Okay, I do know that I have a ton of guest blogs, and I could have put one up. I’m also aware that this should have been up long ago. But I woke up dragging, and even the ADD meds aren’t keeping me from getting captured by all sorts of stupid little things, like editing hte image above.
No the image isn’t a cover. I came across it while searching for something completely different and it just got my attention (there’s enough of it (I cropped) to make a wrap around too.
I guess someday if I decide to write a collection of historical tales. Who knows. It kind of deserves to be a cover, I just don’t know for what.
I considered writing another short-short weird fairytale but a friend has threatened me with deathy death if I give anymore of those away. So, I will probably write it (likely not today) and put it in the drawer till I have ten or twenty of them.
I’m just so horribly tired and out of sorts. To be fair, my auto immune is spinning up like something that spins. And also to be fair this is sort of expected, a week into returning to high altitude.
I find myself dreaming of walks by the sea shore which is mostly what I do at the beach, and of a village perched near sea, which I’m sure doesn’t exist in the US, except maybe somewhere in New England and …. well… probably as much at risk as Colorado.
Husband was not at home to a peevish whine of “But I want to go to Brighton!” (some of you will get this.)
So…. I cleaned the kitchen, and set dinner cooking in the slow cooker, and tomorrow’s dinner in the sous vide.
I have a book (Kate Paulk’s) to finish editing, and my book (Other Rhodes) to finish writing. And I just want to crawl back into bed and sleep. Consider this your extended whine for the day :D
Perhaps part of this is me, again, trying to damp down the berserker by making myself very very tired. Or depressed or something. Not sure which.
2020 btw is my fault because I had a careful plan of everything to publish/finish/edit. I’m…. somewhere at the end of January in the plan. I’m sorry. I jinxed everyone I guess.
Right now everything just makes me want to crawl into a dark comfy room and sleep: the state of publishing. The state of the country. The state of my house. (I need to start on the remaining room to floor. I do. I should be emptying it right now.) I don’t know if son caught the edge of this, but he’s ALMOST cleared the library,without being asked. (It was filled with random debris from older’s son moving/choosing stuff he wasn’t taking.)
Which means I could get to my research books, should I want to write a bunch of historical tales. I probably would, too. if I weren’t so tired.
I’m going to have an energy drink and write. Probably very slowly. And I promise a real post tomorrow. You guys deserve better than a whine.
Meanwhile, I keep meaning to post this on insty and forgetting: The state of publishing. You’re smart boys and girls, you can fill in the rest.
It’s hard to fight a culture war when you ain’t got no culture. The conservatives I knew in the arts, in broadcasting, in writing in the eighties used to say that and laugh bitterly.
Mind you we were a small group and had trouble finding each other. We had to first identify the other was safe enough to come out to, a process that involved mutual signs and countersigns, and straying ever so slightly into forbidden territory and seeing how the other reacted, always ready to pull back and say “it’s a joke.” Honesty, hanky codes would have been easier: yellow for slightly right of center, blue for old-fashioned so-con, purple for small l libertarian, psychedelic tie dye for the Libertarian party, black for Anarcho Capitalists, brown for OWL (Older, wiser Libertarians), pink for voluntarianists, chartreuse for “I’m just so tired of what pigs leftists are” and red for the blood of our heroes.
The problem of course is that if these handkerchiefs started showing up everywhere, the left, in their idiotic way would decide that they meant something else completely different, and try to destroy your life with it. Or worse, they’d know exactly what it meant but accuse you of meaning something different so that they could destroy you.
And they owned all the means of mass communication and signaling. Which frankly is why we used to say that. It wasn’t that we had no culture. It was that those of us who worked in those fields had to pretend to be on the other side so that we could work at all. And those of us who were socially smart enough knew it.
Weirdly a lot of the survivors were women of interesting heritage, (for this purpose being a first generation immigrant from a Latin culture and having been exquisitely “educated” in Marxism helped. I knew what to fake) or gay people (this probably helped me fly below the radar too. No, I’m not gay. I’m about as straight as the next person, and in this case the next person has a ram-rod for a spine. But there is no use denying that some part of my brain is devoted to “weirdness with sex, attraction and, yeah “gender””. Possibly because I read sf/f at an early age and therefore became interested in how things might change in ways that broke society/people and what came after. I don’t know. This thing isn’t exactly under my control. All I’m saying is that my first books published contained a gender-changing elf, and they weren’t by any means the most bizarre thing I’d written by then along those lines. I think I’ve figured out how to make my first world palatable to humans. We’ll see) or people whose day job/education was in other fields wholly controlled by the left, or well…. very odd people. (Raise your hands brothers and sisters, and say Amen.)
Others had got into the field as extreme left, and then changed. So slowly, and so strangely, and along such paths, that the leftists never figured it out or couldn’t figure it out.
Part of it you have to understand, and yeah, studies have revealed this, but we didn’t need it, those who have lived in the dominated fields, and passed well enough to be sitting at revelatory conversations, is that the left has no idea what the opposition is. Absolutely zero. None.
They construct these straw men, and never actually seem to realize they’re completely wrong. You’ve seen the idiots who come spinning onto comments and insist we’re racist, sexist, homophobic, uneducated hicks, who’ve never left the American South. I mean it takes about three seconds to figure out that this is, a an acquaintance called it in the early days of my blog, Hoyt’s Refuge for the tragically gifted, and that education formal or not is what most of us have spent our lives absorbing. But their beliefs require them to see illusions, and humans will kill and die for the right not to break their easy assumptions.
One of my areas of interest, mostly because I saw an early boyfriend (I’m not even sure we were dating, just sort of vaguely sweet on each other. And we were very young) disappeared into a cult, forever, is to read about cults, both the ones that led their followers into horrible, tragic ends, and those that have adapted to something more normal (not going to name names, and no, I’m not being snarky about anyone’s religion. The ones I’d name flourished in Europe in the sixties and seventies, and still have enough power and influence, I don’t need that additional trouble.) One of the things I know is that it’s almost impossible to deprogram someone from a cult, unless there is a personal and Earth shattering event that causes them to want to change. It is in that way very similar to drug addiction. You have to hit rock bottom and realize everything you want and think is wrong. And then start to rebuild.
And the left is effectively a cult.
Sure we know how we got here. The left controls schools, entertainment, news, corporate management. They basically control all the centers of soft power. (How much of the hard power of the military they have gotten hold of, I don’t know. And I’m afraid to find out.)
Those of you who say it wasn’t as bad before are kind of right. But only kind of. You see, once they’d taken the universities, and the ways to signal “high class” (entertainment, the arts, the awards, the tv shows, the movies, the markers of success) they controlled everything. It was all over but the shouting.
Those of you who marvel as to why a self- made millionaire like the owner of Amazon, or any of the social media owners sing in the choir of the left are entirely missing the point.
The point is that THESE PEOPLE AREN’T POLITICAL. Yes, I know what social platforms have done. I know what insane things some of these people say and post. But the problem is not that they are political. Most of them are focused on their field, very good at what they do (which make money from the most unlikely things) and completely blind to political philosophy.
This is very hard to believe given the damage their do, their crazy donations, and the way they signal. It’s also very hard to believe they’re non-political, because let’s face it, you and I and the rest of the people here are as political as it’s possible to be. Either by a natural bend of the mind, or whatever (and note that I always assumed it was my early experiences, but I’ve seen normal, American people fall into this too) we have a passionate interest in politics and forms of government, and in my case an utterly paradoxical (if you know what I do for a living) hunger and thirst for the truth. (And yes, I have long, long wondered what is meant by “for they shall be satiated.” I’m not sure it’s a promise I’d want fulfilled, and yet I do. Yes, even so.)
But these people don’t care about politics. They’re making money, they’re successful, and like very noveau riche, they want the social acceptance, the “intellectual bling” that makes them accepted by the elite.
If this were the Victorian age, they’d found hospitals or libraries (if only the poor were educated, they’d be more like us!) or build hygienic villages, or send boat loads of pants and Bibles to Africa.
Nowadays, the culture, the social signaling, the ostensible admiration of the lumpen crowds, the certainty that they’re shiny and smart and brilliant comes from signaling left as hard as they can.
Yes, they’re doing horrible things for that. What? You think it never happened before in history? But they really have no idea. Even if they know what will result, they don’t know what will result. They might know they’re sweeping all those bad people from public life and silencing them, but they don’t know that in the end it will be them against the wall. And they have absolutely no clue what the policies they support will do, because the “smart” (smart in our day and age is determined by the fact you mouth the right or rather left platitudes, at least for purposes of recognition, jobs as, oh, respected public health experts, and/or experts of any kind) people that surround them have excuses for all the failures, assure them that Cuba is beautiful and quaint, and tell them paradise lies that way.
Perhaps I should tell you about the most 2020 week ever, in some ways (not I hope all the ways. No rains of fish today, please.) at least in the ideological sense. I’ll start with yesterday evening.
As some of you know I watch second-hand movies and television. This is not intellectual posturing, btw. Yes, much of what’s on TV is bloody stupid. But even for what’s good, I need to be doing something at the same time. I’m not visual enough for visual-only story telling to hold my interest. (To be fair, I also tend to do other things while reading, which is why my kindle often wears a ziploc and why paperbacks used to be covered in stains from cooking or from cleaning fluids.)
So, in the evening, I sit at the social-media laptop in the family room, and check in with my homies (shut up) or write non-fic (or lately edit Jane Austen fanfic) while my husband does his equivalent activity, which he does when his mind is completely exhausted: watch a movie or tv series. I will get bits and pieces, and sometimes look up to see what’s going on. Weirdly this is enough to get most of the plot, mostly because frankly my husband — by that time — isn’t looking for intellectually stimulating fare. (Younger son listens to political podcasts for the same “my brain is on spare cycles” function. Which is weird. And also, I’ve mentioned that one is mine, right?)
