Tag: rush limbaugh

More Than This

Wednesday morning and the midpoint of the week. Huzzah! Yes, I am back to wishing my life away, as my mother used to call it. But I can abide, you know? I wasn’t rested properly yesterday, I don’t think, or else it was the off-and-on rain/thunderstorms we had yesterday. That wet cold air inside the office just makes me want to curl up somewhere and go to sleep under my pile of blankets, which makes the workday a bit of a slog. Ah, well. It’s supposed to continue like this until the weekend or so, when it’ll just be hot and sunny and humid and miserable. Yay! And Monday is my next infusion (second of three). Soon I’ll be giving myself shots. Can’t wait…although everyone tells me it’s easy; it’s a pre-loaded pen-like device I just need to stick myself with. And it’s not like my job hasn’t gotten me used to sticking myself and other people over the years. Sigh. It’s hard for me, sometimes, to wrap my mind around the whole this is the rest of your life thing. But it could be worse–it can always be worse–so I will accept this and not let it bug me. I’m sure I’ll eventually get so used to it I won’t even give it a second thought. It’s always the first time, you know? Just like I was nervous about the infusion (when they tell you all the things to look out for during, it can be a bit scary: “if you can’t breathe or have shortness of breath”, you know, things like that) until I did it for the first time.

Definitely will be bringing my book with me on Monday.

I guess Ann Coulter got tired of not being a part of the ICE raids and so decided to glorify genocide on social media, suggesting that the European genocide of indigenous Americans didn’t go far enough? She wound up deleting the post, which is more shocking than the post, to be honest; she’s always been one of those “freedom of speech means I can say the most disgusting things without apology” advocates. Ann Coulter has always been hot sewage, and back in the day she used to compete with Rush Limbaugh to see who could say the most revolting, inhuman kind of shit. Back in the 1990s, as I saw my parents and family getting sucked in more and more by Fox News1, I used to actually read books by right-wingers, including Ann Coulter. (My primary takeaway was they needed to hire better ghostwriters.) Don’t ever forget that Coulter also wrote the introduction to Phyllis Schlafly’s autobiography, and Schlafly was a monster. Like attracts like, I suppose. But since she turned on Trump for not being racist enough in his first term (she probably orgasms with every news report about ICE and Alligator Auschwitz), she’s not as popular on the right as she used to be; how very dare she be critical of MAGA’s God Emperor? I mean, she can’t even get booked on her ex-lover Bill Maher’s show anymore. But she deleted the post. What the fuck, Fraulein Coulter? Outrage used to be what got you out of bed in the morning and paid your bills. I certainly don’t believe she grew a conscience in her sixties.

After the stolen election of 2000, I no longer needed to read right-winger’s books because I didn’t really know what I was gaining by reading them anymore–I used to think it was better to know what they were thinking and saying, but this century, they’ve pretty much started saying the private stuff out loud. It’s impossible to go on-line or watch any news or anything without knowing what the Right’s position on anything and everything is–but you can be sure it’s rooted in racism, misogyny, and homophobia…same as it ever was, same as it ever will be.

Plus, sharing what I learned from reading those books and proximity to right wing voters? I was never believed by anyone on the left, so I just wound up being Cassandra on the walls of Troy…and truly understood her madness. It’s horrible not being believed…but everything I warned about is coming true.

Sigh.

It rained off and on all day yesterday–we even got a flash flood advisory in the afternoon–and I wasn’t really fully and completely mentally functional yesterday. My brain was loopy and my body was fatigued; I felt all day like I could go back to bed without a problem. When I got home from work I did some chores (didn’t finish them, though–there’s a load of laundry that needs to be fluffed and folded, and I need to finish the dishes to load in the dishwasher), and then worked on editing for a while. It didn’t go well, but I made progress, and I do feel more awake and rested so far this morning, so maybe tonight will go super-well. Stranger things have occurred, after all. We also watched the second to last episode of We Were Liars after Paul got home (later than usual), and then I went to bed earlier than usual. I think I need to get back into the going to bed at nine thing again. I also didn’t read anything last night because by the time I sat in my chair my brain was misfiring again. Heavy sigh. Maybe tonight? I think I just need to get back into the writing habit again; everything is still rusty and the gears don’t shift accordingly. so I need to retrain my brain and my body and my creativity into productivity again.

I can do it, I know I can.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Hump Day, Constant Reader, and I will be back again tomorrow morning.

