New Puppy. Brigit. Don’t be fooled! She’s a perfect engine of destruction.
It’s beginning to look a bit like spring time! I turned the earth over yesterday for my mini garden, Year Two. I’m also moving the stumps to New Locations. I am cognizant of both function and decoration via my mini garden. I am also eyeing the places where rabbits and ground squirrels like to visit. Plus, there’s the New Puppy. She likes to dig. Investigate where the humans go. Check out why the humans do this or that. I have a feeling my mini garden might not survive New Puppy.
Politics. If I. It’s just. WTF. I??!!
After that above enlightening delve into the current state of American politics, let’s move on. Oh sure, there’s a political rant in there eight miles long. It slaps the Spirit in the Sky, nut punches Jesus and generally includes words better suited for our POTUS and the Locker Room Boys known as the GOP. Anyhoo!!
What am I working on. Nothing.
That’s right.
I don’t have a PROJECT on deck or waiting in the wings. It just tires me to even think of rumbling up the engines right now. Or ever again. Which is troubling, to say the very least about that.
I have the Oregon novel. Which deals with the sorts that took over the Malheur wildlife refuge over by Burns. I really do wish to work on this. Eventually. It interests me. I like doing the research into extremist radical gun-toting scary ass militia groups as well as Oregon history. Scraping some sort of novel out of all that, interesting as well. But not right now? Or maybe tomorrow. Or.
Rework my Beastface Bay tales. Fuck no.
Start a brand new something. Maybe even a PLAY. What?? I never leave the house. What can I write a play on?
My conversations with the three dogs?
My inner monolog on trying to decide to make a pie or not out of whatever I can find in the fridge?
A family story that’s so boring it’s almost interesting but it’s not? Something I saw in the news cycles????
Seriously, when fiction can’t compete with your basic cable opinion piece on liberals taking their babies home to kill them, reported with a straight face as if true…yeah. You just kinda deflate like a sad little balloon writer-wise. Maybe that’s just me?
That’s total fiction, of course. But all we hear is that LIBERALS KILL BABIES here in ‘murica. It’s going to be a slogan for 2020. It’s predictable. They control the narrative, so they get to direct the narrative with the Lefties playing wide-eyed defense. It’s just…fuh.
Oh no, political rant about to snarl forth like a castrated lion looking for a snack.
Short stories, flash fiction, humorous essays? Mmm. Nope.
I seem to be running on dead writer batteries.
I even scraped myself together long enough to go to a FREE WRITER’S WORKSHOP. In Nampa, Idaho. It was on a Saturday, all afternoon, at the library, which was right by where that other writer’s gathering had been! So I knew how to get there and back again. Score!
It wasn’t in the downtown one-way hell of Boise!
Yeah, I went to the workshops, as there were four of them. I did three, then the fourth had to be held at a coffee shop, as the library closed at five. I just headed home, I’d had enough. All three of those were practical, well run, informative and actually helpful.
Death Rattle is the name of the organization here. I can’t say enough nice things about them. I’m glad they exist and that they’re nearby.
I wish, sort of, I’d schlumped off to the fourth one. The drive back was right as the sun was going down, so trying to see the road turned into GUESS WHERE THE ROAD IS HA HA for me. I also treated myself to a sausage biscuity thing and an outing outside my present comfort zone.
I also felt guilty. I was wasting time. I was feeding my delusions that I’m a writer. I clearly am not a writer because writers, well, for one thing, actually write.
My thoughts all the time. All the time. All the time. A constant punching stream, with me as that bag the boxers hit. Except it’s punchy thoughts that swing haymakers at whatever’s left of my drive, ambition or will to GET SHIT DONE.
Maybe it’s time for the ole writer standby of heroin, wine, mind-altering shit that allows one to be totally oblivious to reality while writing about reality.
I am trying to co-write a screenplay. I should have whipped that out in a couple days. Nope.
To sum up!
I just need to retrain myself to start writing again. Something like that. Just put some crap down on the page! I am in a frightful abyss, looking upward for any bit of light. There isn’t any. I always admire people who are positive, or at least pretending super-alot. The ones who’ve lost their entire family to the local volcano, then found out they have brain cancer. Their dog then gets run over, and their house catches on fire. Yet, that person smiles at the world, going, oh, isn’t that daisy growing through the cracks of that mass grave grand?
Maybe I need to hang out with more creative sorts. That energy seems to sizzle the old writer batteries a bit. Except me and other humans have seldom gotten along. I’m always too much or too little in some way…it’s confusing. Oh sure, just be yourself! If I fucking knew who that is, I’d now be a teacher with a pension plan, a bad perm, wondering what would have happened if I’d followed my dreams…
You get hammered in the face, dear.
That’s what I’d tell that other me. You get hammered in the face and it’s supposed to mean something. That’s pretty grim.
Smile. You look so pretty when you smile!
So, there ya go. You’re all caught up on my Artistic Strainings. Thanks for stopping by. I hope…
mumbles something about almost ready to outline that Oregon zombie novel set during the imagined ages of Middle Earth if it were run by the Narnian minotaurs. Almost ready. Almost.
Christmas. It’s over. I have tales. A new dog. A relationship so toxic Baby Jesus winced even as Baby Jesus gave the two the side eye. A funeral. Ah.
The death of a mother. A friend of mine. Right before a big holiday season. Not pleasant when there isn’t a string of days devoted to this or that. Horribly nasty when it takes place during festive times. A Buddhist funeral. I’ve never been to one. I went with another family member, who’d never been to one either. This was a neighbor lady, Japanese, who had lived at the house across the field for eons. Farmers. Everyone about here are either farmers or teachers. Or cook meth. It’s that kinda world here lately.
Bells. Incense. Chanting. Very dignified. A sort of foggy Christmas Eve day. No snow. Wet, muddy, foggy. A reminder that Dicken’s immortal classic began with a funeral on Christmas Eve. Marley’s. More bells and the sweet odor of incense.
Christmas Eve is spent with the hillbilly side of the fam’ly.
Christmas Day was and is traditionally spent with the other half of the family. Both sides of my family got along very well, in case you were wondering. Both sets of grandparents really enjoyed visiting with each other. Both sets migrated here to Oregon and Idaho from Nebraska, where they grow corn and manners and tornadoes. That’s what I’ve gathered from all that talking back and forth over the years. Christmas Day was giant meal, the women did all the cooking, and we played cards all afternoon.
Christmas Eve was spent with the hillbillies.
That’s my own pet snarky nickname for my mom’s kith and kin. I did get to see pictures of the cougars my cousin trapped and hear about how the price of coyote pelts is through the roof right now. I silently wondered who’s buying fur anymore. Who the fuck is that? Cause you’re not eating the cougar meat. You’re not eating the coyote meat– though I did see where you can cook it and turn it into haute cuisine sort of food. That was when Andrew Zimmerman still wandered through the Travel Channel. But anyway, before I get distracted and this gets super-ass long as hell!
I do cuss. If you’re new here, well. I do cuss on occasion.
Yes, now to Xavier and Vickie. Which is not their real names.
My little group trundles off toward the Christmas Eve festivities. It’s a foggy, muddy, somewhat rainy Eve. No snow. No real cheer. Just obligation and the thought of the chips and dips. Which tell me the holiday season is truly nigh. Sad. Chips and dips is what I look forward to, not halting awkward family interactions and hearing that the lib’rals have attacked God-fearing red-blooded ‘murican farmers.
I’ve done entire blog posts about what I hear pooped out of human mouths around me. M’kay.
We get there, it’s cool. As in groovy, not my auntie needs to turn the heat on or stuff some wood in her wood-burning stove.
Calm.
Most of the people showing up for this gathering are already there. It’s mellow. My aunt has enough food to feed Boise bubbling, boiling, baking or waiting to go into an oven. Ham. Turkey. Taters. Stuffing. Bacon mac and cheese, from scratch…with six kinds of cheese in it. OH MY WORD. Oh look, chips and dips. And then someone else brings bread and HOMEMADE DIPS THAT ARE SUPER TASTEFUL.
Veggies? No. I have yet to see a veggie dish show up since the death of my own mother over ten years ago. No salad. No squash. No weird green bean casserole attempt. Just meat and carbs and DIP.
Old-timey recipes!
However, I pick up on how watchful people are. Waiting. One cousin is not yet there. I hear, nearly five seconds after I enter the house, decorated with red and green, blue and silver, gold and sparkly lights, that Vickie is a bitch. There’s the oh no, don’t start that yet admonishment. Do I already know what is thought of Vickie and her California ways? Yes. Yes, I do. Yep, she’s from California. California is a bad word in Eastern Oregon/Western Idaho. It’s kinda the queen mother of bad words here. You want to really insult someone, ask if they’re from California. [Because it’s run by liberals, the housing, the myths and legends people absorb as truth, the…uh huh. Then, Californians are all moving to Idaho and Oregon, ruining everything. Uh huh.]
I’ve mentioned that one, too. I know I have.
Okay! So we’re all waiting for Xavier to show up. If he and his little woman show up. It’s that kinda crowd.
Ah, the two arrive. The lights splash along the driveway! We’re all tensing already. What will walk through that door? Stay tuned to find out! Where’s the dip??!!
