Yesterday, I saw the first harvest warning from local law enforcement. The annual harvest has started, slow down for farm equipment, your itty bitty plastic car will not beat a two lane wide hunk of slightly rusty metal older than you. More politely worded, of course.
The schools are gearing up to start: Bus Drivers Wanted!, law enforcement checking the school zone signs still work, the big downtown college welcome back fair, where local vendors show off what they have available to separate the college students from their financial aid, er, show off their wares, and the state fair is advertising heavily for the upcoming festivities.
Climate wise, it’s still summer. The hottest days of the year should lie ahead. (This year has been a touch odd, weather wise, here. Not unprecedented, just not normal. Eh, it’s one of those states where the ‘wait five minutes and it’ll change’ really does apply to not liking the weather.) The garden’s been weird, and the late frosts and birds wiped out all the tree fruit so far.
For a long time, as home schoolers, we met the back to school season with rejoicing: cheap notebooks and the good pencils! National and State parks empty of people! Weather still good and crowds gone! But as the kids grew up, it started to affect us more: back to school also meant return to enrichment activities, early enrollment college classes, actual regular college classes, etc. Now it’s fitting in a couple responsibilities I have to local and state youth organizations that need to get wrapped up before the youth are tied up in school, and the opening of the local civic symphony season.
Which is, that last, why you’re getting a fairly short note today. I’m running off to a pre-season music workshop this morning. Sarah is . . . I think working on furniture, weather allowing, though she might be supervising house painters and flooring contractors. I got an update on a book last night, along with “ragweed pollen, my head is killing me”, so she’s still alive, though the ragweed should probably be watching for axes.
If you are in the areas that have been burning and are now getting the misnamed monsoon thunderstorms, please keep your eyes open for burn scar mudslides. I know of at least one road closed indefinitely in my region. If you are in the area of I-70 that decided to wash out, be mindful of your roads, as well.
And please keep us posted, all you with medical events and natural disasters. We do note and worry about you.
(A Blast from the Past from https://accordingtohoyt.com/2018/08/28/the-masks-are-coming-off/ Huns, I am having a wild time looking back at what was going on in previous Augusts on my Blast from the Past days. Plus ca change, plus ca reste la meme. Although I think we see it a little bit more easily now, since we’re looking.)
For years, being a conservative or — in my case — a libertarian (no step on snek) in the arts, in writing, in publishing, in any cultural enterprise was an exercise in going insane.
You knew what was going on in private, you knew how hard they could hit on what absolutely minor and ridiculous points, but the public in general was not aware of any bias, and if you complained, they thought you were paranoid.
This was particularly the case when you were small potatoes, or when what they were doing was rejecting short stories or asking you to change your books.
Sure, I could sense the principles behind it, and how changing my books would make them say something I didn’t want to, but at the same time there was the weird feeling “um… is this true? Or am I imagining it? I’m a small-time writer, writing in a tiny-small-time field. How could they possibly micromanage it to this extent?”
It was particularly hard for me because I grew up under socialist (national then international) regimes, with occasional outbreaks of outright Ocasio-Cortez er… I mean Communism. This both allowed me to see the holes in it (no, truly, even at 13 or so, studying Marxism in five high school courses will cause you to see the holes) and, once I’d decided I was against it (I was actually fairly left, in the US meaning until my mid-twenties. Couldn’t help being. Young, stupid, and raised in a soup of leftists “facts”) I started seeing all the little ways the establishment — educational, cultural, arts — pushed people towards the idea of for lack of a better term “the inevitable certainty of Marxist victory.” The inevitability and echo chamber are essential, because Marxism is not particularly convincing if you look at it. If you’re sure it will triumph, though you’ll pick up a vast majority of “the scared” (which are way more than the “convinced”)who want to be eaten last or not at all by adopting the philosophy now and being strident.
So, coming from that background, my “feelers” detected all sorts of things.
In my entire — 34? well, if you count hidden pen names and work for hire more like 40 novels, but never mind — I had very few edits. Mostly the books get copy edited, not edited.
About 3 books were “edited” which amounted to “remove this scene, move that one” “I don’t think this sentence says what you think it does” and “this will heighten tension.” Those were as far as I could tell very innocuous.
Only two books had rewrite requests, and both of those, had I followed through on the rewrite would have changed the books completely, in one case yeah, to fit with feminist and “race” narrative (they wanted the Masai woman from the first book to accompany the two white guys to India on the adventure because “she’s as good as they are” — which no one was disputing, though perhaps less equipped for yet another culture change — and when I objected that if we took her to India we would get into issues of Indian racism, I was told that only whites were racist), and in another case to have my character LEAD rather than oppose the future analog of the French revolution. My refusal to do those re-writes, because then the books would say what I didn’t want them to say severely damaged, if not broke, my relationship with the respective publishing houses. (Yes, and I know some of you will recognize the book and go, “but that was… it can’t be.” What you don’t get is that I don’t have that big a name, and that the house isn’t MAJORITY libertarian/conservative. It just allows it and it depends on who you’re actually dealing with.)
