Tag: pandemics

Live to Tell

Work at home Friday, and all kinds of stuff to do and I simply have to stay focused today and all weekend in order to get everything finished that I need to get finished this weekend. It’s been a strange week, overall; the way the week after I turn in the final version of a book always is. I’ve also not had much down time for quite some time without something weighing on me; I’ve written two books since around 12/15 and of course, losing Mom. (I always worry about mentioning that every time I do; but I’m not really sure how and what I am supposed to feel or behave in this situation, so am working my way through it, okay?) I also worked on a short story during that time–two, actually; one I abandoned and another I revised and overhauled–and of course, I write this every morning. Some days I even do two entries. There are any number of saved drafts, too; ones about things I find outrageous, disgusting and deplorable, but want to be able to write more concisely and insightfully on those topics, primarily because I’m usually a bit foggy every morning when I start writing these; and while the drafts get written when I think about the subject (it can be any time of day), I generally don’t have the time to finish those drafts the way I want. Sometimes I go back to them and think, you are a whiny little bitch, aren’t you? And being whiny doesn’t move hearts and minds, does it? If anything, it hardens them more.

But it’s been a hot minute since I went what some of my friends call “full-on Julia Sugarbaker.” Don’t think that there haven’t been times I’ve wanted to, but I simply didn’t have the time to make certain that everyone I was saying was correct and sourced properly and so figured it was better to do nothing than do something wrong. Almost every day something happens or I see something that makes me apoplectic with rage–whether its the unabashed and unashamed racism, misogyny, transphobia or homophobia I see with far greater regularity than I should, quite frankly; there’s no excuse in 2023 for not knowing better than that; you choose to be a bigoted piece of shit asshole–but I try to calm myself and walk away from the computer or sign out of the infected social medium I am using and go do something else. There were other reasons, too; my day job is dependent on federal funding, after all, and I was also heavily involved in a national non-profit for a very long time. And while I feel no shame nor disgrace nor embarrassment about my beliefs and values, there was always the possibility that there could be fallout for the day job or my volunteer work. So I dialed myself back a bit–not completely, that could never happen in a million years; who I am is so deeply engrained in me that I can’t ever totally stop myself from making pointed observations about bigotry, hypocrisy, stupidity, ignorance, and false prophets. I also try to combat my innate natural selfishness every day, without as much success as I would like.

What happened in Tennessee yesterday was a disgrace and reeked of the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow. Oh, look, another Southern legislature violated their oaths of office and their vow to defend and uphold the Constitution by expelling two Black men who disagreed with them. (The white woman, of course, got to stay,) It’s disgusting, and highly indicative of a political party with no ideas, no ethics, and no morals. All they have is an addictive thirst for power and a Fascistic mentality, a disgust for the Constitution and every principle this country was founded upon, and a need to tear down anyone who isn’t a cisgender white male in order to maintain white supremacy. The great irony is they consider themselves to be a “christian” party, when everything they do is not in the least Christ-like. I guess I missed the part of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus beseeched everyone to give their money to the rich and powerful? To not help the poor and sick because their situation is their own fault?

Yeah, I missed that part, just like I missed the part where we should all give money to Joel Osteen the apostate, because he shouldn’t have to fly commercial. Let people starve and live under highway underpasses! Joel needs a plane! And if you send him money and pray hard enough, God will shower you with riches!

Um, isn’t the whole point of Christianity is that your reward comes in the afterlife?

But empathy and compassion have no apparent place in organized right-wing Christianity; they made a religion in their own image and it’s so hateful, disgusting, and abhorrent no one outside of Margaret Atwood could imagined its end game back in the 1980’s (and sadly, she was right). People today still don’t see the hypocrisy, the greed, and the amorality that many sects of Christianity have come to follow. How is Joel Osteen or any of his co-horts any different than the Renaissance popes? At least they patronized artists. (Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly is perhaps one of the best books about how the stupidity, venality, and short-sightedness of incredibly fail men leads to disaster, the section called “The Renaissance Popes Trigger The Protestant Reformation” is particularly apt.) Just as the billionaires of our time (Bezos, Musk, the Koch family, Zuckerberg, Gates) are nothing more than the modern versions of the Robber Barons of the so-called Gilded Age. It’s always the same thing, cycling over and over again with us as a society and culture refusing to learn the lessons the past is crying out for us to learn.

