Where do you go when you need to hide? When everything is just too much, and the world is just not doing what it should, but you can’t fix it?
Because there are things you can’t do, and things you can’t fix. I almost drove myself insane in 2020, convinced there must be something I could do to stop the madness. If I just explained once more…
It is a side effect of playing with worlds, with made up histories, with empires that rise and fall in my mind. You get confused when it comes to the real world. Kind of like when you’re in a rough spot and you just want to fast-forward and get past it, because your mind is used to movies. Only more so, because you think there must be a clever trick you can use to make it all alright.
But clever tricks are a novel plotting device, partly because it would be really boring to write “And then the character sat around for ten years waiting for the other shoe to drop in the minds of those who weren’t paying attention. And then–“
But the world doesn’t lend itself to fast forward or clever tricks. Not most of the time.
Note I’m not going to say you can’t do anything about the mess — looks around — we’re in. It’s a mess and no mistake, one that started before I was born and probably long before most of you were born too. And it’s… Well. It is, you know? It took almost a century to weave, or if you look at it another way, 300 years, from the beginning of the industrial revolution, to the worship of “scientific” and “experts” and larger and more bureaucratic governments.
We’re not going to undo it all in one go. Even if you take the approach to untangling this mess that I take when I’m crocheting and the thread gets in a big tangled mess, and just cut out the worse of the knots, then tie to the last clean thread, when it comes to the world, and everyone in it, or even to the vast and complex nation we inhabit… well, other than that outside the metaphor, you end up in blood up to your ankles, with that approach, and what comes after is more than a bit of a gamble, even that takes time. And pressure. A lot of time and pressure. And heaven help us, the pressure is being applied. Yes, it is. But the time is awfully hard to take.
And honestly most of us, perhaps desperately, are still hoping for a solution that doesn’t dye all the thread red with blood, and allows us to go on crocheting a tissue of human dignity, liberty, individuality instead of the old grey, dingy pattern of feudalism or communist neo-feudalism. That, well, now, it could go very slowly and then all of a sudden. Or it could go… slow. Incrementally slow, so it looks like it’s all coming apart, because you don’t see the parts that are getting slowly rebuilt in the background. It’s messy, it’s slow, and most of the way — probably the rest of my life — is very uncomfortable indeed for those who know history and see how it could all tip into the brown stuff. Or worse, the red.
But it’s all slow, beyond individual, or even plucky small group control. Hard to live through.
However, we live not just in a place but in a time. And it’s the time we have. Probably (unless you believe in a very specific form of reincarnation) the only time we have. Like the space opera “these are the times of our lives.”
And you know, it could be worse, much worse. I mean, I doubt I could have gotten this far and still be alive, given what my body is and how it works, if I had been born ten years earlier, even in a slightly more advanced place. Also, I like daily showers. I like clean clothes every day. I like hot meals. All of those were at times luxuries, and at times unobtainable without extreme effort or wealth while I was growing up, let alone say when the founders lived.
So our times are not so bad, even if parts of it are very much Heinlein’s crazy years, and our polity insists on going howling further into them.
Then there are personally bad times. Sometimes I wonder how my friends survive, how they go on functioning and producing beautiful things, or creating these ordered, joyous lives, while dealing with stuff. I think I’m more of a wussy in the emotional field. I worry obsessively about those I love. (My love language is biting my nails to the quick.) Particularly when I want to help but I can’t.
But I know, blessed though I’ve been so far, there will bad times ahead. They arrive for everyone. Nights of a thousand years by a hospital bed. Days of dealing with a loved one who is sinking into illness or losing his or her mind. Endless weeks of drudgery and effort. Personal or inter-personal strife. People you love who leave, by their decision or not. People you lose to death, misunderstanding, anger. You wake, you sleep, and you wish you could be anywhere else, at any other time, doing anything else. All of us go through times like this. All of us. It’s part of humanity.
Where do you go then? What’s your bolthole? The fox goes to ground. The bunny goes down the rabbit hole. Where do you go?
I don’t mean physically. We all have places we go physically, where we feel renewed, refreshed. Where we gain strength, so we can go back and do what must be done.
For most of my young life that was grandma’s house. I’d go around the side gate, past the renters’ yard and the wash tank, around past grandad’s workshop and the orange tree and to the grape-vine shaded patio where I played every day until I was seven, and often enough till I was ten. The kitchen door was always open — unless grandma was going to be gone more than a day — and the clock ticked loudly on the wall. If grandma was not in sight, I crossed the kitchen, opened the door to the inner corridor and called for her. If she didn’t answer, she was out on some errand. But most of the time she was in the kitchen or the yard, doing something, or answered from the depths of the house, “Daughter! I’ll be there.” (Daughter/son is a term of endearment in Portuguese, often used for grandchildren, and even your spouse.)
And then I’d sit down. A kitten or three would climb into my lap. The dog would lie at my feet, grandma would make tea. Later, when she decided I was a young lady, instead of the bowls used for tea in family, she’d bring out the teapot, the night cups, and the bought cookies. (Heaven only knows why, but I appreciated the effort and the love behind it.)
She’d talk of people in the village. I’ll be honest, I have a lousy memory for faces and names. And always did. So most of the time I was only half aware of who she was talking about, unless she mentioned a connection to one of my classmates, or a cat or dog. (Yes, I know. But it’s like this. I knew every pet in the village. Humans on the other hand, were Rex’s owner or Tareco’s girl.) Still, I was interested, in a way. And grandma had a gift for making stories interesting and infusing these very ordinary people with interest and color. Particularly because her memory often went back to their grandparents or great grandparents. And she wasn’t malicious. Sometimes disapproving, but not malicious. (If she made malicious comments, they went waaaaaaaay over my head at a point that I caught the hint, but knew she wouldn’t elaborate. Stuff like “And if you knew how his grandfather made his fortune.” Or “Well, they said her great grandmother was no better than she should be, but I never…” Sometimes, I really wanted those stories. After grandad’s death, while she was still in shock, I managed to get her to tell the story of a local family whose first ancestor in the village was a “dangerous sword-fighter” and “not a good man” and I got a feeling that, well, things we value in characters are certainly not how the village knew people. Or how they valued them.)
Sitting there, listening to grandma talk, to the daily life of people engaged in their own struggles, and how she wished to help this one, or convince that one to take it easier, or– And petting a kitten and sometimes the head of a dog that came to rest it on my knees, I could feel my own struggles: exams and college and ideologically motivated teachers and professors, and spiteful (and sometimes ideologically motivated) classmates and friends or ‘friends’ slip away. Leaving me a space to catch my breath, and just be. Until I had to face the outside again.
For years, while living in Colorado, the bolthole was Pete’s kitchen on Colfax, which is kind of funny, since for at least half of that time, it wasn’t in a particularly safe part of town. Also, it was technically a “low dive diner” frequented by working class people, but also marginal people. That was part of its charm. I could go there, usually with the family, and sit in the back, and soak in the noise and the busy and the various pieces of various lives I could overhear. And eat some souvlaki and rice pudding. And for a moment, the world was bearable.
My other respites, the first one from the beginning, the second only my last ten years there or so, were the Natural History Museum (Yes, it changed names. I’m not at home to their weird notions. rolls eyes.) And the zoo.
I’d walk slowly through the hallways devoted to the evolution of life on Earth, soaking in how small we were in relation to the immensity of time, and I’d feel better. And there were often interesting special exhibits.
Then there was the zoo, which particularly when it was cold and almost empty was like a very large garden with interesting animals as a side attraction.
It probably says something about our last years in Colorado that we ran away to those at least once a week. (Until the lockdown.) And older son and I would often drive through night for coffee at midnight at Pete’s. (Mostly because I wanted to talk plots, or stories, as it was getting harder and harder to write, for reasons that were probably physical.) By that time, nighttime at Pete’s was a who is who of area writers. I have no idea why. I mean, I know why for me, but not for others.
Now I’m far away from all my physical boltholes, and grandma’s house is gone. I mean, parts of it stand, but it’s not remotely the same. The room I was born in is now a bathroom, tiled in pink roses.
Going to Colorado this summer did my heart good, even if I paid for it physically, in having my auto immune go completely insane the moment I went to high altitude. (It got better when I came back down.) It’s good to know it’s still there. Look, yes, I knew it existed. But remember we left during 2021, lockdowns still in erratic existence, and everything plain weird. It’s not what it was. And Colorado Springs has changed beyond recognition, at least the downtown area that was my stomping grounds. But a lot of my hangouts are at least similar enough, it’s good to know they’re there, that people are enjoying them, even if I can’t.
I have memories. Both of grandma’s house, and of Denver, and of a couple of perfect days in Denver with the family. One when the kids were little and one when older son and I just couldn’t take “it” — house hunting (for us), apartment hunting (for him), short on money, waiting for house to sell, stressed over writing career in my case, and applications in his — sometime in 2015 and we went out for the afternoon, had a long walk in the zoo, under a drizzling rain (so rare in Colorado we didn’t have umbrellas,) then dinner at Pete’s. At the time we were both strict low carb, but we were bad and split souvlaki for desert. We sat in a small booth, up front (you could only sit in the corner booth if you had 4 or more people) and watched the street outside through the window stippled with rain drops. I don’t know why that particular afternoon was perfect. It just was, and thinking of it makes me feel better.
And of course, when I sleep I go to grandma’s house. That kitchen, with the (insufficient number of) blue-painted cabinets, and the huge table, is somewhere at the center of who I am. It’s probably where I’ll go when I die. And you can tell I feel it when I want to paint my kitchen cabinets blue and put a chicken mural on the dishwasher…
But I’m a writer. My boltholes aren’t always real places, or real memories.
Oh, I’m a reader too, but weirdly, I don’t often go to other people’s worlds to hide. Heinlein’s, sometimes. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; Puppet Masters. Pratchett’s Hankmorpork. Simak’s rural places, in fall, with someone hunting raccoons.
But it’s more likely I’ll go to my own places, my own internal worlds. When I’m truly going insane, the world is often Elly, which is yes, very weird, very dysfunctional. But it’s been with me since I was 14, and I have 3000 years of its history in my head. (The rest is fuzzy.) And it’s so different from ours that I’m not in it at all, so I can go there and live for a moment a life that is not mine, and that is impossible to me.
Going away, even if only inside my head, gives me a few moments to breathe, so I can face reality again.
And its being inside my head means I can go any time (so long as I remember to come out again. there were years, while growing up when making myself do that was almost impossible.) I can take a much needed break while cleaning boxes or doing dishes, or sorting clothes.
Then come back refreshed to face the mess we’re in. Again.
I honestly think without those breaks, I’d already have gone insane. (Or at least “non-functionally insane” since these are the Crazy Years, and I haven’t taken and I’m not likely to take the solution of the “sane man” in those circumstances, you can tell I’m a little nuts myself.)
So, what’s your bolthole? Not physical. (Or physical, but not in the sense of where you go when SHTF. We don’t want that out in public anywhere.) Just the place you for a respite, so you can face the madness again.
My parents didn’t have a lot of spending money, and my Dad was converting our house from a one floor schoolhouse to a two floor home, so it was always in a state of construction. This meant a lot of our Christmas presents were not new, but were often second hand. One year we all got skis, with poles and boots. One year it was bikes.
When it came to the items, I was often quite clever at finding the places in the house where my parents liked to hide things. I hated the suspense of waiting until Christmas or my birthday to find out what I was getting. I just couldn’t do it, so I found that place at the bottom shelf of my parents’ closet one year where they had hid a box of what seemed to me like treasures. It was full of clothes for Barbie dolls. It didn’t matter to me that they weren’t new, and some of them were obviously homemade. They all seemed beautiful and I couldn’t wait to dress up my dolls and show them off. So I woke up eagerly on Christmas morning, eagerly anticipating getting this present. And to my dismay, it wasn’t there. I had been punished for my lack of self-control by my parents forgetting this present and neglecting to put it under the tree. I can’t remember how they reacted when I pointed out this lack, but I do know that it was the last time I went searching for my presents before Christmas morning.