Yesterday husband said he really couldn’t even stand anything but rom coms. The first one he put up was SUCH a spectacular piece of lefty bullsh*t even he noticed. While I sat there horrified, for once actually watching, mouth agape at the non-stop bullshit, he was seemingly not reacting. And I know that though our political opinions are not that different, he’s by and large WAY more tolerant about this crap than I (to the extent that is a ton less interested in politics and thus doesn’t see them everywhere. He is in fact like those people above and was soft-left and thought his wife was insane until I came out politically and had to explain to him why. And why I believed what I did.) But fifteen minutes in, he got up and went “Well, that crap is enough.” And turned it off. For a gauge of what that means, he then proceeded to watch in full a rom com in which all the characters are democrat activists, and in which this is not only a good thing, but means they are GOOD people, and in which the most appalling leftist crap was celebrated throughout, openly and not, all of it wrapped in the veil of “these are normal people, and this is about their romance, and this is how everyone lives.” The most right wing people there might have been the ones who didn’t want to kill everyone to the right of Lenin. And it was a love story, played for laughs.
Afterwards I talked to him about it, and yes, he got these were all crazy bullshit points, but the fact that it was set a few decades ago, and that everything was presented as normal, including the pov on history from an exclusive left (and insane) stand didn’t kick him out of the story.
This morning he told me ruefully that the two most popular book genres (he reads both, because “spare cycles.” Mystery and sf/f are for when he can think) of thriller and romance don’t even bother with research, they just do “what everyone knows to be true” aka, what is on TV, and in the news, and in all entertainment. So, you know, Leftist Fantasy.
Note these are the most popular genres because most people who read them only read to decompress. They don’t want their views challenged or to find themselves researching what really happened in Bumf*ck Redistan 50 years ago, that everyone has lied about. So, just going with “what everybody knows” works. And what everybody knows are big, big lies. Things like every woman is discriminated against at work. People die on the streets for lack of health insurance. Leftists are the under dog. And everything wrong with society is brought about by greedy capitalists. (Not an exhaustive list. Dig far enough into what “everybody knows” and you find that everybody knows I’m a white Mormon male who is racist, sexist and homophobic. And that was my only reason to oppose the awards in my field going to sophomoric dreck dominated by one house.)
This piled on on an …. interesting week. I found one of my remaining soft left friends has gone…. well, the way they go. And no, there will be no public breach. But psycologically this is not good for me. Not good at all. Other people’s friends might be redpilled, mine all seem to run screaming the other way. Which makes me wonder if I know how to pick them, or if this cult is impossible to recover from. Either way. That’s what we’re up against, and I’m not …. sanguine.
Two days ago, here, I posted about why I don’t want people to gleefully, joyfully join in saying “if the left wants a civil war, we’ll give them a civil war.”
As usual I got the strange accusation that since I don’t want us to jump into immediate chaos and violence (which, yes, the left is practically begging for, and yeah, they might think it’s better for them than it is, but after the last century I think you guys would be less sure that the other side doesn’t know what they’re doing, okay?) That I think all is lost. That other than voting, I want to lie here and just let it go into communist paradise without fighting back.
You have no idea. And the weird thing is that you have no idea, after all the years I’ve been fairly frank on this blog. Though granted I’m somewhat sparing with my history in public, mostly to protect the guilty. (The guilty who aren’t me.)
Suffice it to say I’m a berserker. I’m also, naturally, attracted to simple solutions, which are often violent ones. There is something simple and clean about physical fights. The pointy end goes in the other guy (Or the side that goes pew pew, but that’s a recent accomplishment for me.) And the other guy is the person physically attacking you.
It’s so simple, it’s so clean.
It’s so dangerous in the circumstances we’re in. Which brings me to the other two events this week that hit me hard psychologically.
One was a stranger’s death. An Omaha NE, bar owner who fought (physically) against an antifa attacker and for his trouble was indicted, maligned, lost his properties, lost his home, got so much hate and slander poured on him (guys, you have no idea, unless you’ve been on the other side of these campaigns, and frankly the one I fought in was beanbag compared to this. It will strip you bare and destroy everything you care about, even so. Most of my friends who fought that one alongside me have been suffering from it ever since, in career, in psychological wounds, in physical health.) that he killed himself.
This is a reminder of the power they STILL have. If you needed another one after this year of gross civil rights violations instigated by their “scientists” and “computer models” and crazy media. They still have the power to destroy completely random and innocent individuals, even if they fail sometimes, as they did with the Covington kids. Yeah, their power is no longer absolutely universal, and it won’t stick, but it will stick long enough to kill you. Or as I told the circle of guys with machine guns, while I held a (granted weaponized) umbrella “Sure, you can kill me, but I can f*ck up one of you before you do. Volunteers?” The left, metaphorically has that umbrella.
Their power is waning. They are in trouble. Probably in more trouble than any of us realizes, which justifies the measure of their insanity. But they still have the ability to destroy us if we do anything stupid, or even if we are just in the wrong place at the wrong time and they need to make an example.
Do I want to beat them all? Sure. Do I think many of the crazier ones are utterly nonredeemable? Sure. Do I think when it comes to the sticking point, we might have to fight physically? Sure. Do I think we should be prepared? Sure.
Do I think that time is now? Sure. If you wish to lose. Because right now they still have enough power to tar whatever you do as utterly unprovoked and evil. And to convince those “non political” people that everyone to the right of Lenin MUST be utterly destroyed. And then what comes out of that? Ah. Well, you know. Quaint paradises like Cuba.
And don’t delude yourselves that we’ll utterly destroy them, okay? I too have fantasies of beating them to death with their “institutional patriarchy” signs. But they’ve sold that fantasy to enough people. They might have sold the fantasy of “mostly peaceful protests” to enough “non political” people too. And even if you utterly destroy them, who is you? You are aware a lot of the younger people who are non leftist have totally turned leftism on its head. Which — because leftism isn’t the exact opposite of reality, but more like a vicious fantasy land — means they landed in a fantasy land of their own. Even if you — for values of you — win utterly, most of the readership on this blog will be as out of place. And most people will be as broken and poor in all senses, as if the other side wins.
And no, it doesn’t mean I think everything is lost. I did at this time in 2016. You might not realize it, since I often post my most hopeful articles here when I’m most hopeless. Not exactly lying to you, honest. More lying to myself. Call it “Sarah’s depression management.”
I didn’t realize how much I thought everything was lost until Hillary didn’t win. The relief. The stunning, unexpected relief. I walked in a dream for a week, in fear it WAS a dream. And yeah, that’s a measure of how well they “sold” their narrative even to those of us who are politically plugged in and addicted to the stuff.
So, what do I think? What do I think our chances are? Do I think we shouldn’t bring the cartridge box out, ever? What would make me bring it out?
Ah. Shake the magic eighth ball and ask again. Right now? I don’t even know what the result of the elections will be. To be fair, I don’t think I’d trust any prognostications after 2016, but also…. well, they’ve pulled all the stops on the fraud. And I thought they’d already done that in 2018. And I can’t tell if we can beat the margin of fraud. I can’t tell if anyone could. Even if every living person went in and voted straight GOP. And you know they won’t. A lot of them are non political and believe the narrative.
So, why not go at them, now, before they fraud their way to power? Partly? Because they want us to. Which means right now they have strategies in place. They are ready. Dear Lord, what do you think the Summer of lack of love has been all about?
Yes, they might be wrong. They’ve been wrong before. And yes their “troops”are pathetic, and the people who tell us “but they got bloodied” need to take a powder already. I do agree with you on that. Because most of their “troops”that are in anyway effect are violent criminals. They’ve long ago been blooded. But their ante-fa only gambols where authorities are friendly for a reason.
BUT–
The night between Monday and Tuesday my profile disappeared from Facebook, and yesterday I had to log on to FB TWICE and change my password twice. Apparently this happened to a lot of people on what I’ll broadly call “our side.”
Sure, it might have been a technical glitch, but wait: I also had to log onto WordPress TWICE. The chances of having a glitch hit both companies the same day is….. uh. lower. Though I’ll give you that tech in general is capable of a lot of that.
I don’t know, because I no longer have reliable sources on the other side.
And frankly that’s the biggest problem with going hot. It’s mutual assured destruction. Yeah, I know, a lot of you don’t use FB, I personally don’t really use Twitter, etc etc ad definite nauseum. But are you sure of your cell phone? Are you even that sure of your snail mail? (Were you ever? For those who think vote by mail is a good idea: take a $1000 dollar bill, but it in an envelope addressed to yourself, place the necessary stamp, and mail it to yourself. Go on. I dare you.)
No, they can’t black us out completely. As I’m fond of saying the photocopier and fax brought the USSR down. But organization will be interesting, and do you really want to bet the life of the republic on this leaky sieve before it’s absolutely necessary?
So when will it be absolutely necessary? When you have a reasonable expectation that it’s either the Glorious People’s Republic of Bumf*ckistan or the regime in Starship Troopers. Because in those circumstances, yeah, Starship Troopers is preferable. (And those who think that means I want it need their heads examined. But it’s still preferable to communism. [And for those who’ve never read the book, read it. The bullshit in the MOVIE wasn’t preferable to communism. It also wasn’t Heinlein’s ideas.]) Because it’s quite likely at that point it is our best case scenario and our best hope: that the veterans will have had enough. It won’t be the Republic, though. Remember that. They can’t win, but we can lose. And we probably will, for a definition of losing.