It’s just Xavier and one of his very young chil’ren. She’s fucking still out there in the car, he snarl-snaps at the startled, still sorts watching this entrance.
Suddenly, we’re watching a Eugene O’Neill play, except with modern language added. [The f bomb, mostly.]
Xavier dumps his first load of baby stuff– as it takes several Sherpa loads these days to take babies anywhere– to fetch the other kid and the rest of the stuff, presents and stuff. Vickie has not yet made her appearance. We’re all…uncomfortable audience members to this kitchen sink reality show of epic proportions. It takes perhaps half an hour before Vickie makes her DRAMATIC ENTRANCE.
DOG SHIT. ON MY SHOE. BIG PILE OF DOG SHIT. RIGHT THERE BY THE CAR DOOR. WHAT THE FUCK? DOG SHIT DOG SHIT DOG SHIT!
She’s more wound up than a barrel of rattlesnakes and twice as poisonous. Something like that!
Instantly, as we’ve been enjoying the two very young babies– both under two years old or so– the tension goes to eleven.
Xavier bristles. Vickie uses Wet Wipes to clean the poo from her shoes. Instead of just removing her shoes, leaving them by the door. Or laughing about stepping in dog poo right out of the car door. Or…so many other choices here than what she chose to do. [It’s family, you pretend you have manners. If I learned nothing else, I learned that, hello!]
Though dog poo on velvet shoes or delicate little spendy numbers you adore…but. I saw the shoes, just some old cheap ass boot looking things. Then the mutters, from Vickie, about the baby crawling on the floor…mm. If the tap water was drinkable. To keep so and so away from Baby X. Mutters. Oh the mutters one overhears at times.
Xavier and Vickie apparently fought the entire time they drove to the Christmas Eve gathering. Apparently, they’ve been fighting since before they met, if you know what I mean. So, there’s muttering. So much under the breath muttering, just muttered loud enough for all of us to hear. Those not front and center in this O’Neill gritty reboot, have the side eyes down to an art. We’ve all become experts in body language communication exchanges. There’s selective deafness goin’ on! Whee!
The holiday air seems stained with invisible dirty bomb emissions. The chips and dips, so good! Everyone’s munching or in the other room, shoulders hunched up. Because surely, this ugly pimple is gonna burst. Spray noxious fluids all over us. Ever had one of those ugly angry white-topped pimples? Yeah, like that. Ever watched cysts and infected pimples get drained?? So gross and yet so satisfying!
Where was I.
The presents get opened. Ah. Thanks! The sound of ripping paper, the asking if those pretty boxes were bought at Joanne’s. [The local craft store.]
The food, the literal mountains of food, become available for consumption. The alcohol has been flowing, so actual food that’s not chips and/or dip, nice. Xavier, shoulders hunched to his angry earlobes, slaps some of that food on a big disposable plate, prepares to chow down. Vickie mutters she’d sure like a hot meal as she slams about getting out baby food stuff. Xavier about comes out of his angry skin, like a butterfly bent on rampages, bursting out of a cocoon, ready for carnage. He shoves that giant disposable plate away. He goes off for cartons of baby goo to shove at the youngest kiddo. The older kiddo gets mac and cheese and other tidbits. The two sit on the same side of the table. We’re…careful. Watching. Afraid to breathe.
Are the guns locked up? [I had that actual thought. Both sides of the fam’ly are totally into GUNZ.] This is the lead up to one of those Christmas Eve drunken fam’ly shootings. I’m watching it in real time. That was the impression I had.
Now, the two are shoving food at the two kids. Neither talk. The one year old can barely crawl. I see Xavier about once or twice a year, if that. My other cousin’s little woman fills me in on all this so…I have the gossip and what I observe. Okay!
Not long after the most uncomfortable dining experience I’ve had to sit through in years, Xavier and Vickie pack up their spawn, their shit, and head back ‘home’. Without a kind word for each other, without much enjoyment shown toward either kid, with faces like death masks from a Greek tragedy. A Greek tragedy channeling Long Day’s Journey Into Night with big handfuls of Mamet’s way with certain words thrown in.
During this brief, awful family drama unfurling, I go outside where people are smoking the funny weed that’s legal in my state. I burst out about the tension, what the hell is this, does anyone have any heroin, because it will take the edge off that scene in there. We all laugh, gossip fiercely, suck down some smoke. Because hey, why confront directly when you can smoke funky plants and gossip in half-whispers?
No. I don’t do heroin.
Okay! I’m not around Vickie on a regular basis so I don’t really know her but it does seem she got painted early on as a bitch, and unlikable. That she never really had a chance. When you’re around people who don’t like you, no matter how nice they’re pretending to be, you tend to get defensive. A lot defensive. Poor Vickie can’t avoid her own kid’s grandma. Well, she can and has, I gather. What a mess, a hot sticky this is gonna hurt to actually resolve this MESS.
That was my Christmas Eve. I had pecan-flavored whiskey, but did not get drunk. A bit high, but not drunk.
The fate of those four caught in some loop of resentment, outright hatred, commitment entanglements, children, obligations, job loss…ugh. I don’t know. Counseling might help, some neutral party that can weather the pimple bursting far better than family members can. I see a nasty as hell breakup galloping down the two-lane. Maybe people going to jail for assault. [Yes, that’s the air I got from all this.] I don’t want to hear Xavier and Vickie imploded and took everyone around them downward, too. I want to hear they took a realistic look a their situation, their relationship, worked out custody and money matters, then parted for good. So they could both heal from all this and become far better people on the other side. That’s my Christmas wish this year.
And the writer part of me…sadly…goes– how to use this? They don’t read my stuff. Or if they do, I don’t hear about it. [If that side did read my collected works, they’d tar and feather me, after asking me if so and so was them…] Family drama fuels a thousand percent of literature is my humble opinion. Usually first-hand family drama.
Except those writers who grew up in a vacuum somewhere in the wilds of Oregon on a communist commune where nothing happened except the day’s baking of nan bread. They grew up, wrote nice poems about flowers and were politely puzzled at another writer’s seething three-book rage-athon on why their dad was a POS.
Xavier and Vickie, poor things. Their two little peanuts. You just want to offer to take the two kiddos, let the two adults go destroy each other all they wish…
But hey, found a stray dog. Cream underbelly, dark brown silky soft short coat. What we call a cow dog. But there’s something else in there. Rottweiler? German Shepherd? Maybe even a bit of pit bull? Boxy head. Smart, female, no collar, skinny. I did post her on social media. I did ask the folks living where I found her if she was their dog. Nope. I found her where we’ve found other dogs, it’s a spot to drop unwanted canines out. Brigit. Or Miz Bridge. As she was found by the bridge. Yeah.
So far she’s torn up some mats and a old magazine. And my flip flops. But. She’s a big puppy yet.
I’ll end on a nice note instead of the intense sadness that is my cousin’s life situation at the moment. New dog! Oh and it snowed. It’s not a muddy spring-like mess without. Snow. I do love snow.
I just like this pic. We have rabbits, there’s snow now on the ground. Then I wonder if that poor bunny is cold…
Setting up corn field obstacle courses that will make people shit their manties.
Carving pumpkins into leering demon faces.
Dang it! I should be a Halloween-happy fiend of productivity!
Instead.
I’m watching Father Ted. I’m also not writing. Bigly so. My brain remains serenely blank. Like a giant piece of blankness. Nothin’ up there up blankness.
Eh.
from the Denver Post. Yep, that’s what it looks like.
So!! I did some marijuana trimming. On the Blue Diesel, on the Hawaiian, on the Star something. Yeah. The plants have names. Did you know that?
Your reefer has a specific name for a reason. Connoisseurs of reefer can lovingly talk about properties, high qualities, etc…rather like those wine freaks can talk about barrels, soil and grapes.
Reefer growers can talk, for hours, on the troubles they’ve had with a certain plant. On bud size. On stickiness and gumminess. On which plant is mostly all star buds. Which plant is not all star buds but sports some good solid gigantic, super-giant, buds. Which are easier to trim, so I’ll give them points here, fellow babies. On how people really like reefer that’s named after berries. Blueberry anything, for example, is a good seller.
You have to hand trim. The machine to do this, that would replace the people-labor portion, is rather spendy. As is all farm machinery. At least, the small aunt-run operation I show up for can not field an expensive piece of fiddly machinery.
Also, she likes the company, I think. Family and friends show up to snip buds from stalks. She makes lots of food, there’s snacks and coffee and soft drinks. It’s more of a party than work! Well, no, it’s still mind-numbing, factory-like work. But there’s snacks! You get to hear gossip about people you don’t know. You get to hear gossip about people you do know. I’m not a Gabby McTalkerson, so I just listen. I just listen!
Where was I? Father Ted.
I’ve been watching this twenty year old Britcom. Craggy Island. Catholic priests. It’s gut-bustingly funny. To me, at least. I know the star of this series has died of a heart attack before he turned fifty.
It’s basically Father Ted [Delmot Morgan], who’s our Everyman sort of guy, flanked by the astoundingly stupid Dougal[Ardal O’Hanlon] and the mad elder, Father Jack [Frank Kelly]. Girls! Drink! No! Feck!
