Keeping The Magic Fresh- Doug Irvin

 

One of the sad state of affairs we humans have to put up with is that when we grow out of childhood, our imaginations are stunted. It’s like the loss of milk teeth triggers a drying up of our sense of wonderment.

It doesn’t have to happen that way.

In fact, for some people it doesn’t happen at all.

The best part of childhood is looking at everything through new eyes. As adults, we tend to treat a new wonder as so much ho-hum by the eighth day. That’s very true, even for children. I have a three year old grand daughter who managed to hack her mom’s smart phone and would call me every morning. She doesn’t know how the magic works for calling, but she’s utterly used to using it.

Fortunately, it is possible to train yourself – even starting from adulthood – to regain the sense of wonder.

I call it recapturing the magic.

As we grow and mature, our minds are forced into narrower and narrower channels of thought. For some, though,  even as they learn the lessons needed for adult pursuits they still manage to retain that sense of newness.

The writer/philosopher C. S. Lewis who wrote a fantasy series called the Chronicles of Narnia, understood the process of recapturing magic. It’s a matter of looking beyond mere details, to what might be called the meta-data. Not ‘what is it?’ but ‘what is it about?’ or maybe even ‘why is it?’.

This was demonstrated in a scene from Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The crew members have landed on a far away island, where they find men caught in an enchanted sleep. They finally meet the owners of the island, who are pressed for sailing details for the region beyond the island.

*****

“And are we near the World’s End now, Sir?” asked Caspian. “Have you any knowledge of the seas and lands further east than this?”

“I saw them long ago,” said the Old Man, “but it was from a great height. I cannot tell you such

things as sailor need to know.”

“Do you mean you were flying in the air?” Eustace blurted out.

“I was a long way above the air, my son,” replied the Old Man. “I am Ramandu. But I see that you stare at on another and have not heard this name. And no wonder, for the days when I was a star had ceased long before any of you knew this world, and all the constellations have changed.”

“Golly,” said Edmund under his breath. “He’s a retired star.”

“Aren’t you a star any longer?” asked Lucy.

“I am a star at rest, my daughter,” answered Ramandu

“When I set for the last time, decrepit and old beyond all that you can reckon, I was carried to

this island. I am not so old now as I was then. Every morning a bird brings me a fire-berry from

the valleys in the Sun, and each fire-berry takes away a little of my age. And when I have become

as young as the child that was born yesterday, then I shall take my rising again (for we are at

earth’s eastern rim) and once more tread the great dance.”

“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”

“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”

*****

Eustace had been one of those tiresome people who strive for adulthood by ignoring and disdaining anything considered childish. Fortunately for him, this trip managed to work a new sense of possibilities into him.

We are fortunate indeed if we can find a sense of newness again.

There is magic everywhere around us.

I don’t speak of the arcane and mystic arts as portrayed in Harry Potter or any of the urban fantasy stories prevalent.

I’m talking about the glory of a soap bubble. When you can see one, and even knowing the mechanics of making one you rejoice in the brief existence it has, then you are on the path of regaining your childhood magic.

I know scientists who yet have that magic. They see a rainbow, and though they can explain the physical properties in how they form, they still smile at the beauty – and maybe even hope for a pot of gold at the end.

When the magic is sucked out of a life, the body may breathe and move, but the real life is missing.

I tried to instill a lasting appreciation for magic in my children. And I’m proud to say that in at least one case, they continue that with their children.

When you have the magic, the world is full of possibilities. There may be giants, but they are friendly. Dragons wait to have their heads patted. What others see as a swarm of dragonflies, you can see their inherent faerie nature.

You can know the mechanics of reality, and still rejoice in its unknowns.

You can see the star is a huge ball of flaming gas.

But you also know that star has a personality that perhaps you can come to know.

If you have the magic.

 

 

 

Sunday Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

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

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

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: appear

Sarah’s Posts of the Week At PJMedia

The Puffington Host Now Doing Bad Science Fiction

The Twilight of the Liberal Gods

Has Michelle Obama Ever Met A Human Woman?

The Lieutenant Wouldn’t Like It

Would Obamacare Repeal Mean More Abortion?

I was born a poor black cat.  Okay, stop laughing.  It is actually true.  I’m mostly black, except for spots of white, embarrassingly shaped like human body hair, which show when I lie on my back.  And I was born in the crawl space of a rental house from a feral mother who was dumped as a kitten, and the neighborhood gentleman Mrs. Hoyt pleases to call The Resident Mad Feral Tom.

I wasn’t much more than ten weeks old when I had to defend mam.ma cat’s honor against a roving tom who took the opportunity of papa cat (who used to baby-sit us when mama went about her errands) being absent.

To be honest with you, I didn’t so much worry about my mother’s honor.  It was that the tom made it very clear my brothers and sister and I should be done away with and possibly eaten, so mama could turn her attention to his offspring, the getting of.

Well, I was tiny, but I had needle sharp claws, so I jumped on his head and–

Mrs. Hoyt says that’s when she decided to call me Greebo.  It didn’t hurt for the name that when the neighbor next door trapped me and my siblings (we could never resist tuna) she took me to be “fixed” (I wasn’t aware of being broken) to a feral-fixing service, which then cut half of one ear so people knew we were fixed.  She did this despite Mrs. Hoyt offering to pay for the fixing, which to be fair, she was never forgiven for.

Another thing she was never forgiven for was locking us all in a six by nine powder room, and not letting us be adopted.  To be fair, she let the Hoyts come and pet us and play with us, but she kept insisting we were feral and dangerous — she wasn’t a cat person, and to be fair, I didn’t like her — and not letting the Hoyts find us families.  Then when we were a year old she turned us out just before winter.  This is when Mrs. Hoyt took over looking after us, and trying to re-tame us, as we were rather traumatized at being dumped out into the freezing cold.  She even bought us an insulated house to sleep in during winter, and had us chipped and vaccinated.

