Don’t put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again.

Today I was talking to Bill Reader, who is a little more discouraged than normal about the stifling climate of academia.  Mostly because, if what I hear of reports from the “inside” academia, like the arts, like writing, like news, like… well, the democrats, and all other places colonized by leftists, has gone farking insane. I mean, if you think that the NYU (?) study declaring that milking cows was sexual abuse is bad, you might not follow the giant pile of manure that is academia in our day and age.

Anyone rational would be fed up with it. And I’m sure a lot of people are.  I’m sure a lot of other mild-mannered lecturers in the liberal arts keep their mouth shut, and nod or pretend to nod, because (their) baby needs shoes, and they can’t afford to do a grand gesture of honor and leave their family starving.

And I pointed out something that came up in one of my private groups on facebook: the peak of leftist crazy has already passed. The wheel is already turning the other way. [By this I meant the peak of letting crazy leftist politics be mainstream and form society. As you can tell from the rest of the article, the remnants of the cult will only get louder and louder and more insane. Those of you in compatible religions, pray to Saint Dymphna. We’re solidly under his purview now.- SAH 2020)

You can tell this in several ways.  The first one was given to me by an older friend — who might now be gone, but we lost touch several list-groups ago — who told me in 2004 that the left was losing. They always get louder and crazier when they’re losing.

As a show of the fact they’re losing — not the election. They might pull that from the a…ir by virtue of extreme vote fraud. Which they work to facilitate ANYTIME they get any kind of power — I refer you to the fact that they’ve never been this completely insane.  But wait, there’s more.

The more is that they are pulling out the most bizarre and unlikely slurs. Look, the Russia thing didn’t have any legs. For one accusing the right of Russian collusion was the ultimate act of projection, after Obama’s “more flexible” comment. But beyond that: there.was.nothing.there.

Only the left doesn’t know how to back down anymore. Everything is a fight to the knife, and everything must be pushed to absurdity.  Take the nonsense around Kavanaugh.  They might have accused him of being skivvy around women and got along with it, but no. They had to go for rape, and the chick had to pretend to be so traumatized that she couldn’t fly (while having a vacation house in Hawaii) and then they had to accuse him of having a rape ring. And then…

In the same way they could get away with saying that Trump was crude in speech and manner towards women, and even emphasize the morals of work in the seventies were different from now, and leave him tarnished and walking wounded. But they had to go for the pee dossier and claim he really did grab them by the p*ssy and REEEEEE to 11.

Which pushes it past any pretense of being reasonable or believable.

#metoo could have flown if they’d made it a few, judicious cases, but their people have no discipline — and I’m not talking about the kids in schools and work. I’m talking about cases that get press — and when the press decides to run with George H. W. Bush molesting a nurse, in a description that anyone who has cared for an aged relative recognizes, empathizes with and realizes the man has no more control than does a toddler and only a fool considers that abuse, it’s insane and the movement is already burning itself.

This “and the kitchen sink” behavior is not the behavior of a movement that has any answers or any self confidence.

And as for the clown car of Democrat candidates… who the hell thinks it’s a good idea to pile on with “Health care for illegals, because health care is a human right and they’re humans?”  So is the rest of the world, but we assuredly can’t pay for it.  They are laying bare the idea that proclaiming something a human right that requires the labor of others is insane and a form of reinventing slavery. (The Dems? Slavery? Who’d have thunk it!)

Other things they keep signaling are how much they hate America and all of us. “Vote for us, peasant. We hate you” could only be a platform that appeals to an aristocratic class that has climbed so far up its own behind it’s forgotten what history looks like.

What history looks like, once aristocrats, or self proclaimed aristocrats get so out of touch is “Aristo, aristo, a la lanterne” and ça ira.  I recommend to the usual leftists reading this blog for things to offend them that they study the French revolution and realize once and for all that they are not the revolutionaries. They are the stodgy, entrenched aristocrats who have all the power. They got there via selecting for the kind of cant that at this point no sane person can believe. And so they’ve achieved in 4 generations what would take a monarchy centuries of inbreeding to achieve: either total lack of ability to think, or total refusal to.

Which brings us to… they survive because they really like power, and because they are protected by being on top.

Look, the institutions they control at this point are the profoundly conservative ones: news (prestige news) reporting, academia (the older and more established, the more leftist) the good old families, the people with money and power.  In fact, now becoming “woke” is the equivalent of joining a country club for parvenus to fit in, which is why people like Bezos and Gates trip over themselves to pay homage.

But the thing is, in every time and in every place by the time an elite controls all of that, the revolution is under way. If not a physical revolution with head chopping, a tech revolution, a new way of doing things that dethrones them.

The left is blind to that because it’s part of their credo to believe themselves eternal underdogs and revolutionaries. Writing that into our entertainment and news ONLY requires them to pretend they’re living somewhere circa 1950.  And not even the 1950s that were, but something from their own heads.  Which means…

They’re out of touch. Even those of them who can reason and think can’t do it without realizing the foundational lie of their ideology: that they’re in power while pretending to fight power.

Now they’re desperately trying to redact history to make themselves eternal victims. That never works well.

And meanwhile the real functions they hold are moving on, however shambling and imperfect. They have to move on, because the corrupt institutions can no longer perform. And a lot of these functions are needed (arguably even storytelling.)

More and more, the left holds a shell of power, while the real power moves on.

That’s the good news. When they seem most entrenched, they’re already falling apart.