There’s also a housekeeper [Mrs. Doyle–Pauline McLyn] prone to pratfalls and absurdities. Which the British excel at. It’s rather like Monty Python meets the Vicar of Dibley, except Father Ted never ever ever seems to go near a church. Mm? Oh yes, Graham Norton shows up as a priest from time to time. And he’s HYSTERICAL. Oh my sainted aunt!
Anyway! It’s soothing and funny. The comments below the episodes [I’ve found this over on Youtube.] speak to a longing when comedies were not so PC, or policed by the SJW’s of today. Yeah. You just want to start laughing at that, too. Remember back when comedies were full of racist stereotypes and we could be awful to non-white people? Remember back in the good ole days?
Ah! Liberal nigger lovers and lefty kike watchdogs have ruined everything! Thank God America is great again! Snowflakes, LOL. SNOWFLAKES LOL.
I might be exaggerating a wee trifle, but it sure feels like I’m toning shite down.
So, today, I will force myself to write. Something. Anything. To splash some words on that blankness in my head. Or just go outside and play with the two dogs. Or watch some Father Ted, marvel at how great it was twenty years ago to be openly crappy to others.
one of my fav episodes back when TV was really entertaining and funny when people didn’t go all PC gawd i miss those days yes yes that would be a ecumenical matter–shane upham, commenting under Father Ted Are You Right There Father Ted?
you don’t see good comedy like this anymore thanks to the jackasses called the PC police–Espada2234
Sorry, no review, this time, of Father Ted. I can’t seem to gather enough thoughts to write up a little something on Ted and the gang of priests. I do recommend the episode where Ted and Dougal try to write a song for the European song contest show. Eurovision? We don’t get that here in the colonies. They came up with a song about a horse. I kid you not. The scene where Dougal and Ted have been up all night, trying to write that song, is just. I! Oh feck, it’s about the funniest fecking thing I’ve seen in a goodly long while.
That includes a ten second clip of any FatNixon public fap rally held with paid audience members.
Well, yeah. We’ve time-traveled back to the Fifties. Let’s go fix some stuff! What are we waiting for???
From a local fire we had years ago. Taken from my window.
I’m an agitated little poster maker these first days of October. I’m trying to get ready for my booth, and gear up for a public reading. Two of them, actually. So that’s good! Nampa, Idaho for the Death Rattle festival. Mountain Home for the tenth anniversary of Whistle Pig. Both in Idaho, so local events I can drive to easy enough.
Now, yesterday. I had a visit with an old friend. At the library. We sat in the far back, hushed voices. Talking about. Politics. We’re both a bit blue in a very scarlet area of Oregon.
What??
Oregon has conservatives??
Yeah, outside of that Portland-Salem-Eugene strip, the rest of the state is mouth-breathing methheads who still think Obummer is comin’ for theirz gunz. I know this because I’m related to some of them.
We’re a blue state only because that I-5 corridor consists of staunch liberals, for the most part.
Anyway!
Vale, Oregon
I’ve written about this friend before. The gentle peacenik sort with the high ideals of society and people. Right now, he’s ready to move to the bluest commune he can find, leaving behind his beloved animals if he has to. He feels sick all the time. He’s fighting with those around him who are Trump-supporters. He’s left his church over it being too pro-conservative. But he is writing. It’s helping him cope. He wants to hold a poetry workshop.
Cope.
Those not in the cult o’Mangled Orange Hellbeast seem to be on coping mode right now.
Old movies, binge watching something familiar, listening to the same pieces of music over and over, eating too much, not eating enough, sleeping too much, not sleeping enough.
There’s this stunned, this cannot be happening take to America’s direction right now, from Americans who have to live here. We’ve become an army of zombies who want comfort, fattening food, mental candy and long snoozes in a soft, warm bed. To wake up to it was all a dream, everything’s okay, we’re still the good guys in the world.
How to turn that survival mode switch off? Turn the LET’S FUCKING TAKE THESE MOTHERFUCKING ASSMUNCHES TO THE TRASH switch on?
We don’t need more opinion pieces on why so and so is a supporter of Fat Nixon. STFU, New York Times. Enough!
We don’t need more earnest discussions on what to do if this becomes a dictatorship. That fucking ship sailed a while ago, kiddos.
We don’t need any more the politicians on the left are as bad as the ones on the right snooty snoots.
Fuck! Are you kidding, far lefties?? Are you actually trying to make sure shit goes down that will get America listed up there with North Korea, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany?
How bad does it have to get before you unicorn-seeking far lefties start fighting back with more than long blog posts on how no one is woke but you and about three others named Dreamstar of Nowhereland, Xena Cloudwarrior for Vegan Harmony, and Jangles the Non-Materialistic Clown for World Peace?
People mention civil war more and more here. That’s what has my hackles raised, my teeth bared. Because, frankly, it would be a relief to watch Trump supporters getting their heads blown off in mid-love fest of that thing they’ve chosen to worship. I know. I’m not supposed to voice such a thing, ever. I’m not even supposed to imagine that, I’m on the ‘nice’ side, that plays by the rules, takes the high road and loses about every election there is to lose lately. Which is the problem.
People still think there are rules, checks and balances, in place. BWHA HA HA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH um, I mean, tee hee, tee hee.
There’s not. Rules and fair play left years ago, you idiot grinners, you mannerly snitchheads.
Yeah.
The limping left keep waiting for Republicans to DO THE RIGHT THING.
Waiting. Waiting.
Waiting!
While assuming crash positions, knowing full well that those on the right will allow this creeping tide of fanatics to unleash the dogs of war on all of us. Yet waiting for the GOP in America to PUT A STOP TO IT.
Though, some on the right are sounding the alarm quite loudly. Going– hey, look over here, bad dudes and bad dudettes doing shitty things! LOOOOOOOK.
With the left using their inside voices and their company manners, telling those on the left using their outside voices and pointy fingers to pipe down, don’t upset people. Always Be Cautious Abused Wives seems to be the real slogan of the left these days. Placate, placate, placate, is the battle cry of the left. Those not placating get treated like something stepped in when walking the labradoodle at the dog park.
Yeah. You notice that, you suppress the crappy crap, you sit through a literally hellish week of watching Kavanaugh blah blah.
And now the White House released a four person list that the FBI could interview, yet no one on the left seems to be screeching a screech that will be heard round the world about that…!!!!!!!!!! FUCK
BOOM BOOM BOOM
CLANG CLANG CLANG WENT THE COUNTRY
Until your head explodes after your tenth viewing of that song from the new Star is Born, where you melt with happy numbness over Lady Gaga hitting that middle shouty bit about being shallow or something. Bradley Cooper can sing? What?? Where’s that ten pound bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups! I need some Hot Cheetos! Hit replay! Oooh, Lady Gaga, girl! Who knew Bradley Cooper could grow a beard and sing??! Lindsey Graham said what??
So, I went to the library to talk to a friend. I’m redoing my posters for the writer’s event so they don’t look like I did them when drunk, asleep, depressed to the point of turning into an actual slug. I’m wondering what the uniforms will be like for American Civil War II, the Return of the Orange King.
I hope it’s flattering for all body types, and that blood washes out of it. No sense getting a uniform that stains too easy.
It’s rather sobering how the people around you get revealed. How that top layer of niceness and decency just go away. And you see the rotting bones beneath, the strips of moldering flesh.
You notice you’re talking to ghosts, who cling to things they know with all their might and mistake the screeches of a selfish idiot for truth, beauty and the American way.
He speaks for us. He’s saying what we’re saying.
Um, wow, I hope not. Have you actually listened to that thing speak/shout at the multiple rallies?
This isn’t strangers around me saying that. I’m a lone island in a sea of blank-eyed eidolons.
I grew up around these desperate little spirits, who can’t understand that their wages going down, and everything else going up isn’t because of welfare queens taking advantage of the system.
Well, it sort of is. Those welfare queens run giant companies like GE and Exxon and Bank of America.
The welfare queens, usually portrayed as a black woman or an immigrant-colored sort of gal, that my relatives and others are told to hate, holds some sort of legendary status right up there with Bigfoot, Nessie and the Abominable Snowman.
Everyone knows about them, but nobody’s actually seen one. There’s the tales about so and so in line at the grocery store. This woman, with a fancy phone, fancy clothes, blah, is buying steak and lobster with food stamps. The details! The more details piled on, the more people lap it up! She’s got her hair done, she’s got fancy salon-looking nails! She’s wearing clothes!
How dare this food-stamp mama WEAR CLOTHES?
Outrage, outrage, get your outrage here! We need to cut those programs…! Yeah. Yep.
It’s on par with an urban legend.
Except. People repeat it and repeat it, like an urban legend. Going back, fact checking that, boring!
Welfare queens milking the system, sexy as hell. And the fault of the left who wants to give all your hard-working money to gang members, those welfare taker milkers of the system, slutty single women who want abortions every other weekend and…yeah.
I can hear Fox News from the other room. Hyde Amendment, ever heard of it? You have to wait five years to apply for any sort of assistance in America if you immigrated here legally or…ugh.