Despite this, my brothers chose to live with the neighbors.  Okay, fine, I might have chased Maurice away.  Mr. Underfoot genuinely preferred the neighbors, even though they called him Dumb and Maurice Dumber.  Look, given how et up with cats the Hoyts are I judged my chances of being brought inside best if there was just one of us, okay?  A cat’s got to do what a cat got to do.

At any rate, Maurice owed me, because that first winter out, a fox got him in an indelicate place — to put it bluntly, the fox took an off-center chunk off Maurice — and if I hadn’t descended upon the fox like the wrath of Greebo, Maurice would be dead.

Mrs. Hoyt is still confused at my bringing her half a fox’s tail, ripped vertically.  I’d heard they were valued for stoles, but I think she threw it away, silly woman.  What do you expect from writers.

I also once saved them from a fugitive.  It happened like this, see, I wasn’t very fond of the outside house, so I convinced them to put a cat door on the little screen door to their mudroom.

The mudroom didn’t lock, because back then Colorado Springs’ Old North end was, in the main, very safe.  Besides, all they kept there were these tall plastic shelves with gardening stuff and basketballs, and the kids scooters.  That kind of thing.  Oh, and two cat beds, one in the lowest shelf and one on the highest.

It so happened that every so often a fugitive escaped the maximum security facility somewhere South of the Springs, and then the police would hunt them down and have lights shining from helicopters to catch them. We all knew what those lights meant.

Of course, the problem with that mud room — the Hoyts called it an air-lock. Shakes head at the silliness of science fiction people — is that once you were in there, you had all the time in the world to break into the kitchen.  I knew Mrs. Hoyt was there, cooking, because I’d greeted her at the kitchen window — purr, rub on glass, purr — before going to sleep in the top most shelf.

I don’t know why I know this man was a wrong one, except he smelled bad, of fear and bad intentions, and besides he wasn’t daddy, who was the only person who should be coming into the air lock at that time.

Well — flicks claw — I have my claws.  And I remembered who I got rid of mama’s suitor.  Yep, I dropped on his head.

He ran out of the airlock with me on his head, and I stayed on, yowling and scratching, and let me tell you it wasn’t easy to keep my balance, so I held on with my front claws and ripped with my back claws.  When we found the police he was sobbing, asking for his mommy, and saying something about demons.

Mrs Hoyt was very proud of me and gave me tuna.

So, what does this have to do with writing tips?

Be still, there’s more to the story.

Imagine my surprise when the Hoyts moved away and left me behind.  I thought it was understood I was THEIR kitten — albeit a near 20 lb muscular kitten — but apparently the strange pink monkeys thought I was the neighborhood cat.

So I sat my butt in front of the house and yowled ALL NIGHT.  It worked.  One of the neighbors called and told Mrs. Hoyt she had to come get me, because I wouldn’t let anyone sleep.

And that’s how I achieved my long term goal of being an indoor cat.

Now, because I know she has a lot of other cats (Yeah, not happy about that, but one is old enough he shouldn’t be with us long, the other one is really her son’s cat and just staying with us for a year, and the third is probably just an animated ball of cotton wool) she has to feed, and I don’t intend to go without my tuna, I also herd the silly woman to the chair to write at all times, so she has money to keep us.  Because, and here’s the thing,  found if you work at it, you will be successful.

So, my tips for writers are:

No matter who you were born, or to whom, or how unlikely your circumstances, you can do what you set out to do.  It just takes effort and determination.  Tell yourself right now you’re not going to give up and die when the big feral tom wants you out of the way.  You’ll chase him off if needed, even if you’re much smaller.  And you’ll do it WELL.

Develop your innate abilities.  Mine is chasing off large wild life and terrorizing neighborhoods.  This not only saved my brother Maurice and the other cats in the neighborhood, since the fox found another place to prowl, but it made me beloved by a lot of people who only heard about me.

It also made me capable of chasing off a real, dangerous fugitive and earn the gratitude of the Hoyts.

Also, as I keep telling the writer-woman, when you become what you always wanted to be, don’t slack off.  Be vigilant and always on the job, and you know, sometimes you’ll even get tuna rewards.

It’s all in working hard and never giving up.  Now go write, before I figure out a way to come to your houses and chase you to your keyboards.

Happy hunting.

First, I’m alive.  Sorry about the lateness of this thing, but we were running some unavoidable errands, and sending younger son to visit with adoptive nephew and niece with whom he has a mutual adoration society.

I came home and shortly after this arrived:

 

 

 

 

Which suddenly explains why Greebo has been getting the covers off me in the middle of the night, then trying to herd me to the writing chair.  Yeah.  I thought he was being silly.  Apparently there’s more going on here than I guessed.

And btw, this is why Baen is different and special.  I could go wholly indie, I could.  I’d probably make more money.  But Baen is family.  Because only family jokes like this.

And  from this: I’ve been mildly ill, as I’ve mentioned with a stomach “thing.”  I thought I was all right yesterday, but apparently not, as I was acting disoriented and it turned out I still had a fever.  I’m better today.  I think it’s the same stomach bug that has recurred over the last two months, getting increasingly weaker, which is why I hate stomach bugs.  They often do that.

Anyway, this part wasn’t fun, and it’s been dark and dreary, and sometimes it’s difficult to write on when you don’t feel well.  (Of COURSE.)