The bad news is that they won’t go without a fight. And the fight is going to get bad. Both in overreach, because they are doing that, and not just with accusations. Consider proposals to make KG or preschool mandatory. It’s crazy overreach, an attempt at indoctrinating the kids who are somehow still evading them after 12 years.  Or consider California’s bizarre plan to make race studies (their way) mandatory.  Or– It’s all around. It’s all insane. And yet, they will continue doing it.

And then there is the fact they have an iron grip on vote manufacture, which means disinfecting our government might take … well… a revolution.

They’ve already lost where it counts. They’ve already lost the real culture and the “way things will be done in the future.”

What they still have, though, is the ability to make the next fifteen to 20 years very unpleasant, and, possibly, to ensure that what comes next is much, much harsher and more punitive than it would otherwise be.

Keep your hearts on high.  And if you’re a praying sort, pray.  Because the waters are going to get very choppy.

But given half a chance, we’ll turn this yet, and come out on the other side as America. Home of the brave and the land of the free.

 

A couple of weeks ago, at  friend’s gathering, someone asked: How long are we going to put up with this?

This was before the mandatory mask mandate in Colorado, but with everything from public gatherings to churches limited to ten people — strictly six feet apart — per gathering.

The title of this post — Saudade — for those of you gaping at it and wondering if it is the name of a fantasy character (Now I think about it, it would be a pretty good name for a fantasy character) is a word the Portuguese pride themselves on saying is untranslatable.

This sort of claim from any language more or less always makes me roll my eyes. Because it is translatable, of course it is.  Most of the time, in its pedestrian every day use, “tenho saudades” means “I miss.”

Now the thing to remember is that besides basically being the chaotic neutral D&D alignment with borders, Portugal is a place of poetry.  Perhaps because as my older son put it “The damn country is an iceberg. Most of it is in the past, trawling beneath the water, unseen, and affecting everything.”

So saudade, not used in its every day pedestrian sense, but in the sense poets and madmen (most Portuguese) use it refers to missing something with a deep, painful longing, something that can’t be called back/experienced again.

Perhaps the best way to express it is the ballad by Jean Ingelow quoted in Agatha Christie:

Ah, maid most dear, I am not here,
I have no place, no part,
No dwelling more by sea or shore,
But only in thy heart!

Saudade is what you might feel if you lived by the sea, in a beautiful city, and one day an earthquake came, the shore collapsed and the sea came in.  Suddenly all the places that were familiar and commonplace to you, the places you lived in and worked in, and saw every day were ten miles from shore, under water.

In storms you’d hear the tolling of the submerged bells and felt an acute but unavailing need to go back, to walk those streets again and meet all the friends who died that night, not as an extraordinary event, but as they were.

That’s saudade.

Saturday I left eating till much too late (this grief thing is weird. Every time it hits me as though it were brand new, too) and being famished and with us needing to go look in the business mailbox, we went to Pete’s (which is right around the corner from the business mailbox.)

Because Pete’s is an old style diner, the six foot (insane, unsupported, completely arbitrary) rule means that the main dining room is basically unusable. I mean there is EXACTLY one two person booth available.

Also, because some people are insane, some interpret the rule — all hail absolute king Polis, who needs a kicking on his fat ass. Since when does he have the right to violate our pursuit of happiness that way?  Also all of us asthmatics should sue him for violating ADA.  Oh, and Sprouts is on my shit list FOREVER. They don’t “view” a face shield as enough, and don’t make exceptions for asthmatics. WHERE are all the lawyers?– as meaning they can only remove the mask for shoveling food in. (Picture how much touching of that mask goes on, and the eating and just how gross and unhygienic the whole thing is.)

As we drove back, I felt — looking at the mostly deserted summer streets, the masked people — as though I were hearing bells toll under a stormy ocean.

I wanted more than anything to go back to just five months ago, to the normal, awake world, where Americans have freedom of assembly, of taking risks in pursuit of happiness, of having businesses open or not without the fiat and imprimatur of the government.

And the problem is, it can never come back again.  The compact is broken.

So many things we thought utterly unimaginable have happened in the last year.  Oh, some happened before, but we found out about them: like the utter perversion of our system of government by an outgoing president who decided to weaponize the secret services to a) prevent the election of someone he didn’t want b) prevent that person from governing if elected.

In politics, a lot of things are like the genie in the bottle.  Once you let it out you can’t cram it back in again.

The current — orchestrated — distraction might prevent Obama and the Clintons, and the whole vomitous of mass of self-proclaimed and dirty as sh*t (with apologies to real excrement) elites from paying for their crimes.  But it won’t prevent this from becoming the new normal.

Honestly, the only thing that prevented us from banana republic status for generations was the fact that the press wouldn’t report on the casual law transgression that democrats routinely engaged in, which of course gave the democrats a leg up, since Republicans couldn’t retaliate without being torn limb from limb by the hounds of press. But it also kept the fragile form and idea of a constitutional republic in place.

The democrats MIGHT (but I doubt it) have realized that what they were doing was the equivalent of certain diseases and parasites which mask their existence until it’s too late.

And it could be much worse. Without the internet. We are blessed that the enemies of freedom have a TOTAL inability to foretell where things will lead. Like all people greedy for power and control, they see ONLY their desire, not what comes after.

Look, they were never going to get their heart’s desire, which is the equivalent of Stalin’s reign in the USSR, but more absolute and going on forever.  Partly because that reign is actually impossible for any extent of time. (Even Cuba or NK only look that controlled from the outside (besides being smaller areas with very uniform culture.) Partly because… well. Stalin would eat them alive for lunch, without disturbing his mustache one whit.  When it comes to evil our lefty elites are the equivalent of a possessed rubber ducky.  The evil and the intent are there, but the ability to carry it out is matches their (in)competence at everything else. That same press that protected them also made them unable to survive without protection. They’re like the evil possessed toddler let out to play on the highway. …. often, as we’ve seen in the last few months, literally.

