported that way even if he did (he could be a convert.)  If he didn’t, if he has creditable links to the fringe right, I want you to think about this very carefully: HOW on Earth would two marginal (very marginal) “righties”  go berserk JUST before the election, in time for the left to wave the bloody shirt?

Can you say Reichstag fire? Can you say “by any means necessary?”  Can you say “most mental health professionals are leftists and have access to nuts?”  Can you say “we can’t even trust reports of affiliation?” Sure, I knew you could.

Nobody knows anything, but the smell I’m starting to get is not good.

It’s two weeks before the elections, and not only are we blind and flying by instruments, but the instruments are leftist and are guiding us to the ground at speed.

If they win this way, you know this train doesn’t stop short of civil war station, and that will be sooner than later.

Strap in and brace.  And pray, if you believe in anyone to pray to.

We’re in for a h*ll of a ride.

I’m a bleeding heart libertarian.  Yes, I know how that sounds.  But it’s true.

Particularly when it comes to animals, plants and creatures who can’t defend themselves.  I will very carefully transplant aspen volunteers that grow too close to the foundation.  Chances are they won’t grow elsewhere, but at least they have a chance.

I spent my childhood dragging home baby birds that had fallen from the nest and sometimes having to defend them from mom who thought it was more merciful to put them out of their misery and also that I was “only prolonging their suffering.”  Since life is suffering, she was right, but I raised about 50% of them.

There are two main differences between me and bleeding heart liberals.  One, I’d never try to do it at someone else’s expense (but the fact that they do this might come from two.)  And I understand evil.

I’m just evil enough — not in practice.  My character is saved by being too lazy to do the evil I think on.  If you really upset me, I won’t go out of my way to help you.  Weirdly you’d be amazed how often that is revenge enough — that I know there is evil in the world and people who do evil.  That evil doers don’t need to be twisted, beaten or victims of society.  And that even those that are might simply have got into enjoying evil and can’t be saved no matter what you do.

My brother is liberal and at least when he was young he started by not understanding evil and therefore taking all the wrong conclusions.

I realized that today because I was thinking of an occasion in which I acted in self defense and how my brother would disapprove, because the person attacking me was homeless and drug-addled, and I’d piled on to that injustice by beating him with a dictionary.

Yes, he would literally save his pity in the circumstances for the “poor man” who would probably have raped me if I hadn’t defended myself.

This eventually led to his being very upset at George Bush for “threatening poor, mad, little North Korea” without taking in account that North Korea is poor because it’s mad and that its madness takes the form of crazed communism.  But see, they are small and powerless, so they must be the ones who need his pity.

He’s not alone.  At least in the beginning a lot of liberals become addled about morality because they can’t conceptualize evil or someone doing evil because they want to, or someone enjoying doing evil.  Therefore they look at people doing evil, from the mundane family tyrant to the dictator of North Korea and see … well… a wounded bird.  And think if only we “make that right” then evil will stop.

This is why the liberals have come up with cute things about only whites being able to be racist, and why they’ve convinced themselves they live in a white supremacy (seriously, these people have never seen a white supremacy.)  Because this explains a lot of the criminality in the black community.  (Of course so do broken families, but that goes against the leftist dogma of not being repressed and also doing whatever the hell you want without regard for your kids. Oh, and could be laid at the feet of family-destroying welfare policies, and heavens, how could liberals be guilty of anything?)

This is why they’re convinced males have “privilege” because …  well, because.  That one doesn’t make a ton of sense because criminality in women is way lower.  OTOH many women are mean in petty ways, and obviously, it’s society that’s to blame.

The problem of going down that path, unable to SEE evil or acknowledge its existence, is that it eventually turns you against the good.

Since evil will always be with us, liberals need to continually invent oppression to justify it.  And eventually they want to punish all those “oppressors” because, you know, they’re creating evil and not letting the left “heal the world.”

It’s not just that they, as Reagan said, know lots of things that just aren’t so, but that the admirable inclinations of their hearts aren’t corrected early on.  No one ever explains to them and SHOWS to them that yes, there is evil, evil without first cause and some humans are evil and almost all humans can learn to enjoy evil, as the bleeding heart liberals eventually do, too, when they’re “punishing” the “oppressors.”

Just once I’d like them to step back and realize what they’re enabling are the evil people and the dysfunctional cultures, and if they win they’ll be the first victims.

They made a desert. And they called it peace.  In this case it would be “they made hell on Earth, and they called it justice.”

I hate chaos, which is weird because most people perceive me as working best in the middle of chaos.  But it’s not … precisely true.  I love the “controlled chaos” of very, very, very busy. My happiest years (except romantically.  I didn’t have Dan yet, and I can’t even imagine that now) were in college, when I was going to school, tutoring AND had a busy social life.

Partly, of course, it’s that I am a depressive and also an introvert.  These two feed off each other, because if I get my wishes, I sit in a room, with my own thoughts, and when they turn to depression, there’s nothing I can do. And the depression feeds the introversion.  The bottom stage of this is me in a dark room both physically and metaphorically.

