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.

 

 

Mostly because I’ve been sadly remiss with Witch’s Daughter.  BUT right now duty and honor (eh!) call me to laying down flooring in son’s new room.

Once he gets his diploma in order (GRRRR lockdown, universities, bureaucracy, argh!) and gets a job he might very well move across the country, and then I’d have to pay someone to do it, since I can no longer do this stuff alone. (Trust me, gals, after 50 your strength falls off a cliff, so make use of it while you can.)

So think of me with kindness as I deal with the — argh — flooring today.

I’ll try to post this evening.

PS – Greebo is not doing well. At this point I can only ask you join your thoughts and prayers to mine that it be quick and relatively painless.  I’m far more worried about his tendency to hide from me and not come up for pets or to sleep with me. I miss my cuddle boy. I’ve… well, almost reconciled myself to losing him. I know they’re ephemeral. But I’m also somehow losing his affection and our closeness before he’s gone.

Never mind. I’m being maudlin. He’s just… a very good cat.

To make matters worse his chosen successor whom he obviously gave orders to, aka Havey cat, does NOT silently herd me to the office. Instead he laments every minute I’m not in my office. And because the only word he knows is “hello” I’m being bullied by Hello Kitty.  Sigh.

I’ve been thinking of the whole Covidiocy.

I’ve been thinking of it through the framing of WWII, particularly in Britain (though we weren’t wonderful) where strict rationing and also recycling (in the form of scrappers collecting every bit of paper, old signs, etc.)

Speaking of erasure of culture and destruction of statues, that did a lot more damage than even our hordes of simplificators.

And in the end, none of it really helped very much.  No, I’m not sure about the scrapping, but knowing how the rest of things were run, I suspect most of the metal and other things collected ended up not suitable for the intended purpose and basically wasted. Food production got completely divorced of demand and kept up shortages.  And let’s not start in on fabric, etc.

And all the while there were vast fortunes to be made. All of which is basically textbook fascism: tightly controlled economy where the government picks winners and losers from nominally private enterprise.

within a very short time, all of the economy was bent to this purpose, to the “war effort” although not really, and all brought under the government heel.

In the anglosphere (Southern Europe was always… different for both good and bad) this paved the way for all the abuses and intrusions that we’ve been enduring for a century.

Which brings us to….

The way to get people to knuckle under was fear: fear of the big bad Nazi empire. (With reason given their expansionist tactics. Even if they ignored the equally dangerous COMMUNIST expansionist tactics. You can’t have everything. Where would you put it? Who would dust it?)

The threat was commensurate, though.  Remember that in Europe you can’t swing a cat without a passport (yours and the cat. Also the cat won’t like being swung.)  People had family in France and Italy, in Poland and countries under the fascist heel.  They GOT the threat.

And yes, it had to be stopped.

So, while the measures meant diddly for the war effort, it did a lot in psychological cementing and “we’re all in this together” effort.

From the whole “we’re all in this together” and dumb slogans that the left keeps spinning, you know they’re using WWII as the model for the Covidiocy as well as their lusted after Green Nude Heel.

But here’s the thing: to pull the kind of transformation they want, you need the extraordinary claims to have some concrete and immediate BACKING to show that yeah, we need extraordinary measures.

That was present in WWII. Now? Not so much, besides the fact even the dumbest person can tell if the grocery store is safe, the park is safe. If a riot is safe, so is a stroll on the beach.

Which brings us to: this is the reason for the whole masks mandates NOW, and for all the crazy claims that we’re worse than never.

They made a massive grab for power based on claims that were pretty obviously crazily inflated.

They now want to keep piling things on, to keep the return to normal so far future we never focus enough to see how ridiculously exaggerated and insane their reaction was.

In other words, the left has a tiger by the tail.

You can’t hold onto the tail of the tiger forever.  And when you let go, you know he’s gonna eat you.

This is where they are now. Desperately holding on to that tail, and not letting go.