And yes, it might all come to a head in less than a month and a half, though things usually take longer to percolate.
I wish I could tell you it won’t be needed. I wish I could say those of us who have been fighting the cultural civil war are winning. I wish I could tell you that it won’t come to the death of the Republic in both constitution and territory, or that we’re not in danger. Or that the dread fourth box won’t be needed. But I only lie in fiction and this ain’t fiction.
I came out of the political closet in what can best be described as a Road to Damascus experience. Some of you know what I’m talking about. Some don’t. Let’s say it was a very bizarre thing to happen to completely non-mystical me who dreads woo woo stuff even from the religion (s?) she was raised in (it’s complicated.) Let’s say I didn’t rush out of the political closet. I was shoved. Or drop kicked. In a way impossible to resist. I’m not a happy warrior. Not intellectually. And only some of you know how hard those first steps were. I’m conflict averse, and I used to cry while writing. And shake so hard it was hard to type.
I just had to, and resisting it would be harder than doing it. Kind of like when I was giving birth to second son, and they told me not to push because the doctor wasn’t there yet. Worst half an hour of my life. And it only kind of worked.
But I’ve been doing this now for what? A decade? And yet…. well this year. Despite me and all like me who scream in the desert.
So am I saying we’re winning the cultural war, and even if the left frauds their way to power we can’t lose?
Tickle me. See if I laugh.
I’m saying the nihilist Marxists had won the culture so completely by the time I was born, that we are a rearguard action, a regiment of the damned, the crazy Nekulturny bastages willing to take what they fling at us, willing to give up on the cocktail party circuit, or more importantly on acclaim, security, respectability, because we think Marxism is that bad, and that the future and civilization are that important.
Yes, people like us win. Sometimes. That level of insanity commands its own respect, and wins its own victories. If we have enough time.
Do we have enough time? Who the heck knows. We might. Miracles do happen. We saw one in November 2016 and honestly, back then I didn’t even know what we were handed. I expected at best that we’d slowed down the death camps and our utter destruction. Because well… Himself chooses the strangest instruments. (Yes, I know, Noah was a drunkard, Moses was tongue-tied, and the list goes on. Sometimes I think He delights in contrary plotting. Yes I do keep telling Him He needs a writers’ group. He’s becoming predictable. Speaking of miracles, still not charred here, on this side of the screen.)
In case anyone is keeping score at home, lately — like the last three weeks — I’ve been getting the sort of push I got towards coming out of the political closet, but this time it could briefly summed up as “Write fiction and release it as fast as you humanly can.” And “Make all your friends on the side of light do the same.”
THIS part is true and puzzling. I mean, that’s a true push, and not just from my broken mind. When it’s …. THAT, whatever it is, it’s undeniable.
What does it mean? Heck if I know. Do I look to you like I have special knowledge? It could either mean that “we win they lose” and He’s moved on to incite warriors to win the culture fight. OR it could mean all is lost, and perhaps a fragment of a novel or two will be needed ten thousand years from now. I’m just passing it on, because if I seem less stable than usual, for the record, it’s really hard to go about our lives “in these trying times” while a divine boot is being applied repeatedly to one’s backside. And because it maybe means something good. Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not writing this novel.
So, we could get a miracle. Or not. I’ve now for some time been getting the sense I should leave my beloved Denver. For, oh, a little over a year, now. At the same time events have conspired to make it impossible for us to leave under two years.
Is that feeling right? Well, it’s coming from ME and my back-brain, not from whatever it is that pushed me out of the political closet. And who knows? All we can do is make preparations and set things in order so we can leave in two years, if we can leave then. If it waits that long.
And in the end, that’s where we are in the largest sense. Will this whole thing go hot, and go up like a Roman candle? I don’t know. And neither do you.
Will we prevail when we’re forced to fight? Will what emerges be at least as good as Starship Troopers? Will a miracle occur and we get to keep the republic?
Magic eight ball is broken. You’ve poked it way too much. My friend to whom I’ve been pasting this as I write it, because this is the longest blog post in history, has just sent back “This too shall pass, possibly through the plumbing system, all things considered, but still…” And she’s not wrong.
So I am saying there’s nothing we can do?
No, no, I’m not. Remember half of this blog is me talking to myself. Besides, making use of the wonderful term one of you dropped in comments yesterday, I’m not Martyrbator. I don’t expect to be glorified through holy martyrdom. Nor do I want it or wish to hasten it. I’m not the type to sing hymns and turn my eyes to heaven as I’m herded into a place filled with hungry lions. By genetics and disposition, I have a dream of going out as I came in: screaming and covered in someone else’s blood. (Naked at this point would be sad for everyone’s sense of aesthetics. And hopefully not prematurely.) At least if I don’t get the option to go quietly, at an advanced age, surrounded by my children, bio and adopted, including those adopted as adults (ever so useful. No diapers to change) and their tribe of children and grandchildren.
I’m saying the time is not yet. I’m saying now is the time to prepare on all fronts. You know what they are, and if you’re smart, you’ll include ways to communicate with and help those you trust.
And that the time might be very short indeed. Or not. Because miracles do happen. No, you shouldn’t count on them. But at this point well…. even I have had to admit they happen. Call it quantum uncertainty. Call it life being whimsical. But they do happen.
Prepare for the worst. No, worse than that. No. Even worse. Look, just prepare for the worst you can imagine. Then grab your most pessimistic friend and ask them what he can imagine. Then have him get his most pessimistic friend….. You get the point. Prepare for THAT.
And if that doesn’t happen, be aware you’re not off the hook. We have to change this ridiculous culture, or our kids will fight this with fewer resources. Or their kids after them. So, physical or not, as is needed at whatever point, fight now. No matter the cost. Even though the cost of the culture war is all out of proportion to the rewards any of us will see.
Fight as you can, while you can. And remember, physical or metaphorical, the pointy end goes in the other guy. And if you can, poison it. And if appropriate, break it in there.
This is no time to go wobbly. Be not afraid. And do prepare.
And now I’m going to finish one of those novels, a fragment of which might be needed — and completely misunderstood — in ten thousand years. Because Someone refuses to join a writers’ group and is fond of convoluted plotting. (Still not charred. Winning. But you might not want to stand so close to me.)
And I Can’t Get Up A Blast From The Past From April 2020
If you’re like me, you have trouble with the usual encouragement and sayings that are meant to give you strength/courage/optimism.
You know perfectly well what I mean. I’m not going to give sources for these, because I hear them from everywhere, and my mind isn’t really good at buying anything wholesale. Hint, my mind buys it even less if it comes with a cute kitten. I think I started hating motivational posters before I had my first job (Which this being the eighties was PLASTERED in them). (Though at one time I did have the “hang in there” poster because the kitten was adorable. So, I’m inconsistent. Deal with it.) We are naturally attracted to demotivational posts out of frustration with the easy pollyannaish motivational posts, and annoyance with the people who believe in them. Hold on to that thought. It’s important. Seeing people for whom things seem to work, particularly things that our annoying brains tell us are far more complex than the poster/maxim/story is making them out to be causes annoyance. Frustrated annoyance. And a desire to believe the opposite. If people tell you “Hang in there” you know you’re going to drop hard. You just know it.
Some of it is born of experience, sure, but be honest with yourself, you expected it all along. Remember that too, it’s important.
One of the things that annoys me most is the saying that “the best predictor of whether you’ll succeed is how many times you fail.” Mostly because that’s not how that works. That’s not how any of that works.
That saying is sort of the incarnation of survivor bias. The more you’ve gotten knocked down AND still managed to get up, the more likely you are to succeed, sure. But that’s because you’re already by any definition a fairly exceptional person.
I’ll use writing for a bunch of this because it’s THE experience I have, but honestly, you could use anything, from your love life to your attempts and being the world’s best tiddly winks player. (Why am I obsessed with tiddly winks? Well, my eidetic, brilliant brother spent something like 12 years devoting all his free time to playing tiddly winks, a game that in Portugal, usually was left behind at age six or so (for boys. Girls didn’t play it.) In retrospect, it was an addictive behavior. If he’d had video games, he’d probably have been addicted to that. It’s not unusual for very, very bright people to need to dull the pain of… well… of the world not being made for them. And if they have an addictive personality, even if they don’t fall into drugs or alcohol, they’ll get addicted to something REALLY weird. For one of the worst times of my life, I was addicted to fanfic for a TV series that I never watched. Why? Well, it kept the brain minimally occupied so I could dream my life away without DOING anything. Yes, brother eventually stopped it. But meanwhile my parents kept joking his ambition in life was to be the world’s best tiddly winks player.)
Most people who want to be writers never start. Laziness? Maybe. Perhaps. Sitting down and putting fingers on keyboard is not physical work, but it is work.
I’d argue though that most of the time the problem is not so much laziness as the fear of never getting better. I know that’s true for almost everyone who tries to draw anything.
And trying to write a story is a series of compromises. In your mind the thing is multicolored and gigantic, with 100 actors and 1000 elephants. But you can’t write that. It’s simply not something you can put on a page. No one is going to follow that sort of diffuse action. So you compromise. You’ll tell this person’s story. Maybe 10 actors. And one elephant.
And even then, if you’re a beginner you’re going to botch it. For instance, it’s perfectly normal for beginning authors not to be able to handle more than two characters on the page at a time.
So most people give up. Our model as humans seems to be “perfect first time, or I’m no good” but also most people don’t believe they can get THAT much better. (Hint, you can.)