What they’ve proven over the last few months is this: They hate us and wish to torture us.  Winnie the flu, that increasingly flimsy excuse, becomes day by day more obviously a paper tiger, and they stomp their little hooved feet and scream they won’t let us out to live our lives, and that we have no rights that don’t come from them.

There is no going back. Even if they donned masks of normalcy and sanity tomorrow…. who would believe them?

There are many paths from where we are.

One doesn’t exist.  That’s their promised land where they get to play “Simon says” with us for the rest of eternity.  First because everything they learned on how to run a society is wrong, and often the diametrical opposite of what allows a society to run.  Second, because we’re a continent-sized country of increasingly restless prisoners.

It doesn’t mean unpleasant alternatives don’t exist.  When societies go out of their nut insane, as ours seems to have gone these last six months, the only thing that seems to stop it is war and more specifically losing a  war.  Considering the state of those who could win a war against us, (enemies foreign and domestic, in fact) I don’t think that would end well or be a viable alternative. Well, not for those of us who dream of living in freedom. (Though you can’t kill an idea and some of us have our scraps of flag, if only in our hearts.)

There are decent alternatives, too, though. Those in which Marxism which has infiltrated so many of our institutions is finally dismantled, and we start rebuilding western civ, now with more sanity.

Tech is harder to monopolize now (yes, yes, I know. the tech giants, yadda yadda. But that’s their attempt at one more yota of control. It’s not actually as easy as you think. There are ways to evade it when it becomes intolerable.) It’s harder to long march through the institutions when institutions are toppling (Largely because they were infiltrated by the gang that can’t tie its own shoes.)

You know where I’m placing my bets. In the end, we win, they lose. Unless we concede the culture fight, which honestly I don’t even think we can. Our very existence threatens them. They can’t cancel EVERYONE.

So be not afraid. I don’t know how long we’ll put up with this. I expect till November, one way or another (which makes me remind you to have food and meds on hand for a couple of months, etc.)

But even though I know the status quo ante was already rotten, and that the people who pulled this on us were already in power throw vote-by-fraud-mail and able to do whatever they wanted; even though I remember all their abuses before this last catastrophic intrusion….

I miss the unbroken sunlit world, where I knew a shop would admit me if I needed to run in and buy a blah blah, without demanding I impair my breathing or — who knows, next week — hop on my leg, or whatever governor shithead Polis dreams up to impose on THEM.

Sometimes the tolling of those bells under the water as the storm gathers fills me with unbearable longing.

*For those who want to know how I am. I’m …. managing. I still get moments of extreme grief out of nowhere.  But I’m trying to re-create A routine. Difficult as Marshall and I still have three rooms to floor, but– I’m trying.- SAH*

Book Promo

*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. ;)*

 

FROM KARL K. GALLAGHER:  Storm Between the Stars: Book 1 in the Fall of the Censor.

Niko Landry and his crew thought a routine hyperspace survey would be easy money. But when the barrier separating their homeworld from the rest of the human race opens, they seize the chance to go exploring . . . finding an empire more dangerous than they imagined.

FROM MARY CATELLI:  The Princess Goes Into The Forest.

In the home of a wealthy but vanished family, four young people, inventorying the household, find the props for the family’s amateur theaterics. But a few minutes of donning them to play at roles has consequences that none of them could have guessed. One plays a subtle courtier, one a brave swordsman, one a powerful enchantress. . . and one takes up the role of a princess, and goes into a forest.

FROM L. A. GREGORY:  Stoneheart: A Novel of the Bitterlands.

A vicious attack. An enigmatic ore. Can two young mystics solve the mystery before chaos spreads?

Shale strives to protect his embattled city using his stoneshaping magic. But when he intercepts a plot which puts his beloved home in danger, all his knowledge and experience aren’t enough to uncover the truth. If he can’t find the source of the danger, everyone he cares about could die.

Kestrel believes in duty to family, friends and the natural world. When Shale asks for her help, she doesn’t hesitate to come to his aid. But as they follow the trail through perilous wilderness, can even her shapeshifting ability keep them alive?

Battling hostile environments and corrupted creatures, they forge their way to a fortress whose very stones can drive them mad. Can Shale and Kestrel stop a gathering calamity, or will the truth destroy their minds, their bodies and their land?

THOMAS SEWELL: Hitchhiking Killer For Hire: Sovereign Security Company (Sharper Security Book 0).

Former Army Ranger beaten and left in the south-west desert by a dozen strangers

Sam Harper wants to relax on a beach and surf. Put government service behind him.

But a border gang and their corrupt government backers refuse to let him retire from violence that easily.

Betrayed by friends, Sam must find a new purpose fighting human trafficking, truck jacking, and protecting those in need along the Mexico-Arizona border.

Can he endure long enough to make that difference?
—
Prequel to Sharper Security. This story stands independently, but is set after the events in Techno Ranger and Covert Commando, so contains minor spoilers about characters and relationships in those books.

WRITING CHALLENGE

*While I’m sure that Mary sent me the vignette word as USUAL on Sunday last, my email has ways of hiding things in search. So, for today’s challenge, write the beginning of a story, or a story challenge on THIS picture. SAH*

*Sorry for the long hiatus. Things are still not… normal.  And I don’t mean just getting used to a world without Greebo, which is bad enough, but trying to finish reflooring the house before the snow flies.  Three rooms to go but one is the family room, which is going to be pure hell, just in terms of moving furniture around.

