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We were all drafted into wars we didn’t begin*. A war, that if you’re a believer of certain religions, might very well have started with a serpent in a lush garden, either literally or metaphorically.**

We are born into a place and time we didn’t make and our life will be influenced by decisions taken by others, far away and long ago. ***

Things are certainly not what your parents would want for you. Judging by myself and what I want for my boys, that’s flat out impossible, because I want them in that garden without defect, walking with perfectly compliant animals amid the lush and perfect vegetation. (And older son would lecture those poor animals on biology. no really.)

We are all born into terrible and imperfect times, and with our own imperfections, of mind body, and yeah, spirit. At least–

Okay, so when I was twelve, I used to yell at my mom “I wish you’d never have had me.” That didn’t last because mom is more appalling than I in frankness, and she would yell back, “I didn’t want to have you and when I wanted to correct the mistake, your dad stepped in. So, go yell at him.”

It was appalling — also truthful — but it stopped me on my tracks. What it didn’t address was that my argument was stupid and flawed.

Yes, I grew up in…. difficult times. I’ll be absolutely honest, being an Odd there were no good times to live in. **** Particularly since I was born in an extremely conformist country where sticking out from the norm gets treated like the nail that sticks up and will be pounded down, but also because compounding the issue, my Odd parents didn’t think I was supposed to be taught the norms, but expected me to respect the norms which I suppose were meant to emerge spontaneously from my naturally virtuous nature as their daughter. *****

But you probably know I don’t do things by half measures, so I was born under a National Socialist (but not fascist which is a very specific thing, and certainly not Nazi) system, and then it transitioned, suddenly and to my 11 year old eyes unforeseeably to international socialist with vague shades of Mao (and the Maoists in control for six months) and violence and atrocities. *⁶

Which is a terrible thing to do to someone who was born fighting, and has no intention of doing as told.

Yeah, I made my peace with it, and found my own way to a place where i could be free and not live in fear of transgressing the rules I couldn’t divine. But– Now they’re trying to take that away from me, and I don’t know what to do about it. Or I do. But I can’t get anyone to listen to me.

Recently a young friend said it’s not fair to have children now. They will be unwittingly recruited into a war not of their own making, even if it’s just a culture war.*⁷

I wouldn’t say anything, except that I expect that there is a lot of that generation worrying along those lines, at least on the conservative side. ^*8

It’s really just a more sophisticated version of “you shouldn’t have had me” but because it’s “altruistic” it might convince what are at heart good kids, who have been handed a very raw deal as to the time they’re born in. ^*9

The thing they don’t realize is that we are all handed raw deals when we are born, and some of us manage to make good things out of them.

Look, I’m not beating up on the young ones. Heinlein himself fell for this. His reason not to try for children with his wife before Ginny ^*10 was that “who would bring a kid into this fucked up world?” If he had had children then, they would be now in their nineties, around my dad’s age. And yeah, if still alive and having inherited a don’t tread on me disposition from daddy, they might be very worried about the road we’re on. But they would have lived through the age of greatest American prosperity, and have had the ability to make a very good life for themselves.

It’s still just a sophisticated version of “why was I born”. It assumes you grew up in the worst of times, with the worst of possible paths ahead, both of which are demonstrably flawed if not outright crazy ideas.

Look, I said above, I was born under national socialism. I was. It’s a fact of life. I found, later, I couldn’t live under international socialism, so I suited myself.

BUT here’s the thing: my parents were born under national socialism. Their parents were born during a brief Anarchists in power interregnum (I think all of them.)

They all had good lives. Okay, the lives might have been distorted by those in power above them. There was a reason grandad worked abroad most of his life, and frankly, I don’t know how long till mom started screaming if the revolution hadn’t happened. (Probably not long. She screamed under international socialism, even though they were — trust me — more crazy and intrusive than under national socialism.)

But beyond the distortions, all of them had good lives, and had kids, and raised their kids. Now, I don’t think I could have tolerated either regime as a grown up. But I’m me, and I fit weirdly anywhere. And mind you, I’m not complaining. Well, I am complaining, because the ranks are forming NOW when I’m old and unsuited.

In point of fact, the times I grew up in were much worse than now. But we survived. And I even have some very good memories.

You can’t know. You can’t know ahead what your kids are being born into. No one can. The one things we know is that they aren’t being born into paradise. (D*mn it.)

My box of regrets is full of things like ‘if I’d kept my mouth shut and written leftist, the kids would be so much better off.” But on the other hand, I wasn’t ready to sell my soul, even for them.

The thing is, any kids you have will be born into a war. So it was since the beginning of time. But here’s the thing: they’ll have to make their own lives, live their own choices.

None of my fans will like to hear this, but your kids might very well decide to be statist drones. ^*11 (In which case, it will really suck to be them, but that’s on them, not you.)

All you do is give them life, give them the opportunity to choose. Ultimately, they will make their own choices, and yes, some will be things you wouldn’t make UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. This is something that’s very hard to fit in your heads, until the kids are in their twenties or so, but every parent since that garden and that serpent has had to face that.

But why give them life if it’s not going to be perfect? Or at least good?

…. Because it’s the only thing that gives life meaning, in the long run.

No, I’m not saying that childless people have no meaning in life, though I think a lot of them think they don’t.

What I’m saying is that if you care passionately about anything: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, say, even if you’re not religious (particularly if you’re not religious, because if you’re religious you view this life as a short preamble) you must have kids to invest in the future. (Or get close to the kids of others and hope to influence them. Which is harder. And it’s about to get massively harder for the left.)

Because in the end, those kids you “draft” “unwillingly” are the only ones that can win the war of human liberty. Or life. Or the pursuit of happiness.

You’re not going to win it in the present. And if you leave the reproducing to people who want government to care for them like a mother or a father forever, then liberty is going to go down for a count (it will come back up, because genetics aren’t all) because the kids will be raised with that. Yes, some of them will defect to our side, like some of us will defect to theirs. But on the main, temperament and disposition have an influence, and they will tend to go the way of the family, in the majority.

So if you care about the future, you’ll have kids. And you’ll do your best to raise the little sh*ts so they don’t defect, and don boots, and go stomping on human faces.

Because that’s what your ancestors did. And your ancestors before them. World without end.

The alternative….

I was tallying how few people in my generation, that I KNOW have grandkids. Even those with enormous families have maybe one or two grandkids.

I can’t begin to emphasize how this is not normal. I’ve preached about population dearth, but this is population crash: assume the position and kiss your *ss goodbye.

And we don’t know what comes next. I don’t know what comes next, and neither do you.

I know a ton of you were propagandized that on the other side of this there’s rainbows butterflies, and we’re all rich. They’re idiot Marxists. Wealth isn’t something to be endlessly redistributed. It needs humans to create it.

Times of population dearth are hungry and horrible times. And that’s not what we’re looking at. It’s 10x worse than that.

Add to that all the people who are going to find that most of their age group has no kids and gives no fucks; that the majority of their age group believes neither in G-d nor man, nor anything beyond them, and it’s too late to do anything about it. ^*12 And a lot of them are going to flip into end-times bacchanalia and crazy.

Which will be biblical and epic. After which the Earth will go very silent, as the children (particularly adult children) who depended on others looking after them die. Those that survive such “end times” will start again, if we’re lucky not from pre-historic conditions, but that depends on how ugly things get as they come apart.

It won’t be very far up from that, though, because it can’t be. Because we’ll have enough (maybe) for small bands of people, dotting the landscape. How long can one keep tech going? When in the end times the hedonists will insist 2 + 2 = infinity and teach that to the scant children?

“But Sarah, if we bring children into the world, they’ll just have to deal with that.” Maybe. Or maybe there will be enough of them, and enough of them will be sane and functional to keep us going over the very rough spot, so that we can emerge on the other side, still civilized and functional.

“But I can’t ask that of them!” Every generation asks that of every other. Each generation has it in their hands to end civilization. Not having a generation, or having a generation that’s 1/10th of the past just guarantees that the few that exist will fight in vain against the fall. The more we have, the more likely we survive this.

No, we are not overpopulated. We never were. That’s a big government statistical lie. It’s possible for humans to be overpopulated. That usually leads to invention and expansion to other areas.

But we can get under populated. And like the cooling of the planet being a much bigger danger than the heating of the planet, under-populated can destroy humanity, or send us back to living in hunter gatherer counts for a very long time. (I believe this has happened before. Maybe many times. Hence it being built into every language that our ancestors were much, much better than us.)

No, I don’t see communism as the future, and I don’t see communism in the US. I think the current crop of arrant idiots, quite the dumbest set to ever run in possession of Marxism and red crap, will try. They will TRY. But they’ll fail. I expect chaos and almost for sure violence. (Yes, I expected the beginnings this month. I’m not sure we’re not seeing it. There have been a few events… Besides a sitting (if illegitimate) president threatening us with nukes. And since this is the second on their side to do so, you know it’s what they really believe.) I think the violence only hasn’t happened because our proportion of young people (real, not statistical) is low, and low enough they were taught a culture of safetyism. (Because they were the precious few.)
But I believe violence will come, because humans are not tame, and this bunch is cornering us.

But even if we don’t rebel communism is designed on Malthusian and other completely insane assumptions. We don’t have enough people for us to pretend it even works. And if they take out the country that feeds the world, there will be no one to subsidize the pretense. (Yes, I’m sure the idiots think China will, but I’m not at home to Communist delusion.)