The truth, which my community has been screaming at the Democratic party, progressives, and liberals for decades, is that the far-Right is just as Fascist as Hitler and Mussolini and their end game much the same: do we really think they’ll stop at banning books and “don’t say gay” bills and erasing transpeople? Of course not. It never ends. They want to purge this country of anyone who doesn’t see the United States as a paradise for straight white men. Are there parallels between our modern times and oh, say the 1920’s and early 1930’s in Germany? There absolutely are; I started noticing this in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s; can we not forget that as recently as thirty years ago the Republican party was more than happy to let everyone infected with HIV just die? (Their reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t much different, really.) They thought it was a good thing–and laughed about it–that gay men were dying.

They haven’t changed in thirty years. If anything, they’ve gotten worse.

They impeached Bill Clinton for lying about a blow job; but will defend the high crimes of the Trump family to the death. They claimed Bill Clinton didn’t have the “moral character” to be president, but voted for a lying con-artist who is not only a narcissist but a sociopath, who went through wives and mistresses and rape victims like Tom Brady carving up a defense in the Super Bowl. It always amazes me that the so-called party of family values is also the party of child rape, divorce, and adultery. The same people screaming about “groomers” to scapegoat drag queens and transwomen are actually the party filled with child rapists and kiddie porn enthusiasts. (Dennis Hastert, anyone?)

So, yeah, I’m probably going to start talking about these things a bit more. I am now sixty-one and I am sick and tired of right-wing garbage and trash and the Christian dystopia they seem to want us all to live in; where they decide what is sin and what isn’t (they of course can do as they please), who we can love and how to live our lives, all the while screaming about their fucking freedoms. It’s always funny to me that the progressive idea of freedom is live and let live, while the right’s is you have to do what we say and we’ll decide what’s right and wrong for you.

Kind of like a Renaissance pope.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Good Friday (I didn’t forget) and a nice Easter if that’s your jam; otherwise have a great day, okay?

So Emotional

And just like that, Our Hero is sixty.

And, as I suspected, it doesn’t feel different; just another day.

But it IS my birthday, I somehow made it to sixty, and I am taking the weekend OFF.

Oh, I am sure I won’t be a complete and total slug; I really need to do the dishes (leaking dishwasher), and I have to take Paul to pick up his glasses later today, and also we have to go out to Metairie to get my deep dish pizza from That’s Amore–but other than that, I am really hoping to not leave the house this weekend other than to go to the gym briefly once or twice. I want to finish reading the book I am reading and at least one other; I have some organizing and cleaning to do, but….that’s the sort of thing I like doing. I also like writing; so I am probably going to do some of that this weekend as well. But I am not holding myself to anything; I am just going to spend this weekend drifting a bit from thing to thing, and if I get some things that need to be done done, so be it; if I don’t, well, that’t what next week’s stay-cation is for. I don’t have to work from Wednesday thru Monday, inclusive; if I can’t use that time to get a shit ton finished there’s really not much hope for me, is there?

I am also hoping to get even more reading done next week as well.

We’ll see how ambitious I actually am, won’t we?

But it’s nice. I didn’t think I would wake up to heavenly hosts singing “Alleluia”, the clouds parting and the sun shining directly on me or any such nonsensical things. I’ve never been one to be deeply into my birthday; sure, when I was a kid we celebrated and I had cake and got presents, but I don’t really remember it being that big of a thing…and I’ve carried that into my adulthood. I mean, sure, it’s nice to have a day that in theory is all about me (which should be every day, really–I AM a Leo, after all), but I also have that weird “I want attention/I hate attention” thing going on as well. It’s seriously a wonder that I am as mentally stable as I am–which is a very low bar–but my mind and my personality and ego and id and everything are always, it seems, at loggerheads with each other; all those voices in my head making me feel a little bit on the unstable side.