And my portion of hating chaos can also feed depression, because I can lock myself into a girder of obligations that leaves no room for variation.  So, it’s difficult.

I’ve learned the signs:

Wanting less and less to have people around till in the final stage, I can’t endure MY FAMILY around, and isolate myself even from them.

My work becoming more noise and motion than work.  I am at the computer ALL the time, but nothing gets done.

But I also have “silent depressions” — not as much as my husband, whose depressions are always silent — in which I just channel to the least productive possible things, and feel perpetually out of sorts.

What works:

Forcing myself to go out.  The going out might be just a walk around the block, where I see maybe one person and their dog, but it seems to help.

Sunshine helps.

Weirdly, starting a PHYSICAL project where I have to give it my all and go to bed exhausted helps. (You’d think it didn’t.)

Coming up with a for-the-love project I do in the evenings (and which isn’t too messy, because chaos) helps.

So does taking an hour and a bit before going to bed and just watching something with Dan.

Keeping all of this going is difficult, particularly as my internals tell me we need to be alone and very, very quiet.

Part of the problem is I hate chaos. So in the middle of a protracted self-administered cure for depression, life is upside down and sideways, and that might push me into depression again.

All this to say: My house looks like a construction zone but I’m only mildly depressed and obsessive about the elections.

However, it might be time to bring it all in, put away the paints and resume the writing schedule and the — relaxing — walks.

It’s time to talk about the elephant in the room.  By which I DO NOT mean older son who self-identifies as an elephant.

So the “migrant” caravan.

There are a bunch of disjointed thoughts, disjointed partly because I didn’t sleep well.  I have some weird symptoms, like I’m coming down with something, which makes me wonder if I forgot my thyroid yesterday afternoon (it often gives me symptoms like the flu is descending) so I slept in two hour increments, after turning into a pumpkin short of 9 pm.  (Yes, I’m finishing the cover.  Yes, I’ll be better at posting at instapundit.)

Partly they’re disjointed, because I have so much to say once you start talking about, oh, immigration and assimilation, and in this case, because that is the very big thing, leftist ideas there of.

I’m trying to assemble that into one or possibly three columns for PJ.  But in general here are some thoughts:

• The internationalist left doesn’t get that it’s not just “white” countries (or western ones) that are nationalist.  Their idea that the brownz people shall conquer the world ignores the fact of Spanish Supremacy (very much racial) that infects South America (and anything South of the US.)  NO ONE who has come in contact with a Spanish-derived culture can ignore this.  Most of us get what “La Raza” means.  But the left has more blindspots on race than anything else, and one of them is on nationalism.  They decided that nationalism was white supremacy was Naziism.  This, mostly to ignore the fact that Nazis unpersoned people because they were socialists.  Now it’s a subconscious belief and so they’ll never “get” how wrong this insanity is.  I wonder if they even SEE or understand that the caravan is carrying Honduran flags.
• Race.  Ooh, boy, RACE.  Gramsci convinced these idiots that unlike the disappointing Western peasants other races were NATURALLY communist/socialist.  So the left is fully invested in replacing every white person with someone who can tan, because then communism will automagically happen
  This is at the back of their obsession with “demographic replacement” for countries like the US.
  Being enormous racists they don’t even understand Latin cultures are not naturally communist or socialist.  They only see what they want to see.  Latin cultures are basically and still the outposts of Rome (and sometimes Rome’s bloody borders) with mostly hereditary families governing under the guise of being voted in.  As far as power of the rich, they’re far, far worse than the US and more like feudal systems than capitalism.  But that don’t make them socialist. Something only socialists can ignore.
  And then wrap up in race.
  This belief that melanin equals communitarian thought is why they keep claiming people like Thomas Sowell — or me, but you know, I’m not even worthy to be in the same sentence — are white or at least race traitors.
  It’s so stupid, so imbecilic, so infantile only the indoctrinated could believe it.  And they believe it because they don’t know the origins of the idea and never examined it.  They just internalized it as part of their subconscious assumptions.
• How bad is this going to get? What are we going to have to do to defend the borders? What will we have to do to our neighbors to the South to stop this sh*t? Will the left ever “get” it?

But more importantly, and no one is covering this: Why don’t the journalists and leftists understand that this concocted crisis and concocted narrative makes no sense?
Do they think refugees just materialize out of nowhere, for no reason?  What do they think these people are running from and why?

I know they keep interviewing people who say they’re running from “oppression” and “economic hardship” and “intolerable conditions” but are they out of their mind to believe this would spontaneously form a caravan?

We actually KNOW what causes caravans (more like columns) of migrants and refugees.

Sudden invasions.  Total and SUDDEN economic collapse (and for this, Venezuela counts as sudden.)  Real and sudden intolerable conditions.  Natural disasters.

When it’s impossible to remain where you are — and consider how far it has to go to make people think it’s impossible.  Think Venezuela — people grab essentials and families and GO.