So, whatever you think you’re having kids for, it’s not that.

What is it? Bobbed if I know.

My parents couldn’t have foreseen the fall of Communism. They like every conservative in their era thought communism would win in the end, and that the only virtue lay in resisting it as long as they could. Their parents might have thought the children they were having children for was endless European wars.

It turned out much better than they could have hoped. No, not perfect — duh — because it usually does.

The truly horrific things — the black plague — tend to be absolutely unforeseen. And unplanneable for. They just happen out of clear blue sky, unforeseen.

Yes, tomorrow or tomorrow or tomorrow the sun could go supernova, and what if you drafted — DRAFTED — a child to the unforeseen end of the world?

I hate to say this, because I realize it’s a retroactive rebuke at Heinlein. It is also a rebuke on the new agey pamphlet that I was handed when older son was born:

We ALL have children for uncertain times. The total idiots are those who think their kids’ lives will be lived out in candyland with sparkles.

And yes, for some it will turn out very badly. Contrary to the stupid pamphlet, you can’t CONTROL your kids forever into the future, and if you could it would be terrible.

For some it will turn out very well. Better than you could have expected. Or do you think that Leonardo DaVinci’s parents, having an illegitimate son in a dirty-poor village expected him to die in a royal palace and be admired four hundred years later?

The real question is: Would you rather not have been born? Do you know anyone who would rather not have been born, unless they’re mentally ill, or 12 years old?

We can’t even CONCEPTUALIZE not existing, because the essence of life is to live, and pass life on. It’s the most basic thing.

Do the thing, if you can. Pass it on.

The doom of civilization I foresee is probably wrong, as all foreseen dooms, but it has a better chance of happening than “We’re going to be fighting them from the Gullags FOREVER.”
There’s not that many of them. They’re not that powerful. They are a terrified minority, fighting like cornered rats.

Be not afraid. And if you can, bet in the future. Bet in the future in the only way that matters.

The future might not belong to those who show up. But if no one shows up there is no future.

Only silence and emptiness.

Forever.

(** Metaphorically and by modern interpretation, it always starts with a serpent in a lush garden. See Leonard Cohen “It is in love that we are made.” — and yeah, I woke up in a weird mood, then the day got weirder, and you’re inevitably going to have to put up with it.)

(*** BTW, I’m not going to whack the regular who preached this at me, because regular. But there are another three comments on this that I DID NOT approve, to the point I wonder if my post yesterday got posted on one of the whacker “Christian” sites. So, for the record, “You were beautifully and fearfully made” is true. It’s also true “G-d doesn’t make junk.” (And incredibly vapid.) That doesn’t mean that humans are perfect machines, or that they have to live with everything they are born with.
I, thank heavens, I was raised in a religion that whatever its other issues understands that creation is still subjected to the effects of sin, starting with the original sin, and that G-d respects the free will of humans, even free will that distorts his plan. He obviously respects the free will of other creatures because by the time we became humans we had some very interesting ancestral systems that work at cross purposes. Take my auto immune. Your immune system is forever on patrol against different proteins. This is how most cancers we get (and we all get like 2 a day) never survive and grow. Because your immune system whacks them. HOWEVER either mine is insane (possible) or I express proteins that are different (I’m above the highest for Neanderthal genes!) So mostly it whacks me, leaving me at danger for cancer and making me scratch my arms raw. But I’m just an extreme example.
I’m not being heretical. There is still a miracle there. My older son says it’s a continuous miracle that humans continue living and don’t self-destruct any of the million of ways we can at any time. So, that is a miracle too.
I do realize people are uncomfortable with treating things that if you squint and look sideways can be considered moral failings. Which was the whole point of my post. Sometimes you have to. They are not moral failings, but have their origin in well-defined physical issues.
I have said I’m “still at large” on depression because, unless something unforeseen occurs, I DO have it under control. The worst I got was when Hypothyroidism fought on its side. I try not to have to take treatment for THAT because I want to make sure what I think with is mine.)
HOWEVER I wouldn’t be here without medical treatment. I’d have died in early childhood. And the ADD? I had a choice. It is severe enough that I could not get anything done the rest of my life, now I don’t have editors calling and demanding work (i.e. I’m not exernally regulated) or I could be productive. I choose to be productive. Some people manage ADHD fine. Because they don’t have as severe a case, or because they’re better at managing it. I can’t.
To anyone demanding one manage everything without drugs because “you’re beautifully and fearfully made”: I have a distant cousin who has warring mental illnesses the least of which is schizophrenia. When he’s well, he’s around and doesn’t take his meds. And then things go wonky. He watches himself all the time, and when he thinks he’s at risk for killing someone, he commits himself and gets the treatment. Yes, he’s beautifully and fearfully made. It’s not his fault HIS ancestors married their first cousins more than mine did, and gifted him both a brilliant mind and a severely flawed brain. And he deals with it the best he can. And in eternity his CELESTIAL body will be free of those flaws. Or would you rather he accepted G-d’s will and killed people, starting with his very beloved mother? I don’t care if your crazy interpretation of the Bible says. My branch doesn’t engage in biblio-idolatry. G-d might be a pantser and have plans to rescue everything into His plan at any minute, but he’s not a puppet master and you’re not a meat puppet. He allows free will to run in the world, and that means the free will of your ancestors affects you too. And if that’s not what you believe too bad, so sad, but you’re not going to convince me by shouting at me.)

***** And people wonder why Jean Jacques Rousseau is first on my kill list as soon as younger son builds the long-promised K’nex time machine.

^*6 Though you won’t find that in any history books, not even the mass graves found decades later. Hell, I don’t know if people in Portugal know about them. I don’t know how mom found out, though I verified it sideways and weirdly.
When I was telling a friend who worked for the State Dept. under Reagan about this stuff I started with “you’re going to think I’m crazy.” And he said “Oh, heck no, honey. We knew. We just couldn’t get anyone to listen.” And it was SUCH a relief.

_*7 Spoiler, I don’t think it will just be JUST a culture war. It’s been delayed due to the aging of the populations, but the blue model can’t go on. Their ultimate model, communism, has shown what it is almost half a century ago, and we’re running out of denial. And people are getting angry. It’s not a coincidence the FICUS wants to nuke us. They know. In fact, they’d never have cheated this blatantly or done the crazy things they imposed on us for a year and a half if they weren’t terrified out of their corrupt little minds.

^*8 The liberal side is still trying to figure out: what kind of genitals they have; what kind of genitals they want to have; what kind of genitals they’re attracted to; how to make babies in the middle of all this mess; whether the sacrament of abortion is more important than making babies. So, we’ll leave them out of this.

^*9 One of the things I like about Budhism and other religions that believe in Re-incarnation (The Mormons believe in Pre-incarnation, and I might or might not have known this at one time, but I no longer remember if they believe this particular thing) is that they believe the baby chooses the time and place to be born into ^*9*1 which absolves parents of that particular anxiety and responsibility.)

( ^*9*1 I don’t believe in that, but let’s suppose I did: did I have to choose such a strange time and such a backward place. If I believed that, I’d go around randomly whacking myself in the back of the head for being a dumb ass.)

( ^*10 Yes, she was a lush. But people have had children with lushes, and all of us have ancestors who are/were lushes. And yeah, he was sterile, in his fifties, when tested. MAYBE.
Because, look, they weren’t that good at determining that. We still aren’t. My best friend not someone to play around and besides her oldest is the spitting image of his dad was told her husband was basically sterile. She didn’t know it but when those results came back, she was pregnant with their first child. At any rate, due to Heinlein’s health issues, this might not have been true EARLIER.)

( ^*11 If only to piss you off or to be different. I mean, you guys know not all of my family is conservative. In fact none of them is for liberty, because they’re Europeans. But some of them are on the other side.)

( ^*12 For women there is a very specific end. Surveys suggest every woman who hits it childless wishes she’d had children. But hell, even women who had as many children as they planned, when it becomes impossible to have more, eat their own hearts out. Even those who tried to have more. Trust me on this. The saddest words in language are “it might have been.”)

Sometimes it’s important to know why you’re failing.

No, seriously. And it’s important to admit when it’s something, if not external to you, so intrinsic to you that you can’t do a hell of a lot about it.

Not as an excuse, but as an engineering problem. And so that you can figure out how to go back and this time not fail.

I have problems with this. My kids have problems with this. My husband has problems with this. Most of my friends have problems with this. This is why I decided to talk about it, even though it’s a bit cringey and it feels like I’m making excuses. I’m not. You need to admit what is making you fail, before you can do the thing and not fail. And even when it sounds like an excuse, it isn’t. It’s just a factor most people don’t have.

It’s been a shock to me as I get older to find that a lot of the issues I’ve struggled with since childhood are either physical or really bad training at a time when I couldn’t do anything about it.

It’s even harder to accept it.

Look, there are two problems here: one is that I often forget I have a body. My mental image of myself is fairly disembodied. I even think of physical tasks without taking in account the fact of my size, height or age. And feel vaguely guilty when I can’t reach the high shelves, despite that being something I can do nothing about.

Admitting that the body has other, more nebulous limitations: like ability to pay attention, or a quirky brain that scrambles digits between seeing them and writing them down …. that’s even harder, because I feel like I’m making those issues up and that I am at some level giving myself stupid excuses not to be perfect.

