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.

I’m seedy and running a fever.  It’s self inflicted and it will pass in a day or two.  I had the booster on the shingles vaccine. But the reaction is kicking my behind five ways from Sunday. I wasn’t going to post today.  And yet a friend’s text early morning made me realize there’s something I SHOULD say.  To you, and to the world in general. My friend lives in a liberal enclave and is getting scared.  As you should be.

It’s not that there aren’t good people on the left.  Of course there are.

It’s that they’ve bee indoctrinated, spun and guilted into believing a lot of things that just ain’t so.  So many things that just ain’t so that the end result is that their attempts at fixing or improving things (particularly since they think so many things are broke that aren’t) result in profound disaster for everyone.

I’m not going to argue with a lot of you that the results they get are what some number of their leadership wants.  This is definitely true.  But the rest of them, and the overwhelming majority of the followers think they’re doing good.

It’s just that their education and entertainment and media has weaponized their altruism against them, so that they feel guilty for things they’ve never done, they feel like they should punish people who never did them any harm, and they think this will lead to a better world.

My beat down on the idiot woman in the Washington post did not have time to get into the worst part of this: they honestly think all men are guilty.  That there is some sort of patriarchy in which all men participate.  The idea is bizarre and impossible — even in real patriarchies, the women are part of what keeps the other women down — but they’ve been told it’s so by “very smart” (indoctrinated or propagandists) people and they believe.

They don’t expect the results they get, because their whole picture of the world is based on fables, part Marxist theocracy and part “things the media feels good saying.”  Obama might have meant to — did mean to — immiserate America, but he honestly believed it would make the rest of the world better off, because no one in his circles ever questioned the closed pie fallacy (for some reason my fingers wanted to type fappacy. Let it stand.) So he thought if America had less the rest of the world would be better off.

They are sincere, or at least some number of them are.

Which doesn’t make them any less dangerous. Giving them power would be like putting Martians in charge of our polity.

All this to say don’t get cocky.  Work and vote like your life depends on it.  It very well might.

People in the past were not callous monsters.  The modern leftist is not special.

Okay, one or two might be special (how do I know?) but they are not particularly and amazingly kind.  Throwing their weight around on twitter to show how much they care for the “underprivileged” (a revolting word that denotes that someone is in need of more private law applying to them only) doesn’t make them wonderful.  And their ancestors were not horrible because they verbalized their tender notions better.

The funny thing is that if they had verbalized what was considered an admirable sentiment in their time more, the left would probably hate them for it.

I only know this because not only was I raised in a society very different from the one I live in (though already unimaginably wealthy by historical standards) but I work in the past a lot.  (Okay, not as much as I used to, but we’ve already set the last two books of the Shakespeare series and the rest of the Tudor queens books on my schedule for next year.) This means I am aware of how the past is intensely different from the present.

Humans adapt to the conditions they live under.  We’re highly adaptable creatures.  And if you think that conditions in the past were always “more or less” like middle class America (I run into this a lot, mostly in books written by women a little younger than I) you have no notion how different even the early twentieth century could be.

Take the village I grew up in.  Yes, I know. I was born past the mid century mark.  Yeah.  But you see, I was born under a national socialist regime.  While the Portuguese regime – regardless of what you read in the news here, or the even the history books here – was not as actively lethal as even the Spanish and considerably less actively lethal than any other socialist regime of its time, it was still socialist.  Socialism kills.  It mostly kills by stopping initiative, effort and individual creativity.  Little by little it leaches the society it commandeers, making everyone poorer, and slowing down the normal march of innovation.

You’ve seen – I’ve recently seen – pictures from behind the iron curtain at the time it fell.  It’s impossible not to think it’s like a time capsule to the 1940s. Only dirtier, dingier, and falling apart more.

When I was a child, the place I grew up looked like a mishmash of the Roman Empire and the 1930s America.  (The Roman Empire only because Portugal was once a part of Rome, and … well, it’s sometimes debatable whether Rome really did fall in anything but the administrative bureaucracy sense.)

The most common crime was people stealing clothes from the line.  If you’re nodding along with that and going “Well, in certain parts of America people steal shoes and leather jackets”, you’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick.  The clothes stolen were often not just home made and worn, but they were also often patched. They were still valuable to people who had nothing else to protect them from the elements.  This is almost unimaginable when every thrift store in America sells (sometimes new) clothes for pennies. We have no concept for it. It’s quite literally alien.

Or let me illustrate how close to the bone we lived in another way: mom’s business was to design and make (though sometimes she hired people to help with the making) entire wardrobes for wealthy people. Because – like writing – it was a business of peaks and throughs, she bought a knitting machine which she could use to knit sweaters for the not-so-wealthy when business was down.  Now, the people she knit sweaters for were wealthy farmers, people of some substance.  Only about half the time did she get new wool with which to knit.  The rest of the time, they brought her a sweater and expected her to take it apart, remove the most worn threads, re-dye it and knit it in another shape.

More? Sure.  Once you had gone through all your clothes to the point you couldn’t wear them any more, you either sold them to the rags man, or if they were canvas or some sturdier fabric, you cut them up, dyed them, and had the rug-weaver make a rag rug from them.  (For some reason my family ran on rag rugs so we usually did this.)

Yes, food was about the same thing, though fortunately no one recycled it.  We mostly ate what we grew (what Heilein so aptly described as “root, hog or die.”) and though my family was solidly middle class meat (as opposed to fish, which this being a Mediterranean country was dirt cheap) was a Sunday dish.

I’m not saying this to tell you how hard I had it.  Compared to my parents’ time, not to mention my grandparents’ time we were incredibly wealthy. We didn’t go hungry, and we had antibiotics and could afford doctors.

I’m saying this to say that having a glimpse – just a glimpse – into the past, I know how different it was.

The same thing applies to my research.  Granted, Tudor England was a little more turmoil-y than your average era, but one of the things I read to get the rhythm of the language was the diary of a woman who had three husbands executed for treason, and who only had two of ten children survive. The interesting thing is the insane amount of work this woman – a nobleman btw – did every day, which she recorded with scrupulous care.

Even for someone who had a cook and servants, the maintaining of clothes, making sure herbs and meat were preserved, and supervising things like baking, was an insane amount of work, which makes those of us who run a business and raised children feel like the laziest creatures imaginable.

