Tag: Nazis

Doing the Best That I Can

Sunday in the Lost Apartment and all is quiet here. Today’s four parades start later this morning and literally run all day. I suspect I’m going to skip them all today. I wandered out to Iris, but just can’t stand for very long; I’m just not in good enough physical condition yet to exert myself into anything other than sitting in a chair resting and icing my ankles, which I did for quite some time yesterday. I overslept in the morning–Sparky was cuddled up with me again, with the occasional plaintive “mew” to try to wake me up. The bed did feel marvelous yesterday morning, but the morning was already pretty much over by the time I was caffeinated and finished with yesterday’s blog entry. I read for a while (and this reread of The Secret of Hangman’s Inn is showing me, at long last, the primary flaw in kids’ detective fiction–which is also why The Three Investigators have held up better than most of their contemporaries), and did some here and there chores. I don’t, after all, have to go back to the office until Wednesday morning, so having another day that was mostly for resting my body and my brain didn’t seem like a waste, you know?

I finished rewatching Judgment at Nuremberg and it remarkably holds up still in modern times. Not going to lie, and if the reasons I rewatched it aren’t quite as obvious in this modern time, let me explai it to you: we are, despite all the lessons and warnings from the past, sliding into that same kind of world where “just following orders” is no longer merely about ‘doing your job’ but doing evil. Nuremberg is one of the best films–if American propaganda heavy–dealing with these questions of national guilt and national morality; I remember someone writing (or saying) after 1945 how amazing it was that no German was really a Nazi and how none of them “knew.”

Did people admit shamefacedly to being in the Klan after? Still?

I’ve always given the common German people a bit of slack about being Nazis, simply because, monstrous as Nazism was, they weren’t making the plans and the decisions. So, how much culpability did the rank-and-file people actually bear? The cogs in the killing machine?

For example, how culpable are all Americans in what is going on in the country now? Was it possible for every day Germans to not know what was being done in their name?

We don’t know what’s going on in our own concentration camps, do we? But we know they exist and more are being built, don’t we? As Americans, how much culpability do we have as citizens? It is easy to say “we didn’t vote for this” or “I was opposed to Vietnam” or “dropping nuclear weapons on Japan was necessary to save American lives” or “my ancestors didn’t own slaves/weren’t in the Klan/didn’t benefit from systemic discrimination” but…wasn’t enslavement human trafficking, and on a scale modern minds can scarcely comprehend how big it was, how horrible it was, and historians and American propagandists have done an excellent job of downplaying the horrors and dismissing the immorality of owning other people. Human beings had less rights than animals in the so-called land of the free; and this is not even taking into consideration the genocide of the indigenous peoples and the mistreatment of those survivors for generations. History will not look back and think all of that horror was unknown to most Americans. They will say it was a horrible part of US History, a spreading stain that soaked in and spread for hundreds of years. Is not the whole world responsible for not stopping Hitler when they could have? The Allies knew about the camps as early as 1940, if not sooner, and did not only nothing but actively worked to suppress the information. Why?

And there were American Nazis before the war–lots of them. Still are, in fact. So much for never forgetting, right?

Heavy thoughts on Bacchus Sunday, but Judgment at Nuremberg is a still important and necessary film.

After the movie finished, we watched The Fighting Tiger, the ESPN documentary on D-D Breaux, the legendary LSU Gymnastics coach for over forty years, who single-handedly built the program up from nothing, which was incredibly fun and also reminded me of how long Paul and I have been watching LSU Gymnastics. I had been meaning to check out this most recent season of The Traitors, because Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski are both on, so I switched over to that. We’d never watched the show before, but MY GOD were we entertained! I was kind of hesitant because I despise Lisa Rinna (a complete turn on her, by the way; I was a fan before she was a real housewife), but this show is perfect for her! She stopped being fun as a housewife, but this is the Rinna I enjoyed in her first seasons on the show. We stayed up much later than we intended because we simply couldn’t turn it off–and there are former seasons to catch up on, too! HUZZAH!!!

It looks like its going to be another gorgeous day out on the parade route–maybe I’ll wander down there to take some pictures; tomorrow I plan on walking over to Office Depot and take some current pictures of the bead trees; one of the many things I miss about our office on Frenchmen Street is walking to and from there during parade season, and all the bead debris along the way. There was also a racist moment in Tucks yesterday, apparently, with some riders hanging a black doll over the side of the float by the neck with beads–so it looked like a lynching victim, which is completely and totally disgusting and unacceptable. I hope the fucks who did it are publicly named and shamed; they deserve worse. There’s no excuse for that shit ever–let alone during Carnival. They should have been pulled off the float and had the shit kicked out of them.

And on that note, my easy chair and my ice machine are calling me this morning. Seriously, I cannot wait for Paul to get up so we can get back to The Traitors, which is my new addiction! Have a great Sunday wherever you are, and I’ll be back for a Lundi Gras post tomorrow.

Talk to Me

Monday morning and it’s still cold. Go figure. Parades start this very Friday, and if it’s cold, well, I won’t be bold. I am not going out there to get sick from being out in the cold, and besides, I’m old. Maybe it’s all that history I read where someone old caught a chill that developed into pneumonia and death within days. As much as I joke about it, I am not in any rush to leap into my grave (or the crematorium, as it were). I just don’t like being sick–and last spring I was sick enough to last me for a lifetime, thank you very much. I am about ready for this cold to take a serious hike. Although apparently tomorrow’s high is going to be seventy? But then it gets cold again for the rest of the week, but not nearly as bad as this weekend and today are going to be. Layers, layers, layers.