Nobody is perfect?

Well, that’s the second problem. I never really expect ANYONE else to be perfect, but I get very upset at myself for not being so.

And damn it, I know I’m smarter than the average bear. So there was never any excuse for not having perfect grades, when I was in school. Except that of course, I did all my studying and school work in short little intervals, followed and surrounded by vast oceans of time in which I roamed around in my own head. This might involve physical stuff, like taking notes, reading on something that I had no business reading on (up to and including rabbit holes of finding all the books by x in the house, and finding out if his characters all looked alike, as I vaguely remembered) or simply sitting with my brain doing the equivalent of having too many tabs open.

It wasn’t till 57 that I got treatment for ADD. Mostly what convinced the doctor is husband’s explanation that if I’m in line at the grocery and it takes more than two minutes, and I didn’t bring something to do, I’ll wonder off randomly, and leave the cart there.

This drives him — and me — insane. And all my life I thought I SHOULD be able to control it. Only of course, I couldn’t. Will power only goes so far, and as older son puts it “Mom, you’re not ADHD. You’re ADHD AF”.

Taking meds — which I hate, btw , but that’s life — gave me the range, and helped me see the difference between being on and not. This means when husband is trying to get me to choose something he’s showing me on the computer, or whatever, and I space out in the middle of his sentence I can point out the meds ran out, and I don’t want to have caffeine late at night. It’s not that he’s not interesting, or I’m not interested. It’s that my mind is flitting around like a cat on LSD. I CAN’T keep my attention on it, no matter what I do.

Is this an excuse? Well, I could use it as such. But what I actually found is that now I know what I was doing wasn’t normal, and where normal is, I can fake it for a time after the meds run out. And get stuff done. Tiredness though, means my will power goes to pieces, and that’s fine. At that point I can’t do serious, intellectual a follows b work, be it writing or buying something I need, by evaluating three different models. It just won’t happen. And if pushed, I revert to bad habits from when I was vaguely aware I wasn’t normal, but was trying to hide it, and pointed at one thing and bought that. (Don’t go there. No, really, don’t.)

Now I know it wasn’t normal, and I couldn’t make it normal by will power, though, I can work around. It’s like any other physical disability. You work around it.

Some disabilities are easier to deal with. Once I found out I was mildly dyslexic and PROFOUNDLY digit dyslexic, it started being easier to control both, and I worked out a great deal of tricks so I don’t confuse digits, or don’t measure twice and cut– Oh, hell did I do that again?

Sometimes knowing “thing” is there and working around it is all it takes.

The weirdest thing is finding out at 58 that a lot of the things I thought were moral failings are actually and for real physical issues. I could no more will myself to pay attention to something not fascinating to me for hours at a time than a deaf person can will themselves to enjoy symphonies.

There are other things, too. Weird food dislikes or avoidances that turn out to be the fact I have an issue with that food, and/or with a texture. And other minor stuff.

It’s a relief to stop beating myself and going “I have to try harder” and instead go “Oh, yeah, that’s because of x. Can I work with it? Do I want to?”

Does it make life easier? Yes. Is it a cop out? Oh, no. If I still want to do thing y I have to come up with a way to do it, despite and besides x.

But it means the reasons I fail are no longer “mysterious” given my status as brighter than the average bear. And it means that I can try again, in a different way, avoiding the definition of madness.

And sometimes I can even fake normal for long periods at a stretch.

Now do I wish I’d known this … oh, let’s be generous… 40 years ago? Damn Skippy I do. I’d have got so much more done with the time I’ve been given.

But you know, better late than never, and at least now I KNOW. And I want you to know as well.

Forgive yourself for what you can’t help, and work with, over and around things too. And yes, that also means your body’s sudden, irrational “I don’t wanna.” Find ways to bribe it to do what you want. Or get someone else to do it.

You’re not a floating brain bubble. And the ape must be appeased. And when you learn to appease it, the brain can reach much further.

Now stop beating yourself up, and figure it out. Even if it involves doing that ickiest of all things: forgiving yourself.

You know what garages are like. You keep things there. Things like weird old stuff, old car parts, empty computer boxes, chainsaws, corpses….

Okay. Probably not corpses. Except mouse corpses, which weird out younger son.

We still haven’t found a place to move to. We have found places we might/could but only if we have to. and we’re giving it till the fourth of July for the perfect house to come up before we settle for one of those.

But it’s time to get the h*ll out of Colorado — and good Lord, it hurts to write that. I’ve left a place I loved beyond and beside reason before. It’s not good — and we know it. It’s time to get this house ready to sell.

So far we’ve been going through the areas where things were so piled we couldn’t get into them, partly to clear storage space to put things in them while — emergency plan 5 — we move our essentials to a rental and look for a place to buy from there. (As you guys probably still remember, we’re BAD at buying real-estate, mostly because we’re Odd and live in the houses Oddly, so they have to fit OUR purposes. Strangely, this is fairly normal for writers, who tend to buy bizarre houses. (If I could find one of those poured cement diners, in the shape of turkeys or apples or Shrimp, I’d buy it in a heart beat, if it were weather-tight and cheap, at least. Alas, no one has offered one for sale.))

Anyway…. The garage mostly contains empty boxes, parts for cars we no longer own, tools to fix cars we no longer own. Tools for me to do house remodeling (Younger son: Mom, do you really need forty hammers? And no, they’re not specialized. The movers in the last two moves packed them and– Okay, later.) LOTS of copies of my books, a few of which are water-damaged beyond repair. (Younger son had a good idea for those. Because the last book sale was a mess due to the need to keep track of who ordered what, and different postage and such. So he said we should sell “boxes from Sarah’s Garage”: like three signed books — if you have them, you can use them for gifts — and a signed con program, cover flat or piece of art. And put them at a price about the same as the cover price of the books, including postage. Flat fee.) Look, I don’t do that many cons. Administering a sale is time-expensive and I’d rather be writing, and younger son has more important things to do, also, so– And how many boxes do I have/ Well, enough to take up a 5×5 storage unit. which we’re not going to rent just so we can continue dragging boxes around the country.

So– Sometime in the next month there will be “Boxes from Sarah’s garage.” And we won’t include a mouse corpse. Unless your cats REALLY want them. (We have a 400 acre natural preserve behind us (around that size anyway) so mice are a given.)

But meanwhile, after son, in an heroic effort, had dug and dug and dug, and filled the back of my car with donation stuff….

We found at the very back (near the mouse hole) a stack of oh, probably five by ten boxes, which were apparently stashed in there by our movers, when we weren’t looking.

Here, I’ll interject that I hate moving. I’d done it precisely once by the time I got married, from grandma’s house to mom and dad’s new house (now 52 years old.) We moved in an ox cart (it was about a mile, and the ox cart was a loan from the farmer) and well, that was it.

Mom and dad haven’t moved either.

However in the eighties, and with Dan in computers, it became obvious we were going to move a lot. Before we had kids we moved every two to three years. Then we moved to Colorado when older son was 1, and we’ve moved four times since. That is, if you compress the last move into “one time” which it kind of was, but not.

Because we got it in our deranged minds to buy THIS house which was on a short sale, it took us six months to buy this house.

Since we were renting while getting the other house ready for sale, we ran out of lease waiting for this one to come through and we moved to another interim apartment before moving here. In the meantime, Older Son moved away to school and–

Well, all in all we had five more or less complete moves in a year, which is kind of nightmare scenario for me, since my own particularly “neuro ATYPICAL thing” is that I hate having my cheese moved. I will endure the most bizarre arrangements, just so long as I can keep my daily routine intact. When the routine is in flux, I get grumpy and depressed and out of sorts.

By the time we moved into this house, almost exactly 5 years ago (the short end of the time we expected to stay here, but we didn’t expect the state and the country to go howling insane, honest) I was not only grumpy, but also very ill with a combination of ill-treated thyroid, and sleep apnea. The combination is bad for me, let’s say.

We had once before had things packed for us. Well, once and a half.

When we moved from South Carolina, we packed as much as we could, to save time/money, but we had a week’s notice that Dan was getting the job and, oh, yah, must start in two weeks. So we didn’t sleep for a week, but we still had the movers finishing up packing the kitchen and the bedroom. (Which is why I got to experience Dave Barry’s “They packed a coffee cup with the coffee still in it.” Yep, they did. They also packed the contents of the bedroom TRASHCAN which is why 6 years later, unpacking the last box, we stared in horror at a USED fossilized (more or less) infant diaper….)

Then we had people pack everything in Manitou Springs, when we moved to Colorado Springs. This was needed because it was early-years of Dan’s career, relatively speaking, so he worked 19 hour days, and I had two school children full time, plus a nascent writing career (three books a year, that year.)

So we had someone come and pack, and because they were packing and transporting in increments, I had to go to the new house and leave them to pack.

NEVER do that. NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER.

We were fortunate in the fact that they were really bad at identifying what was actually worth money, but I lost some tools and weirder stuff. (This was the move in which the weaponized umbrella left my life.)

It was however even weirder in the non criminal “What the hell” portion of it.

You see, they had given us an estimate for boxes that I thought was way too high, but they assured us that if the boxes came in under that count, they would — of course — only charge for what they used.

I was somewhat weirded out the boxes were the exact right amount, and I thought “they padded”. But I thought they padded by doing things like extra cushioning on dishes.