I also need to stop indulging myself for my birthday. Yes, I am sixty, and yes, I generally don’t treat myself to anything other than some books usually, but this year I got a new computer, a new Fitbit, a new phone, new shoes, books, a new toaster, a new coffee grinder, and a new atomizer for the kitchen. Clearly, I more than made up for past lean years (and dipped into the budget for future ones) already; but it’s also fine, you know. I don’t mind indulging myself by any means; the problem is stopping once I’ve started. I always feel like I should treat myself, all the time; all day every day, frankly, and so the issue is training myself to say no, you don’t really need that, do you? And when you look at things in terms of need vs. want, you find that there really is little that you actually need.

I got caught up on my Real Housewives shows yesterday while making condom packs, and yes, there definitely needs to be an entirely different, Real Housewives-dedicated post at some point. I am getting to the point where I don’t really want to watch them that much anymore, and it’s more from habit now than any sense of enjoyment; like it’s a duty to watch, the way I watched Dynasty all the way to the bitter end, UFO encounters and all. I’ve already paired down from a high of watching every one of the franchises to cutting back to simply the New York and Beverly Hills franchises, but it’s becoming very, very difficult to watch even those two. Paul and I watched this week’s episode of Titans last night as well–which is going in a weird direction this season, but I am here for it–not the least reason of which is Brendan Thwaites, who plays my favorite comic hero Nightwing, is smoking hot. SPOILER: I hate that they killed off super-hot Alan Ritchman and Hawk, but he’s playing the lead in Amazon’s Jack Reacher, and I will say I will be watching every episode of that. He really looks like Reacher, even if at 6’3 he’s a few inches short for the part, but I don’t think those three inches will make that big of a difference on camera.

Sixty. It does take some mental gymnastics to wrap my brain around it. I don’t feel any different–as always on a birthday–and of course, the aches and pains and wearing down of my body has been pretty regular over the last ten years; regular and gradual. I am going to, once the gym renovations have been completed, dive hard into weight lifting again. It occurred to me the other day that, sore and muscles tired from the workout of the day before, that I am going to always be sore and achy anyway; I might as well feel that way from pushing my body to its limits rather than just from every day life. I do want to lose some weight, which may mean changing my eating habits at long last (I didn’t have to for so long that it will be a severe and deeply painful adjustment) but I am going to indulge myself this weekend with the deep dish pizza and after that, I am going to try to start cutting back on fat content and simple carbohydrates–no more snack foods; a sad farewell to chips and Cheese Puffs and Toast Chee peanut butter and cheese crackers–and focus on more health foods. I need more fiber in my diet, and more greens, and less garbage. Heavy sigh. I am dreading this retraining, but it’s a necessary one and it would be great to get down to 200 pounds, and possibly even shoot for 190 again (although I do think that would be too lean for my frame, body type, and current muscularity). I was down to 203 earlier this year, but am now back up to 212, and this shall not stand–way way too easy to get back up to over 220 and I will NOT allow that again.

I don’t have anything witty or profound to say about turning sixty; it’s really nothing more than a testament to my weird survivor abilities–which I’ve done absolutely nothing to develop other than simply waking up every morning. I think that’s partly why I have such a mental block about celebrating birthdays, really–it seems a bit morbid to me; “yay, I’m still alive! Let’s party!” It’s not like I’ve been super-careful or anything; but somehow I survived and witnessed and made it through the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and am now doing the same–so far–with the COVID one. I just seem to go on somehow; there’s really no rhyme or reason to it. I’ve seen a lot change over the course of my sixty years–we live in a completely different world than the one I was born into and raised in–and I’ve seen a lot of things I wished I hadn’t, lived through a bunch of things I’d certainly prefer not to experience ever again in however many (or few) years I have left. I have no secrets to life or how to live, not any deep knowledge or wisdom to share; as I said, I just endure and somehow keep surviving from year to year.

I sure as hell never thought I’d last this long.

And on that note, tis time to get cleaned up and prepare for my short little outing for the day. I will be blogging over the course of this weekend, as always, and periodically checking in on social media (when I get bored), but for the most part, am not planning on being on-line much for this weekend; I’m due a break from it all, methinks, and why not now?

