Tag: Greg Stillson

Proud

What have you done today, to make you feel proud?

That M People song was released in the mid-1990’s, and has become kind of a queer anthem in the time since. It was used in the original American adaptation of Queer as Folk, and it gets played a lot during Pride Month. I loved the M People; I have one of their CD’s and they were prominent on my dance soundtrack of 1994-1996 (“Sight for Sore Eyes” is still a great song I have on Spotify playlists today), which is also a time I am writing about (sidebar: maybe “Never Kiss a Stranger” is a novel not a novella), so it stays fresh in my head.

Pride is a direct response to shame–because so many of us were forced to live in shame about who we are and just existing for so fucking long, we now choose to come out and be proud rather than ashamed of who and what we are, despite the bigots who continue to try to legalize oppression of us while all we really want is to be left alone to live our lives in peace. I will never be made to feel ashamed of myself for who I am any more. And no, I’m not sorry that my existence bothers some people because you know what? Their existence bothers me–-but the primary difference is I am not trying to force them to stop existing or even to like queer people.

Pride is of course one of the seven deadly sins for Christians—Proverbs 16-18: Pride goeth before destruction, And a haughty spirit before a fall. Better it is to be of a lowly spirit with the poor, than to divide the spoil with the proud.

So, the use of the way “pride” for our month of celebration inevitably brings out the faux-christians, screaming about sin and…but as I said, our pride is the opposite of shame, and we are reclaiming ourselves and refusing to be shamed for who we are anymore. And yes, the shaming always comes from christians cishets (I prefer the French pronunciation shah-SHAY)  —you know, the ones who are supposed to love without question? And ultimately, my life and my sins are between me and God—and none of your fucking business.

But this post is for those of you who stubbornly refuse to get it: my sexuality doesn’t impact you AT ALL.

Why do they need a whole month? Veterans only get a day is one of my absolute favorites. First, the use of “they”, while politer and not quite as insulting, is really no different from the ever-popular bigoted “you people”; so I guess props are in order for being slightly more polite (although I suppose if they knew it was politer they’d use you people, or to be grammatically correct, those people)? As for veterans only getting a day while we get a month, well, I don’t seem to recall legislation being passed on any level of government legalizing discrimination against veterans. (Although the way our government treats its veterans is disgraceful–and as always, the war hawks who love to send young men and women to risk their lives, mental health, and limbs for a foreign policy predicated on ensuring corporations make as much money as humanly possible will always vote to cut or eliminate veterans’ benefits while waving Support the troops! banners and flags–because they are nothing if not craven, vile, and completely soulless.) The combined efforts of government and medical science were applied for years to criminalize and stamp out the existence of queer people. Homosexuality was still considered a mental illness (!!!!) until I was twelve years old. How precisely does one grow up well-balanced mentally and emotionally when you are repeatedly told that what you are is actually insane? (And coming from a family where mental health issues are genetic…and knowing that I had my own mental health issues already wasn’t helpful; I thought for a long time the two were connected.)

And for the record, May is Military Appreciation Month, and the fact they don’t know this makes a mockery of their religion, their intelligences, and their feigned concern for the military.

If the cishets had to put up with, for one day–a mere twenty-four hours–what queer people do every day, they’d become homicidal.

And telling people they cannot legally discriminate against a fellow American citizen is not forcing them to accept and/or like queer people; it’s merely telling them they must treat queer people with the same respect they’d treat anyone (oh, the horror). The entire point of this country, from its beginning (although it has often failed to live up to that ideal) is that every citizen is equal in the eyes of the law–regardless of anything that might make them slightly different, especially when the difference is so slight as to not be noticeable. I don’t know why this is so hard for people, I really don’t. (And yes the convictions of Greg Stillson last week affirmed this guiding principle for the nation and his worshippers choosing to not accept that is more example of their utter contempt for this country, period. Some ‘patriots’.)

And if you don’t want to be compared to Nazis, then stop coming for marginalized groups and scapegoating them. Your dishonesty is not only un-Christian, but inhuman. It is not for other humans to judge sin; that is, per your own Holy Book and what you theoretically believe, reserved for a God who is very jealous about what is His and what is not. I believe in Christianity as a game-plan or road map to being a good person and doing good things in my life; I do not believe in talking snakes or trumpets so loud they can make walls collapse or that having heatstroke on the road to Damascus was actually divine intervention. I do not believe Paul had visions of Jesus, so anything written by him in the New Testament is suspect and not gospel.