Now picture living like that.  Ignore the political jeopardy, even (though it took up an enormous amount of mental cycles) because Tudor England was crazy.  Concentrate on a society where if you don’t make sure everything (including the water, which doesn’t come from faucets) is clean, your entire family can die of typhus, or worse, where if you don’t keep clothes mended your baby will be carried off of a chill, where if you don’t work as hard as you can, you’re going hungry.  (Which weirdly in Elizabethan England could still apply to some ranks of noblemen.  Elizabeth herself is said to have grown up hungry and ragged when out of favor.)

Did these people spend all their time worrying about the plight of “insert minority here”?  Nope.  The amazing thing is that as far back as we go, people were still charitable.  Okay, it might be a religious obligation, but at least from what we can find from primary sources, people still seemed to have the charitable impulses we have.  They didn’t like to see other people suffer, and they felt the need to help within their means.

Sure, a lot of them demanded at least some effort from those being helped.  The whole point of helping the “deserving poor” (it was much the same in the village, btw) and letting the “undeserving” go, which the left thinks is so offensive, is in fact essential when you have limited resources.  If you help the “underserving”, you’re going to denude yourself uselessly.  When these people are done, they’ll still be as poor as ever, while you’ll also be poor.

But – the left says – this means a moral judgement.  How can you judge?

You can judge very easily.  Chronically poor people, those who won’t help themselves or shift to improve their lives can’t be helped.  Yeah, sure, it might be because they’re discriminated against for other reasons.  Perhaps it is because they’re ill.  Perhaps micro-aggressions hold them down.

That’s nice.  A society that lives close to the bone is not going to care about all that.  They’re going to help those who can be helped and let the others go. Because when you only have a little to spare, you can’t afford to give it away to no effect.

What brought about this rant is that I just read a Pride and Prejudice Variation written by someone who swallowed Dickens hook line and barbed socialist sinker.

Dickens was an amazing writer.  What he was not was an historian or an impartial observer.  What he put in his books has tainted people’s perception of the past and encouraged the cardinal “socialist virtue” of envy.  It causes people to think those richer than themselves are callous bastards.  It teaches people to see the past through that lens.

This book was almost walled when the woman assured us that the middle and upper classes did not care about the disappearance of a serving-woman.

It wasn’t many years after that the murder of a series of prostitutes set Victorian England aflutter, and yes, that included the upper and middle classes.

In the same way she waxes pathetic about how death was common among the poor in the Regency.  B*tch, death was common in the Regency, period.  If your entitled, propagandized ass were plopped down in a society with no antibiotics and uncertain house-heating, you’d learn really quickly how common.  Young ladies in the upper reaches of society routinely made two baby shrouds as part of their trousseau.  They were expected to lose at least that many children.  And while we’re talking of children, yeah, death in child birth was really common too.  As was death in any of the male occupations which, as is true throughout history, took them outside the house. Even noblemen were around horses a lot, and spent quite a bit of time – if they were worth their salt – managing their own lands, fraught occupations in a time when any wound could turn “septic” and any cold could turn “putrid” and carry you off.

Yeah. The people in these close-to-the-bone societies didn’t give money to people who’d waste it.  They sometimes set conditions on distributing largesse. And they had definite opinions on what behaviors were “good” and which “bad.”

They weren’t tight-ass moralists, as the left imagines. They were following percepts and behaviors proven to lead to success.  Mostly success in staying alive.

They were poorer than us and in that measure they were a lot more realistic.

They had to be. The other way lay death.

Spitting on our ancestors for not obsessing about gender-fluid trilobites is in fact the ultimate expression of “temporal privilege.” The left is yelling at people poorer, unhealthier and less able than themselves.

And they’re proud of it.

Sunday Book Plug

FROM M A ROTHMAN:  (I recently “read” this, and yes, I’ve had fights with him on various things, but he’s an excellent writer and this is an excellent book if you like thrillers and hard sf with a bit of romance.  It’s not much to say that this book has best seller quality. ) Primordial Threat.

The year is 2066 and the world is oblivious to the threat it faces.

The fate of humanity lies on the shoulders of Burt Radcliffe, the new head of NASA’s Near Earth Object program.

He’s been rushing the completion of DefenseNet, a ring of satellites that are both part of an early-warning system as well as the means to eliminate incoming threats.

Yet Burt knows that despite the world’s best efforts, nothing can be done about the alert he’s just received.

Coming out of deep space is a danger that’s been approaching since the dawn of time. A black hole. An unstoppable threat that promises death for all in its wake.

Dave Holmes was a modern-day Einstein. As the original architect of DefenseNet, he’d had visions of this Primordial Threat before he disappeared, yet he’d left behind no details on how the problem might be solved.

Can Holmes be found, and if so, will his solution even work?

The world has less than a year to find out.

FROM PAM UPHOFF:  Cooking Hot (The Directorate Book 10).

Tenth Story in the Directorate Series

A Novella, sequel to Project Dystopia

Ebsa Cloustuone is back from a perilous assignment, and in a sort of quarantine that’s going to keep him on the Embassy World for a few months until the Empire decides it’s safe for him—and the other survivors—to finally go home.

And someone has to feed all these people, so Ebsa’s back to work, cooking and feeding anyone who shows up hungry.

Including Ambassador Ashe, who sees a number of opportunities in the presence of a Warrior with a cooking hobby.

A challenge leads to a Multi-world Cookoff, that devolves into a spontaneous city-wide fair. Should be fun, right? Right?

FROM ALMA BOYKIN:  Daughter of the Pearl.

Count Chang wants glory. Leesan dreams of marrying. Neither can foresee the power that awaits them—or the danger.

Cloud-dancers use magic to keep the world in balance. But the Great Northern River ails, and strange, twisted and evil things move across the land. The humans along the river cannot see the danger, but the Great Sky Emperor does. He grows angry. His wrath will remake the world and none of the cloud-dancers want that.

Count Chang hears a rumor of a Chosen One living far to the south, the only human able to heal the river. Instead he finds a corrupted naga and Leesan, the unwanted third daughter. Valueless, cursed, ignorant, Leesan would be better off dead, or so her father’s mother insists. Instead Chang claims her and takes her north, to train the gifts she unknowingly carries.