Oh, that would be rational and make sense, which is something I’ve found movers just.don’t.do.

The china was left half-wrapped, so we could lose irreplaceable parts of our tea sets, of COURSE.

No, in the boxes towards the end of it, what I found was that they had done things like fill entire, large boxes, with ONE SHOE and a lot of padding.

Though perhaps my favorite… You know those plastic lids you buy for cat food cans? The ones you use to cover the can, if you’re only feeding the cat half the contents (a violation of feline rights, but what can I say)? Yeah. Three of those in a large box. And a lot of paper. And the box was marked and delivered to… Master Bedroom.

So, we didn’t want to have movers PACK again, but I was very ill, and most of all very tired for two of those moves in a year. I was also dealing with stuff in my professional life that was taking ALL my attention and creating a shitton of stress.

So, husband convinced me to go with a packing service. This wasn’t part of the moving, but separate, and it has good reviews.

Okay……..

I knew there was trouble, when the lady doing the packing had a “hole” in a box and went looking for things the right size and shape to fill it. Sure. it saves boxes and money, but having kitchen cups in the middle of my office stuff is going to cost me time and aggravation on unpacking. I told her not to do that, but by then it was already too late (I’d been working instead of watching her.)

Then the movers did their thing. And you know movers, right? Regardless of what is marked on the actual box, if you turn your back for fifteen seconds, it will get put in the room or place nearest the truck.

Over the years, as we rearranged the garage, I’d found kitchen appliances, and — mostly, because they’re heaviest — boxes of books marked “library” (which is in the basement.) In fact, the library boxes were amiably distributed all over the house, as though they had no idea what a library was. (It has built-in floor to ceilin– Never mind.)

But we’d never made it to the most distant corner of the garage, partly because we THOUGHT those were all boxes younger son had abandoned with us when he moved. And because over time things that we were using to fix and improve the house (pallets of flooring, for ex) got in the way.

So, son has been making HEROIC efforts and clearing it up. There is still an entire array of shelves for Dan to go through, but yesterday I had fifteen minutes, so I went through and said, let me see anything that’s mine, and let’s see what’s in your boxes and if we can donate some.

…. The boxes clearly marked — by the movers — with son’s name…. well, no wonder he felt he had everything he needed and could leave them behind….

They contain my stuff, Dan’s stuff, some of older son’s stuff. Oh, and cat care stuff. What they don’t actually contain is any of younger son’s stuff.

Though one contained probably my entire “cleaning closet” and the mice had got into that, and… well, I hate to throw away swiffer pads and a hundred rubber gloves, but I’ll be d*mned if I’m going to try to use them with mouse poo and pee on them.

However, the two boxes that — so far, the day is young and we haven’t got to the storage room in the basement yet — take the absolute cake.

One of them says office supplies, and as far as I can tell, having opened it and looked in, it contains a table top water fountain, curlers, some projects in clay the kids did in kindergarten, and a proofread manuscript (which to be fair, is “office” broadly speaking.)

But the one I opened this morning was marked “Younger Son’s Room.”

Inside were… A Rex Stout novel I was re-reading at the time of the move. A portion of my silverware drawer, that I assumed had been stolen (including one thing with sentimental value and no particular value otherwise, but it looks good.) My good table cloths, including the Christmas ones, and the antique, embroidered and lace one that I normally use for Easter and hadn’t been able to find since the move (DUH) though I have all the (12) napkins. Stuff from my art room (art paper, mostly) and a package of printing paper. Some broken pastel crayons. …. Clothes pegs? AND the content of my card box where I kept story ideas, and which arrived empty. There’s a rubber band around the cards, so this was intentionally packed that way. (The box was in another box, natch. I gave up the cards for lost years ago. I glanced through them this morning. This is the Short-story-ideas file, so I might use a bunch.)

AND the entire contents of the “reservoir” of the pencil sharpener (which was not in this box and was unpacked in the first batch) evenly distributed to a one inch depth over the bottom of the box.

Honestly, I don’t even know what to make of that, or why she thought that should be packed. Or, if the pencil sharpener container fell out, why she didn’t just shake that into a trash bag. I mean, it’s jaw-droppingly insane, okay?

Onward towards our destination. I’m going to finish those boxes today, and hopefully start in on the library. And Bowl of Red is getting finished. And Rhodes will be on preorder soon.

And I promise not to send anyone any chain saws or corpses. Though at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if I find some of those in some boxes in the garage!

Yesterday I recorded one of the pre-recorded panels for the virtual Liberty Con (next weekend.)

I must warn anyone who sees me, I’m not a zombie and I didn’t suddenly age 40 years. Mostly there was a confusion with the time of the panel, so I was on 4 hours of sleep after a very crazy 2 days. (Yes, I stopped coloring my hair. I planned to wait till I was 60, but the stupid covidiocy made my hair turn white, or would if it hadn’t been white since I was 28. So, whatevs. I do however look ANCIENT. I don’t know if this happens to other people when exhausted. It does to me. I first noticed it when I was 40 and wrote a book in three days.)

Anyway…. So there we are — (I have a headache today, so meandery) having the panel when Peter Grant noted every panelist had a multicultural background (I think they’re now called 3rd culture people) which makes you (he thinks) better able to write different genres.

He might be right at that. I don’t know, because I’ve never written single genre (not even before I was published) and I never consciously thought about it, but he might have a point that being keyed to evaluate people’s expectations gives you a leg up when writing a new genre, since each genre has different expectations. (Aka reader cookies.)

But I do know that being “third culture” or whatever is actually a serious problem for identifying cultural mind sets. I just — for instance — read a book by a friend in which a character is supposed to be subtly cued as black. This went COMPLETELY over my head, because it was a set of small cultural hints, which are not part of my brain-programming. (To be fair, I’m a complete dork about race anyway, which led to interesting things like my making a cover and the client being very upset because the character was ethnic. The character in fact looked like my second cousin. Then it hit me, that this is because Latin officially isn’t a race, but it’s perceived as race in the US.)

I know there are things about Heinlein books, mostly sub-culture hints, which I didn’t get till I’d come to the US and lived in three different states.

So it got me to thinking — look, it’s a disease, or a bad habit or something, okay — about the left’s obsession with multiculti and how crazy/bizarre it is.

First of all, let me get this off, right up front: America is multicultural, and always was. This has absolutely nothing to do with skin colors. It has EVERYTHING to do with the fact we’re a continent-sized country with a variety of environments, which was colonized recently, and where people as a routine spit on our hands and no, not get ready to cut throats, that’s just you Sarah, adapt to circumstances.

I’m forever somewhere between annoyed and confused when Hollywood movies, or some other “cultural spokesperson” talks about the uniform and unvarying culture of America. In what parallel universe? No one who has lived in more than a couple of states can think that. And if you’ve lived in different regions of the country, it hits you even harder.

Look, sure, whatevs. We’re Americans. At least WE are, the least said about TWANLOC the best, and so we believe in life liberty and the pursuit of happiness as well as equality before the law, the last of which has Earth Shattering implications for how we relate to each other and everyone else too.

So. Yeah, we’re all Americans. But in the minutia of culture, for instance in how we perceive an overdressed person coming into a building, or for instance, in personal distance observed, not to mention what is polite to say to strangers… Well…

If you think the entire country is the same, I invite you to live for a year in the deep South and then move to NYC and then go to the Mountain West.

Dear Lord, people, you have no idea of the freedom of coming to Colorado, and stopping being asked at every grocery store and casual meeting “Where ya’ll from?” Because…. yeah. No, my accent hadn’t gotten any lighter, and I probably still give subtle “outsider” vibes anyway, even now. But EVERY time I opened my mouth, from restaurants to grocery stores, to– ANYWHERE. In the South I got “Where y’all from?”

Sure, okay, they’re just being friendly, maybe. Some weren’t but that’s besides the point. The point is that every time I had to ask for a pack of gum I got reminded “Y’all not from around here.” And keep in mind I was in a large city full of outsiders. But the culture is more SOCIAL so it’s okay for people to ask things of total strangers, tell total strangers their dress is a weird color (I swear. Often) or grab your hands in a public bathroom and “heal” you because your arms are having an eczema outbreak. (Yes, I do realize that my arms are OFTEN freak-show bad, but let’s talk about it, okay? That’s bizarre.)

It was a relief to get to Colorado and find no casual comments on my hair, clothing, accent, or — Well, strangers pretty much left you the heck alone, which is good and bad. (And don’t take me wrong. I love the South which is still my spiritual home, but the places I lived in were a wee bit crazy, I guess. I don’t get that level of crazy in TN when I visit, for instance.) And I think over the last 30 years I’ve been asked where I’m from 3 times, one of which was when I was speaking French to my older son so he could practice for his final exam.

As for NYC, whenever I have to head thataway (though Atlanta is about half as bad, coming from the West) I find myself singing under my breath “don’t stand, don’t stand, don’t stand so close to me.” Even the restaurants have tables, what is considered here in Denver “on each other’s lap.” Even at a restaurant in downtown Denver on New Year’s Eve, we have more space. And dear Lord, people in my groups at least, stand in a parking lot, three to four feet apart to talk to each other. Not social distancing, you get? In Colorado that’s considered close friends. In Portugal people would be shoving their way between each of us, and asking why we were shouting at each other from a distance. In NYC probably also.