Post World War Two, during (mostly) the Soviet “liberation”, people leaving Germany.  During World War Two, refugees leaving places the Germans invaded. Jews leaving Germany (the reason my mom calls a 30s design of overcoat a “refugee coat.”) under the Nazis.  People escaping the East when the wall fell.

Refugees form columns not on purpose, but because they’re all headed the same way, starting at about the same time because that’s when they couldn’t delay anymore.  They carry the absolute minimum.  They do not cover 100 miles in a day (which, yes, this “caravan” has done.)  And they do not — repeat NOT, not even under the German invasion or while escaping Eastern Europe —  carry the flag of the country they’re escaping, or burn the flag of the country towards which they’re traveling.

I don’t know if the left is confused by their own insistence on calling Muslim immigrants “refugees.” BUT caravans are not normal ways to run away from anything, and if you get help it’s usually a hunk of stale bread from a nearby person, not trucks to convey you during the night.

This bizarre sham is a leftist pilgrimage, complete with the hagiography of Marxist icons, like flags of third world countries and people spouting Marxism for the cameras, and Marxist rituals like burning the American flag.

Let’s call it what it is: a Marxist crusade.  And let’s treat it accordingly.  Your freedom of religion doesn’t give you the right to violate US laws.

Also, while at it, and I’m putting this here AND in PJ because I want my marker down ahead of time: if they get to the border and there’s ANY confrontation, a pregnant woman will get shot.

How do I know that? Aren’t there way more men than women, and aren’t only some women pregnant? Aren’t the odds staggeringly against it?

I know it because EVERY TIME there’s a big confrontation staged by communists (and the left are ultimately that) a pregnant woman gets shot.  Since it’s so against the odds, I think that if needed the left shoots the pregnant woman themselves.  But I learned this through countless incidents.  EVERY TIME.  And then there’s hagiography built around this woman and the left advances a bit more.

My advance condolences to the family of the woman who’ll get shot, and remember you read it here first and it’s not an accident and not anyone’s fault but the communists who need blood sacrifice to advance the sacred “cause.

Perhaps instead we should take their sacrifice of a symbol of the future for a measure of their true intentions for the world.

Sorry to be late.  I had doctors appointments.  One of them was a test with the audiologist and despite the fact I can’t use the cell or the headphones on the left side (because it’s like someone is whispering) I was told I have normal hearing on both ears.  I don’t actually, having been diagnosed with mid range loss in my twenties, so I’m sure something is weird (again.)  But never mind. I’m not even going to speculate.

Which brings us to other things I don’t want to speculate about:

Why are some people desperately interested in other people’s business?  No, seriously.  Of course, we have a whole party of them.  In the sixties and seventies, the left loved saying that they didn’t care what you did and weren’t moralist prudes, but really,that only applies to sex and MAYBE drugs anymore.  Maybe drugs, because, honest to heaven, there’s more and more things they think you shouldn’t take, and they’re on the vanguard of the “make everything prescription” wave.

In neighborhoods…  Well, for reasons known only to the psychiatrist he doesn’t have my husband reads NextDoor obsessively.  I signed up and then never checked it again.  If there’s, you know, a killer flu in this expected-to-be-colder winter, I’ll want to check who needs help or whatever, but other than that, it would only encourage me to put a foot through the monitor.

So I get the crazy second hand.

In our particular street where there are maybe six kids, only audible in summer when they play outside, and even then not much, because being middle class kids in the US they’re booked solid every spare moment, someone complained about “children shouting.”

Our next door neighbor has a very large, elderly dog who likes going walkabout.  Unless I’m refinishing and afraid he’ll get hurt, I let him come and visit.  In the reports this has morphed into “vicious dogs roaming the neighborhood unimpaired.”

Then there is the crazy even we can’t escape.  Before one of his medschool exams, older son went out for a walk around the neighborhood.  Now, older son is like a mini Larry C.  Not as tall but proportionately built like Larry. He also has very dark hair and a (generally trimmed) beard.  He wears button down shirts, nice slacks, and if I remember properly at the time it was blustery, so a nice wool overcoat. His normal untanned skin tone is somewhere between mine and Dan’s.  He tans darker than I used to be able to, but he’d been spending months indoors, studying.

So…  as he came back from his walk, Dan was outside raking leaves.  Robert and he exchanged a few words, and in Robert went through the garage.

Not two minutes after, this woman slightly but not markedly older than us comes to Dan with the air of super detective dog, and tells Dan that a large, swarthy male, probably Latin, just got into our house. When Dan failed to be alarmed, she started piling it now.  Now our son was a large, swarthy male who had been walking the neighborhood and trying the handles of parked cars.  This is even crazier, since a) yeah, no, I can’t see Robert trying the handles of cars for any reason.  b) there are NO parked cars in our neighborhood during the day.  I’ve noticed this because the only one out during the day, normally, is my terminally unsightly 20 yo truck, and I’m surprised no one has complained of it yet.  There’s no rule against it, but most people on the street are childless, so the cars are either in the garage, or out at work.

This woman just kept trying to panic Dan even though Dan told her several times that the suspicious male was our son.  (Yes, for the next several weeks his name in the household was “Large Swarthy Male.”  When it wasn’t “Car thief.” What else?)