Yesterday morning was disrupted by the power outage. It was only out for an hour, but it was enough to disrupt the day and throw it off track. I did read in bed under my blankets with my coffee until the power came back on, which was lovely. After which, I went downstairs and read while watching the news. I was pleased that Carlos Alcaraz won the Australian Open (I am no longer a fan of anti-vaxxer Novak Djokovic). After Paul got up we finished The Night Manager before moving on to His and Hers, which is interesting so far. I do enjoy Jon Bernthal, so there’s always that. (I didn’t like his take on American Gigolo, which could have been really great, but we didn’t finish.) I didn’t get a lot of anything done yesterday, overall, but I did get some chores done and the house won’t take much to look orderly. We’ll see how I feel when I get home. I have to make groceries on the way, but that’s not a big deal. I have some dishes to do and such, but other than that and straightening out the kitchen rugs, I think I am pretty caught up on the house? There’s no laundry left to do, the dishwasher is empty and ready to be loaded, so once I put away the groceries, I can do that.

The news, for the most part, has been good lately–or at least, better than it has been. This weekend’s Epstein reveals were staggering, and are only going to continue to get worse and worse. Murder? Rape? Torture? Cannibalism? How nice that our modern elites looked at Caligula’s court and said “hold my beer”, right? I mean, we’re still living under a fascist government, so the news can only be so good, you know? Minneapolis is still under siege, the Supreme Court continues to be a joke on the regular, and day by day the trash that voted for him to “own the libs” are slowly peeling away from him because the hellish policies of the mad king are affecting them, too–which “isn’t what they voted for.” Aw, shucks, sugar, we warned you and you mocked us–and while I am pragmatic enough to understand we need them to turn on all of this and vote it out; but that doesn’t mean I am forgiving anyone. Even those of us who voted for the lady with the weird laugh own this, too–because we’re Americans, and we could have done more to stop this. None of us get to say we aren’t responsible for this because it is our government, we’ve allowed this all to happen, and now we all have to come together to rebuilt it all back together and clean up this fucking mess.

That was part of the reason I wanted to watch Judgment at Nuremberg again–we haven’t finished, we only got about forty minutes into it–because of the entire notion of societal responsibility and guilt. After the war, the common German people–who’d seig heil‘ed and gone to the rallies and threw flowers and cheered the military parades–weren’t allowed to look away from their government had done in their name. The question of “true believer” or “too afraid to say anything” is something that can never really be answered. I was born sixteen years after the war ended in a neighborhood filled with war and post-war refugees from eastern Europe. I was shown the military films of the freeing of the camps in elementary school. I learned very young that fascism and Nazism were both evil. My childhood and teens were filled with stories of the MOSSAD tracking down Nazi war criminals, all over the world. There was a lot of World War II historical fiction out there, too, and even more fiction about Nazism rising again out of the ashes of history–William Goldman’s Marathon Man, for one, and Ira Levin’s brilliant The Boys from Brazil–and I did see Judgment at Nuremberg in my teens, which got me interested in the day-to-day German people, how the scourge rose to power, and what they lived through and experienced. We were taught that Nazis and fascism and antisemitism were societal evils…and that we Americans, with our freedoms and our democratic republic, were morally superior. (We were not–and in our American arrogance we also believed that such a thing could happen here.) Now we are in a situation (again) where our government has turned us into a rogue, authoritarian wannabe dictatorship–just as the Roman republic declined into an autocracy. Don’t blame us! we post on social media in response to foreign scolding, we didn’t vote for this!

How does that make us any better than the former supporters saying this now? The American penchant for dodging responsibility is perhaps our worst, most narcissistic, societal and cultural flaw.

And on that somber note, I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and try to stay warm if you can.

The dragon float arrives at the Orpheus Ball

I Sing for Things

Wednesday Pay the Bills Day again, and yet another cold morning here in the Lost Apartment. Yesterday was bitterly cold again, and our “break” from the cold is today, getting up into the fifties before we slide back down into the freezing water level and even….SINGLE DIGITS this weekend. It’s in the low thirties outside, and my workspace is really chilly. I forgot to set my alarm last night, but woke up when I was supposed to, which was nice–and I did it without Sparky’s help. Usually he’s trying to get me up before the alarm goes off, but not this morning. He was curled up somewhere warm downstairs, obviously, because he was waiting for me at the foot of the stairs this morning when I came down. Sigh. I have to run errands tonight after work–prescription, some groceries, gas–so am hoping it won’t be too terrible outside when my work shift is over. If not, oh, well. The one thing I don’t like about the cold weather is how my legs get so tired and achy so much faster–and leg exhaustion pretty much sets the tone for your entire body, doesn’t it?

But I did some chores last night–started some laundry, ran the dishwasher before putting the dishes away, cleaned the counters–and it was very nice coming down to a clean kitchen this morning. Note to self: the reason for doing chores during the week is to stay on top of it so I don’t have to spend time on the weekends getting it all caught up. I plan on doing another book purge this week, too, and to do some organizing of the bookcases again. It looks so much nicer and neater in the living room with all those books gone…and absolutely must remember to continue purging when I get to the point where I feel like it’s okay to buy books again.

I spent a lot of time last night watching news clips, interviews, and influencer podcasts about the fallout from the fascism we’ve all witnessed in Minneapolis. (It doesn’t escape my cynical notice that everyone went completely nuts about this–right and left–once they’d murdered a straight white man on camera…so, not to worry, racialized people, queers and women: we still care more about straight white men than any other demographic in this country.) The blame game, the quick shift by Kristi Noem to “just following orders,” and the possible fall of the vile Stephen Miller and his pick-me skank of a wife (IMAGINE seeing that naked and letting him inside of you…I may never stop internally screaming) was just too delicious of a train wreck to look away from. It almost feels like they are in the “find out” part of FAFO, but they are literally like the walking dead. Firing Bovino, Noem, Lewandowski (her adulterous LOVER), and Miller is just a start, for the record. Nothing less than prosecution will suffice.