But today is a beautiful day and we were out driving and went to Pete’s for brunch, and son is getting to see the littles (and give their parents a little break, maybe) and I just figured out how to use The Affair of the Poisons in Monster Hunter Guardian.  And I got a new book on the battle of Cannae which I’ve started realizing can apply in a space opera.

And my editor is awesome, even if she bribes my cat.
Which brings me to why I’m going to move away from mystery-reading for a while and probably towards romance until MHI is done, then to science fiction.

I realized this morning I didn’t feel like reading any of the mysteries I’d downloaded, and it hit me why.  It’s all dust and despondency.

Look, sure, mysteries are about death, but does everything else need to be grey.  Does it need to be “no one clean and no one happy, ever?”

Two bits that made me go “Pfui” stand out.  A character talking about his marriage of 20 some years says (in authorial voice that obviously thinks she’s saying universal truths) “I guess marriage is mostly boredom and avoiding each other.”

Uh?  What?  Sure, there are periods of both in a long lasting union, but they’re not even close to the majority of the time, much less ALL the time.

AND talking of WWI: “He’d promised himself if he survived that battle, he’d never enter a church again.  He was done with believing in God”

Sure thing.  Look, I know a lot of people who have made that type of promise but it’s never in that direction.  For heavens sake the saying is not “There’s only atheists in the trenches.”

Also, what does Himself or the church have to do with WWI?  What sense does any of that make, except to signal how “smart” the writer is not to believe?

bah.

Nothing is ever total dross, just like nothing is ever total sunshine and rainbows.  There’s both laughter and tears, and sometimes very humanely, there’s both at once.  And there’s always hope and the ability to improve things.

Why would you want to convince people that there isn’t?  Unless you’re aware of the barrenness of your life and spirit and want to drag everyone down with you.

Despondency is neither profound, original nor “clever.”  It’s just despondency.  And there’s a reason despair is a sin.

As for me and mine, I choose hope.

 

 

This was my first good night in weeks — maybe in months, if you count the fact that my body seems to have decided it was allergic to France in general — so of course I’m still a little zonked, which makes no sense whatsoever, since I slept in my own bed (instead not sleeping in the bathroom) for the first time in a week or so.

I was talking to my son about that, because yesterday, as he was leaving for the hospital before dawn, I ambushed him on the stairs and said “what is abdominal pain here?”  He said “gas.”  And he was right.  I had of course been scaring myself with ideas of rotting livers, failing kidneys, who knows what?

And I told him, “Yeah, but in the middle  of the night when it feels like you’re alone in the world, it fells like you’re dying, even if all you have is the sniffles.  Every new ache is a fear.”

That was the problem, you know?  Is that you’re alone and, in my case I was trying not to wake my husband up, every little thing magnifies into a major issue.  There is something we call in our family “the three am terror” which boils down to something or other that could go wrong, but in the middle of the night, you know it WILL go wrong and in the worst possible way.

Say you bought a motherboard for your computer and you’ve heard the same type of motherboard has been known to catch fire (shush, I had that happen on one of my laptops.  Leading to my waking up going “Dan, why is my laptop smoking?”  “Shush, you’re dreaming.”  “No, it’s smoking.”  “Oh, sh*t.”) and in the middle of the night, you imagine it will catch fire, set fire to the laptop, catch fire to the papers on your desk, and when you come back from a grocery store trip, the house will have burned to the ground taking everything you own, your cats and your kids with it.

That terror is so vivid in the night, that you feel like I should get up and tear the mother board from your computer right now.  But if you go “Three am terror” and wait, and look it up in the morning, you’ll find out the motherboards used to do that 10 years ago, but there hasn’t been an incidence in ten years.

I’ve noticed something interesting as the right gets more connected, gets more places to discuss things and get together, the less prone we are to conspiracy theories of the truly insane variety.  Say, the FEMA camps or the coffins that whoever it is bought.

It’s easy for a small and isolated group — and none of you has any idea how isolated we were if you didn’t live in the pre-internet days — to suffer from three am syndrome.  If you thought you were alone, the only person who came to the conclusion that socialism/communism didn’t work, even while all organs of information touted their wonders, you’re going to trust the few other people you meet who agree with you.  And it will attract nutters, of course it will attract nutters, because believing what you do requires you to go against all the socially accepted sources of information.

So while a lot of people it will attract are those who always verify and poke and check, a lot of them will be the sort of people who want to build a bridge across the Atlantic, and know it will float because it is made entirely out of soap.  And the problem is when you’re isolated, it’s hard to cut out the nutters, because there are so few of you.  The isolation makes you vulnerable to crazy.

At the same time… what the heck is going on with the left?

I mean I expected them to walk back the crazy scare mongering of prison camps for minorities, women and gays after Trump was elected, because, well… that’s what happened when Reagan was elected, and when Bush was elected.

Instead, they seem to have gone crazier and to think the rounding up is just around the corner and that maybe it’s already happening (yes, I know Hillary is an old woman and listening to old people raving is silly, but she actually imagines that Trump is SOMEHOW having journalists killed and no one knows.)  They virtue signal that they accept everyone, as opposed to the rest of us who… accept everyone.  They take knees and fight really hard in the “resistance” against something that isn’t happening.

It sure as hell sounds like the three am terrors.  Only, they can’t be having them, can they?  I don’t believe for a moment that the left, the real convinced left, not the ones who go along to get along, are 50% of the nation.  I think they were more than that, thirty years ago, or so, because there was still a working (for values of working) communist block that could be idealized, and because the idea is so attractive.

But even though the real horrors after the fall of the USSR were never really reported in the US, enough percolated, and a lot of people looked at that and were horrified.  And since then there has been steady chipping away, and only the very rich who visit Europe on luxury package tours can even imagine that euro-socialism is better.