I hear the loud, very angry hectoring that makes up the bulk of Fox News programming. Hannity to Laura Ingraham, screaming how Pumpkincunt is a savior of the American Way of Life while Obama and Hillary and the Left want to turn everyone into scary words scary words. It’s not the words at this point, it’s the tone that people respond to. That’s what I get from just hearing that shit from another room. That comforting outrage that pours into the ears like oil squeezed from snakes. I get a sick, hot feeling and a need to FACT CHECK EVERYTHING around me, then a need to take one of those showers you take after exposure to anything nuclear. I’m contaminated. I’ve been exposed to radiation.
I’m in a terrible place right now. Mentally, physically, the whole kit and kaboodle.
I walked out to get the mail. A beautiful day. Cooler than it has been. Clear skies, that smoky haze pushed out a bit. My thoughts full of what am I hanging on for. What. What am I hanging on for. There’s no reason for this.
It’s just this passing clot of darkness amid, should I make some biscuits, is my pumpkin ripe, I need to find a play for such and such. There’s even some fancy name for always having suicidal thoughts. Being always on that cliff. Looking into the abyss. Wondering. How soon. How soon.
My relatives, over on Facebook, posted a meme. Here, you can see it, too. Or curse me, wash your eyeballs with bleach and go get drunk with bikers. Or acrobats, hey, I will not judge you.
This doesn’t appear to be a joke or hoax
I know her. She’s a good person. Like, deep down nice. Funny, tough, one of those women who stand by their man sorta woman. She’s a throwback country song, sung by George Jones, with Mo Bamby singing backup. A bright spot during the family Christmas Hell-Eves.
And yet…that meme. Does she believe that? Is there some part of her that goes, some tiny still voice in the center of her head, that goes…I’ve been fooled.
Apricot Hellbeast’s speech in West Virginia. Actual excerpt.
She’s got a medically fragile kid. She’s on all sorts of assistance to help that kid, to keep him alive. Medical bills that way, ouch!
To pay for those massive tax cuts, the regime that holds all three branches of the American government will go after everything she depends on. Those programs to help kids in that manner already cut to the bone or going away.
This will be blamed on immigrants clogging the welfare system…or lazy Millennials who don’t know the value of working or people with arts degrees or Hillary. Or avocado toast. Or Starbucks coffee runs. Or. Or anything but pointing out the hoary old there’s always money for anything military, none for social programs.
Oh sorry. Anything military contractor. As veterans getting help when they come back from the never-ending war/s, pfft. We’ve never taken care of our veterans, why start now?
It’s all the Democrats fault, of course, that veterans blah dee blah.
They’re into BIG GOVERNMENT and red tape! It’s not us nice Republicans who love family, the military, guns and Jesus and tiny tiny government! Wheee! Sorry, veterans. If only the demoncrats would work with President Orange Jesus, everything would magically just become magical!! Unicorns in every cooking pot!
We’re the party of Lincoln! We must all tighten our belts, some must tighten their belts so much they get cut in two and die under a bridge having frozen to death. But that’s the fault of Nancy Pelosi. Nothing is ever our fault, we’re the party of Lincoln!
Doesn’t…doesn’t she know this? Doesn’t that compute? Hasn’t she been paying attention at all?
No.
No, she hasn’t. It seems my entire family turned into members of some sort of weird cult. I’ve never fit in with my family but this is…so much worse. I feel afraid. For me. For them. For all of us. I can’t forgive that they embrace that thing. They can’t forgive that I don’t. I don’t want to talk to them or be around them.
They don’t seem like my family anymore.
At the Western Idaho Fair, Boise, Idaho. This is the Republican Party these days?
I think that’s the worse thing that has happened to this country, well…not even close, but still. Dividing friends, family into hostile camps dedicated to erasing the other.
Maybe this is a tiny taste of those pre-Civil War years. People divided so sharply that there was no reasonableness left. No logic, no reason. Just hasty words, slogans, propaganda and shouting. Promising things would be done to protect their side. Swords rattled. Before they really got rattled for four years.
Fuck, we’re still fighting that damn war to this day. It never ended. 1861-?. The South will Rise Again! Um, does that mean we’re gonna have to wear hoops skirts and own slaves and shout that cotton is king? Holy barfballs, ‘murikkka!
How long do you ignore this cult brouhaha from the ‘other side’?
When you remember a snowy Christmas Eve night– that hulking MAGA hat wearing sort used to be a tiny tot in a blue knitted stocking cap, delighted over all the Christmas wonderfulness.
When you remember your dad coming to get you after you flipped your truck but didn’t die or even get hurt that much. When…yep. How much do you have to give up to live with yourself a bit?
Because you can’t put the “nice” faces back on the rotting ghost visages.
You can’t unring the bells, that one is very true. You can’t unsee. You can’t unhear.
I don’t have any answers.
Others have cut all ties with their Trumpkin relatives and friends.
Others have given up on anything political, thrown up their hands with a ‘Can’t we all just get along’ darty-eyed look.
Others don’t discuss politics or religion with family or friends. I guess they talk about the weather or traffic. Or old Bewitched episodes. Who didn’t love Serena? Uncle Arthur! Dr. Bombay, what a hoot! Derwood!
And how, after all this is over and it will be, one way or another, how do you reconcile or reconnect? Or just find those you cut loose to point at them and laugh?
America will either right itself, ha ha, or it won’t.
We might very well find ourselves with an actual dictatorship in place.
And people writing careful puff pieces on the “right” people who had faith in Apricot Hellbeast and Sunny Jesus, and never wavered in faith for either. Because writing anything else. Mm. We’re already kinda there at that point. The lying media. Fake news. Enemy of the people. Yeah, we’re there. Fun!
We might find America will shake this off, with a lesson learned.
HA HA HA HA HA.
America flunks history every damn time. We have those Etch-A-Sketch memories. We in America are always AMAZED AND HORRIFIED at the latest wave of racism or awfulness.
America has never been this bad. Yeah, um, yeah it has. I’m outraged and horrified, this is unprecedented! Ten years ago, then five years before that and then…
It will all get blamed on the Democrats. All this now going on, when it’s over, will get that patina of Right Wing Blame It On The Democrats. People will fall for it, the same people now who think Hil Clinton is running a pedo international child sex slave operation out of a New Jersey pizza parlor. [See QAnon crap]
Or think that Obama is a secret Muslim born in Kenya to outer space lizard lords. Who then rigged the elections, twice, to ruin America so that Pumpkincunt had to save it…
to make amerikkka grate again and put amerikkka firstest. cause obummer fucked us for eight years and trump had sex like a boss with porn stars. he wasn’t prezident when he fucked them porn stars and cohen a big jew baby lied about all that, trump didnt no abut that money. he sed so i beleeve him. the russans helped killery not trump has anyone investigated the dnc?? lock her up!! crooked killery who had all those people killed but nobody went after her she’s a real witch kill that cunt we should kill her shes evil. baby killer killery. obama probably brought in those mexicans. maybe we should send the national guard to CHICAGO. fire muller it’s a witch hunt! clean coal! MAGA!!
People believe this. Actual real people believe this. Why mother fact-checking, CNN? Why? What’s the fucking point now?
That’s what I hear. That’s what I hear. That’s what I read.
And worse. And funnier. And far more jaw-droppingly WTF. With bad spelling and monstrous trembling outrage and jumbled conspiracy theories galore, oh my.
I dread any meeting with relatives right now. I don’t want them watching me as they speak about…whatever they heard on Hannity or the Five. I feel any love I bear them get a little bit less each time. Each time. Until they’re just strangers to me. And if it came down to it…I’d be very ready for the Nu Civil War. And that goes a little deeper than some cheap tears and a hasty blog post.
Light-hearted summer moments with Jake, Molly and Clyde, the big Newfie, who is now, ah, over the Rainbow Bridge
What month is this in this ghastly interminable hellbeastly span of years masquerading as a span of days? Oh. August.
It seems time has thudded to a damn standstill. And yet speeds along. I know. How original am moi? Not at all.
I’ll answer myself as no one comments or spews invectives at me in the social media time out I seem to be in. Or maybe I haven’t pledged myself enough to Satan or given enough lip service to AmmoJesus.
from Pandora’s Boxx. No, not this version of Jesus. Is it me or did the artist put a bit of Tom Cruise in that face?
We only have two options for worship here in ‘murica. Sort of only sorta kidding about that. You’re either with Jesus and the angels or you’re a godless Satan worshiping hate America commie traitor who hates babies. Yep.
Oh, so for those at home breathlessly reading along, I wrote a poem. That’s all.
It included the words ‘motherlumping’ and ‘scorpion’ and ‘Mamerigaga’.
I wrote it with great and furious anger.
I had fun writing a poem in great and furious anger. It drained my fury and anger.
I sent off my barely coherent scream against avocado toast to that monthly poetry challenge I AM STILL DOING. Because it’s good practice, and it helps foment me into a BETTER WRITER.
Or so I tell myself. Don’t we all tell ourselves happy lies so we don’t spatter our pretty brains on the ugly walls wherever we live? Or perhaps we live under a bridge and have to walk to the library to use the internet.
So some other form of suicide will have to do for welfare moochers and societal losers. Starvation and disease and freezing to death are free, moochers!
from geograph.uk. Small bridge over river Dulais.
Wow, that took a dark little turn.