But this was all done covertly, behind the scenes, and of course none of us could talk. First because we’d seem like paranoid loons. I mean, we’re complaining about things no one saw.
Second, because we would never work in that town again.
As this started to change, so did the pressure on writers become more open and more obvious.
And boy, do they micro manage. Yep, at that level. None of their “intended” bright future can be questioned, not even the incidental bits, like “a female president wold be the best thing ever.” or “Leftists are always wonderful.”
And no, of course they’re not doing it on purpose, in the sense that they’re not trying to consciously push every little detail of the message. That would be exhausting, and also require them to be super-geniuses (they aren’t.) I’ve known and been friends with a lot of lefties before the current frothing times. Haven’t dropped them, though some of them have dropped me. It’s not that they consciously police every detail. It’s that they are immersed in this “vision” that includes every little detail of the socialist paradise and its coming, and they absorb the latest directive from the echo chamber. So when they see something against that, they flinch and want the painful part removed. Like, in the French Revolution book, I suspect someone looked at how I was denying that equality of outcomes was a good thing, and got very upset “no, no, she’s supposed to be supporting these.” probably even considering what I had done an error, not an intended thing.
But that’s traditional, and look, guys, I have friends in journalism and in education, and I know they get the same exact pressures. “No, no no. You can’t teach that. You must teach this.” “No, you don’t want to report that. Or at least remove this word. Otherwise it gives people the wrong idea.”
Heck, sometimes headlines get changed and strange assemblies to discuss some current events get caught (so much of these when kids were in school.)
So here’s the bad news: our culture has been immersed for almost a 100 years in a cohesive, monolithic narrative. A narrative that moved steadily left, with no relenting. This is why those of us who are older than about 35 grew up in a world where voicing a dissenting — conservative or libertarian — opinion got you labeled “crazy”and “uneducated”. If you were denying what everyone knew, confirmed multiply from unrelated fields like news, research (oh, so easily manipulated, particularly in the soft sciences) and entertainment, then obviously you were either crazy or uneducated or, yah, stupid. This is how leftism became a positional good.
The good news? The barriers are coming down, the doors are blowing open, and now we know we’re not alone, we know we’ve been lied to and manipulated. Sometimes we don’t realize the magnitude of the manipulation which, yeah, can be staggering.
And yeah, I know, some people on the right are convinced indie channels like Amazon are out to get them. We know facebook and twitter and yeah Google are.
I contend Amazon isn’t — yet. None of the cases I’ve seen are convincing. Also, when it comes to indie publishing, they can hit a few, mostly on covers and titles, but they can’t do this kind of micromanagement that trad pub does. Why? Because they can’t. Because they’re not dealing with 10 or even twenty books a quarter. To police every indie novel, every story that goes up? I would take a massive work force, and not the third-world-country-uncertain-in-English one that Amazon hires.
Won’t happen. Not saying that we don’t need alternatives, and yeah, we’re working on that.
But that’s exactly the thing. PRECISELY. In exact detail. There are alternatives. Or there will be, once things become untenable. And as the masks come off, as each corrupt medium and source goes full turnip, people shy away from it. Not just us, mind you, but the Muddled Middle. How many people think CNN is reliable anymore? The crazier they go, the more they make their agenda obvious, the shakier they get.
And when they reach a certain point, alternatives become viable. Even when we think they can’t. Look at journalism, which we thought was immovable. But it’s not.
The USSR had to regulate typewriters, because they were dangerous to its stability of uniform message. So were copiers and mimeographs. Mimeographs, which in the west caused only a ripple of really bad fanfic could bring the ability to control information down. Then fax machines came in and it was goodbye.
The current technology has issues, but one thing it’s doing is making it difficult for the left to maintain the unified narrative and view of the world without which it CANNOT survive.
Sure, I won’t guarantee they won’t win some elections. Given their amazing fraud machine, they might even win most of them. And yes, I know how dangerous that is, because it can take us into actual blood on the streets and much much worse, a reaction-regime which is not America in any recognizable way.
But in the end, regardless of how rocky it gets, we win, they lose. Because they can only survive where every voice repeats the same and logic never intrudes. And that’s not the world our technology is shaping.
(Say a prayer for Sarah and Dan, as today they perform the final duty of any pet owner to their Havey.)
(Photo by Jeff Henry, National Park Service)
Once upon a time, not so very many years ago, the summer skies were mostly blue and clear . . . not in 1988*, but before that, and after that.
But that isn’t far enough back. I’m lucky to live in a place that still has living memory of when was far enough back, at that.