So: *For the previous chapters, please go here. These are posted first draft, as the brain dictates to the fingers which are remarkably stupid. Also there will be inconsistencies because until September or so, the timing on these is wonky, and I’ll forget stuff between posts. Eventually it will be cleaned up and fixed just before page is made secret/taken down and the book is published. At that time I will take lists of typos or volunteers to proof read. For now, it’s written in a hurry, usually an hour before it goes up. And, let me remind you, it’s free – SAH*

Complex

Albinia was mortified.

She’d read novels — to be truthful mostly because Mama had forbidden her from reading novels.  In those works, it seemed that whenever a young lady brought home a suitor of higher status or magical rank or fortune, the young lady’s family would conspire to unwittingly embarrass her mortally.

Albinia had read with great amusement a hundred such scenes of the character being mortified by the behavior of her relatives.

Fine, so Lord Michael wasn’t her suitor, but still! He was the son and brother of a duke, and here was Geoffrey behaving as though he’d been reared in a stable… or worse.

She scratched at her nose, as he promised to explain everything and how everything was so complex.  It wasn’t so much that her nose itched, as that she felt something was very wrong, but couldn’t quite figure out what.  Other than the fact that her brother apparently could change shapes and become a swan and that papa might be the werewolf they had smacked on the nose.  She was trying very hard not to think of the implications of this, since papa had never met her. If she understood the timing correctly, he had left — disappeared — around the time mama was approaching her confinement with Albinia.  How terrible to first meet one’s father with such an unfilial action as smacking him on the nose.

Scratching at her nose was what Albinia did when she was confused and trying to gain time.  Usually trying to gain time to think of something not quite a lie to tell mama in order to stop her asking inconvenient questions.

Geoffrey made a big show of being offended by Lord Michael asking perfectly reasonable questions, then crossed his arms on his chest and said,

“Very well. We’re under a geas, you see, when none of us can be human at the same time. So I was trying to say my piece, because I don’t know–” Suddenly his voice shook, which to Al was the scariest thing of all, because she thought Geoff was going to break down and start crying.  “I don’t know if the others might have need of changing at any time.”

More to ward off his possible tears — she knew from when they all lived together how much any of the boys hated crying — than because she was incensed, she said, “What do you mean by that, Geoff? Surely you could leave each other notes and plan your human–”

To her horror this made things worse. Geoff’s lips trembled, and his eyes shone, and he said “W-w-we d-d-d-did f-f-f—”

And Al realized what had been bothering her.  Geoff hadn’t stammered at all through the previous speech, but now it was back, in full bloom. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Lord Michael’s horrified expression and wasn’t sure why, but she reverted to what always worked and said, “Geoff! Deep breaths, and speak slowly.”

This brought a wan smile to Geoffrey’s face.  He said “D-d–  Darn it, Al.  I rarely stammer anymore, because I have had years of solitude to p-p-practice, but…”  He took two deep breaths.  “Forgive me, Lord Michael.” Then to Al, “You see, at first we did just as you said.  We had a big board in this house, and w-we used to have a schedule.  And we also left notes and letters to each other.  That’s how father told us that L-Lord Michael should be able to free us from this geas, and also how he told us to wait until he came of age. B-b-b–”  Geoff took a deep breath.  “We couldn’t wait, you see.  You have no idea how terrible it is to spend years and years really alone.  Though I can see the others when in swan form.”

“Swan, not goose,” Lord Michael muttered under his breath, but Al chose to ignore that ornithological observation. She didn’t suppose that sons of dukes spent much time in the poultry house.

Geoff looked at Lord Michael and the wan smile became more pronounced, even if still wan, “Right. Swans. My step mother got the idea from some old tale or other. But seeing each other as swans doesn’t help much, as there’s a limited degree of what you can communicate by body language.  And Papa–  Well, it is best at any rate for any of us not to meet papa when he’s a wolf, since he becomes quite a ferocious beast.” He paused for a moment. “To be fair, even as a human, he used to be ferocious if we interrupted him while he was working, though at least as a human devouring people was not in his range of ideas.”

“I imagine not,” lord Michael said, drily and stepped back till he sat on one of the chairs.

“But as I said, we grew impatient. And we had some idea of how to break the spell. Or at least–” He paused.  “Papa thought it involved taking the path out the back door and meeting the challenges. He just thought the challenges required g-g-g-genius. And he said none of us had it to that degree… So the others–”

Albinia knew her brothers too well not to know what was coming next “They took the path?”

“One by one,” Geoff said.  “Till only I was left.”

She opened her mouth, closed it. There was a cold feeling of dread in her middle.  “And none came back?”

Geoff shook his head.  Now he sat on one of the chairs as well, and his hands were visible trembling. “Till only I am left.”  He looked at Michael.  “And if you won’t help us, I’ll have t-t-t-to go myself.  Only if none of the others could do it–  And papa doesn’t know. I didn’t dare leave him a note telling him what happened.  And, oh, Al, it’s been hell.”

And Al fell into the role she’d had all through childhood, when she — incongruously — tried to look after all the boys, “There, there, Geoff, it will be well.” But she didn’t dare ask Lord Michael to help. They’d already put him to so much trouble.

She looked to the side, where he — under the grime and dust of their adventure — looked very solemn.

Well. Never mind. If he wouldn’t, she’d have to do it. Even if she wasn’t a genius. Not even as much of a genius as the boys.