Ah, so. I squibbled out a VASTLY POPULAR post about fires. I believe that’s the one before this one. Let me check, brb.
Yep. The fires still burn. It’s awful. It’s getting smoky. It’s HOT. But it is summer.
Thank you, Queen Obvious!
You’re welcome, sarcastic voice in my head!
Some snow would be nice. A nice couple days of constant rain would be nice here in Eastern Oregon.
I do mean the entire area. From Ontario all the way to Bend. Awash with rainy rain!
No wind, no lightning, just rain. The wet stuff we’ve heard tell of in tall tales. As you can, literally, walk between the rain drops here when it does piss down a bit. I’ve gone outside, when it rains here, and not gotten a drop on me. Sorta, kinda…kidding. Sorta.
I’m working on Starved Out, which, for right now, is set in the mythical world of government-hating extremists. As in they have a mythical view of themselves as freedom fighters and the rest of us see them as scary fuckheads.
But anyway!
I am telling it from the POV of the women, as men have enough stories under their column, frankly.
And when I tried to just write it…I stalled right out of the gate, trying to put the two men who started a fire and started an actual insurrection against the gubbermint front and center.
I’d also read a blip about this woman homesteader who Starved Out right at the start of the Great Depression. And of course the Massacre at Hells Canyon, I wanted that to make an appearance in my Great American Novel that No One Will Read Until I Am Well Dead and Rotting Under A Local Bridge.
So far, it’s a tripod. Rosie, the wife of Butch, the son, and Vickie, the wife of Merle, the dad. And Gladys, who had to pull up stakes and head back to the big city when drought and ruin faced her in sagebrush country.
I was, at first trying to be super-accurate and capture everything about the Hammonds and all that.
And then went, yeah, it will be fun to get sued. Fun! I’m not writing a non-fiction account, after all. I can fudge things, smear things, compose composite characters to protect the guilty and insane.
So, in the hot afternoons, I attempt a few paragraphs. It’s slow going. I need to dive in and let her buck, as they say around here.
Because we have rodeos and horses, and people actually go and get up on wild horses or other wild livestock, and…uh huh.
Why not write in the cool of the morning, dear? I hear some of you mutter that in nice, polite tones.
That tone you get when someone rattles on about some project of theirs that you could give two shits in a shot glass about.
Where your eyes glaze over as the person prattles about how they tracked down that one knitting stitch only used in Medieval stockings in Ireland by cloistered nuns who occasionally took fits because they thought the devil visited them at night.
That stitch!
Ah, well. I’ve been writing on ‘other stuff’.
Junk crap that I need to clear from my smoke-filled head so I can do the ‘real’ writing later in the day while not looking for gainful employment. Oh.
I did vow to at least go look at Craigslist and DesperateFuckers.org.
Sigh!
One last bit before I go find some pictures to place at random among these sickly paragraphs of LIKE ME I WRITE LIKE ME.
Shit howdy. I had a thought but…gone, baby, gone. Oh!!
Okay!
Movies.
Now, I wanna go see Mama Mia 2, I heard it’s great fun. I wanna see that damn Spy thing with the two women, because that looks like a lotta fun. I also want to see Spike Lee’s Blackk Klansman because that looks like angry fun.
I find I want to watch movies that are light, fluffy and might contain dance numbers with colorful outfits.
I find I have no head or heart for sitting through a Serious Drama. I find many others share this right now in ‘murica. We want our entertainment fluffy as wobbly kittens and our real life to resemble some dystopian novel that doesn’t get that happy ending. Whee.
I want Christmas movies all year round right now, the Hallmark ones. Where there’s barely any real problems, people are shiny clean and look made of glitter and sugar cookies, and the villains and obstacles are easily overcome in the last five minutes.
Give that crap some Oscars! Emmys? Yeah, Emmys, as it’s television. Sorry.
That level of sugary goo erases the gritty reality show playing on every screen and device world-wide. Where people seems made of rattlesnake poison and toxic sludge and the villains win every single fucking time.
And the heroes mumble and then there’s tweets from ten years ago with jokes and…ugh.
What the hell was this post? Mostly just fart noises, I think.
Ah, you were wondering where the ‘fart’ came in. Glad to help out, darlings.
Tee hee. My mother, who was a nurse, worked in a Catholic hospital back in the day. She was told to carry a spoon…not even kidding. Not even a little.
When the real world produces much scarier, crazier asshattery than any combo of words I or others can devise…you tend to wander off to youtube to watch puppy rescues and those top ten lists as to why Jupiter Ascending is the worst movie ever penned. Or the best.
Depends on which top ten listings of attributes and qualities you dig up, accidentally, while searching for Benedict Cumberbatch porn. Not that I do that. Or know anyone who does that. I just heard other people do that.
And.
That wild baby bunny has died.
It was more than likely my mucking something up or it nibbled something bad for it when I put it in the outside cage as it was almost ready to be released…I managed to bring it back once but could not repeat that success.
It was laid out on its side, cold and not moving, having spasms now and then. I warmed it up, I got some milk down it, it actually sat up, had its head up, seemed to be recovering from whatever had plagued it…and then it died. Just turned its head a bit, spasmed, and then died. I watched the last little breath. The sides went in and did not come back up.
I waited.
I waited.
Nothing.
I buried it. I feel a real loss that something in my clumsy care passed onward into whatever awaits or does not await. It had a personality, a feistiness. It explored the little box I had it in. It froze just like the adult rabbits do, hoping I could not see it. It responded to noises and huddled in its collection of pulled apart cotton balls, that tiny tail the only thing visible at times.
It remained wild, except when sick. Then it didn’t care if I handled it. I knew it was better when it didn’t want me near it. I felt a success that this wild creature wanted no part of me, that it would survive and go have a short life out in the fields.
As I know the fate of rabbits, yes, I do, in a world full of hawks, coyotes, dogs, cats and badgers. And humans.
I’ve gone through this with baby birds. They seem to be doing well and then the next morning, they’re stiff and cold, beaks open. And I still check for life, I make sure. Sometimes young animals get chilled, sometimes just getting them warmed back up…Thank heavens for heating pads and hot water bottles.
Why do I try when…Because you have to. That’s all I know.
I have to at least try.
I have succeeded in keeping baby birds alive and then releasing them. I’ve helped with too-young kittens, feeding them and caring for them as they needed. My mother taught me how. And sometimes they live. And sometimes they die. So sayeth life and death.
In a Thai cave, boys await to be rescued. That has been dominating the news. Because it focuses on things we can understand.
Children trapped. Cave filling with water. Brave people planning a rescue. Boys need to be taught to swim. A rescuer dies trying to help. Cave divers, from Scotland no less, who are the best in the world go to help. Boys start getting rescued…
We watch and sigh and cheer and cry, this is something we UNDERSTAND. This is something that makes sense.
When children get trapped, you go help them. When men get trapped down a mine, you go help them. Dramatic rescues remind us we’re all alike and yet all different and yet…that compassion magically goes away when applied to others who need help that don’t meet some public understanding of who deserves to be rescued and helped and who does not.
I am glad those boys are getting out of that cave.
But I keep getting drawn back to ‘murica and now, the UK and Brexit and the shenanigans world-wide. As the very modern far right seems hellishly determined to repeat the fascists regimes of the 1930’s that led up to…an actual world war. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco!
I’ve left names out, I just know it. And everyone seems to have a nuclear warhead tucked away these crazy ass days.
It’s interesting times indeed.
I can’t compete with that in a literary fashion.
I see people getting more upset over being impolite to fascist wannabes than the actual fascism attempting to rear its very ugly head in the heart of the land of the brave and the free. [No, not Canada.]
I blathered on about that in other posts, I won’t here because if I do, someone might complain I’m being mean to the skin-heads and assclown Jesus shouters or something. God forbid they feel a moment of discomfort or actual shame. God fucking forbid.
Oh and someone or something crushed my tiny growing pumpkin.
I took a picture of it, imagining it grown into a lopsided ball of orangeness and bland pulp. A future jack-o-lantern. A future possible actual pie!
And then noticed it had been crushed.
Smashed.
Destroyed.
Ants trundled all over the little insides. Ants.
It felt like someone hit me in the solar plexus. That unable to breathe for a bit sensation.
Oh great, the crazy liberal barely read writer lady is lamenting a destroyed squash. Liberals, lol. Need a safe space, snowflake??
I always add very sarcastic comments in my head now to all my reactions, feelings, sensations and thoughts. It’s just how I roll these days. Or always. I have a chorus of Fuck Your Feelings sorts catcalling me from inside my head…should I admit that or pretend otherwise?
from My Confined Space. Notice that date.
So, I did finish a draft for Grumpy Odin and Sexy Jesus.
I rather like it. I need to go over and over it, get it a bit sleeker. Get its engine running smoothly and not at a choppy, too loud decibel that will have cops pulling me over and giving me literary tickets.
Sorry, ma’am, this novel is cobbled together with nonsense and duct tape.
This is not a safe novel to have on the literary highway. This is an accident that already happened.
Yes, that is the amount of the fine and not the national debt rounded up into a tidy amount number!
Well then, you should have rewritten it and turned it into the next Harry Potter series.