As in most things, the best revenge for a parent when their child does something wrong occurs when the same thing happens to that child as a parent. My son inherited my lack of self-control. Boxes of Lego would arrive and be hidden, only to be found and opened by someone who just couldn’t wait. It got to the point where I ended up having packages sent to my wonderful next door neighbor, Mrs. Winnie, who held onto them for me until the big day.
Self-control is still something I struggle with to this day.
With some things, it isn’t hard. As a Canadian by birth/American by choice, I still prefer Canadian chocolate bars and will buy large amounts of them when I travel back to the land of my birth. But I don’t have trouble hanging onto them, using them as occasional treats and rewards when I’ve accomplished a difficult task. I can make them last because I know that they won’t be replaced easily. Now my son, on the other hand – he even found them when I hid them in the freezer in empty pierogi boxes! But bring chips or cheese popcorn or ice cream into the house…. After all, you don’t want them to go stale or get freezer burnt. Better to eat them quickly so they don’t go bad, right? And I’m sure I’m in the majority of the readers of this blog who, after starting a book, will find themselves late at night saying “Just one more page… one more chapter… one more part…” Or getting on your phone/tablet/computer at night with the intention of getting to bed on time only to find that you got distracted and it is well into the wee hours. The lack of self-control has resulted in many sleepless nights and not so productive days afterwards, as well as many pairs of pants that either don’t fit at all or are uncomfortably tight. And let’s face it, the lack of self-control can lead to much worse fates than that.
So now, as the year has ended and a new year begun, my goal is to continue to make improvements in this area. If I can’t turn off the electronic gadgets at a reasonable time, then maybe I can stop from turning them on. If I can’t resist the call of the ice cream or bag of chips, then maybe I can stop buying them so that they aren’t in the house and tempting me. If I can’t stop from turning the next page… ok, no point in kidding myself. Who has that much self-control?
The bad news is I forgot my Adderal this morning, which I only noticed when I realized it was 1 pm and I hadn’t done a heck of a lot, and even the post at Mad Genius Club took forever, though it was basically a ran on what annoyed me in recent reading.
I can’t explain what happens, but I’m going to assume I spend an inordinate time between sentences playing with these guys:
Or perhaps staring blankly out the window. Who knows. Or half and half. Honestly, the ADD becoming weaponized is the downside of the post menopausal life. Apparently estrogen mitigates ADD. Who knew?
Okay, new head canon: ADD meds work by keeping Terry Pratchett’s monks of time from stealing hours of your time to patch holes in time elsewhere. It’s as plausible as anything else.
Also is forgetting your adderal (yes, I prefer vyvanse, but the pharmacy has been having trouble sourcing it) the most ADD thing ever? Or is it just me?
Anyway, yes, I have a couple of guest posts waiting, but you know I don’t like wasting those when it’s (eeek!) the middle of the afternoon.
So, first an announcement: for the first time in donkey’s years, I made a recommended reading list in science fiction, at Tangent, with 3 stars, their highest rating. Which was gratifying, since this story would be the prequel to the series of novels about mirror-nauts that I posted a bit of a few years ago. It starts with “Jump, the mirror said.” Anyway, yeah, still intending to write that, and this short story is kind of my promise that I will.
Anyway, I thought this would amuse you, and also serve as a promise to myself. This is the cover for the eventual first novel, yes, after the short story reviewed by Tangent:
And this is, not the back cover, but the beginning of the novel:
Mirrorplay
Sarah A. Hoyt
“Jump,” the mirror said.
I blinked. There was one thing I knew for sure, and that was that mirrors don’t talk, even if this was great uncle’s whatshisface’s mirror, inherited in the family for generations, a heavy thing in a heavier gilt frame, which had been a pain and a half to move to my college apartment. I didn’t have any idea why mother had wanted me to bring it with me, either. I mean, sure, your college essentials: modular bookcase, folding table, desk, and of course heirloom Venetian mirror, right?
“Jump,” the mirror said again. “Honorable Katrina Rhea, jump now.”
The mirror looked like a mirror, reflecting myself in jeans and a loose t-shirt, my long red hair caught back in a ponytail.
Right. So somehow, somewhere, someone had slipped some drugs into something I ate or drank. Only I hadn’t eaten or drank anything or been around anyone all day.
Which left going insane as a possibility. I tried to think of insanity in the family, but came up dry. My reflection in the mirror looked pale; green eyes wide, lips parted.
The kitchen exploded.
It was at my back. I was in the living room, facing the mirror, when I heard the crash and saw a blossom of light reflected in the crystalline depths of the mirror. Sound and light. Explosion. I smelled burning.
I can’t explain why I jumped for the sofa, reaching between the arm and the cushions for my gun. The back of my mind gibbered to get out, to call 911.
I held the gun pointed at the doorway to the kitchen. In this cheap apartment it had no door. The people before me had hung a bead curtain, but I’d removed it.
Shadows moved against the light in there. Was it flame? Was this just stuff burning.
“Put the gun down, Rhea,” a man said, stepping from the fire-light-explosion in the kitchen and into the tiny living room. He was huge, blond, with the sort of mustache that had gone out of style in the 19th century. And it looked like he’d outfitted himself by buying everything advertised in Soldier of Fortune, plus some. “The game is up.”
Two other men came out, also large, one more blond and a dark haired guy. The outfits were the same. But they were holding… water guns? Weapons of some sort, from the way they pointed them, but in brilliant colors, and weird shapes. The back of my mind said to rush them. They were only bluffing, my head said. But something held me still.
“My name is Kathy Jones,” I said. “I have no idea who or what you want.”
The first man laughed. I moved my gun between them. When one pointed his weird device at me, I aimed at him.
The door to the outside flung open behind me. It shouldn’t have. It was locked. But I heard it swing open, and felt the woosh of air at my back.
I turned around in time to see what I can only describe as fish men come in. They were tall and wore business suits, but from the neck up, they had the heads of sardines. They walked with a distinct flop flop flop, leaving a trail of water behind them. They wore helmets. Space helmets.
I opened my mouth to protest I wasn’t doing drugs.
Something hit me from behind. Not an object. A force. Something like a heavy wind.
I fell down. I fell down and down and down what seemed to be a cylinder of dark, crackling energy. I fell down and down and down, as though through the floor, and the apartment below, and the earth. Down, down, down.
I was taken. The back of my mind screamed I’d been taken.
****
“Where is it?”
The words repeated, echoed in my mind, with an odd reverberation. Once, when I’d drunk more champagne than anyone should drink in a night I’d woken up with that odd sound effect.
My eyes hurt. My mouth felt dry and like I’d licked a Niarmus hole. And I was immobilized, floating mid air.
“What is it?” I asked. The syllables fell oddly in my ears.
“No games now, Rhea. It’s been a good race, but you lost.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. My voice cracked in the higher syllables. Damn it. How long had I been out? What had they done to me?
I moved my fingers, testing my bonds, and felt them, like fine spider webs against my fingertips. There was an edge of burn too.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. And I heard the syllables coming out of my mouth. Really heard them. They were nonsense syllables. There was a sound like Latin, maybe a hint of Romanian only none of the words were words in any language I knew.
“Don’t try us.”
I had a moment to register that I’d been answered in the same language, before pain hit. It spread from my fingertips and the soles of my feet. It met over my heart, it stopped my mind.
An eternity later, covered in sweat, my body spasming, I heard my hoarse voice say words I had never heard before, words that meant, “By the mother and the world, by the unborn and the eternal, I will end you.”
My interrogator laughed. My mind scrambled, like a cat on ice, trying to get hold of something that identified that laugh. There was a memory, there was– The name slipped, but I had the image of the blond man who had invaded my home.
As though called by the memory he approached, stood next to me, arms crossed. He’d changed. No one would mistake what he wore now for gear off the pages of Soldier Of Fortune. It looked like he’d fashioned a tunic out of flowing, molten silver metal. Mowerelian. Something told me it was suitable to his rank. I didn’t know what his rank was, but I knew his arms were crossed, and there was a superior, smug smile on his face. “There have been advances you knew nothing about when you went to ground,” he said. “Your outdated protections will not hold. Your choice is speak or die, like Kreios Yirach died.”
It hit me hard. I had no idea who he was talking about. Not objectively. Yirach was a strange name, pronounced with a liquid affectation at the end. But grief seemed to choke me, wet and constricted in my throat. I had an impression of a vast palace, of windswept rooms, a feeling of an arm around my waist, of a body entangled with mine.
My love, my lost love.
It was as though I had a mind within a mind, a memory within thoughts. Even as part of me lamented, caught, a child crying, open mouthed, passionate, lost, the other part of me was thinking about that tingle on the fingertips, that sense of spiderwebs. Yeah, the science might have advanced a lot since I’d gone to ground. But I knew this bind. I’d used this bind. I knew the control points. I knew how to short it. All it required was effort and pain. If I could move my shoulder blade just so, and twist my left heel to the right. Painfully, I forced my body through minute contortions. If only Ermis didn’t notice.
Because the contortions were minute, they were more painful. They required incredible control to do. Once I felt the field give under me, I played on my fingers. I’d had someone escape from me this way … but I couldn’t recall when or where, or even who.
I needed to find the pattern, the weaving. I did, finally, little finger of my right hand crossed beneath the palm, thumb and forefinger on the left stretched as far apart as they could go. Then I wrenched my shoulder half out of its socket, shoving just so on the lock point.
The shock of the snap of the grid reverberated through me, like a sharp note, making my teeth ache.
But I had no time to wait, no time to think. Falling, I modified it to land on my feet. Before Ermis could recover, I’d grabbed his gun from belt and was pointing it at his head, my arm around him, immobilizing him.
Men came from the shadows of the room, then, pointing guns at me. It was a vast room, dark, maybe a cavern. The men who came forth were fish men, fins flapping on the floor, their helmets shining in the light. “You live with Rodans now?” I asked, my voice bitter. “Rejected by free men.” I spit. “Master of puppets.”
He didn’t say anything, and I shouted at the fish men in their liquid, watery tongue, “Stop or he dies. He dies now. Leave me a path to the mirror.”
Inside my mind, I didn’t know why I was saying this. There was just the urgency, the certainty this was the only way out, the only way to escape.
I shoved Ermis ahead, the gun at his temple. I could feel him trying to find a way to escape, trying to figure out what to say that would get him out of this. I’d expect no less from him, but I shoved and pushed, in the direction the Rodans were leaving open. It could be a trap. Of course it could. But none of them could stop me from killing their master. And Rodans weren’t that imaginative. There wasn’t that much in their makeup.
“You can’t escape,” he said. “We’ll track you again if you escape. It’s easier if you give it up now. What good is to you anyway? You don’t even use it.”
I cursed him in three languages I couldn’t even understand, save that I was consigning him to the deepest hell of parricides in the mythology of a long lost world. We’d crossed half the cavern and I could see it now, at the end, the mirror, gleaming milky and sharp. It was larger than my mirror had been, as it would be, of course. Wondered what it handled.
I shoved Ermis again. The Rodans were now behind us, in two lines.
I said a string of syllables, hoping it would work, wondering if it would. If this mirror had once belonged to me—
For a moment nothing happened. Then the mirror misted, and a voice said, “Rhea, Lady.”
“Mylarco Tenco,” I said, giving him the precise destination I needed seeking, though I couldn’t tell you how I knew that those particular words would take me back to the world from which I’d been dragged. I didn’t even know why I had to go back there. “Jump me.”