Have a lovely day, Constant Reader.

It’s A Sin

Ah, SIN.

The human concept of sin is something that has alays fascinated me; as does the societal distinction that sin isn’t necessarily a crime. Adultery, after all, made the Top Ten in the Bible; but adultery isn’t a crime, at least in our country. Maybe I’ve been reading too much medieval plague history, but as a result the entire concept of sin v. crime has been running through my head a lot. We also always tend to speak and think of historical as being more religious and superstitious than our modern, “rational” time; which is why when the religious superstitions start finding their way out of the woodwork, people are always surprised. I’ve seen that a lot, actually, since 2008; the surprise of people who were just now noticing that much of organized religion is steeped in bigotry propped up by skillful, selective usage of their “holy” book while ignoring the parts that do not prove their bigotry and ignorance as holy. I’ve been toying, since the start of this current pandemic and the beginning of my own plague readings, with a story called “The Flagellants,” based on an idea obtained from rereading Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror and it’s plague chapter–about a movement of religious fanatics who believed God had sent the plague as a punishment for mankind’s sin (as fanatics have always believed in divine punishment as long as they have believed there are gods in the sky), and marched through the streets praying and repenting loudly while flogging themselves; their theory (if one can call it that) was that they were representing mankind’s penitence to God and therefore their behavior was intended to get God to take the scourge away. This set me to thinking about that Christian group that loves to show up here in the Quarter during Southern Decadence and Carnival to loudly tell us all, through megaphones and over amplifiers, that we are all sinners that need to repent and find our way back to the Lord, and wondering why they weren’t parading through the streets of the Quarter, doing something similar. (Their faith isn’t as strong as they would have us believe, apparently.) And so I started writing said story, but wasn’t really sure where to take it…I have some ideas; hopefully this weekend will help me sketch some of those ideas out.

Ah, sin.

A three day weekend is always a delight; I’m of the mind that every weekend should be three days rather than two. It generally takes me one day to rest and recover from the weekend, which is when I do my errands and clean and so forth, and then I am centered enough and rested enough (after two good night’s sleep) to get some work done on Sunday. With a three day weekend, that gives me an extra day to simply focus on writing. Naturally, of course, if every weekend was a three day weekend it would eventually prove also to not be enough time for me, I suppose, and so probably best to leave things as they are and simply enjoy those weekends when they come around. I have some plans for today; primarily a grocery run and perhaps a trip to the gym, along with some cleaning and organizing and perhaps some writing/brainstorming.

We continue to enjoy The Great on Hulu; I do recommend it, it’s very entertaining if not always the most historically accurate–and as I have stated many times, when it comes to television or film adaptations of actual historical events, accuracy inevitably goes out the window (the most egregious example of this being The Tudors. By combining Henry VIII’s sisters Margaret and Mary into one person, and then having her die without children, they essentially erased not only the Brandon/Grey line–no Nine Days’ Queen Jane Grey–but also the Scottish Stewarts; so no Mary Queen of Scots or any of the royalty since the death of Elizabeth I); and complaining about historical inaccuracies in fictional representations of actual history is low-hanging fruit, as it were.

I also want to finish reading Phyllis A. Whitney’s The Red Carnelian, and I’ve also started rereading a book from one of my favorite kids’ series, the Ken Holt mysteries by Bruce Campbell. The Ken Holt series is always neck and neck with The Three Investigators as my favorite kids’ series; they are very well written, action-packed, and well plotted as well; with a kind of hard-boiled edge to them. The first book in the series, The Secret of Skeleton Island, (a title also used in The Three Investigators series) introduces us not only to our young hero but to the people at Global News (Ken’s father is a globe trotting reporter; his mother is dead, and since his father is gone a lot Ken is at a boarding school somewhere outside of New York; I always assumed it was up the Hudson valley but it may have actually been Long Island), and how Ken meets up with, and basically is adopted into, the Allen family. I’m actually enjoying the book–and considering it was written for 9-12 year olds in the late 1940’s/early 1950’s, and it still holds up, is saying quite a bit. The fact these books never caught on or were as popular as, say the Hardy Boys, and have been out of print for decades, is disgraceful.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I look forward to speaking to you again this weekend.