When told, Robert said he thought there was a woman following him, but he told himself, nah, she’s only out for exercise.

The problem with this kind of crazy is that it leads to “there ought to be a law” to correct the “packs of vicious dogs” (I’m sure there’s a law, but the old pup is a sweety, and we just ignore his jaunts.) Or the children shouting.  Or large, swarthy males ambling around to clear their heads for medschool exams.

It also leads to its opposite.  If my son were a — snort — delicate flower, there might be laws against racist assumptions.  There are de-facto regulations against it in fact. The most poisonous part of motor voter, in which you register people to vote without asking for proof of citizenship is just part of this.  You can’t ask people — even people like me with an accent you can cut with a saw — for proof of citizenship, because it offends them.  In other words, it hurts their feelings.

Look, guys, I EXPECT to be asked for proof of citizenship.  Yes, I do get almighty tired of being asked where I’m from, and if I’m feeling testy, I’ll tell you I’m from Denver, or from our particular suburb, or from Colorado, or if I’m really testy, from North Carolina (I was naturalized there, after all.  So in a way I started existing there.) OTOH my accent is like having a big red growth on my cheek.  People are going to ask how I came by that.  Meh.  It doesn’t hurt my feelings.  I just get tired of it, and frankly might not be in a mood to engage with human beings face to face that day.  (Maybe the day ends in y.)

However my franchise is a good I don’t want diluted by people voting who don’t have a right to.  As such, I’ll endure the questions, because I can answer them and have proof, and don’t want non-citizens voting.

So, proportion.

And we weren’t so much offended by this crazy woman thinking son was a car thief, as somewhat alarmed at her (lack of) mental health and her inability to process “he is my son” (granted Dan is shorter than son and a very different build, but then…)

Next door neighbor isn’t upset either when we call to say “Can you keep Joe inside?  I’m refinishing and there’s stuff drying in the garage with the door open.”  He just goes “Oh, that d*mn dog is roaming again?”

I am aware that we’ll never get rid of every busybody and every delicate flower.  They’re human.  Hell, sometimes even those of us very opposed to crazy legislation, say “there ought to be a law.”  For instance I… No, wait, I can’t remember any instances, certainly not recently.  But hey. I probably could, at least for five minutes.

But there is absolutely no reason to give them power.  Either legislative, executive or judicial power.  Or even power over our neighborhoods, our businesses, or you know, our pets, our sons, or our streets.

For too long we’ve run on “If someone squawks loud enough we’ll do that.”

It’s time to stop it.  The wheel isn’t even squeaky.  It’s just making noise to get attention.

It’s time to weaponize “So what?”

“I don’t like your car/dog/kid/business/idea/book/etc.”  The answer to that, the civilized and decent answer should be “so what?”

“You culturally appropriated your book/music/dress/food”  “So what?”

Unless I’m materially harming someone, if they squawk the answer should be so what.

We’re getting “good mannered” into tyranny.

Would-be totalitarians piggy-back on both busybodies and delicate flowers and if we let them will control every aspect of our lives.  (See, France, our leader in this.) Our main defense, perhaps our only one is “So what?”

As we tell the trolls who come here to chide me for bad thought, or those who try to get me to stop saying/doing/thinking whatever I’m doing by following me obsessively and complaining about everything: don’t like it, don’t read it.  Or as mom used to say “don’t like it? Put it on the side of your plate.” It’s not like I’m going into the houses of my lefty colleagues and forcing them to read me at gun point.  Even if I COULD, I wouldn’t because I don’t care that much about what they do/read/whatever.

Sure, sometimes a particular piece of crazy falls under my eyes and I bitch/make fun of it.  But I don’t follow them around obsessively, and certainly don’t read them extensively just to be outraged.  And I never said they don’t have the right to be stupid-and-crazy say whatever they want and think whatever they want.

I mean, how could I prevent it anyway? They don’t make anti-psychotics that strong. And Marxism is a defect in thinking and character that no medicine can cure.

I just wish they extended our side the same courtesy and — except for occasional fits — they left us alone because life is too short and there’s better things to do.  (Maybe they’re intending on living forever?)

I propose peace through ignoring.  Except for not letting them get their hands on the power to force them, rolls your eyes and go on.  And if they won’t do the same, roll your eyes, point and quack.  Eventually they’ll learn to behave like human beings, at least most of the time.

Don’t like it? So what? Go and do/read/be what you like.  This is — still — mostly — a free country.  And we aim to keep it that way.

I’m sorry to have missed yesterday, but Dan and I were figuring the layout of wood floors and buying a table saw and … other stuff.

How many of you remember that we bought this house partly because of a library with a wall of shelves going floor to ceiling 14 feet tall and eleven feet wide?  Good, Good.  This is why we held on through thick and thin on a short sale that went south four times before miraculously coming back onboard.

… which I thought was really good when we figured out it took everything, with one of the spare bookcases for my remaining fiction-on-paper (mostly signed volumes, and a few books not yet in electronic) and a couple of shelves for my brag shelf.