The gate opened, flowing like water, shining like molten gold, swirling like a dream. I had ten seconds, enough.
Ermis’s body tensed, just before I pressed the trigger.
“Mother,” he said.
But I had no mercy left in me. I shot, and I felt him go heavy, and I smelled the metallic scent of blood.
I held the ray pistol tight as I leapt through the mirror.
And landed on the other side, on soft grass. I was naked, and there was a fire truck nearby.
First I threw up. It was instinctive, the body purging itself from tension and recoil.
On hands and knees, I was aware of a firefighter approaching, boots on the grass. “Ma’am?” he said. He was tall, dark, and spoke with a soft Southern accent. “Are you the resident?”
I had enough presence of spirit to shove the ray gun under one of the bushes, to wipe my hand and arm on the grass, where blood and brains had splashed it. Ermis’s blood and brains. Oh, mothers. I had the image of a chubby blond child running to me across a tiled courtyard.
But there was a feeling that was many centuries ago, and loss and betrayal lay between, and it didn’t matter. I didn’t know what had happened. I couldn’t even think of the language now, but I had the feeling I’d done what I had to do.
“Ma’am?”
I was shaking, as I stood. “I got out, when… something exploded. I jumped through the window.” I pointed. “Second floor.”
He nodded. “Yes, Ma’am. We think it was a gas explosion.”
There was a woman firefighter with a blanket. There was a cup of cocoa. After a long, long time, in which I intermittently dozed and woke up as from horrible nightmares of which I couldn’t remember any part, I was told I could go in, to salvage what I could, but I couldn’t stay there, not in the condition the apartment was.
I went in with the tall firefighter beside me. He turned his back while I dressed, then followed me, seeming to pay attention to every creak on the floor, looking up as though afraid the ceiling would give.
The place was a shambles, as though something in the kitchen had exploded. But there was no sign of fire. Only broken things, blown out. My books, my papers. Everything I cherished. From the bedroom, I gathered clothes, my purse, all my ID, all my papers. The mirror on the wall was gone.
I absorbed its absence but said nothing.
“Do you have a place to go?” the firefighter asked.
“I will find one,” I said. My throat hurt as though I’d cried for days.
“Good. We need someone to do an engineering inspection, before we can let you back in.”
I knew I’d never be back in, never to this particular place.
In my car, I thought of where to go. The problem is that I didn’t know who I was. Or rather, I knew perfectly well who I was. I was Kathy Jones, from Portland, Oregon. I was sure of it. I remembered mother and father, my childhood, my high school, the pimply young man who’d escorted me to the prom.
None of which explained the other, more intricate memories in my head, or any of what had just happened. I couldn’t be going insane. There was no insanity in the family. At least not in Kathy Jones’ family.
I drove a little forward. The firefighters were talking to my neighbors. I rounded the corner, and came back through the darkened yard next door, to that same bush under which I’d shoved the ray gun. I put it under my sweater.
Then I got in the car, and headed for Portland. In finding out from where I’d come, perhaps I’d find the answers.
And besides, something in me said I needed the mirror. Or a mirror, at any rate.
I also have covers and descriptions for a couple of books I’ll EVENTUALLY write (might not be this year, as you know what I have on the slate this year. OTOH a miracle could occur, and I could take my adderal and get stuff done. I mean, what are the odds?)
So, ALIEN HUNTER
Cassiopeia Jones was left at the altar, waiting for a groom that never showed up. She assumed he had got cold feet. But her crazy aunt Marge (don’t we all have one of those) couldn’t leave it alone. When she calls Cassy for help, things have already gone horribly wrong.
Trying to save her aunt, Cassy finds out what happened to her fiance, and also that the Earth is disputed territory with 100 different species trying to take it. With various governments and bureaucracies in the pockets of an alien faction or the other, there’s only a few, competent and slightly insane humans fighting all the aliens for the sake of humanity.
And then there’s Cassy who– Well, Cassy is not elite anything, and she just wanted aunt Marge to leave her alone. But Aunt Marge didn’t. And now Cassy is the most unlikely Alien Hunter who ever was.
Does luck favor those totally unsuited for the job? Cassy is about to find out!
And A FATAL PAWS
Jane Blond already has too much to do. She has two teen children to keep an eye on, and that’s not counting her mathematician husband, whom no one can predict or even figure out. And they just moved to the small town of Goldport, where he accepted a job teaching Mathematics At Colorado University at Goldport — CUG — where the only acceptable house was a Victorian in need of a lot of repair.
Her daughter — Ada Lovelace Blond — is dating someone unsuitable, and her son — Blaise Pascal Blond — isn’t making any friends and she just can’t catch a break.
And then someone throws a bag full of newborn kittens from a car onto her lawn, and involves Jane in a mystery that she’ll have to solve or die trying.
So, hey, can we talk? About that whole race replacement thing that the left thinks it’s doing?
Yesterday I got instantly salty at a commenter, (granted a new one, and I’m a bit paranoid right now for reasons) and realized it was because I hadn’t unpacked things in the text that I kind of need to, so we’re all on the same page.
Understand, I’m still possibly wrong — again, the whole crystal ball being on the blink thing. In fact, it’s never been not on the blink — but I don’t throw things out without thinking about them, and when I think about them it’s rarely a trivial amount. I just don’t always explain. And also the last couple of weeks have involved a lot of night-staring-at-the-ceiling which makes me testy and not very clear. (And no, I don’t know why.)
First, why I don’t like doing a deep dive into this: It’s the perfect leftist Kafka trap. It is, yes, something they’re trying to do and have been trying since the sixties (more subtly, via skewing our immigration policy) because their prophet, Gramsci, told them that people who can tan are perfect, natural Marxists. (Not especially. And yeah, I can tan. When I go near the sun, which I haven’t recently.) However, to talk about it, you get dragged into racial discussions in Leftist terms. Which, because all the leftist terms and assumptions are enormously racist (it’s like they can’t help themselves. It’s the whole Marxist people as widgets) then allows them to call US racists. For using their terms and definitions.
Avoiding that takes an awful lot of unpacking. And the unpacking can get profoundly weird.
So, first, the vexed question of race. Race, at least as Americans see it, is the purest bullshit. Actually, race, as most humans see it, is the purest bullshit. In the US this is just more so, and with a swirl of more shit on top brought on by the government wanting to know your “race” and the left filling your head with shit about race and protected and victim groups for the last sixty years give or take.
There’s a lot of shit there, in fact, but no matter how much you dig, there is no pony at the bottom.
Now, like most of you who went to school when there was still a class called anthropology and not the utter shit (yeah, it’s the word of the day. Roll with it. Put galoshes on first) of “social studies” which as far as I can tell translates to “Marxist indoc”, I learned there were three races: Caucasian, Negro and Asian. From that there were any number of subraces. Oh, Amerindians were considered I THINK — but please, it’s been fifty years — a sub-race of Asian. Or perhaps Caucasian. Who the heck knows at this point? Indians (dot) on the other hand were solidly Caucasian.
This was bullshit, of course. Though the definitions in your head are bullshit too.
The definitions in the head of the people around me were even crazier. There was a lot of talk — and poemifying — on the “Portuguese race.” Look, bring a microscope. Find me a “Portuguese race.” The country is the reservoir tip at the end of Europe, and everything and everyone in humanity left a deposit. The same applies to the “English race,” btw, with little wheels. Sure, Anglo-Saxon, because they were preserved in amber and never consorted with anyone else.
Now, race is not visible under the microscope, unless you’re looking for diseases that are characteristic of certain groups. And even then, ladies, gentlemen, and platypuses, those diseases are mostly the result of extreme inbreeding and often appear in other groups, randomly and no one is sure why.
Sure, sure, there are certain genes the movements of which we’re getting better at tracking, but in the end when your 23andme says that you are 50% French what they mean is that of the people they test, 50% of your genes appear predominantly in France. They’re getting “better” with testing historical skeletons (which explains my fondness for axes. Don’t ask. Apparently some things breed true over a thousand years or so) and with deep-DNA studies that trace the movement of humans throughout pre-history and history.
But mostly races are a visual thing. You look at someone and you “know.” Except what you “know” varies from culture to culture and people to people.
Put a Norwegian (at least pre-Middle-Eastern immigration) next to a Zulu and there’s an obvious difference, but in the middle there’s a vast sea of “I know them when I see them” and a lot of it is… Oh, wow, I’m so proud as you’re all chanting it at home. Yep. “Bullshit!”
Like most of you — by a hair. We have lots of kiddies reading this. I approve — I was taught the old theory of how races came about. That too is bullshit. No, we don’t know the details of how much bullshit it is, but the things like Negro (look, dudes, I don’t care what it sounds like. That was the word for the race back when. DEAL) hair being the way it is to provide protection from the sun? Just-so-Darwinist stories.
The last time I did any reading about how visually/physically distinct races came to be the whole Darwinist “just so” of “Blue eyes emerged during the ice-age because they’re best in low-light situations” thing was not just in doubt, but in deep, deep doubt.
Mind you, that book also seemed to think there simply wasn’t enough time for distinct races to emerge, but I wonder if they had heard of the Siberian fox experiment, so I’ll dismiss that.
And yes, I read stuff like that. I have to, because I create fictional worlds, and I have to figure out how these things came to be so I can see if they make sense in my world.
If I had a guess most of the visually and physically distinct “racial” characteristics are the result of what other human sub-species we absorbed in which region. And inbreeding. There’s only one thing humans like better than screwing everything that moves (or even waves in the wind) and that’s screwing their close family. Over and over and over. Shrug.
But until we know a heck of a lot more about genetics — and even then, maybe — the emergence of visually and physically distinct “races” will remain a phantom, dancing at the end of the dark corridor of pre-history.
Now add to that that people can be trained to identify sub-groups as different races when no such thing makes any sense from the POV of races. And that the visual distinctions thus learned can slice very fine indeed.
I remember during the Bosnian war people from the US saying that they really couldn’t tell the difference between the combatant factions. But they could. Oh they could. In the same way, when I lived in Portugal, I could tell someone from the South by looks. This despite the fact that Portugal had been a country for over 1000 years and that on a recent visit, I found myself by accident (I rarely watch TV on purpose) in front of the TV, watching a national gymnastics team competition and thinking the entire group of girls from all over the country looked like sisters, or perhaps cousins at “worst”. Because that’s how homogeneous the whole country is. Oh, and I could do a parlor trick. Being from a country where we got a lot of tourists, I could tell you with an amazing degree of certainty, which COUNTRY the tourists came from on sight, before hearing them. For a while after coming to the US I could guess the predominant make up of people I met by country. Like, you know “your ancestors are primarily Spanish, with a bit of Greek.” Eh. Parlor trick. I’ve lost it since.
Americans on the other hand — Americans born and raised here — see race in places that no one else sees it, and in ways no one else sees it. It reminds me of the Far Side cartoon showing the penguin bathrooms with “only they know the difference.” Let’s face it, in a world where Meghan Markle is black, anything is possible, and I’m probably a svelte blond.
When I came over in the 90s I was amazed at the number of people who thought I was from south of the border, in the Americas, including Mexico, which pardon me is not the same genotype at all. But that was because I didn’t realize the US government was engaged in the charming experiment of creating a new race ex-nihilo, by defining Latin/Hispanic as a separate ethnic group.
Perhaps that’s not what they thought they were doing — who knows, with government — and they do say in the paperwork that it’s a cultural not racial group. But people are simple, and once the group existed, they started seeing it. And nine times out of ten people look at me and go “Latin.” More importantly, they do that to my kids (unless younger son has let his hair grow, and then it depends on how far he lets it grow. Or older son… Let’s say during an apartment-hunt in the not best part of a town, we realized after a long day that everyone had been visually identifying him as black, despite poke-straight hair.) And when it comes to my kids, it can’t be by body language. More importantly, my kids, looking at their childhood pictures, recently, informed me they looked “ethnic as sh*t.” Shrug. They look human to me. Most of the time. (Exceptions made for moments I came into their shared bathroom and found them peeing for distance and style.)
