Tag: Dred Scott

Every Day

Monday and back to the office with me this morning. The weekend was lovely, if not particularly productive in terms of getting things done, but I do need to rest from time to time. Yesterday I had to do some work for Paul–nothing really, just didn’t want to do it, you know how that goes. I slept later than I’d wanted, but it rained overnight and was still raining in the early morning, which is why I was so asleep and didn’t want to get up. The rest of the day was damp and chill, if humid and gray, but I did manage to get some things done. I didn’t find the time change particularly grueling this year; I just went to bed early on Saturday and slept in a bit. I did have some trouble sleeping last night, and got up to yet another boil water advisory and low water pressure. Heavy sigh. I hope I can shower and have a normal Monday this week–but the fates do seem to be conspiring against me. Oh, well; there are always worse things.

Yesterday was restful which was very nice. I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked on the house yesterday, but that’s okay. I spent time icing my calves to try to help the Achilles tendons stop being sore–they are very much better than they were, it’s barely noticeable now–and made dinner and did do some things before we watched LSU Gymnastics at Florida, and then went to The Traitors-UK again. (I’m hoping there’s enough of it to get me through the Festivals, at any rate. Overall, I had a lovely, relaxing and restful weekend, which was necessary and lovely. I got all errands done that were necessary, did some clean up around here, and got the rest I needed in order to face down this week. I think we’re busy in the clinic this week, too–and I’m a bit behind on my work, so I need to use today to get everything caught up before I am back in the clinic tomorrow (Monday is my administrative day where I try to get everything caught up from the week before). No pressure there, right? I’ll manage somehow. I always do.

I’m dreading looking at the news; over the weekend I don’t pay attention much because I can only take so much, so I limit my exposure to it as much as I can. It isn’t that I don’t want to be informed or know what’s going on in the world around me, but the reality is “24 news” doesn’t mean reporting on news for twenty-four hours, it means regurgitating the same news over and over again while everyone you can get on camera to discuss, argue and debate the same news until you really want to throw something sharp and hard through the television screen. Who have we bombed and/or invaded today? What rights are being curtailed by either Congress, executive order, or the most corrupt and lawless Supreme Court since the Dred Scott decision (which hounded Roger B. Taney for the rest of his life, as it should have)? What other allies are now refusing to share intelligence with us because our president and his court are all Russian assets? (I remember the days when not a single Republican dared support anything Russian; their entire party was grounded in anti-Russia sentiment, only to do a complete 180? The North remembers.) I remember still all the Vietnam news reports when I was a child…

As I mentioned, I didn’t sleep that great last night; I had a fever during the night and woke up to a damp pillow and a damp spot in the bed where I’d sweated. Obviously, I flipped the pillow over and rearranged things so there was a layer of blanket between me and the damp spot in the sheets, and I didn’t feel that great. I woke up several more times during the night–love waking up to a boil water advisory, but at least there was enough pressure for a shower this morning, praise Jesus. I have something going on with my stomach again, but I am hoping it’s not a relapse, and not entirely sure what I would have to do to ward that off. I think maybe I ate too much yesterday–always a possibility–and that’s what the issue is this morning (and was overnight). I also forgot to take my pills yesterday, which also could be a part of this stomach annoyance.

And on that pleasant note, I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again tomorrow.

The Colossi of Memnon, during the Nile flood

Edge of Seventeen

Just like the white winged dove….

Sing it, Stevie!

So I managed to get some writing done yesterday–not only did I get some writing done yesterday but it actually flowed; it wasn’t nearly as painful or forced as it has been when I’ve been writing lately, which is lovely. I also read for a little while yesterday; I am moving into the final act of The Savage Kind and am really enjoying it; I hated put it aside yesterday when my allotted reading time had finally run out. I slept very well last night–didn’t want to get up this morning, or more precisely, didn’t want to get out of bed which felt unusually comfortable to me this morning–but I do feel well rested. I am working at home today, which is nice–I really don’t want to go out into the heat–but things change. We watched the first few episodes of Condor last night–it’s not bad, a more modern-day version of Three Days of the Condor, which was one of my Cynical 70’s Film Festival movies during the pandemic–and I do feel relaxed this morning….probably because I am still in denial about everything I have to do and get done.It just keeps building….

My anger has finally cooled over the so-called “supreme court” rulings of last week; but I still have a lot of righteous indignation and outrage left that can easily be fanned into red-hot flames. Louisiana, of course, had just passed its very own trigger law, which our piece-of-shit governor signed. Of course, my own rights will soon be overturned by this joke of a court; as I tweeted on Friday, “Somewhere in hell Roger Taney is smiling because his supreme court may no longer be the worst in our history.” I mean, when you are passing out rulings that are about on the same level as Dred Scott, you really should sit back and reflect on your life choices. It’s bad enough we have four perjurers on the court along with a sexual harasser, a probable rapist, and a woman whose religion has brainwashed her into a Stepford wife–someone on Twitter said yesterday “if the founding fathers could see us now they’d say ‘You let Catholics on the court?'” I love to point out that despite all evangelical claims that this is a Christian country, they never specify which brand of Christianity they mean. Pentecostal? Quaker? Lutheran? Catholic? Missouri Synod? Latter Day Saints? No two sects of Christianity agree on anything; it was precisely this division of belief within the same theoretical faith that led to centuries of war and oppression in Europe, and the very American standard of the separation of church and state. You also have to remember that originally nearly every colony since the Europeans decided they were taking over this continent from its natives followed a different sect: Maryland was Catholic; Massachusetts Puritan; Rhode Island was founded by Roger Williams upon the very principle of religious freedom and became a haven for persecuted religious minorities; Virginia was Episcopal; and so on. Christianity isn’t a monolith where everyone believes the same thing–they can’t even agree on the basic principles of their religion or how to pray or who can preach or teach.

Although they do all have the symbolic cannibalism ritual–but again, all different versions.

But the “supreme court” has a long and tragic history of incredibly bad and damaging rulings–see Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, Citizens United, etc.

There’s another Alabama story brewing inside my head–you know, that non-stop creative ADHD thing I have going–about a small town in Corinth County trapped and controlled by it’s radical fundamentalist religion. I know I had the idea for the town years ago–it’s called Star of Bethlehem–but this idea for using that town is vastly different than the original one I had (in which the town’s water supply was deliberately tampered with as a corporate experiment in which the townspeople began developing strange abilities; I can still make that work into this–imagine a small remote town in the grips of a maniacal controlling religious sect where this happens; are these miraculous abilities a gift from God or the work of the devil? Which, really, was kind of the point of the superb mini-series Midnight Mass) but it keeps nagging at me as I sit down to work on other things. I scribbled some notes in my journal last night while watching Condor–again, it’s an interesting modern take on the original story–and so we’ll see how it goes.

I also started writing Mississippi River Mischief yesterday. I was going back and forth, wondering how to open the book, and finally just decided to say fuck it and start writing it. I wrote 173 words on it, which while not much is certainly something. Hopefully after work today I can work on it some more. I’ve started figuring it out a bit more–I already know who the victim is, I already know what’s going to be going on in Scotty’s life during the course of this book–but there’s all kinds of things left for me to get figured out. But–as with every Scotty book–I usually tend to just jump into it headfirst and see what happens.

So, all in all, a relatively productive weekend and very few regrets. I still have a ridiculous amount of work to do, but…progress is all that matters and I refuse to allow myself to get stressed out.

And on that note, it’s Data Entry time. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader. Hope we all have a better week this time around.