That, and never being able to show their disgusting faces in public again without heckling.

When I’ve talked recently about wishing everyone could just let us enjoy Heated Rivalry and its success without being jackasses, I was referring to the Cyd Ziegler/Empty Netters podcast that’s been going on since late last week and early into this one. At first, the piece in Outsports was terribly disappointed, as it seemed to indicate that the guys on the podcast were actually homophobic trash who pretended to like the show for views and clicks, by exposing text messages the one supposedly sent to a friend. Obviously, he knew who he sent the texts to–as they are still in his phone–and he did a video defending himself, claiming, as always, they were taken out of context and the timeline of how things happened and played out were muddled to make him look worse. Some of his defensive language was problematic, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about the whole thing…but then I got some more context on Cyd Ziegler, the Outsports journalist who exposed the story.

Cyd is a registered Republican gay man in Florida who supports Ron DeSantis, so anything he says is bound to be suspect, and his claim of years of gay advocacy and activism is rather suspect, given his politics. If you are a gay man, claiming advocacy and activism–how the fuck can you be a Republican and support Don’t Say Gay DeSantis? The backlash was so strong he backtracked, but…you can never believe or trust anything a Republican says, because they lie like it’s mother’s milk to them.

And yes, I will stand in solidarity with straight allies who might not have the best education on queer rights or issues over a self-loathing gay Republican every fucking day of the week. We may both be gay, but we have significantly different values and morals. Queer MAGA, to me, is even more despicable than straight MAGA…”fuck those fags, I’m not like those pansies” is an attitude and mentality I will never align with or support or stand with in solidarity. There’s an essay in this, methinks, for the newsletter.

I also started the new version of Chlorine, and it’s slow going so far; maybe eight hundred words or so? But the voice feels right, and I am looking forward to getting back into it again today.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader, and I will be back tomorrow morning for my weekly “last day in the office” blog. STAY WARM!!!

When gorgeous, muscular men are involved, wrestling can create living sculpture as art. Meta will, naturally, hide this as “adult content”

Don’t Let the Green Grass Fool You

And it’s back to the office with me this morning. Bleargh. There are worse things, after all, and I don’t have to go in on Thursday, so that’s something. But it’s been a hot minute since I got up this early, so it feels weird to be sitting here, a bit groggy, with dark outside. But my coffee tastes good and the incoming cold weather doesn’t strike until tomorrow. Paul is leaving to see his mom tomorrow and won’t be back until sometime Sunday, so it’s just going to be me and a lonely, needy cat here for nearly a week. That’s okay; I don’t mind having Sparky glued to me at all times when I’m home. He really doesn’t like being left alone by himself, and he really doesn’t like it when only one of us is home. He’s a spoiled little baby, but he’s our spoiled little baby, isn’t he?

I feel surprisingly good this morning; it wasn’t a struggle to get out of bed and I was also able to resist hitting snooze repeatedly until I had to rush around the house like a madman, either. Today is my injection day, so I need to take it out of the refrigerator to thaw out for forty-five minutes before attaching it to myself. I also don’t know if today is an Admin Day or a clinic day; in either case, we aren’t busy at all this week so it’s not a very big deal, one way or the other. The rest of the week is very slow, too–we kick back into high gear next week, after the new year, as everyone’s insurance resets for a new calendar year. Woo-hoo! But my mood is good, I don’t feel tired, the coffee is going down well, and I am getting a bit hungry and may have to eat my breakfast sandwich here in a moment.

I was really hungry! But that sandwich hit the spot properly. I also have to do my every-eight-weeks-injection–and I can sort of tell it’s almost time. My digestive system hasn’t been painful or anything, but…I can tell when the injection is almost due. I’ve been very dehydrated lately, so need to focus on replenishing electrolytes this week, too; this is all related, of course, to the UC (bastard that it is). I am sure everything will be fine once I pump the medicine into my abdomen for five minutes. So exciting!

We watched Cover-Up, the documentary about Seymour Hersh, which was very interesting. I hadn’t thought of Sy Hersh in years, but have always appreciated his reporting work. He does kind of come across as a bit of a dick in the documentary, but they don’t make journalists like him anymore, which is a pity. My formative teen years (the 1970s) was a decade of spectacular journalism, which made me think that the bad old days of yellow journalism and if it bleeds it leads were a thing of the past and all journalists were ethical and did things the right way and protected the public interest all these years…Fox and our current embarrassment of legacy media is definitely something that needs to be fixed in the future, but our system has become so corrupted that they don’t even bother trying to hide it anymore.

Brigitte Bardot, the Nazi skank who couldn’t act, died. Hope she’s enjoying the flames of hell like the racist homophobic piece of shit deserved. You didn’t become famous for your intellect, madam. After Anthony Geary and Rob Reiner, it was nice to not feel a bit sad when a celebrity died.

The long holiday weekend was lovely, even if I accomplished very little. I did run the dishwasher before I went to bed last night, so I need to unload it tonight, and pick up a few things around the apartment. I also have to make a bit of groceries on my way home from work tonight–nothing major, nothing much, just a couple of things to get me through the week. Tomorrow night I’ll need to swing by the post office to pay the rental and pick up the mail for the last time in 2025…2026 might be worse than 2025, but at least for now there’s the promise of things getting better somehow. I usually do start the year with optimism…

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely last Monday of the year, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back here for New Year’s Eve Eve tomorrow.