And knowing what can’t go on forever,won’t.

And everything is okay.
Today is younger son’s moving day and I kept watch on his u haul while they were loading it.  It’s not a lot, but I’m glad I could do something.

Unfortunately, since he’s moving from the springs, we had to leave early enough I couldn’t write a post.

This is just the “I”m okay, don’t worry.” post.

Why is it always Hitler?

The left is off on another of their half-cocked bits of insanity comparing Trump to Hitler, because Trump used an eagle on a campaign t-shirt.  The Washington Post, in the article about it, kind of admitted that the eagle was also an American symbol, but they did it reluctantly and hidden, because of course it ruins the comparison.

But seriously, why Hitler?  There have been countless other bad men since the failed painter committed suicide in his bunker. Heck, on body count alone he was kind of a piker.

So, why is the left always and forever obsessed with Hitler.

Yes, yes, the second world war.  Well, there have been other wars since then.

BUT, you’ll say, Hitler is the only one of the state-mass-murderers who didn’t do it in the name of communism.  Waggles hand. Kind of. He did it in the name of socialism, the nationalistic kind, and yet, the left has no trouble ignoring that.

With the help of their captive press corps, in fact, they have spent a considerable amount of time convincing the world that Hitler wasn’t a socialist, not harf.

Hell and damnation, I heard a communist in my field, who passes for an educated man, claiming that Hitler/Stalin was the ultimate confrontation of capitalism and communism.  Because, you know, Hitler is to capitalism as–  I don’t know? Chalk to cheese?

If you assume capitalism is “free trade” (and not a made up word of the left) that was the one thing that Nazis definitely didn’t have or encourage. In fact, like the international socialists of Europe, and like our own left, people were nominally allowed to keep their wealth and business, but the government told them what to do with them, and picked winners and losers.

So, surely the left could have picked someone else: Mao or Pol Pot, or someone and proclaimed them totally not communist and then obsessed about them as the monster to watch out for.  (To give kudos to a random complete idiot leftist (BIRM) she did compare Trump to Mao but that was only a facebook post, in which she showed more creativity than the Washington Post and the New York Times combined (tied together and thrown in the deep blue sea).)

Today I was watching Foyle’s War.  I have been “reading” Agatha Christie books (audio) while working.  And it hit me.

The left obsesses about Hitler because they’re nostalgic for WWII.
It’s the last time the world made sense to them.

No one openly challenged the principle that government, the bigger the better, should do everything and control everything, from news to food distribution (and growing.)  In many things, in fact, there was hardly any difference between the allies and Hitler.  Well, the allies in what would become the other side of the iron curtain were doing … well, just as awful stuff as Hitler was doing.

And even here, in the land of the free, that utter bastard, FDR, was busily putting people in camps, and interfering with private business and doing everything he could possibly do to make people miserable and to bring about the glorious triumph of the state over the individual.

Which brings to WHY the left are so nostalgic.

At the root of it, fundamentally, they have to know their policies, their initiatives, their grand plans are wrong at the level and by the only metric that counts: that of impoverishing society and destroying lives, and making people miserable who would otherwise be fine, really.

But during WWII they had an excuse: everyone was doing it. EVERYONE.  The only difference is that Hitler went in bigger than the other guys for ethnic cleansing. (Which is also why racism is now the left’s only and obsessively confessed sins.) And did it by the numbers and to horrifying levels.

Am I defending the bastard?  Of course not.

Because the world is NOT a dispute between complete light and utter darkness, ever, yeah at the time the allies defeated the worst possible of the alternatives. BUT they did it at the cost of convincing their population that the government had the right to enslave them, to curtail their lives, to make the individual count for nothing. Which goes a long way to explain the mess Europe has become since then.  (Well, again, they should have turned around and gone after Stalin next, but you can’t have everything. where would you put it? Who would dust it?)