Anyway, so America is multi-culti at base line. When people move between states, they either adapt, or they get treated as profoundly weird, and if they’re engineers they probably don’t notice. Which btw, is another sub culture. As is science fiction writer. Hell fiction writer is. Science fiction writer is small, insular and we change very slowly. Whenever I look at pictures of science fiction conventions Heinlein attended, I’m struck by how I could move in that room, and know exactly how to act to be left alone, to join a group, to make friends. And some of those are near a century ago. It’s a small, insular culture, it changes slowly.

Now, you’re going to say every country has those sub-cultures. And you’d be kind of right — ish. For instance the culture in the North and the South of Portugal used to be very different pre-highway. But–

But that difference was buried under a thick layer of conformity that governs every day things.

One of the unspoken things about America is that it accepts weird more than most places. It’s the first thing that struck me. All the funny posters teachers put up. Classrooms were very individual. In Europe these people would have been out-there insane. Here they’re normal. And the same goes for ways of dressing and the leeway in how you behave. (Though you might get asked “Where ya’ll from.”)

America is large enough that there are enough people in your subgroup. (I think that if I tried to join a group of professional SF writers in Portugal, it would be me and maybe 2 people. And I’m not sure of the standards to admit those two people. Certainly not making a living from it, unless it is by grants and such.) And America gives a bit of leeway on how weird you can get before someone goes and sniffs your koolaid. Sure, that gives us some crazy-ass groups, but it mostly allows the creation of a ton of small sub-cultures. Science fiction people, makers, people who are into scrap booking, etc. etc. ad nauseam.

So to an extent we’re all more multi-cultural than the rest of the world. Which, yes, does confer some advantages, in that all of us move between one or more subcultures on the regular. It also confers disadvantages, in that subcultures can drastically misunderstand each other, and in the case of regional subcultures, moving between them is a pain. And sometimes, like Scotland, we’re a country in relentless conflict with itself.

It does confer some advantages, because we’re all at bottom and baseline American. So the variations and the ability to adapt to them keep us from getting too hidebound on the irrelevant details. “You must wear your pflark on the left side, and tie your hair on the right. It’s the fashion this year.” That’s not a thing in America, thank heavens.

But does that mean that more diversity is beneficial.

Well…. Where y’all from?

It annoys the living daylights out of me, yeah, but I know why people ask it. They hear the accent, and they’re afraid of traipsing onto no-man’s land, where a smile or a look can be weirdly interpreted, or where I’m going to take offense because their voice is too high/low or they met my eyes, or failed to meet them.

Even living aside the cheerful customs of cultures that are never mentioned in pushes for multiculti: turning women in slip-covered furniture, dropping walls on gay people (or dropping them from tall buildings, whichever), considering women whores if they are alone with their boyfriend for five minutes, considering women/other races inferior/not quite human (and trust me, it’s almost like that’s the norm in the rest of the world) different cultures have a variety of traps and stumbling blocks that won’t be obvious to the naked eye, or to people on either side of the divide. And some of them are, to American eyes, stupid-crazy and will impact one’s ability to make a living. For instance, I spent years feeling like I was being put down because I worked retail for a year. Stupid right? But it was considered “low class” where I grew up and I didn’t even realize that was there till I realized it was bothering me. (Once I realized it I got over it, and found it funny, but then I’m a little more self-aware than the average bear, for various reasons.) And keep in mind the culture I came from was solidly Western.

Is there an advantage to importing other cultures and treating everyone as equal?

Well… it’s expensive in time, money and stress. Because, look, 90% of human society is monkey ape games. Because we are built on basis of social animals, the social animal has to be appeased before whatever common purpose can be pursued. So there’s a ton of dominance/hazing/etc. in everything. People from different cultures do these differently. And the wrong cues are going to gum up the works like nobody’s business, even if they don’t result in mass shootings or something (and sometimes they do.)

This is annoying to those of us who aren’t quite human don’t read social signals well, or neglect to read them because we’re so busy pursuing whatever “the thing” in our heads is. But it’s still true and part of humanity. As is part of humanity that culture shapes these games. Which means different cultures interacting has bad side effects.

So it really has to have a big advantage.

The only advantage I can see is the chance to import the best from all over the world. The other countries brain-drain is our brain-gain.

But honestly? That’s only under the condition that those who come in are the BEST in whatever we need. And I want to point out as much as illiterate third world peasants might want to come in, and as much as we might be beneficial to them, the work and expense of integrating them make them not worth it.

“But Sarah, some of the illiterate peasants might have tons of potential. Or their kids might have, with proper nutrition.” Maybe. Look, we’re more and more out of work they can do. Contrary to what the left thinks this isn’t the thirties, when most work required neither literacy nor a familiarity with concepts of hygiene and exactness. So most third world peasants get trapped in welfare, which I’ll be honest is not beneficial to anyone, generationally. But yes, there is the occasional very bright person who was held back by their circumstances and whose family will take off like a rocket in America. The problem is finding those. And figuring out if they’re willing to work hard enough. And figuring out how not to trap them in welfare. And once we figure that out — of course, I’m one of those hard hearted Libertarians who’d cut it off, cold — let’s do the same to those people born here who are trapped in the same place. And let’s work on giving them a way out of where they’re caught. Because, look, it really, really, really, doesn’t require a high IQ to get out of the flat spot economically and culturally. It requires being allowed to and a change in culture. Oh, and incentive. And if we’re doing that, let’s do it for our fellow Americans first, and then consider how to “save the world” shall we? (And yeah, I know I’m day dreaming, because cutting off welfare will require a near-extinction event. Even though it’s needed and more than needed.)

I don’t care how, though, or how it’s determined, but to be worth the price of integrating different cultures, we have to pick people who in themselves or their descendants have a ton of potential. (And not just for captive welfare recipients who vote for the welfare givers.)

AND note that “integrating” — because if we have to live forever with encysted foreign cultures in our midst, there’s no enough pay off to offset that, EVER — the second thing that makes admitting members of other cultures worth it, is having them welcomed with an intransigent “FIFO”. Fit in, or F*ck off.

Because if we keep talking like multi-culti-tutti-frutti and keeping your “sacred” culture of origin intact are the goals, we’re just going to shatter into a million pieces.

Then the new comers won’t do well. And neither will the people who are here.

And we’ll have destroyed the one culture that matters: American culture, with its promise of freedom from the old shibboleths and crazy of historical humans.

So in the end, no matter where you came from, once you’ve been here four or five years (it takes that long, even if you’re educated/aware/trying) the answer to “Where y’all from?” should always be “America.”

Because tutti frutti is a lousy flavoring for gum, something that never existed in nature. And in cultures, it won’t exist for long. That’s the law of nature.

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. I ALSO WISH TO REMIND OUR READERS THAT IF THEY WANT TO TIP THE BLOGGER WITHOUT SPENDING EXTRA MONEY, CLICKING TO AMAZON THROUGH ONE OF THE BOOK LINKS ON THE RIGHT, WILL GIVE US SOME AMOUNT OF MONEY FOR PURCHASES MADE IN THE NEXT 24HOURS, OR UNTIL YOU CLICK ANOTHER ASSOCIATE’S LINK. PLEASE CONSIDER CLICKING THROUGH ONE OF THOSE LINKS BEFORE SEARCHING FOR THAT SHED, BIG SCREEN TV, GAMING COMPUTER OR CONSERVATORY YOU WISH TO BUY. That helps defray my time cost of about 2 hours a day on the blog, time probably better spent on fiction. ;)*

FROM CYN BAGLEY: Tiny Joe and the Green Knight Terraforming Co.: Cases 1-3

Most customers are extremely satisfied with the job “The Green Knight Terraforming Co.” does to refurbish their planets. However when there are customer complaints, then the human Joe called Tiny is the person who solves those problems.

Joe’s backup muscle, Donald is there for the occasional times when Joe touches before he looks. Joe, Donald, and the lab animals troubleshoot those problems that need a delicate touch with a hammer. There is a one hundred percent guarantee that this group can fix any customer problem– or fix the customer.

A collection of short stories

FROM JULIE PASCAL: Traditional by Accident.

Can you say yes, if it’s impossible to say no?The encroaching Solaran empire has gobbled up Svana’s world. Svana fled her planet with the first wave of refugees, swept up with members of a different clan. Space is vast and she finds herself on a space station, alone, waiting hopelessly for her own family to arrive to save her. Thomas is from her world and similarly adrift. He offers to save her, and it’s an offer that Svana can’t refuse, but that doesn’t mean that letting him save her is the right thing to do.

Unless, perhaps, they can somehow save each other.

FROM MARGARET BALL: A Tapestry of Fire.

Thalia Kostis is a budding magician (depending on how you define it), but she has a theoretical mathematician’s grasp on socialization and people skills. When pressed into spying on a rival magician’s company retreat to find out where kidnapped coders are being held, she expected things to go completely sideways.

She didn’t expect to end up mistaken for her rival’s fiancee…

Now she has to juggle her own impending wedding, her cover, her magic, and company politics that might turn out deadlier than anyone expected!

FROM BLAKE SMITH: The Hartington Inheritance.

Almira Hartington was heir to the largest fortune in the galaxy, amassed by her father during his time as a director of the Andromeda Company. But when Sir Josiah commits suicide, Almira discovers that she and her siblings are penniless. All three of them must learn to work if they wish to eat, and are quickly scattered to the far reaches of the universe. Almira stubbornly remains on-planet, determined to remain respectable despite the sneers of her former friends.