Maybe It Was Memphis

Maybe it wasn’t?

Sunday here in the Lost Apartment, and all is well. LSU won, 13-10, not a particularly impressive showing. (Tulane also won, GO WAVE!) The games yesterday weren’t exciting or interesting, so after Paul got up we alternated between games and other things (more on that later). It was a very nice relaxing day, over all. I did run some errands in the morning, but after I got home that was it; no more outside for me this weekend. It was actually in the 80s yesterday, too. I didn’t do much cleaning around here yesterday, either, and the kitchen is a total mess (because I made Shrimp Creole last night for dinner) which I will need to clean up at some point this morning. I also didn’t read much yesterday, either; something I need to rectify this morning. I mean, it is a real messy mess. Yikes.

I dropped off four boxes of books to the library sale yesterday morning, and yes, this pruning of the books had helped de-clutter the living room, and I also came across some books I’d forgotten that I had–juvenile mysteries, amongst other things–which was also kind of cool. I’m planning to do another round of pruning once I get back from the trip (but probably not next weekend; I’m going to spend Sunday recovering from the drive); progress! I also want to start working on the storage attic. I know, the non-stop rollercoaster thrill ride of my life is almost too much to read about, isn’t it?

But I came across copies from a juvenile series, Ken Holt, that I really loved when I was a kid (still one of my favorites; it’s a toss-up between this series and The Three Investigators) and while paging through one of the copies (The Secret of Hangman’s Inn) I remembered how incredibly homoerotic the series was, particularly the relationship between Ken and his best friend, Sandy Allen–they are often around each other in varying stages of undress, including nude, for one example–and often share rooms and beds. There’s definitely an essay for the newsletter about this series, its homoeroticism, and how well the books are actually written. They all have a hard-boiled, noir-ish aesthetic that I loved. They were shot at with real ammunition, had to outwit and out think criminals, and since they were journalists (despite being so young) Ken’s write-ups of their cases and Sandy’s photos often went into syndication. Not bad for a pair of eighteen-year-olds! I also think this series is why I kind of wanted to be a journalist when I first went to college–but that is also a story for another time.

I didn’t write anything on the computer yesterday, but I did spend a lot of time writing in my journal. I also went back and reread my current one from the start, picking up on notes and ideas and thoughts about several things I am working on. I came across some excellent notes for Chlorine, for example, and as I reread my notes (just from this journal) I recognized something–part of the problem I am having with writing further into the book is base premise that starts the book doesn’t really work or make sense; the stakes aren’t high enough for my main character to get involved to begin with, and so I have to amp them up, kill my darlings, and maybe start over. I get very stubborn about throwing stuff out that I’ve already written, but those chapters are salvageable, kind of; I may be able to use the bits and pieces, but I am going to dive into it, headfirst, in December with the goal of getting a first draft finished by the end of the year. Stubbornness about your work is not a good quality for an author to have.

I also got my contributor copy of Celluloid Crimes, which ironically has the short story I adapted from Chlorine’s first chapter, “The Last To See Him Alive,” which is still a good story and I do love that title an awful lot. It’s always nice to see your work in actual print in a book, you know?

Around the games we watched some of the skating from Cup of Finland, this week’s season finale of The Morning Show, and a lot of the news shows. I am still processing the Friday news; the bromance in the Oval with FOTUS basically rolling over on his back and showing Zohran Mamdani his belly, and it may take me a while longer to wrap my head around the devolution of the MAGA movement into fascism and Nazism with the embrace of Nick Fuentes, the gay Latino Nazi, which makes no sense to me but I’ve never understood people who lick the boots on their own throats.

I am also really enjoying Ken Burns’ The American Revolution, which at least is honest and doesn’t really get into any of the weird national mythology we’ve built up around our history–basically to erase any wrong-doing and eradicate any questioning of the endless justifications for stealing an entire continent from its inhabitants. The Americas weren’t discovered and colonized; they were actually conquered, in a mass genocide that lasted centuries. US History and the American Revolution were actually my gateways into my lifelong obsession and interest in history; watching this series is reminding me of how I went from US History to English history to European history, with some dabbling in the ancients (Egypt, Greece, Rome); I really should have majored in History, the primary problem being picking a particular period to specialize in. As I said the other day, I should have majored in History with a minor in creative writing, and I could have become a historian like Barbara Tuchman; her A Distant Mirror remains one of my favorite histories and served as an inspiration for my idea to write a popular history of the sixteenth by focusing on women holding power…that century remains an outlier in Europe when it comes to powerful women and queens. I am probably going to write an essay about my interest in US History, and one about my interest in ancient Egypt.

And on that note, I am going to take my coffee into the living room to see if any more news has broken since I went to bed last night, after which I am heading into the spice mines. Have a marvelous Sunday, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back tomorrow morning.

The temple at Edfu, Egypt

Southern Cross

Monday morning and I am up, drinking coffee and trying to get a move on for this exciting new week! I feel rested and well this morning, which is very pleasant, and looking forward to another new week. Yesterday was pleasant, and I spent most of the day reading or writing or thinking about work, which was nice. It’s always lovely to have a productive day, isn’t it? I find it to be frequently so, and also? Yesterday Scotty’s voice popped back into my head, which was lovely and also made me realize that was why I disliked the manuscript so much; it’s not written in his voice and we’re not really in his head at all and he is simply observing what’s happening without much of a reaction to it–and that sense of growing dread and unease I need the readers to experience isn’t really there. So, I basically unlocked the book at last, and am rather excited about it. Naturally, all I want to do now is work on it, but have to wait for free time to do it. Heavy sigh.