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Casting a Shadow

And it’s Friday again! Cue the dancing horses.

I have a lot that I want to get done this weekend. I need to get those stories pulled together, and I want to get started on finishing off the Secret Project. Stupidly, I also started writing another short story yesterday, “The Flagellants,” which I am not really sure what it’s going to be about, or how to even finish the stupid thing. (An\d because I am twelve years old, sometimes when I think the title quickly it sounds like flatulence, which is a joke I may make in the story because I am twelve years old.) And yes, I got the idea from the bubonic plague chapter in Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror; during the fourteenth century’s bubonic plague outbreak, the church was already in disrepute and many felt that the plague was God’s judgment on a sinful mankind, so there were some religious cults that sprang up; the flagellants movement was one of these, and it was enormously popular and spread throughout central Europe, primarily Germany. These penitents would march through town and flagellate themselves with whips and cat o’nine tails and knotted ropes, trying to take on the sins of all mankind.

Naturally, I found this interesting, and I really liked “The Flagellants” as a title, and we’re kind of in the midst of a pandemic…granted, we’re not that far into it as of yet, but we’ve already seen ridiculous behavior in the name of Jesus–so far, nothing I’m aware of from other faiths–but I began to think about it some more and wondered, what if this becomes more lethal and lasts longer than anyone is even considering now? The second wave of the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 was much worse than the first, and in the wake of the Great War (aka World War I) and said pandemic there was a huge religious revival in the US during the 20’s–we tend to only think of that decade as flappers and bathtub gin, but that wasn’t all that was going on during that decade (it was also the decade that inspired Sinclair Lewis to write Elmer Gantry, and the decade of Aimee Semple McPherson)…and the old “what if” questions started running through my head, and I remembered the religious fanatics who always protest at Mardi Gras and Southern Decadence…and yeah, that’s kind of how stories get born. I’m not sure where this story is going to go or what it’s going to become–it’s kind of fun and different than anything I’ve written before–and I’m not entirely sure it’s going to end up as a crime story, which makes it even more fun.

I slept really long and well last night, and didn’t want to get up this morning, which was lovely–and a long time coming. It’s been a while since I’ve had such a great night’s sleep, and it was absolutely wonderful. I feel rested and ready to go mine some spice this morning.

As expected, Joey Burrow was the Number One draft pick last night, taken by the Cincinnati Bengals–and I said to Paul, “it’s going to be weird rooting for the Bengals now”–one of the many reasons I don’t get so far into the NFL is it is impossible for me to not root for former LSU players and their new teams to do well; and I really can’t devote more time to the NFL than I already give to the Saints. But after last night, I feel it’s pretty safe to say the Saints are Louisiana’s favorite team, and now the Bengals are our second favorite. I also never pay attention to the NFL draft, but I did last night because I wanted to see how the LSU players would do in it. Five players in the first round, I believe–Joey Burrow, K’Lavon Chaisson, Patrick Queen,  Justin Jefferson, and Clyde Edwards-Helaire (which is a record, I believe, for LSU and one short of the overall record)–and now I need to go read the Advocate to see how the rest of the team did, and where they wound up.

Obviously, I will always love this 2019 team and everyone on it. It’s kind of hard not to, after the dream season they just gifted us with–and it’s going to be a very hard act to follow; every LSU team going forward is going to be compared to this one.

This weekend, I hope to get some more writing done. I didn’t get hardly anything written this week (after having such a great writing weekend last weekend), but I do need to finish revising and polishing these stories that are due, and maybe even work some more on some of these ones that are in progress–I may just keep writing “The Flagellants” and see where it goes, just letting it develop as it goes–and I need to start getting some other stuff prepared to get back to work on. I also want to do some reading this weekend; I’ve really fallen behind on that, and I want to make reading more of a priority; it certainly is a better thing to do with my time than falling into Youtube rabbit holes.

And now back to the spice mines.

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