So why does the left go back there like a dog to its vomit, from their obsession with comparing every single Republican president to Hitler, to trying to revive WWII rationing and programs, in response to various things that are to be declared the moral equivalent of war: the latest one being the “climate crisis.”

So–

Well, other than the fact that it’s fitting they’re running a demented elder for the presidency, what is the point of that?

The point is that it’s nostalgia.  Nostalgia is the sin of dying philosophies. Of those who know their time has passed.

The left is involved in a ghost dance.  It doesn’t mean they can’t do a lot of damage before they die, but they’ve entered that phase into which their maldaptive image of the world leads them to dig themselves deeper and deeper, every time they hit bottom.  They’re now reduced to Wile E. Coyote and his clever plots, which always backfire, because he fails to account for the other side not simply going along with his imaginings.

They are, in the end, headed to the trash heap of history.

Our job is to make sure they don’t drag us along.

Be not afraid, and keep working.

*This one is dedicated to Occasional Cortex who thinks that, after releasing criminals indiscriminately and refusing to enforce the law, the reason that NYC (and everywhere, really) has more crime is because “people are starving and need to feed their children.”
The level of stupidity involved in believing that is aided by a good bit of Marxist indoctrination and the fact that ultimately she’s a rich bitch who never had to do any real work or employ her mind in any way. (Bartender? Yeah.  She probably was a lousy one.  And we know she did no work in school.) Even so it is amazing that people believe this cr*p. But they do. Particularly people like Sandy Cortez, who find that they can use these stories to fashion saddles that they may ride us.

Of course the rise in crime is — as always — the result of letting people wedded to power and a dysfunctional philosophy (not to mention their own unearned sense of superiority) have any power at all.  Stay frosty.  Ça Irá! – SAH

Doing Evil by Doing “Good” – A Blast From The Past From August 2018

There is a peculiar strangeness to virtues, to those things we strive to practice and which are good for us and society in general: you have to know when to stop.

An excess of virtue seems to turn to vice and derange the mind just enough that it doesn’t realize what it’s doing.

Perhaps part of it is that we’re a less religious society, so some people have never been warned of the dangers of keeping the form but forgetting the purpose.  Or perhaps because so many people have forgotten the idea of “virtue” as such and just have these left over, ingrained reflexes of a post-Christian society.  These people can usually be recognized by saying quite the most stupid things about who Jesus was or what he believed, while running down those who have any religious belief in the mean time.  You’ve run into these critters, for instance, deploying memes on compassion to claim Jesus was an illegal immigrant (as though the forms and borders of the 21st century applied to the 1st) or deploying memes to say Jesus expelled the “capitalists” from the temple, (ignoring that the sin was doing it under the aegis of the temple, aka, confusing the market place with religion and vice versa which is not, usually, a sin of capitalists, except in those places corrupted by socialism,) or oh, telling us that we should be willing to pay more taxes because we ere enjoined to look after the poor, or perhaps my favorite from the party of abortion-on-demandTM reminding us that Mary was a single mother, (again completely missing that the forms of the society in 21st century America and 1st century Judea couldn’t be more different.  She risked stoning, had someone not stood by her, and yeah, for the record I completely oppose stoning single mothers, even without divine intervention.  OTOH I don’t remember her asking for government benefits for her baby. Must be a different translation of the New Testament I read.)

But this is not a religious blog, and at least one third of my readers aren’t Christians, as far as I can track.  This was just to explain that the society retains the “form” of Christianity and a lot of the impulses, while having lost the why.

Which allows virtues to morph into truly repulsive behavior, which destroys lives while going unchecked, because it’s hiding under cover of something “we all know to be a virtue.”

Take charity, or if you prefer compassion — caritas, by any other name — which in many ways is unraveling society and destroying lives.

