So. We are under a winter storm warning, or watch, or something telling us to look out. Supposed to have ice and/or snow late tonight and into tomorrow morning. I would be ecstatic if it was snow, but I would be pissed if it was ice. Either way, it is going to be deliciously cold, which I rather like. Losing power is always a concern. This complex has lost power if there’s a sneeze in the heavens, so I am always somewhat prepared for being in the dark. One year, there was an ice storm, and power was out for three days. That more or less sucked, especially since the manic hoards of survivalists had descended on the grocery stores and stripped the shelves of bread and milk. I will never quite understand the obsession with those items, but whatever. I have Rice Krispies Treats, King Cake, and protein shakes so I can survive for at least a couple of days. If the roads become impassable, that would complicate things, because my strategy is that if things prove untenable here, I’ll drive South, or North, or somewhere that has power and functioning grocery stores. Im not gonna die. Unless I do something stupid like grab a live power line or something. But otherwise, I think I’m good.

Back to the exploration of obstacles, though. One of the other prompts in my new course asked what obstacle is the longest running in my life. I don’t know quite how to answer that. I feel as though my weight has been the longest running obstacle, because it has been attached to lack of self-confidence, and my incessant second guessing of myself, distrust of my judgement are the longest obstacles I can call out. I feel as though they are all related, and maybe all part of some larger triumvirate of self-defeat. I suppose the big question though, is which came first – the weight or the personality by-products. Did I have a lack of self-confidence first, which led to self-protection with excess weight, or did I have excess weight first and then developed lack of confidence and lack of trust and second guessing as a response to the weight? Does it even matter?

When you’re Black, you know that you’re not white, and you know that you’re somehow down in the pecking order. You understand from the very begining of cognizance that you are not a member of the dominant culture, that rules are different based on the color of your skin. When you’re fat, you know that you’re not thin, and you know that you’re very much not in the dominant culture of thin, or at least weight-proportionate-to-height. You get those messages from your peers, from the media, from the size of clothes that fit, from the size of furniture, from the size of bus seats. You understand, without understanding, that you are other. You take up too much space, and the issue of attractiveness is made clear in many ways. Children can be cruel. Families can be cruel. My mother and even my beloved grandmother spent way too much time discussing my “weight problem” as though I wasn’t even there. “She’s going to outgrow that baby fat, just wait.” “Just feed her a little less at every meal, and she’ll start slimming down.” So, I learned it wasn’t a particularly good thing to be fat. The funny thing is, I felt as fat then as I do now, and that was over 100 pounds ago. I wasn’t even a teen before they were having those conversations, my mother fretting over it as though it was something tht broke her heart. I suppose it did. She was a tiny little thing, and had been somewhat sickly as a child. Pregnant with me, she weighed not quite 100 pounds. She had a bizarre perception problem about size, she wanted everything to be “small” or “tiny”. We got a dog at one point, and he wasn’t a big dog. A poodle/terrier thing, fuzzy, cute. We got him as a puppy, and he grew a bit, as puppies do (when they are healthy). I remember her saying many times that he used to be so cute, and small, and she thought he would stay like that, but he had gotten big and ugly. Ugh. I don’t think he weighed 15 pounds, if that. But she saw a big dog, too big to be cute, too big to be attractive. Maybe I internalized that, because it wasn’t a far leap between her perception of that dog and my “baby fat”. By the time I was a teenager, it wasn’t baby fat any longer, and she began to exhibit a resignation of my weight. I think I started to feel ashamed of myself at that point, but had no vocabulary to describe that and, like all other abuse victims, assumed what was happening and how I was feeling was quite normal. Just another day in Paradise, so back on the bus.

I thought I was huge, because that’s what I was hearing, and that’s what I was seeing. I didn’t seem to fit into any clothes at the department store, I couldn’t zip up knee-high boots over my calves. I couldn’t dress like the other girls dressed, even though I didn’t really want to wear the frilly dresses and sassy skirts – I wanted to wear blue jeans and Dingo boots and tennis shoes. I wanted to wear hippie clothes, boy clothes. But there was no room for that, and it would be a while before I dealt with all of that stuff. It’s another story entirely. But, suffice it to say, the weight was quite an obstacle. By the time I was in the 8th grade, I had begun to feel as though I had no right to be wherever I was, as though people were simply being kind to allow me to be there. I knew there were other girls that were my size or bigger, but I was somewhat obsessed with my size, and I saw it as gargatuan. When I have seen pictures of myself around that time, I was always surprised to find that I really wasn’t’ very large at all. I just felt that way. I felt the same way I feel now, bloated and huge and a bit like Mr. Stay Puft in Ghost Busters, busting clusily through everything in sight and leaving a mess behind. Goodness.

What a load to carry. I was socially awkward, felt particularly unattractive, and had begun to feel somewhat dumb once I was enrolled in private school. When I was in the neighborhood parochial school, I was at the top of my class. I was one of the smart ones. But, I enrolled in private school in the 6th grade, and they seemed to be so much farther ahead of me from the moment I walked through the doors. Between that and my weight, I felt like a dumb ass that didn’t belong. And that’s where the lack of confidence and the second-guessing and the distrust of myself really took root. To my way of thining, and my mother’s, I didn’t know how to act and I was a misfit. I just needed to act like everyone else was acting – why couldn’t I just do that. I was never going to amount to anything acting like I was acting. Those were my mother’s exact words around that time, and not only did I never forget them, I made them a self-fulfillinng prophecy. So, I am not clear on what came first – the weight or the dysfunciton. Whatever the order, I would say that has been the longest standing obstacle of my life. More than race, more than academic limitations, more than sexual orientation, more than theological identity – and I don’t so much think of any of these attributes as obstacles, but frequently they are challenges.

So, I’m finding myself a little frustrated with the exploration at this point, because it has begun to feel like a therapy session, without the therapist. I am guessing it’s necessary in relation to identifying obstacles that block me from the path I want to take. I’m not sure I’ve ever taken the path I’ve wanted to take, at least not because I just wanted to. I’ve always taken the practical path, the path that I felt was responsible, was expected of me. That’s a little complicated, because I can’t say those journeys have not served me. I felt that it was expected of me to go to college, and I am glad I did. But I went because it was expected, not so much because I had a burning desire to go. I was incredibly immature, but go I did. I nearly didn’t make it out, partly because I was so immature, but also because I was so incredibly damaged. I didn’t know who I was, or what I was; I was desperate even then, desperate to find something to hold onto. A person, a sensation, some meaning. Nothing seemed to mean much of anything, and it still felt as though I had no right to partake of the life I was leading. I felt like a failure. I was not 21 when I graduated from college, and I felt like a failure, because I was not the societal ideal of a “normal” girl, with normal weight and normal intelligence and normal sexual orientation. I was not normal. If that’s not an obstacle, I don’t know what is.