Why don’t you give up writing and become a two-dollar a blow job whore in your home town’s park? Like everyone thinks you are already?
It’s not like your writing ‘career’ is all that and a bag of chips, snap!
Or hey, just write something good. Then we don’t have to pull you over like this! Have a good day!
Elliot Stabler, SVU Law and Order, as played by Chris Meloni. This is not the literary cop I picture at all. I picture one of my relatives, dressed in those too-short Reno 911 shorts writing me a ticket for not immediately turning into JK Rowling…from TV Screener. Reno 911. Thomas Lennon as Jim Dangle. Now you see some of what I see in my head. Along with pumpkins, puppy rescues and those elevator doors in the Shining doing that slow, slow open and releasing that flood o’blood.
I should probably get rid of some of those voices in my head before the shitshow clown act that’s so far playing to the gullible and grungy alike, takes center stage in full costume under dazzling lights in full surround sound.
So the entire planet can relive in collective wonderment and Lock Her Up fashion and Hold My Beer super-patriotism– the 1930’s and 40’s in vivid, re-enactment detail, with updated clothes, New Age slang and fabulous city-destroying weapons one can send off with a push of a button!
The parades alone, darlings!
Not a parade, but an actual 4th of July fire we watched from the yard. It got handled pretty quickly by the local BLM and firefighters. Planes, helicopters, etc. Notice those bone dry hills covered with cheat grass. That’s the entire West right now, by the way…
from Gearbubble. Also, just taken off the shelves at Wal-Mart. Yep.
Fascism has come to America wrapped in cheeseburger wrappings and waving a MAGA hat.
People are cheering FOR FASCISM and those who would be king…because it upsets the liberals. As long as the liberals are upset, hey.
Hey, how bad can it get? Overreact much?? LMFAO! They’re so emotional! Let me call the wahbulance! Finally, a president who speaks his mind! Drain that swamp! Lock her up! Fake media! Losers! America is great again, get out if you can’t handle it, commies! LOL, let me get a cup for all them tears. Fuck your feelings! Get over it, he won. GET OVER IT.
No, really.
That’s the attitude of the ‘other side’, the so-labeled disenfranchised, economically anxious, nobody lets us talk yet we’re heard all the time and talk a lot all over the place, sorts. Middle America. Liberal tears taste so sweet. Snowflakes.
I’m tired. I feel tired all the time by this.
Fear lives in the center of me, a small tiny fear that this won’t turn out okay at all. That America won’t escape our turn toward fascism with a few bruises and maybe a bloodied nose. That we won’t rebound or shake this off or…yeah. Despair has come to nestle in so many of us lately. Actual real despair, like a moist blanket soaked in small pox we wrap about ourselves.
Because I’ve sat through the history classes. I’ve watched the documentaries on Charlemagne to the Mai Lai Massacre. And beyond. I paid attention. I tried to articulate a bit. I grew silent and grew into a coward about speaking up.
Me, with my big loud voice, am now silent and meek and afraid, afraid, afraid to say anything. As combating that constant gleeful, purposeful deluge of wrong information, twisted facts, made up stats, outright lies, whataboutism, why are you so angry, blah blah blah…it just gets to you.
And you curl up, put your hand out, say, fine, I can’t do this. I can’t combat this, I’m bleeding to death from a million paper cuts. I’m watching my own family and friends embrace this shit with gleeful, maniacal grins. The same ones who screamed that Obama was coming for their guns, going to turn us all into Muslim commies and declare himself president for life. Uh huh.
And I don’t see a lot of loud, belligerent, fighting back sorts right now.
They are few in number and treated like lepers and enemies and told to hush. Maxine Waters, for one. Told to hush up and play nice by leading Democrats, instead of being backed up and supported…Tread carefully and don’t carry a stick at all seems to be the message.
I see mumbling apologizers who whisper for courtesy and niceness against actual real-time, real-world, yes it’s fucking happening in America, totalitarianism.
I hear a lot of– don’t upset them, play nice, we go high if they go low. When has that ever worked with fascists, with those trying a coup, with those thrusting their version of hell on earth into a government’s skeleton? To place a coating of insanity, greed, death and corruption over those bones…all while waving a flag and holding rallies and pretending to be saints and angels.
Placate the very ones beating the hell out of you over and over, day after day, year after year. We must be civil in the face of bullies, assholes, the stripping of our rights, the stripping of everything that makes life a bit more bearable. We must say please and thank you and not call names. No bad language. We must be door mats, so we’re not labeled violent extremists, which we are anyway by Fox News and Breitbart and Alex Jones and…and just hope they’ll turn as nice as we are.
Or something.
As others have pointed out, that sounds a lot like abuse. You hope they won’t hit you today if you’re quiet enough or nice enough or cringing enough. And when they don’t hit you as hard, it feels like a victory, I guess. When you just have a split lip instead of a broken arm, hey, that’s great. That’ll show em.
I mean, this has been a hellish week. Our actual framework of what makes America America seems broken, shattered, torn into chunks to be sold to the highest bidders. To line the pockets of Cheetolini and his children and cronies. With no one allowed to say bad things about him or they get the fake media screech directed at them or…Hell seems far nicer than America right now.
Satan doesn’t seem that bad right now. I truly do think that. We never did get Satan’s side of the story, after all. Republican Jesus seems to be a horrific monster, no thanks. Just no thanks and I’ll reserve my spot in hell right now if that’s salvation.
Pregnancy crisis centers can lie to women. The Muslim travel ban is now permanent. Unions got gutted, bigly. Bang bang bang. The Supreme Court, our actual bastion against the very regime already in power in the White House…has failed us. With a justice set to step down, Justice Anthony Kennedy, stepping down suddenly under suspicious circumstances...it could be rigged for decades, for generations. If we have decades or generations left in us. There might go same-sex marriage rights. There would go Roe v. Wade. There might go civil rights, a revisit of Brown V. Board of Education might be looming…
Maybe people will vote.
That’s the big hope everything is pinned on. There’s a giant vote in November. The problem is people in America don’t vote for elections, we all know this. Well, the liberal side doesn’t vote, the other side shows up in droves.
This has been hashed out, fried in a pan, put in a bowl, taken out the next day and microwaved.
The Blue Wave is coming!
I’ll believe that when Cheetolini is impeached. Until then, I’m a wee bit skeptical. As the liberals seem utterly set on voting only for perfect angel candidates that mirror whatever their pet cause is. Instead of holding their nose and voting for anything with a D by its name…you know, that shit that wins elections or something. That shit the basic average Republican voter does because– Anything but a Democrat– is their actual belief and creed. They’ve been trained and taught and conditioned very well.
Pointing that out gets one labeled a snowflake who’s been conditioned by Hollywood elites and indoctrinated by the public school system.
We’re not the ones who are acting like zombie cult members under an orange Jim Jones, you are! Oh I love the taste of libtard tears in the morning!
And stories of days like this, where it’s just so utterly dark and everyone felt like giving up. Gettysburg. Paris. Pearl Harbor. No Man’s Land. McCarthyism. Vietnam. Korea. The Great Depression. The AIDS crisis in the Eighties, the…ugh.
The long slow slog to get some Americans the same rights as other Americans. And how people stayed to fight, as steady as boulders in a river trying to wash them away.
How people made light and kept walking forward.
With the knowledge that if they didn’t, that awful tide would drown everyone they loved in it. With the knowledge that that awful tide, whatever shape it might take or be, can be sent back out.
To wait for a time when it will be…invited back to wreak what horrors it can. Again. Again. Again.
This same pattern. Again and again.
Evil rising, the light rising to meet it, evil rising, the light rising to meet it.
And we never learn.
We never learn a fucking thing.
Which has me tired and yet oddly hopeful. Maybe this time it won’t take too many years to send that tide back out to sullenly plan its next inland surge.
But I must speak and fight and push back as much as I can. Because we’re all drowning. And it’s getting hard to breathe.
And those drinking the tears of others always seem miserably parched and miserably bitter about it.
And maybe the time after that, the time will get even shorter to wise up and send that tide back out before it can do any real lasting harm. Until we finally learn and can take steps, before we drown in oceans composed of our own blood, shit and tears.
Not just those we label our enemies or the other…but everyone gets to drown, we’re all equal at last as we drown together.
Don’t people know that?
Don’t you know you won’t be safe? Don’t you know all of this will come for you as well? That you won’t escape it? That eventually you’ll have to look history itself in the eye and explain yourself? I went along because it upset the liberals. Is that really your excuse here? For realsies??
Don’t you know…there will be consequences?
Being civil isn’t the answer to fascism. Because they will use it against you. As is being done now. I think I want to have ‘radical’ written in my obituary. She was a radical and she spoke out.
I want that, now. She spoke out.
I don’t know who made this but thanks.
Silence has seemed the safe, pretty blanket, the easy choice. And now I will pay for that. And try to speak as best I can.
As the suffragettes kept onward. As those freeing the Jews kept working. As those who ran the Underground Railroad kept going. As those who. As those who crumpled a bit in the utter-seeming darkness, who then searched for light, even starlight or a light within.
This is not my country, I hear. I hear that. A lot.