I am also willing to account for that, if need be, if there ever actually is a Judgment Day. But what I believe is between me and God. To paraphrase Cher, I account to three people: myself, Paul, and God.

What I do know is that if there is a God and such a thing as a heaven, going to church three times a week while acting like a hateful piece of trash the rest of the week ain’t getting your ass into your heaven. You’re literally doing the bare fucking minimum, and those three hours or so you’re spending in church are just a waste of your time because you aren’t learning anything or striving to be better.

And any heaven that welcomes people like Phyllis Schlafly, Anita Bryant, Maggie Gallagher et al is not my idea of heaven; spending eternity with those people would be Hell.

This year, Pride seems all the more important–certainly more than it has in years. I haven’t been to Pride in a very long time–I’ve been to a lot of Prides over the years–and probably won’t attend this year either; it’s too hot for one, and the older I get the less I like being hot, sweating, and tired in crowds.

I hate to break it to the homophobic trash, but nothing you say is original or something we haven’t heard a gazillion times before. I’ve said it before and will say it again: fuck all the way off. Miss me with your concerns about “the children” when you aren’t concerned, for example, about the need to teach kindergartners what to do if there’s an active shooter in their school. Miss me with your concerns about “the children” when the states passing the worst anti-queer laws are the same ones where child beauty pageants are the most popular. Where is the outrage about sexualizing children in that instance, Moms for Liberty? Yes, painting a six-year-old’s face like she’s a streetwalker and dressing her provocatively for a chance at a sash and a trophy is absolutely one-hundred-percent okay with you? These are also the same states that allow underage marriage and have almost complete abortion bans.

Moms for Liberty is just another incarnation of the hate group One Million Moms (who never ever had more than fifty thousand members); which is why I always say queers can never completely trust a lot of straight white women. (Let’s never forget that straight white women gave us President Donald Trump. Ever. This should be their everlasting shame.)

It’s also going to be interesting to see what companies and corporations will be making a play for queer dollars during Pride Month, while donating money to anti-queer politicians and stay silent when all these horrendous laws are being passed. Target? Anheuser Busch? Miss me with the rainbows and pride statements this year. You have a chance to stand up when it mattered and instead you turned into pathetic sniveling cowards waving a white flag–proving that your so-called “commitment” to equality and my community was nothing more than a disgusting, shameless attempt to attract queer dollars and the money of our allies. Shame on you both. I don’t drink beer, but when I did I drank a lot of Bud Light in gay bars because of their support of the queer community. But when they had an opportunity to take a principled stand for equality and against bigotry, they crumbled like a finely aged feta. Same with Target, which was even sadder because they had been so supportive. But I will never step inside another Target and I will never order from their website. My Target credit card will get paid off as quickly as possible so they make as little money from me in the future as possible, and I have already cut it up because I will never support that shitty, backstabbing, cowardly piece of shit company again.

I’ve always kind of had an issue with the corporatization of Pride over the years. Yes, I get it; they are usually non-profit organizations who need to raise money to pay expenses and put the show on. You need donors for that–as every nonprofit does–and so the swing to wooing businesses and multi-billion dollar corporations began…as well as the complaints about the merchandizing of Pride. But Pride was, and always has been, an event to celebrate every color in our rainbow and to show the world that we’re here and we aren’t going anywhere; we are not ashamed nor will we be shamed. We aren’t going back into the closet for anyone. Period.

It’s always amused me to listen to people complain about Pride, with the leathermen and the kink fetishists and the drag queens. “I don’t want my kids to see that!” Then keep your fucking kids at home. Any Pride that turns it back on any part of the community is notPride. I’m tired of being penalized because other people have had children—your children are NOT my responsibility.

I already pay taxes to educate them.

I also hate the shaming of kink; the attempt to remove drag queens and the leathermen and so forth from Pride celebrations because that makes the straights uncomfortable frankly disgusts me. Just because some queers have issues with kink—well, that’s their problem, and if anything, we all should be grateful to them. The leathermen and drag queens were out and proud when a lot of their current critics cowered in their closets, while the kinksters and queens were out fighting for the rights of the cowards, creating a community and a world in which they were free to come out…only to want to drive the people responsible for that freedom and community out of Pride. “I want to bring my kids to Pride but I don’t want them to see that.”