There have been too many moments of eye-opening shock, no matter how little our media reports them.

And the schools now have to resort to referring to all government as socialism, in order to have the kids graduate with the illusion they’re socialist.  But that illusion doesn’t last long once they hit the real working world.  And then there are more and more kids being homeschooled every year, who never even go through that transitory phase.

I don’t think they’re fifty percent.  I think their presence is amplified by the media, by the schools, by our industrial-cultural establishment which is uniformly to the left of Lenin.  Oh, and by vote fraud, which is why they oppose any initiative to curb it.

I think they run around maybe 25%.

But the thing is they’re behaving more like they’re ten percent and attracting every nutter, every person who wants to build bridges out of soap.

In their screaming, their paroxysms of fear, they behave like a tiny blog in a sea of mainstream blogs, the one blog where everyone is sure they uncovered a conspiracy by the lizard people of Alpha Centauri to take over the Earth.  They ignore all the contrary evidence, they tune out anyone trying to calm them down, they scale their panic up and up and up.

Is it possible for 25% of the population to become seized by a three am panic?  Perhaps because what they’ve always done doesn’t work now?  Is that “small enough to be crazy?”

At any rate, I wish they’d go to bed and sleep it off, because trying to talk to people who are panicking is exhausting.

And it’s probably just gas.

 

The good news is that this isn’t apparently an auto-immune attack but stomach flu of some kind.

The bad news is that spending the night in the bathroom is not conducive to getting up early and ready to work.  I’m more or less okay now, but haven’t yet showered, and am only demi-caffeinated.

The good news is that the idiots are self idenfying.  From the NFL taking a knee in response to…. G-d knows what.  Apparently “I’m black, and even though I’m a millionaire, you’re mean to me.” or perhaps “I liked how much attention the idiot who took a knee got and I want that attention.”  to Star Trek STD cast members taking a knee in solidarity with the NFL because “well, we have no clue why, but it has something to do with being anti-Trump and stuff. Besides, a lot of players are black, so they’re obviously right, and we denounce ourselves.” “Besides our show sucks, and if we’re uber left we can convince the rest of Hollywood it was great but no one watched it because we spoke truth to power.”  (Aka Rolling left and dying.)

And then there’s this.  No seriously, a guy with a high school education, probably with “athlete’s breaks” is calling half the nation uneducated.  This is the old, old bullshit of “if only you were educated, you’d be progressive” leading to all the idiot-flakes saying “educate yourself” when you disagree with them.

Some gems from that one:
“At the end of the day, I don’t think a lot of people was educated,” he said.
“I’ve done things for my daughter and realized I shouldn’t have gave my daughter that many damn Skittles.”

“And am I saying that the people of Ohio wasn’t educated?”

“”Am I saying that some of the other states that voted for him was uneducated?”

Actually what LeBron James is proving is that you can get a High School diploma in America while being a complete moron.

So, the good news is that they hear their own echo chamber ad nauseum, they’ve lost track of any opposing opinion, the media has lost all integrity and the left thinks they’re winning without realizing they’re just disgusting the normal people out there.

As Ace of Spades put it, they used to try to appear “just like you” and that led us to think they couldn’t be bad people even though they advocated appalling things.  Now they’ve lost track of what “normal” is.

I can’t find the link, but I’m sure one of you will.  (I linked it at instapundit, I think.)  The thing is they’ve lost track of what the average person thinks, and so they think pushing brightly hair colored gender-indeterminate super heroes (for instance) will cause us to accept weird-hair-gender-indeterminate-feminists, instead of turning away from comics.  Or they think that having barely literate sport stars and unhinged singers/actors lecture us on how bad Trump is will make us side with them instead of going “Oh, good Lord, I don’t like him that much, but if you hate him…”

The bad news?  The bad news is how far the long march through the institutions has got before they thought they were safe to come out of the commie-closet.

I don’t know how one deals with a communist like Rapone.  I’ve been told being a communist is not an objection to being an officer in the United States Army.  Well, if it’s not, it ought to be.  Anyone who believes in the communist manifesto and also that communism will win (briefly, before everyone dies screaming?) cannot in good faith take the oath of allegiance to protect and defend the Constitution.  This is the same reason convinced communists shouldn’t be able to become US citizens.

The good news?  The good news is that the more they think they already won, the more they crawl out of the closet, the easier it is to isolate them and counter their years and years of undercover work to undermine the republic.

They are only effective while they’re buried and hidden.

Seriously, they’re doing our work for us.

Be not afraid.

*Forgive me for being so late and doing a BFP — I’ve been having a recurring and weird problem that is probably the next step in my body’s attempt to kill me, or that might “just” be the result of my idiotically becoming dehydrated by forgetting to drink water — anyway, it took most of yesterday’s afternoon/evening.  And I woke up really late today.*

The Grandchildren of Imagine – A Blast From The Past Post From August 2014

The other day here, someone brought up “Imagine” under if everything we think we know is wrong, then…

Imagine is one of the songs which gets me talking to the supermarket loudspeakers, and not in a good way. If I’m alone in a section I might go so far as to give the speakers the double middle finger. (The others are mostly Phil Collins.)

The problem with Imagine is not that it’s lousy, kitchy, superficial art (it is) or that I tend to like songs that have a bubbly meaning on top and more layered meanings underneath (“I’m not crazy, I’m just a little unwell. I know, right now you can’t tell, but stick around and soon enough you’ll see another part of me.”) I also like plenty of songs that are objectively tempests of sound and percussion signifying nothing.