From very young, naive folks. From the elderly who should know better. From myself at times when I have brain freezes and forget the tidbits and scraps I’ve picked up over the years about the history of my country.
from the history of Indian Boarding Schools.
Separating children from the parents seeking help, asylum and surcease from whatever political bullshit they were fleeing from.
This is a POLICY put into place by Putinscunt, whispered into that corpulent ear by Stephen Miller…an avowed and known white supremacist. It’s not law. It’s not something the Democrats invented or put into practice.
And all three branches of the American government are ruled by the Trumpicans, er, GOP. So. As scapegoats go, blaming the Democrats for this POLICY is, uh, working.
Because people don’t fact check in America. Fact checking is for losers. And liberals. And SJW’s. And commie socialists who want to take your hard-earned money and give it to illegals and drug addicts and MS-13 gangmembers…Right, Nancy Pelosi?
Those children, and they are children, are being held hostage, so I’ve heard/read, so that Putinscunt can get that wall financed and built.
And the Foxchristians [a term I saw and it just FELT SO RIGHT] are a thousand percent behind taking kids, already traumatized by leaving everything they know behind, and traumatizing them, possibly, for life.
That’s fine. That’s what Jesus would do and approve of. Mm.
I’m not some hardcore, shouty Christian type, don’t worry. But I was brought up in the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church.
I’ve been confirmed as a member. I’ve done Sunday School.
I’ve attended church camp. I’ve worked at that same church camp. I was almost raped at that same camp and never went back, so.
I do have some background in churches and the Bible. [And I know firsthand why women don’t speak up about what happens to them. Oh yes, I do.]
I’m puzzled, to say the least, by people who cheer for what’s going on at the border. At building giant, for-profit concentration camps–
in Brownsville, Texas, where it’s already a hundred degrees. Tents/facilities with no air conditioning.
I think I saw something about the Catholic Relief Aid trying to get fans or something sent there…
There are plans to build more CONCENTRATION CAMPS in Wyoming. Housing for 5000 at a pop.
Tax money being used for this. And people turning a profit off these concentration camps. Capitalism and crimes against humanity, score!
People seem dazed. Scattered to the wind. The resistance seems incredulous. This is not happening, seems to be the major takeaway.
The urge to roll my eyes at marches planned at future dates is just…not possible to control at all.
More out of why are we not just ripping those places apart with our bare fucking hands? Why am I not hitchhiking to Texas to do just that?
There are senators, including the one from my home state, trying to drum up public awareness and fan some god damn enough of this shit already outrage, which will lead to actual action.
Anger gets shit done, as Mr. Nancy says in American Gods over on Starz.
Anger is very dangerous to this POLICY designed to get a wall built and zero tolerance immigration crap passed.
Actual mural on wall of Texas camp.
Strangely, America has a history of this. Going way way back, babies.
We did it with slavery, where babies were sold on the auction block. There are illustrations of this oh so human practice. We tend to call such things ‘inhumane’, literally washing our hands of admitting that humans treat other humans like garbage a lot of the time.
We did this with indigenous people. Took Native American kids from their families, cut their hair, took their clothes, forced them to speak English only, stripped them of their culture and heritage, forced them to be Christians…it wasn’t until almost 1980 that the religious practices of Native Americans were even allowed to be practiced legally. [As at times ‘illegal’ substances were used, like peyote.]
And of course, the Japanese internment camps. See George Takei for a history of that. See lots of others for a history of that. These were American citizens. Stripped of everything, lost their livelihood, their homes, their possessions, everything.
A stark reminder that it did happen here, it did fucking happen here.
America has a gigantic streak of treating children like livestock, social experiments, POWs, and demonic criminals intent on destroying the Home of the Free and the Brave.
It seems we’re actually the Home of the Cowardly and Cruel.
We spout Bible verses without reading any of the verses around them.
Romans 13:1 does say to obey the laws of whatever land you reside in. Yet further, in Romans 13:10–Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.
That Romans 13:1, by the way, was spouted by Nazis and slave owners to justify their practices.
Jeff Sessions and Sarah Huckabee Sanders both spouted it as well…in a country that celebrates separation of church and state. Scary fucking times, indeed. By the same people who scream against Sharia Law coming to ‘murica. And upset that football players are kneeling quietly and…Not even Beckett could adequately capture the absurdity of America right now. Well, he probably could. He was Irish.
See history of how America treated Irish immigrants, dearies. Whee? Or watch Gangs of New York or The Departed or pretty much any movie about the Irish in America, really. It’s a popular topic and hey, white people front and center being treated badly…wet dream time for Stevie Miller. And Stevie Bannon. And Gorka. And Sessions. And David Duke. And…yeppity yep. Yes, the Irish got labeled and scorned for a bit, but…mm. Okay!
The Keebler Elf and Aunt Lydia both tell us to calm down, it’s not so bad, it’s in the Bible. It’s a law they can’t do anything about, they are just HELPLESS BEFORE THE DEMOCRAT’S EVIL WAYS. Uh huh. They bravely report that if only the Democrats would relent and…uh huh. And the Bible, of course, says treating kids like something out of Schindler’s List is fine and dandy. That treating brown kids in a repeat of the Trail of Tears is AWESOME WITH GOD. God loves immigrant criminal kiddie tears!
The same Bible that says to treat foreigners like family, as you were once a stranger in a strange land. To drown yourself if you hurt children–see that whole millstone thingie Jesus said.
The rabid pro-life crowds seems really confused and lost when it comes to actual children being tormented, tortured and lost. As in missing. As in no one’s quite sure where a big bunch of kids are. As in might be in the hands of human traffickers.
Ripping children away from their exhausted, frightened, stressed parents and housing them in a sweltering place where no affection or treatment that borders anywhere near compassion or actual concern for those kids is, um, the definition of evil.
There. I said it.
A truck packed with American citizens, San Pedro, CA, 1942, heading for a concentration camp.
It’s about as far from what Jesus taught in the treatment of others as it’s possible to get.
I don’t ever remember at church camp, which had pastors and people studying to be pastors, working there and occasionally delivering actual sermons on kindness and love…about where it’s okay to hold kids hostage in nasty conditions until one gets what one wants.
A vanity wall that won’t keep anything out at all.
As most people come here on planes or boats and just don’t go back when their visas expire. That’s, um, known. That’s an actual fact. So.
Again, this isn’t law.
It’s policy.
I know we’re not supposed to upset anyone in case they don’t vote anyway but…
Calling a halt to separating kids from their parents is something that can be quickly shelved, stopped, ended today.
This POLICY of cruelty and deliberate malice is something Putinscunt decided to do all on his own.
And then blamed, predictably and with great success, on the Democrats. I didn’t do this, the Democrats did! OBAMA DID IT, TOO is the battle cry here.
It works. It always works.
That loud hectoring wasp whine drowns out the soft, polite, take the high road idiots on the other side.
And they are idiots! Big quivering ones!
Soft, melty idiots who scold over the use of ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’ and ‘crude language’ rather than take on the real actual issues, as that might turn away voters who are tired of hearing about racism and other inconvenient social issues. Voters that stay home, at that.
We must be nice, we must be the grown ups in the room. Eventually we’ll, uh, win. The Blue Wave is coming. It’s Mueller Time! People won’t stand for this very long.
Bwha ha ha. I can’t breathe! My sides!
Oh yes, I’m a cynical little kitty cat right now.
You see liberals and others calling for ‘civility’ against the crude, very successful, attacks of the right. We can’t be like them, is the not-battle cry.
It’s a Ned Flanders kinda strategy.
We can’t get mad, facts will win them in the end, the truth is on our side…
And then my head just pops like a balloon shot by an AK-47.
The time for civility and niceness went bye-bye years ago.
We can get back to murmuring politely at each other when America isn’t being rapidly turned into a fascist shithole. The UN frowns at the US right now. America no longer supports humans rights. Canada is possibly considering an invasion to liberate us. They might team up with Mexico.
I can flash my Lutheran card when they come for me. I’ll be mostly okay if I keep my mouth shut and my eyes down. I have the right skin color. Yeah, I went there.
Only racists talk about racism…yeah, heard that one yet? Yeah, it’s bullshit and meant to silence conversations and observations. The BLM people are the REAL RACISTS HERE. We don’t notice skin color, why do you? Democrats arethe real racists. Etc. Etc. Etc.
It can also vend into Free Speech fuckery– why is the tolerant left so intolerant of my right to express myself about just why blacks are [insert stereotype penned by the KKK here] It’s my opinion! Why are they trying to silence me?
Yep. It’s why the left is reduced to softly scolding about bad language most of the time. People can safely rally behind not using bad language and being adult-ish. That’s my hot take, anyway. Oh yes, back to explaining how I can blend in with the American FlagLovers of Trumplandia.
I can scrub my feeble liberal-esque bloggings right damn quick if I have to. I can trace my ancestors coming here ‘legally’.
I have the right papers. I have my official birth certificate– it’s needed to get a driver’s license and a passport. I have a passport, which is valid for years yet.
My ancestors! From places like Norway. And Germany. And the UK. When itcomes down to that.
I have Viking blood! My grandpa spoke German! Some uncle fought for the South, as a general. I glow in the dark I’m so right-skinned!