Chang detests the idea of marrying. Leesan cannot imagine a woman with value of her own. Together they must find the cause of the river’s ailment and heal it. Evil lurks in the land, and it will take all their power, trust, and strength to do their duty and save the world from the Great Sky Emperor’s wrath.

That is, if they can.

MORE ALMA BOYKIN:  Imperial Magic: Merchant and Empire Book Three..

The Great Northern Emperor Returns!

Ewoud Rhonarida needs experience, or so his father insists. Tycho sends his son east, to the trading center of Kehlibar vlee. There, Ewoud must learn to balance deference with duty. When he fails, it costs one man his life and endangers more.

But Ewoud attracts the attention of the Great Northern Emperor. This could be a boon. Or it could signal the undoing of the Galnaar family.

Tycho labored to remain unnoticed. Will his son’s fame be the family’s ruin?

FROM DAVID BURKHEAD:  Roaming the Universes.

Epic journeys through space and time

Whether exploring the solar system in the near future or venturing to worlds of magic and mystery, these fifteen stories take you on a journey to other universes.

Included are stories from the FutureTech Industries series, from the Knights of Aerioch, and an assortment of stand-alone tales.

The stories may be short of length, but they are not short of wonder.

So climb aboard and see what these other worlds have to offer.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: violent.

* Sorry to everyone, but particularly Amanda for being so late with this.  I woke up late and have been trying to do wash which is very late, so it’s all my stuff, but you know…  my fault. – SAH*

Stop Mass Hysteria – by Amanda S. Green

Two weeks ago, the media was filled with so-called reporting, much of it demanding Brett Kavanaugh not be confirmed as the next justice of the Supreme Court. Anyone who dared question the claims of Christine Blasey Ford and the other women (and, by the way, isn’t that assuming their gender? Did the media mavens ask if they wanted to be called women, “she”, “her”, etc?) was labelled as sexist and misogynist. We were told it was important to always believe the woman, no matter how unbelievable her story might be.

I woke this morning fully expecting to find the media in an uproar about First Lady Melania Trump’s interview last night. After all, the press has made a sport of doing all they could to condemn or make fun of her. From her clothes to her accent to her stance on bullying, she has been one of their favorite punching bags. I haven’t seen the interview yet, but she must have knocked the proverbial ball out of the park because it is barely being mentioned this morning. Good on you, Mrs. Trump, good on you. I don’t envy you being married to a man who is not only the President of the United States and one of the most polarizing personalities around.

And that left me with what to write about this morning. As much “fun” as it was to poke fun at Hope Never Dies: An Obama Biden Mystery, I couldn’t face reading more of it this week. (And thanks—I think—to Uncle Lar for sending me the entire book.) Real life has left me with little brain power for reading anything that needs much critical thinking. I wasn’t in the mood for another liberal tome, even if it would give much snark material. Honestly, I nearly contacted Sarah and said there’d be no post today because my brain had taken a vacation.

Then, as I was checking Amazon for something we need for the house last night, several “recommended” books caught my eye. One in particular had a blurb interesting enough that I downloaded the sample. It very well might become my next full review here. (Yes, I will get back to The Coddling of the American Mind. But that may have to wait until Mom’s able to do more on her own than she is now. To say I am exhausted mentally and physically is putting it mildly.

What book, you ask? Stop Mass Hysteria by Michael Savage. The subtitle pretty much says it all: America’s Insanity from the Salem Witch Trials to the Trump Witch Hunt.

I’ll admit I was skeptical initially. While Trump has, on the whole, done a better job than I expected, I’m still not a complete fan. I wish someone would take his phone away from him, deactivate his Twitter account and coach him better on when to keep his mouth shut. But he has managed to get a great deal accomplished, despite some of the most hateful and hate-filled Congress critters and their supporters doing all they can to stop him.

The blurb, once you move beyond the intro bit was enough to have me download the sample. What do you think?

Since Donald Trump’s historic ascendance to the presidency, American politics have reached a boiling point. Social and economic issues, even national security, have become loud, violent flashpoints for political rivals in the government, in the media and on the streets. This collective derangement has a name: mass hysteria.

In his new book, STOP MASS HYSTERIA, #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Savage not only deconstructs the Left’s unhinged response to traditional American values like borders, language, and culture, but takes the reader on an unprecedented journey through mass hysteria’s long history in the United States. From Christopher Columbus to the Salem Witch trials to the so-called “Red Scares” of the 1930s and 40s and much more, Dr. Savage recounts the many times collective insanity has gripped the American public – often prompted by sinister politicians with ulterior motives.

Dr. Savage provides vital context for the common elements of dozens of outbreaks of mass hysteria in the past, their causes, their short and long-term effects, and the tactics of the puppet masters who duped gullible masses into fearing threats both real and imagined. By shining a light on the true nature and causes of American mass hysteria in the past, Savage provides an insightful look into who and what is causing dangerous unrest in our lives – and why.

What surprised me is this book is published by Center Street, part of the Hachette Book Group. I guess they have gotten tired of publishing liberal drivel that doesn’t come close to earning out and that finds its way to the discount shelves in weeks, not months, after release.

Anyway, as I said, I downloaded the sample and started reading. I’ll admit to being pleasantly surprised so far. As much as I didn’t want to read another book praising Obama or Clinton, either of them, I also didn’t want a book that did nothing but fawn over Trump. The man is doing a better job than expected but he is far from a saint. So imagine my surprise to find, at least in the first chapter, a book that appears to be pro-Trump but not to the point of blindly following him. Better yet, Savage’s writing is engaging, at least so far, the topic is interesting enough to keep me reading.

I mean, who can begin a book with a negative attitude when it is dedicated to “the men and women in law enforcement who are on the front lines protecting the rest of us from the violent, radical, left-wing street criminals whose goal is to tear our society into pieces”?

Wondering if he would keep that tenor in the upcoming pages, I started reading.

Chapter One’s title is “We’ve Reached a New Mass Hysteria Inflection Point.” I think anyone who hasn’t lived under a rock in a deep, dark cave and who has at least a single working brain cell would agree. It’s been a long time since this nation has seen the likes of the antics we’ve witness since Trump took office. When you have sitting Congresscritters calling for their followers to all but attack members of Congress, when you have a former First Lady who also happens to be a former Senator and former SecState basically calling for open insurrection, you know fear and hysteria are in the air. Like any good carrion feeder, they smell it and do their best to drive the frenzy without thought or care for the consequences.