Over many years, MANY years, I have worked on many aspects of this obstacle, of feeling not normal and not having a right to be here, not having the self-confidence to walk with purpose. I’ve been in therapy for many years, explored meditation, gotten sober, participated in 12-step recovery, read a veritable truckload of self-help books, journaled, talked, raged, meditated more, been in therapy more. I usually tell people that I will die in therapy. It’s the closest I can get to having someone listen to me, hear me, let me talk about things nobody really wants to hear about. Let me have a sounding board. If I have to pay for that, so be it. It’s better than raging at everything and everyone because I can’t find an exhaust vent. Has that worked? I would say it has, since I am still here, still standing (even if wobbly at times). I can’t guarantee that would be the case if I wasn’t in therapy.

I would say the biggest obstacle I have faced has been myself. I am my own worst enemy. If I could just stay out of my own way, I might get past some of the speed bumps. I run around inside my head, going down dead-end streets and alleys and running up stairways that lead to locked doors. It seems that I’ve done this for quite a long time, snatching defeat form the jaws of victory, talking myself into the abyss. I have a t-shirt that says “I”m a December woman – I was born with my heart on my sleeve, a fire in my soul, and a mouth I can’t control.”. That is me. A mouth I can’t control. So yeah, the biggest obstacle is me. One of the biggest accomplishments in that area, though, is getting sober when I was 28. I’m still sober, have not had a drink since 12/7/88. That’s taken a fair amount of work, and I still work at it. I don’t so much work at the not having a drink part, because that has become habit and I’m really just not interested in it any longer. What I have to work at is the personality and character issues, the self-centeredness, the selfishness, the tendency to ignore the spiritual aspect of my walk through the world. My recovery work there helps me to orient myself more spiritually rather than in a hedonistic fashion, where everything I do is centered on my comfort and enjoyment. It’s the place I get to focus on things like balance, and ego, and avoiding intellectual self-sufficiency. Working on those kinds of issues has helped tremendously, and helped me to figure out who the hell i am. I thought I knew that a long time ago, but I was mistaken. I knew who everyone expected me to be, who I thought I was supposed to be, but I did not know who I was. I can’t say I know every single aspect of that, but I have some form and definition now. Years ago, I may as well have been Silly Putty – just slap me on a surface, and I take on those characteristics. That’s not the case so much any longer, and I think that’s a good thing.

OK, another piece of this exploration is going to give way to some rest. There’s more to come, I can feel it rattling around behind my eye balls and making that little bongo sound like in the cartoons. I’m tired, though, so it will need to wait a little bit longer. I ain’t goin’ nowhere.

So, there was a Town Hall with the President last night. I didn’t watch the whole thing, but what I saw illustrated, at the very least, a return to civility. There was no name calling, no childish posturing, no poking out of the chin or puffing of the chest that has been trypical of the bullying behavior coming from the White House over the past four years. I’m not entirely sure, but it seems there are some who believe that a new administration should perfectly encapsulate all of our dreams and desires and, in many cases, provide antithesis to the status quo of the last crew. In many ways that has already happened, but the media in particular seems intent on poking the fallen ogre to see if it’s really dead. It’s dead, people, if you will allow it to be dead. Continuing to compare current activity to the inadequacies of the past will only stir any last shreds of organic activity in the carcass, so cut it out. Even the President spoke to that last night, saying that we’ve been focused on the last guy for 4-1/2 years, and he wants the next four years to be focused on the American people. What a concept! If we’re tired of talking about the Orange Puff, we should just stop talking about him. It’s just that simple.

As I listen to all of the “analysis” of the Town Hall last night, and the general critique of the new administration, I was struck by sentiment that seems very familiar. He said that he wouldn’t forgive student loan debt up to $50k, in response to a question from a participant. The CNN hosts this morning rattled on and on about how disappointed progressives would find that response, and how that’s not a good sign for younger people, and blah blah blah. Disappointing. Not what we want. Getting what we want is sometimes more the problem than NOT getting what we want. I believe the more imporatnat question is…what do we NEED to provide for that common defense and greater good for ALL? I cannot say that only right-wing extremists visit that short-sighted place, we all go there. If I agree with something, then yeah, it’s what I want and if you agree with me I can give you a smile and a thumbs up. If you don’t agree with me, and have another idea, I give you a frown and a thumbs down. Or worse. Maybe the real answer lies in pushing for a win-win compromise, but we don’t do compromise well. It’s messy, and one side or the other usually feels they are losing something precious, and while they are losing, the other side is gaining, and … there we are, impaled on that zero-sum impasse once again. As long as we operate from a mindset of scarcity, and finite resource availability, we’re going to keep arriving there. When pandemic relief became an urgent topic, we had a multi-trillion dollar debt ceiling. We still do. That debt has not magically evaporated, but there are proposals to disburse billions, if not trillions, of dollars in direct relief for citizens who are drowning in loss of income. According to the accountants and economists, this is still very bad because we are just deficit spending, and … that is a bad thing. OK, well, it must still be possible because we are doing it; there has already been a relief bill that disbursed hundreds of dollars to millions of people. So. Because it’s possible, and it actually happened, despite the prophecies of doom regarding our national debt, I contend … we need to remember these are numbers, on computer screens and pieces of paper. This is not real money, not real bars of gold and silver or clusters of diamonds, and even it it was, those minerals are just material things we have chosen to value.

The value of those things – and the green-tinged paper with numeric designations that we idolize here in this country – are just human constructs of worth, based on abundance or scarcity. Gold is valued at a high rate because it is scarce. If you have some, you’re very special, apparently…so you’re worth is high? Having gold really has nothing to do with your character, or your contribution to society, but more your good fortune or luck? Some of our nation’s so-called original sin involves the bad behavior of those who had resources that were highly valued, but attained by the unpaid and forced labor of others who lacked that resource. Hmm. In this century, we no doubt could synthesize important material resources like gold, or silver, to fulfill their practical usefulness. Gold and diamonds are not highly malleable, and so they have great value in crafting and manufacturing other structures, conducting electricity for other functions, and so on. One of my larger questions about circumstances like this involves the synthetic production of things like gold and diamonds. We’ve synthesized these substances, but because we’re snobs, the synthetic versions are valued less and looked down upon. Cubic zirconia says “fake diamond”, while “real diamonds” are seen as … better (and more expensive, of course). I would ask whether or not cubic zirconia, or whatever synthetic diamond material is available, can actually achieve the function of the “real” diamond, or not. The value of diamonds, in the eyes of most, lies in the beauty of adornments and the display of relative welth and personal abundance. I’m not sure that’s sustainable.