No. What really gets me going about Imagine is that its pretty, shiny bobbles of concepts are infantile, wrong AND pernicious. And also that it is largely the same concepts I was raised with (not by my parents, but my brother, his friends, the schools, the popular entertainment, etc.)

Take for instance that “Imagine there’s no religion…. Nothing to live or die for, a brotherhood of man.”

Oy.

Where to start?

 

Imagine there is no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky

Imagine all the people
Living for today

He is of course, fluffy and confused, and then the next verse is about nations and we have:

Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
That sort of refers to nations, but bringing religion in, gets us the idea people kill for religion.

Most people start on the Evangelical Christians get boiled out of shape by that verse – which was probably Lennon’s intent – but let’s, do, examine why eliminating religion is such a good thing “Nothing to kill or die for”. Uh…. Really?

Yeah, okay, we had “Wars of religion” that lasted for centuries. But to be fair, most of the wars of religion only got that way because the cause was co-opted by various princes, kings and countries. And I’m not even going to go into the Crusades as war of retaliation, or the West learning that the only way to stop a religion that promotes itself by cutting off heads is to have a religion that cuts off heads, which made the reformation a kettle of fun as the state seized control of the whole thing as a means to enrich itself.

Let’s go instead into the post-religious world. Whether they dressed it in religious shibboleths or not, WWI was not religious. WWII was not religious. The cold war’s “little” flareups, the millions of people who died in the camps, etc, none of it was in the name of G-d, but in the name of the state.

So for someone in the seventies (?) to be crooning about the brotherhood of man that would ensue once no one had religion is not just appallingly shallow, bordering on stupid, it’s also a crazy denial of facts that were already in evidence.

Turns out, humans being tribal, what ensues if you remove religion is not a brotherhood of man, but tribalism for other reasons. And once the higher objectives of religion and the idea that we’re all created by the same G-d and therefore brothers and sisters are removed, what ensues is not a great family, but – as in those countries for whom atheism was a state religion –humans as utilitarian work machines, humans as fertilizer, and humans as food (during the engineered famines. Look up Holodomor. It dare you.)

So, you say, no nations.

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too

Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

 

We’ll leave aside the fact that it can or cannot be achieved. It’s not something that has been achieved in… ever. Yes, I know some fluffy libertarians think that the nomadic tribes that roamed around without established location were “equalitarian” and had no kings and no concept of nation. This only ignores the evidence of all grave goods and the experience of anyone who’s lived in a large family.

Never mind. Let’s establish that there were no Nation States. Is this by any chance a sign there was peace? Well, no. See again under “humans are tribal.” The graves we discover from that time do not speak of peace. No matter what you heard about the nomadic past of the US, the Amerindians weren’t children of nature, living in peace. In fact, anyone who has raised kids knows better. Humans not only are tribal. Humans have a will to power, a will to either be admired or admire, to either control or be controlled. Humans seek it. We’re Odds and goats and a little different, but still. You can’t even say that in their vision humans would have to be sheep, because sheep fight intruders, too.

That impulse can be controlled but not eliminated.

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

Do I have to dissect this piece of crap? It’s not even wishful thinking, it’s irrational babbling. You’d think a grown man, no matter how many interesting substances he was snorting, injecting and smoking, would have realized possessions are not the only thing people strive for. For a lot of people, power over others seems to be the driving motive.

But let’s leave that aside. HOW do you enforce the “no possessions?” Humans like things, and humans will take and hold things they like – pretty baubles, interesting stones. Humans will make things too and those they are even more attached to. “You didn’t build that” is the cry of someone who has never built anything and is jealous. Oh, yeah, jealousy. Another thing that precludes “universal peace.”

To have your state with no possessions you need to have someone making sure no one else has possessions, and that person, of course, will have possessions, because human (and we’ve seen this pattern over and over in human history.)

But beyond that, who is going to enforce “no possessions” if there are no nations.

Don’t answer. I know the nightmare answer to this. I once read a document from the Weather Underground on how they’d organize the US after taking over. It was all “soviets.” You’d belong to a soviet for each of your characteristics. Take me, for instance, I’d be in a soviet as wife, one as mother, one as Latin, one as woman, one as writer, one as…

These soviets would have representation, but not the individuals, who were supposed to help the soviet come to positions through “struggle sessions.” Those of you who have read about the Cultural Revolution are shuddering right now, and if you haven’t, do. I suggest the first hand accounts of people who escaped it.

So, none of these concepts or their children-concepts (“No patriarchy” and “PIV is rape” and a million other insane ideas that proceed from believing that religion – something that has been with man since we didn’t quite have language – is just a plot of “priests” and can easily be discarded; that nations and nation states can be abolished without just as pernicious entities appearing in their stead; that possessions are things you can just say you’re done with, and also that these three things are the only cause of violence) are so stupid that a blind child can see their asinine idiocy.

BUT and here’s the important thing, they were embraced and promulgated by the intelligentsia: those controlling your entertainment, your communications, your education. (We won’t point out their semblance to soviet propaganda probably caused that.)

It is assumed in most things that these three principles and everything that comes from them is “right” and that we deviate from them at the risk of “sin” (Not sin, sin, since we’re not supposed to believe in religion, but a secular sin that leads everyone to point and call us stupid.)

These ideas amount to a wholesale discarding of western civilization and of everything that’s been believed and written about how to integrate human nature with civilization without destroying either.

And we are up to three generations raised since these became not just fringe (they have been there since there’s been humans writing, and yep, mostly they’ve been fringe) but the core and center of our education in civics.

We’re now up to the grandchildren of Imagine, people so far gone that the precepts of their grandfathers are these nonsense assumptions; assumptions not only unproven, but proven wrong and impossible at least in this world we live in.