So, race is a phantom, and the ability to tell a race on sight, or even the definition of “race” changes and has changed even during my own lifetime, much less over the centuries. The characteristics that go with each race? Even more so. I found this out by reading old books. Did you know that black people were presumed to be compulsive gamblers? No? Neither did I. The stereotype had changed.
And because some or a few of you will bring up IQ and other such bullshit, which is even more bullshit than race. IQ results by race are bullshit, because IQ is highly dependent on socio-economic conditions, nutrition and conditioning. As in, if you present someone who’s never taken a multiple choice test with a multiple choice IQ test they’ll do worse than those who’ve been taking them since they were 10. And nutrition… Let’s say that in real terms of survival, people who are starved in childhood are often left with cognitive deficiencies. BUT on top of all that layer the fact, please, that a lot of the IQ tests “of Africans” bruited about were taken by the apartheid regime of South Africa, for the purpose of proving Africans were inferior. Consider some selection might have (almost certainly did) take place. And the fact we don’t know what IQ is for.
Yeah, Africa is a rank mess. But it is a rank mess because it is where our ancestors were kicked out of over time. Stop staring at me. For “our ancestors” I mean not racial, or not really. I mean the people on this blog. We’re odd. Goats among sheep. There’s a high chance our ancestors were too. (It’s…. transmissible, somehow.) Africa was an ideal environment for early humans, and all those who were weak or disturbed the pattern got kicked out over millennia. What that left behind was not an environment devoid of goats as such. We still get those out of Africa: the ones who don’t fit in, the ones who want more. But what it left behind was an unbreakable system of tribal cohesion. Many tribes. Africa is a mess because it’s a collection of crab buckets. Very successful crab buckets. It has nothing — or very little — to do with race, and a lot to do with the fact that this is the default state of the human species: Little tribes that hate every other tribe around them.
And yeah, the independent “decolonized” countries of Africa are a mess too — we’ll get to that in a moment, because absolutely this is the left’s definition of “decolonization”: a Marxist spoils system based on race. — but that’s because we left behind our most lethal colonial export: Marxism. It makes all the tribal stuff worse, and destroys any hope of modern, functional civilization. To make it worse, we’ve infested their institutions of learning, and take their brightest and educate them in our equally infested ones. Yeah. It ain’t pretty.
Anyway, so much for race. There are genetic human characteristics that go with physical characteristics, but, because of rats in head, we aren’t really studying them. Because we can’t trust you zanies not to run out and say, kill all redheads because that will diminish violence. Or something. Perhaps in a world without WWII these links are better known. If we find a parallel world, we’ll ask. BUT the characteristics, to the extent some have been accidentally found are much much finer than “dark skin, short time preference.” (That btw seems to be a characteristic, in the US at least, of Welfare, because it wasn’t like that before from what we can tell.) As far as we can tell it’s the sort of thing that would make the physiognomists of old happy. Stuff like “Long fingers means likely good with mathematics.” (No, not that I know. I just PFAed, because even though some of those characteristics have been found, they’re hard to track down, probably deliberately.)
Also, I don’t care what your 23 and me tells you (remember, it mostly goes off recent populations/movements) let me assure you that you are a complete and thorough mutt. All of us are. Because there’s only one thing we humans like more than sleeping with our relatives, and that’s sleeping with…. everything. Remember there used to be many human subspecies (and how that came about I leave you to contemplate in your free time, given that even pre-historic humans seemed to travel everywhere, and so isolation doesn’t explain it. If you say “Different colony ships” I’ll make you write a book, though) and now there is one human race. What happened to the others? Well, we ate them and f*cked them. I’ll leave you to work out percentages.
That process, and the fact that for probably much of our time in pre-history there were visually distinct tribes (in some amount) over the ridge probably accounts for our ability to magnify characteristics into “whole different race” even when “only they can tell the difference” because humans are also cheerful cannibals, usually of “the other tribe” so it is, as our oldest fairytales tell us, for a child to know if he/she is among a tribe that will eat him/her.
So much for race as it really is a “construct.” And if you tell the left that, you’ll get the reeeing to end all reeing. They are absolutely convinced that sex — a thing with observable characteristics all the way from the microscopic to, well, naked inspection — is a construct, but race, a thing that is defined differently and seen differently at different times and places, is immutable, locked in forever, will never change. Set in stone.
And what they mean by race, btw, is more and more JUST skin color. By this magic, Kamala Harris, a woman of almost pure Caucasian ancestry is suddenly “black.” (Ah. I have more African features. And again, given some time in the sun, like in Spring when I’m gardening, I’m at least as dark.) And Palestinians, the dregs of the Middle East, which in turn is solidly Caucasian, Mediterranean sub-race, (waves in I should know) are “brown” and therefore an untouchable minority. Oh, and Hispanics are also brown, and — the left assures me — must have Indian admixture (arches eyebrow and challenges the bright lights to find Hispania on an ancient map.) And therefore we can’t stop them coming over the border because that would be racissssssss. Like we’d be less upset if ancient Vikings were pouring over the border. (Though I could finally get a decent ax. Also, pardon me, I need to go do the ritual to banish a plot bunny. D*mn it. I thought I’d fumigated my office.)
To the left there are whites, blacks and browns. Nothing else matters. Oh, and that dictates every characteristic of your behavior and attitudes. Hence, anything that allows you to be successful in modern society is white supremacy. And encouraging Welfare-pets (many of them, increasingly, not even vaguely brown) to loot and terrorize is “decolonization.”
To understand the left and what they’re trying to replace with what, you have to understand three things:
First, they view everything in terms of groups and group success or failure, and because they believe creation is impossible (you know, they’re not aliens. They’re fairies) they believe that the way groups rise and fall is through theft and oppression of each other. In other words, Marxism. A deeply broken model of reality.
Second, their predominant grouping of humans is by skin color. I don’t know what they do with edge cases like me. (Oh, actually I do, when they have full rein. I just rather not think about it. Mass graves.) In their head, they’ve made whites — and by that they mean mostly Northern Europeans, unless they need to throw all Mediterraneans in too, to make their crazy theories work — uber-colonizers, and basically the sin-eaters of humanity. If something is bad, they blame “whites.” Considering that some of their idiots think there was no rape in the Americas before Europeans landed, it’s a bad variety of crazy. (If we get a time machine, let’s strangle Gramsci in his crib, just in case.) BUT the most important thing to understand is that there’s no individuality or free will. Groups act as the definition of the group. This is how AOC could think that Amerindians, oh, pardon me, Native Americans could come out of the reservations to teach us to respect the environment. They just know. Anyone with Amerindian blood is born with an innate knowledge of how to use every part of a buffalo or pray to the great spirit or whatever the comic-book noble savages of the early twentieth century could do. (Give me a minute. I need to tell the Mathematician to enlighten me on how to take care of the environment, due to his percentage of Amerindian. It should be worth it!) Which leads us to the next point:
3 – It’s not that they don’t know history. By and large they know what happened. Sort of. At least they know what happened to vast numbers of people fighting and moving around. What they’re missing is cultural distinctiveness or individual influence. In other words, it’s all skin color. All of it. (This is why they think Kwanza is an “African” holiday. They’re virgin of knowledge there’s more than one sub-race/linguistic divide/and probably the most diverse (truly, not in their meaning) cultures on planet Earth in Africa. Thinking all of Africa has the same “values” is like thinking Germans and Portuguese will behave exactly the same. (Sorry. just shot coffee out of my nose picturing that. Took a moment to clean up.))
Okay, now that we’re set up. The left’s Gramscian delusions got a shot in the arm in the sixties, when a lot of the countries in Africa “decolonized” violently and instituted Marxist dictatorships of various kinds. See, dark people were natural communists! Now to bring that here! And therefore they set an immigration policy that favors Africans, and after that various people who can tan, in the hopes that by population replacing, they’d get their wonderful Marxist paradise.
What they were missing (not an exhaustive list) was that a) Marxism was a colonial import from Europe. b) it was particularly strong in Africa, because Russia was in the process of colonizing Africa under cover of so called “decolonization.” i.e. a lot of the independence movements were financed/supported/taught by the USSR. (Colonization is debatable, in this case. Although Russians sent “experts” and Cuban cannon fodder, I don’t think they ever moved in in numbers. Cannibalization might be a better term. You see, communist countries need to steal from other, more functional societies to survive, and Russia gorged itself on Africa, as China has been doing more recently.) c)that in practical application, on the ground, Marxism was often a cover for much deeper tribal conflict and domination that had been going on for a long time. This, btw, made the whole thing far worse, more violent, and infinitely less productive. Since the left confuses destruction with “ushering in utopia” this was to the good, for them.
Anyway, over the last, oh, 40 years, Africa has eaten itself by “decolonizing” but really “being eaten by the Marxist mind virus” which lent cover to tribal genocide and also destroyed what there was of functional society in the continent. The left looks at such horrors as Rhodesia, or what happened to South African farmers and rubs its hands.
You have to understand: at heart they’re enormous racists. I mean, that’s obvious from thinking that kin color means character and philosophy, right? But what I mean is, they really believe that whites are superior. (Whatever your definition of white.) They also believe that other races, ultimately destroy everything and need superior whites to “lead” them. Hence the constant harangues on “raising consciousness” etc. Their argument with “white supremacy” as they view it, aka the propagation of functional behaviors, is that we “racissss” think that it can be demanded of all races. I.e. their problem is that we try to make them poor darkies behave like “us” and look down on them when they don’t. Them poor darkies are like chilluns, you see, and we should just give them make-work and show-positions (like president of Harvard, say) and then the enlightened whites — the left — do all the work behind the scenes and look after them poor blighted darkies.
Excuse me, I need to go rinse my fingers in alcohol after typing that. But it is observably the left’s view. Look how they excuse poor Academic performance or outright stupidity and still try to raise people to positions of supposed command because they tan. No non-racists would push forward total wastes of space as Claudine Gay or Kamala Harris. And let’s not forget Karina Jean-Pierre, whose main qualifications to be the voice of the white house are being somewhat tan, and a lesbian. (And almost as stupid as Kamala Harris.)
Anyway, so the left in the sixties conceived the amiable idea of replacing “white” in the US with dark skinned people, with the idea that inevitably, in the dialectic of history (gag, splurch) they’d kill most of the whites, leaving only the enlightened ones (the left) to “lead them.” (You have to understand that the left aims for feudalism, more or less.)
This was happening too slowly for their tastes. (They’ve had more success in spreading dark-skinned genes with tech visas, but that’s something else, and something for later.) And they’re old. And they have been waiting for the glorious end state of Marxist revolution a long time. So now, they’ve just opened the border, to achieve their glorious population replacement FASTER.
I don’t, honestly, know whether importing mostly military age males was design or accident. Or yes.
I mean, yes, I can see their little reptilian minds (minds shrink on Marxism, and become very simple) focused on all these “fighting men” who can take out Americans if they get upitty. The left is stupid enough to view this as the end-run on the fact we refuse to give up our guns. (Thank you, Founders, for your foresightedness on the second amendment.) It won’t work, because– never mind. Later. But I can see them thinking it would.