I suppose the issue of adornments brings me to wonder, as a side issue, about beauty. I would admit that beauty is absolutely necessary in the human experience. Beauty is entirely unrelated to personal abundance, or wealth, but very often those wil little access to wealth are excluded from public access to beautiful things. Wealthy “upper class” neighborhoods incude “beautification” efforts in their public spaces – landscaping, trees, flowers, sidewalks, decorative lamp posts and street signs, and so on. These are not efforts made on private property, but on public rights of way. That effort is not included in the planning or maintenance of other neighborhoods. Instead, you may find lack of even basic things like sidewalks, trees, and shrubbery, poor condition of things like street surfaces and traffic control devices like signals and signs. There isn’t much beauty provided, and in the middle of urban areas locked into grids of traffic patterns, there’s not much opportunity to improve that. Access to even clear sky and clean air may be hard to achieve as well. Are they no less deserving of beauty?

Back to value…of things and of people. I believe it’s an ethical dysfunction to value people, but we do it all the time. It’s problematic to value things, because we use them to value peolpe. If I have a 55″ big screen television, am I simply worth more than someone who can’t afford one of those? Why does that television say that I am doing something “right” because I have it? How do I attain it? I somehow attain enough monetary resources to acquire it from a seller, a retailer, a merchant. I attain that monetary resource by…working? Producing a product that is in turn valued? By having inherent wealth, and thereby worth? Some of us have, some of us have not. It’s a capitalist society, and that’s how it works. But even in socialist or communist societies, there’s still a have and have not dichotomy it seems. The prime minister of a communist nation does not live the same way the proletariat lives. A tribal chief in a so-called third world country does not live the same way as the common person. So what’s THAT all about? I suppose it’s just human nature to set up hierarchies of worth and value. It seems to be rather primal, because even lower primates have dominance hierarchies, and certain resources therein go to the more dominant members (male alpha wolves eat first, get their pick of reproductive age females, lead migrations, etc.). I wonder if we humans can get past any of that primal instinct to get a leg up higher than the next person. I’m not sure any longer; it seems to be pretty hard-wired.

So, I guess where I’m a bit troubled is on the issue of how our advanced brains assign value to each other, and to other living things. We typically value ourselves at the pentultimate level in all circumstances, and therein lies our dilemma. When the first colonists arrived on this land, they nearly immediately began to do basic terraforming – cutting down trees to produce materials with which to construct shelter, and to clear the land for placement of the new structures. Once there was shelter, and groups of shelters occupied by like-minded peopole, they asserted their claim to possession of the natural resources there – the land, the water, minerals, herbs, food sources. And we’re still doing it. As a nation, our mindset has been that everything is here to benefit us, to feed us, to house us, to make us more comfortable. That mindset seems to be more the product of the European state than the indigenous mindset, but…we are still highly subject to that primal dominance hierarchy. I suppose there are just degrees of the harm it can do, degrees of the good it can do. The practical aspects of that are simply power…the haves and the have nots reflect that hierarchy, and what it can do. If it’s the way of the human to accept this hierarchy, the simple reality of power, I can live with that. I just don’t believe it’s the way of the human to manipulate and hoard that power, for the good of some and the detriment – or the neglect – of others. That’s an imbalance, on a material level, and on a spiritual level. Most of us would rather ignore the spiritual aspects of the human condition, but it exists, and it exists beyond the realm of want. We cannot ignore it, although it is esoteric and challenging to acknowledge that which cannot be seen, duplicated, observed with the senses. But it exists, and we cannot deny that it exists. Human power dynamics as we experience them is a function of the denial, I believe. Some are physically stronger than others, some are intellectually more gifted than others, but the only reason to value and the strongest and the smartest as more worthy is a power dysfunction. At least that’s how I see it. Not expressed particularly well, but I’m workin’ on it. I suppose this is somewhat an extension of my previous thought exploration about what’s blocking me, and feeling that I am not worth a lot, or not valued, or something. We’ll see. I am approaching the dregs of the second cup of coffee, which usually means it is time for o-u-t-s-i-d-e with the canine, who is definitely NOT the alpha in this household…although on days like this I wonder. I could happily stay inside and not venture out into the cold if it was left up to me, but four feet usually outweigh two when they are pacing around and peering hopefully toward the front door.

So. I signed up for this writing course, on an impulse. It’s supposed to provide prompts for writing, guide a writer to connect with authenticity, and help release blocks and obstacles to both. I can’t bitch and kvetch about current affairs and Q-Anon for the rest of my life, so I thought maybe that would be a way to move forward or up or sideways or whatever, in my writing. It wasn’t terribly expensive (they even had a sliding scale, which was nice), and I figure even if they just drop stuff that is regurgitated from somewhere else, almost any prompt will help. Unless the prompts are stuff like “Describe the worst experience of your life” or “Tell about the most cruel betrayal you’ve ever experienced”. I can do that on my own.

The first prompts asks about what is standing in my way right now. Oh, lord. That isn’t actually difficult to name, but difficult to let go. It’s mostly fear…fear of what other people will think of me, that I think I have some competency but I’m wrong. Again. Fear that I am too old to be embarking on this whatever it is…journey? Fear that I’ll run out of money and have to go live under the bridge. Fear that I’m just not worth … and there i was typing all kinds of words, but the one word that embraces ALL of them is … anything. Fear that I’m just not worth anything. I think I can write, at least I can write some things, but it’s not all that…stellar. I want to be stellar at SOMETHING, and feel as though I am merely dangerously mediocre at a couple of things. I suck at far more things, which I’m fine with…I have never aspired to be a competent mathemetician, for example. That’s what calculators and cash registers and banks are for. I have never aspired to be a competent house cleaner, or domestic goddess, or culinary artist. I have, however, aspired to be a competent IT specialist, and a competent … not sure what to call it…artist in the realm of philosphic and musical renderings? That makes no sense. I’ll try again…at this point in my life, I want to be able to write well enough to have my work earn money, sort of likek Pavlovitz or somebody like that. I want to be able to express my thoughts in a way that entices others to read, and ponder, and think a bit…and I want to do that well enough to get paid for it. I don’t need millions, just a little more than basics. See? I don’t know how to go big, but that’s another part of this lack of confidence, a.k.a. fear. So now what?