An elderly friend told me that when she helped her daddy pull cattle off the range for the winter, they always fired the range, because the Indians had told her daddy to do that when he first came out and settled. The transition of the land from nomadic to ranching/farming is just outside of living memory, today: the oldest generation here are the first settled children born here.
The experts decided at some point that fire was very bad, and banned the regular fall burning.
And here we sit, under an orange sky, with a red sun, in June, July, August, September . . .
Somehow, we need to get back to the ranchers firing the range when they pull the cattle, and burning all the stuff that needs to burn, when the fall rains and snows will put fire out, and the burns will be light and skippy like they were back before the experts got involved because they happen so often they burn the tinder fast and don’t get into the larger plants.
It seems increasingly clear that absolutely everything has had the same problem of incorrect experts infesting the system. People who didn’t have the entire picture, only parts, and wanted to fix the problems, and did fix the problems, they could identify, but in so doing broke the entire system and left us with a world prone to conflagration.
All it takes is a spark, and there are so many sparks blowing around right now. Who knows how things actually work? When did they actually work? In what ways did they not work that left openings for improvements that were actually the seeds of destruction?
Much of it was a multi-generation process of breaking working systems to improve them, in the name of progress, in the name of scientific advancement, in the name of modernity, equality, charity, environmentalism . . . and some fields have definitely improved immensely at the same time as they have created the conditions for destruction. It doesn’t seem to have been pure malice, but misguided and/or ignorant do-gooderism, with a touch of malice slipping in here and there.
Like Sarah always says, Build over, build around, build under. Keep building, and try to rediscover what used to work in the areas you can see starting to smolder that you can touch your own self, and build from that.
*Yellowstone Fires. The Yellowstone Fires were a direct result of the long time policy of suppression of fires being lifted. There was too much to burn, and did it ever burn.
For those who don’t wish to follow through, he claims there were no real fat people in the fifties/sixties, when mothers cooked for their families, etc. It’s one of the those things of “he’s right and wrong” because he’s much younger than I and I can assure him the having home cooked meals was not universal, or even close to it, food was already processed by the time people bought it to use as ingredients, and there were indeed fat people (though very rarely as abnormally fat as now, but you do see those throughout history too. And I can go into that if anyone wishes me to write on fat, and why our society is exceptionally “fat”. It’s a number of circumstances, including that we’re as a rule older (the very fat people of the past were usually very wealthy, meaning they could live longer with serious physical issues. Like Henry VIII with a debilitating, never-healed leg wound) and that … well, the pictures that Devon uses to illustrate the “there were no fat people” are part of the problem. Because those pictures of the sixties and seventies show people who were by and large on extreme diets due to the worship of “thin.” We do know there are serious metabolic consequences to whip-saw dieting — trust me, I’m a case study — and to early-life anorexia, as well as to extreme dieting while pregnant, which screws up the baby.)
The post is still worth reading, and I’m very glad it can be said. It’s just his being younger than I, I think, and also falling into the writer trap of “there was a master plan.” This is usually true in novels, never true in reality.
Sure, there was a short of prospiracy of cult devotees of the communist manifesto in places of power in entertainment and mass communication which led to the poison of “Marxist feminism” inserting itself into the dynamic and making everything objectively worse.
Note henceforth I can refer to it as simply “feminism” because “feminism” in modern society is Marxist. But there was, before that nonsense, a sort of sensible feminism. It curbed the greatest excesses of societal oppression of women (which happened because women are the most precious resource of any society. Do I need to unpack? You don’t let the people who can literally give your tribe a future wander off on their own and be captured by the enemy, for ex. This leads to curtailing the movements of women, historically) and advocated for stuff like a widow’s ability to manage her own household and money, without needing to return to her parents’ home or be subordinate to her inlaws. My grandmother was a feminist in that sense and at points it was opposite what is considered feminist nowadays. How opposite? Well, you see Victorian feminism was for women and children. So, it actually encouraged a woman to have children, treat her children well, stay home with the children and have no other employment, if the husband could at all manage to support her.
This was most often not possible, btw. The mid 20th century ideal of the housewife who stayed home and did nothing but watch her kids, cook for the family, decorate and maybe garden is the ideal of a very wealthy society. As such it was probably transitory and illusory, both. It was also, and Devon is absolutely right on this, aspirational and amazing. Because if you can afford to do it — and are temperamentally suited to it — what is better than to spend your life making the life of your family and community better?
It is particularly suited — center mass — to most female personalities. Women tend to be more social than males and like to perform acts of service for the community. It’s not that we’re saintly, it’s just what evolution selected for in females probably from the time we climbed down from the trees, if not before.
While women’s work tends to be indoors and non-dangerous, most women throughout history worked. And I’m going to lay down a marker here that I’m not even sure most women watched over their own children, in the sense we tend to think of it, the sense of the mid century housewife doing everything for her own kids. (And here, as with my thinking those very thin people of the sixties and seventies — I have my own pictures and honestly it looks odd, because people a generation before and after were if not “fat” more “normal”. I think that thinness and all the dieting are reflection of “listening to experts” who indulged their own fancy — being the seed of weight problems later, that housewife having nothing to do but mind her kids seeded the boomers neuroticism.)