I no longer remember the statistics, and since I don’t know how they collect them anyway, they’re probably meaningless, but it’s something like:of a million people who ever thought to write a book, one actually does it. Of course, there’s no way of measuring how seriously they thought of it, so again, it’s just a vague indication.
We do have more solid ground for people who actually wrote anything significant AND submitted it, ever getting accepted. The ratio is something astronomical like 100000 to one.
Why? Because most people give up after the first rejection. On this, I’m going on my experience in many writers’ groups over the years. Any number of people I met along the way wrote ONE NOVEL. It was a good novel, in most cases (two were brilliant.) They then spent the next five, ten, fifteen years trying to sell it, so single mindedly focused on selling it, that they never wrote another. And the novel got rejected. It got EPICALLY rejected. It got rejected by every reputable outfit and a dozen of the oh, 100 or so I knew ended up falling for scams like “pay us to read” or “pay us to publish.” When this failed to obtain success, they stopped writing. Well, honestly, they’d stopped writing years before, in favor of selling the one novel. But that’s something else. The truth is that they looked at that novel as “proof of concept” and since it didn’t sell, they knew nothing would sell and they gave up.
This is understandable, but completely contrary to reality. So contrary it doesn’t even coexist in the same plane. It’s part of the lies we tell ourselves and the world tells us “if your thing is good enough, it will be a bestseller.” Doesn’t work like that. You’re not submitting your novel to some all-knowing perfect judge. You’re submitting it to a person who is flawed and has issues in his own life and views your story through their own lens. And sometimes their lens has bloody nothing to do with anything you could anticipate when writing the novel. For instance, one of my series took SIXTEEN years to sell, because it was weird, but also because the one house who WOULD have bought it rejected it with “we bought something very similar just last week.” You know, in such circumstances I assume they’re lying. But I know what they bought, and yes, it’s very similar. And it went on to be a bestseller.
Let’s assume you’re one of the very resilient few and write a second novel and a third novel, while trying to sell the first. (I wrote nine. Three of those have sold since.)
The fairy of good fortune comes and touches your novel. It sold. YAY.
Good for you. Be aware the chances of its becoming a bestseller is not dependent on quality, but on distribution, cover, and how much the house pushes it. Heck, the chances of it becoming a GOOD seller are minimal.
Most people who sell a book never sell a second. I don’t know how many, but way in excess of half.
By the way, all of this applies to indie. Most people who put a novel up never sell more than a dozen copies. Discoverability is the problem, mostly. Just advertising your novel everywhere is not going to make it a bestseller (for one indie is heavily biased for series.) I’m not in writers’ groups now, but I KNOW just from people who write me and who decided they were “no good” after a novel or a short story that the “drop out because of perceived failure” rate is about the same.
So, what about if you sell a second or a third, or a fourth novel? Yeah. My career has died… eight times now. Utterly dead. At one time it took me almost two years to sell anything to anyone again. I did a full relation of my career here. Well, more or less full. I elided some set backs. And there’s been one more since that was written. Without going into details let’s say my own remaining option — ONLY option — is going indie with both feet. Whether I’ll ever recover my IP is something else again. No, I’m not ecstatic about any of this. More on that later.
One of the most bitterly funny things about me is that most people perceive me as an optimist. One of you in comments yesterday asked where do you master the will and the optimism to try again. Ah!
It has nothing to do with will or optimism. Seriously. Absolutely nothing. It has to do with being alive and wishing to remain so.
My family is notoriously unlucky. I was born knowing that or at least imbibed it with mother’s milk. Seriously “if we made baby bonnets, babies would be born without a head” unlucky. The stories of wars, investments and just general life in which we backed the losing side KNOWING IT WAS THE LOSING SIDE is extensive.
On dad’s side (you don’t want to know about mom’s truly) we tend towards melancholic depression, dark sense of humor and sad poetry. Because I’m half mother’s daughter, my depressions can get way more active and self destructive. Which is why I learned to control them early.
To all this is added a disposition I’ve started calling “born owing money.” (Though in fact I wasn’t, mostly because my parents have a debt-phobia, one they passed one.) You don’t approach the world as though it can give you things. You approach it as though you’re afraid of bothering it, and would much rather it didn’t notice you.
How much are all of these attitudes responsible for the repeated failures in my career. I don’t know. When your lens is flawed, what do you see through.
I don’t believe in affirmations. Sometimes I’d like to, but I don’t. They’re like the motivational posters. It does you no good to write on your mirror “I’m beautiful and everyone loves me” if you know with bone deep certainty that this isn’t true.
And yet, I know from observing others lives that what you start out with really influences the outcome. And by that I don’t mean your gifts, talents, beauty, or even wealth.
A little man who looks like a monkey and smells like a diseased weasel but who believes he’s the master stallion of the world will have women hanging off him. A smart, handsome man who thinks he’ll never get a romantic relationship will die bitter and alone.
Part of it is that if you don’t believe something is possible, you don’t even see the opportunity when offered. Part of it is that when you get it, and attempt it, you keep expecting it to crash. And part of it is that you don’t protest bad treatment, don’t ask for what you deserve.
i.e. Yeah, your beliefs about life and yourself can set you up for failure.
I realized last year I simply did not believe I could be successful in writing. What does that influence? Well, everything. From how much I put in my writing, to how much I write, to how much I promo, to…
“But Sarah,” you say “I’ve really failed over and over and over at thing x. Why should I try again?”
And I’ve failed over and over and over again at becoming spectacularly successful, or at least having a publisher recognize the potential of anything I wrote. (Weirdly a ghost written novel for another writer made her career. Odd, uh?)
So, why not just lay down? Why not give up?
It depends. Is it something you CAN give up? By which I mean without significantly losing part of who you are and what you want from life?
I could give up sewing or art tomorrow. I probably won’t, but I could. They’re “interesting” occupations, not part of what I am and how I’m made to function. Not the thing I’ve wanted all my life.
I’ll eventually have the kids move out of state (probably) and see them only a few times a year. That’s fine. My relationship as a mother is something created to be given up (if successful.) If we’re lucky, we’ll replace it with friendship. But could I give up my marriage? Well, we’ve had our ups and downs, but I fight for it because no I couldn’t. Not without losing a significant part of myself.
The crucial question is “And if you give up, then what?”
For something that’s central to you, the answer is usually “I don’t know. I do nothing.” or perhaps “I’ll just drift.” That might not be the answer, in those words, but it is what will happen.
In the few times I thought I HAD to give up, I undertook bizarre, mind numbing activities. To avoid doing the beloved thing, because that hurt.
So, where do you find the strength — ah! — and the optimism — ahah! — to get up again?
You don’t. You get up because you have to. Because there’s nothing else on the other side of giving up.
Look, we tend to think in static categories. “I’ll just give up.” Or “I’ll succeed.” Or “I’ll fail.”
But none of these are permanent. Nothing stays still, not even our emotional states. All of them are followed by “and then what?”
Even those who succeed will EVENTUALLY experience failure. Trust me, I have a ton of friends who are bestsellers. Most of them have experienced catastrophic failure more times than success.
“The key is to get up one more time than you fall down.” Sure, but how. From what?
From a fear of what happens if you don’t.
I hesitate to write this, because the person might read this blog and know himself. But if he does, perhaps it will help, because it’s high time he understood it. Hell, we saw it happen and we didn’t understand it.
Decades ago, when we were young and green as grass, and Dan was just starting up his career, we met someone about our age (a little older)who wanted more than anything to be a writer. His education and background were different from ours and he thought this was massively important but it wasn’t. When we were all young, he was starting out in a profession with just as much potential as Dan’s, and he was moderately successful and made just a little less than Dan. And hell, he had advantages I never had in writing. For one, he was a native speaker of English. For another, he had some vague idea of how publishing worked. Very vague, but better than mine.
Over the years, I wrote and wrote and wrote. It took me 9 years from first sending anything out to selling a short story at semi-pro rates. It took me 13 to sell a novel (and that series crashed hard.)
I’m not made of iron. I’m naturally pessimistic. Sometimes rejections hit so hard they disabled me for months. Not just being unable to write, but sometimes spending months crying and trying to hide it from Dan and the boys. One day I had 60 some rejections ON MY BIRTHDAY.
But there was nothing else, so I kept writing. Along the way I stopped here and there, tried to give up and got some really spectacularly stupid addictions (fanfic for TV series I’d never watched, for instance.) And carried them on for months/a year before realizing it was not just making me useless, it was making me hate other people/resent them for no good reason. Like, I hated everyone who was still writing — even my closest friends — even though they had NO success. Because they were writing, and I couldn’t/had given it up. When I started being mean to my kids, because I was hurting and someone else had to hurt, is when I realized I had to pull up. Even the stupid addictions are hard to give up. Trust me. It was difficult.
Along the way I had some successes too. Some critical acclaim. A couple of awards. Series that sold well enough I had the income of an underpaid secretary now and then for some years.
Our used-to-be-friend? Not so much.
He had a story accepted and the magazine went under without publishing it (note this happened eight times with the first story I sold. It killed magazines.) and this seemed to be it for him. He wrote a few more stories because all our friends were writing them, but some of them he seemed to think he was being clever and mocking our idea you could just write many stories. He seemed to think he was writing very bad stuff. In fact, that’s some of his best, but never mind.
And he became more and more invested in the idea he’d write a novel, it would be a world-shattering success, he’d be set for life. This is not the way things happen.
I don’t know if he tried it. One of our kids thinks he did. And got rejected. Possibly.
What I know is that year on year, as the “defeats”– and he seemed to view MY successes (such as they were, dear lord) as his defeats — accumulated he did less and less and less. He restricted himself more and more.