That is, until younger son moved and needed to store things in our garage and we went and got the remaining unopened…

WHY did the movers put FORTY boxes of books in the garage.  And, dear Lord, they’re all research and I can’t just donate them.

For the last year and a bit, the library has been unusable, with piles of boxes blocking access even to what is already shelved.

Since I’ve been wasting three weeks in Home Improvement TM (from the POV of writing, of course, a waste.  Maybe?) and since the library is actually REALLY important in a household of writers, three of which tend to the historical and sometimes need quick references, I started browsing craigslist for ANYTHING.  What I was willing to take was really tall bookcases to replace the loose ones we have, so they MIGHT take most of the books and then I’d do another cull.

What I found was a library system of matched bookcases that hook to each other and to the wall.  They’re eight feet and a bit tall, and fourteen feet of wall space.  Of course, they’re not real wood (we couldn’t afford them if they were.)  OTOH their not being real wood means I can paint them white, so while they don’t match our wall-library, they’ll kind of blend in.

The problem is painting over paper veneer TM is hard because it bubbles up.  So I have them a coat of shellack, sanded, then a coat of white paint to about half of them.  I’m hoping to finish the others today and be able to write afterwards.  Thing is, if we get them downstairs I can indenture sons when I catch two of them in the house, and get things set up.  Older son’s lovely future bride can help me shelve them rationally, since she wants/needs the use of the library anyway.

So, is this writers’ block gone insane?  Um… no  This stuff has needed doing since we moved in two years ago, and we’ve been putting it off because I lacked energy. But the longer you put these things off, the worst chaos multiplies.  So… Taking care of them.

Weirdly a side effect has been that I’m positively hungry to write for the first time in years.  Husband things that I needed a break from just writing, writing writing, and since a lot of the house remodeling TM has required my creative strengths, I’m still using my creative mind but not in words, and that unblocked things.

The urgency is finishing before the snow flies, not just for better ventilation, but because I’m using two bays of the garage to work in, and cars with ice/snow are not a good thing.

But except for today it SHOULD be evening/Sunday work from here on.  Which is good, actually.  Evening work gives me some exercise when I’ve been sitting on duff.

The bad side?  I was so happy to be done with refinishing crap, to have left all that in the past.  The good side?  Oh, boy.  To begin with, Dyce gets “Death In Marble” and “Maquetery Murder” and “The Body In The  Painted Library.” They’ve been writing themselves in my head, so when I finish A Well Inlaid Death, there’s those.

I won’t lie too, that it’s a good thing for this work to keep me away from the news, as I’m gibberingly insane with fear of the elections.

Look, by the mood of the electorate, the left should lose big.  But…

But motor voter has eroded our votes for decades.  Not just by registering people who have no right to vote, no.  Also because it gives a LARGE pool of people who are unlikely to vote and who can be exploited by impostor-voting or vote-by-mail.  Since some of our states are mandatory vote by mail… well…

And then there’s funny schemes like West Virginia Vote-by-phone.  While a warm body a vote is not the best thing ever, it’s better than what we have, which is one name one vote, regardless of whether the name is entirely fictitious or someone else’s.

But the nation schools, media and entertainment have — against all examples from the rest of the world — convinced a significant portion of the nation’s women that they live in an oppressive patriarchy and everyone is always out to get them and keep them down.

It’s a perfect form of gaslighting, because it goes like this: You don’t feel oppressed?  Your mind has been colonized by the patriarchy.  THAT’s how oppressed you are.

Women have been encouraged to consider their every failure a fault of the “the system” and to obsess over every slight, every look, every peel of laughter (whether directed at them or not) and every maybe, perhaps, half remembered grope.

I watched these shabies become convinced that Kavanaugh was somehow responsible for that boy in fourth grade who either kissed them or didn’t kiss them when they didn’t want want it or wanted it, and who SOMEHOW was a patriarch.

Yes, most of them are incredibly funny, including their obsession with bad-porn Handmaiden’s Tail Tale. And yet, there’s a lot of them, their vote counts as much as mine or yours, and they’ve been convinced a vote against Republicans is a “brave” and courageous thing, which means something that will give them good feels.

Yes, they’ll vote themselves and their menfolk into shackles for the feels.  They’ve been propagandized into imbecility.

But the media isn’t reporting the left’s crazier words and most corrupt actions. Or the physical attacks on political opponents.  If they were disgust would be universal.  But they’re not.

Look times really are achanging and the worm really is turning.  It’s all over the world, including Brazil — BRAZIL!  — and it’s a definite noticeable new trend.  Something, to quote Wretchard, has finally woken and is fighting back against the forces of dissolution.

But we who fight for it are at an incredible disadvantage, even with the little help the new media gives us.  The left has almost swallowed the world entire.  We are fighting without the use of our legs and with one arm pinned down.

Our victories are AMAZING.  (Kind of like my averaging two books a year while so hypothyroidal that I couldn’t remember little things like most of my first language.)