While people tended to raise their own kids, and certainly (as I’ve said many times) the societies (upper class Victorian, Roman) that outsourced the raising of kids to hirelings did NOT fare well long term, child raising was more… flexible in the past.
I still caught the edge of this, to an extent. I mean, my mother, like my grandmothers, worked from home in her own business, and minded me in the sense that mom — and grandma — were there and provided meals at set times. But to be honest, from the time I was four or five, I played with other kids in the neighborhood for entire days. They played at my house too, sure, but that meant mom watched us all maybe one day out of six (Sunday was for extended family.)
More importantly, going back to former times, the children were expected to help with household work at about four, and often were apprenticed/had jobs/were in serious school (how serious? Well, people often entered university in their pre-teens. And don’t tell me they didn’t learn as much. They didn’t learn the same, but the amount was maybe more than we do as preparation) all day, etc.
It is a mistake to look at the middle years of the 20th century as “the way things ought to be.” To an extent we were already seriously off course.
To the point of fat and there not being a fat gene, etc. True. But at the same time there are things that break the system and predispose people to accumulate fat.
I’m not going to defend pre-packaged food, which is a thing regulated by the government and therefore by “experts.” Like, the ones who decided in the eighties that fat was bad for you but sugar just “got used up” which is a metabolic misunderstanding of epic proportions. For me and my family I always preferred to cook from scratch, because it’s healthier and often cheaper. But let’s face it, the diet of our ancestors wasn’t particularly wonderful, between lack of refrigeration and often being limited to what grew locally. Sure, they got limited amounts of protein, which might be good in a way, but which we’ve also find stunts growth and perhaps brain development.
Go ahead and cook from scratch and local if you can, but the fat epidemic is probably more related to see saw dieting in an attempt to reach the standards of thinness the experts said we should have, and the fact our health care has gotten good enough people survive with serious illnesses. My metabolism has never been the same, for ex, since I was put on strict bed rest for six months with first son. It is likely at a less wealthy time I, myself, and my son would both have died of eclampsia.
However, there is one contributing factor that absolutely can be blamed on feminism and that Devon hit on, though glancingly: the fact that all of us work, and work ridiculous hours.
Someone else mentioned that Americans define themselves by their job, as if that justified our existence. They’re not wrong. I figured that out in the aftermath of 2018 and being let go by the two main purchasers of my work. I realized I was suffering from middle aged unemployed man syndrome, as I’d defined myself by my jobs, even though they were in many ways crappy and stress filled.
And it’s interesting that Devon pointed out corporations jumped all in on “Women should have jobs” because it expanded the workforce and therefore lowered wages for everyone, because my friend Bill Reader had tentatively told me the same a few weeks ago. As in “Was it all a ploy like importing a lot of third worlders? A way to depress wages?”
I don’t think it was a “ploy” as I don’t think it was calculated. I think it was partly, sure, the communist manifesto at the back of a lot of influential brains, but also the fact life had got so good. Women not only could stay home, but were under-utilized. Look at recipes from the fifties and these people weren’t really cooking from scratch, but buying a series of canned things and combining them, with the result that a meal that would normally take half the day to prepare (Still does to me, if I’m doing something big from scratch, which is why nowadays it’s so hard, because we don’t eat that much, and it seems a waste of time.) And cleaning the house had gotten exponentially easier with machines (Seriously. I washed clothes by hand. You don’t have any idea how much time it took.) Women found themselves seriously under-employed, and therefore started casting their minds to what else they could do.
Now, if that prosperity had hit fifty years later, when there was an internet, there would have been a flourishing of work-at-home jobs, and I still think that’s where we’ll end up. But in the sixties, seventies and eighties, what it caused instead was bored women to start ENVYING their husband who got to go out and have jobs. (The fact most men’s jobs were no longer difficult and arduous helped with this. Women are still not hankering to be construction workers, truck drivers or trash pickup workers.)
Did corporations step on the accelerator and aid and abet this ethos? Yes. But corporations are served by university graduates, and the universities had already come up with the narrative of the oppressed woman freed by work.
And this in turn depressed wages, which in turn made it absolutely necessary for everyone, male and female to be “married to the job.” Because there’s always someone who is willing to work harder/make more sacrifices than you.
Recently we found ourselves explaining to both sons that yeah, though in very different jobs, we too worked 18 hour days in our late twenties and up through our late thirties. It’s what you have to do to establish yourself. And to be honest, because of increased longevity “establishing yourself.” and gaining credibility in your field, no matter what it is, takes longer and longer and longer. I mean, Dan is still working way more hours than he should be, and he might still (I haven’t checked) be considered “the kid” in his office. (Even if he works from home.) I know I suddenly crossed from “Raw beginner” to “Old woman of science fiction” somewhere in my mid fifties, and I’m still working raw beginner hours.