John C. Wright wrote a brilliant (natch) essay on the uglification of art. He approaches it from a … ah… theocentric perspective. (One of the reasons I admire John is that he doesn’t shy away from explaining how his belief works, even when this belief is obviously based on religion. He won’t be shamed by Imagine.) I’m a little different. While I am, as I’ve said, a woman of belief, the way I was raised requires I explain my beliefs and ground them without resort to my faith.

So, here’s my explanation for the uglyfication of all artistic pursuit. These are the children of Imagine. I’m not going to say that the SONG is to blame, understand (I must explain this for the wandering SJWs who read this) but rather the philosophy behind the song, a kitchy, irrational faith prevalent in progressive circles.

The belief in that nonsense and in the nonsense that derives from it makes people’s lives NATURALLY meaningless and horrible.

Look, if you’re going around believing you must eradicate possessions and religion and nations ALL the time, when these things are patently impossible, you’re going to be miserable. If you attribute every setback you suffer to “the patriarchy” or “the oligarchy” or whatever you’re blaming it on these days; if you attribute your dissatisfaction and hunger to the fact other people have more – that is the recipe for ending up in a private hell of envy and resentment.

And this explains the tone, the purges, the sheer anger you encounter in progressive cycles. They can’t enjoy their lives or build anything until oh, possessions are eliminated, and there’s “a brotherhood of man” and every step taken towards that seems to have the opposite result.

Take, for instance “I’ll try everything once.” Or “I will not obey my husband” both precepts promulgated by this sort of hatred for the past of Western civilization. If you live by them, you’re going to end up broken and miserable. (Translation for the SJWs who read this blog: No, dears, I don’t mean that you should always obey your husband. He’s human too. (Well, yours. Mine is a living god. Yes, I AM joking.) I mean that sometimes there are reasons to take his opinion over those of your best friend, your hairdresser or the cashier at the grocery store. More reason probably. After all, you married him. But the women liberated across to your “prescription” refuse to take the opinion or advice of any man, because patriarchy. Which is why they end up miserable.)

Most of the SJWs I know are miserable. At best they hold on to the trappings of “normalcy” by pretending REALLY hard. But they feel either guilty or failures or ineffective, because they’re not living up to their ideals.

Hence their stories, where everyone is miserable, and all of life is pointless, and their works of “art” where every shred of beauty must be eliminated.

They think they’re holding up a mirror to the world and showing that everyone is really, really broken and those evil people who pretend to be happy are really the worst (this is why “hypocrite” is the worst insult in the SJW vocabulary.)

They don’t realize in the end they are just holding the mirror to their own lives, and that those of us who are, in fact, happy and fulfilled, and who are in fact in the majority, just ignore them more and more, until their screams of rage occur only in their own little echo chamber.

Now, is that work complete? Not yet. They still have the education, and other bully pulpits and they’re still twisting the young into non-functionality.

Which is why we have a lot of work to do. Three generations of stupid pap are enough.

Teach your children well. Read, write. Enjoy. Rebuild the foundations of society that they’ve been chipping at for generations.

Living well and living on are the best revenge.

 

 

 

 

Yesterday in a thread discussing the crazy idiocy of “taking a knee” to protest the US in general and our lack of perfection in particular, I  made a comment about how they’re protesting in name of perfection that doesn’t exist (though idiots might have convinced them it does.  I mean, people who haven’t lived in Sweden like to claim it is perfect) and running down the most just country on Earth.

It never fails.  If you make a comment of that kind, you’ll get someone trotting out the “inequality indexes” according to which the US is no good, very bad, horribly unequal.  It’s sort of like the pavlovian reflext of threatening libertarians or non-socialists, really, with “no roads for you.”

But in this case, it’s even more puzzling.  Okay, so roads are at least self-obviously necessary, even if they don’t flow from the bounty of the ever-loving heart of Marx.  But why is “equality” self-obviously a good.  I.e. why should any sane, thinking human being care about statistics saying we’re unequal or give a good goddamn that we aren’t?

The equality promised in the declaration of independence is predicated on two things: equal standing before G-d and, aspirationally, “equal standing before the law” (this is always aspirational because no, a perfect state doesn’t exist in anything involving humans.)

It is not, has never been, will never be “equality of results” or “equality of possessions” or even “equality of social standing.”  It can’t be.  It’s impossible to guarantee or even attempt that, so long as human beings aren’t widgets.

Do you think that any Portuguese immigrant who came here at 22 and married an American would be writing this article thirty years later?  No?  Then why would you expect equality of results in anything else?

Take the class of first graders I started in, back in village school, in 1968.  We were all girls.  Though we all thought we came from extremely different backgrounds, in retrospect, looking back, we all looked alike, we all dressed alike, and we were all more or less at the same social level.

I knew how to read, mostly because I was so much younger than my only sibling and my cousins, that I was bored out of my gourd but honestly, by the end of the year we all knew how to read and cipher decently enough.

So… are we all equal now?  Are you kidding me?  Those I know about range from France (my long-lost best friend) to the US, to faculty in a Portuguese high school, to village housewives, to… well… dead (at least three, alas.)  The rest I have no idea how they turned out, because our lives diverged shortly after fourth grade and never converged again.

Does this mean that there is something broken with the system that produced us?  Sure.  Plenty.  But none of it is responsible for how differently we turned out and how unequal our circumstances.  Only each of us is responsible for how she turned out.

In the same way, throughout our married life, Dan and I have had friends who made more or less the same we did, and lived more or less on the same salary.  None of them had the same lifestyle.  Some were better off, some worse.  Few people — like me — decided to compensate for their profession/staying home with kids not paying by refinishing furniture, making clothes, and generally spending time instead of treasure.  And at least one couple in our social-economic level at 22 are probably millionaires now, because they devoted all their time and attention to making money: investing, financing, that sort of thing.