But what does Savage have to say?

Hatred, “the most accessible and comprehensible of all unifying agents” is “spreading like a virus into all-too-willing-hosts.” This hatred has unified many liberals, no matter what their differences. This is a hatred of Trump, of his policies and his followers. It isn’t the only case of mass hysteria in our country right now (look at #MeToo, for example) but, according to Savage, it is “likely the most destructive”.

He cites three examples, “three of the most malicious acts in living memory”, as having been carried out by the left.

First, AntiFA’s publication of the home addresses of ICE agents. Savage appears to have little use for AntiFA thugs (oops, did I just use a bad word?), calling them “that group of lawless, self-styled, anti-facist anarchists masquerading as ‘activists’.” Can’t say I disagree. Their actions put not only these agents but their families in danger. But that doesn’t matter, at least not to much of the media because of Trump and feelz and whatever other false justifications they can come up with.

Savage’s second example or, as he calls it, “obscenity was the odious suggestion by Peter Fonda. . .that Barron Trump, son of the President of the United States, be locked in a cage with pedophiles.” As Savage points out, the media was strangely silent when Fonda made his suggestion. Oh, there was some coverage of it but nothing like there would have been under the previous administration. Can you imagine the outrage, the demands for not only FBI and Secret Service investigation but Congressional investigations as well had Fonda said that about the Obama daughters? Yes, there is a double-standard and it is alive and well and living in our MSM.

As for the third example, it comes to us from that paragon (cough) of Congress, Maxine Waters. During a toy drive, and on many other occasions, she has egged her followers on to “push back” at the Trump administration, members of his Cabinet, etc. She has done everything but put guns in their hands.

As Savage asks, “Where is the outrage? More importantly, where is the humanity? Where is the decency?

“It is gone. It is lost in the sea of mass hysteria that dominates our world in a way and at a level that history has never before seen. Can it be stopped before we have an actual civil war? Can it be stopped before America is lost?

“The question is a real one.”

And it is a question that’s been debated here at ATH a number of times.

But don’t get the wrong idea. The book isn’t all about what’s happening now. Savage writes about contemporary and historical cases of mass hysteria in the book. One thing, however, is the same in all of those cases: hatred. He also notes that “today’s mass hysteria must end before it ends us.” Truer words haven’t been spoken, at least not for a very long time.

There is more, much more in just the first chapter of the book. As I said, it caught my eye and now it’s caught my interest. The next chapter is about the history and mechanics of mass hysteria. It’s followed by chapters on how mass hysteria is the secret weapon of anarchists, how mass hysteria forms and spreads, etc.

So, are you guys interested enough in the book for me to finish reading it and to do several post about it? Or would you rather I look at something else?

All I know for sure is I will be finishing the book or trying to. So far, I’ve seen nothing to warn that Savage is going to go off the rails and turn the book into a Cult of Trump sort of thing the way so many of the Left’s books are Cult of Obama or Cult of Hillary or Cult of Bernie books.

(All quotes come from the Kindle version, preview edition, first chapter of Stop Mass Hysteria by Michael Savage.)

I know you guys have been worried about how unorganized this blog (and frankly my writing for PJ and other things) have been this last month and a half or so. I know because some of you have pinged me by various means to make sure I was okay.

I am okay.  I’ve been caught up in a cycle of cleaning/repairing and doing home improvement projects.  It started with my “having had enough” of the cat pee problem in our basement and taking a black light to the walls of that bathroom.  I realized every one of them were marked, and honestly probably by the former owners’ cat whom they used to lock up in the master’s bath.  Because that wall had never been painted, since the original builder’s pain, I killzed the wall up to two feet (no, our cats aren’t that tall, but the wall wicks moisture) and then painted the whole bathroom.  That was a day, but then other things happened.  The pantry into which we’d just thrown stuff on moving got on my nerves enough that I just HAD to organize it.  That took an entire day. Then there was preparing the downstairs apartment to be a fully independent place (because having older son eat with us every day and simply have a tiny counter at which he can make coffee and a bar sink big enough to wash cups at is okay, but I refuse to have newlyweds actually LIVE with us and that’s on the plans soon enough — guys, I need dates, and what I’m supposed to do! — so, there must be a functional (enough) kitchen down there.  The entrance is already independent, though I wouldn’t advise the side-steps in winter.)

Then I cleaned and organized my closet, which was still cluttered with moving boxes.  Weirdly some of the clothes I was ready to donate as too small when we moved in fit me again (yay) so not all is lost.

Anyway, in the middle of that there was buying wood for two rooms on the bottom floor, which will need to be done, and yesterday “finding the pee spot that is stinking up the entire house” and neutralizing it as well as fall cleaning of the downstairs.

There are still all the floors to redo in wood (no asthmatic — even if it’s been in remission — should live in a house with carpet floors.) and the guest bathroom to get the same treatment as the master bathroom for the same reason (except there it’s been painted and the walls are purple.  BRIGHT purple.  It’s a tiny bathroom.  I’d ask what the former owners were thinking, but I don’t think they were.)

I know, half of you are rubbing your heads and wondering if this is writers’ block.  I’ll be honest, I wondered the same, but I don’t think so.  Or not anymore, anyway.

I think I know what this is.  For the last twenty years I’ve been hypothyroidal.  For the last five years before two years ago (so, seven years) the hypothyroidism has been critical. Which meant among other things that everything was let go.  Two years ago I started being treated, but the dose was nowhere near right till this February. (MIGHT still be on the low side.)

This feels like waking up.  When you’ve been severely depressed, the first emotion that comes back is anger (and that happened with thyroid treatment too, btw) and apparently for me recovery means cleaning and organizing.  Which makes perfect sense.

That this is on the borderline of a transition to “just us two” is also part of it. Because if things are organized, I can actually be MORE productive.  I.e. with “just us two” it doesn’t take much to keep an organized/finished house clean.

The thing is, though, that I didn’t realize that was what I was doing, or that the net result has been EXPONENTIALLY more clean and organized.  Why didn’t I notice it?