 

 

When I was fourteen I read Desmond Morris “The Killer Ape” [I’m reliably informed Morris wrote The Naked Ape, which if I remember also went on about how violent we were, though maybe not uniquely so. There was however a “The Killer Ape.” I just don’t remember the name of  the authors. It’s been 44 years, okay?] and because I was fourteen and virgin of any real history, anthropology and/or psychology, particularly animal psychology (to be fair, so are college graduates in those fields. In fact, college has become a way to cultivate and preserve ignorance and misconceptions, sort of a bell jar over the mind that lets no contrary facts in.)I thought it made a good point.

Since then I’ve read a lot of books about people who observed actual animals, and not only are we not the killer ape, but we have nothing on chimps, who flip on a dime from friendly to stone cold killers and will kill babies in their own pack.  In fact, our frenzies, our occasional mob behavior is probably a return to that part of the brain that comes from our deep ancestry.

And yet the idea is still out there that we’re humans because we’re the worst of the worst.  For the record, btw, every mammal goes to war.  Mostly territorial or subspecies war. I rather suspect some birds might too.  It is the way of the animal to defend and expand territory, and yep, mostly for those who are like them/close relations.

Yesterday I came across one of those pages that come up with “news” (if you intend to read only the crazier left, meaning this always annoys the heck out of me) when you bring up firefox.  I didn’t read the article, but right there, on top was an article about the ape and the mushroom, according to which we became humans because we ate a lot of magic mushrooms — man! Trippy! — and in my head canon I want you to know every sentence in that articles ends with a variation of “have you ever looked at your hand?”

Like the idea  that men were the killer ape, this seems, at best misguided.  Anyone who has lived with cats knows that every mammal tends to get stoned given a chance (Well, actually Greebo wasn’t fond of it.  Catnip seemed to have no effect on him besides a mild attractant. He loved the catnip rat a friend made for him, but I think because it was a toy his size.  The little catnip mice disintegrated under the onslaught of his claws. And Valeria completely ignores catnip.  And toys. She’s a little, broken cat. We won’t talk about Havey, though.)  We know that apes eat fermented fruit full of alcohol. I very much doubt they don’t eat other things that make them high. (Some of us hate being out of our minds which must serve as my excuse for not even liking to be drunk. Fortunately, genetically, I almost never am. OTOH I moderated my drinking considerably as aging seems to have made me more susceptible.)

So, magic mushrooms made us human, uh?  I wonder what the person who came up with that thesis was smoking.

But while I was thinking about it, I related it to the stuff above, and came up with a weird thought: We’re not the ape who kills. All apes do.  We’re not the ape who gets high, all apes do.  We’re the ape who loves.  We’re the ape who loves so much we take — and took, even when our life hung on a knife’s edge of need and scarcity — creatures of other species to our hearts and make them part of our band, our pack, our family.

If you look around, that’s pretty weird.  Sure, some species have symbiotic relationships, and sure, man and wolf/dog hunted together.

But if you think about it, that’s different form the mutually exploitative relationship of other symbiotic species.

Oh, we make use of our friends, but also as far back as we can remember or find evidence, there’s marks of affection.

And anyway, we’d never have started hunting together if we had eaten those wolf pups — tender meat — we found in a cave, instead of keeping them and training them and teaching them to ENJOY being around us, enjoy being petted, to defend us as if we were members of their pack, because we defend them like members of ours.

Cats, even stray cats we feed at the door, bring us kills, trying to support us as we support them.

What I’m trying to say is on both sides there’s a volational step to love those who are utterly different from us.

And that seems to be what made us human.

Sure you can say we’re horny apes.  You can presume that the traces of other human races all of us carry around are part of being horny and “humans will screw anything” and you can assume it was all rape.

It’s hard to tell, that far back in pre-history, before records, but I’m going to bet you it wasn’t all rape.  I’m going to bet you, because of course, if we can love cats and dogs (and bunnies, mice, snakes, fish, even monkeys) as children, we can surely love things that look more like us closer/better.

I bet you there were mixed couples. I bet you there were childless couples taking to their bosom orphans found in the forest. (There are enough legends about that, and those are sometimes the most reliable accounting of our ancestry.)  I BET you there was love.  Love is what made us what we are, a hybrid species that we find, more and more, carries genes of many others, and are better for it.

This is also, btw, no matter how much bigots on both sides of the isle howl, there is no such think as a pure race human. Yes, I know what gene analysis says, but bah, it’s early days yet.  I remember when the earliest gene analysis made us basically chimps. THP.

Humans love.  Humans love across species, across race, across what should be the unimaginable gulf of phillum and clade.

If we go to space and find aliens, I give you a couple hundred years, tops, before some human is trying to get a scientist to help him make a child with his smart octopus girlfriend.

How did that make us human?

Well, besides the obvious and improbable genetic mix with other human species some as yet unidentified (We’re in very early days of the field) and hybrid vigor, it forced us to develop empathy and imagination.

Cats, dogs and horses, our closest, most faithful companions, do not talk.  We had to bridge the gap.  We had to communicate with them, understand how they were communicating, and carry the relationship.

Which in turn made us more capable of understanding humans who weren’t like us, humans far away, humans in the past.

And, by giving us empathy, as a trained trait, (Perhaps a neo-natal trait that persisted because — as someone said in comments, tribes with cats kept more grain, and therefore raised more children.  My reading on the brain indicates mirror neuron and structures babies possess allow one to integrate and avoid being killed. I think our domesticating animals/being domesticated by them makes use of those.) they made it possible for us to live in cities, in large groupings, and thereby to develop civilization.