I didn’t watch the Saints game yesterday because I am still pissed about the moment of silence from the last game, and they got dog-walked by the Seahawks, didn’t they? Thoughts and prayers, Mrs. Benson, thoughts and prayers. I’m not sure if or when I will forgive the Saints for this slap in the face to the city of New Orleans (83% for Harris, Mrs. Benson, 83 fucking % for Harris), but this misunderstanding of the Saints fan base make-up (and those of the season ticket holders) is pretty fucking bad and makes me wonder if maybe she might be the gold-digging skank his blood relatives always thought she was. I for one am tired of being a fan of a team that regularly makes it clear they don’t give a shit about their non-white non-straight fans. I’m not at “throwing away all my Saints merch” stage yet, but pretty damned close.

I got deeper into reading The Hunting Wives as well over the weekend, and I am really enjoying it. As I’ve remarked numerous times already, it is very different from the TV show and so I am enjoying the book and how it is all coming together. I need to finish reading this before October–along with the other two current reads–so I can move on to the Halloween Horror Month reading. And yes, my enjoyment of the book means I am probably going to end up reading more of May Cobb’s canon. It’s always lovely to find a new writer you enjoy, but I have so many already I can’t keep up!

It was an interesting weekend for evil and corruption, wasn’t it? There was yesterday’s Nazi rally in Arizona, featuring all the right American fascists, but was a little taken aback by the shock some people have expressed about it; what the hell did you think it was going to be? Charlie Kirk is far more powerful to them as a symbol than he was when he was alive, and they’ve already started whitewashing things he said and did during his public, grifting life. I also loved that the ‘border Nazi” was exposed as corrupt and open to accepting bribes, and the fact that the regime told the FBI to drop the investigation? There really is no low they won’t stoop to, and as long as they remain racist and misogynist and homophobic their voters don’t care. Free speech is under attack, and don’t think any and all efforts to censor or ban “adult” material won’t be used as a pretext to ban queer work. I’m glad to see people are finally waking up to how rigged the Right and their soulless minions have made everything. Better late than never, I suppose, but this kind of insight was sorely needed in 2016 and 2024, thank you very much.

I don’t think the lady with the laugh y’all hated would have pressured a network into firing a talk show host who was critical of her, you know. But that laugh, amirite?

And on that note I am heading into the spice mines for the day, so have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader! I will see you tomorrow morning like clockwork!

Egyptian god Horus

Take a Chance With Me

Well, here we are on Monday morning and I am getting my second infusion today, which means driving out to Clearview on I-10 and spending two hours in a heated massage chair as I get this stuff infused into my blood stream before heading to the office. I am already a bit groggy and sleepy/tired this morning, so who knows how I am going to feel once I am finished? I got nothing done yesterday–Paul came downstairs and turned on Wimbledon, which I then got sucked into watching, and soon enough I was no longer in the mood to get much of anything done. The chair is like a black hole sucking me in…and of course, Sparky turned my lap into a bed for most of the day as I watched the MAGA meltdown and civil war raging across all news networks and all political influencers. What can I say? I enjoyed a lot of cruel laughs at their expense (odds they’ll begin to think he’s lying about other things? Too soon to tell) last night–but while everyone not in the MAGA bubble is very well aware of the Trump/Epstein connection and have been for a very long time…I’m beginning to think they had no idea? And thought of course if your only source for news coverage is Fox or Newsmax–which would never do anything to connect Dear Leader with convicted sex trafficking pedophile–you might not have known.

Which could finally explain the shock and horror– and the outright rejection of the party line.

Could this be the tipping point? There was an awful lot of anger from the right over the weekend; even Hitler Mini-me Nick Fuentes pronounced MAGA dead and “good riddance.” Did I miss a falling out between that POS and MAGA?

And for the record, Pam Bondi has always been trash.

We did finish watching Too Much last night, and kudos to both Megan Stalter and Will Sharpe for inhabiting the main characters and their relationship. They really had great chemistry together, and Sharpe is both charismatic and handsome. He looked familiar, and I think it’s because when he was on season 2 of The White Lotus (which also got him an Emmy nomination) all the gay sites were posting shots of him from the show in his underwear, so he was kind of everywhere but not in a way that would stick in my mind (I looked him up, and once I saw the pictures from The White Lotus I knew where I knew him from). We really enjoyed the show and the romance between their characters. I don’t know if there will be a second season or not; the first season kind of definitively ended, but I can also see how they could spring a second season out of that ending.

I did do some more filing and cleaning around here yesterday, and ordered some groceries for delivery. I have to stop again on my way home from the office to get a couple of things I couldn’t order, but based on my bloodwork from the other day I probably should cut ice cream and some other high-sugar foods out of my life again. I’ve reached the weight I’d like to stay at (actually, I’m a bit heavier than my preference), so it’s time to start eating in a more healthy manner again.

I’m taking Megan Abbott’s new one with me to read during the two hours of the infusion, primarily to keep me off my phone, and get back into the swing of reading. Tonight I am going to put my editing hat back on and start tearing through all the things I need to get written by the end of the month. I’m not really sure what we are going to watch next, but I know I want to see the new Taron Edgerton show on Apple Plus; I’m a fan, what can I say? But we may have to wait until it finishes airing to stream it all at once.

And on that note, I am heading on out there. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back tomorrow morning with a report about whether or not the infusion made me tired again.

Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)

Saturday morning and I have a couple of errands to do this morning. I need to go by the bank (I haven’t made a deposit in person in eons) and I have to swing by the grocery store. Sigh. I really didn’t want to leave the house today, but here we are. It’s also a struggle these days to get through as we go through and experience the collapse of the American experiment in self-rule. I think another significant part of our history that isn’t taught the way it should be is we aren’t taught about how many Tories there were in the colonies during the lead up to and aftermath of the Revolution. We aren’t taught New England threatened to secede during the War of 1812, or that there were people on both sides of the Civil War1 that sympathized with the other side; North and South weren’t monoliths the way we are taught. We aren’t taught about how many Americans were Nazi sympathizers and isolationists before Pearl Harbor, using the slogan “America First”–so you see why I have always raised a cynical eyebrow whenever anyone uses that slogan; it was tied to Nazi sympathizers to me.

Watching the collapse of our country is challenging and more than a little bit depressing. It is terrible that just as I approach the age of retirement and the final chapter of my life…well, the retirement may turn out to be involuntary, as my clinic’s funding is definitely on the chopping block, Social Security is about to be looted and destroyed, and I don’t want to even look at the paltry 401k, which has also probably evaporated. No job and no retirement funds is going to be awesome when I turn 64. Paul got the notice from the NEH to not bother applying for grant funding, as it’s all been cut, so his job may not survive this, either–no more festivals in the spring. So, miss me with “we need to be nice to MAGA voters now finding out”–fuck them now and forever. I will never forgive them, and their suffering lightens mine. You want to embrace them, be my guess. Me? I will never stop laughing and pointing, let alone mocking them and enjoying their tears. My patience has worn out for ignorant haters, sorry not sorry– and as they so eloquently put it, “fuck your feelings.”

Yesterday was a nice day, overall. I got up, had a virtual meeting at work, and then did my Admin work before running some errands. I got that done, and then Paul and I made a Costco run and spent an insane amount of money. After getting home, lugging everything into the house and putting it all away, I was tired. I collapsed into my chair for a while as Paul went upstairs to work on the NEH grant–but got the email so didn’t have to bother for the rest of the evening and we dove further into The Residence, which I am greatly enjoying. Uzo Adoba is fantastic as Cordelia Copp, the world’s greatest detective, and it’s very well cast, high production values, and the writing is quite crisp. The chief usher at the White House (the divine Giancarlo Esposito) is murdered during a state dinner, and Cordelia is brought in to solve the murder. I think what’s most interesting is the divide between the White House domestic staff v. the White House political staff; the domestics work for the House, the political staff comes and goes. I’d never really thought much about the staff of the residence, so it’s an interesting look at how that all works, and it’s very cleverly structured. Highly recommend.

I do have some errands to do today, and a lot of straightening up to do as well. I want to get some reading and writing in this morning, so I can go to the gym tomorrow (I know, right?) and get some more done. I’ve been letting things slide a lot lately, which probably means I am depressed, which isn’t surprising, given the state of the world and everything else going on in my life. I think there’s an element of why bother with this book, to be honest, which is counter-productive and quite self-destructive, but it’s hard to be productive when your default is almost always pessimism. I always knew Republicans were working very hard to destroy everything decent about this country (unfettered capitalism is sociopathic in nature), but I never dreamed they might actually succeed. To paraphrase Game of Thrones: “Whenever I wonder why the Republicans would do something so counter-productive to democracy, I like to play a little game: what is the worst reason they would want to do this?”

Littlefinger was right, even if he did end up with his throat slit for his treachery.

Yesterday I also realized that one of the great American traditions, going back to colonial days, of evading paying duties and tariffs was smuggling. I used to love to read about Colonial smugglers (John Hancock was one), and some great fiction was built up around smuggling. I’ve always thought the years of Prohibition (and alcohol smuggling) in New Orleans would be an interesting time to write about. That decade saw the rise of Huey Long to power in Louisiana, and there are some fantastic stories about that post-Storyville time here. Jean Lafitte was a pirate, too–but he was also a very successful smuggler. But again, one of the great problems of New Orleans/Louisiana research is going down wormholes and sidebars–my ADHD does not matters at all in this regard; I do remember wanting to write about “Mrs. Officer,” the first woman cop in New Orleans, who was hired because they needed a woman to search and interrogate criminal women, which was a problem during Storyville days. I mean, what a great decade to research and write about! Imagine what “Mrs. Officer”2 endured in terms of misogyny as the only woman cop in an era where women couldn’t vote.

There’s also a protest today scheduled in New Orleans, as well as around the country. I’m hoping to make it, it just depends on how tired I am after getting things done this morning. I feel pretty good right now, but that also doesn’t mean I won’t flag later, either.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you most likely tomorrow morning.

  1. This is a classic example of why I say we don’t teach history properly (which will end up being a longer-form essay for my newsletter at some point). There were plenty of Tories during the American Revolution. There were Southern sympathizers in the North and Unionists in the South–I knew about the North, but whenever I’d come across that about the South I figured it was after-the-fact apologia, excusing Southern whites for their inhumanity. But over the least few years as I’ve done more deep dives into Alabama history, and hearing more old family stories, I’ve come to realize it was actually true. Erik Larson discusses this in more detail in his The Demons of Unrest, which I do recommend. ↩︎
  2. SHe was always referred to as “Mrs. Officer,” which also makes a great title. ↩︎

Mama Can’t Buy You Love

Ah, Wednesday and it’s all downhill for the rest of the week, isn’t it? Huzzah! I feel good this morning, too, more rested and alert than I have been for most of the week. So, this week feels back to normal in that weird way of feeling better later in the week as my body again resets to getting up early every day. I was fatigued again last night when I got home from work, but I wrote for a little while once I was home, and did some chores (the kitchen looks presentable again) before zoning out with The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and the news last night. I also ran an errand after work, picking up my copy of Christa Faust’s The Get Off, the third and probably final book of the Angel Dare series. I loved the first two (Money Shot and Choke Hold), and nobody writes like Christa. If you’ve not read Christa, and love noir, you really can’t go wrong with reading this trilogy. It really is fantastic.