What the fuck, people? Don’t you understand that the only reason you can be queer in public with your kids is because of the very people you don’t want your children to see? It’s bad enough the straight use “the children” to try to take away our rights; it’s even worse when people within our community try the same tactics. I don’t know, maybe reexamine your own internalized homophobia rather than trying to reshape the community?

The original Prides were protests, and the original parades were protest marches. Seeing how Pride has, over the years, sold its soul and meaning to corporate sponsors saddens me. Those sponsors are mostly interested in queer dollars only (see: Target and Budweiser) and not in actually supporting the community and our rights (see: Target and Budweiser); you can tell by how quickly they back down when the Christofascists have a problem with their support of our community (see: Target and Budweiser).

That shallow support is unwelcomed and unwanted and very transparent.

Learn your history, queers. It wasn’t that long ago—during my own lifetime—that our sexuality stopped being considered mental illness. We’ve come pretty far in those fifty years, but we have a long way to go and the fight is not over. So, come out to Pride, and celebrate our hard-won freedoms. Be visible; because that visibility might help someone else come out and stop feeling shame. Create and live and love and vote and above all else, maintain queer joy in your life.

Because all of those things? Well, they’re also victories.

Bongo Rock

Today is two things–the start of hurricane season and the start of Pride Month. I have a Pride post that I definitely want to finish and post at some point, and I’ve not really decided what kind of entries I want to do–social media and here–to mark the month. I still think the thirty-four convictions of Greg Stillson was the best gift for Pride American queers have ever been given, to be honest, and I still am a little in shock that it happened–trial and verdict. And of course the traitors have all lost their treasonous little minds, too–my personal favorite is “if they can do this to him they can do it to anyone!”

Um yes, that’s precisely how laws and the judicial system work–no one is above the law in the United States.

Period.

I way overslept this morning, but we stayed up super late last night watching Bodkin (we only have two episodes left to go, and it’s really interesting; much more complex and clever than I’d originally given it credit for) but I wound up not getting into bed until midnight, and I didn’t get up until about nine thirty this morning. While I wanted to sleep in, I didn’t want to sleep in that late; I feel discombobulated and like I won’t be able to get the things done this morning I wanted to get done–but that’s just loser talk, methinks, and a way to give myself excuses for not taking the books to the library sale or washing the car or picking up the mail and dry cleaning or go to the gym. But now that my coffee is kicking in, I’m feeling more alive and awake and like fuck yeah I can get that shit done, get out of my way.

Always nice.

Yesterday was a good day. I worked at home, got all that done while laundering the bed linens, and ran my errands, did some cleaning around the house and later in the day we had a massive and marvelous thunderstorm. I grabbed The Rival Queens (my current nonfiction read) and spent some marvelous time with it in my easy chair. I do love that period of time, and I’ve always wanted to write about an adventurous fictional woman who was a member of Catherine de Medici’s Flying Squadron; an accomplished seductress spy, navigating the complicated politics of France during the Wars of Religion and the decline of the Valois dynasty. It was truly a fascinating period, not only in France, but throughout Europe. My next non-fiction read will probably be The King’s Assassin, the book on which Mary & George was based, and that’s another fun period I would like to write about. Someday. There really was nothing like the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for upheaval and Game of Thrones-like cutthroat politics.

I also watched LSU’s thrilling baseball win over Wofford in the regionals yesterday, and they play again today at 4. GEAUX TIGERS!

I also looked at the submissions call for the story I am working on–thinking the deadline was May 31 only to discover it was actually June 1, which means I can let the story sit a while longer before revising it one more time to see if I can make it stronger. I am very pleased with how it’s going so far, and looking forward to getting some more writing done today. I am a little behind on my schedule thus far (the one I made earlier this week, remember?), but the deadline being later certainly has made that a bit simpler and easier to navigate without feeling pressure.

And on that note, I am going to get another cup of coffee and head into the spice mines. I’ll most likely be back later–that pride entry I want to write–and I also need to think about what kind of entries to do for Pride Month. Anyway, have a lovely Saturday, and I’ll check in with you again later, okay?

You’re So Fine

Work at home Friday, and the weekend is nigh. Huzzah! Yesterday was a gloomy day with rains off and on, with a flash flood warning and everything. It was the kind of day that makes you feel lazy, you know? When the air conditioning inside has been going for days and then all that damp gets into the cold air? All I want to do is curl up with a book and a blanket. Alas, it was not to be as I was at work. Sigh. Why can’t these marvelous thunderstorms strike when I’m at home and can do just that very thing? (I was woken up by another amazing one this morning at around three; the thunder was so loud and close I kind of figured I’d wake up to no power.) But I slept well last night, have only a couple of things to do outside the house today–pharmacy, mail, gym–and am hoping for a really productive day.