If we go to the stars someday (please) it is because some neolithic hunter didn’t kill a litter of wolves, but brought them home and made them his children/his brothers.  Because some hunter-gathering primitive didn’t strangle the kitten and put it in her sack, but fed it and petted it and made it part of her circle, raised with her children.

We are the ape who tames itself.  But our taming started with love across species barriers, across the gulf of misunderstanding, across the vast chasms of different self interest.  And that’s why we’re human.

Which might be worth — maybe — the occasional writer who gets all mired in grief at the death of her curmudgeonly, protective black cat.

Now I’m going to go help son put his doors back in and install floor transitions: me and my broken heart.

And I know the broken heart is the price for doors, for floors, for civilization.  And yes, for empathy and stories as well.

 

 

 

I wasn’t going to write a post today, but I’m not always given a choice. And I woke up thinking I should write this.

I’m not alright.  Of course I’m not alright.  My older son says that there are things that break you and that it’s a proof of your humanity that you are broken.  Events after which we’ll never be alright again, if alright is understood as what we were before.

Of course you also grow through breaks.  I’m not even at the point of seeing that yet.  Today I CAN think for longer than 30 seconds at a time. OTOH I feel like I’ve been deathly ill and am just recovering.  In fact, as close as I can tell, I feel exactly like when I woke up five years ago after major surgery.  There’s no specific symptoms, I’m just extremely tired and out of spoons.  I.e. any endeavor, even looking at the shower  pan to see if it needs replacing or just re-sealing/re-finishing is way too much for me.  (The walls will need to be replaced.)

I told (younger) son I’ll try to do it tomorrow, because the wall system once ordered will take two weeks to arrive, and — you know — it would be nice for him not to have to trudge upstairs to the guest shower.  BUT I think I’ll have to treat myself as I did after the surgery (which is STUPID. It shouldn’t feel like this) and work two or three hours, then  call it a day.

Weirdly, I got where I am by son distracting me with work from 11 am to 10 pm yesterday.  Look, it wasn’t even that much work and I should have been done much sooner, but I wasn’t processing.  He probably did the most of the work, and I don’t know if he meant to snap me out of the funk, but what happened was, as I was trying to hide in a corner and pull the world in after myself, he told me I had a lot more experience and he needed me, so he dragged me to finish some honey-dos.

When I was done I could actually sleep.  I still feel awful, but I can think, and I think I’ll be okay.

However, what I wanted to write: This has been an exceptionally BRUTAL year.  It started at the end of last year, when our friend Charlie Martin moved out of state. Yes, I totally get why he did it, and it’s been good for him and hell, he lived two hours away, so we saw each other twice a year… BUT he was nearby and in the same time zone, and we used to talk a lot. So, that was a change.

Then the changes kept coming.  Some of them are good, such as the stuff with the kids (supposing younger son manages to get university to actually you know officially graduate him. [It’s all bureaucratic, but it’s a mess due to shutdown.]) But it changed the … texture of daily life.

Some of it was sudden and catastrophic and shouldn’t have been an issue, except it was, because the car died and left us stranded without a car, and we had to buy one, and since we’d had the previous car for 21 almost 22 years, it was a huge change.

Some was long overdue.  We should have eased Euclid over long ago, but … we have trouble saying goodbye?

Then there was the lockdown and that’s a kick in the pants destruction of a routine I LIKED.  (Work like crazy all week, take sometimes lunch special at Pete’s on Thursday, or lunch with son in springs during the week, but always take Saturday off and do fun relaxed day with husband (sometimes after cleaning house, if not done on Friday.)

Then….  Well, then I lost my shadow.

So it’s been a time when there’s no foothold to establish “normalcy” which is making me feel as crazy as when we were moving again and again and again over a year, till I felt homeless and like I had no roots.

Honestly, part of the issue is that I’m now in fear.  What will be taken next?  Havey?  One of us?

BUT….

Okay, here’s the thing: love them while you have them.  Kids, cats, dogs, husbands, ants, dragons, fish, friends, routines.

Just take the time off, take a deep breath and be grateful for what you have.  Be aware of what you have and that it’s good.

I know this is sometimes really hard.  It’s hard to appreciate your bratty, messy toddlers.  But take time, LOOK past the exhaustion and do so.

There is one thing I can promise you: everything passes. Everything changes.  Love what you have and enjoy while you have it.  And find something to love in the changed circumstances.  Even when it’s hard.  I’m having trouble with Havey wanting to sit on me ALL the time, and having to reach over him to type.  BUT he’s warm, he’s fuzzy and he loves me.  Could be WORSE.

Find a foothold of love as things change. Take comfort in things.

The human nervous system HATES change.  I’ve heard moving, because of the change in routine, is stress enough to precipitate as many heart attacks as divorce or death of a partner.

And I swear to you, 2020 is trying to kill me.  Over and over and over again.

But I’m not going to let it.  I hear gratitude and love help.  So I’m going to try that.

You try too.

I remember during a particularly “from hell” school year, in 7th grade, I needed a break like you wouldn’t believe.  Portugal has a “carnival” break for four days. (Don’t ask.)
I decided I was going to “stretch” it.
I couldn’t stretch the time of course! Only how I experienced it.  So I concentrated on doing things I loved and being REALLY there while I did them.

I still remember those four days (I read pirate stories <G>) sitting in the sun, reading, pretending it would never end. It worked. It was VERY restful.

I’m going to try the same.  You try. It might not hurt.

Hold on to the things and people that matter.  Even if you know they’ll pass.  While you have them, enjoy them and be with them.

It’s all you can do.