If fear didn’t stand in my way, if I had the cajones to risk failure, set a goal and stick to it, I suppose I would have a lot more freedom? I would be making money doing something I feel competent to do, and would be compensated equitably. No, screw equitably. I would be compensated well. Very well. I wouldn’t have to worry about ridiculous things like how I’m going to pay for 12 months of health insurance, because I would be making enough to comfortably do that. Just writing all this I am struggling with feeling as though I have a right to say that I want to have disposable income, that I want to not be encumbered by lack of funds, that I want to be able to do what I want to do…like take a long weekend somewhere and stay in a decent hotel, just to see new landscape I’ve always wanted to see. Like buy new furniture that’s what I want and not just what I can afford. Like buy a moderate home (I really don’t want something huge and ostentatious, because it’s too much to clean and maintain), in a neighborhood or area that I like, not just where I can afford. Like buy a GOOD computer and printer and comfortably pay for high speed internet so I can do the writing gig effectively. Like pay somebody to help me clean this crack house of an apartment, or wherever I choose to live. Like be able to eat out or have meal service delivery so that I eat healthy but with variety and don’t have to constantly berate myself for not being a decent cook. Stuff like that. I really don’t care about fine clothes or jewelry, or conspicuous consumption…don’t care about showing off luxury items. Oh, I probably would like to get a decent vehicle…the one I’ve got is nearly 20 years old, although it’s still got plenty of life in it. Just doesn’t have some of the more modern contrivances, like an aux-sound port and glass-bending speakers.

So, those are the big things, I believe. The immediate things. I should probably add more practical things like funeral service and burial plans, but that can show up later. If I happen to wake up dead tomorrow, they can throw me in a hefty bag. I won’t know the difference. I suppose that’s what cold happen if I didn’t overcome this all-encompassing fear. I feel as though I’ve always had it in some form or another…always doubting myself, always avoiding making a wrong choice. Since I was reallly little, too…or at least what I remember of those early years. Some of that could have been my mother’s anxieties, some of it could be just how I’m wired. At this point, I just don’t really care, just want to get on with things. I feel like I have things to say, things to do, and I’m pretty tired of constantly feeling bottled up while being violently shaken (and not stirred). Constantly feeling like I’m about to blow, but…wait…no…just wait for it to die down. I suppose that’s despair – always feeling like you’re on the verge of something wonderful, but never quite getting over the hump…over, and over, and over again. Groundhog day, without the Hollywood budget. That shit gets old.

I’m not sure what I might need to do in order to get over, past, through, beyond the fear thing. I don’t have the self-confidence that I see in people I consider less talented, or sometimes not talented at all. They still get what they want, because they don’t perceive of themselves as untalented, or mediocre, or undeserving. I have always had this primal anger about less deserving (!) people getting what they want, while I feel as though I rarely get what I want. I get what I need, but rarely what I just want…well, at least not on the grand scale of my whimsy. I mean, if I plug away for a bit, and save a few pennies, I can eventually get something I want…like when I bought my 12-string guitar, or even the 6-string that I play so much. But, those were still functions of what I could afford, didn’t want to get all carried away with instruments that cost several thousand dollars or anything like that. I don’t DESERVE all that, right? I wonder who does deserve all that. But I digress. Anyway, I suppose the bottom line is that I don’t have the trust in myself, or the confidence, or whatever the hell it is, to believe that i have a valid shot at being respected for something I do very well. Apparently, I don’t truly believe that I do anything very well. Some things I do better than some people, but I’m not at the top of my game at anything, at least in my own mind. Apparently, my own mind is an issue. Of course, I am glad these days I am dealing with my own mind rather than someone else’s mind…I dealth with other folks’ minds for a really long time, and that got me … here. Bleh.

I suppose I can stop here, at least for a bit. There’s more exploration to do around the issues holding me back, but … it’s Mardi Gras, dammit! I have King Cakes to deliver…and it would be kind of cool to get out of this funky place for just a minute. I hope they are in good shape, the King Cakes I mean…been sitting in an unopened box since Wednesday or Thursday, but I think they’re fine. Still shrink wrapped and everything. If not, people can fucking just sue me.

So. They’ve acquitted the same President in his impeachment again. Second time around. If I could stomach the thought, I almost wish he could stay long enough to go for a trifecta of impeachment…and see if third time really is the charm. I don’t know if it would do any good, though; it would just give everyone more reason to focus on him. He’s a narcissist, so that would probably make him really happy, thinking of how everyone else is thinking of him, like he is thinking of himself. All the time. Every day of the week. Every month of the year. All year. I guess the only time he’s not thinking exclusively of himself is when he’s plotting revenge on someone else who wasn’t thinking exclusively of him, which I guess is still thinking about himself in a somewhat indirect way, but whatever. I think I would find it rather boring to be a narcissist, although I imagine the fantasy life could be quite impressive.

Anyhow, I used to believe that I suffered from some dire mental illness, one that is no doubt contained with lengthy description and diagnostic criteria in the mental health bible, the DSM. I think they’re up to the 5th or 6th edition of that now, but when I started contemplating my unique craziness, I believe they were still on the DSM 4. I really did believe that I was a multiple personality at one point, but I think I was just drinking too much. Then I believed I was a sociopath, or psychopath, and/or narcissist. I was told by a medical professional that narcissist in particular do not question or contemplate whether or not they are narcissistic. They presume they are quite normal and any problems they might have are the result of other folks’ inadequacies or competition. They never question their walk or their talk. I second guess myself so automatically, so I was told I could never qualify for that diagnosis. Oh, well. Rats – foiled again. I recently came in contact with something that holds promise for “figuring out” my challenging way of having relationships with people (the attachment disorder exploration from a few days ago), but at this point I would rather just be. A human being rather than a human doing.