Charity, as practiced by all the Abrahamic religions is supposed to be a PERSONAL virtue.  Sure you can band together with people of your faith or others to extend the reach of your charity. BUT you are not supposed to force other people to participate by force.  That might be organized crime, or perhaps just extortion, and like some organized criminals, you might have the best intentions in the world, but it does not sanctify the arm twisting. Because you’re still “causing harm to do good” and that’s always bad.  Because your knowledge of others is limited, you won’t know the unintended consequences of your actions, or even if you’re extorting from the “right” people. (Not that there’s any “right” people to extort from but people delude themselves about the “rich” paying their “fair share.”

Government is particularly bad about this.

Take us, for ex.  I pay an unreasonably high tax rate, because I fall under a category that is meant to catch under-reporting lawyers and doctors, not free-lance writers. For the government, though, we’re exactly the same thing and if some government drone noticed that we fall into it too, he’d probably assume all moderately-successful writers are exactly like the series “Castle.”

And even programs supposed to be more discriminating (in the right sense) do very weird stuff.  Keeping in mind I’m a writer: we learned earlier that when our kids applied for student loans, we had to make sure my money from writing was in another account, neatly labeled business and locked away by being part of a corporation.  Because suppose I go a few advances, and had been doing well indie for six months, and had 40k in the bank the month the kids applied: the program ASSUMES all of it is available to pay for their tuition (we paid half of each) and none of it would go to taxes or other business obligations.  Nor did it seem to understand the money might be there for some other reason: a new computer, or whatever the need for making more money was.  There were a couple of years we had to shoulder the full thing, because my not unusual situation was completely opaque to what is supposed to be a fairly sophisticated ah “ability and needs” judging program, led them to believe we had a year’s income sitting around in the bank, waiting to be spent on tiddly winks and chocolate milk, and that the kids were only applying for loans out of joi de vivre.

In the same way, many a family business goes bankrupt when the main owner dies, because even though the business’s worth is invested (particularly in the case of farms or restaurants) in things that are neither convenient to sell nor can be sold without destroying the ability to make more money, the government expects the heirs to pay full tax on their WORTH.  It’s amazing how many small businesses (not ours, though some of my colleagues got books seized when the copyright passed to heirs, and the assumption of the copyright value was… interesting to say the least) have a worth of a million or so, while barely making enough for a family of four, once you run it and pay employees.

The thing is this is all done in the name of compassion, which has been outsourced to the government and therefore is going after the — on paper — rich to give to the — on paper — poor.  This is a lot like the left’s conception of Robin Hood (they have him as wrong as they have Jesus.  Mostly Robin Hood stole from tax collectors and gave back to the people.) And they think it’s a good thing.

But the repercussions or our… ah, developmentally disabled tax system has destroyed many many lives.  And not those of the plutocrats the left imagines it’s taking undeserved money from (they should know about undeserved money, since those of them who work work entirely on the parasitic mechanism of the state “equalization”machine.)  It has taken the money from family businesses that had sometimes taken generations of patient work to build, it has made it harder to survive as a middle class working person than an indigent lay-about, and it has made it harder for families to climb out of government assistance, because after taxes the proceeds of honest labor are much lower than what you can get milking the system.

To the extent that generations on welfare stunts the ability to be a contributing member of society this false compassion based on extortion has destroyed entire generations of people and might have done irreparable harm by creating a tribe of anti-socials in our midst, who consider themselves entitled to living as they wish while not working. I’m not sure how many of those a functioning society can support.  I suppose at some time we’ll find out.

That’s the macro level.

The local level…. Ah, compassion.

Look, I do realize that some people, at times, are homeless through no fault of their own.  We’ve never quite hit that point but after some exceptionally bad years, I won’t say we weren’t close.  We stayed off soup kitchens by eating a lot of rice and frozen vegetables for years.

But you have to understand just like our “hunger in America” count dieting people (the question is “did you ever go to bed hungry” or “Do you normally eat all you want.”) so does homelessness in America count your kid who is between jobs and staying in your guest room, or your friend who just moved to town and crashed on your sofa for a week.  The most common time someone in America is “homeless” is 1 day.  Second most common is 2 days, etc.