As I tried to tell my parents at one time — with marked lack of success — that Americans aren’t overweight because we’re lazy but because we work too much. It’s just most of our jobs are so all-absorbing.
So, in the essentials — aside from quibbles on the “fat” thing — I’m in accord with Devon that feminism has caused a break in American life, and by extension destroyed the family in our health.
It’s more that feminism was not so much an intended thing as a trend that picked up after World War Two.
Part of the problem is that all reproduction is a war between men and women — or in the animal kingdom males and females — in that each sex tries to have the most babies with the least expenditure of energy and effort, so at the expense of the other.
If you study evolution, this is how some species ended up with things like…. well, eating your mate right after copulation, or completely atrophying and becoming a pimple on your spouse’s side, but a pimple that can still impregnate her.
That kind of war is all very well, but the point of it is that it leads to more children.
This broken situation where each man and woman is an independent and competing economic unit is not leading to more children, or even a healthy and connected life.
Instead, it’s led to a life of anomie where humans have value only as economic production units, and can be discarded when no longer (or not yet) functional. Where it’s a shame to not be “employed” and “producing.”
This type of life is obviously completely compatible with communism/Marxism, in which the individual only matters so long as he produces, and where he’s a widget who is the same as everyone else.
And like all forms of Marxism, it leads to death and unhappiness. (Not necessarily in that order.)
The bitterly funny part of it (more bitter than funny) is that the entire left blames this on “capitalism” and doesn’t realize their version of feminism does nothing but feed all humanity into the maw of faceless corporations.
It would be funny if we weren’t living it and at risk of dying laughing.
(Note from Holly the Assistant: last night, Sarah lamented “I’m tired and I want to write Vic,” and I replied “Let me run a Blast from the Past tomorrow and go write Vic.” Vic being Skip’s mom, and a very interesting character.” So, in favor of getting a few words of the next book written, the blog gets a rerun today.)
We’ve long known that the image of reality has diverged in the two parties. Not the actual reality–whatever your party affiliation it’s still possible to talk to you about the doe with the twinsies by the old egg farm, you can see her same as I can–but the image, the view projected by others and accepted by those not personally present at the scene of, of the reality.
This got exhibited just now on a perfectly innocuous State Patrol social media post about checking trucks for safety at the border (northern). The trucks are entering a state that goes from 900 ft above sea level to over 10,000 ft above sea level (though I sincerely hope none are scaling the peaks, and are staying to the more paved roads that top out about 8,000). A little double check of the brakes and tires seems appropriate. One group is praising the State Patrol–by far the majority. Two small groups think either that State Patrol should be checking for illegal alien drivers or that they are there only to harass poor innocent brown drivers. Somehow, I suspect that the legality of the drivers entering the USA is really the department of the border crossing guards just north of the State Patrol stop, and the State Patrol is probably about as brown as the drivers anyway.
But I’ve seen it everywhere. One group condemning President Trump for not sending firefighting help to Canada, the other group condemning President Trump for sending firefighting help to Canada so it’s not available to local fires.
One group condemning Congress for grilling that poor old hero Fauci, the other group condemning Congress for not jailing that old crook Fauci.
One group condemning parents for not getting their kids vaccinated thus causing the spread of measles, the other group pointing out that the current cases are vaccinated adults.
One claiming that Russia or Iran has won and the Ukraine or the USA are done for, the other claiming that the Ukraine or the USA has won and Russia or Iran is on the brink of total collapse.
One claiming that ICE is arresting and deporting Native American Tribal Members, the other pointing out that the photo is too blurry to make out if it’s ICE, there’s no evidence that the arrestee was deported, there’s no evidence of the legal status or tribal membership of the arrestee, there’s not even a name attached . . .
The award winning children’s book is banned! The smut is removed from the school library, go buy it online you nasty person.
A rational person would think these are fairly . . . reality checkable things? As checkable as the doe with the twins is? But they aren’t . . . that is, we ourselves cannot go there personally and look. Well, some of us have looked at the lack of aerial support in the timeline we would prefer to local fires, but it’s a bit harder to tell if that’s because the planes are stateside elsewhere, out of country elsewhere, getting repairs, or some other reason why reality simply couldn’t conform to our expectations.
We rely on reports from others, and those others have their own agendas. We trust that others have fact-checked or ask people we trust to fact-check if we don’t have the knowledge. Or we accept the reports based on our own biases and previous knowledge.
I don’t think my leftist acquaintances are going to be born out in the midterms in their belief that President Trump’s supporters are abandoning him over “starting a war in Iran”. I don’t see that in my right acquaintances at all. Maybe a little pissed off he hasn’t ended it yet, but no one thinks he started it. Far more likely that the right rejects some senators for not passing the SAVE Act, (or shenanigans at the ballot boxes cost some re-elections) and the left interprets that as Trump’s supporters abandoning him.
