Tag: MAGA

Charlie Brown

Thursday morning day after Payday blog, in which I just have to get through today before it’s work-at-home Friday again. I feel rested this morning, something I’ve noticed in the last couple of weeks: by the end of the week I feel better than I do at the beginning, and it’s easier to get up. Peculiar, isn’t it? I certainly don’t get it.

It was about four years ago that the pandemic shut down the world. It seems like it was about a million years ago, doesn’t it? (And it makes me laugh every time idiotic MAGA trash ask “are you better off than you were four years ago?” Yes, yes, a million times yes, you memory-impaired inbred morons.) I remember coming to work that morning with no idea what was going on or what was about to happen. They were putting up shields around the front desk in the lobby and everything was being wiped down with bleach. I sat down at my computer and started doing some work when the announcement came that we were shutting down the entire building and closing off services and to go home. I was stunned, because the only time this ever happened was when a storm was coming in from the Gulf and the city needed to evacuate. I don’t even remember going home that day, but I do remember making hundreds and hundreds of condom packs while watching movies and rereading old books to get reading again. Christ, what a nightmare.

So yes, I am better off than I was four years ago. You’ll need to do far better than that to get me to change my vote–far far better.

I did finish my rather long blog post about the Left Coast Crime incident, but am hesitant to pull the trigger and take it public. I’m not sure how comfortable I am with it, because there’s still very much a lot of centering myself in a conversation about race…but it was my race that was being questioned; and I am still not sure how I feel about the whole thing. On the one hand, how do I write about an experience I had without putting myself into the center? On the other, isn’t it tiresome when white people make racism about themselves? I also worry that I am not being sensitive enough. I know that part of the shock of the whole thing is really because my white privilege was challenged (I do enjoy born-with-a-penis privilege until I open my mouth and my Louis Vuitton clutch falls out).

I’ll post it later today most likely, and take the slings and arrows that may come my way.

Sparky was very needy yesterday when I got home from work. He climbed up onto my shoulders and cuddled and gave me head butts, and then when I sat down in my chair (after doing some chores) to let him sleep in my lap…he stayed there until Paul got home at nine! I did write a bit more on my story, and I also realized one of the problems I was having with it was making it long enough, because in my head I always want a short story to be around five thousand words. Not every story needs to be five thousand words, Gregalicious. Seriously, sometimes it’s hard to believe that I am in the twenty-third year of my career as a fiction writer…which is also a third of my life. Wow. The world was certainly a different place when I first got started, isn’t it?

The beauty of writing is there is no right or wrong way to do it as long as the finished product is good. I get these weirdly dogmatic mentalities about writing fiction–“a short story needs to be 5k, a novel minimum of 80k”–it’s not carved onto tablets brought down from Mount Sinai–and get past that kind of stuff. But that’s the logical, everything needs to be neat and tidy part of my brain that often triggered my anxiety, and it does feel good to not be anxious the way I used to be. I also think I’ve convinced myself that my creative batteries are dead and need to be recharged. I was thinking this morning–as is my wont–that when and if I get this book done, I am going to go back to working on Chlorine and try to get it–as well as Muscles–finished. I really do need to finish all this stuff. I do want to write more Scotty books, but maybe not right away, to be honest, although I do feel like time is slipping away, but who cares if the Scotty books going forward are kind of set in the past? The older ones certainly are.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back later on.

Da Ya Think I’m Sexy

Lundi Gras, aka Orpheus Monday, and I have taken the day off from work. I have to make groceries and lay in supplies since we’ll be trapped in the neighborhood except for a brief six or seven hour window after Orpheus and before Zulu tomorrow morning. I am up early because of PT at ten this morning, and here’s hoping I can get this done before it’s time for me to fly. It looks like a lovely day out there already, which means a hopefully lovely night for parades. Orpheus is my favorite night parade, mainly because I love Ole Smokey, the Orpheus train float, which is gorgeous. Orpheus also throws a shit ton. I did very well at Iris on Saturday morning, and while my endurance was sapped, I am glad I started going to parades again this year after missing last year. My moods this year are all over the place, since this is when Mom was in hospice last year. The anxiety medication works, of course, but even it isn’t strong enough to conquer grief, I guess.

I worked on the house yesterday a bit but my mind was too fatigued to read, which was a real bummer. I want to write this afternoon after I get home; time really slips through your fingers the older you get. I do need to work on the house some more today as well. We also streamed more of Abbott Elementary, keeping track of the Super Bowl on my phone. I did watch the boring first half, so gladly changed the channel when Paul came downstairs to take a break from working. Ironically, the second half turned out to be a lot more exciting, with the Chiefs winning in overtime 25-22. That sound we all heard last night was MAGA heads exploding. They are still exploding this morning–especially the MAGA christians (lower c deliberate, not a typo)–who’ve decided that the only Black woman in the Kelce suite (Ice Spice), who was wearing an upside down cross, is a Satanist because of it. The horrors! Satanism!

I’m sure it has nothing to do with her being Black. Might as well include a side of racism, right?

Fucking idiots. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Have fun in hell, apostates. I do love calling them on their sanctimony with a Bible verse. 1 Timothy 2:12 is my favorite when they’re women…

But then again, we’ve known they were dangerously stupid morons since 2015, and every day is a new lesson in their dangerous stupidity.

Heavy sigh.

I did do some good scribbling in my cool new journal yesterday as well. It’s always lovely when you’re starting a new journal, with all those fresh and clean pages to fill in, and there’s always a bit of sadness when I finish the old one. This last one was red, and one of the things I need to do either today or tomorrow is transcribe any notes on any story or book or essay that’s written in there that I haven’t already. I think I’ve managed somehow to get everything from the early part of the journal done, but you never know. If I don’t transcribe them, I need to at least put sticky notes on important pages so they are easier for me to find.

My memory continues to suck royally, but the lack of anxiety about it is nice (thank you, new medications!). I’m still trying to adapt to this new world for me; and of course I worry that my lack of anxiety is going to be a problem with motivating myself to write. I don’t think I’ve actually finished anything since the change in meds, but that was also correlated to my surgery and the recovery and the loss of stamina/endurance….which has me wondering how long I’ll be able to last at Orpheus, especially since I’ll be exhausted from PT this morning. I just checked the weather and it’s going to be windy and chilly tonight, in the low 50s, which is also unappealing.

Sigh.

Ah, well. It is what it is, I guess. So I am going to put on my PT clothes, finish my grocery list, and get a little more cleaned up before leaving for my appointment at PhysioFit. I will probably be back later. One never knows.