Well, because when you start projects like this, it gets way worse before it gets better.  Particularly when the project is “house improvement” it’s like your entire house becomes a construction zone.  (When we had a bathroom built adjacent the master bedroom at a former house, we slept with a bucket of cement and discards next to our bed for three months.  It seemed permanent.)

So to me this has been “riding the edge of crisis till they resolve.”  And things seemed to get exponentially worse until they got sort of okay.  By that time I didn’t remember the previous state of things, so I just felt they were “sort of okay” when done.

Then older son came back after two months away and kept commenting on how clean and organized everything was.  which was a bit of shock, because that’s not how I thought of  it.  I just thought of it as “For some reason I find myself creating these messes that take me forever to clear and leave me exhausted.”

But he’s right.  And when he said it, I blinked and suddenly saw how much more organized/cleaner/easier life was becoming.

The thing is that in most big projects, you make a bigger mess on the way to cleaning it up.

Please keep that in mind when it seems like the world is coming apart at the seams.

Actually what’s happening is that, the left’s lock on the news being broken, people who don’t agree with Marxism no longer feel alone and isolated.  I.e. we’ve woken up, and we’re aware of the need to clean society of this corroding philosophy.

They of course are reacting with madness to losing what they thought was a locked-in position of power.  And cleaning this up and bringing that portion of the country into marginal contact with reality is going to take forever.  And it will probably look worse before it looks marginally okay.  Also, because the left exerted a monopolistic control on media, entertainment and education for about 100 years, most of us don’t even remember what the previous state looked like, so we might not realize when its improving.

But the thing is even the mess is a sign we’re starting to clean up.

Be not afraid.  Go and clean.

Yesterday in the comments, there was a discussion about the bitter fruits of #metoo.

And it made me wonder exactly what else was supposed to happen.

Sure, in many industries women are treated shamefully.  This is usually the kind of industry — like writing used to be, like literature still is, like academia, I’m sure, also is — that is afflicted by oligopsony.  I.e. there is only one buyer (the gate keeper) but far more suppliers than could possibly be bought.  In such a market it quickly becomes known that the reason you’re being bought or rejected is not just the quality of your work. I mean, it was known in the nineties when countless “how to write” books told you to go to conferences and workshops to meet editors, because it’s easier to reject the work of an unknown.

In writing and publishing — and yeah, other industries — there is another level of crazy induced by not being able to “control” how well your book does.  I.e. so many people put their hand in, a critical failure by an office drone at a publishing house — say stealth releasing your book in eform and telling no one, not even the author — can make a book “fail” because by the time the paper book comes out your numbers aren’t great on Amazon, so the bookstores don’t order it, etc.

In that sort of system, where the fault is always the supplier and the supplier is always expendable, it helps to be in good with the gatekeepers.  Women are treated shamefully, yeah, but so are men.  In different ways, sure (not really always.  I’ve heard rumors.  Everyone has. Men too can be sexually harassed when they’re powerless.) but still treated shamefully.  I’ve heard of men whose publicity for a book was quietly dropped after they disagreed with their editor on a trivial non-book-related matter, for instance.

So, yeah, horrible things happen to women — and men — under systems where people have absolute power over the career of others and have never learned economics, and also, honestly, don’t care for the field or what happens to it.

It seems to me, particularly since in the twenty first century most of these systems are in rapid failure mode, that the way to deal with it is to get around and build around them.  It’s surely happening in publishing, and as for Hollywood, the tech isn’t so far off.  For education, the tech is here and what is holding us bad is accreditation and prestige, things that should arguably be easier to get around than tech.  Or at least which are possible to remedy by being loud about it.

It is patently obvious oligopsonies are poisonous to the soul and the mind.  The fact they also engender sexual abuse is almost irrelevant.  Oligopsonies by definition destroy the fields they “serve”.  (Particularly when the people who exert power have bee misstaught economics, but that’s something else.)

So sure, the #metoo movement had a point in Hollywood and such places.  Perhaps too narrowly focused on just women, and just sexual abuse, which in turn led to its being quickly spun into crazy.

I.e. it was rapidly presented as being a problem everywhere and of every woman.  Which in turn led to women complaining about men with a slightly off color sense of humor, men who might not have meant what women thought they meant, men who were so old their hands wandered aimlessly and might, maybe, have touched something, and men who were ugly and dared ask a woman out. Oh, yeah, men who knew more than women about any given subject, were also more than ever shamed for “mansplaning” (something that now involves any appeal to logic, so women using logic are also accused of it.)

Look, in the States, in our day and age, no woman my age or older has experienced “patriarchy” nor anything resembling patriarchy at large.

Sure there are toxic work places.  I worked in one (physical location employment) and I’m sure other women have also (and not just fields like Hollywood, but places where the boss is a handsy jerk.) but a) this is not the universal experience, far from it.  b) if these men are discovered and revealed, they are universally reviled by men and women.  It has been so since I came to this country in the early eighties.  There are legal and social means to deal with this kind of thing.  The cartoon of the boss pursuing the secretary around his desk was at least 50 years out of date.

But women are told that #yesallwomen and #metoo called for every woman to chime in with SOME incident.

It took exactly zero seconds for the movement to devolve to “he looked at me longer than I felt comfortable with.” as well as demands that all men denounce men who do this, and SOMEHOW mind control them into not doing it.  Sorry but “I should be able to walk in a dangerous neighborhood and no one will attack me” is fantasy land.  In the entire history of mankind, including periods where attacking someone meant death, there have been safer and unsafer times and places, but there has never been a time where somehow no man would ever attack any woman (or man.  Again, let me point out that while the “abuse” or “attack” is different, men aren’t safe in this type of neighborhood either.)

Since men STILL lack the ability to mind control everyone who shares the same genitalia with them — just as I can’t mind control the Shabies (sheep+babies) who fall for these “movements” and make these demands — that portion of #metoo was always going to fail.  How could it not?

So, what has #metoo and #believeallwomen and #yesallwomen wrought?

Well, what it seems to have wrought is young men (and generally men who might be in mixed industries) refusing to work with women, and certainly refusing to work with women alone.

Because any woman at any time can accuse you of anything, and the presumption of innocence doesn’t apply.