But there is real homelessness.  Of course there is.  When Acacia Park, downtown Colorado Springs was infested with them (is it still?) I used to hear them talking candidly among themselves during my morning walk.

Do you know what I never heard them say “I can’t find a job.”

Do you know what I heard them talk about?  Drugs, mostly.  The young ones would talk about not going home, because their parents (gasp) would require them to stop doing whatever it is they were doing, drug wise.

There were also complaints about cities making it hard to beg, talk of having “dropped out” 30 years ago, and the injustice of even thinking of finding a job.

Were a lot of these people drug addicted or mentally ill.  A-yup.  Were a lot of the mentally ill drug addicts who were trying to self medicate?  A-yup.  Were a lot of them on the run from legally prescribed drugs that would control that mental illness?  A-yup. Do a lot of drugs, when used over time, have the uncomfortable side effect of bringing on mental illness which might have been latent?  Seem to.  The relation hasn’t been very well documented or studied, but anyone who knows people who did a lot of drugs in the sixties has noted a difference before and after.

The one thing that’s certain is that encouraging (with money and freebies and that famous “compassion”) the homeless to continue in their destructive lifestyle has horrendous social consequences.

Those shelters and soup kitchens that cater to all without demanding sobriety will turn teens who left home because parents objected to their pot use into hardened street people who will not have any skills and fall, rung by rung into being utterly useless and unable to integrate in normal society.

But they do worse.  Around these soup kitchens and shelters, if near residential areas, there grows an area of crime and desolation, because you know, these people still have to pay for drugs somehow.  If near commercial areas, they blight the tendency of shoppers to come to that area, because no one wants to be followed/accosted or screamed at by people who are acting crazy (whatever the real reason.)

The do gooders then claim the fault is of “normal society”, of those horrible bourgeois who don’t want to live or shop in an area where they’re likely to be assaulted, insulted or mistreated, not mention robbed from.

But of course, there are very few (some of course) middle class people who are that by virtue of having inherited all their money.  Most of us stay out of homelessness by working daily, sometimes brutal hours, so we can pay our taxes and still live and build a future for our children.

When you make the work and our limited enjoyments more difficult we move on.

Now the “compassion” in the more “progressive” locales has reached the point of if not outright encouraging, not discouraging “homeless” — which really should be “barbarians” because they’re actually not just homeless.  The habitual ones are people who live outside our civilization as effectively as though they were the nearby tribe who lives from raiding us — from defecating on the street.

You know, I come from a society where many many illnesses were endemic that shouldn’t be: from cholera to TB to typhoid.  They were finally controlled not by modern medicine but by a rigorous program of public hygiene; by making people buy shoes and wear them on public streets and spaces (in my mom’s time, though there was still a law forbidding going barefoot, which I fell afoul of when boarding the train to school on a day I had forgotten to put shoes on.  Shut up. It was in finals.)  Other things it discouraged included spitting or on ground.  Or pooping on the ground, where it could contaminate ground water.

In the densities of people in cities, it is very easy for one barbarian to infect the entire tribe and I look forward to seeing what sort of new epidemics develop in one particular city.  Or I would, if our society weren’t so interconnected and people didn’t travel all over taking their germs.

And ultimately that’s it.  Like a gap in our immune system — or an exploit-worthy flaw in a computer system — this “outsourced compassion” and this non-judging charity without paying attention to when it actually becomes harmful, is a gaping and growing wound through which barbarism is invading civilization.

The idea that instead of people being secure in their possessions and in the enjoyment of their space, anyone who has anything is somehow beholden to those who don’t is a Marxist lunacy, (not Christian) and a part of that whole fixed pie economics fallacy.  It’s the idea that whatever you have, you stole from someone, and if you wish to enjoy a clean and safe walk through your neighborhood, you’re some sort of despoiling ogre who caused the filth and the aggression of your neighbor, and therefore must have your nose rubbed in his (never learned to restrain it) anger and filth.