Back to the rest of the world. We’re past this impeachment trial (like deja vu, of course) and on we go. So where are we going again? We didn’t know before that trial, and we still don’t really know. We have some immediate tasks, which is a good thing – get COVID relief for people who are going under for the 3rd time, if not more. Get the new administration firmly on its feet, including the DOJ and the Attorney General. Get the previous POTUS off our plates, off our television sets, off our minds. He loves the attention, so what do you say we not give it to him? We’ve got more important stuff to do. Like figure out how this insurrection really happened. Which of the watchers stopped watching? Who on the inside was holding open the doors? We need to know that. >

People are still wide-eyed to find out there were so many active duty military and law enforcement personnel taking part in that riot, but I am not at all surprised by that. Seeing that only brings more light to the claim of many marginalized communities that police cannot be trusted, that you only call the police as a last resort because you’re more afraid of them than somebody who just invaded your home. This is a function of what people have been saying for decades – there are two Americas. There’s the America that resembles the amber waves of grain and purple mountains’ majesty and manicured lawns and kids outside on bicycles and all that, and there’s the America that resembles run down tenement houses and project buildings and has a soundtrack of gunfire and sirens 24x7x365. In one America, you call the police for just about everything, including when one of your kids mouths off at you or comes home with a joint in his pocket. You call the police when somebody is parked blocking your driveway. In the other America, you take care of all that stuff yourself – your kid mouths off? You can send them into next week with a friendly tap on the back of the head. They come home with a joint? You confiscate that and smoke it later, or hold it for them and maybe you smoke it with them. They only get punished for not sharing. Somebody parked across your driveway? They ain’t gonna be moving that car anytime soon with four flat tires. Even if there’s a personal crime in the projects, you think twice about calling the police. Do you want to risk getting into trouble yourself once you show ID? Do you want to get labeled a snitch or risk worse pushback from the person who is causing you a problem? And it goes on and on and on…the differences in how we live, the differences in how services are rendered. The police in some urban areas won’t even go into certain neighborhoods – they risk ambush, and sometimes find they are wasting their time because the compainant won’t follow through. It’s just a bloody mess, and the system just doesn’t work on so many levels. Ugh. Sadly, we actually have bigger issues to resolve before getting to criminal justice reform.

I was listening to some coverage of the COVID response, and the vaccine distribution. There are two vaccines, and they are desperately trying to get those out to as many places as they can. Some people are still hesitant to be vaccinated; a friend of mi ne just told me she’s “just goint to wait”. I can’t say I blame her to be a little hesitant, although I’m not entirely sure on what her hesitancy is based. Some people are afraid of unexpected side effects, others are all-out paranoid and believe there could be some tracking nano-technology inserted into the receipient. That one is a little interesting…no, sorry – that is effing nuts. But, it’s out there, just like the ones that refuse to believe that innoculations for childhood diseases don’t give your kid autism. There’s no evidence to support that, just like there’s no evidence to support insertion of tracking technology when you receive the vaccine, but…bless their hearts, they’re out there. As far as I am concerned, they can stay out there. Over there…y’all stay over there…no…there….no, take a few more steps. Waaaaaay over there. Do whatever you want over there, just don’t come over here. I’ll wave at y’all from Walgreen’s when I get my shot. Have a nice day.

See, this is where I lose patience. Everybody wanted to defend the former POTUS about his inciting the attempted coup on January 6th, claiming that what he said was simply him exercising his right to free speech. Hm…got your law degree from Wal-Mart, didn’t you? OK, yes he has the right to free speech, but if what he says ultimately causes people to endanger other people, some of whom die, then free speech is left in the dirt. As in the oft-cited example of yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, and there is no fire but the fear of fire causes a stampede that causes death of several people…the person yelling “Fire!” is liable. Had they not started warning people of an imminent danger, one that did not exist, there would have been no stampede and there would have been no deaths. Had the former POTUS not yelled about a stolen election, and people needed to fight or they would lose their country, the crowds of rabid insurgents would not have been there. If they were not there, nobody would have died on the Capitol grounds, nobody would have been injured there, and there would have been no feces in the hallway of the Capitol building. One would expect the POTUS to be held to a slightly higher standard of responsibility in things like this…and I wouldn’t think he would need that explaiend. But, these are strange times.

I think back on my growing up years, and remember that i had my rebellious moments, ok rebellious years, and I had those periods of resistance when no logic or reason would cause me to do a rational or sensible thing. If I had my heart set on something, my mind made up, and I really wanted it, it was very hard for anyone to knock me off that beam. When I was about 12, there was a musical group – The Ohio Players – and they had a Top 40 hit called “Rollercoaster”. The Rollercoaster of love. There was a point in the song where there were screams in the background of the music, emulating the typical screams of people on a rollercoaster, at an amusement park. There was also a story going round that someone had been murdered in the making of the recording, and those screams were the victim’s. This was totally false, but it became an urban myth, and adults could not persuade most of us adolescents that it wasn’t true. So, I understand how these urban myths can take on a life of their own, and how people cannot be deterred from them. I’ve been there. BUT I WAS 12. These Q-Anon people are adults, with driver’s licenses and credit cards and cars and … guns. Not the same thing AT ALL.

If I could just ignore all these loony tunes out there, I could live with that. Unfortunately, I can’t socially distance to that extreme. They are here, they are us, I am them. When the causes are the ones I support, have passion about, then it all seems a little different. To my credit, and the credit of most of my friends and like minded associates, I don’t resort to violence, don’t own automatic weapons, don’t make pipe bombs. I’m too old and lazy at this point to march long distances, but marching and carrying a sign is about as far as I’ll go to voice my dissent. I will write letters, make phone calls, sign online petitions, speak up at forums or meetings. The other thing about all that is…if I dissent, strongly dissent, I am disagreeing with something factual. I will disagree with a law, or a proposed law, or policy, or candidate…but I am pushing back on something that exists in the real world, even if that’s just someone else’s perspective. THese Q-Anon folks are pushing back at something that doesn’t exist. I can’t understand that. They are pushing against an “illegitimate election outcome”. OK, they believe the President did not legitimately win the election, and the previous President did. By a landslide, they say. OK…show me. Show me where that happened. They can’t produce any evidence of that, or of fraud that corrupted the results, or anything to give credence to their claims. The only way they can explain why their version of the election is true is…conspiracy theories. The evidence is not there because “the deep state” is making sure it stays hidden. OK, who is the deep state? Oh, you know who they are…the Clintons and Obama and this illegitmate guy in the White House now…and his monster Jezebel of a Vice-President. They are illegitimate!

Um, not to be a pain in the butt or anything, but…I’m just not seeing their point.

I’ve learned that people who are so irrationally biased in their viewpoint cannot be reasoned with. If they are going to abandon their Q-ness, it will be because they hit bottom in some way, if they are faced with facts that make it impossible to maintain their allegiance to the lies. I wonder if that’s why there were two suicides after the nsurrection…both were law enforcement, I believe. Maybe they found themselves face to face with a lie, and realized their complicity in something that appalled them, something that had risen up out of the depths of hell and killed people, nearly killed our country. Something they couldn’t believe was…them. I have no evidence of that, only my quirky empath brain, but it’s possible. Just like it’s possible that some of these so-called “patriots” are really the night-riders of days past, the fine upstanding Christians who happened to have a white hood and sheet at the ready for days like January 6. Simple, unaldulterated racists who definitely want THEIR country back, the one where they’re in charge and definitely very special, the one where Black and Brown people shine their shoes and cut their grass and bring their meals. That world. Where they make up all the rules, and other people have to live by them. That world, where all the balls go in the basket and they always hit a home run at the company baseball game. That world is a lie.