In companies that contract with government and where quotas (of course there are quotas) might be observed, I predict a vast preponderance of open floor plan offices, and maybe as time goes on some kind of morality officer, that keeps an eye on everything.

Also you thought you wanted unisex bathrooms? Ahahahahahahahahahahah.  I suspect that bathrooms for the sexes will be soon located at opposite ends of buildings, and if the idiocy doesn’t stop, there might actually be a panty-check which never existed before.  At any rate, anyone in possession of a penis, no matter how gay, or how much they identify as a woman would have to be insane to enter a bathroom where a woman could claim to have been raped.  Hell, I’m not sure of entering bathrooms with other women and no witnesses, and I don’t have a penis.

Unless of course, you take to filming all your calls of nature from the moment you go in, if not using the all-men bathroom.  (Sure, men can probably be raped in bathrooms, and are, but you know, no one ever said #believeallmen.)

Other things are already happening.  No man in his right mind will meet with a female colleague in an isolated spot.  One of the reasons I didn’t drop out of writing entirely in 2003 was a long talk with a male colleague in a park near the convention we were attending.  Sure my husband and his assistant were nearby, but they pretty much ignored us for the whole of it, because it was a long and involved talk about how publishing worked.  Would it happen now?  I don’t know, but I doubt it.

In my own field I’ve seen men accused of sexual harassment for criticizing a woman — in a non-sexual manner — in a series of emails, or offering to help the woman get over some craft issues.  And this was before #metoo.

I’ll point out the other reason I continued writing after 2003 was a bestseller who took it upon himself to call me several times a week to coach me out of the dismals, offered me his agent (didn’t work out) and in other ways tried to get me over the hump.  Would he do it today?  Who knows?

Now?  Any man who offers to help/apprentice any woman he doesn’t know extremely well/trust absolutely is a quixotic fool.  Particularly if that involves any kind of in-person mentoring.

In fields like STEM where women are fewer, this will result in beginning, “apprentice” trainees being ignored and isolated.  It will result in men being afraid to work for female supervisors when it involves any sort of even vaguely possible time alone.

The fruits of the #metoo tree are strictly segregated work places, in which men for their own protection can’t afford to help and mentor women.

Is this what was intended?  I don’t know.  The left always talks a good game, which results in a lot of shabies thinking they “care” and therefore giving them the moral high ground.  But the fruits are usually the same.

Help the poor? Generational welfare and broken families.  Universal education? mal-education and illiterate graduates.  Universal health? dead babies.

I think part of it is the insistence on treating men like widgets who should fit their place like cogs in a machine.  It never occurs to them that poor people are not exactly the same as rich people and the reasons might go beyond the “don’t have money” to cultural, nutrition and yes, even genetic reasons (though those don’t tell us anything about any particular individual, because human genetics don’t work as eugenicists think they do.)  It never occurs to them that the obvious physical differences between men and women lead to differences in perception, or vision, or, yes, culture.  No, it’s always “if we make people treat everyone the same, everyone will be alike.”  Which results in things like the French terror, or the Stalinist purges, and some pigs being more equal than others, but never mind that.

Men and women are different.  Sure, we can work together in the same work places, if you make allowances for the fact that you’re different. Men will, yes, be more interested in ah… carnal matters.  Seems to be a function of testosterone.  Women will often read meanings into gestures and events that are incidental.  If you convince women no sexual jests should be made in their presence (even if not aimed at them) because that victimizes them, or that calendars with pulchritudinous young women are an objectification of ALL WOMEN and also an insult on them, rather than something that makes men happy and hurts nobody, or that any man who asks them out and isn’t their type has oppressed them, then they can no longer work in a field dominated by men. And they will be pretty hard to work with in any field.

The calendar thing?  Hell, some of my best professors had them in their offices.  It amused me a little when I went into conference, but I never thought it was a sexist thing. Men like pretty women in scant attire.  And women like barechested firemen holding kittens (yes, the calendars exist.) Liking the visual means nothing in terms of treating the other sex with respect.  Again, why should it?

And yet they’ve convinced us that’s offensive to #yesallwomen and probably would cause all our hair to fall out or something.

Sure those calendars were more prevalent among men, because men are more visual, but women are more verbal.  Any number of romances and the equivalent of those calendars.  Should men run screaming when they see a woman with a romance novels?  And tell me anyone can read the Anita Blake series (even the first few books) and not find men objectified as sex objects.  And yet I read them and emerged without thinking of my husband and sons as such.

Again, all this seems to be predicated on people being exchangeable, and all the same.

Even if well intentioned, the fruits of that tree are always poisonous, because they don’t fit reality.

And the fruits of #metoo, like the fruits of feminism in general seem to be to make women isolated, powerless, and unable to work in fields and in ways men do.

Maybe it’s time to reexamine the tree?

*Sorry, but after two weeks of construction work, I find that TYPING is too tiring. I barely got through the post on Mad Genius and it probably makes no sense whatsoever. So I should probably take a day off, or at least a few hours, and do something non-demanding, like crochet.  That way I’ll be better and able to write tomorrow.  And FYI, I’m too old for construction work.  So I have to write a million or so books, so I can pay someone to do this stuff for me. – SAH)

Tough Love by Dr. Karma

So I watching this TV movie on TNT years ago, because my parents and aunt were, and it hooked me after only a couple minutes. I would’ve been inspired if I hadn’t kinda already made the decision to head down a similar road a couple years ago. This is what it’s all about. Not coddling and excusing the behaviors of kids but toughening them up, teaching them what they’re made of.

People often complain that libertarians and conservatives have no compassion. That we simply don’t care about the less fortunate. While I can’t speak for others, I do care. Thing is, in my admittedly short time on this earth, I’ve learned the difference between acting like you care and actually caring. The dichotomy is something I’ve seen in relatives, friends, teachers, mentors…basically anyone in a position to affect the long-term behavior of anyone else in a meaningful way.

In practice, it’s quite easy to tell the two apart. One type defines caring in terms of what they themselves do. “I did [blank] for them.” Or “I gave them [blank].” The other kind of person defines it in terms of what they get others to do. The most important people in my life have always been of the latter type. In one or two cases, it took me several years to realize just how important they were.