But we’re still at a disadvantage, in voting, in reporting, in education.

We need room.  A lot of room.  Like 25 years worth of room.

We will get it, but in snatches.  Because the other side will score wins too.  But their wins, even if brief will be devastating and things could get very rough. How rough?  Well, consider the violence already happening, and social media already shutting dissident views out.

I hope this is not one of the defeats.  The man we have as president besides being not-ideal (who is) is a deal maker, and if he gets the opposite party in the legislature…  Well, think about it.

And the left really, truly, is crazier than I’ve seen it in decades.  They remind me of the left in Portugal at the worst times.

So, it’s good I’m away from the news.  Tough after today, I need to buckle in and work towards the elections.  There’s insty, there’s PJM and there’s this blog.

Small potatoes, at least the last two, but every pebble causes a ripple.

And that’s the best I can do.

If we lose it’s not the end, it’s not even the beginning of the end, it’s not even the end of the beginning.  But it’s a set back and it will cost us in wealth and lives, and make the fight even harder for us and our children and grandchildren.

Let’s try not to lose.

I have a treadmill desk and at one point I used it religiously four to five hours a day.  Then I started having asthma attacks, and had to stop using it.  Now it feels strange, and I have trouble actually thinking to write on it.

But it’s all a matter of habit.

There are habits that come with twenty years in the traditional publishing sphere.  Mostly habits of stress and fear.

Because once the book leaves your hands you’re completely at the mercy of the publishing house, and because whatever the results of what they do will be imputed to you, you become used to fear.  Constant, pit of the stomach fear.

I learned this lesson early when a series in which book had earned out was yet deemed to have “failed” (one wonders what the house had intended for it to do.  One also wonders about what lies were told in expense reports, and whether much publicity was ascribed to the poor books, who got their ONLY publicity from me (which pretty much ate the first two advances)) so badly that no other house would touch me.

It’s not what you do. It’s not anything you can control. But your career could fail utterly at any moment due to even mere inatention (not even malice) of someone at the publishing house. Or you know, not even that, they could just “deem” you to have failed according to standards never communicated.

That was five years into my career.  It’s been another fifteen now.

Sometime around 2005 (I think) when actually the issue was hypothyroidism, I was having so much trouble concentrating, sleeping, motivating myself, or really giving a hang about whether I got out of bed in the morning, that I bought a book on overcoming burnout.

This was before I went mostly electronic. Electronic is good.  I can just return the stupid ones.  This book’s first chapter said that burnout was composed of overwork and lack of control.  Without the lack of control you don’t get the burnout.  So, first they advised changing companies, and going to one where you had more control.

If you’re a traditionally published author, what company you work for is ALSO NOT under your control.  So I walled the book.  And I kept on.

Fear of the other shoe falling — an invisible shoe falling from an unknowable height — does burn you out, though, even if I had something organic wrong with me.  Over time, slowly, it grinds at you.

For me the main symptom was my imagination going “arid.” (I find it weird of all the people I described it to, John Ringo is the only one who got exactly what I meant by arid.)

It’s not gone.  And you can still write carefully pre-scripted books.

It’s just if you’re a writer like me, you’re used to your bare bones plot being enriched by “grace notes.”  Characters who become unexpectedly multi-faceted.  Subplots that grow around who the characters are and what they want and which emphasize, contrast or otherwise make the main plot better. It’s… for those of you who’ve never written a novel, kind of like tasting the soup you made from recipe and going “Oh, just a touch of mint (or thyme or rosemary.) would make this awesome.”  You can still make soup without it, it’s just not as flavorful.  Just like you can grow crops in a parched land, but they will be stunted, barely surviving.  (Hence arid.)

It wasn’t even deadline stress.  It was just stress.  Each new book was like a hostage delivered to the hands of fate, and after a while it was hard to create new hostages.

So, a year ago I decided from now on I’ll be mostly indie.  Why aren’t the books pouring out?

First, of course, there is the fact that the last year has been fraught not just with worries, but with things that “need to be done right the frack now” so I end up being a construction worker (or furniture refinisher) for 17 hours a day, which even if I had energy to write, leaves no time for it.  But that’s minor-ish. I’m finishing the “last big to do.” Left is re-flooring two rooms and then nothing more till Spring. It would be wunderbar to have made enough money from indie by Spring that I can actually pay someone else to destroy their knees to do the rest of the house.

Second … second is something more insidious.

Humans are immensely adaptable creatures.  We adapt to everything, even things that are bad for us. Older son tells me that if you are overweight too long, or have high blood pressure too long, or any other thing like that, your body “remodels”.  I.e. it develops structures to support the incredibly unhealthy thing you’re doing and being.  Some of these remodels are worse than the thing itself.

I’ve learned to associate finishing novels with pain. So my thoughts of publishing come with flinching away from pain.

There is only one way to fix that. Yes, you’re right losing weight. :D.  No, that’s just the peculiar obsession of my past PCP. Seriously, you could crawl in with pneumonia and he’d tell you it was because you’d gained ten pounds. Is it weird that I’m finally losing weight under a physician who thinks my weight goals are crazy.  (They probably are.  I was unhealthily thin when young.)