On the other hand, immigration usually is a thing of working age males. Particularly the sort of immigration they’re encouraging, which is economic migration. Look, I should know this. Over his working life, grandad worked in Brazil, Venezuela and South Africa. Grandma stayed home and raised the kids. (Every time he visited, they had another kid, so…) And in the village, when I was growing up, most of the working men worked for at least some time in … at the time usually France or, more rarely, Germany. Most of the time they came back with enough money to build a house and start a business. Their wives never left. Only like 10% of them ever “sent for” the family. And those might never come back, or come back at retirement, with or without their kids in tow. This is the model still in people’s heads, leading to people asking me, when I visit, when I will “return” and why in heaven’s name did I let my sons marry “outside the race.” (They miss that my husband is not Portuguese, or it doesn’t matter. I’m not sure. Also, my mom put it best when she finally told one of her friends that my husband would be more likely to retire in Portugal than I, and that I’d become “wholly American” — like it was some kind of a disease. LOL.)
So, this is to an extent normal. But it’s not that normal in the US, where a lot of the previous flows of immigrants were either whole families, or males who sent for their families after a time and more often than not settled her, or their kids did.
It’s just…. I’m almost sure that the left hasn’t thought about this in conjunction with their “population replacement” scheme. Right now they’re just seeing “fighters” and “illegal voters” and nothing else.
And yeah, the commenter yesterday — and another one, one of my old-time friends — said that males can do it, by impregnating all the women, or something. And yeah “this is the mechanism of Western Civilization.”
Look, the left can have their illusions — and their sexual fetishes — but you’re not REQUIRED to buy into them, even if you went to the same schools.
Yes, most of civilization; most of human history to be honest, is the result of conquering males impregnating conquered females.
The scenes of horror almost for sure played upon a vast number of all of our ancestresses went something like this: in the dark of night, invaders arrive, outside the village and attack. They kill every man over the age of three (or sometimes every man down to infants. They might or might not kill the elderly women.) And then they impregnate every female. The psychological mechanisms for this are as old as time. Women will turn on a dime to “fall in love” or at least attach to the conqueror (being hypergamic is a survival value) and the civilization conquered will survive only in female-genetics, some words, and maybe the odd tale or two.
Right. That much is true. But if you don’t see the difference between that and what is actually happening, you have leftist blinders on.
Not only haven’t the invited invaders killed every man, it’s unlikely to happen without… well, their being squashed like bugs.
Yes, there’s any number of criminality and nonsense, but you know, that’s because they’re recruiting from various groups from communists to militant Muslims. And there’s a vast Cartel presence. But the ur-scenario that destroyed many sub-populations throughout pre-history and history is just not there.
Two other things to consider: if you say “but they have testosterone, unlike our soyboys and they will–“
Coughs into hand. The cough might sound like “bullshit”. The decline in testosterone in male populations is WORLD WIDE. No. Look at that again. The decline is world wide. Which is why it’s inexplicable. I can understand cultural trends in the west making males less virile, through some kind of mechanism. But it’s world wide. And yes, viable sperm production is down worldwide as well.
If I had to guess, I’d guess that not playing as much physically in childhood, but sitting in front of screens, which, yes, is a worldwide phenomenon save for maybe tribes in deepest Amazon (Have they been tested?) leads to lowered testosterone and sperm production. But it could be anything else, including the fact we are as a whole fatter worldwide, and fat is a feminizing “organ” as it produces female hormones. (No, for real. Though it’s more like ‘pseudo female hormones’.) But that’s a guess. See “unexplained.”
What you’re confusing for “masculinity” is “unruliness” but women in the third world behave like that too. It has more to do with instability and “lack of rule of law” than anything else.
Women are hypergamic. Women in the west are still hypergamic. And while the PUA and such think this correlates to primitive brain functions — and it does in certain women. Usually the ones more inclined to the one night stand lifestyle — the truth is in the west women tend to look for leftist men — or men who make leftist mouth noises — for a reason. Because leftism has inserted itself in the west as a “conquering culture” and therefore gives off powerful and success vibes. Remember all the women fainting over Obama, who is at best (AT BEST) as someone here put it “a skinny closet-case”? It wasn’t race. It was giving off the “conquering leftist male” vibe. Because that’s how f*cked our society is by the Marxist virus. This also led to men of beta inclinations swooning over his pant crease. (Rolls eyes.) That is the real unconscious attraction.
Most of the men coming in are the product of the last twenty years of relative plenty abroad. Yes, some of them come to work and make money while also getting welfare. But the drift I get from various “victim profiles” is that a lot of them came over because they thought they would do nothing and get a lot of money and adulation. What is due to them, you know, since we somehow did them wrong, as their Marxist education taught them.
They tan, sure, but they’re no more ready to make it in American society than our men and boys are. And let me tell you, I’ve talked of this before, but the last 20 to 30 years, we’ve morphed into a society that destroys men. And boys. The Marxist certainty that all males are evil, because throughout history women were “oppressed” (mostly through being weaker, and also being the child bearers, but never mind) has done a number on society.
Increasingly, we’re a society that doesn’t appreciate men and/or boys and pushes them out of everything we can, leaving them with no place, no role, and no ability to earn money or raise a family.
In practical fact, it’s not QUITE that bad. Kids are finding their place, but it takes longer, since all the mechanisms are designed to sideline men. So around thirty or forty, they’re finally starting a family. BUT–
But, like the reduction of testosterone, the surplus males with no role is also a world-wide phenomenon.
The reasons are different: from the ability to choose by sex BEFORE birth and selective abortions in highly chauvinistic cultures; to Islamic cultures, which always marry all available women to successful older men, and one successful older man will marry several women, young men are surplus to requirements all over the world.
Add to that mechanization making the need for big, strong men less in manual professions and therefore manual professions less well paid… and the fact most of these cultures are still extremely chauvinistic and worship the male archetype of the PHYSICAL conqueror to whom every woman defers.
Which takes us on an interesting side-spur — bear with me. I know this is already too long, but it links to what is likely to happen with the current invasion, if anything — of the events in Israel on October 7th. That particular bit of nightmare fuel connects very deeply with the history of mankind, because it is a replay of those scenes of our pre-history. The conquering males come in and claim their place with unimaginable violence.
Except…. Except they killed everyone. Killing men and children and babies is more or less normal, but they raped AND KILLED the women.
A friend looking at it, said it was mostly lackanookie. These men had never got any and in fact knew they couldn’t keep what they got. Therefore they killed the women in an orgy of wantonness, because they hated what they couldn’t keep.
To an extent we saw this, kind of, with Amerindians attacking frontier settlements. But only to an extent. They took mostly children and teen girls, and killed adult women. Though they might take some adult women, if they looked meek enough, and beat them into submission as much as possible, etc. I wonder if that was because adult pioneer women had proven dangerous, but that’s speculation. Note the “braves” of the Amerindian tribes were often kicked out to form raiding parties that were all-male. So there was strong lackanookie there, as well.
I won’t point out that there is strong lacknookie among our young men, too. Or more important, lack of sane women that they can marry and build a family with. This is thanks to Marxist indoctrination of our girls in school (Marxism. Is there anything it can’t make into shit?) It’s a minor miracle that “violence against women” is as low as it is. And again, most men are finding their way, but late, and limpingly. And women start getting saner — as a friend told me, and at the time I didn’t believe him. I’m sorry, you were right — around 27. Not ideal for reproduction, but not bad.
Here’s the thing, though: The men they have sent over: and at this time we’re very much in recruitment and sending over from farther afield, mostly China and Africa, are, besides being wholly unprepared to survive in a tech society, the ones they wanted out of their homelands, because they’re useless, crazy with lackanookie, utterly without prospects or hope.
If you’re going “oh, shit.” congratulations. You win the golden shovel. Yes, there’s going to be trouble. Lots of it. There already is, in terms of increased criminality. And how it plays out, only G-d knows.
Ultimately there will be deportations, I think. Probably in vast quantities, and hopefully not on visual-identification or a lot of American born and bred, and absolutely integrated young men (and women) will go too.
BUT the American population is armed, which is something most of the incoming aren’t used to. More importantly, Americans don’t react as they’ll expect, which… yeah, will make things worse, but also make it less likely we’ll see a lot of incidents like what happened in Israel on 10/7. I think even one of those, in large numbers, that can’t be covered up, will cause a convulsion none of us wants.
And replacement? Bah. Not unless they find a way to grow babies in vats. As far as racial replacement, the left’s project has been more successful in ways they didn’t and probably still don’t realize were even happening: American men importing foreign brides. For some reason, a lot of these seem to be Asian. So, there’s that. Though to be fair, Asians are something the left doesn’t know what to do with.
True America is soaking up everyone’s surplus, purposeless males right now. And because this is one thing I agree with Pope Che on, right now we have a massive problem with youth unemployment. Specifically youth MALE unemployment (Which Pope Che won’t say.) That’s what’s happening. We’re getting all the sons that parents hope will somehow become successes here, and send money home.
The problem being we’re ALSO a society profoundly hostile to males.
So… there will be an increase in gang warfare, a swelling of welfare ranks (already happened. In fact, I think the ranks are mostly replenished from abroad) one or two — maybe — bright stars who rise above all the conditioning and expectations to make a success of themselves.
But mostly? A vast number of rudderless males with nowhere to go and serious lackonookie.
Dangerous, scary, unstable, and a problem that will unfortunately probably solve itself. And give our ideological enemies a chance to point at our “massive” prison population as a “failure of capitalism.”
What won’t happen is population replacement. Or the left’s adorable little fantasy of all the dark people rising up and killing all the white people as happened in Africa. (Some bright bulbs expected this to happen when Obama became president. They expected black supremacy. (Pinches bridge of nose.)) Because those are stupid fantasies based on seeing history but understanding nothing. Which is a good thing. I mean, top down plans for vast amounts of people never work, but imagine if they were slightly more competent how much trouble they’d be.
For the rest? It’s going to get rough. Really rough. Hold on to the sides of the boat and teach the children well. All the children. Ignore the left’s (mentally handicapped) definition of race. Teach them all well. Make them Americans.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Making predictions is difficult. Particularly about the future.
Of course, it sort of is my stock in trade as a science fiction writer. Kind of. Almost. Sideways, if you look at it with an eye half closed, so it doesn’t bite you (which is what you should do to 2024, btw. After the last four years? I ain’t trust it an inch.)
I mean, unless you assume G-d or whatever it is you, personally, calls whoever keeps this thing cranking (no, please. Spare me. Logic has very little to do with this. Narrativium does. Roll with it) runs on whimsy. Heinlein might have thought so, so you’re in good company, though the truth is all believers see G-d in our image and semblance, only larger and more perfect, so writers tend to believe Himself is an author. Pratchett, Heinlein and myself might be biased.
If in fact that’s the truth, then the predictions we make might come true, because let’s face it, we don’t do them for accuracy, but for the rule of cool. Take the world of Darkships (please? I mean, I’ll borrow it back, hopefully, a couple of times this year for sequels, one which will bring Thena and Kit to their upright and locked position and leave them alone till we mess with their kids, and another to do Fuse’s story, because it must be done) when I was doing actual projections for that future history, it got dark. Very, very dark. And then I added in anti-grav brooms, and a USAian cult, and…. Because rule of cool and I aim to entertain, not predict exactly. (And at 500 plus years in the future, it allows for a couple of impossible breakthroughs based on the edges of what we don’t know yet.)
So while it is my job to do predictions and extrapolations, I’m not exactly in the business of near future, really close, or particularly accurate.
OTOH last night all the amateurs were out in force making their predictions, and more importantly, I got a very strong sense that the herd was being stampeded.
[As an aside, here: To the high and mighty “lords” in DC, pay heed: you’ve done many, many stupid things in your misbegotten official existence. But probably the stupidest of all was to bring to bear on America the techniques you used abroad to “shape opinion” and “create movements.” and whatever the heck else you thought you were doing. This is eating-rocks stupid for two reasons.