That world is actually a movie called “Pleasantville”, where two modern-day teenagers get mysteriously sucked into the tv-show world pf their favorite show, of the same name. In Pleasantville, every kid’s ball does go into the basket, and everything is pretty much perfect. All the time. It’s the same routine, the same everything, like in a magazine. Except for one thing. The show is in black and white…so everything in Pleasantville is black and white. No color. Everyone is stereotypical, and behaves accoding to script, and nothing goes wrong. Ever. Unfortunately for Pleasantville, however, these two kids from present-day have been deposited there, and they begin to change the dynamic. They introduce variables, like sex, and *gasp* feelings. The discover the books in the library are just book covers with blank pages, so they tell their classmates the real stories. When feelings begin to emerge on these folks, an amazing thing happens. They turn…colored. Literally. And then Pleasantville isn’t quite so pleasant any longer – there’s suddenly prejudice against “the coloreds” and discrimination and explicit bias and all kinds of nasty stuff. Just like in the present-day world those ‘alien’ kids came from. It’s a really interesting thought experiment.

The “Pleasantville” story comes to me when I think of these Q-Anon people, who are saying they want their country back, and they want things to be like they always were, back when they felt good about being American. Back when it was a lie, is how I see it. Yes, I’m sure it was quite pleasant for a lot of those folks who were shitting on the floor of the Capitol, and walking around with the House podium, but it was a lie. The only way that world could exist was by ignoring, denying, the reality other people were living. The only way they could get all their balls to drop in the hoop was to be the only ones playing. The only way they could get the best grades, all the time, no matter what subject, was to narrow the field of knowledge and learn the same thing by rote, every day, in every grade. But they couldn’t feel things, they couldn’t really be authentic, they couldn’t experience the full range of humanity. If they did, they couldn’t control all of the variables, and they just couldn’t have that. So, in a way, these folks have been numb for a really long time, because they haven’t seen reality. Now, they’re seeing it and waking up, and it’s painful. It’s so painful, like when you’ve been in the movie theater and the lights come on…it hurts for a few seconds until your eyes adjust. Eventually, you’re just fine. But if the lights are turned down again, your eyes won’t adjust. At some point, there will be more light and then you’ll have the pain, it just came later. That’s what’s happening with these Q folks…they’re being roused out of sleep, they’re numb, and it hurts to wake up. They want to be put back to sleep, but it’s just not possible. So they’re gonna fight. Fight for the right…to be numb. Fight for the right to sleep through life. I suppose that’s their right, but once again, I’d be fine with that if they just stayed…over there. Waaaaaaay overe there. Let the rest of us get on with something else if you don’t mind. I think we could work it out where we don’t bother you, and you don’t bother us. It’s a big enough planet, we might have to rearrange a couple of things, but it’s do-able. As a show of good will, I say we let you have the former POTUS free and clear. Again…just stay…over there.

Seriously…are we there yet? How much further? I have to go to the bathroom, and I want a snack. We probably need gas…wait…no more gas. Electric charge. There has to be a charging station around here somewhere. What happens if you can’t find a charge? Does your really expensive and really quiet car just die in the middle of the highway? Inquiring minds want to know. Not that I have ANY yearning for an electric car. I generally want to be able to drive 300-500 miles before needing to interact with humans in some capacity in order to continue my journey, so if a charge only gets you around 300 miles tops, I’m kind of not interested. Especially if I have to sit in traffic somewhere. Thanks, but no.

Not sure why I needed to go off on electric cars, but I do feel as though I’m on a road trip and tired of the monotony. Today was really a boring day…weather was dreary. Cold, looked like snow weather, but it was a couple of degrees too warm, so all we got was pissy misty stuff. That followed freezing rain yesterday. Bleh. The dog is wondering why I’m still here and why she’s still here. We’ve only been outside for a few minutes at a time, and she is not terribly amused by that. I need to get back to walking her long haul…it might be time. The cold doesn’t really bother me, or her. I managed to wrestle her into her sweater yesterday, since it was below freezing, and she did everything but throw a paw over her brow to indicate how much the sweater distressed her. But, she was better than usual, and didn’t bolt off under the bed hiding from the evil knitted foe. She’s figured out how to squat while she’s wearing it, so I don’t have to worry that she’ll explode from holding it in. Crazy little thing.

Today, I ate nothing useful. Someone made banana bread, and I brought it home and ate a huge chunk of that. I had a big bag of popcorn, some icky grapes (not happy about that), a couplel of cups of coffee, and a little plop of leftover tuna salad. Plus the usual requisite of RiceKrispies bars and Hostess orange cupcakes. The height of nutrition unconsciousness. Meh. It was kind of a throw-away day…I did not feel motivated enough to go to service…or to do anything else. I’ll go to my 10pm meeting as usual…I suppose it’s helpful. I wanted to get more involved with them, do service work there, but it’s too hard to get them to cough up the details of when their business meetings are held. They may be kind of a closed club, but whatever. I’m not there to socialize with them, although a couple of the regulars are pretty devcent eye candy. What-evuh.

Today was Valentine’s Day, which I wasn’t focused on until everybody started buzzing about it. It’s never been a particularly big thing for me, and not just because I perennially single. I just never saw all that much use for it…I can buy Russell Stover candy any time of the year. Their marshmallow hearts are the same as the Christmas trees and Santa figures and the same as the Easter eggs and Easter bunnies and the same as the Thanksgiving pumpkins and the Halloween ghosts. They just change the mold, but it’s the same heavy fructose corn syrup and preservative concoction, covered in cheap chocolate. That always just makes me giggle for some reason, that it’s the same candy just in a different shape, and in a different wrapper, and that signifies a different holiday. Capitalism. Gotta love it.