It’s not what you start with; it’s what you make of it.  People end up very rich who had none of the advantages, not even a degree that paid any money.  And people have ended up very poor who were born with a gold spoon in their mouths.

The only way you can guarantee equality of results is to have the government dictate exactly how much money you can make and how far you can go.  When the government interferes in the economy to the point no one can ever be poor and no one can ever be rich, then yeah, you have greater equality.

But here’s the thing, I’d bet you dollars to doughnuts that every one of those countries with greater equality, their rich live about at the level of our upper middle class.  If that.  Sometime ago I read in an article that for each social level in the US you have to subtract two levels to get the equivalent in Europe.  In my experience this is exactly true.  Their upper middle class lives more or less like our lower middle class.  Their lower middle class live like our poor, etc.

Understand this is not “disposable income” or “how flashy can they get” — Europe can get very flashy indeed.  It’s more comfort, health, food, day to day ease of living.

Take air conditioning, for instance, even if you can afford it in Europe, you can’t afford to turn it on unless the heat is truly unbearable, because the governments, in the name of saving the Earth or worshipping Gaia or whatever, make electricity and fuel so expensive.  Here?  Most people have a temperature controlled environment, and most people use it year around.  In fact, the one year we spent without in a climate that needed it we were truly “poor.”

I’ve also visited supermarkets in Europe.  I remain amazed that Europeans can afford to eat.  Yes, food here is cheaper, and the variety more abundant.  The same applies to every consumer good.

Frankly, even though I enjoy Europe, it’s always at least slightly uncomfortable, which always makes me happy to be home.  Even our service people are more uniformly nice to every customer.  Our public accommodations are more responsive to complaints.  Our hotels are more comfortable (seriously.  One of the best hotels in Portugal was somewhere below Embassy Suites in Denver.) Our cars are more comfortable, too, since most have air conditioning and heating (it takes effort not to have heating in the car, but my dad’s car when I was growing up didn’t have it.)

So, is America more unequal?  Oh, sure.  I think we live middle-middle class, and even one level above us means vacationing abroad, better clothes, going out to eat more and not just because it’s someone’s birthday, or you’re sick and can’t even, or you’re away from home.  And we’re miles above where we were thirty years ago, where if I bought a $5 book, we had to eat pancakes for dinner for a week.

But regardless of the clusters we got ourselves in (we’re both creative) when newly wed (we were paying off the birth of the son, on COBRA, a three day delivery with emergency Caesarean and three surgeons) I know even there we lived better than my friend who married a Frenchman at about the same time.  We had some close shaves but we never actually went hungry, and our son certainly didn’t go hungry.

What I’m trying to say is, I’m completely at a loss as to why the INEQUALITY should matter.

Did it matter to me during the worst year of our lives, when we were broker than broke, in Columbia SC and thought we’d never dig out from under?

Sure it did.  Up the hill from us was a development with very nice houses and a lake (it occurred to me some months ago our new neighborhood is much like that without the lake) and we loved to make sandwiches, go park there and eat, just to bask in the nice surroundings.  It was good to know that better things existed than the shitty place we were in at the time.

But didn’t it make us mad?  No.  Why should it?  Just because we were tight as hell and worried about surviving, didn’t mean we wanted everyone in the same place.  Why would we?

And this is where we get to “inequality” and indexing it is the sanctifying of envy.  It is giving envy the veto over civil society.  People who care about or protest over it are a bunch of whiny kindergartners screaming “but I wanna.”

Yeah, sure, there are countries where the inequality means something.  North Korea, say.  Or Cuba.  If you’re a party member, you live well, while everyone else drowns in the gutter.  But that inequality matters not because it’s great, but because the baseline is so low.  I think we can admit that like “perfect equality” if it existed, “everyone drowns in the gutter, but a few people have mansions” is the sign of despotism.

And before our European readers get confused, no, THAT IS NOT THE US.  Despite all the whining about the 1% a) the 1% vary year per year, and there’s great mobility in general and b) our poor aren’t dying in the gutter.  When you hear the sob stories your TV showcases of poverty in America, remember what you’re not being told: almost every case is self inflicted and involves drugs, alcohol or other forms of impairment.

In fact not so long ago, a liberal activist tried to go and “live like the poor” and found that to remain poor he had to continuously turn down private offers of help.  People wanted to give him clothes and furniture.  People wanted to feed him.

The few genuine, undeserved cases of true hardship in the US are usually as ours was when young and stupid, a case of simply not knowing where to go or how to ask for help.  Years later, in a less pinched but uncomfortable situation, we never hurt nearly as much because we knew things like the club you could join that bought food from restaurant supply stores and sold it to you at cost.  You could feed a family of four on $30 a week about fifteen years ago, and not eat badly at all.  I suspect the same existed when we were young and stupid, but we didn’t know it.

However, the base level, the safety, cleanliness, food and comfort of the poor in America is higher than the poor in just about everywhere else.  Sure, of course, our rich are also extravagantly, bizarrely rich, roaming around Europe and offering to buy whole countries and turn them into parking lots, but so what?

The theory that revolutions happened because of inequality is bushwa.  Sure, socialist/communist revolutions might happen, but they happened whether there was inequality or not, because the Marxist hasn’t been born who can’t instigate envy over the smallest differences.  Envy is, after all, THE Cardinal virtue in their system, the one through which they hope to bring about paradise.

But once communism is installed and inequality greater than ever no revolution ensues.  (After all, the bureaucrats need to be rewarded for working tirelessly for the people, comrade!)