Sir Percy Wallingham pities the new Lady Hartington. But the lady’s family will take care of her, surely? It’s only after he encounters Almira in her new circumstances that he realizes the extent of her troubles and is determined to help her if he can. He doesn’t know that a scandal is brewing around Sir Josiah’s death and Almira’s exile from society. But it could cost him his life, and the lady he has come to love.

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: Manx Prize.

Charlotte Fisher lives under colliding skies.

It’s the second half of the twenty-first century, and mankind has reached Earth orbit but not much farther. Orbital debris is a by-product of the industrial activity, and it’s dangerous both to everyone up there and the bottom lines of the corporations offering a prize to get rid of it. Charlotte heads up a team chasing the Manx Prize for the first successful, controlled de-orbit of a dead satellite. To win, she and her team must out-think and out-engineer a cheating competitor, dodge a collusive regulator, and withstand the temptations offered by a large and powerful seastead.

The sky’s not the limit. It’s the challenge.

If you like hard science fiction, impossible odds, and a touch of romance, you’ll love Laura Montgomery’s Manx Prize.   Buy Manx Prize to join the race for space today!

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: Family Law.

People love easily. Look at most of your relatives or coworkers. How lovable are they? Really? Yet most have mates and children. The vast majority are still invited to family gatherings and their relatives will speak to them.

Many have pets to which they are devoted. Some even call them their fur-babies. Is your dog or cat or parakeet property or family? Not in law but in your heart? Can a pet really love you back? Or is it a different affection? Are you not kind to those who feed and shelter you? But what if your dog could talk back? Would your cat speak to you kindly?

How much more complicated might it be if we meet really intelligent species not human? How would we treat these ‘people’ in feathers or fur? Perhaps a more difficult question is: How would they treat us? Are we that lovable?

When society and the law decide these sort of questions must be answered it is usually because someone disapproves of your choices. Today it may be a cat named in a will or a contest for custody of a dog. People are usually happy living the way they want until conflict is forced upon them.

What if the furry fellow in question has his own law? And is quite articulate in explaining his choices. Can a Human adopt such an alien? Can such an intelligent alien adopt a human? Should they?

Of course if the furry alien in question is smart enough to fly spaceships, and happens to be similar in size and disposition to a mature Grizzly bear, wisdom calls for a certain delicacy in telling him no…

The “April” series of books works from an earlier time toward merging with the “Family Law” series.

FROM DAVE FREER: A Mankind Witch.

To the North of the Holy Roman Empire are the pagan Norse-lands. It is here that Prince Manfred of Brittany, and Erik, his Icelandic bodyguard, must venture in the dead of winter to a mountainous land of trolls and ice to find a stolen pagan relic, the arm-ring of Odin, something so magical that it should not be possible to move it beyond its wards, let alone take it away. It is gone, and unless it is recovered before Yuletide and the re-affirmation of truce-oaths, a new Viking age will be born. King Vorenbras will lead his berserkers in an orgy of killing, rapine, looting and destruction, across the Empire’s unguarded North-Western flank.
Princess Signy is the King’s older stepsister, and everyone believes her to be the thief, a witch and a murderess. Everyone, that is, but Cair, her stable-thrall, a man plucked from the ocean, with a hidden past. Cair doesn’t believe in witches or magic, let alone that Signy could steal and murder. If he has to drag the foremost knight of the age, and his deadly bodyguard kicking and screaming though the entire Norse nine worlds to prove it and free her, he’d do it. No Kobold, dwarf, or troll is going to stop him, or his scepticism. Not the wild hunt. Not even a Grendel. He doesn’t believe in this superstitious rubbish. He’s a man of science and learning, and he’s used that to fake his way into being feared as a magic worker. But for Signy, he’ll be all of mankind’s witches.
He’ll have to be, because that’s what it’ll take to defeat the dark magical forces which are marshalled against them.

FROM MICHAEL HOOTEN: We Are All Enlisted

Peter Wright joined the Navy thinking that he could do his time in a nice, quiet billet somewhere on Earth. The Navy had other ideas. When the asteroid miners claimed their independence, Peter finds himself getting sent to space on a warship headed straight into the combat zone. He has to get used to everything: zero gravity, standing watch, and being the only Earth-born in his crew. And he has to be ready for the biggest battle the solar system has ever seen.

FROM J. L. CURTIS: April Fool.

Sean ‘Mac’ McCampbell just wants to keep his head down, avoid the riots, and finish his Linguistics PhD before his GI Bill runs out. But when the professors are promoting insurrection and the cops won’t contain the violence, Mac finds trouble won’t leave the people and places he loves alone.

There’s only so much hurt you can inflict on a man before he decides to do something about it.

The Long March is about to get a real surprise on April first!

FROM JEFF DUNTEMANN: Dreamhealer.

By day, Larry Kettelkamp keeps ancient PDP-8 computers alive in a collapsing industrial bakery. By night he wages war on nightmares, and has been waging that war for thirty years. As a young man, Larry discovered that he could enter other peoples’ nightmares, end them, and then vaccinate the dreamers against that nightmare with an ancient symbol that alters the relationship between the two hemispheres of the brain.
For nightmares are not random concoctions of our dreaming imaginations. Strange creatures called archons living in the subtle realms of the collective unconscious craft horrifying dreams to drop into sleeping minds, and then feast on the terror those dreams evoke. This scheme goes back 15,000 years, to the dawn of human history. It was created by a sort of super-archon who claims to be the Demiurge of ancient Persian myth.
Once Larry learns how to destroy archons instead of merely banishing them from dreams, this architect of all nightmares hunts Larry down and demands that Larry stop destroying the monster’s archon servants. Thus begins an escalating conflict that draws in a bored title-search agent, a witch and a lightworker, two teenage prodigies, a modern-day cult practicing ancient Persian death magick, dream mechas a quarter-mile high, and a very very large number of dogs.

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: ILLUSTRIOUS

The other night on facebook, I found myself in a weird argument with someone who thought there really was white privilege because “you can go anywhere and be treated like a human being.”

I’m not 100% sure what he means by “being treated like a human being” because casting a long eye to history and how human beings who ain’t from around here are treated, I’m glad to say I’ve never been — on the mild side — run out of town or killed and thrown in an acid pit.

The “ain’t from around here” is operational here, as is the concept of “fitting in” which is how you earn not getting the “ain’t from around here” treatment.

Does it have to do with skin color? Maybe. Sometimes. If one area is uniformly one color, of course you’re going to stick out if you aren’t. As in, try being a Scandinavian in Portugal when I was growing up and it wasn’t as touristy. If you had moved in, your surname of use would officially become “The blonds” because no one would know your real name. And that’s if you were lucky and it didn’t become “Bleached” or “Raw milk” or something equally weird.

And no, even in the US, that “you belong” treatment is not bestowed on whites universally. For one because, as a (appears white) friend who grew up in a black-majority area, yeah, black people are human too and give outsiders the weather eye. Second because there are things you can do to mitigate that.

My sons don’t appear black (well, the younger if he’s tanned, looks half way there, partly because his hair grows upward) but they appear “mixed race” (Human race. We think. Most of the time.) and are both large, swarthy and male. By the time they were in their mid-teens they found that total strangers skeedaddled away from them backwards. Or — poor older son — that they had to argue for hours to get the “honors cords” for their graduation gowns. Or that their departmental honors and second degree wouldn’t be called out at graduation (while the “honors” of the tiny, bespectacled guys and chicks graduating from studies were.” Or that, when found in an area of school/college reserved for serious pursuits, they were questions and in one case told that “you jocks don’t know this.”

What have they done? They’ve mitigated by dressing in slightly old fashioned ways, wearing their hair short, and talking with old-fashioned courtesy.

White privilege? Well, hell no. “Insider privilege.” And you can fake it.

I look white-ish, particularly if I’m ill (I don’t like my look in the mirror these days.) But I open my mouth, and I don’t belong (It would probably not be a problem if I’d stayed first time I came out. If you immigrate before 18 you mostly lose your accent.)

So, coming in late into a Shakespeare panel (conferences put me on them for years after that series was out of print) at world fantasy, where I not only am the chick with the accent, but I’m also the one who isn’t a college professor? I belonged in ten minutes. In fact I over-belonged, as I started correcting their fallacious spit-balling. I was the one people clustered around as the panel ended. Mostly because — signs of a misspent youth — of an overgrown vocabulary and knowing way too much about good old Will Waggstaff. (I used to, I did.)

Usually the reaction the left misunderstands as prejudice is “Human reaction to outsiders” which again, looking at history, mostly comes down to “common sense, and don’t want to die.”

The last century in the US has been relatively law-abiding. Taking the ability to move about freely and not be killed and thrown in an acid pit for granted or for belonging to a skin color is not the brightest thing to do.

But it is a symptom of the left’s persistent inability to confuse the wrapper with the gift.

“People in majority white areas are more likely to be okay with white people coming in. Reeee.White privilege.” Or, perhaps, the reasonable assumption that you know, a white person is someone’s cousin or otherwise lost family member.

And btw, this doesn’t apply to every white person in a white area, either. I don’t know if it was here or over on sosh media, but some idiot tried to tell me my objection to homeless everywhere downtown Denver is that I was racist, and my reaction was ‘what?? Against whites? No. I got over being scared of blond people because they were blond by six.” Because Denver is a mostly white city and yeah, there is the occasional black homeless person, but 99% of the feral crackheads are white. Privilege? Well, we haven’t dissolved them in acid pits. No bets on it if society breaks down completely, though.