I’m pretty sure the Huns are the most political fact-checking prone community out there on the internet, but keep in mind your neighbors have different fandoms, and the folks who are most engaged in the fandom of which breed of sheep has the lowest parasite load in your local conditions, what the best drought condition supplemental feed is, and which herd dog breeding pairing would be best, might could use a heads-up on what that ballot proposition actually will do, or even a reminder of when the various elections are. Just try to keep your geeking out short enough they don’t zone out, please!
*Alike in dignity? Well, yes. Exactly. I didn’t claim either had any amount of dignity at all, did I now? And neither did Shakespeare, did he? Also, recollect the next two lines of the prologue, if you would please, and let’s try to skip that, thank you very much, in so far as it is in our power to.
The lyricist was clearly not familiar with having to do his own work in the summer, by the way. (Edwin DuBose Heyward, if you care to read about him.)
Summer is when everything needs to be fixed and weeded and watered and chopped down and all in the hot. Sarah mumbled something about sanding furniture this morning. I braved the hardware store and bought a new ceiling fan: the old one broke after forty years of dedicated service. Not the motor, either, the pot metal that had held the blades. It’s not the modern design where you can put a new blade on, but they all came off a central ring . . . anyway, it’s clearly time to play with electricity while standing on a ladder. (Not to worry, as long as the electricity is paint by numbers, I’m good to go. Although in this house, it often isn’t.)
Meanwhile, the weather is doing exactly as pictured above. which at least offers some relief from the heat.
Like houses, and gardens, and trees, did I mention the pruning? countries take a lot of maintenance. We see the local Roads and Bridges doing their bit right now, with orange cones everywhere, filling potholes, chip sealing, repaving . . . but a lot of the work goes on in places that are less in plain sight.
Do you have a state campaign finance sunshine law? My state does, and it’s enlightening to see who’s getting how many donations from where. Mr. “I’m just one of the people” Republican gets an awful lot of money from out of state unions, for example. Now would also be a good time to sign up for poll worker training for November, if you’ve got not much else to do that day.
There’s a growing push to change the county medical services here, mostly because the new non-government hospital has managed to irritate everyone in a variety of ways (sanitation. billing, eating all the independent medical practices) and make the old county hospital look good by comparison. That’s one to watch, and keep an eye on the commissioners. Who is watching your county commissioners? Your city council and mayor? Anyone?
We hear a lot more about the big government than we do about the local from the media, by design, I think, and not malicious: everyone is affected by the federal government, but state may only affect five-hundred thousand, and county might be down in the four digits. Can’t sell nearly as much news if you have a maximum market of eight thousand souls as you can if you have a maximum market of the entire country and half the world beyond. So we hear that the House passed this, that, and the other, the Senate is sitting on their hands, and the President signed another executive order on any news site, but we don’t hear the closer-to-home news unless we go digging.
So after you mow the lawn, while you’re sipping your lemonade or beer and cooling off, check in on what shenanigans your local government, the not-orange-cones division, is up to. Because I promise you, they’re up to something. They always are. And it might just be something good.
There are moments in life when you know something will end, and you’re not sure what’s ahead, but you know it will be difficult, at least for a while.
I think we’ve all gone through this, when moving, when graduating from a school we loved, or much later, when our kids are growing up and we know they won’t be around like that for very long.
And we can enjoy it a little while. We know what’s coming, but we get a chance to say goodbye.
There are other times that the bolt comes out of the blue. You go out on a beautiful September morning, walk the kids to school, and then get back and make coffee, and there’s a friend on the phone screaming “Turn your tv on, turn your tv on.” And after that day, everything changes, first slowly then very fast, so that a few years later, your writers group of tight knit friends doesn’t exist, your husband has changed jobs, and you have moved, and what seemed to be halcyon days that would last forever are gone.
Or you know, you come back from a trip, sit down for the winter, and plan to visit your parents next year and have all sorts of things you want to do. And then you’re locked down, your city goes to the dogs, your health heads south and two years later you’re in a place you never thought you’d live and your life before is a distant memory.
I’ll say for the last that the very last day before lockdown, as it happens, Dan and I took one of our rare days off, did the Museum of Nature and Science, the Zoo, a walk in the park and our favorite restaurant for dinner. I’ll always have that. That was, in retrospect, my goodbye to the Denver I loved. I just didn’t know it at the time. If I’d known it, I’d have done just what I did.
On the other hand, seeing my parents — given their ages possibly for the last time — is still not possible, for a whole host of complex reasons, of which “I’m afraid something will happen and I won’t be able to come back. And even if I knew Portugal would coast through this, while it will be hell on Earth in the US, I’d prefer being here, where I belong, with my people.” (And that’s true even if my kids were with me there.)