It destroys decent life, enjoyment of the fruits of one labor and the safety that civilization is supposed to provide.

It’s not Charity.  It’s the “Marxist virtue” of envy dressed in charity garb and strutting and dancing to fool children and idiots.

And unless we start combating it, it is enough, by itself, to undo civilization.

 

 

The rest of the house still looks like a screaming disaster zone /construction area, and for that matter so do I, from weird bruises and cuts to the fact that my hands look like I’ve been wrestling something with fan-blade hands. I was telling my husband I have performed sacrifices of blood on every inch of every new floor. I don’t know if he was impressed or appalled. The expressions are so similar.

BTW you’re not looking at the side of a refrigerator on the right, but at the side of some very old cube-shelves we’ve had since the kids were little.  (Look, buying the same shelves all now would set us back $500.  We have too much stuff to do to waste that kind of money.  I do need to get cubes for my eventual sewing area, (When we get there) but I’m half tempted to get the cheap plastic ones, so as not to put the knife in the account QUITE that deeply.)  Of course, before putting them up I spray painted all of them (After saying I wasn’t going to do it because it’s so much work, of course, but I note that I need to bring in one of the little paint bottles and cover up those glaring screws.  Although that’s not a big deal in the long run (right?) and the office looks largely as it will look, pending my arranging files and such properly.

Which means I have a place to hide in, when things get to be too much for me.  Well, to hide and hopefully to write and resume normal life.

Besides the fact that it’s a relief to have ONE room that looks as it should, it is a much needed reminder of why we’re killing ourselves doing all this work. Because when we’re done the house will (hopefully) look like this, and we can have our life on a more organized and productive pattern.  It is the bait for when I don’t feel like doing anything.

Of course, yes, I want to fast forward to when all this is done, and the house all looks like this (well, not exactly like this, since this is a highly personal space with Boris Valejo on the walls, and pictures of the kids growing up, but you know what I mean.)

Sometimes I think it is like that with our polity.

Look, for a good 100 years our supposed elites have been playing footsie with totalitarian Marxism.  To an extent you could say that we, as we came along, purchased a nation in need of some renovation and fix up.  (We definitely need to find that rot in the attic and clean it out.)  I mean, it’s in better shape than other nations, but it does need renovation.

It’s just that you can’t do everything at once, even if you try.  There are limits to what you can accomplish in a month — or a life time — and while we’re attempting to fix the most glaring issues, it makes the whole thing look worse (like replacing truly ratty carpet means everything is out of place and you trip on crowbars in the hallway.)

This is not an excuse, metaphorically speaking, to just run off, soak the whole thing with gasoline and set it on fire.  Everything looks worse when you’re fixing it, be it a house or a nation.  And much as we’d like to fast forward to when we’re all done with this, that’s not the way it works.

OUR house should be done in another month, two at most.

The nation?  Well, maybe our grand-kids will live in the land of the free.  It’s better than the alternative, at any rate.

Be not afraid.  And keep working. Even if you have to bleed over every inch of the project.

 

*Sorry this is so late. The GOOD NEWS is that I am almost done setting my office up. YAY! – 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 MARY CATELLI:  The Lion and the Library.

The library holds many marvels. Lena and her betrothed Erion had found things that helped the beleaguered Celestians of the city.But when the king’s caprice decides to sacrifice Erion to protect himself, Lena can only hope a legend can help her. A legend of just kings. And lions.

FROM SABRINA CHASE:  Rogues and Heroes.

…with a young woman desperate to leave her dusty planet for space … a British boy determined to end WWII all by himself … a cop in a dark world willing to do anything for a good read… an old cowboy with a final, heavy burden

…and more, in this collection of short stories from SF author Sabrina Chase.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

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

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

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: UPPITY