Again, a lot of it can be mitigated by how you dress, where you go, etc.

And note here that I’m the first one to say when shopping for #1 son’s first apartment we paid about $400 more than needed to get him in a “Safe area” because you know what? In a bad light, he can look Latin or black or “undefinable” (with mask he might look undefinable Asian, because he has anime-eyes.) You see the cheaper apartments were in an area where there were routine fire fights between black and Latin gangs. Because of what he was studying, he kept late hours. Stepping out of his car, bleary eyed, in the wee hours, he might move wrong/go to the wrong place. I didn’t want him shot.

OTOH I probably would have done the same had he been blond (you have no idea what all fell into the ketchup! Let’s say it was a possibility) because he’d have stuck out like a sore thumb and been taken for a police informer. On yet the third paw, the problem wasn’t lack of privilege, the problem was that the local communities “of color” (Thank heavens that’s not racist, unlike “colored”) have an history of violence and criminality and that’s where his school was.

So, there are things you can do to earn that “won’t get dirty looks/thrown in an acid pit” and 90% of it is how you dress/behave.

Think about it, if a young black guy in tats and ripped/dirty clothes comes to the door, you’re not going to react the same as if a young black guy in a shirt, dark suit and tie comes to the door (in which case you hide behind the sofa while the nice black Mormon missionary shouts earnestly at you through the letter flap.)

This morning it occurred to me this is related to the notion of respect, and how it changed between my kids and I.

In my generation, with the older boomers and their attempts at being hip just having become teachers, I knew it was a bad, bad sign when I came into the class room and the teacher, instead of being referred to as Doctor so and so (It’s complicated. Technically school teachers have a licentiate, not a doctorate. Also traditionally, they’re called “doctor”. Probably some medieval thing.) they started in with “Call me Manuel/Maria/whatever.”

Because they had respect — “doctor so and so” — because getting into college, much less graduating was difficult and earned through exams. But they wanted to subvert that and be “one of you.” I always knew these people would suck at teaching AND try to raise my consciousness, or whatever

Meanwhile, when my kids went to school, the danger sign was “you have to respect me, because I’m a teacher.” We got this from illiterate morons (to be fair, some were half wits) who didn’t know their subject and were trying to browbeat the kids into believing stuff that was never so. “We” because I got some idiot children on my blog telling me I had to respect one of these morons because “she’s a teacher.” Oh, reeeeeely? I’m better educated, I’m smarter, and she’s doing strange crap to the subject I actually have a degree in.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is “a brief history of the left.” First, subvert the legitimate reasons for respecting someone. Then demand respect based on irrelevant, incidental or outright stupid reasons.

Hence their current war on meritocracy: i.e. what people earned. And their demand that you extend “equity” i.e. benes based on people looking vaguely like other people who might have been oppressed some places by people who maybe (in my case, very maybe, depending on the day) look somewhat like you.

Oh, and their demand you get treated like a human being even though they’ve made war on the fact that everyone should be considered human until proven otherwise, and on the greatest leveler of the human race and reason not to throw strangers in an acid pit: Judeo-Christian culture and beliefs.

Most of the time, the only safe thing when the left demands something is to tell them “No. Go fish.”
Because in the end what they aim for is always graft for them and their buddies. Because they’ll be the arbiter of “who will serve and who will eat” regardless of what they say. And in the end they and their buddies (If you didn’t vote for Biden, you ain’t black, after all) are always the ones who eat.

Liberal privilege by any other name.

I was reading Jane Austen Fan Fic again — yes, I know, but you know what? It’s still cheaper than cocaine or even the levels of alcohol needed to get through the present idiocy — and something made me guffaw out loud.

This young lady — almost for sure young — seems to have a very weird idea of the English Regency. Oh, she’s not so strange as some of them who think “Lord” is a title and that your title is just your last name and the house you live in satisfies the “of.” So, you know, the Bennets are made Lord and Lady Bennet of Longbourn because…. Cheese, Green, Penguins!

This woman’s ignorance was not that in your face, and because of that it was probably less noticeable, by her and others as well.

You see, she’s talking of how noble families disposed of second third and etc. sons, and caused me to laugh so hard I scared the cats.

Because you know? She thought the favored professions for such scions of noble houses were medicine, the law and the church in that order.

Sorry, I’m still giggling.

In fact, medicine was considered a trade, such as carpenter or plumber and would not have fit such great personages.

Mostly, they were sent to the army or the church, though a fourth son might be allowed to study the law, maybe, provided he could be granted some important post like judge.

Medicine rose in consideration as it became more efficient, and better at producing outcomes, and particularly as the men and women that people interacted with in the profession often went to crazy levels of self-sacrifice to make sure other people were well.

A few of those public figures and it set the tone for a respected profession.

The law became respected because well…. they make money. And are useful in the present day.

I was thinking of that when doctors have thrown their prestige and ability in in the service of various social causes that have nothing to do with medicine, and have become ever more faddish and prone to follow whatever the left wants.

Now, sure, that’s not all doctors. That’s not even most of them. It’s just their professional organizations and their public figures.

But it’s enough.

In the same way, how many lawyers does it take becoming judges and proving themselves partial and prejudiced, not to mention invencibly stupid, before lawyers too lose all perstige.

In this as in everything else, the left captures the institutions, professions or organizations, skins them, and wears the skin demanding respect.

As the error in the fanfic shows the left (almost for sure for the author) thinks that prestige and power inhere to things: to institutions, to skin color, to positions, to professions. They think it’s always been so and it will always be so, pre-ordained, world without end.

That is not how the world works. Professions and institutions acquire respect by proving themselves worthy of it.

Awards win respect by being given to people others admire. But how many idiots winning them with unreadable books does it take to wash away the patina of Heinlein?

Well, turns out not many.

How many idiots like the pathologically narcissistic Fauci does it take to destroy the patina of medicine? How many doctors on tic toc doing choreographed dances in empty hospitals while your cancer goes untreated? How many doctors getting in the middle of the street and pretending to be dead in “White coats for black lives?”

How many idiot engineers who can’t figure out 2+2 does not equal white supremacy have to build bridges that fall before people figure out the profession is not what it was.

How many graduates from Harvard have to fail at basic historical analysis before a degree from Harvard is worse than toilet paper, particularly in times of shortage?

There is something cells do when they deem they’re no longer useful. They commit apoptosis. I.e. they implode and get eaten by other cells.

In a way all the institutions of the industrial age, taken over by the left because the left imagines that power inheres to things, not individuals (even if things are status or station or organization) are now committing apoptosis, convinced that just a little push can get the left into power forever.

But society has already changed, and all they’re doing is killing themselves and any trust people had in them.

The society being aborn — these things always happen in pain and blood, alas — will have different prestige, different ranks, different trust. And definitely different institutions and organizations, in place of the crazy ones pushing historical fantasy and “equity” which means “Bias worn out and proud, because we’re that stupid.”

In the end, when you skin something and wear the skin you don’t get respect. All you get is a suit made of rot.

And the world goes on past you.

I got up really late (yes, benadryl again, because my skin is unhappy being on me, and wishes to be scratched off.)

So, I’m vaguely hang-over-y and out of it, and have some work I need to do this morning.

Another Rhodes moves SLOWLY towards publication, probably next month. Hey, it’s not Jan 2020 but it’s only a year and a half late. Coff.

I will try to get at least Bowl of Red up next month, also. …. Dyce — A Well Inlaid Death — probably not till August. Then there’s Winter Prince. No Man’s Land is in progress…. Oh, yeah, and Darkship Defiance and Hacking the Storm (Fuse) should be out before the end of the year.

Today I need to buy Dragon naturally and train it. I’m told professional will get my accent. We’ll see…

I tried having someone transcribe my stuff, but I got way too self-conscious.

Anyway, I have been redoing the cover for Rhodes, and I think we’re down to these two choices.

What do you guys think? (The wording for the series will change, and at any rate it can be gray where it goes against the white.)

Actually what to use for the series is an issue too. Rhodes works, and I tend to be cranky and just go with what works. I suppose Rhodes Mysteries book 1 will be the tag (and book 2 etc, oh, geniuses. I’m not calling all of them book 1! Don’t make me stop this blog and come back there.) I’m going to do this in novels (short, about 40k words), novellas and shorts, so…. “book” works.

I’m open to suggestions as well as opinions on the covers. Mostly because if this kind of thing worked for Jim Baen, it can work for me. So, fan opinion on covers requested. And suggestions for series title/wording.

This might not be the final form, but there’s a good chance it is. Because the book has its roots in the thirties (though not the real thirties, it’s complicated) and because of how they then view the thirties, the attire is appropriate. And now I’m done fussing with it.