I really appreciate the fact that the majority of pro wrestlers today focus more on their fitness–and have much better bodies than the ones in my youth did. I can easily see this dude dancing shirtless at Oz during Southern Decadence.
  1. In fairness, they were always right-wing; Rush and Fox just confirmed what they thought. ↩︎

Heartaches by the Number

Sunday fun-day, and I am up much earlier than I was yesterday. It wasn’t a bad day, but I clearly needed to sleep in. I slept later than expected this morning, too, but here I am, up at just past eight and feeling pretty good. I really didn’t do much of anything yesterday. I did leave the house and get the mail (I got two shirts I’d ordered from Macy’s) and then swung iby the grocery store to get treats for Sparky and for us (they had the Snicker brownie cookies again, which are fucking amazing), and then I came home. I curled up in my chair with Scott Carson’s Where They Wait, which I am enjoying the hell out of, before Paul got up and we finished the first half of Bridgerton, watched The Iron Claw, and then after we watched the gymnastics meet last night, won by Simone Biles (of course), moved on to Hollywood Con Queen, which in interesting, if odd. I plan on spending some more time with the book today, hopefully finishing reading it this morning before getting some writing done today. I’d like to get this second draft of “When I Die” out of my hair, and I also need to reread and possibly revise “The Last To See Him Alive” before I submit it to an anthology. I have been very lackadaisical about my writing now for almost a year, and I need to start taking it seriously again. I think that’s been part of my feeling off for so long–I am not writing much, either and that always has an affect on my over-all well-being.

I also think the overwhelming pile of things I am working on has a lot to do with my feeling at sea and uninspired, to be honest. I do love to write, but as always, I have to make myself do something I love. I also am much easier to distract these days, too–which I do not like–but when I am home working it’s Sparky who distracts me (he’s adorable and sweet, so it’s hard not to give him attention when he wants some), or Paul getting up and wanting to watch something–I will always drop everything to hang out with him, whether I can afford the loss of time or no, sorry/not sorry–but I do need to get some focus. Maybe I should listen to music on my headphones? Music always works, usually; but who knows if the old tricks will continue to work now?

I also need to get caught up on blog entries, too. I still have to finish my posts about Dead Boy Detectives and Mary and George, I’ll have to do one when I finish reading this book, and of course there are any number of others that are dangling in my drafts folder. I also came up with a really good title for another story yesterday, sigh, which I scribbled down in my journal. My creativity is still there, of course, but it needs to be harnessed again so I can take it out for a ride. I also spent alot of time yesterday thinking about something I definitely want to blog about, which was triggered by Marjorie Taylor Greene, the cro magnon congresswoman from Georgia being the white trash piece of shit she was by attacking Jasmine Crockett’s appearance the other day–don’t come for Jasmine unless she calls you, bleached blonde bad built butch body bitch–and the whole “going high” thing. Much as I love Michelle Obama, I have been saying since the of Rush and Fox News that going high doesn’t work when they are going low; they see going high as being weak and they go lower. The only way to defeat them and shut them up is to give their own back to them with a vengeance–I bet the inbred trash will think twice about coming for someone’s looks again. And as someone who has had people going low at him for most of his life, I will not go high. You open that door and I will fucking shred you–and I also will not be shamed by “allies” (always straight white cisgender women, for the record) for giving it back to them. We are literally in a war for the soul and future of this country; going high with these kind of stakes on the line simply does not work, and I am tired of the right saying racist, homophobic, and misogynist bullshit while being told to “go high.” Sorry, Michelle, I love you–and I love you even more for your class and dignity, but I would love to listen to you read Melania for the racist gold-digging filth she is sometime.

The sad truth is you never win while seated on your high horse, and we as a nation simply cannot afford to lose. And they cannot stand on ANY moral high ground while pedophiles like Matt Gaetz and inbreds like Marjorie Greene are serving in the People’s House, period–as well as any traitors, and there are a LOT of those on the Republican side of the aisle right now.

(I’m also enjoying watching all the trash who hated the Chiefs because of Travis and Taylor now worshipping them because of Hairy Butt. Pick a fucking lane.)

And on that note, I am having some breakfast and then reading for a while. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader, and I will probably show up again a little later.

Cold As You

Politics has rarely interested me when it comes to fiction; the reality all too often reads like unbelievable fiction, and it’s also there to read in all its horror in history. I stopped reading political non-fiction back in the day, probably some time around or after Katrina–and when I became involved with the National Stonewall Democrats, I was actually living in that world part time, and had no desire to read about it any longer. Paul and I avoided The West Wing for years for this very reason–only to become completely addicted to it when Bravo was running reruns, eventually renting the back seasons from Netflix and bingeing through its entire run, while watching the final seasons as they aired. It remains one of my favorite television programs of all time; sometimes I think it would be lovely to go back and rewatch it, but it was a balm for us during the Bush administration.

I used to, as I said, read political non-fiction from both sides of the aisle as well as from theoretically unbiased journalists; I used to read, believe it or not, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh and Peggy Noonan, along with Al Franken and Matt Taibbi and others. I always felt it was important to read not only those who were in theory unbiased, but also to read the extremes of both sides–it’s always important, I thought, to know what both sides are saying and thinking to rev up their own extreme bases. While I always paid attention to politics I always considered myself more apolitical than anything else; my primary concerns were initially to stop people from dying from HIV and then to get some sort of legal recognition that my sexuality was not grounds for inequal treatment in the eyes of the law. The 2000 election debacle energized me; the country seemed to be veering off course and the results of that election changed the country and not for the better, which meant it was time to get to work.