First, I don’t know what you thought you were doing abroad, precisely, but we all know your gathering of information and intelligence THERE was laughable enough that I’d think you’d still be in the lavatory washing that egg from your face when the USSR fell without your having any inkling this was even possible. You should at least have a vast cleansing top to bottom with a scouring brush and sworn off hiring bien pensants from the ivies who know the theory of everything and the reality of nothing. You didn’t. You’re morons studying to be incompetents. You never really shaped politics abroad, which you’d know if you were even sentient life forms. Your money did — to an extent — but it was all astro-turf. Leading to the debacles in every American war since WWII, when you had a say in it.
Second- You’re trying to do it in America, quite unaware of how different we are IN THE HEAD from every other nation on Earth. It ain’t gonna work. If shaping the politics and thoughts of the rest of the world evaded you, you ain’t gonna manage us. You delicate hot house flowers just don’t get us anyway. You’d have a better chance at the French, and you fail there too.
As grandma would say, there is not enough toilet paper for how bad you’re about to shit yourselves. You might as well wipe your hands to the wall.]
Not that I think they’re going to manage to stampede us (see parenthetical above, and excuse the ADD. Went to bed late.) BUT they do manage to depress those of you who are depressives. And no one needs that on top of whatever crazy shenanigans they’ll pull this year. (And they will.) More importantly, I don’t want you — or me — on edge, and miscalculating because of all the doom-panicking that has infested political not-left blogs. (A part of me really would like political not-left blogs to figure out how many of their contributors are operatives. Ah well, probably a lot, at the rates they pay. People need other income.)
First the general impression: you see that bridge above, shrouded in fog? (The photographer, btw, João Cabral, does magnificent pics of the city where I went to college. I can’t afford his work, of course, but I found that he had a bunch of the early ones in Pexels, including the one above.) It was built by Eiffel, of tower fame, and it is very pretty. One of the levels is for trains, the other for traffic, with pedestrian sidewalks on either side. And by the time I was going to college in town it had become unsafe. Heck, it had been unsafe for fifty years. But of course, it was still used. (I just tried to remember if it’s still being used. I can’t, because my last few visits were very brief, and the last one a whirlwind showing new DIL and her family around, so things escaped me. But I do know the bridge has been replaced, and I have a vague idea it is now only pedestrian. Maybe? And that maybe considerable shoring up work has been done?) The only way South from Porto, by train, was to cross that bridge.
Now I don’t know how much what we’d been told/drank with our mother’s milk was true, but I know all locals believed that one day the beautiful bridge, with all its intricate iron pieces and the train on it would go down into the shallow, rocky, turbulent river. And no one could survive that fall. And those who, by a miracle, did would surely drown because the Douro is an unforgiving river.
So when you were on a train crossing that bridge you could tell the locals from the tourists, because the minute you started in on the bridge every local shut up, held his breath, didn’t move, lest the vibration of his speech were the final cap on the bridge’s instability that made it collapse.
I feel the year ahead kind of like that moment. We’re entering it, and very bad things could happen. And we’re on this train, and each of us, individually, has very little control over what happens. And there’s fog ahead, to boot. But–
But you must remember that bridge never fell and still stands.
Anyway, after that long and weird preamble, (again, I remind you, ladies, gentlemen and dragons, that I am ADD AF) sit down, pour yourself a cup of coffee, and let’s start the:
2024 in Preview
Elections
First of all, as we all know as, with a heavy heart, we put away the noisemakers and funny hats, and drain the bottles of the last champagne, it is now, for our sins (A second flood, a simple famine Plagues of locusts everywhere Or a cataclysmic earthquake I’d accept with some despair But, no, you sent us Congress. Election Season Good God, sir, was that fair?)
So, how does that turn out.
Effed if I know! No, seriously. Effed if I know. Or anyone else knows.
I love the eternal optimists, or maybe fantasists argle bargling that neither Biden nor Trump will be candidates, or that at least one of them won’t be. Kind sirs, I remember 2016. Kindly take a powder. Trump was baked into the cake from the moment the election was blatantly stolen in 2020 (no? Bite me. You’re funny, you are.) Because the American people hate injustice. And also because he has unbeatable name recognition. Biden? Ah, that. Well, the puppet is being run by a powerful cartel of some sort, and my guess is between money paid, and money received and bodies (many) buried around the world everyone is afraid to replace the walking corpse. (Hopefully not literal, though I had thoughts about RBG. And we do know that young blood can keep the very old alive a long time…. And China…. Well, any big shipments from over there?)
So, it’s Trump and Biden, and if this were an election as such, I’d say Trump wins it walking away, or even standing still, mostly because of the evils the walking corpse is inflicting on us.
But this is not an election as such. This is a whole bunch of fraud, with nominal “votes” which are controlled, diluted and skewed by the madlads in DC who, on top of all are also looking for a way to keep those who’d rather not know for sure, from believing it’s fraud.
Normally I would say Trump had not a chance. If the measure of fraud I got by looking at the incoming numbers in 2020 and the — much smoother — 2022, there is not a hope on Earth or Heaven.
But then…. Hey, guys? What happens when the people you trust to fraud you into power are so disgusted with you that they either don’t do the thing, or do it in the other direction? And is that a possibility? Gut says yes. Gut says very yes. Because these clowns are …. well, special. And they’re managing to remove their masks so fast that even those with strong stomachs and corrupt hearts are vomiting. And this type of betrayal from within has happened before. (And I have suspicions about Argentina, because if you think they’re clean!)
So, I’d give it 50/50 chance, and at any rate think we should vote in numbers, if nothing else because they’ll know how much they have to fraud, and we want them scared.
Also a note, will Trump, if he wins, have learned his lesson, and borrow Javier Milei’s chainsaw? [Rubs hand down face.] Gods and little fishies, guys, I wish I could tell you he would. The problem is the man we’re dealing with is, in his own terms, a Paladin. And what he’s a Paladin to seems to be some idea of normalcy and order probably from his childhood. He should by now have a measure of the swamp and some idea of how to drain it. But…. Hey, we can hope, right.
At any rate, the one thing I can tell you is that it will be nothing like what the left is predicting. Mostly because what they’re predicting is what they’ll try to do if they fraud the corpse in again. Only it won’t work, because they have the mierdas touch, and that’s when you have to hold on really tight, because this whole thing goes on a roller coaster.
All is lost
All is not lost. Because if all were lost they wouldn’t be spending so much time trying to black pill you. I’ll go into some topics I keep seeing as “abandon ship” below, but right now, up here: no one spends that much effort convincing others they’ve already lost, unless the others not only have a chance, but have a good chance.
The appropriate response to the horde of black-pillers is the one (apparently apocryphal) given the Russian Warship: Russian Warship, go fuck yourself. Or if you prefer the one Elon Musk (a man not our friend, but definitely an enemy of our enemies) gave “Fuck you.” Because that’s the only response free men and women should give to those attempting psy-ops on us.
Immigration
I am not happy about the erasure of our borders. I don’t think any sane American is.
But the important thing to realize is that what our enemies are trying to achieve with this is not only unlikely to come through, it’s bloody fracking impossible.
First I’d like to counter two pieces of nonsense, one from the doomist right, and one from the ignorant left, and then I’ll explain why what they want is impossible, and while it’s going to be difficult to right the ship it’s not a fatal wound.
So, starting with the ignorant left: Yesterday on FB I think someone tried to be sarcastic at me on the idea we could close the borders and bring in only those people who had money or a profession or something else the country NEEDS. I.e. immigration for the benefit of the country. I think we can ignore her knowledge of history because when I said Australia for instance does that, she seemed to think Australia was STILL a penal colony. But moving right along: every country in the world used to do that. Until Merkel opened the borders of the EU (and we’ve seen how that has gone, yes?) that was normal. Including in the US for legal immigration. You get a health report, and you show your education and that you’re likely to be able to make a living. AND more often than not, you have to deposit money to prove you have something for the lean times. Or have a sponsor.
This is not unobtanium of “racist” policies. It’s what immigration policies across the world have been FOREVER. And that’s for reasons. Like sanity.
The nonsense from the doomist right, I encountered yesterday at American Greatness, which other than their never Trumpist reflexes is normally better than that, so this is an odd kick in their gallop, and I expect will be all over today. And that is that we have taken more illegal immigrants in this year than we have had births.
Um… okay. That’s cute trivia, but I fail to see what in the bowels of hell that has to do with the price of codfish. Newborns aren’t men of military age (usually. I mean, have you seen any dragon’s teeth?) which are the bulk of the immigrants. And this bulk of immigrants does seem to be male, so you can’t even flop around like a fish and say they’re changing our demographics forever. If they were child-bearing age women, sure, but really? Unless you’re a leftist, you should be aware men don’t give birth. Worst case scenario, we have a large (kind of. The birth rate is in the crapper) number of males that create their own demographic in the US and probably raise our crime rate for a while. And that’s worst case scenario, and therefore not the most likely.
And this is what I mean by doomist and trying to stampede us. The same article added the helpful “terrifying” fact that half of young adult Americans have a parent born abroad. This is me holding my middle fingers aloft. BEHOLD, I have a matched set. If you think the children of say the Clintons or the Obamas are more patriotic than my kids or the about 2/3 of their circles with an immigrant parent, I invite you to admire my digiti medii impudici. (or also Russian Warship, go fuck yourself.)
But Sarah, the numbers. The left is trying to orchestrate an invasion. They are trying to destroy us via replacement.
Yes, they are. Racial replacement, but more importantly, replacement of those who are, want to be, or have become (by dint of great and concentrated effort) Americans. They might hate whites (it’s complicated, starting with “what is white” which you’ll find out for them is mostly German or Norse and continuing with the fact that they don’t so much hate them, they just believe “other races” are naturally more submissive (which is wrong on various counts, but then they ARE horribly racist, and mostly very white)) but there is nothing to the red-hot hatred they have for the free and the brave of this land.
However, the thing to remember about the left is that they have rats in their heads. BIG hairy rats, dropping shit everywhere. Which influences all their thinking.
So, number one, you don’t do population replacement by importing males. I’ve noticed here the same thing I noticed years ago in British entertainment, where every couple on TV is not bi-racial and usually the male is darker. I think the left has sort of realized their original plan won’t work and their new plan is to talk every American chick into marrying a darker-skinned male. Eh. That will be fun. Those poor men, by and large. There is a reason so many geeks in the nineties went to find women abroad. Anyway– Moving right along.
Most of the people coming in are male. And at this point most of them are not from South America, but from Asia and Africa. If you look up “Planes Trains and Automobiles” on this blog, you’ll see this is likely being financed by one of the many, many communist fronts around, not to mention likely by the CIA, (because they’re idiots.)
Their primary purpose if population replacement, and I wish they had paid more attention in sex ed. Or do they no longer teach mere reproduction? Because they’ve lost their bloody minds. Sure. Over time. “Family reunification.” If we were in the sixties or seventies. Which we ain’t, and they don’t have that kind of time.
Second, the reason they want population replacement is become of the Gramscian retconing of the gospel of Marx according to stupidity. Since the proletarian refused to rise up, and in fact, got jobs, saved money and started investing, Gramsci reeinvented Marx with the helpful idea that it was “minorities” however defined (and as some friends said last week, Latins are Schrodinger’s minority) that were naturally communist and would usher in the worker’s dark skinned paradise. All of which is crazy cakes, but flew really well over here, because most Americans, including (or particularly) those who have gone to the third world with various NGOs have no bloody idea how people abroad live, or why other countries are so poor and have been fed Marxist pap about how they’re poor because we stole their “resources” (look, dudes, we have all the nail pairings and metal filings we need. Thanks.) Most Europeans for that matter, shell shocked after WWII were willing to buy this version of history and believe they were the villains, because some of them don’t tan really well, but really because the American Eve had fed them the capitalist apple. Shrug.