Habits can be superseded by new habits, subconscious expectations by new expectations.  I’ve promised myself that publishing a book — just publishing — will lead to our going away for a weekend of writing (yes, I know that sounds funny, but Dan and I love our writing weekends.  We write and talk story, and take interesting walks, and do fun research.)  That way, regardless of how the book does, I’ll rush to finish with an expectation of something fun.  Yes, it will be tight.  But hopefully only for the first few books.

But habits are hard things to break. Even those that are counterproductive and you know they are.

For instance, I wrote for so long while listening with most of my attention for the sounds of kids in the floor below (when the noise stopped it was a problem) that for years after they entered high school and were more or less self-sufficient and trusted (at least not to water the piano, draw an entire landscape on their sleeping brother’s back, pull dressers down on themselves, build elaborate structures that obstruct their ability to leave the bedroom or other such adventures) I couldn’t settle to write.  Took me years to figure out that the problem was I was listening for sounds of little kids and panicking wen I didn’t hear them. (Silence was always bad.)

So, can I learn to live without the fear? the overhanging the stress? the listening for the other shoe to drop?

I’m going to try.

For most of the last twenty years I’ve been on a treadmill.  Movement was forced by movements I had no power over.  Series started and were declared dead at seemingly random. Proposals were written and the least likely was bought. Dates were set not by me.  In the middle of the next book, revisions would come for a book I finished over a year ago, and I had to wrench myself from one and into the other.  I’m not whining, that’s just the way the business worked.  But it’s hard when you write in as many different times and series as I do.

So… I need to learn to step down and write while standing on a firm surface (not physically. There I need to train to the treadmill again.  Ah, the irony.)

I need to figure out the best way to do things, and do them.  I need to set deadlines.  I need to reward myself for doing what I should (which is hardest of all. The reward thing.  I’m just not used to them.)

Habits. The problem is that we’re not creatures of will, we’re not creatures of mind and spirit.  We’re creatures of mind and body, and the physical body (even parts of the brain) run on habits which are hellishly hard to change.

But it will be done, because I’m a creature of mind and spirit too.

This analyzing what is holding me back is hard, and I don’t want to do it.  It’s still better than the treadmill.

And so it will be learned, and it will be done.  It is being done as we speak.  Because habits can be changed, and are not in charge of me.

I’ll stand or fail on my own.

This morning I’m very cranky.  For reasons I know but don’t want to get into (it’s a post in itself, and one I don’t want to deal with) I was up at two am and couldn’t sleep till four thirty am.

This morning I’m cranky and out of sorts and debating whether I should shower before getting in painting clothes and finishing painting the “decent looking but paper veneer library system” we bought last week, or just shower afterwards.  Because I will need to shower afterwards.

Because I love showers, you know it’s just crankiness, and not wanting to relax (though admittedly if I relax I might never do anything, because I’m tired and cranky.)

Yesterday read myself into place on novel in progress, which has been dragging since January.  There have been reasons for it, and I understood fully the reason I haven’t forced it.  The last chunk was forced (eight weeks ago) and I realized I had three blind alleys in it, which had completely destroyed the plot I planned and left me floundering.

I’ve written … well… I’ve written and published something like 35 novels, not a bad reaction to them, unless politically motivated.  So, it’s not lack of craft.  As I told a friend this week, the craft never leaves you.  And my subconscious knew I’d gone wrong in pushing and going to weird (and unexpected) twists, because … well, because none of it worked.

I don’t often go down bizarre sidelines that end in cul de sacs when plotting or writing.  And my unexpected twists usually just add subplots or depth.  So the book has been dragging because I haven’t been fully functional.  (Even today, despite the tired, I’m more functional and less depressed than I’ve been in years.  Maybe in 10 or 20 years.  Part of this is the treatment of apnea, which I’ve probably had that long [it’s not even really weight related, though the weight doesn’t help.  I have the lungs of a 5 year old child, due to infantile TB.  So when you add lying down and even a little overweight — I’m more than that now, but wasn’t for many years — my O2 levels crawl in the basement. The apnea has only been treated for about 7 months, so the final recovery is still setting in.)

Frankly I haven’t been fully functional for twenty years.  And that was the hypothyroidism.  The entire span of my career has ranged from “profoundly difficult to write” to “okay to write but so tired.” Keep in mind this affects all action scenes because you can’t write them if you can’t live them in your head, because so tired.  It affects other things too, like complex relationships.

Look, maybe that was a good thing.  Up till 20 years ago I had a tendency to plots so complex you needed an ax to cut through them.  Perhaps it was my puny craft then, or perhaps a mind that turns in on itself that made those impenetrable to readers.  Who knows? At least the last twenty years have given me craft.  I had to have it to function.  But craft isn’t enough when you’re dragging, and I have built-in controls that stop me pushing when I’ll destroy the book if I do.

Anyway, now I see the problems and I think I can finish it, and get back on A schedule, hopefully relatively fast.