And though it took us years to realize it, he came to first resent us, then hate us. It manifested in a hundred different ways, all under the flag of continued friendship. We felt sorry for him and tried to help him, but every time we saw him, it became more unpleasant. Until two years ago at the end of the year he went too far and at a time when we had neither financial nor emotional resources to handle it. He has tried — at least twice — since then to “avenge” himself by bringing crisis into our life, at a time when he thought we were at a party or enjoying ourselves. (We weren’t, but that’s something else again.)
Normally I hate losing friends. I hate cutting off contact with anyone. This time I realized I was ridiculously relieved.
I realized over the years he’d acquired the habit of belittling us, attacking us verbally, inflicting his presence on us at the least wanted times, and generally being a pain in the ass.
Why?
See the thing above. This was an immensely talented individual who fell down a couple of times and decided that was good. He’d just lay down and rot. But he couldn’t help knowing what he’d wasted. And he couldn’t help resenting those of us who had gone on to do ANYTHING. Anything, even my halting, painful, not very profitable career seemed amazing to him, and also like “if there was any justice, I should have had that.”
From the amount of times he tried to bleed us (financial emergencies. Loans never paid. Etc. etc. etc.) he also viewed us as “very wealthy.” (We’re okay. We make do. A little stressed now for reasons that should pass in a year. But mostly through the miracle of living beneath our means, buying from thrift stores, etc.)
You can’t lie there. You can’t just lie there. You’re alive. You can’t stop. Because you can’t. Because that’s not how humans work.
Not getting up is a choice, and not one that ends in a static option. You’re not just going to be there, forever, world without end. No. You’re going to become bitter, resentful, envious of everyone and everything, even JUST those who are still trying. You’re going to say “I wish I had their optimism” without having a clue if they have it, because they must have SOMETHING you lack. You’re going to think it’s their academic education (ah!) or their higher class background (ahah. Doesn’t translate between countries) or that they’re prettier than you, or have better clothes, or … Lord alone knows.
And in the process you’re going to destroy everything, including the regard of people who once cared for you. You’re going to push everyone away. Most of all you’re going to destroy yourself.
The opposite of trying once more isn’t just laying there. The opposite of trying is dying. And a horrible death in bitterness and self-destruction.
The example I gave is NOT the only one I’ve seen, it is just perhaps the most spectacular example of it I’ve ever seen.
When you fall and decide you can’t get up, you’re choosing to reign in hell, rather than serve in heaven. You don’t have to be religious to understand that. Milton knew a thing or two about people. You are NOT lacking strength or optimism. Because those aren’t needed to get up again, and try again. You can do that from nothing but stubbornness.
No. You’re choosing to lie there and die because your pride is hurt. You should have been an amazing success. Don’t they recognize your genius? Fools! you’ll show them.
Only the only person you can destroy is yourself. And you do.
This is why I crawl up, on bloodied and hands and knees and try again. Despite total pessimism and lack of strength. Over and over and over again.
If they made a motivational kitten poster of me, it would be too bloodied and gruesome to hang in an office. My spirit animal is Inigo Montoya.
Will I succeed? I don’t know. I am actually trying to convince myself success is possible, because I’ve realized mind set is important.
Will I lie down and die? No. Because that’s not an option. Failure is not just a static state. It’s decaying and bitterness and giving yourself in to evil. And I’m not doing THAT.
So. Up on bloody knees. Despite weakness and despair, up.
Everywhere you turn these days, the term “civil war” is on everyone’s lips.
We know the left WANTS one, both because they tell us they do, and because, true to their mechanic of projection, they tell us it’s the “right” that wants the civil war, and latch onto the craziest things, like Hawaiian shirts, which men of certain portliness wear, as a sure sign we’re now wearing a uniform and we “want a civil war.”
The thing might be unavoidable, of course, since they’re trying so hard — and I’ll explain WHY they’re trying so hard in a minute — but my earnest question to those on the right doing things like posting memes of the Founding Fathers with “my homies and I would already be stacking bodies” (Which is historically wrong. They put up with a lot more shit than we have. The Road to the Revolution was loooong. You only hear about “relevant precipitating incidents”, but it was a long time before Americans snapped. This has been true in every war, btw.) is “WHY would you give the left what they want?”
Have they been alive in this world at the same time I have? Because I don’t recall a time that what the left wanted wasn’t good for them and bad for everyone else.
In this case, the left needs a civil war. They need to destroy civilization, control the news again, and install a totalitarian regime where no dissent will be allowed. Yes, they’re trying to get it by means of censorship, but if that were working, they wouldn’t be so hot to trot.
The most baffling thing about what I’ll call “The dogs of war” on the right is that it doesn’t stop with circumstances. No, seriously. Before 2016, they wanted to burn it all down. (To an extent, I DO understand that, by the way. Because after Obama, Hillary would have put an end to us. It doesn’t mean going out in a blaze of glory was the smart choice for us and for the future. But it was understandable.) Then Trump won, and they REALLY wanted to burn it all down. Uh? You have the president, the house and congress. Yes, embattled. What, you expected it to be a fairy tale and the dragon imploded? But still, you’ve shown you have the ability to change with the system you have…. and you want to blow it all down? And now they want to burn it all down….
At which point do they realize that whatever is driving them is not the current political situation? And that maybe what apparently are called “black pillers” are not people who have our society’s best interests at heart?
Has the time leading to Trump’s election taught you nothing? All the people running around, approvingly talking about how racist he was, who disappeared right after the election….. YOU THINK THEY WERE REAL? YOU THINK THEY WERE AMERICAN? YOU THINK THEY WERE ON THE RIGHT? Are you out of your minds?
That’s the beginning, but there are other things. Like the insistence that our loss of the rule of law is unprecedented. That cancel culture is unprecedented. That our colleges are uniquely infected.
Every time I hear this — and often it is from a leftist who is changing — I want to post this:
Look, I do realize I see things a certain way, because of where I was born/grew up. But I’ve lived here most of my adult life.
The shock was not coming here as an exchange student, from a country dominated by the left where education taught the splendors of communism and my suddenly enjoying the land of the free. The shock was realizing your left was a lot like our left — just more veiled — that the history books taught the same bullshit, only less openly, and that you had to keep your mouth shut about how bad the left/communism/socialism were or risk being treated as crazy or an idiot by all the bien pensant.
The number of times I told my host family “This is what is really going on” and they told me that stuff didn’t happen in America and I was being paranoid is in the hundreds. You know, stuff like sitcoms painting Reagan as a crazy person and practically campaigning for Carter? Yeah, stuff like that. They, btw, eventually came to see it. By then, at eighteen, I couldn’t figure out how people didn’t see it.
And yes, of course I kept my mouth shut in school and social situations. Because if even my host family thought I was insane, what would strangers think?
And when I came here as a young wife, it was no different. Yes, part of this were the circles I ran in, which were academic/artistic and technological on the husband’s side. But it was the same. When our dentist, during a session, campaigned for the democrat for mayor, and talked about the horrible racism of the GOP candidate (assumed because GOP) do you think I set her straight? She’d just decide I was racist.
As for cancel culture…. PFUI. With a cherry on top. Why do you think I kept my mouth shut in order to keep writing. It didn’t even take much. I know for a fact a liking for elephants as an animal was enough to make people suspect you of being a secret republican. And like the hunt for witches, once they suspected you, it was easy to find “corroboration.” You’re religious? Ah! Obviously an evil right winger who wants to kill all non believers, put women in chain, restore slavery, etc. etc. (The fact their image of the right has bloody nothing to do with reality never stopped them. Besides it was reinforced by entertainment, the news, everything.)
And yes, you’d get cancelled. I saw it happen. Granted, it wasn’t all politics. You could get cancelled for all sorts of reasons. Word went out that you were seen with so and so, who once called your editor a b*tch, and you were friendly with them. And no one would touch you again. Suddenly you were “difficult to work with” and no other editor would accept you.
Why not? There was an infinite supply of widget-writers, and what made you really successful was whether you got promo and push or not (to an extent not wrong, after selling to the net, btw. It just took them a while to figure out that they couldn’t make dog turds shine.) You were done. More importantly everyone was warned not to talk to you, read you, or even think about you. You were banished.
It was no different in other entertainment, academic, or even news or scientific circles. Cancel culture has been alive and well ever since I’ve been in this country. It’s just that most people weren’t aware of it. This is how we got the myth that only leftists were talented, because they were the only visible ones. The other ones disappeared. And though people tried to explain why civilizational product in general, from science to art, was going down, (the left loved the theory of the decadence brought on by capitalism), it never occurred to the average man on the street that the people in these fields were being judged and culled by criteria that had nothing to do with ability or merit.
Heck, even some people to the right of Lenin who had come in before me, when the left at least attempted to pretend they were even-handed didn’t see it. They bought into the myth it was all merit. BUT they knew too. Because they advised you not to be seen with so and so. They just never correlated it. And if I brought it up, I was told it was a conspiracy theory. So I didn’t.
It wasn’t a conspiracy, btw. As we’ve found out, a lot of fellow-travelers who all believe the same thing and head the same way is indistinguishable from a conspiracy. Also, the power to cancel and destroy was the stronger because they controlled the mass media, the press, etc.
But Sarah, you say, we’re seeing uniquely partisan persecutions, and attacks, and–
Really? Want to bet on that? I’m remiss on studying the history of the US, I confess, but while there have been better times — mostly while the west was open, which meant there were places where it was hard to track people, although that had its downsides, too — and worse times, partisan persecution, oppression, suppression of opinions, etc, have always been with us. They probably always will be, honestly. We are human.