As a general rule, I simply watch the antics of “”book social media” from a removed, slightly bemused distance and don’t get involved, other than a comment about how jaw-droppingly insane the latest controversy on those sites are, and these controversies usually involve the actions of a problematic author and/or publisher. I have my thoughts and opinions about each and every topic in those hashtags and posts that grow heated (remember the fun days of American Dirt? Good times!) but I don’t contribute to them because I don’t see any point. Are there authors that write bigoted, uninformed work that is questionable at best and horrifying at its worst? Are there readers who will embrace those works because said stories confirm their prejudices and values? 100%. Are they all, authors and readers, awful people? Certainly. Will arguing with them on social media do anything other than raise my blood pressure and wreck my day? Not likely. Personally? I don’t want to ever unintentionally offend anyone (unless you’re MAGA, in which case you shouldn’t be reading my work in the first place because you are not my intended audience but if you are reading it, suck it up snowflakes, and fuck your feelings); and I constantly question my choices in my work. My go-to is always if I question it, best to remove it. (Sidebar: I bet the American Dirt author–Jeanine Cummins?– was really happy about the pandemic because it made everyone forget about her and her shitty racist book.) There have been some tempests in this week’s (and last’s) social media teapots1, haven’t there? Sheesh. There was an explosion (again) of homophobia in the m/m writing community, which got people riled up (I love when cishet straight white women inform gay men that books with two men falling in love aren’t for us.) There was another kerfuffle where a romance writer gave her main male character an HEA–just not with the female lead, but another man. Horrors! Needless to say, that also triggered an on-line meltdown, and I am reminded again why I never want to write romance…just like I eschew the y/a publishing community, which is also a snake pit.

I’d rather jump into a piranha-infested river, to be honest. Or be forced to be on a Kardashian television show.2

And yesterday, the “Tori Woods” groomer romance situation blew up on the Internet–and her book, about a “romance” that begins when an adult male is attracted to a three-year-old “but waits for her to grow-up so it’s not child sexual abuse”, is from the same publisher as the last author who wrote racist books and was “canceled” (whatever the fuck that means) deservedly for being a racist piece of shit. Sounds like a publisher issue to me, doesn’t it? I think the publisher has also published problematically racist books before, too. There was some historical romance writer who also outed herself as a racist pos–apparently, people of color only existed in the past to be enslaved or rescued by noble white people–and seriously, how did RWA take so long to burn to the ground in the first place?3

Don’t get me wrong; I still want to write a gay romance novel at some point–and maybe even more than one, honestly. But I’d really rather not get dragged into that on-line community, if I can. (I saw yesterday that someone is publishing a grooming romance–and the grooming started when the girl was THREE. Um…yeah, no thanks.) Did not trying to be a part of the on-line y/a community probably, possibly have cost me some sales? For sure, but at the same time I am really grateful to have my peace of mind.

Peace of mind is priceless.

I also got my assignments for Saints and Sinners/Tennessee Williams Fests, and I am going to be hopping all weekend, it looks like–panels, a tribute reading, the anthology launch–and I will have LOTS of friends in town, too. But this year I took Monday off, too, so I can recover from the weekend and get things done around the house. I’ll also be commuting back and forth so Sparky’s not alone for the whole weekend, and someone needs to feed him, anyway. He is not going to be happy. Paul went to the office yesterday and wasn’t home when I arrived, so Sparky was especially cuddly and needy. I don’t mind, but clearly he doesn’t like being left alone–or puts on a good show after he has been.

My Youtube algorithms, always an interesting mystery, have recently started showing me videos about the classic scifi television program V. I loved V when it originally aired, but when it became a regular weekly series in the 1980s, I stopped watching because I lost interest. I did love the rebooted series, which was fantastic and again ended on a great cliff-hanger. And of course, once I watched one video, it started showing me more. This of course is because I’ve been watching videos about the rise of fascism in Europe between 1918-1939, World War II, and the “America First” movement of that period (newsflash: conservatives were Nazi-adjacent until Pearl Harbor)…and that’s the allegory at play in the series–the Visitors are stand-ins for Nazis, etc. I had grown up believing that it could never happen here…but watching this show made me realize how incredibly easy it is for people to side with their oppressors. It’s something, sadly, that is very human. I also remember a school did a social experiment with fascism, which was made into a TV movie called The Wave, which was again the same thing–the way we can so easily slide into being “good Germans.” I read Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here during the reign of Bush II: Electric Boogaloo, which cemented it even further into my head. I’ve talked before about writing a book that I originally got the idea for in the 1990s, where the queers fill in for the scapegoated minority…interesting, though, that my video research into fascism triggered the algorithm to remind me of V, which was also probably, along with Red Dawn, the biggest influences on that idea.

And on that grim note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a wonderful midweek Wednesday, and I’ll probably be back later or tomorrow.

  1. Although I am really hoping the move to cancel Kim Kardashian and her odious family really takes this time. ↩︎
  2. Please, God, let this be the end of all things Kardashian. Haven’t we suffered enough? ↩︎
  3. Racists working with a gay white man (racist) brought RWA down, remember? ↩︎

I Love the Nightlife

I also love to boogie–especially in the disco round, oh yeah, baby.