None of which disguises the fact that Gramsci was a genius at stupidity, with more ability in that area than even Marx. Because none of that bunch of idiocy is true. Traditional third world countries are dysfunctional because of their culture, but their culture has bloody nothing to do with the angry inkblot’s theories. And more important, and of great interest to us at this point: the “minorities” are not natural allies in the fight against “whiteness.”
The left has had a few glimpses of this already, but they keep covering their ears and going lalalalala.
Asians are possibly the most racist people in the world (in aggregate. I’m not insulting any of you who happen to be Asian, particularly if you’re American. I mean, Asian CULTURES are incredibly racist) and against everyone, including other Asians. Africans…. Oh, dear Lord. Africa’s tragedy is being a land of tribes. (Don’t say anything about “African culture” when I’m drinking, please. Because shooting liquid out of my nose with force hurts.) And every tribe is racist against every other tribe, and a good number of European nationalities. (Those nationalities vary depending on the tribe, location and colonial past. And no, they don’t hate all colonizers. That’s crazy cakes Marxist bullshit. Real humans are more complicated. Some tribes think well of Germans, some of English, some of French and some of Portuguese. There’s a good chance no one thinks well of the Belgians, a lesson that the EU should have heeded.) They will tend to look down on every other nationality and race other than the select one. Latins/Hispanics…. Ah, Madre de Dios. We’re not only the Schrodinger minority, we are most of us fairly nuts culturally, and the culture isn’t even by country, but by region, and it kind of depends when and where the colonies were colonized, same as with Africa for what resonates with what.
(Before you dispute the “we”– last night again with a cute video on how Latins celebrate New Year, it was brought to me that yes, Portugal is a Latin culture. Which makes perfect sense, since in the US it’s mostly attributed by surname, and if you think Marquez is Latin/Hispanic and Marques isn’t we need to have a talk about cultures not being JUST spelling — Latin/Hispanic, as your census form explains is not a race, but a culture. And Portugal as a CULTURE is — I’m sorry, and I know my parents will be calling as soon as someone translates this for them — part of the whole mess. Brazil is slightly less so, due to a lot of German and Italian immigrants, but yeah, it still is.)
Look, just growing up? The people from the next village over were foreigners, and also probably heathens. This is somewhat mitigated by TV now, which creates a sense of unified culture, and highways which facilitate the mixing of genes, but still, the North of Portugal is … um…. a little quieter, due to British influence from way back. And we didn’t trust them Southerners. (If you imagine the US flipped culturally, it will all make sense. Yes, yes, the Northerners are rednecks. Guilty as charged.) The rest… Portuguese look broadly down on Spaniards (no, really, trust me) and the rest of the Portuguese/Spanish speaking world. Broadly they like Africans better than they like South Americans, though perhaps they think Brazil is a little more tolerable than the rest. Crazy, but tolerable. And that goes for every single nationality flying under “Latin.” Argentinians and Brazilians tolerate each other a little better than the rest of the Latin world. I’m not sure of the other finer divisions, but I know the Mexicans look down on practically everyone else. And no, they don’t like those with darker skin than theirs, and are more likely to identify with blond, blue-eyed Caucasians.
So, so much for the left’s hope of creating a coalition of everyone against the “whites” and being the only “whites” left and therefore the master race. In their racist dreams, this works. In reality, if by importing all those military aged males, they expect a cohesive force who will fight for them…. Well. It’s going to go in interesting ways but not, in fact, as they expect.
“But Sarah, Welfare! They’ll keep each minority isolated and one against all.” Um… some of them might think of that, though it ignores two things: Males don’t give birth. And, oh yeah, the cupboard is bare, so the poor dog gets none.
I.e. what they’re doing is going to crash the already unsustainable welfare system. They don’t understand this because they think money is a construct and worth what they say it is, instead of a symbolic unit of value worth what you can buy with it. (Still a construct, yes, but different.) Which just means they crash the system even faster with their clever fool tricks.
The other thing they’re ignoring: These are not your grandfather’s immigrants, legal or otherwise. Oh, I don’t mean they’re not refugees. You know that. And yeah, some of the earlier waves, even under Obama came here to work and prosper (the problem being we can’t “normalize” their situation, without inviting further invasion. So I’d advise them to go back, wait for sanity, and try again.) The current wave is being enticed and transported over mostly for either illegal purposes (a lot of them) or to receive free education, health, and welfare, which to them, in their country’s terms, is …. a fortune. BUT and more importantly, they are not your grandfather’s immigrants in the sense that the world got so rich, more or less all over, in the last 40 years, that these people certainly didn’t come here to endure hardships. Their standard for “good living” is lower than most Americans (but so was it here and in Europe in the seventies.) But it is not low enough that they want to be living on the street, or in tents in the middle of nowhere forever, which seems to be what this whole mess is defaulting to. In fact I’ve already read more than one interview with Venezuelans (of all people) saying that if they’re going to be accommodated here at the same level or below that of Venezuela, they’ll go back where they have family and connections. (My guess is that’s the impetus for more Africans. Harder for the poor buggers to go back. But this is a thing I’m willing to pay taxes for.)
You guys don’t know, because you’re not immigrants, but the vision of America in most foreign heads is of a land of ease and plenty, where you don’t have to lift a finger to be well fed, and have money to send home too.
This is true to an extent, by comparison, but not true in absolute. I knew this because I’d been an exchange student here. Most people don’t. And add in that you have to work d*mn hard to acculturate to even understand the direction of “getting ahead” and you’ll find that as the spigots of welfare dry up (all the faster the wider they’re opened) people will very much want to go home. Or back. Or something. Because they’re not constructs of perfect proletariat who tans, but human beings, with hopes, dreams and ambitions.
While on that, Obrador, you piece of communist shit, you are a prize idiot by opening your country to the hordes coming through, and you’re about to get what’s coming to you with interest. Because when the flow reverses, the people who can’t get to their countries any other way, unless America is in a shape to fly them back, are going to head to Mexico first. I hope you and the cartels enjoy eating the mess you created.
But yeah, my prediction is mostly that probably sometime this year the flow starts heading the other way — if it hasn’t started already, and I suspect it has — devastating everything in its way. Sucks, hard, for the border towns, but well… It was bound to happen.
The Economy
Well, now we’re on firmer ground. The economy is F*CKED with a capital F which starts with failure and rhymes with “with a cactus dipped in ghost pepper sauce.”
But part of what you have to understand is what parts are dying, and why.
To an extent the current economy is part of the FDR patch on the American system. Yeah, the patch was political, but all the agencies, and “worker protections” (Okay, some go back to Wilson) and general government interference created …. um…. a top-down economy of government-abetted quasi-monopolies.
It never reached full fascist collaboration between government and industry, malgre Obama’s attempts. But the innovation, etc. got pushed to the edges and the places the important people thought were unimportant.
Fortunately the great minds of their respective generations are idiots, who don’t understand what is likely to upend the economy, which is how we got the internet, and innovation that’s upending everything.
So, what is failing is the “blue model” institutions, the top down, centralized, controlled economy. The rest…. well, is scrappy and ready to go. Which means, ladies, gentlemen and small flightless birds, that what we’re seeing is not a death, but a birth.
The problem with births is that they are a complete change in state, which involve pain and a lot of blood. The full birth of the industrial revolution caused (among others) the French revolution. We’re in the early pangs of this one, and as always I hope it will be as close to bloodless as possible, but don’t hold your breath and wait with sandwiches by the phone. Not only is the chance for very, very bad, but it’s the overwhelming chance.
However, remember, as always, it will be bad in patches. For other people there will be opportunity and a lot of new things will be made, created, invented. And thus is the future birthed.
If you’re one of the Huns, or even one of the more distant “Odds” chances are you’re, yes, weird and never fit in very well. But you’re also — the virtues of those vices — innovative, different, and do not so much think out of the box as you don’t know what or where that famed box is. So. Straighten your shoulders and get creative. Work smarter and harder.
And if you’re a younger man, or raising one, concentrate on different, innovative, creative ways of making money, and multiple streams of income. This country — but really the world — isn’t geared for males right now, particularly young ones. They are in many ways making war on them. (Which is why it’s stupid to import so many of them, among other reasons it’s dumb.) So it’s difficult, but man was made to strive. And again, I trust you and your kids to create the future.
BUT it’s going to get difficult. No argument on that. And 2024 will get very difficult.
ABROAD
Abroad is not going to save us. It is unlikely to kill us either. It might cause us problems, but they are doing their worst by sending over their military-age males, to be honest. That’s the greatest weapon they can deploy right now. (And it won’t work.)
Reason being that when America sneezes the rest of the world catches pneumonia.
It takes generations for communist “economics” for China to be dumb enough to try to tank us without understanding they also tank without our consuming a lot of what they produce. They’re already paying for it. And the rest of the world… Well. In detail I can’t tell you who’ll do better, but I can tell you everyone in the developed world is going through the same crash of the “FDR model” that we are. Because they imported it. And it’s failing there. Harder and faster. The countries that ditch it fast might survive. BUT it’s going to be very difficult.
We’re in a mess, but we’re relatively better off than all of them. And some of us with family abroad are praying very very hard.
The Unknown Unknowns
So, 2024….
I couldn’t have told you the shape that 2020 would take, but I knew they were going to do something utterly stupid, because they were afraid of not having enough fraud to win the elections.
Even I couldn’t have predicted the insanity that was 2020, much less the fact that so many people panic-obeyed, including some of you.
So, I can’t predict the insanity they’ll try now when they’re in worse shape than in 2020 public opinion wise.
What I can say is that I will not underestimate them this time.
One thing in our favor is that they have trouble realizing when a tactic is no longer working. So I predict a lot of failed “scary illness! Lock down now”. This has been going on for about a year, and keeps eliciting more and more yawns.
BUT at some point they’ll realize it’s not working. I expect some clever fool trick around April. I think they’ve been trying to get a nuclear war going for a while, and I’ll be honest, I just don’t think the resources are there, period. Feel free to imagine there’s too much sanity for that, but I suspect it’s mostly that other nations’ nukes are largely non-functional. I don’t actually put past them nuking one of our own cities, but if they do that, they won’t like what comes next.
Honestly, having sat at the back of a lot of their meetings and discussions, I expect them to try 10/7 type sh*t over here, largely in big cities, and largely unsuccessful.
To the extent it succeeds, (and let me say I think they’re already trying) it will be the end of them. But I don’t expect they can see that.
I am nonetheless sure they are going to try next level insanity, and I’m not crazy enough to predict it, so I’m not going to try. Just be prepared for emergencies, and keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.
In Summation
If any of you have stayed with me this long: I expect it will be a lot like those train rides. Those in the know are coming into 2024, in the ominous fog and holding our breath.
My gut, weirdly and bizarrely, tells me it will be better than we expect, and there are some miracles in store for us. BUT at the same time those ol’ Earthquake* bells which don’t exist, are ringing up a storm and there’s a sense of mourning and horror ahead.
So, stay ready. And be aware that yes, we’re going to loose some people (including perhaps the one writing this, and some reading this), and we’re going to lose institutions and … conveniences we can ill spare. And that will probably accelerate in 2024.
And they’re going to throw everything but the kitchen sink at us. It’s just their aim sucks, because of the rat feces in their heads.
So be not afraid. In the end we win, they lose. I think 2024 won’t be as terrible as we expect, but it’s only the beginning of the bridge. And there’s the fog.
Hold your breath. Don’t talk. But chances are good we get to the other side unscathed.
*I feel bad about the Earthquake metaphor. But it’s baked into the blog. So: Japan is in my mind and prayers this morning, and for those of you — I know at least two — who have family there, I hope your family and friends are okay.
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. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH
Meg Turner, vampire accountant and investments advisor, has plenty of living clients, but not many among her fellow undead. That’s about to change: she’s been invited to a regional business fair for her kind. She’ll get to meet and greet more bloodsuckers than she really wanted to (hopefully without having to suck up to any of them). than just the two Vampire cops she helped track down and stake her late, unlamented sire—and hopefully make some friends and answer some questions.