 

 

 

How can someone who weighed 16 lbs in his prime and 10 at death leave the house feeling empty?
How can a cat who was mostly silent, save for purring while cuddling and the occasional rusty-hinge meow when I wasn’t listening to him, leave the house so silent?

I slept very badly and my head hurts.  I think part of it is losing two cats so close together, in a year of tumultuous change.  Even good change is stress.

I will try to resume the blog by Thursday. Don’t worry (too much) about me.

Yes, I know Greebo was just a cat. As was Euclid.

I’m not sure what that means, but I know it.

I’ll go on.  This will pass. And I’m aware I’m probably being stupid. But I feel like I’m thinking through goop.

I’ll be back.

This is not a post I wanted to write.  This is not a day I wanted to live through.

And if I must write about Greebo I want the skill of a bard, to sing his life.

We don’t get what we want.  We get what we’re given.

Greebo’s mom was a stray, dumped in front of our house in the old north end of Colorado Springs, on the day we moved in.  Someone slowed by the u-haul and dumped a tiny little tortie.

I don’t know what they thought was going to happen.  What happened was that she was so terrified we couldn’t catch her.  After a while she started coming to my kitchen window, because I gave her food.

Greebo was born in the crawl space of the house across the driveway from us, in the summer of 2003.  The first time I saw him was with his brothers, nursing in our driveway.

He must have been all of eight weeks, all soft fuzz, and wobbly legs, when a mad feral Tom tried to attack him and his brothers.  I watched from the upstairs window, as he jumped on the feral’s head, tearing him up, till the bad cat ran away and Greebo came back, strutting like a warrior.  That was the day I named him.

Our next door neighbor took him and his brothers, but never socialized them or tried to find them homes.  She kept them locked in the bathroom almost a year, and had them fixed at a “free” place where they cut their ears to show they were fixed.  Greebo’s cut was deeper. He was also bigger than his brothers, which is how I knew him.

Once the neighbor released them (his mom having vanished) Greebo started coming up to my window every morning for food.  Through that year, I sat on the back step a lot, waiting for him to come nearer and nearer.  Eventually, he’d let us pet him.

He liked being petted so much that in the middle of winter, if we opened our door, we’d hear him meow as he ran nearer, basically “Wait for me, I’m coming for pets.”

We set up a little resting area, with a heated pad, in our airlock (Dan says it was really a mudroom, but you know…) with a cat door so he could come and go.

The local wildlife learned to respect him.  A fox took a bite off Maurice’s butt, didn’t do anything else because Greebo…  Well…. he brought us half a fox tail, cut vertically.

If we went to Denver for a weekend vacation, we had to be careful on coming back, because Greebo would build  a pyramid of mouse skulls to our glory on the backdoor rug.  (Actually a semi-circle, three levels carefully stacked up.  No. We don’t know why. But it worked. We always came back.)

For a while he had a baby racoon understudy. (Just before we moved.)  The racoon followed him around, and did everything Greebo did, including looking at Greebo to make sure he was doing it right. I have no idea what became of that very confused racoon.

Perhaps Greebo’s most notable exploit was saving the family from a fugitive.

To explain this one, I must tell you that sometimes, in downtown Colorado Springs, you’d see a floodlight, pointing down, from an helicopter.  We’d learned over our years there that this meant there was a fugitive, either someone who’d just shot a cop (twice) or someone who had escaped from jail and they were trying to find him.

One bad feature of the airlock is that the screen door didn’t lock.  And once you got in there, you had all the time in the world to break into the house.

I was cooking dinner and looking out at the driveway, which was empty (so Dan was not home) and the boys were upstairs doing homework, when I heard someone fiddling with the kitchen door lock.  I’d seen the spotlights before, so I was trying to figure out which knife to grab, when I heard a war cry from Greebo, and a scream, and a guy ran out the backdoor, with Greebo on his head, yowling and tearing him up.

The neighbor’s said, he just ran in the middle of the street, and gave himself up. Greebo came back, strutting, and we fed him well that night.

I presume this guy came in while Greebo was sleeping on top of the shelves, and so Greebo decided to attack. I don’t know why. He never attacked our friends, or even people coming in to knock at the door. BUT he was a very smart cat, and I guess he saw something wrong.

When we moved, we figured, like his brothers, he was the neighborhood’s cat and he would stay.  The neighbors across the street had built a glassed in porch with a cat door and a wood stove for their old age, and we figured he’d be happy in his familiar territory.

Only Greebo would sit in front of the house and lament all night, and the neighbors called and told us to come get him.

So, we did.

And he became my editor, my shadow, my dog.  If I were somewhere, Greebo was following along.  As consciousness returned in the morning, he was there, headbutting my forehead and purring.  His happy place was by my side.  He loved for me to be in the office and writing, because he could sleep at my feet, with no other cat or people around.

He’s been losing weight for about a month and a half. And I thought it was the hyperthyroidism returning.

It wasn’t.

On Thursday he wasn’t in my bed when I woke up, and I thought that was odd, but son moved in Wednesday, and his friends helped, and he hated strangers.

I found him hiding in the dining room, and couldn’t get him to come out.  But on Friday, he jumped on the arm of my chair, and I petted him and spent time with him…

And then on Saturday he was hiding in a corner of my room, behind the armchair, and wouldn’t come out.  I called him to the bed, and he wouldn’t come. He also threw up a lot of green stuff.

Then around midnight, I heard him climbing on the bed.  Only instead of sitting by my head, as usual, he huddled by my legs, and stayed there all night, with me waking now and then to pet him, and afraid to hurt him.  Early morning he jumped down, and I heard him throw up.

All of yesterday he didn’t move, and I was afraid he wouldn’t survive the night.