Which doesn’t change the fact that without them, I would not have taken the path I did. I would never have known what it was like to break your own trail, to clamber over the obstacles in my way, to find the meaning of what strength is. Without them, I would have trudged down an easier path, worn smooth by the countless number of feet that passed before mine, and I would be lesser for it.

As steel must be forged in the hottest of fires, so too must the human spirit. And while there is a danger that one can go too far, becoming as brittle as the hull of the Titanic, in my eyes the far greater menace comes from not being exposed to the inferno in the first place.

We accept that the immune system is strengthened by exposure to pathogens, that muscles only grow when stressed to their limit, that without gravity, bones do not grow strong. But far too many of us deny the importance of being pushed to one’s limits when it comes to personal growth.

The key to a child’s success is not their diversity training, their self esteem, or their ability to use large words. It isn’t in making them ‘feel loved’, or in the clothes they wear. It isn’t in being passed along to get a meaningless high school diploma. It won’t be found in a four year degree either. People will only realize their potential when their success is contingent upon their own efforts.

Perhaps my biggest problem with leftist thought when it comes to this issue is that it is a mindset that consists of nothing but excuses. Why one ethnic minority can’t match the success of others. Why one sex hasn’t achieved what the other has in various pursuits. Why children of the poor are unable to achieve what the offspring of wealthier people are able to. And, as in all things, some of these arguments have merit, whereas others hold so little water as to remind me of my youth in the Dust Bowl.

The best of these are nothing more than extenuating circumstances. They explain why some people haven’t accomplished what they are capable of yet. And while they’re somewhat valid in that context, they do nothing to contraindicate the future success of these people.

Yet what the Left tends to focus on isn’t the fact that these people have unrealized potential, but rather the aforementioned extenuating circumstances. Social welfare now encompasses 43.5% of our budget. The ghetto? As large as ever to these admittedly cynical eyes. Affirmative action has before my very eyes grown to encompass some recent immigrant groups while ignoring others. Exclusionary politics and who hurt who are the rule of the day in their minds. And while righting wrongs is a noble pursuit, it does little to change what Maslow called self-actualization. While it’s a useful term, Maslow’s framework itself is exceedingly flawed. Many of the greatest figures in history never had the trappings of comfort and wealth; instead they succeeded because they were willing to push themselves. On the other hand, every one of us can point to many, many acquaintances who rather than being enabled by their wealth and comfort were instead hobbled by it.

Rather than getting their hands dirty as Mr. Clark and I do in our respective professions, they treat these symptoms, willfully turning attention away from the disease growing within. They reward people for their poor choices, they remove the sting of failure from the inability to realize one’s potential. They act like they care, but they never make the steps to actually better the lot in life of these people. They never show people what they’re capable of. And they never demand they do it.

They seek to spare us from the flames, and in doing so leave us as useless as a lump of raw pig iron.

** Dr. Karma is an attending physician at (information redacted). His many professional accomplishments include contributions to evolutionary biology and saving an untold number of kids from stupid adults and an even more stupid entrenched bureaucracy. His primary accomplishment remains convincing his coworkers that he’s a pediatric specialist rather than a hitman in a mere six months. He specializes in whatever he feels like that day, and his coworkers are too scared to point out that he’s ‘just a psychiatrist’. The kids get better just to get him to stop yelling, singing, dancing, or dressing up like batman. It works, so he’s good with it.

The Quest For Truth — or Who Are You Gonna Believe? – A Blast From The Past From July 2014

*Sorry.  I was going to write a post and then I realized how dropping-dead tired I was.  As is trying to find a post exhausted me.  So bear with me.  I’m going to take a nap, so maybe I can work. Interestingly now the press lies on the other side, or keeps silent on the good economic news or even more farcically tries to find reasons why prosperity is bad.  Plus que ca change.- SAH*

“What is truth?” a man of the world asked, and washed his hands.

And now in what was once the land of the free, we’re reading newspapers that sound like echo chambers and we’re asking ourselves, “What is truth?”

I don’t now, and you don’t either.

In some cases, like when “the truth” refers to who created the world, or the date set for the heat death of the universe, this is not exactly a problem.  At any rate, I suspect the answer to the first doesn’t filter well through time/place bound minds, and so, the best we can do is an approximation.  And, as Heinlein put it, one of these days you will know.  Until then, you and everyone else just do the best you can.

In other cases, though, not knowing the truth is a real problem.

I am the sort of person who is always suspicious when too coherent an image is presented — or as my mom puts it, I can’t see a freshly painted wall without making a little scratch to see what’s beneath — which means I never precisely fell for the glossy images the Soviet Union presented in the seventies.  Does anyone but me remember it?  The glowing production numbers, the assurance that there were no poor and no unemployment?  Why in the eighties I read a poor idiotic journalist who’d visited the USSR enthuse in the Charlotte paper about how the very simple cartoon she’d seen on Russian TV represented their embrace of simple living and sophisticated aesthetics.  When in fact it represented their penury, their old equipment and, yes, the fact that their audience had no other choice.

In Europe this sort of self-delusion was almost universal particularly among the intellectuals.  You see, they had bet their future, after WWII on a Marxist-lite mess of pottage.  To suddenly find out that neither socialism nor its big, bad cousin communism worked, would have shattered their view of the world and revealed that they’d in fact been taken for patsies and wrenched the more or less functional core of their country’s economy, and engaged in massive redistribution… for nothing.

So they couldn’t believe that, and instead chose to believe USSR was a finely tuned, humming machine of success.

They managed to believe this despite the fact that visitors to the Soviet Union inevitably caught a feeling for just how deprived these people were.  But of course, they could tell themselves that they were just rich in non-material things.  (Someone tried to make a similar point when I echoed a post by Charlie, on Facebook, in which he pointed out how astonishingly well the Free Market has done in the last fifty years, in making us massively more wealthy.  All of us.)

They managed to believe this despite the fact that escapes occurred overwhelmingly in one direction: from the USSR to the free world.

Humans can believe just about anything if it’s printed in glossy magazines and nice (wholly made up) figures.  Particularly if it tells them what they very much want to believe.