I heard the news about the verdict (verdicts?) in the first criminal trial of a former president of the United States in history–well, he did say he was going to have a historic presidency, and he certainly has achieved a lot of firsts–first president to be impeached twice, first president to be criminally charged and convicted, and every time he seems to appear in court, he loses again–all that winning he promised the American people, who knew the winning was going to be done by prosecutors? I did dip into Twitter a few times to see the predictable meltdowns, and who knows what this means? He could still win the election, if people are nasty and hateful enough to still vote for him, and the absolute moral collapse of evangelical Christianity (they never had any high ground; they have always been abominations and apostates in the eyes of their God and the world they think he created)–now they are committing blasphemy and driving even more people away from Christianity–which has always needed the enforcement arm of the State throughout History to gain converts–they do not follow the ministry of Jesus, to whom they pay lip service and drape themselves in the symbols of their faith, but that is merely hollow pageantry, since their souls are blackened and shrunken with hate and pride and everything else forbidden in the Holy Book they love to thump but not read.

And yes, as much as I personally am enjoying all of this, it also saddens me, as someone who, despite its flaws (and there are many), loves his country. The very idea that someone could have been elected to the highest office in the land who was never anything more than a braggadosio; a liar and a rapist and a bigot and a psychopath, with no loyalty to our system, our Constitution, and the law of our land; only to himself and enriching his family at the expense of the taxpayers. He used the power of the position to commit crimes, and he had to commit crimes in order to get elected in the first place. I have always suspected there was more election interference in 2016 than we know about. Hey, if they can deny the results of 2020, why can’t we question the 2016 election? It was never properly investigated, was it, thanks to his enabling traitor acolytes in Congress; the cancer that is Mitch McConnell saw to that. I just hope more people see that the right is “party first” rather than “country first,” which means they definitely betray their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution, like the power-hungry corrupt trash they are.

Our country has been tarnished forever by electing fool’s gold and embarrassing us on the international stage, a sideshow freak hawking snake oil who’s never accomplished anything other than being a “fake” businessman on a reality show and stealing an election.

Needless to say, any plans to write last night were completely derailed by the news–I spent most of the night watching the news on MSNBC, I mean, it was historic (although I am growing very tired of witnessing history, seriously) and therefore should be paid attention to, but it also put me in mind of all the major changes and historic events I’ve witnessed: a man walking on the moon; Watergate; the end of the Vietnam War; the hostage situation at the Munich Olympics; the Bicentennial; the Iranian hostages; the Gulf War; 9/11; a president being impeached for a blow job; the endless wars that followed 9/11; the first female presidential candidate from either major party; and now…this national disgrace. In all honesty, given the evidence I’d seen, I didn’t see how the jury could not convict…but…the gravity of convicting a former president had me wondering if the jury would take the job that seriously and remove the aura of the Oval Office and see him as he actually is: a petty criminal who grifted his way in the public consciousness…and for the record, I’ve despised him and his family since he first started turning up in infotainment news. I cheered every bankruptcy and public embarrassment/failure, hoping that each would be the last time we ever heard that benighted name again.

And from 2015 on, he always reminded me of Greg Stillson from The Dead Zone.

I’ve also tried very hard to never talk about him on here, because I didn’t want the foul stench stinking up my blog…but how can I not mention the convictions, probably the biggest new story in years?

I do apologize to you, Constant Reader, for bringing him up here. Seriously, if a genie offered me three wishes, the first would be to never see or hear of him or his wretched excuse for a family ever again.

And on that grim note, I am heading into the spice mines. I feel very good and rested, and hope for a very productive day. I might be back later; one never knows, and tomorrow is the start of Pride Month, so I’m sure I’ll have quite a bit to say on that score all month long.

Louisiana Moon

As if you weren’t sick of my self-promotion already, now I get to start promoting Mississippi River Mischief!