It’s good to have the ideal of equal treatment under the law. It’s also important to realize that it’s never going to happen. Not completely. For various reasons, but mostly because no, ever judge is not going to be a paragon. Every police officer is not going to be a saint. And there are no angels among the populace, either. Miscarriages of justice will happen. To demand a world where there is no miscarriage of justice, ever, puts you in the same mind set as the idiots who think all men should be responsible because one of them is a rapist. That’s not how humans work.
But Sarah, look at how they’ve gone after Trump and his people….
Yeah. I’ll forgive that to the college kids who don’t know any better, but those of you who were old enough to shave at the same time I bought my first lipstick (at 17. I was a late bloomer) do not get that kind of pass.
It’s like you’ve forgotten the endless “scandals” of the Reagan administration, that kept them tied in lawfare. It’s like you forgot that aids to Bush were thrown in prison on bullshit procedural “crimes.” It’s like you don’t realize that compared to what Obama clearly has gotten away with, Nixon was a choirboy.
And by the way, I’m sure all of that goes back much, much further back.
But Sarah, the federal government didn’t have that kind of power in the past–
Oh, yeah? Read first-hand sources during WWI. Or WWII. Or read The Forgotten Man which is like a manual on how a deranged totalitarian president can screw this country. Ask yourself how we got where we’re now. How the crawl through the institutions happened. How they came to have control of our societal mechanisms. Go ahead. Ask yourself how we got here. And how long it’s been going on. (Heinlein said that the Democrats had been taken over by communists by the forties. That communists were in control where it counted. I see no reason to doubt him.)
Your ignorance of how bad things were in the past, doesn’t make this the worst things have ever been.
So, what has changed?
Well, it’ more visible now. Things have changed, indeed — changed at such a pace that it qualifies as “catastrophic change” in the last 20 years or so. 20 years ago? I’d be praying a lot and keeping my mouth tight shut. Also, most of the publishing establishment would think of me as a very domestic woman with no political opinions. One of those Latin moms, you know? Why? Well, because I would want my stories to continue being read.
Now?
Despite all attempts at keeping only the official narrative going, the dems are losing control. They’re losing control of the very institutions they worked so hard to control completely. They can cancel people to an extent, but people KNOW ABOUT IT. And that in itself, even if the canceling works, goes against them, because other people realize what’s going on.
Obama? They tried to paint him as a boy scout, pure as driven snow. But it didn’t work. Stuff leaked. No one but the most invested of the left believes that his administration was ethical and pure. Hillary? They tried to sell her so hard. SO hard. Media and entertainment burned their credibility to do it. (And it was planned, since at least Clinton’s first term, when I heard a bunch of editors talk about how long it would be before we COULD have HER, who was the real hard left in the family.) And it didn’t work. Enough stuff had leaked, that the stink clung to her. And their media lost a bit of their shine.
Their war on Trump? Sure, it’s been worse than anything I’ve seen. But part of it is that I’ve SEEN it. What was going on before, when we relied on the tainted media to report? Do you know? Because I don’t.
I know that most republicans before didn’t fight. I don’t judge them harshly, even those who clearly developed Stockholm Syndrome.
I don’t judge them because…. go up there and read that if things hadn’t changed the way they have in the last twenty years, I’d probably still be tightly politically closeted. Trying to embed messages in my books, sure, and probably getting more and more depressed because I couldn’t tell the truth (which would increase my silences) but …. What would be the point of telling the truth? Or of blowing things up and start shooting people? I’d just go down in history as a monster and be used to destroy people like me. Be used to increase the repression. (Yes, that is still in effect to some extent, though it’s changing. The fact the right refused to condemn Kyle Rittenhouse scared the living crap out of the left, which is part of the reason they started calling out the rioters. BUT his case is so clear cut defense, that the left had trouble selling it. And also, even so, a lot of the “not politically connected people” BOUGHT the idea he was a white supremacist murderer. So the stupid press still has some power.)
So I don’t judge the older republicans too harshly. And I do realize why Trump daring to fight back drives the left bonkers. It’s not just that he fights back, but that by and large he gets away with it, which is a reminder of how much power they have lost.
Guys, the very fact they’re OPENLY talking about stealing the election via fraud, is not a sign of their power, but of how they are losing power.
If they still had the power they had 30 years ago, all you’d hear is how the people would all rise up and vote for Biden. Seriously. And you wouldn’t even have a suspicion he’s demented as f*ck. Because you’d watch the debates and think it, but then you’d hear everyone talk about his acumen and wonderfulness, and you’d go “well…. I might be crazy.”
Yes, this year has driven me nuts, partly because I’m cracked due to past experiences. You don’t need to have been in physical battle to experience PTSD. And I think that’s hitting a lot of you too.
But what you have to realize is that the old establishment, from corrupt scientists to the news media, to the lefty governors, to academia and the schools went all in, did everything to create a crisis (it’s not a surprise. They were openly wishing for something to crash the economy. And for the idiots reading this, no, I’m not saying they created or made up the virus. I’m saying they directed the response in the craziest, most counterproductive way possible) in order for the mass media to regain their captive audience, and the left to sell their story.
And they’re failing. Across the country they are failing. What they succeeded in doing, in fact, was destroy what remained of the credibility and finances of the institutions they control.
So, yes, they want a civil war. That’s their hail mary pass. That’s their only chance. If we remain free and functioning as a society, they’re done, and they know it. This is also why they’re openly fantasizing about fraud.
This is not the behavior of people who subscribe to an ascendant, powerful philosophy. This is the behavior of ants whose hill has been dug up.
There is a book, and I wish I knew which, only I think I rather hated the book, and that it was one of those mainstream things that I read because I had to, which had an insane description that stuck with me.
It was talking about a little boy with a boil. The little boy was very proud of that boil, and watched it swell, and become huge and red, and admired the sheen of the stretched skin. Yeah, it hurt a bit, but look how big, how beautiful it was. And then someone (I don’t remember who) lanced it, and all this yellow, bad smelling stuff came pouring out. And he cried because the stuff was revolting, and he no longer had his big shining boil.
That is kind of what I’m seeing. All this bad smelling, yellow/green corruption you’re seeing? It was always there. In fact, the modern left have become uniformly horrible human beings because the cover of the institutions meant their corruption was never found, so they could do whatever they wanted with no fear. My guess is that the sewer-like effluvium we’ve not yet seen is much worse than we can guess at. Worse than anything we can dream of, because we are not by and large insane.
BUT just because you didn’t see it, weren’t aware of it before, or were briefly aware of it, and then it was covered over, it doesn’t mean things weren’t as bad before. I think they were worse.
The new tech was enough to lance the boil. Oh, not fully. But enough for us to see some of what’s inside. Enough for the left to be unable to keep it all secret, and pretend only crazy people oppose their program, and that they’re the best there is.
And that’s what scares them. If the boil is fully cut open, we’ll all see what it holds and it will heal. Sunlight and the disinfectant of people’s disgust will destroy their cozy corruption. They can’t stand it. They want to destroy our ability to open that boil more. And only a complete collapse of society will give them that power again.
This is why they’re pushing so hard for civil war.
The question is, why should we give it to them?
Yes, it might become inevitable. But that point is not now. Hell, the point might not come if they win through massive fraud. It might, though. Depends on what they do with that, and how far to North Korea they manage to take us. My guess is, like Obama, they’ll find they’re not as powerful as they think they’d be. And also that the levels of fraud will generate more resistance than they dream of. I could be wrong.
Am I saying there won’t be a time to fight? Who? Me? One of you gave my husband a shirt saying “I’m with the excitable Latina.” You know better.
I’m just saying that though I too long for a clear confrontation, one that will finally lay everything bare…. That’s not the way reality works. We’re not a in a movie.
Listen to those in the comments who have experienced civil war and insurrection. Or read (real) histories of the revolutionary war and the civil war. Once the shooting starts, things get murky, and high principles get lost.
Yes, we got very lucky with the revolutionary war, and to a certain extent with the civil war — it could have been worse, believe it or not, even if the changes to our government set up the seeds of the current mess — but do you want to roll for a third time? Before it’s absolutely needed? Really?
Sure, the time might come — and unfortunately not far off — to live free or die. But if the time comes it must be done with forethought and in the certainty it won’t lead to what we’re trying to avoid. Trusting the left to poke us into it, and thinking it will turn out all right is a fool’s game.
This is no time to go wobbly. If the republic can be saved at the ballot box, the cartridge box should stay shut. Full and ready, but shut.
In the end we win, they lose. Unless we start falling for their — weak — mind games.
*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog. Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so. As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste. 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. ;)*
Five years after the world learned shapeshifters are real, Mackenzie Santos is at a crossroads. Her responsibilities to the local pride and the Tribunal are taking more and more of her time. As the Dallas Police Department’s official liaison with the federal government on all things dealing with shapeshifters, she often finds herself on the road. That means she is away from her daughter, who is growing up much too quickly. Something has to give, and it might just be the job she loves.
But walking away isn’t going to be easy. Someone out there is determined to prove monsters do walk the face of the Earth and that they are the top of the proverbial food chain. They don’t care how many lives are lost or how many innocents are hurt. This is war and Mac and those she loves are in the middle of ground zero.
Leaving the DPD may no longer be an option. Yet the restrictions placed on her as a cop may prevent her from stopping the carnage, especially since she doesn’t know where the danger comes from or where it will strike next.
Storm clouds gather. An unknown danger nears, one that may spell the end of Mossy Creek, TX, and all those who live there.