Which one is better? Knowing or not knowing? Saying goodbye or not saying goodbye? One last golden summer, or not?
In the moment we are facing right now, we’re not given a choice, are we?
We know. We all can feel on the ground the thumps of the approaching beast.
Maybe we’ll get lucky one more time. G-d looks after drunkards, fools and the United States of America, and maybe he can still get our butts out of the bear trap, even now.
As some of you — and I myself — have mentioned, even though we’re in deep, deep trouble, the rest of the world is worse, and there is some protection in being the one eyed man in the realm of the blind, even in this.
Maybe we’ll see it play out in the rest of the world and right our boat before we take in too much water.
Maybe. But also, maybe this is the black dog speaking, but that’s not what I see ahead of us. I’m sorry. I think the idiots in power are going to continue idioting because they think no one is onto them.
And I think the water is going to get very choppy, very fast.
Americans aren’t used to deprivation, much less to hunger. I think it will get ugly. Very ugly.
Yes, I think in the end we win. But judging from the other countries that are now rebelling, I think it’s going to come to the brink of an irreversible situation.
Yes, I think we’ll reverse it. I think we’ll come around. I think we’re nowhere near done.
But I also think the next few years… two? three? four? are going to be difficult for almost everyone. We’re going to have to change the way we do everyday things in ways we can’t even imagine. We’re going to go through and have to do things we don’t think we could survive.
A lot of us, who are dependent on daily medication to stay alive, and who might otherwise live for another thirty years or so (forty, judging by my family history) might die if we can’t navigate alternatives.
I think most of — maybe even me, if I get very lucky — will come through this and see the other side. But we won’t be who we are now. And looking back at who we are now, we might very well think of this as our golden time of innocence, before we had to– do all those things, and endure all those things none of us wants to.
So, this last golden summer?
You know what’s coming. We all know what’s coming.
Take a day off. Take your sweetie to a park, or a museum, or the movies, or dinner, or whatever it is you’ve been putting off.
Take a day off and play with your kids.
Is there a trip you wanted to take, and is there some conceivable, not matter how much it requires you to pinch way to take it? Do it. Particularly if you and the family always wanted to.
Sit outside. Savor the peace. Take walks through the neighborhood. Forget your diet for just one day. There’s a chance the government will arrange for you to lose that weight anyway.
Mark some days, a week, a day a weekend. Go to that nice place you always wanted to go. Turn on the music and slow dance with your sweetie.
Be relaxed, be happy and savor it.
Make memories to take you through the hard times.
You can’t change what’s coming. It’s not something a single person can change. And you can’t prepare for everything. There will be things that take you by surprise, and those will hurt worst of all.
But for now, for this golden summer, this calm before the storm, enjoy how very very good life is.
Before everything changes.
(Note from Holly the Assistant: Isn’t it odd how much different and better and weirder and stranger things turned out then we expected four years ago? And in some ways worse, but in most ways better? And yet, the advice holds true: Make memories to take you through the hard times. Because there will always be hard times. And there will always be good times, too.)
(So today is the last day of the Annual ATH fundraiser, by the way.)
I know you all like cute critters, and we had one stop by earlier this week.
A bit of background: many, many years ago this house was built by some very weird people, and many years ago it was remodeled by some even weirder people. We do not have, nor do we need, air conditioning, and a fair part of the house will stay survivable even without heat in the winter. Most of our neighbors are not so fortunate and have more conventional homes. One result of this weirdness is that we are committed to daily opening and closing of the ventilation during the hot season. And I do mean committed: missing the moment by as little as five minutes means we gain a degree or two of extra daytime heat. And the windows mostly no longer work by crank, but must be opened by pushing out and closed by pulling in.
So, at approximately seven-twenty am, as the sun came over the ridge, on Tuesday morning, with less than the preferred amount of coffee in my system, I pulled the screens off our bedroom windows, pulled the windows shut, and put the screens back up. As I put the last screen back up, I noticed something in the corner that did not belong there. On the outside of the screen, mind you, but it did NOT belong there, and that screen had just been sitting on my bedroom floor while I fussed with the window!
Now, bats are all very well and fine, I loathe mosquitoes, but bats belong in the cracks and crevices and tunnels in the rocks on the mountain behind the house, across the creek. They do NOT belong in my bedroom window!
The bat hung out there for a while, as the day got hotter, and I kept the cats and dogs shut out of the room because the last thing I need is a bat loose in the house and a torn up screen. By and by, though, when we checked on him, we found he’d relocated to the bottom of the window screen.
Yes, I need to clean the window. But that’s probably the best detail photo of the little guy we got. Because understandably, we weren’t getting close. There has been a rabid bat in our county already in 2026, my husband went through treatment for a rabid dog bite as a child, and we do not mess with this risk. As a household, we may be slightly more paranoid than average about rabies.