The news is still consumed with the acquittal of the former POTUS in the impeachment trial. He’s still impeached, the fart, just not convicted of the charges. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, but it is what it is. While the outcome was not unexpected, it was still frustrating. The GOP has de-evolved into a Q-Anon conspiracy of its own, and not one of the fun ones like drinking children’s blood in the basement of a pizza parlor. They are still about the business of advancing the Libertairan agenda, it seems…claiming they are just political conservatives who are out to defeat big government and not let us become a socialist country. OK, thanks a lot for that, y’all…but how do you plan to replace any of these legacy programs that you claim are nothing but big government? Like Social Security. Like the VA. Like national parks and transportation funding. Oh, you’re just gonna cut all that and privatize it…federal contracts. Yeah. That private contract stuff has been working really well in prisons, and in health care, and in schools. Let’s face it, the allure of privatization is making it easier to construct exclusive bastions where public accommodations law prohibits that. Ever since schools were desegregated, political conservatices and racists (sometimes the same people) have been trying to get around anti-discrimination legislation in any way possible. Ever since prisons became full of mostly black and brown inmates, let’s bump down the quality of their care to the lowest possible standard by hiring private contractors, sometimes without bid and with revery primitive service standards. Get it off your plate, make it someone else’s problem. It’s the racism, stupid, and you’re not fooling anyone.

I’m not particuolarlly thrilled about where the country stands right this second, although I have to admit it could be much worse. The new President (I almost said “our new President” but there is a significant number of people who refuse to acknowledge him as their President) is determined to keep moving on his first-100-days agenda, which is a good thing. He did not let the impeachment trial drama get him distracted, and he continues to maintain a face of confidence and decorum, and we still don’t quite know how to act with that. The Vice-President has been out of the spotlight, and I have to wonder if that isn’t for her own protection. The religious zealots are fixated on the “Jezebel” angle with her, which is funny if only it wasn’t so dangerous. Many of those folks truly believe the Bible is the literal word of their creator, their God, the one and true God. I don’t have any problem with their God, and if they choose to believe the Bible is a literal communication from God, that’s fine. I have no problem with their understanding or belief in God; it’s just some of them, who claim to be followers, that are a trifle scary. But, so be it. I just need them to keep that stuff where it belongs – in church, not in the White House, not in the Capitol. There is a separation of church and state for a reason, and that is a primary legacy of the founding of this country.

Anyway, back to the impeachment trial. Seven GOP Senators voted to convict, and that is a big deal. Last time, only one voted to convict. Unfortunately, that wasn’t sufficient to provide the quantity of votes needed to render a guilty verdict. In my mind, he was guilty. In the minds of a large part of the citizenry, he was guilty. The former Majority Leader played the process like a Stradivarius fiddle, and gave the rest of the GOP Senators a way to escape their own hellish decision of whether or not to abandon their daddy or vote according to the evidence and their conscience. You can’t give what you don’t have, and they don’t have the ability to do that, so he slithered through the narrow keyhole of justice again. Many believe that he will be held accountable in other ways, because the nekkid emperor is feeling the breeze on his butt cheeks at this point…the breeze from a flurry of legal pages turning on his tax liability, on his attempts to subvert the GA election results, on the sexual harassment/assault charges filed against him. While he was in office, nobody could indict him for anything because of DOJ policly. But now he’s John Q. Public again…an orange tinted scofflaw, grifter, carnival side-show carney without Twitter to help with his image. I don’t know if legal realities will give him a rude awakening or not, and I’ll believe it when I see it, because the rules are different for people who run in his social circles.

I don’t know how this country will be able to recover from this unfortunate, and disappointing, chapter in our history. There was harm done, real damage done…and it’s going to take a bit to unravel all of that. There is already consternation about the COVID relief bill, that was originally supposed to raise the federal hourly pay rate to $15. There is, however – and of course – resistance to that aspect of the bill, so it may have to be omitted. The President says he would be surprised if it was able to survive as a part of the relief proposal, but that he is still committed to fighting for it. His position is that getting financial relief to people struggling to survive during the pandemic response is the most important part of it all, and if necessary, he’ll go back and try getting a stand-alone minimum wage bill. I have no problem with that, and I think he’s absolutely correct – the priority is to get some kind of relief to people who are struggling to keep their noses above water. It shouldn’t have taken this long to have gotten even this close to achieving that.

In addition to the kind of harm done, and the suffering of so many who are literally at the end of their rope financially, I don’t know if the economic recovery will be the biggest part of the recovery. Unrelated to the pandemic response, there is Q-Anon. What in the f*ck is THAT all about? People running rampant on conspiracy theories…pedophiles in Congress and the White House, drinking the blood of murdered children in secret rooms of pizza parlors? SERIOUSLY??? Unfortunately, these people are very serious, and they really believe this nonsense. They are being elected to Congress, and they are dangerous. The former President lent his public face to legitimizing the conspiracy crowd, and so now they’re organized and there are a lot of them. Personally, I don’t know that he or anyone elected to office really believes all that stuff, but they garner the support and loyalty of the people who really do believe it. Those people donate money. A lot of money. He and other elected officials function like televangelists, repeating the propaganda that keeps their followers – the “base” – locked into a literal cult of personality. That cult operates on the basis of adoration of him, because his followers have been programmed to believe that only he understands them, only he is on their side, and only he can save them from the evils that the Democrats/black people/socialists/Jews will rain upon them. Only Jim Jones could deliver his flock to salvation, and they could only travel there by means of drinking posonous Kool-Aid. Only Marshall Applewhite could be counted on to guide his troops to the comet that would take them to the Promised Land, or the promised comet, but they had to be dead to do that. These are proverbial false idols, and worship of those never goes well for the faithful.

Cults of personality have existed for a long time in human history, and they aren’t going away anytime soon. This one seems incredibly vile, however, and maybe that’s because technology gives us the ability to find each other, whatever our proclivities might be. If I want to find other guitar players, I can do that very easily. If I want to find other people who believe that vaccines are dangerous and that the government cannot force us to take them, I can do that as well. FInding your people is not a bad thing, but finding them and organizing them into a coherent activist bloc is problematic. The folks who stormed the Capitol were organized; they were grouped, and had common goals. They were able to share plans, information, strategies, without needing to make physical contact or travel. They were able to converge on Washington D.C. knowing exactly where they were going and what they were going to do. This wasn’t possible with the Heaven’s Gate folks, so they were mostly localize in their impact. The People’s Temple lef the U.S. and relocated in Guyana, but they remained localized there.