Dr. Jax Powell and her best friends, her sisters from other misters, are determined to do whatever it takes to protect their town and loved ones. Each of them, once considered the town’s wayward children, have returned home. All but one: Magdalena “Maddy” Reyes. She’s not refused to return to Mossy Creek, but she appears to have dropped off the face of the Earth—or at least from the streets of Dublin.
Can they find Maddy and save their town or is it already too late?
A Magical Portent is novella-length story that follows Rogue’s Magic.
Trust me.
There are things in the lab no-one ever talks about.
Risk everything.
How far would you go to save a friend’s last hope?
Three friends, one fateful conversation. You can’t let your closest friends do something drastic, not if you can help it. When one of you has a a brilliant mind, another is a skeptic, and the last one is willing to be a guinea pig… should you stop them?
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.
I don’t feel up to writing a post, mostly because my head isn’t “fully on” yet, (I’ve managed to be jetlagged for two time zones at once) and I’m not up to writing the Witch’s Daughter chapter that’s ridiculously overdue.
I’ll try to do it tomorrow or tonight, around the promo post which, yes, I’m aware is ALSO overdue.
Look, the last two weeks were excessively 2020, okay? I’m trying to recover.
So I’m going to tell you what I was thinking of, apropos nothing (as far as I know) this morning.
I was thinking about Faustina, the elastic lady.
Uh?
Well, it goes something like this: my family has a tradition of scaring unruly children into behaving.
I’m sure it will shock EVERYONE here that I was an unruly — though more pain in the neck, rule lawyering — kid. Actually that’s how I managed to get kicked out of kindergarten. I kept rule-lawyering the teacher, and not just about my issues (I was actually fairly well behaved, as I’d hide in a corner and read) but everyone the teacher tried to punish. Mostly because she had a tendency to pick on kids who didn’t know how to defend themselves.
After bribes of candy (I hate hard candy, and that’s what she offered) and a glow in the dark rosary (who can resist that you ask? Well, I did) had failed, she took me by the hand, walked me back home, and handed me to grandma with the words “Next year, we’ll have to take her. Until then the law doesn’t say she has to be at school. Keep her at home, please.”
Anyway, as you can imagine, since I was — mostly — impervious to bribes and kept coming up with creative ways to argue why I should be allowed to do whatever I wanted, my family had to come up with something that would …. oh, make me go to bed on time, or shut my mouth for a minute or two.
And that something was Faustina, the elastic lady. The weird thing is that I remember nothing about this woman.
She was one of the peddlers who made the rounds of the village one day a week, and sold — I presume — not just elastic and lace, but probably other sewing notions. I presume like the other peddlers she did the rounds of other villages on the other days. (On Sundays we got the fun peddlers: cookies, candy, soda and potato chips. But during the week we got the Olive Man (who also sold oils) and the fish vendors, and probably others I don’t remember at all. I remember the olive man, because his donkey wore a hat, and because if I had been good I got to give the donkey a carrot. And the fish man because if I had been good, I got a half dozen clams to cook on top of the wood stove. Look, life was very boring, okay?)
BTW it’s a measure of how much my life has changed that I can’t IMAGINE how someone could make a living, no matter how small, selling sewing notions (and I presume elastic was the greater part of her business, since she was called Faustina dos Elasticos.) Maybe fish, or oil since both were major components of our diet. BUT elastic and notions? I can’t picture it. Yes, things were more expensive, and buying these from stores involved going to the city,which cost bus or train fare (and my mom did, because she was a professional, but even she bought from Faustina of the elastics now and then.) But still. This woman was on foot, and sold only what she carried. How can she have made a living?
It’s unsettling to realize that my worldbuilding might suffer from not really understanding/being able to picture such limited economies.
I have no idea why Faustina scared me. I’m going to presume she did, or my family wouldn’t have seized on it, nor invented such an outrageous story about her. But I don’t remember her at all. It’s possible she had a squint, and a half a century later, I have the impression she had a weird hamster voice.
Kids are merciless about “strangers” — which is why all the stupid stories about how babies are racist are ridiculous. Of course children shy from strangers. That was part of remaining alive and not becoming dinner when humans lived in family-bands — and find things strange that wouldn’t even register for adults, mostly because they have such a limited experience of the world. They don’t know how weird things and people can be and still fall in “the range of normal reality.” (Now I think about it, that’s the problem with all the woke superannuated children. Having been raised with a narrow idea of what’s normal, and carefully indoctrinated to distrust anything and anyone new, they can’t imagine the different without assuming it’s “evil.”)
One thing I’m almost sure of, (though I can’t verify it unless I call mom, and if I call her out of the blue RIGHT NOW and ask her to verify it, she’ll think I’ve lost my mind, even more than she already thinks it): is that Faustina walked with a weird gait, probably because of having one leg shorter than the other, or perhaps she’d had polio as a child, or something.
Why am I sure of that? Because I think whatever she looked like/moved like scared the heck out of me, and I started hiding from her.
Having glomed onto this my family — honestly, probably mom because she’s the only one I remember telling me that — told me that Faustina had legs made out of elastic, and could stretch to any length, and that she specialized in reaching into houses and grabbing naughty children, which she took away in her sack.
I remember being terrified of her, to the point that mentioning her name would get good behavior from me.
I don’t remember when I stopped being scared, or when she stopped making the rounds of sales (though I think it was before I was six or so, when we moved to the new house and the lady down the street opened a newspapers/magazines/notions and tobacco store operating out of her front window. (I can’t remember her name, but her village nickname was “of the tobacco” and her virtue was that she sold whenever you knocked on her window, so during the hours the general store (which sold tobacco) was closed.
And I can honestly say I didn’t think of her again till this morning.
Which is how kids grow, I suppose. I mean, we scared older son into compliance by telling him if he didn’t behave the trashmen would take him away. This was after an incident when we’d forgotten to put our trash out, and the collectors banged on our back gate and screamed and cursed, scaring the little two year old playing in the yard.
For the next three or four years, we could get compliance by picking up the phone to call the garbage collectors. I don’t know when he stopped being scared, but my guess is when he was rational enough that we could argue for compliance without having to scare him (and we only scared him when he was a danger to himself, the pets or his brother.) And unlike what our friends told us, he’s not scared of garbage collectors, and is perfectly civil and well behaved to them.
I’m not particularly scared of people who sell elastic, either, I must say. Or even lace and notions.
BUT I realized that in a weird place in my mind, there is this dark figure carrying a sack, who shambles down the old village street at twilight, before jumping up on elastic legs, to snatch a naughty child through a second floor window.
And yes, I realize she must appear in that guise in some future story, poor woman.
Absolute Truth and the Death of Turpitude by Cedar Sanderson
Riots, looting, shootings in the street. Get woke, go broke, believe all women except that one, and that one… You’re only black if I say you are…
Where did all of this violence, hatred, and sheer greasiness come from?
The death of truth and morality. When philosophers replaced the concepts of absolute truths with the idea that everything is relative, and it’s all what feels good, man! When those who did not fully understand relative truth began to use it as a justification for destroying the foundations that upheld the concept of turpitude, civilization as we knew it began to totter.
“Relativists often try to meet this challenge by giving a definition of truth that makes its relativity plain. If truth is idealized justification, then it might reasonably be thought to be assessor-relative, since ideal reasoners with different starting beliefs or prior probabilities might take the same ideal body of evidence to support different conclusions. Similarly, if truth is defined pragmatically, as what is good to believe, then it might also be assessor-relative, insofar as different things are good for making sense of relative truth different assessors to believe. But although these coherentist and pragmatic definitions of truth capture the ‘relative’ part of ‘relative truth’, I do not believe they capture the ‘truth’ part.”
He goes on in this talk to the Aristotelian Society to discuss the methods of ascertaining the relativity of an asserted truth, and comes up with a very useful ‘commitment to truth.’
“Here are three things that might be thought to constitute the ‘commitment to truth’ one undertakes in making an assertion:
(Withdraw) Commitment to withdraw the assertion if and when it is shown to have been untrue.
(Justify) Commitment to justify the assertion (provide grounds for its truth) if and when it is appropriately challenged.
(Responsibility) Commitment to be held responsible if someone else acts on or reasons from what is asserted, and it proves to have been untrue.
Everyone should be able to agree that assertoric commitment includes at least (W). Imagine someone saying: ‘I concede that what I asserted wasn’t true, but I stand by what I said anyway.’ We would have a very difficult time taking such a person seriously as an asserter. If she continued to manifest this kind of indifference to established truth, we would stop regarding the noises coming out of her mouth as assertions. We might continue to regard them as expressions of beliefs and other attitudes (just as we might regard a dog’s whining as an expression of a desire for food). We might even find them useful sources of information. But we would not regard them as commitments to truth, and hence not as assertions.”
He concludes, finally, that “the weakest form of relativism about truth would seem to be true.” So, looking at MacFarlane’s commitments, we can judge just how weak relativism is, against absolutes.
Commitment to withdraw an assertion in the fact it is untrue: fact-driven reality. If the statement is made ‘the sky is green’ and it is backed by evidence, or data, then the statement need not be withdrawn. The statement ‘the sky is blue’ is indeed a relative truth provable only under clear, daytime conditions. Green skies ahead of a tornado also exist.
However, to come back to turpitude… the statement that riots are necessary to effect change is a truth relative to what? That it is demonstrably true, as they have caused change; the statement was ambiguous in that the change was not desirable to anyone who was not enriched by their own looting.