We took him in to the vet at 2:15.  They said his thyroid was fine.  But they did tests.  He had intestinal cancer and it had metastasized to other organs.  And when we picked him up to move, he cried in pain, and the vet said he was in pain.  So much so they didn’t make us wait or schedule euthanasia.  We drove back (we’d left him for tests) and eased him over.

Only this is Greebo. The rainbow bridge would be too tame for him.  In my mind’s eye, he went to Valhalla, where all the warriors stood up to salute him and feed him tuna.

If there is justice in the universe, if there is one dram of justice, I’ll see him again, where cancer and pain don’t exist and where species is no barrier to friendship.

Goodnight, sweet prince, and flocks of angels sing you to thy rest.  Unlike the emo Dane, you were brave and equal to your task.  Your heart, in your small cat body was the equal of any warrior, any king, any immortal hero sang in poem and saga.

We shall not see your like again. And I’ll miss you everyday, until we meet again.

 

Greebo is still alive, and will hopefully remain so till 2:15 when we have an appointment at the vet.

They don’t think it sounds like hyperthyroidism returning (both the speed of the illness and the fact he’s throwing up great big GREEN spews.)

So it might be an easily curable infection and all this might recede as a weekend that lasted half a lifetime for me, as I haven’t slept much.

Or it could be something worse. Or a weird presentation of hyperthyroidism.

BUT I’ll hope for something that can be cured with antibiotics.  And I’ll hope to get my grumpy old editor back on the job. It’s clear his chosen replacement (TM) isn’t up to it.  Mostly he scolds me for letting Greebo get sick and flops about dramatically being fussy fuzzy Havey.

Anyway, just wanted you to know.

It occurs to me you might be worried. Havey cat is. You have to understand, they’re best buddies, and this is ripping Havey apart.  He keeps screaming at me and leading me to Greebo, so I can fix the problem.  Sigh.

Greebo is very dehydrated and sick and I don’t know if he’ll survive the night. If he does, I’m taking him in tomorrow morning, and seeing if they can stabilize him and if perhaps the anti hyperthyroid cream on his ear will keep him… well…. a few more months. Probably not many, but every day is a gift.

In the middle of the night he came up to the bed and curled at my legs (not near my face, because then I might notice how sick he is) and slept there till morning.  Which means I almost didn’t sleep, afraid to turn and hurt him, and waking now and then to pet him.

The reason there was no Witch’s Daughter yesterday is that I was falling on my face tired.  Today there was no promo because…. well, today I have gotten the bedroom in the basement apartment painted and ready for younger son. We still need to deal with shower and bathroom in general.  I wasn’t going to paint the bedroom, just do the floor and varnish…. BUT — but.

You see,t he paint in the unpainted areas of this house (mostly the basement and my bedroom is a chalky white on texture.  That means it’s mostly dirt and cobwebs.  I’m not doing his living room or his dining room, or even the kitchen, but the bedroom was truly horrendous.  So, it’s now painted.  He’ll be able to move into it Tuesday afternoon.  And then he can organize his space and be on his own…. except for the shower, and for helping us do the flooring in the three remaining rooms upstairs.  Probably this weekend.

However, after tomorrow, I should be able to resume A writing schedule.  I have three ideas on the white board to write up for PJ and three novels needing to be finished.  And frankly paint and varnish cost money :-P Not to mention that Greebo — I hope he lives that long — will probably cost us $500 this month.

Also, frankly I have an open letter to Jared Polis, self assumed tyrant of Colorado on his mask order and what it reveals about that pusillanimous disingenuous and self-admiring maggot burning a hole in my mind.  THAT will probably run here tomorrow.

I know he’s admiring himself in his Hugo Boss uniform in his room of mirrors, and I suspect he doesn’t realize that there’ 75% of chance this ends very badly for him.  If his fellow self-proclaimed communists manage to get power, they’ll get rid of him, because he’s too stupid and not connected enough to be the new ruling elite. OTOH if it goes badly for them…  Well, I hope he has plane available to run off to a banana republic.
Of course, I hope the real Americans win.  And I hope we just laugh him out of office. I wouldn’t want any harm to come to him. I want him to live to find out how much we — and everyone around him — consider him a jumped up fool and laugh at him even while we spit, because he’s too vile not to spit after saying his name.

I wouldn’t sully Benedict Arnold’s name by putting Polis’ next to him, Benedict Arnold was a smart and honorable man with a fatal weakness. Jar-RED Polis is a puking mass of weakness, malice and lust for undeserved power in something vaguely resembling a man’s shape. However, it’s possible that future and uninformed citizens of Colorado will link the two names.

Because he’s no Coloradan and no American. His kindred is Castro and Mao and Pol Pot. And while his mask order is a small step in that direction, in the magnitude of how unnecessary it is, and how adversely it affects the state he purports to govern, you can tell it is a step he longs to take, and in his mind he wishes all Coloradans had but one mouth, that he could suffocate us all.

In his heart he knows he was frauded-by-mail into power and that we never wanted him. He spies and schemes for ways to get back at us.

Which proves what a fool he is. Because he has no clue the anger burning in people.  And not just those of us whom masks send into respiratory distress.

I bet you he was the kind of bully who cornered weaker kids in the playground. And we’re all paying for the fact none of those kids ever turned on him and popped him one. He might have learned to be human before the left handed him power he thinks is limitless.

But more on that tomorrow. As you can tell right now I’m just in the grip of the red veil, which does not make for good prose.

I’ll go make dinner and tend my cat.  And tomorrow afternoon, I’ll write.