I never read Allen Drury’s Washington novels; as I said, I was never all that interested in fiction based in politics. Robert Ludlum was the closest I ever came to reading political thrillers, and I was a huge fan of his throughout the late 1980’s and 1990’s. But political thrillers can be terrific reads; my question is are they crime novels? Thrillers are a subgenre of crime fiction, but do political thrillers actually count as crime novels? I suppose, in theory, they are; this is the question I’ve been grappling with since I finished reading The Coyotes of Carthage yesterday.

Andre marvels, watching a kid, a stranger of maybe sixteen, pinch another wallet. This lift makes the kid’s fifth, at least that Andre’s seen this morning–two on the train, two on the underground platform, and now this one on the jam-packed escalator that climbs toward the surface. The kid’s got skills, mad skills. He makes his lift and keeps on moving. There. Right there. The kid picks up another, his sixth, with the practiced grace of a ballerino, this time the mark, some corporate chump, probably a lobbyist, with slicked-back hair and a shit-eating grin. No one suspects a thing, and why should they? This kid blends in, looks like a prep-school student–and , who knows, perhaps he is–his aesthetic complete with a bookbag, khakis, and a dog-ered copy of de Tocqueville tucked beneath his arm. The kid reminds Andre of himself at that age–lean, hungry, steel eyes with smooth skin–but Andre concedes that he never possessed this kid’s talent.

Aboveground the kid disappears into the big-city bustle, and Andre thinks, Good for you, li’l man. Go in peace. For sure, the kid has plenty of places to hide. Northwest this morning is a mess: snowy, busy, noisy, the perfect urban jungle in which to flee. Andre works around the corner, and a lifetime ago, his family made a home inside a boarded-up rathole six blocks over. Andre has, in fact, loved in the District his entire life, thirty-five years save a stint across the river, two years in juvie for a grift gone bad on a nearby street. Seventeen years ago, when he left kiddie correctional, he never imagined he’d work on K Street, or that he’d own a walk-in closet full of three-piece suits, and the sudden realization, that he might lose it all, cuts like shards of glass crushed into the lining of his stomach.

Dre, our main character in this exceptionally fine debut novel by Steven Wright, isn’t necessarily likable, but he is understandable, and really, that’s the key with unlikable and unpleasant characters: as long as the reader can understand and empathize with an unlikable character, they will come along for the ride and may even root for that character. (As I like to say, the best note on character I was ever given by an editor when I was writing an unlikable character: even Hitler loved his dogs. ) The key is to find their humanity, and even when the character is doing unlikable things, you won’t lose the reader. It’s a skill set to be sure, but Steven Wright does this extremely well in a debut novel, and that’s really saying something.

Dre is a Black man who works for a political consulting firm in Washington, and one who is very good at what he does. He went overboard on his last assignment and almost blew a slam-dunk election, so his job is in jeopardy and if he weren’t being mentored by one of the founding partners of the firm, he would definitely be out already. Instead, he is given a punishment assignment: to get an initiative passed in a rural backwoods South Carolina county that really isn’t in the best interests of the local electorate but rather that of a large corporation who will poison everything in the county but will inevitably suck it dry of its resources and then leave behind nothing but wreckage. Dre comes from a broken home and has a brother who was also an addict; as teens they were small-scale dealers in order to survive and a deal gone horribly wrong put Dre into juvie. But he came out of juvie determined to go on the straight and narrow and build a life for himself…so politics seemed like a natural place for him to go.

But now in his mid-thirties, his life is crumbling around him: he has self-destructed his career; his fiancee has just dumped him for another man; his brother has ALS and he’s having to pay for his care as well as support his brother’s caregiver/girlfriend; and he’s questioning the decisions he’s made throughout his life to bring him to this place where he is now stuck in a backwoods redneck part of South Carolina running a campaign with no staff other than a rather sweet young intern–who turns out to be his mentor’s grandson. This election is a microcosm of everything that is currently wrong with our political system, and its deep cynicism; and Dre is having to face all of that, along with questioning what he is doing with his life for money, while his world continues to crumble around him.

All of the characters, while seen through Dre’s cynical eyes, are well-developed and well-rounded and completely believable; he sees very clearly their worth and their value and yet is incapable, because of who he has become through this cynical work, of connecting with any of them because of his own loss of humanity. This ballot initiative, so important for him to win if he wants to keep his job, is symbolic of his life; what do you do when you realize that not only have your sold your soul, but it may be too late to buy it back?

I greatly enjoyed this book from start to finish, and it’s a very powerful debut. It says a lot about humanity, the state of politics in this country, and the influence of dark money and how that has further corrupted an already corrupt system. But Dre’s search for his own humanity, his dark night of the soul, is what drives this strongly written story, and through Dre, requires the reader to do the same. The book offers no answers, of course; because those answers have to come from us.

What cost freedom?