A commitment to justify the assertion if and when it is challenged. If you state ‘businesses destroyed by looting and riots can simply claim insurance’ then you must give grounds for the factuality of that statement as it is demonstrably untrue in absolute terms. And then you must honor the first commitment, to withdraw that assertion. If you state that the President called soldiers ‘losers’ and you expect this to be accepted as veracity, you must be able to produce evidence of your assertion.
Finally, a commitment to be held responsible if someone else acts on what is asserted, and it proves to have been untrue. For a hundred years, it was asserted that forest fires were bad (demonstrably true according to those who live in their path) and everything possible must be done to stop them. In tandem, logging was decreed to be bad because it disrupted the environment and the wildlife through removal of those trees the forest fires also threatened. Good for the woods and wilderness, yes?
As a result of those twinned assertions, wildfires are raging on the west coast of North America. Not only will they kill people, animals, and destroy property. They will also kill the forests the assertions were meant to save. It has been shown (an absolute truth) that proper forest management through controlled burns and logging saves the trees that are killed when an out-of-control unnatural fire burns so hotly as to destroy all life. Even trees that would survive a more controlled, routine burn as they did for long before the environmentalists came along to ‘save the trees.’ However, far from being held responsible for their relativist and untrue assertions, the ‘truth’ being espoused now is that controlled burns are bad (as are the wildfires they cannot control) as they release carbon into the atmosphere and provoke climatic change. Which means the wildfires that are so devastating will continue, and human lives will be lost while forests die.
The crimes collected under the legal term ‘moral turpitude’ have been defined as “acts of baseness, vileness, or depravity in the private and social duties with a man owes to his fellow men, or to society in general, contrary to the accepted and customary rule of right and duty between man and man.”
Leaving aside the ‘squishiness’ of such a broad and sweeping definition, you can see how relativism would be the downfall of turpitude. So what specific crimes are we talking about here? Including, but not limited to: fraud, arson, blackmail, burglary, embezzlement, extortions, malicious destruction of property, fencing stolen goods, bribery of gov’t officials, perjury, counterfeiting, tax evasion with intent, harboring a fugitive, abandonment of a child, assault, bigamy (see comment on adultery below), grow indecency, kidnapping, lewdness… there are more. But you get the drift.
What is notable that we are seeing both in the recent past, and current societal drift (as portrayed by mass media) movement toward decriminalizing, and normalizing, moral turpitude. Adultery, as I noted above, used to be in that list, but has already been legalized and is seen as so normal as to barely cause comment. Movement toward legalizing bigamy (polyamory), incest, and contributing to delinquency of a minor (sexual) is very much in evidence. The attitude toward looters in the current unrest (see burglary, theft, and assault) is one of positive sympathy in the news. Nothing about that societal duty which a man owes to his fellow man comes up. Not even when minority business owners are the victims of ostensibly persecution-based looting.
The social contract, the one once based on the relative truth of “love one another as you love yourself” is being fed into the shredder. The loss of the concept of an absolute truth: “This statement is always true” was only the beginning. Relativism has its place. The statement ‘this is beautiful’ is relative. On the other hand, stating ‘This (riot, fire, logging) is harmful’ may not be relative, and once the assertion is made, if attacked, grounds can be found to justify the true statement. However, if the argument for truth is not allowed, if the assertion is made that all truths are relative, and therefore nothing can be absolute, then we move to the place where duty to fellow men and responsibility to the truth of your assertion can be abdicated. This ground is where we stand with it can be said with a straight face ‘my feelings trump your facts’ and ‘children can consent.’
All manner of evils spring up from what relative truth taught wrongly has sown in this ground.
So, obviously this was not quite a normal day blog wise. Sorry. Truly, tomorrow everything should be back on track.
And there was no big issue today. It’s just that I woke up and realized it was important for our garden not to look QUITE like a jungle tomorrow. So I spent the morning mowing and weeding the front, till I ran out of battery on the mower. Which means I forgot to charge it after mowing last time.
So, I plugged the battery in, realized it would take three hours to charge and went “if I stop now, I won’t mow the back.” So I cleaned the house. Which is more of a lick and promise, since the place still looks like a cross between a storage unit (with all the displaced stuff) and a construction zone (with the flooring stuff.) But it will do. And it doesn’t smell.
Meanwhile I found another reason to miss Greebo. Apparently he was helping Havey with basic hygiene. Washing my bedspread every day is getting old. We’ve shaved him back there, but apparently we need to shave him more…. by the time we get to the point he can keep clean, he might be a cornish rex.
Other bits and pieces of straggle-business pretty much took till now.
So I’ll glancingly mention some other stuff, while I’m at it:
I have a ton of guest posts (thank you) which I’ll be running once or twice a week, as — for various reasons, it’s kind of important I use this month and a half to work for PJM as much as possible. And to finish novels.
The thing with facebook — i.e. their ability to ban forever anyone who’s been banned even once — means I might be gone from facebook, and with it the diner.
If this happens, or at least in preparation, I’m going to make a point of being on MeWe more. There is a diner there. I got tired of going there because not only do I have a ton of friend requests, but people use different names there, and I don’t know which requests are legitimate.
If you want me to friend you on MeWe contact me some other way (FB included and tell me if you sent me a request and under which name.)
Also, I mentioned this in the comments before: there will be scraps of flag available. If you feel this will help you getting through what might very well be very dark times ahead, I don’t judge. Just send me an email (or PM) with your snailmail address and I’ll get them to you, at least while supplies last.
And now, ladies, gentlemen, dragons and strolling minotaurs, I’m going to vegetate. Tomorrow there will be a post. Might be a guest posts. Depends on how the spirit moves me.
After a much longer trip than we expected, with 5 days added on for not the happiest of reasons.
The funeral was simple, and we saw family we haven’t seen in years. Also on the way back, we got to see friends we normally see at Liberty con, so that was good.
And at home we found Havey has made himself hoarse from crying while we were gone. At last I assume this was so, since my going to the bathroom upon coming home occasioned a bizarre fit of crying outside the door…
We rolled into Colorado this evening, with smoke in the air and a blood red moon.
It’s a bitter-sweet homecoming, filled with the knowledge our time in this, my beloved state, is coming to an end. Not today, not tomorrow, not this year and possibly not the next, but almost for sure 2022 will see us packing up and leaving the mile hi city, something I’d never thought I’d do.
No, it’s not the politics, though that’s not helping, as it’s already changed the texture of life in Denver beyond recognition, particularly in this fucked up year of our Lord, the year when the mask mandate dropped the remaining masks.
It’s not even the persistent back of the head niggling fear that we’re going to get stuck behind the lines. (And being by heritage Portuguese I’m assured by friends who scarpered from various places that when the Portuguese leave it’s already too late [seems to bear out by the number of relatives who came crashing into our lives with only the clothes on their backs and their lives all through the seventies.])
It’s the undeniable effect of high altitude and low oxygen on our systems as we age. So, that’s about it. Against biology, even Odds strive in vain.
This trip — the longest we’ve been away and not flying — just made it very clear. There is no way to wind up our affairs and appurtenances here in under one and a half and likely two years. But after that, barring death, the death of the republic, open war, or other disaster, we’ll be on the move.
Where, only G-d knows, since this is the only place I’ve ever wanted to live since I was eight.
I’d say — having sang with Kansas all across Kansas — it was apropos that as I drove us — I drove more highways this trip than I’ve ever done prior to that. Enough to break the fear? probably not. But it’s not a panic fear anymore at least — into Denver we were singing along with the Eagles “After the thrill is gone.”
But it’s not. Every time I roll into Denver, there’s that closing of the throat, that prickling of the eyes, that certainty that I am home in the place that’s been part of who I am — if only in dreams — as long as I can remember.
So, tomorrow I clean and unpack. And then it’s back into our routine, (and regular posting, though I’ll use guest posts a lot the rest of this week,) but now with the long term plan of consolidating, fixing, getting rid of excess stuff, and planning an eventual move.
Hi guys, I am alive, but I haven’t even had time to put up a guest post, much less the promo.
Be patient with me!
Have a picture to amuse you and keep us in mind tomorrow for the funeral and Tuesday and Wednesday PARTICULARLY when we’ll be driving down and across most of the US on the way home.
Driving yesterday was…. Odd. Every time I got behind the wheel it turned into a kind of “crazy driving training video.” If Dan took the wheel it was fine and boring.
In no particular order I got “car next to me letting its towing rig drop so that it was getting flames from friction on the ground” (Everybody move to the left!), HUGE German Shepherd loose on the highway. (I would have stopped and rendered aid if I were confident I could get across five lanes of traffic to the berm, AND then run back and forth on the highway, to capture the creature without being hit.) As it was I avoided hitting him (twice) and prayed really loud he’d stay on the grassy berm toward the exit. No idea where he came from, but I hope he survived. Looked like a nice pup, though probably part great Dane. I mean, a kid could have ridden him. Even though he looked EXACTLY German Shepherd), “tiny red dumptruck merging at 40 into stream of traffic at 70 trying to merge six feet in front of me, while I have an eighteen wheeler on my left. Followed by, crazy traffic, construction, deluge, direction dyslexics marking construction (left, right left, no, we meant right) in the two miles leading up to it, while playing leapfrog with eighteen wheelers.)
Dan would take over, and it was a beautiful, calm drive. we finally gave up, so I drove maybe 4 hours to his 6 or 6 and a half.
So, whoever was pulling that off, stop it, just stop it. I CAN drive, but I don’t enjoy it, and in the middle there I almost had a heart attack.
Dan SWEARS there was no rain of frogs, no plague of blood. Bah. I know what I remember.
Anyway. Be patient if I don’t post much till Tuesday or Wednesday.
According To Hoyt 