Sunday morning in the Lost Apartment after kind of a nice, slow and easy day around here. Paul stayed up late working so pretty much slept the entire day away again, and I myself got up late yesterday, too. I didn’t mind, even though I was a little perturbed that I got up so late. But I had a nice morning. I did some things I needed to do and cleaned and organized some more, and I got up pretty early this morning, too. I don’t know how motivated I feel today, but I am hopefully going to get some good writing work done this morning so I can spend the afternoon reading. Sounds like a winner to me. We did finish catching up with Reacher, Abbott Elementary, and Prime Target last night, too. Tomorrow I get to report to Criminal Court for jury duty in Mid-city, so I will be finding out what’s going on with that. I’m hoping to be dismissed before parade days start; I’d rather go to the office and leave early than try to get home at five from Criminal Court in Midcity, which would probably require taking I-10/90, getting off at Tchoupitoulas, and doubling back from there with no place to park. Ah, well, this too shall pass, and as a crime writer, it’s always interesting to see how criminal court–or courts in general–operate up close and personal.

It’s gray outside, and rain is expected, which should put a damper on any and all parades today. There are no night parades, so technically I could make a grocery run after King Arthur ends, but I doubt I’ll want to be out and about at that time anyway. I do have all kinds of things to do today–I want to spend the morning writing and the afternoon reading, if at all possible. It’s always so nice to curl up in my chair with a blanket and read while it’s raining, you know? I like feeling snug and cozy; which is why I am so particular about sleep arrangements. Want to know something weird about me? I sleep with four blankets, because that’s enough weight to make me feel snug and comfortable. I have a soft wool one on the bottom and one really velvety soft one on the top. I need two pillows, always, and also need the ceiling fan on and a little personal fan on my nightstand going. Weird? Just a little bit. But I think we all have things that we do, little rituals, that bring us comfort and joy. Just me? Probably. I always default to me not being normal, I suppose; the product of my youth. Thanks, bully trash!

I did work on an essay yesterday a bit, one called “Try That in a Small Town.” I started writing it when the Jason Aldean nonsense happened last summer, because that “real America” bullshit has always, always pissed me off; and essentially has always been used to demonize cities–you know, the economic engines that fucking drive the country–and reassure provincial types who stay in rural areas that they are more important than the city dwellers. This of course goes back to the lies that were always told to encourage immigration when white people felt the need to “fill the continent” with white people while exterminating the natives. You can be free, you can own land and property, you can prosper because the government will leave you alone to do as you please and not restrict your freedoms. No, the rich people needed more consumers, and they also needed population in the “empty” territories to produce and buy. The United States has always been expansionist; even the Founding Fathers assumed more states would be formed out of native land, after they were pushed out. Anyway, I actually lived in a very small town in a very rural county in an underpopulated state for five horrible years–and I will dispute to my dying breath this notion that small towns are the “real America” (fuck you again and again with razor wire, Sarah Palin)…because everyone acts like they’re like Mayberry when they are really Peyton Place–horribly judgmental with lots of cruel gossip and backstabbing, and the sexual perversions of these “good meat-and-potatoes Americans” not even Grace Metalious could have dreamed up–and Peyton Place was nothing more than a novelization of things she witnessed and experienced in a small town. It always infuriates me, you know, to hear this “real America” shit. Try to make it without Chicago, New York, LA, Boston, and San Francisco. The fucking economy would crater in about two seconds. But…cities are usually Democratic strongholds, so they must be demonized, always.

And there’s the rain! I knew it was coming. It’s just a drizzle but it’s enough for the gutter to drip water on the cat enclosure just outside my laundry room–and it’s only raining on that side of the house. This happens here a lot–it can be raining on one block but not the next; one part of the city can be getting a flooding rain while it’s sunny and bright in another–but I don’t remember the last time it only rained on the other side of the house. New Orleans, always so bizarre.

It also seems that the American people are getting fed up with what’s going on in Washington, and they are starting to push back. I’ve progressed beyond FAFO, to be honest1; the danger to the country’s future is that strong that the mocking and pointing fingers and laughing and atonement can come after the threat has been overcome. I think this is the kind of lesson we needed to learn; we’ve always taken our system for granted and always assumed the government was stable and would hold–forever smug about governments toppling and falling in other countries while we remained stable. The problem is that stability was only achieved through horrific compromises…and human rights should never, ever, under any circumstance, be left to public or government whim. The seeds of self-destruction were planted in the Constitution with the compromise on enslavement. Senators used to be appointed by state legislatures, not the people. BUT it was also designed to be a living document, changed and amended over time to clear up inconsistencies and always, always, intended to protect the people from government overreach. I also agree with something I saw on social media yesterday–every elected official should be required to have regular town halls to meet with their constituents, and they also need to remember they were voted in to work for their district, not the president. Separate but equal branches of government means nothing when elected officials in Congress abdicate their roles for whatever reason.

And really, what is MAGA but the modern Confederacy? Yes, they are also Nazis…but remember–the Germans learned about how to deal with undesirable sub-populations by studying enslavement and Jim Crow. There’s your heritage, rednecks. You were Hitler’s blueprint. And weren’t plantations simply concentration/work camps with a nicer name?

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back tomorrow morning (or night).

  1. I’ve not, and never will, forgive MAGA voters, to be sure–just like I’ll never stop mentally dancing and pissing on Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s graves. But I can put that aside for now to overcome this threat. But there needs to be a reckoning–unlike after the Civil War and 1/6/20. ↩︎