So we can establish that inequality causes neither discontent, discomfort, anger nor revolution.  Marxism does.

I suggest instead of keeping inequality indexes, we keep Marxism indexes.  They’re more expressive of discontent, malice and real danger.

Remember children, the less Marxism, the better off your country will be.  Stay vigilant and keep in mind envy is a sin, not a virtue.

Then do the best you can.

 

 

 

 

 

*I’m afraid the Oyster’s promo being late is the result of my computer.  I had it last Sunday but my email wouldn’t pull.  So, it’s my fault – SAH*

Sunday Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

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

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

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is:dependent

 

Long Waited Promo by Free Range Oyster

J.M. Ney-Grimm

Winter Glory

In the cold, forested North-lands—redolent with the aroma of pine, shrouded in snow, and prowled by ice tigers and trolls—Ivvar seeks only to meet his newborn great-granddaughter.

Someone else has the same plan.

Traversing the wilderness toward the infant’s home camp, Ivvar must face the woman he once cherished and an ancient scourge of the chilly woodlands in a complicated dance of love and death.

Ivvar’s second chance at happiness—and his life—hang in the balance.

Alma Boykin

Shikari

Shikari Book One

Adventure! Exploration! Martinus the m-dog! Lost cities and conspiracies! Strange creatures! And homework.

Shikhari, the most-distant human colony world, home to the Staré and Auriga “Rigi” Bernardi. While on school holiday, Rigi and her cousin Tomás Prananda discover a ruined city hidden in the forest. Their find strikes a spark that threatens to upend everything humans think they know about Shikhari’s past, and about the native Staré.

Meanwhile, back in school, Rigi’s determination to do well collides with the nastiest bully on the planet, Benin Shang Petrason. His father has the faculty and administrators under his thumb, allowing Benin to run rampant. If that wasn’t enough, Rigi’s big sister has discovered boys. If it weren’t for Martinus, Rigi’s new m-dog, Tomás, and their eccentric Uncle Ebenezer, Rigi wouldn’t know what to do.

But someone believes that Rigi and Tomás’s find is too dangerous to report. And that someone threatens the children, their families, and their uncle. That someone has just met their match.

Mary Catelli

Through A Mirror, Darkly

What lies behind a reflection?

Powers have filled the world with both heroes and villains. Helen, despite her own powers, had acquired the name Sanddollar but stayed out of the fights.

When the enigmatic chess masters create a mirrored world reflecting her own home and the world about it, it’s not so easy to escape. All the more in that the people of that world are a dark reflection of all those she knows.

Karl K. Gallagher

Torchship Captain

Torchship Trilogy, Book 3

Michigan Long blackmailed her enemies into joining the war against the AIs. Now the secret she used is leaking out and the Fusion is shattering. Caught in the middle of a civil war, she will have to use any weapon that comes to hand—her wits, her ship, her mate.

 

I should be giving you the next installment in either Rogue Magic or Dark Fate (Grant in Portugal.)  I should…

There is about a million things I should be doing, instead of telling you I should.  Here’s the thing: whatever writing (or other business) is accomplished these days is accomplished in mad working dashes between spots of feeling not so good and being unable to muster the energy to do anything.

Normally this would be a bad sign, but the dashes are growing and the spots shrinking, so we’re on an upward trend.  Which is good, because still on the up slope of 50 it shouldn’t be this bad.

The thyroid is being treated (I think we’re nearing right dosage) and the eczema is not erupting as frequently (which is good because pred made me gain weight and lose my hair, which is NOT the look I was going for.)  I’m getting back into regular walking and the asthma strikes less — yesterday I managed not to use the rescue inhaler even once.

Guardian is progressing, though interrupted by a bunch of crazy body-crap.  When it’s done, I’ll finish the fourth Dyce (An inlaid Death) and get it up, then do two Darkships as fast as I can, so you guys don’t die waiting.  I have a Black Tide novel to write, also, but frankly I want to do something in my worlds for a change.  Then there’s the Dragons, something called Mirrorplay (taking the name of an old fantasy novel which will probably be called Horse and Bull or Igniting the Stars or something when it comes out.) and then… well, there’s the second of vampire musketeers, the sixth of musketeer mysteries (though the sales on that don’t encourage me to write a ton more.  We’ll see) and eventually more Tudor queens.

All I want for next year is a body that doesn’t crash every two weeks like clockwork, and we’ll be fine.

On the home front, we think it will be two more years with the boys (at least partially) on the paycheck.  When they fly solo, it should stop our sudden money crunches and depletion of savings and THAT will be less stress, which in turn might help the health.

For the foreseeable future I’ll continue working for PJM (links to the two articles this week here and here.)  Unless they kick me out, of course.  If you have anything you want me to write about, please send me a note.  I might or might not cover it, but particularly if it’s related to something recent I very well might.  I’m not as plugged in to daily news as I should be, because… well, look at my work schedule.

On Rogue Magic, I’m rewriting it third person because it’s cleaner, and also cleaning up the plot.  I’ll put up the revised “to now” version, then finish it here on Saturdays.  The same with Dark Fate, which I’ll do after I finish Guardian (only you know, not changing it to third person.  I don’t know what day I’ll do it.  It might end up crammed on Sundays, who knows.)

So, that’s where things are.  Other than being seriously frustrated with my body, I’m okay.  Yes, I’m sure when medical son moves out I’ll get fewer viruses.  Though he’s doing his clinical year, so we only see him minutes a day, I’m sure he brings home stuff to share.  OTOH if I can exercise and get healthier, I’ll withstand the onslaught better.

Anyway, I’ll leave you to have fun (I know you guys can) and go work.