So… You’ve probably by now got the glad tidings, that our unemployment is way down, and we’re roaring…

Do you believe it?  Or does it seem like a repeat of the “roaring recovery through the summer of 12 which continued through the elections, so that smart people said that “the economic policies of the Obama administration are working.  We must give them more time” even as they made fun of us skeptics who said “uh… isn’t this awfully convenient timing?  And lookit the innards of these figures?”

Amazingly when the real news trickled out they were not only bad, but appalling, kind of like the squalor beneath the facade of the USSR.

Steve Green goes into the figures behind our “good news” here.

Is he right?  Or are the people right who say “see, cutting off unemployment insurance works?”  (Of course it does.  Drops people off the books like a rock.)

Look, I know I have my haunch.  Yeah, yeah, the plural of anecdote isn’t data.  Bah.  Do you see the job market superheated, right now?  Are your friends spoiled for a choice of jobs after years of unemployment?  Do you see the restaurants with a wait after work, as they had even ten years ago?  Do you see new shops opening?  Do you feel the economy taking off?

Or are you sitting there figuring out how to make your car limp another year, and are your friends in pretty much the same situation?  Are you tempted to cry while grocery shopping, because everything costs three times more? Is your family all out of luxuries to cut, and is now cutting into what you used to consider necessities?

I’ll confess my situation and those of my friends resemble the second more than the first.  I confess after summer of recovery 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 and… I don’t believe the economy is roaring back.  I confess I think this is a case of lies, damn lies and government reports.

But the the truth is as unknowable as the truth about who created the universe.  While I doubt the fact sand figures of our sad situation are transcendant and unknowable by the human mind, when you are dependent on a government for all your information, and when that government visibly puts ideology over information, you end up not knowing.

Look, it’s entirely possible that people who were dead broke in their town in the USSR, and who knew all their neighbors were broke, yet thought that maybe, possibly, in other towns the economy was roaring.  They had no way of knowing.

By making itself an uncritical lapdog, our media has made itself even more partisan, more unreliable, than the old Pravda and the glossy Soviet Life.

Which means the books are cooked, but we don’t know how far.  We don’t know if some books aren’t cooked.  We don’t know which books are cooked.

The problem is not just that absent information on what’s really happening, we can slide slowly into the abyss, as others before us — Zimbabwe, Argentina, Greece — have.  The problem the information on what is going on with the economy is vital for a hundred different decisions: which job to take; what property to buy; whether to invest in this or that.

Of course, the administration that couldn’t run a lemonade stand doesn’t know that.  They’re academics and ideologues for whom the essential ingredient for success has been fanatical adherence to progressive ideology, not rational analysis of reality.

And so they spin their numbers and they think if they click their heels three times and wish really hard, this time when they stop telling us lies after securing the election, it will really be true.  The economy will be roaring, you see, roaring.

It might very well be true, too.  Being from Colorado I’m used to massive fires, and they do roar as they consume anything of value in their path and leave only ashes and destruction behind.

Which is what I expect to be plain once this last effort of obfuscation evaporates.

But until then even sensible people are believing those glossy pictures.  Because none of us wants to see the real squalor.  It must be that we love simplicity!  Yes, and we’re really aesthetically advanced.  And besides, this is a wonderful day until we get buried in the corn field.

And we don’t know the truth.  Knowing you’re being lied to is not the same as knowing the truth.

They say the truth will set you free.  Perhaps that’s why the administration is so carefully making sure no one (not even the various departments who make up one or the other set of numbers, but assume all others are right) has it.

And meanwhile we drown in a welter of made up figures and pretend facts.

“What is the truth?” a man of the world asked.

At least he had the decency to wash his hands.

Sorry to be so late today and not to have written a post yesterday.  Yes, I was still doing home improvement work, and we didn’t even get to the tiling, though we’re hoping to do it this evening.  By the time it was time to do it, we were so tired we were a danger to ourselves and others.

When I finish this post, I’ll go downstairs to finish the cabinet work, so only the tile remains tonight.

A bitter cold has set in, so cutting the tiles outside is going to be “fun.”

We’ll warm up a little in the next week, but right now it reminds me of the ionic autumn of my childhood, what I think of when people say “November” (which accounting for differences in altitude is about the same as October in CO.)

When you say “November” I think of tendrils of cold fog, of wood smoke, of grandma in her patio, breaking wood for winter.

I think I’d been very ill, when I saw her do that, because I was surprised at how cold and dark it was, and took great comfort in knowing grandma was preparing wood for the Franklin stove in winter.

I think she was sixty three, so seven years older than I’m now, which is weird, because in my mind I’m still that little three year old standing in the doorway, watching her break wood.  I’m still startled she’s gone, every time, and she’s been gone 26 years.

Our minds don’t age with your bodies, or not the same way.  I mean, I hope I know more and am more mature than I was at three…  At least on the good days.

But I keep forgetting I don’t have the energy and the strength of my twenties.  I’m so completely not in touch with my body, that I’ve been very worried all through September by my inability to write.  I thought there must be a psychological reason for it.

That is, until I got up early on Friday to do some work for PJ and found I couldn’t, and realized it’s not block, just bone-deep weariness.

I swear I’ve not been doing that much, just a little work around the house, stuff that would have taken me a few days 20 years ago.

TWENTY years ago seems a lifetime away.

And part of the problem is that I’m now feeling better, which feels like I woke up after a 20 year long slumber.  And I’m not as young as I used to be.

It’s nothing serious… yet.  It’s just getting tired a little earlier, running a little slower, not having as much upper body strength.

If I can figure it out, I’ll be fine.  Hopefully by May younger son will be off the payroll (he already lives elsewhere.)  And older son should be fully independent by the end of the year and married early next year.

That’s not so hard to get used to.  I’m ready to stop being mommy (though I’ll always want to see them) and pay more attention to my writing, my career, and, most of all, my husband.

I can see glimmers ahead of a new phase in life.  Grandma lived to 88 and was clear and able to the last week of life.  I’m hoping (at least) for the same.  And I’m looking forward to it, in a way: to a time when we’re just responsible for the two of us, and can come and go as we please, and be spontaneous if we wish.

The natural preserve behind the house is full of gold and red as the leaves turn.

Yes, Autumn was always my favorite season, and as my life is about to enter it, I’m trying to figure out how to make it very good indeed.

But now I have some cabinetry to finish.  Before the snow comes.