At this point, my husband carefully pried the window open and the little guy crawled out, and ascended the wall.
He crawled around the wall for a while, then flew off. In the middle of the afternoon. I wish him well and hope he eats many, many bugs, and does not return to my house again, but sleeps in the rocks where he should be.
We think he’s a Little Brown Bat, based on size and ears and range of species, and we’re glad to have him and his kin around. Just . . . please not quite so close!
It amuses me which friends and relatives freaked out about rabies and which did not, which fell in love with the bat via photos, and how many did not mention white nose syndrome (no one, but it was the second thing that occurred to me in finding a bat where one ought not be).
I hope you enjoyed seeing our surprise guest!
Thank you all very much for your support of According To Hoyt, and for being a pretty awesome community of commenters. We love having you here. This is your last day of being bugged to support the blog this year, mostly because I pointed out to Sarah that this is a five Friday month and asked her to keep the fundraiser going until the third Friday for those biweekly folks who will get three paychecks. She grumbled, yes, but she hates having to ask in the first place for money.
There is a Give Send Go fundraiser for this specific fundraiser set up. Here is a Paypal Me Link if you prefer that. (Yes, I know. Paypal, but for now, they’re behaving.) If you have a monthly donation setup to the permanent Give Send Go, that is still working and thank you! There are also two substacks you can subscribe to. One is on the side bar of the blog, the other is supposed to be a newsletter, as well as giving you chapters of the current work in progress if you become a paid subscriber. It takes cards. For snail mail: Sarah Hoyt 304 S Jones Blvd #6771 Las Vegas, NV 89107
Or at least I will throw up a recent picture of lovely Circe for you. Look at those toe beans! Are they not the most amazing toe beans?
It’s occasionally hard to believe that this chill kitty is the full sister of the vibrating Quicksilver, but there we go.
How are cats?
Sarah will likely have an update on the State of the Sarah, or a rant about current events, tomorrow, but today she’s a bit swamped.
Hope y’all are staying cool enough this summer, or warm enough this winter, wherever you may be.
And the fundraising blurb, and yes, you lovely weirdos, Sarah does indeed see that you mailed unmarked quarters or put it in a different donation bin or whatever you in fact did do, thank you very much. Circe would say thank you, too, but she’s snoozing.
If you wish to donate: There is a Give Send Go fundraiser for this specific fundraiser set up. Here is a Paypal Me Link if you prefer that. (Yes, I know. Paypal, but for now, they’re behaving.) If you have a monthly donation setup to the permanent Give Send Go, that is still working and thank you! There are also two substacks you can subscribe to. One is on the side bar of the blog, the other is supposed to be a newsletter, as well as giving you chapters of the current work in progress if you become a paid subscriber. It takes cards. For snail mail: Sarah Hoyt 304 S Jones Blvd #6771 Las Vegas, NV 89107
Sarah has run off to obtain an appliance. So you get me for now.
An older friend lamented this morning in a non-local group chat that she’d missed a boil water order yesterday, but at least she feels fine. A younger friend asked how one even finds out about such things?
It’s a good question, with rather mixed answers, depending on your location, and no one real answer that works everywhere, and struck me as a good thing to bring up here, as obviously municipalities are failing to communicate to new residents how to find stuff out in their towns.
What I’ve learned so far: The HAMs find out about everything over their radios, someone else said local radio stations carry such alerts, so radio’s an option. Some folks still get daily papers. One has a local news blog that updates regularly to skim. There are text alert services in some areas. Someone said that the emergency sirens formerly used for tornadoes are now getting run for all weather events, which gets them ignored, unfortunately, but can be used to note to check the weather app or website. I get emails from the County, rely on Reverse 911 or a County Deputy showing up for Really Important Things (like GO NOW orders), and follow all the various interesting agencies and a couple local gossip groups on social media, and of course my neighbors talk. The hiking group wins the prize for fastest location and identification of any wildfire within eighty miles, interestingly enough. The neighbors get the prize for Large Predator Alerts.
How do you find out what’s going on? If there’s a wildfire, a SWAT situation, a flood, a tornado, or a cougar removing chicken coop roofs?
And since it’s Friday, and possibly your payday, here is your reminder that it is ATH Fundraising Season.
If you wish to donate: There is a Give Send Go fundraiser for this specific fundraiser set up. Here is a Paypal Me Link if you prefer that. (Yes, I know. Paypal, but for now, they’re behaving.) If you have a monthly donation setup to the permanent Give Send Go, that is still working and thank you! There are also two substacks you can subscribe to. One is on the side bar of the blog, the other is supposed to be a newsletter, as well as giving you chapters of the current work in progress if you become a paid subscriber. It takes cards. For snail mail: Sarah Hoyt 304 S Jones Blvd #6771 Las Vegas, NV 89107
According To Hoyt 