It’s hard to believe that this is Scotty’s ninth adventure. Not bad for someone who was just supposed to be a one-off, a stand-alone comic madcap adventure that took place during Southern Decadence. The idea for it came to me at Southern Decadence in 1999; on Saturday afternoon I somehow managed to get a prime spot on the balcony at the Parade to watch the massive crowd of sweating shirtless men partying down below at the intersection of Bourbon and St. Ann. I noticed a really hot guy wearing sweats and carrying a gym bag fighting his way through the crowd to get to the Pub downstairs, and I recognized him as one of the dancers for the weekend. In that instant, I had a mental flash of a dancer being chased through a crowd of shirtless sweating men at the corner by bad guys with guns and the dancer only wearing a lime-green thong. I held that idea in my head, and sometime later that weekend Paul said to me, “you know, you should write a book set during Decadence,” and I grinned and replied, “I already have the idea.” I had started writing a short story called “Bourbon Street Blues” a year or so before this; but realized that would make a better title for the stripper crime caper during Southern Decadence, so I made a folder for it and kept it in my files and in the back of my mind. Several years later, when talking with an editor about something else when I worked at Lambda Book Report, I asked if that might be something he’d be interested in. He said send him a proposal, which I did–having no clue what I was doing–and they offered me a two book deal, turning my stand-alone into a series. Having no idea how to write the second book in such a series, the money was too good for me to say no or to quibble, figuring I’ll figure it out when I need to–which is really the motto of my career.

The Scotty series has always had a bit of a “pantser” feel to it for me because I’ve always pantsed it. I knew that the first adventure–Bourbon Street Blues–was going to be that Southern Decadence story, and I also knew I was going to fictionalize a governor race, basing it on a senate race that occurred when we first moved here and we couldn’t believe that one of the candidates was actually a serious candidate (sadly, he was just a harbinger of what was to come in Louisiana; now he’d seem like one of the fucking sane ones), and I kind of borrowed, a bit unconsciously, from the Stephen King character of Greg Stillson from The Dead Zone. Bourbon Street Blues was a prescient novel in so many ways–and I had no idea of that at the time, seriously. There’s a scene where the Goddess shows Scotty the potential flooding of New Orleans after a levee failure (in the book it was deliberate though) and of course I predicted the Right’s move into full-bore hardcore neo-Nazism as well in that book…never dreaming it would become a reality.

Scotty has always been a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants series; I’ve never really outlined or planned the books or the series in any way, other than an amorphous idea that the love triangle situation I created in the first book would take three books to resolve. During the course of the third book I realized I needed at least one more book to resolve that story, and so it went from stand-alone to trilogy to quartet…and then Katrina happened. Katrina created an unplanned gap in the series, and I never really knew how to do Katrina from a Scotty perspective. It struck me that they wouldn’t have evacuated, but Scotty wouldn’t have ridden the storm out in his apartment, nor would his parents have done so at their place; they would have all gone to the Garden District where Papa and Maman Diderot have a generator. I just didn’t see how I could write a funny Scotty book about the levee failure and the city’s destruction. Also, we learned something about Scotty in the second book (Jackson Square Jazz) that I meant to deal with in the fourth book. By the time I was ready and able and willing to write that fourth book in the series…well, I forgot that I’d planned on dealing with that issue from Scotty’s past in it, and never did ever circle back around to that resolution of something from his youth.

I did remember when I decided to write Mississippi River Mischief, though. I kind of wrote myself into a corner with Royal Street Reveillon, in which something happened in Scotty’s personal life that was tied into the case, but I couldn’t write another book and pretend that never happened, even though it would be hard to deal with in the text of the book and story. But then, as I was trying to work it out in my head, I realized now you can circle around back to that issue from Scotty’s teen years because this is the right place and time for him to be reminded of it because of what happened to Taylor.

And you know what? I think it made for a better story now than it would have almost fourteen years ago.

Scotty has grown a lot over the twenty or so years (!!!) I’ve been writing him, but who he is at his core has never changed. Scotty is a good person, with a genuine sense of kindness, and is pretty level-headed and never really lets things get to him the way I let things get to me–and God knows, he’s dealt with a lot more shit than I have in life. I like his sense of humor, I like his spirituality, and I like his untrained, he-doesn’t-know-how-it-works psychic abilities, and of course, I love his family. His parents are amazing, his older brother and sister are also pretty cool characters, and of course Frank and Colin are also fun to write. I also never knew how subversive I was being by creating a throuple long before anyone ever talked about these kinds of relationships within the queer community–and it’s lasted all these years. There have been ups and downs, of course, but they always wind up coming back together again no matter what happens–and a lot has happened. Both Scotty and Frank have been shot a few times, not to mention all those car accidents–and he’s also helped cover up a crime (no spoilers here, no worries!).