I can’t tell you why since January, since a lot of this is not mine to tell.  (I know, but it’s still true.)  And the parts that are would be of no interest at all to most of you.

Let’s say each year has its character and 2018 has been a year of “everything goes wrong/emerges me in turmoil/miraculously turns out WAY better than expected.”

Look, it beats 2015, the year of everything goes wrong and stays wrong and everything I need to do will take ridiculously long.

However a lot of it HAS been emotional turmoil.  A lot of you will ping me expressing sorrow I’m sick, but I haven’t been sick as such.  I had only one major infection, and that was May.  Mostly I’ve been plunging into autoimmune due to stress.  But I found a doctor who is helping me manage things, and I’m losing weight for first time in 10 years, which also helps.

Of course, losing weight takes time, because if I don’t walk 5 miles a day I don’t lose.  Yes, I should learn to dictate, but so far I’m WAY too self-conscious and sound like a loon. OTOH I really am getting healthier.  “Everyday in every way I’m getting better and better.”  It’s actually true, I just had a long way to go.

Anyway, one of the hardest things to get over right now is “the years undone.”  I wish I could have worked for the last twenty years with my full mind and my health.

Maybe things would be very different.  Then again maybe I’d never have been published.  Who can know.

Which is why I need to let go of the anger and make the best of what I have.

It’s not so bad. As a friend pointed out, I could be seventy and just coming out of the funk.

So… make the best of what you have.

And while at it: we were born, most of us, even those in their seventies, into a world infested with Marxist theories which lead to socialism national and international.  This is bad enough, but they also corrupt the foundation and base of civilization.

It’s only in the last ten or twenty years we’ve had the means to start fighting back.

When you guys express despair, you’re doing what I’m doing when I say “but I lost close to twenty years, and I’m so old now, and exhausted by the fight of fiction.”

Take no counsel of your fears.  It’s not our fault how the world got before we were born.  A lot of it was the form of technology — mass manufacture — leading to mass production, mass reporting, mass entertainment.

Well, that’s changing and going smaller and more personal.  The appeal of Marxism will wither too.

Sure, sure, they still have strength and we still have bottle necks in communications.  But we’re ALSO still here.

Would I prefer we had got this ability to fight back earlier?  Sure. But then again, like my having been healthier through my career so far, what bad things come with that? Because I guarantee some will.

This might not be the best of all possible worlds.  It is the world we have.  And it could be much worse.

We could have an easier battle. We also could have a much harder one.

Be not afraid.  Go and build and love and create. Fight by being you as hard as you can.

Do the best you can NOW and throw away your regrets.

Take no counsel of your fears.  Ignore the gibbering voice that says all is lost already.  Nothing is ever fully lost, certainly not liberty and individualism so long as some people believe in them.

All you have is what you have now.  Make the best of it.

The Song of Lieawatha

By Tom Kratman

Part the First

Part the Second

Part the Third

I didn’t give credit for the inventions of Shabbies, when I used it (misspelled) in the article, because I honestly didn’t remember who had said it, just that it was a pivotal thing for me.

I remembered the person was on PJ TV and that he was suffering from a cold (a lot of the video involved him putting a towel around his face and inhaling steam) which exasperated him more than usual when dealing with an ubiquitous anti-war demonstration in DC. (Remember those.  Amazing how they stopped when Obama took power and sent our troops abroad like the Easter Bunny dispensing candy.  Or maybe not amazing because the left are Shabies.)

Then I mentioned it to a friend and he said “that was Alonzo Rachel and the old PJ TV”.

And suddenly I remembered him saying “They’re sheep, they’re babies, they’re shabies.”

Friend also shared that Youtube has throttled Zo’s views to such an extent that he’s now gone back to his former occupation of waiting tables.

Look, I didn’t agree with the man on everything, but his show and Trifecta’s were the reason I signed for and paid PJTV a subscription.

It occurs to me that PJTV killed their TV channel at the worst possible time, because now conservative pundits and speakers need a TV channel more than ever.  Maybe if they’d taken some time they’d have found it profitable.  But it’s not my money, and I’m not going to second guess them.

What I’m going to tell you is to go listen to the Zo.  Look, I don’t even know his position on Trump because he dropped off my radar, but again even back when I disagreed with him on tons of things, and still enjoyed his show.

And look at that “dropped off my radar.”  Be aware even if you subscribe to, say, Right Angle, you’re not getting notice when a video goes up.  Be more proactive in looking for them.

And if you have the money and the time (I have neither for the next 2 or 3 years, at least) consider what an alternative to YouTube would look like and implement it.

I do have an idea for an alternative to Amazon and a way to make it profitable until (almost inevitably) Amazon goes full potato, be it five years in the future or more. We MIGHT have the money for that, but we’ve been struggling for the time particularly “friends who program” time.

But we have to make time.  And we have to put the money where our mouths are.  Because otherwise we’ll consent through silence. And that’s not the world we want.

Build under, build over, build around.  Create and subvert and BUILD.  You’re nto alone, and it’s time.