You Are Not Alone A Blast From The Past From December 2019

*This is 2021 Sarah. And I can hear the howls of out-rage when your read this post and “see, we told you they were poised to take EVERYTHING.”
That is bullshit. That is rankest, clearest bullshit.
Sure, they have seized all our institutions, but we knew that, didn’t we? It’s been obvious for decades. Some people say since Obama, but I think it goes way back and hinges on the fact our government “service” is taught in elite universities, which went to the enemy in what? the 40s?
So, of course, they THINK they have everything because the statists think in terms of institutions with power.
And yet,t hey don’t have the people. They don’t have the VAST majority of this great country. Think about it, they were so confident of their fraud abilities that they ran a zombie who campaigned from the basement, and a woman who is hated by everyone who’s ever gazed at her. That means they KNEW they had enough fake votes to win even if no one voted for them. And yet people went out and voted against them in such numbers they were forced into emergency, easily proven fraud, in front of G-d and everybody.
As terrible as it is that people who participated in the glorious 6th are under solitary confinement, this is not the act of a confident occupier. A confident occupier would be TELLING everyone they arrested these people and publicizing the “confessions” they beat out of them.
Their ridiculous religion of Critical Race Theory is being opposed everywhere. Apparently they didn’t expect that and are panicking.
They are, in fact, panicking on a lot of fronts.
Their greatest weakness is that they think everyone is programable widgets and they have programmed us. Their second weakness is believing because they penalize speaking, and keep us quiet, we must therefore already agree with them. They don’t understand the vast silent and sullen resentment and opposition they face.
Don’t buy into their premises. They have always been wrong.
Don’t buy into the premise we’re defeated either. Victors don’t have to try to imprison everyone in order to govern.
Be not afraid. We’re not fighting alone. The left’s collection of very bad “memes” will be consigned to the garbage heap of history.
As for us, well the rebuilding is monumental. We’ll probably spend the rest of our lives doing it.
But then, what is life without a great mission? Be not afraid.
Yes, it will get darker before that. It will get scarier. Horrible outrages will be committed against us. Many times all will seem lost.
But their entire game is to break us. If they can’t break us, we win. Sucks to be them.
Be not afraid, I say. Resolve right now you won’t be broken. You only have to get up one more time than they throw you down.
We have a mission, and a goal. Yes, it will be difficult and painful. How glorious it is to be given a worthy challenge before victory.
Lift your heart off the floor, and go work. You are not alone -SAH*

Despair is a sin. It is a sin even atheists should be able to understand, if you understand sin as betraying essential parts of what you believe in, what you aim to do.

Jerry Pournelle reminded me of this many times, when my depressive bend took hold of me.

I’m sick and tired of people wanting to abandon ship and/or act like loons because they think all is lost.  I have no idea who’s selling you that bill of goods (or rather, I have a good idea of where it’s coming from, but not why you’re buying it.)

Despair is easy. It absolves you of responsibility. It means what you do today doesn’t matter. And it might lead you to do something profoundly evil. Not just bad, evil. So evil that you taint the rest of us by association. Or can be painted as doing so.

Let me put it this way: while we might not be able to get rid of taxes, I hate taxes as they exist right now, and I think Lois Lerner’s IRS is a corrupt institution deserving being disbanded.  I do not think, however, it is legitimate to bomb buildings that also contain day cares.  And I think — know — that this did more discredit to the cause of reducing taxes than just about anything. FOR DECADES.  There is also good reason to believe the person who committed that act was linked to agents provocateurs. [Oh, and judging from the flaming *sshole on my facebook page: pretending I mean it’s okay to bomb buildings without daycares in it is cute. It’s like you don’t understand allusion or the depth of the English language. It is in fact as though your mind is doing what it can to stop thinking, because thinking might puncture your Marxist illusions.]

I keep hearing that our Republican party is now to the left of the Dems in the sixties, and I want to line up the people who say it and hit them on the head with actual history of the time till they quit it. This despite the fact I like some of them. It is one of those instances of rewriting history in your own head to save the left the trouble.

Until Reagan, wage and price controls were acceptable for REPUBLICANS. So was gun control. Gun control was pretty much accepted throughout much of the land.  This has changed.  Also, I will repeat that most Republicans in politics at least through the seventies were more Mitt Romney than Ted Cruz.

And I’m tired of “We have too many immigrants. We’ve lost the demographic battle.”  Anyone believing that people who can tan are natural constituencies of the Marxists: stop embarrassing us, and join the Democratic party. They LIKE racists over there.

Sure, most newly immigrated groups go left. Partly because it’s natural in their homelands.  But they change.  And heck, these days a lot of countries are changing, too.

Yes, there is work to be done, mostly in encouraging if not REQUIRING (which I’d prefer) acculturation and integration.  But my guess? that is a self-solving problem. Because people are losing patience with the multi-culti hose beasts.

Sure, because of ILLEGAL immigration (and yeah, something is going to happen on that front soon. people are losing patience) and allowing them to vote, the dems seem like they own that demographic. They don’t. And the times they are achanging.

There are gains in other fronts. Universities are panicking because people are on to their game. And the pronouns thing has already become a punch line.

An witness please, what happens when institutions like trad pub go woke.  Yep, they go broke.  Or if you prefer, they roll left and die.

No. We didn’t turn a page and everything is suddenly wonderful. DUH. DO YOU THINK I DON’T KNOW THAT?

But I remember the seventies. Apparently most people don’t.  And the sixties.  For that matter, I’ve read enough of the times before. The only people who think those were “conservative” in the American sense have rosy memories of childhood, or are toking hard. Or, of course, both.  Conformity, collectivism, and the presumption that central government is the means and agent of prosperity is NOT on the right in the US.

The twentieth century — all of it — was to the left of where we are now.

We are winning the culture war. It’s just slow.  Throwing it all away because you’re impatient doesn’t make you a hero. It makes you a child, who will have his lollipop or start destroying things.

That is not the way you win a culture war. It is however an effective way to lose it.

I’ll only add that I’m probably angrier than you are, that fighting my berserker instinct makes me physically ill. And that there’s a special place in hell for those who force a BERSERKER to talk them down.

Now on what I said: you are not alone.

I don’t talk of religious matters here, because as far as I’m concerned they are intensely private to me.  Also because they convince no one.

HOWEVER, when I read this Richard Fernandez article, now a few years old, it resonated with me and without explaining I’ll just say it’s correct.

Night of the Demon

Have faith. In America, in Americans, or in something higher. But have faith. For the times, they are achanging.  And you are not alone.

Yet what should have been unstoppable wasn’t. The big mystery continues to be why an all-conquering meme suddenly found itself thrown back by ideas of almost equal force with no obvious origin. An opinion article in the NYT by Paul Krugman acknowledges the existence and power but not the provenance of this sudden counterforce.  Worse, Krugman warns the left might actually lose to this mysterious power.

Be not afraid.

There is weirdness in every culture, but sometimes I feel like I grew up in a whimsical parallel universe.

For instance, the other day in the shower, while suffering under that perfect combination of still half asleep and starting to try to plan the day, a “just so aphorism” from my childhood came through my mind, and it made me go “uh?”

So, when I was growing up (I don’t think any longer) it was taken as written that the humble orange had lethal superpowers.

The saying about the orange was “De manha e ouro, a tarde e prata, e a noite…. mata.” I.e. “In the morning it’s gold, in the afternoon it’s silver, and at night it kills.”

Now, it’s possible, the Portuguese being, in general, irredeemable poets that the rhyme was just too strong a temptation to resist. And I do get that mom thought having oranges in the afternoon gave you indigestion (What part of this was insanity and suggestion only Himself knows, and even He might be quirking an eyebrow, like I do when my characters are being particularly themselves.) But what in the name of Ned has the poor orange done to deserve being blamed for DEATH?

I have forgotten this plenty of times in my adult, post acculturation life and suffered neither indigestion nor — certainly — death. Unless, of course, I got better.

Look, sometimes there are sayings and superstitions you can kind of see. For instance my mother in law was horrified when she found I’d kept tomato paste in the can (in a ziploc) in the fridge, and lectured me about how once a can is open the contents become poisonous.

Now, I grant you that if you leave it in an open can, the contents start tasting of the metal. BUT POISONOUS? Well…. researching I found out this is true of lead cans which no one has used in a century, give or take (too lazy to go look.)

So, you know, her grandmother told her, and her mom told her, and then–

So, I can see where that one came from. But Oranges, really?

I’ll refrain from chasing down the rathole of the more superstitious one, like breaking a spider web with your face is bad luck. (well, you’re probably going to have a spider in your hair. So if you mind, that is indeed bad luck.) Or killing a spider first thing in the morning is good luck. (Poor spider.)

And I know there is something to “don’t swim after eating, it will stop your digestion” which might have something to do with its being an arctic current in the North of Portugal, and if not stopping your digestion making you feel ill and out of sorts.

But seriously? I don’t think — daringly — I needed to observe three hours because I had a cracker and some cheese, no matter what mom thought.

And still I come back to the orange. It’s so non-sensical a saying I managed to erase it wholly from my head.

I’m sure there are others, btw, like the belief that if you drink water with fish, you’ll feel like the fish is swimming around in your stomach (the grease, I assume. Cold waters, greasy fish) but the one about the orange strikes me as uniquely insane, and makes me wonder if in this parallel world, where I apparently grew up, oranges become sentient at night, and don little capes, and grab daggers to come kill you in your sleep.

I got nothing.

I’m sure there was a thought, or at least some idea behind it, but it failed to make it. It is said under “everybody knows” in the same way as “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”
Hey, maybe it was the apple lobby, trying to throw shade on oranges?

What do you guys think? And are there other utterly non-sensical proverbs and sayings you learned?
Please? It’s lonely out here, being the only one from an insane parallel world.