You can order it here, if you were so inclined…

Hold On To Now

Monday and back to the office with me today. Weekends are simply not long enough, ever, and should always be at least three days, methinks. Yesterday I witnessed the dreadful Saints performance, and it was not a good weekend for Louisiana football fans; the only glimmer of light locally was Tulane’s victory. I finished reading Shawn’s book, which was marvelous, and then picked out my first Halloween Horror read: Riley Sager’s Final Girls, and it’s long past time I’ve read this book. It’s rather embarrassing that I’ve not yet gotten to it. I also downloaded the audiobook of The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones for this weekend’s drive to the Redneck Riviera, and read another Alfred Hitchcock Presents short story, from Stories for Late at Night, “The Ash Tree” by M. R. James, which was delightfully creepy and reminded me of Daphne du Maurier’s “The Apple Tree”–and that in turn made me think about creepy trees as a trope in horror, and thought perhaps I should give the trope a whirl at some point. We watched the Scouts Honor: The Secret Files of the Boy Scouts documentary–which was just as creepy and awful and horrific as I thought it would be, as well as yet another pointed reminder of how straight people have failed to protect children since, oh like forever, and then cover it up as much as possible but then have the nerve to accuse queer people of pedophilia and grooming?

Sure, Jan.

We also watched the Jennifer Garner Apple Plus series The Last Thing He Said, which wasn’t great but wasn’t terrible, either; it just kind of evolved and wasn’t very thriller-ish or suspenseful. I also predicted one of the bigger plot twists in the first episode long before it played out in the show, but it was well done and an interesting story; but it wasn’t very thrilling or suspenseful; it never really seemed like there was any danger or stakes. It ws talked about a lot, but never part of the show’s reality? It was interesting enough to hold our interest–although I think I may have approached telling the story in a different manner than they did. It’s an interesting thought, at any rate.

It’s lovely having a kitten in the house, even if it means being more alert and having to get up more regularly because there was a crashing sound from somewhere else inside the apartment–usually followed by a galloping kitten moving at high speed away from the noise and mayhem he caused. He woke me up this morning by knocking my glasses off my nightstand table and then playfully batting them around on the floor, and once I took those away from him he went for the broom. He’s incredibly sweet, though, and I love that he’s so fearless and feels comfortable and at home enough to play. He slept on me for most of the Saints debacle yesterday, through the Boy Scout movie, and then moved back and forth between me and Paul during the Jennifer Garner show.

I also started writing the opening of a short story or a novel or something at any rate while watching the Boy Scouts documentary–part of it and the scandal was in New Orleans–and had an idea for the opening scene for something so I started writing it down; mainly about a college student away from home for the first time who’s obsessed with true crime and wants to be a true crime writer but isn’t sure how to get started chasing her dream other than majoring in Journalism at Liberty State in Liberty Center, Kansas–the town from #shedeservedit, why not reuse it? I don’t know why I started writing this when there are so many other things I should be working on. But that’s also life, you know, when you’re a writer–at least for me, there are always so many other ideas and thoughts and stories banging around in my head that it’s sometimes hard to focus on what I need to get done.

Heavy heaving sigh.

I never did make that to-do list for the week, so perhaps that should be the first thing on the list (I often do this so I can cross something off the list immediately; it’s satisfying and always seems to keep off working on getting the list completed). I also think that once I finish reading the Riley Sager I am going to reread a classic Stephen King that I’ve not revisited in a long time, The Dead Zone, which used to be one of my favorites and is still one that I think about a lot–especially during the rise of the former president, who eerily reminded me of the character of Greg Stillson, written thirty or forty years or so before the rise of the reality host/failed real estate mogul. (I’d considered rereading it in the wake of the 2016 election, but didn’t have the strength; I think now would be a good time.) I liked the opening of the Sager; which was encouraging. I hope to be able to get several books read this month…I think my reading is going to start picking up again, hallelujah. I think having a cat sleeping my lap while I read was what I was missing, and why it was hard for me to read since we lost Scooter. (I promise not to turn this into a Tug stan blog, seriously.) Today is going to be his first day left at home on his own for a while; we’ll see how he handles that.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader; I’m sure I’ll be around again later on.