As any liberals left will still be calling for nice language and take the high road, dang it. You can spot them by the patches on their chest. Yep, went there!
I can spout the right phrases with a straight face.
I have actor training, after all. I’m a writer, I remember phrases and slogans quite well. How math works, not so much. Democrats hate America, yep, that I can scream with the best of em, all while enjoying the rodeo and the countryfair and rallies…
It’s rather scary how well I could blend with the ‘other side.’ I live among the ‘other side’. I’m in very red territory in a very red part of Oregon and can cross over into super-red Idaho by driving about twenty minutes, if that.
Anyone who actually knows me would not buy my metamorphosis. But those who don’t…mmm.
I’ll have to work on my sarcastic eye-rolling and muttered cursing and loud WTF sighs. That’s where the compressed lips and eyes down at all times training comes in handy. I can combine my girl training with my go along with fascism necessities. Whee?
I have the freedom to express myself as long as I express what they want to hear. I know how it works, I know the damn score. Oh sorry. Dang score. Mustn’t descend to their level. Then they win or something. Or something.
Back to the actual subject of this sort through the wheat and the chaff effort.
You can contact and donate to the ACLU. You can take part in a march. You can post articles and videos and history lessons about this very subject on social media. You can write/text/call your representatives.
You can help fund grassroots hire lawyers or even volunteer if you have legal training of any kind. You can go help translate if you speak Spanish. You can oppose ICE at every turn. You can get to know what rights you still have left in America. Make a list. Cross them off as or when they go buh-bye.
There’s a tale of a lady on a bus, going from California to Arizona, I think. She refused to let ICE intimidate people into flashing their papers, she went ‘full donkey’, as she put it. ICE backed down because they are not used to people knowing their actual rights and demanding to be treated like citizens, instead of peasants at the mercy of a mercurial king.
There are small tales of actual hope coming out of all this. There are!
There are glimmers of people blinking, waking up from some dream of ‘it can’t happen here’. That’s, I guess, what you have to hold onto.
And try to be a loud, obnoxious, swearing voice yourself against this bullshit cuntery.
It’s scary, it’s hard, and you might have the luxury of being able to ignore it thoroughly because it, allegedly, is not something that affects you. [Kind of like the Black Lives Matter or the MeToo movement or…uh huh.]
Oh I turned the news off and took up breeding Dalmations! I’m so much happier now! My stress levels are way down! Puppies are cute! The news is so gloomy, anyway. Who needs it? They can’t report on nice things? That raccoon! I saw that! Why can’t we have more of that?
I wonder what the next batch of kids being jailed for their skin color and perceived wrongness will be. I wonder that a lot.
Or will we recycle and go retro and American classic? And wait for heroes to rise to save us from ourselves…we’re always waiting for heroes to rise in America.
It’s kinda our thing. And caging people we find wrong, bad, the wrong color, the wrong religion and just generally offensive to some white purity nationalists.
Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave
from istock. I just liked the colors and how cute it was.
I’m going to depart my usual madcap whirl of promoting some obscure project or informing people that my pet eggplant has recovered from the ground squirrel attack it had to endure in brave, stoic silence.
There’s this person. Z. I’ve known this person since high school. So a thousand years at least. Ha ha. Okay.
This person had fallen on hard times, as John Steinbeck wrote so eloquently about. The current economic clime is not nice to lots of people, you make mistakes you can’t recover from, it’s a dog eat dog world and…yup. I, myself, and I am in a place. Where I don’t wish human company, I don’t miss the cities, I don’t wish to visit or chitchat or spend time with PEOPLE. See posts about my own family for evidence. I wish to be left alone, as Greta Garbo sneered.
I won’t go into details about the Day I had with Z. I can only and should only address my reactions and why I’m having said reactions.
I got home, after the Day, and agitation colored my entire being. I could not relax. My teeth seemed permanently pressed together. Rage rage rage throughout me. I wanted to smash all the dishes. I had shaking hands. I could not concentrate. I had shortness of breath. I didn’t feel…safe. I felt like I had been attacked all day.
Maybe if I erased my entire self and had someone else re-design me…I’d be a real person at last. Mm.
Z, though someone from my dim past, is not someone I trust.
They have claimed to respect my fierce need to be left alone yet intrude and poke and pry and assume and…yup. I don’t enjoy Z’s company. I have to watch whatever I say, it will be used against me. I mentioned I wrote a zombie novel, for instance. Everything from holding up zombie novels to asking if they had been included in my writing…which made me defensive and curt and awful and terrible and barely in control at times. I don’t mind being questioned on my writing…I mind someone inserting themselves into my writing like a footnote I forgot to include. I mind “hurting” people because I forgot to base a character on them.
Fuck! FUCK OFF. Okay, breathe, breathe.
Now, I have kept my distance, in case you’re wondering why moonbat me spends every day suffering like this.
I don’t. Our last outing was, I think, last year. I wrote a blog post that went from hysterical to hyper-hysterical then deleted it because it was mean, awful and unfair. I do have rare moments of actual thought and care for others.
This person learned to keep their distance but I…I agree to outings because I feel guilty. I feel like the bad guy, the villain, all the time with Z. I feel an obligation to be nice because Z is so ‘nice’ all the time.
I remember my mother telling me to be nice. How awful I was all the time that my mother had to tell me to be nice over and over…that I should be grateful anyone wants anything to do with me. Which is tied into other things in my spotty childhood and…I won’t ever go into that here.
Tears. Tears now.
You think you’ve dealt with something. You think, hey, that’s the past. It’s over. You read the sayings that say just that.
The scary too-positive quotes that make you feel even worse about not being able to forget or forgive or magically turn into not-you and conquer the world, the universe and heaven and hell.
from Pinterest. See??? Who can survive that relentless positive attack up there? Or is that just me who starts laughing hysterically while stabbing myself in the eye at that advice rant?
That you’re supposed to be grateful for whatever trauma put permanent scars on you instead of wishing it had never happened in the first place. That being angry is somehow bad or evil and you should just be peaceful and smiling and…
Yeah, the list of how to conquer your demons and past blah blah. Entire wings at Barnes and Noble devoted to this subject.
Where was I. Obligation.
I know Z knows I agree to go anywhere under real duress and reluctance. I know Z is stuck in a rather awful situation and feels alone, cut off and powerless. I can back off and look at all this very coolly. Somewhat coolly.
But I don’t feel safe.
That might seem silly to some of you, who have never had to question the people around you all the time or some of the time.
There’s this new show called Dietland, where Plum, the main character, has to assess each and every person that talks to her and ask herself what that person wants or why they’re talking to her at all. She’s fat. Not a size four fat when everyone around her is a double zero, she’s FAT. That rang the bells and then some with me. What does this person want? You have to question everyone’s motives all the time. Because they will hurt you. Because people go out of their way to find new ways to make you cry. Because people butter you up to…yep.
If you haven’t seen Dietland yet or were scared off by the MILITANT FEMINISTS theme implied…honey, overcome that and go watch an episode.
I can’t do slavish, best friends devotion with this person. I am also financially worth pennies. I can’t go on shopping sprees and spend the day eating lunch and impulse buying. I also get so uncomfortable when Z offers to pay for stuff. I can’t repay it, I can’t reciprocate the way Z wishes…sighs here. Lots of sighs.
I’d rather look at costume jewelry, makeup and shoes, as I am FAT and clothes shopping is a horror to me when I go with skinny people.
I just have to stand there and look at stuff or go find a section I can actually buy stuff in, which I can’t, because I have no money to spare for even the stuff marked down.
Okay, I promised not to kvetch about the actual excursion. Sorry!
I’d also rather shop for clothes alone or with people I trust…having to admit the tent-like polyester brown and gray tunic, that’s too short and sleeveless, you found stuffed at the very end of the Savers plus size rack isn’t quite tent-like enough, no thanks.
I jest a bit. A bit.
Ah.
I cannot do the BFF thing. I can’t. Not with Z. It creeps me out.
I get a creepy sensation. That not-safe crawl across my skin. My instincts tell me to get away, get away. Not that I think Z will physically hurt me or anything like that. It’s more like a parasite burrowing into your inner organs…oh that sounds so unkind and horrible and NOT NICE. I sense the clingy. There are some I don’t mind being clingy with me, this one I do mind. I mind it a lot.
Also, yours truly is terrible with confrontation and admitting to having real feelings or being hurt or…yeah. I whisper that it’s fine, it’s fine. I tend to say that a lot. You don’t give them any ammo…is my actual life motto. And then all that repressed everything explodes and splatters people who have nothing to do with any of that repressed emotional magma. I should suck it up and confront the person I’m so and so with.
MAGMA! Whee!!!! Fun!
Safe.
I have to deal with whatever had actually started this notion that I am not safe around Z and that I need to avoid her or even just end the friendship, such as it is. Then Z doesn’t have to try to recruit me to her stable of bolsterers and I don’t have to grit my teeth and pretend very badly what a good time I’m having.
I meant this to be very short. I tried to keep it all about me and my magma emotional fuckwaddery. I don’t experience this with my other few remaining friends…and oh, what if they are just tolerating me? Do you see where the vicious circle kicks in? Yep!
Molly, hoping I’m about to take her somewhere fun.
ANN WUEHLER 