Unfortunately, she’s got a Line Progenitor who’s begun invading her dreams, and a serial killer stalking her future clients to distract her from growing her business. Throw in a sick roommate not long before the conference starts, a mafia messenger boy left on her front porch, and only one car to juggle all of her responsibilities toward her roommate and unexpected guest. And then on top of that, she has the business fair over an hour away that features vampire karaoke, nosy, pushy elder bloodsuckers, and one particular elder who’s friends with her unwelcome dream guest. Seriously, it’s enough to drive her to drink something other than coffee or blood.
Just why did she think this whole conference thing sounded like a good idea, again?
Jack Bristol did shoot the sheriff, and then took his horse and ran a thousand miles, thinking he would be condemned a murderer for defending himself. Then he met old Hank Sherry, who greeted him by burning a cross into his forehead without any explanation of why. Escaping the crazy old man, riding into Culver Valley gave him a hint: everybody who saw the cross thought he was Sherry’s son — and should be hanged! How could Bristol escape the respectable citizens of the Valley, who wanted him dead, and yet win the heart of the girl who knew, somehow, that he was innocent?
This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction giving the novel genre and historical context.
The name’s Chloe Fortebat, and I am in trouble. I left my father’s ranch on the plains to come to the Old World: a place of airships, steampower, and monsters nobody talks about. Now I’m dodging giant werewolves with fangs the size of my knife, and the hunters crazy enough to go after them. The most dangerous of these doesn’t look the part: a quiet, sharp-dressed medical man with a tired face….
My name is Dr. Maxim os Storm, and I hunt the beasts that haunt the night. The leader of this pack of werewolves has set his mark on Miss Fortebat, but this brave lady would rather fight him than let him make her his tool. As far as I am concerned, that makes her my ally. My only chance of curing her lies with an ancient machine, hidden by my people in the caves beneath Wolf Island. We must keep that artifact out of the werewolf’s grasp at all costs, for he would put it to a terrible use….
In the Alternate History novel, two weeks after the D-Day landings, 1944 Britain disappears, replaced by a version of Britain from the distant past, before modern humans made it to Europe. Billy Chandler, like all Allied soldiers in the Normandy bridgehead is suddenly in a desperate situation, cut off from British-based air support, reinforcements and supplies. Meanwhile, deep in the past, 1944 Britain is in its own fight for survival, isolated in a time when Neanderthals rule Europe and no humans have reached the Americas and struggling to feed itself.
The Allies in Normandy struggle to hold out against increasingly powerful German attacks, running low on food and ammunition. Meanwhile, 1944 Britain struggles to survive, a modern nation in a Stone Age world.
But it doesn’t mean Athena Hera Sinistra isn’t ready to try. Flying back to Earth Orbit from her asteroid home, leaving behind unresolved questions and turmoil, Athena becomes a new mother in orbit.
As is perhaps fitting, her daughter is born during battle with an unknown foe.
A battle that ends with Kit – Athena’s husband – missing, and Athena’s ship damaged.
So Athena names her daughter Eris, and goes to war.
What follows is a non-stop fight by a very angry mother, who wishes to make the world(s) safe for her newborn daughter, and other children too.
When the adventure is over, it is just the start of another, where children will be rescued, old tyrants brought to justice, and freedom restored.
Billionaire boss Lucas Danvers keeps his assistant, Evelyn Fontana, very close and very busy. He values her efficiency and intelligence and needs it available to him at all times. It certainly isn’t because he’s in love with her and wants to keep her away from other men. It’s simply a question of respecting her abilities.
That is, until she breaks their tradition of couples’ costumes for the company Halloween party, for which she is solely responsible. When she shows up to the shindig as Eve to his Executive Vice-President Nick Wilbright’s Adam, he has no choice but to disrupt their Edenic date plans dressed as Lucifer. Even if he wants to change the traditional story just a bit.
Nick Wilbright’s been in love with his best friend since college, but Lucas’ procession of supermodels, starlets, and superhot women of all sorts have kept him from making his feelings known. Not to mention that it’s obvious he’s in love with his assistant. Then Evelyn comes to him with a proposition: attend the company Halloween party with her, in matching costumes meant to provoke Lucas to finally pick one of them. Or both. Will Lucas re-enact the scene in the Garden, or can he tempt both Adam and Eve into sin?
In Greek myth, the phoenix is a bird that rises from its own ashes. Growing up in the city named for it, Toni knew the story well, and being a gamer made her used to death being negotiable.
During a visit to her grandfather’s ranch, she discovered a cache of books and videos from the lost golden age of space travel. Entranced by the enthusiasm of Roger Chaffee for his upcoming spaceflight, she was shocked and angered to learn the disaster that happened only days after his interview.
When she expressed her desire to get him his spaceflight, her family’s anger came as an even bigger shock. But she refused to forget, no matter how hard her parents tried to distract her, to prevent her from researching online.
Her determination would lead her along strange paths that would end in a desperate cross-country chase and the realization of a dream decades deferred.
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.
Two thousand and twenty was a horrible year for many people for a variety of reasons. In addition to the most common, I lost both my parents that year. My father, who lived in Florida, died in April and my mother, who lived in New York City, died in September.
This post is not in any way an attempt to garner pity but to help others learn from my experiences.
When my father passed, it was not a complete shock as he’d been fighting cancer for a number of years. Also, as an engineer by training, his estate was fairly well organized. This greatly simplified things for his wife after he passed as most of the legal and other end of life arrangements and documents had been prepared. There were, of course, some snags and surprises here or there, but for the most part, my father had done his best to ease the path for his wife and heirs after he was gone.
My mother’s passing was more of a shock, but the post death situation was even more so. She had not left a will or any other end of life legal documents we could find when we were able to get to her NYC apartment in mid-October. The only thing she’d done was pre-pay her funeral expenses. While this helped, trying to deal with her estate from eight hundred miles away without those documents was challenging to say the least.
As my older brother no longer lives in the country, it fell to me to take care of things. Which I had to do remotely and during the times of covid, with all the shutdowns and restrictions New York City could apply. I was eventually able to get a copy of her death certificate from the county, which enabled me to contact her creditors and get that part moving.
With the help of a cousin (our angel when my mother was in the hospital and a great help after she died) who used to practice family law, I was able to apply to be assigned Administrator of the estate. This was simplified due to the value of my mother’s possessions falling below an arbitrary line and therefore considered a “small” estate. I mailed the paperwork, properly signed and notarized, to the county court at the end of October.
This is where things took a turn for the surreal. It took over two business weeks for my paperwork to get from Knoxville Tennessee to New York City. Half of that was just getting from Knoxville to Memphis. But it finally arrived. I’d been advised to let some time pass due to the offices being closed and people working from home.
For thee and a-half months I heard nothing. Finally, in mid-February I called the court, only to get a recording telling me the offices were still closed and try an email. My first two emails went unanswered, the third received a terse and uninformative reply. Six weeks after the first email, I finally managed to reach someone who could help. At this point, things started to move faster. It turned out there was a piece of information missing which they’d known about since mid-November but hadn’t informed me. With that corrected, I was told the paperwork would be mailed out by the end of the week.
Two weeks later I still hadn’t received anything so I emailed again. Someone had forgotten to put it in the mail and I was told it would go out on the following Monday. It arrived the next Friday.
At this point, it was over seven months since she’d died and because there was no will or a named beneficiary, we hadn’t been able to clear out her apartment, close her bank account, order her tombstone, or deal with a number of other issues.
A week after the paperwork arrived, we were back up in New York City working on all those things. While both physically and emotionally exhausting, the week was very productive, thanks in large part to some wonderful people who looked for solutions when others would have shrugged their shoulders.
The week after we got back with a carload of books, photos, and other keepsakes, I was able to get a Federal Tax ID number and open an estate bank account so I could start dealing with estate expenses and, assuming there’s anything left, disbursement to my mother’s heirs.
Most of this aggravation could have been avoided if my mother had legally named a beneficiary or estate executor. Detailed instructions regarding what she wanted done would have helped even more. However, as with many people, she didn’t want to consider her own mortality too closely.
The most important lesson to be learned here is get your legal house in order while you have time to consider options and make your own decisions. Everyone dies eventually, make it easier on those left behind by managing your estate as much as you can. Also, don’t forget to inform responsible parties and update any instructions as circumstances change.
Also, cull your old documents regularly. This was not a habit either of my parents had as we found paperwork, including tax returns that went back to the 1940s. Unless you run a business, there’s rarely a need to keep more than seven years of tax returns or one year of credit card statements, utility bills, etc. Make it a regular part of your annual routine to purge older papers. Consider it a favor to your heirs. As a bonus feature, it means less clutter for you.
Hopefully this post can help someone avoid repeating my experiences. They certainly modified my habits.
So…. I actually have guest posts, and I should have posted today. One of those at least. But it’s my anniversary and SOMEONE keeps interrupting my attempts at quality time with the computer. GEESH
Yeah. Okay. So, Dan keeps interrupting me, and I feel it would be a little rude to say no right now considering he made me — cough — an honest woman 38 years ago today.
On that note…. THIRTY EIGHT YEARS? where did the time got? And what happened to these kids?
Now, I’ve written before about the lousy economic sense of gift-giving. There is always a ton of money that gets wasted. We have some friends that have the strangest gift giving ability. Like… No. there is no way to explain. If its both perfect and needed, they give it to me the day after I order it for myself.
Yes, there are also friends who marvelously discover my wish list and are smart enough to navigate what I’m saving for the kids, as opposed to what I want for myself.
But there is an inability to tell what someone wants that makes the mismatch inevitable, particularly in the very large aggregate numbers.
And that’s why communism doesn’t work.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, to get down to brass tacks about gifting.
When I was a kid, I loved receiving Christmas gifts — who doesn’t, right? — but Portuguese Christmas gifts are different. The whole family gets together and give you ONE thing. So, you know, I usually got a doll for Christmas, and later a book. Later yet I got money or clothes. (You know you’re a grownup when money or clothes excite you.)
But when I started making a little money I found the real joy, which was to give gifts. I would plot for months to give someone something. It was always something I knew they liked or wanted and would never buy for themselves.
I managed to be the only person to give mom stuff she didn’t hate — mostly jewelry because our tastes are similar, so I knew what she wanted. Not real jewelry, but Portugal means sometimes you need costume jewelry. And when I couldn’t afford anything else, I wrote a poem for my best friend and illustrated it.
Now I’m not going to claim I always get the perfect gift. I very often don’t. But when I do, there is this feeling of elation. It’s much better than getting a gift.
And then there’s kids, and gifts from the kids and for the kids. We just want to make them happy, and … well, when the kids are grownup, you have to balance not overwhelming them and not offending their sense of independence. So it’s difficult but they try.
But the truly ridiculous thing? We’ll love anything they give us, no matter how silly.
Now, mind you, this year I got amazing gifts. DIL gave me jam she made! And she helped me in the kitchen on Christmas day. And future DIL and son cleaned my garage, which might be the best present I’ve ever gotten from anywhere. Yeah, there were also actual gifts, but those were my favorite.
And then there’s …. well, they were both here, for pretty much the whole day. And that’s very much the best gift ever: having the family together for a whole day. It’s a rare and precious thing, more and more as they grow into their own lives, and it’s distilled sweetness and joy for us as parents.
There is nothing that compares to that. A perfect day with the kids and their spices (well, only one is a spouse so far, so we’ve decided their collective name is spices) when we got to be together as a family and enjoy each other.
And the memory of that to take to the days when that is impossible for whatever reason.
Those are gifts beyond price, and quite beyond economic calculation or mismatch.
According To Hoyt 