So, how is Q-Anon different from other historical cults? I suppose part of it is that many other cults are focused on simply controlling people, engineering a mircocosm of society controlle by a demi-god. David Koresh was another one who constructed his own kingdom, with its own rules and its own central command (him), but ultimately they wanted to be left alone. Same with Heaven’s Gate, same with People’s Temple. They all wanted to control people, but the people had been coerced into volunteering for that. This Q-Anon mess seems to be more about the followers attempting to create an alternate society, trying to force the rest of the world into their vision of reality. I suppose even that could be tolerated, up to the point they attempt to overthrow the voice of everyone, and overthrow the government. I don’t see the world as they do, and if they would stay in their own squares, I wouldn’t care what they believed. But…they aren’t staying in their own squares any longer, and they supported having a free election overturned. OK, now you’re in MY square, and you gotta go. You don’t get to break into the Capitol, which has a lot to do with how my life goes, and decide your way is the one I should be following. Nope. That ain’t gonna work, ace. So get back on the bus, get back in your pickup truck, get back on the plane or the train or the space ship (some of them may have gotten to D.C. that way, as effing crazy as they were…how about that dude with the horns, yo?) and go back to where you come from. I don’t take kindly to having my voice silenced, so…let’s not do that. Don’t make me have to come down there. Seriously.

The childishness and hypocrisy of the far right knows no bounds. They cannot get past the reality of the Presidential election, and cannot admit, even to themselves, that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the President and Vice-President. Of the entire United States. Not just a piece of the country, the whole thing. Perhaps they cannot get past a failed coup d’etat designed to overturn that election, or that the insurrection has been met with disdain by a large part of the citizenry, as well as international concerns. Maybe they truly believed the former President, who convinced them a hare-brained plan to disrupt the confirmation of the election results would be successful. Perhaps they’re off their scheduled medications and having a prolonged panic attack. I don’t care what it is, but they really need to stop the juvenile and silly attacks on newly the elected leaders. Kamala Harris may be a lot of things, but Jezebel? Seriously? Not sure if the First Gentleman appreciates being seen as King Ahab.

To further illustrate the hypocrisy that characterizes some of these folks, the Senate’s impeachment trial for the former POTUS is winding down. After viewing graphicc video of the insurrection, including security video that showed the up close and personal moments the Capitol building was actually breached, many of the GOP Senators are still vowing to vote for acquittal of the former Orange In Chief. A few of them are cowering under a rejected claim that trial of a POTUS who has already left office is unconstitutional. Wrong. Still others, though, are desperately trying to make the case that spurring on agitated protesters wasn’t a particularly nice thing to do, but not impeachable. Um, fellas…he’s already been impeached, and that’s a one-way street. You can’t take it back. What you’re supposed to be doing is deciding whether or not he is convicted for the proverbial “high cirmes and misdemeanors”, the ones on video and stuff. They have all gone mad. It would not surprise me if the refused to convict him, but it would make me very sad. Unfortunately, this is the way of supremacy, and narcissism. It’s beginning to look as though such attributes may be inseparable in politics. Believing that you can make up your own facts, change reality, simply repeat a lie until even you aren’t sure of the actual truth…that’s pretty scary stuff.

Earlier today, CNN was droning on and on about the impeachment trial, and they said new information had been reported about what the POTUS was doing on January 6th. Aside from admiring himself in a mirror, I figure, he marshalled his posse at a rally, where he got them all stirred up. Then he said let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue (to the Capitol), and that he would be right there with them. Weeeeel, they did walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, but there was no sign of him, and without daddy they got into some trouble. He was home watching it all on television, according to the reports. When things started to go south, and they had evacuated the Vice-President (and his nuclear codes “footballl”), the House Minority Leader (Kevin McCarthy) called him, begging him to call off his dogs. His first response was … that’s Antifa. Not my people. Um, no sir, these are definitely your peeps. Please call them off. This is bad – they have evacuated your VP, and the building has been breached. We’re in trouble over here – call them off! Fearless leader that he is, the former POTUS responded, “Well, I guess those people are more upset about these election results than you are.” McCarthy uttered the single-most appropriate response of his career, I’m sure – “Who the f*ck do you think you’re talking to!??” Then he ran for his life. This was nuts, to say the least.

And still…GOP Senators are defending the cavalier do-nothing stance of the former President, as though it was no big deal, anybody would have reacted the same way. But, even more bizarre, Kevin McCarthy went down to Mar-a-lago a few days after all the hoopla, ostensibly to “kiss the ring” of the orange poobah. This is mafioso stuff. This is slimy, moldy, nasty stuff. It may, however, well explain why this President-no-more commands such loyalty from some of these Senate denizens…he’s got something on each and every one of them. They are scared to death of him, and what he might do to expose their misdeeds, embarrassments, boyish indiscretions and adult criminality. This guy has run his affairs like he was Don Corleone after the family took over Las Vegas. He doesn’t pay people for work done, he doesn’t respect anybody, and he grabs women by the pu**y whenever the mood strikes him. I’m sure there’s quite a lot more, but I don’t want to lose my dinner. McCarthy was given audience, and he probably did kiss the ring, but he also asked for the Don’s donor list. He didn’t get it. I’m sure he bowed profusely at the waist, but it was all for naught. The Don was not moved, and was probably more than a bit sardonic. If they all owe him for his silence, or his manipulation of other circumstances favorable to them, that would explain it all. Symbiotic relationships, between parasites, for the mutual use and abuse of all involved. Steep price to pay for the delusion of power.

The seamy underbelly of our government is the unabashed and shameless pursuit of what passes for power. He who dies with the most dollars wins, maybe…you owe, you owe, so off to Congress you go. He who can make you take food off your own momma’s plate is powerful. Bow down. Politics is that dirty of a game, and the playing field is covered with slime. Those spectacular sliding, one-handed catches are the result of the slime-skating. I don’t believe anyone who has risen in the ranks of the political scheme can remain totally untouched by that slime – it literally holds the system together. The political game is one of compromise, deal-making, building and tearing down all manner of relationships. You have to wheel and deal, lie, apologize, lie more, tell the truth, sometimes all before lunch. You have to wrestle with the pig, and whether the pig likes it is unimportant but you are definitely going to get dirty. It’s like Gilligan’s Island, with weapons. It’s a game of contradictions and conflict, alliances and isolationism, careful planning and flat out luck. This is oganized crime in some respects, actually; it’s definitely legalized gambling. This thing you do for me, I will not forget…but remember what i do for you, and one day I may come and ask you to do me a service., so be ready. That’s the contract, and nothing is free or gratuitous. In that world, justice and honor coincide with nothing we know as the law, other than the law of the streets – cheat me, rob me, embarrass me and you will pay, when you least expect it, and in a way that you can’t predict but will never forget. This is the law of the streets, not pristine juris prudence. Fairness is what justice looks like there, not torts and case law. People don’t need diplomas to comprehend that if one person steals from another, or harms another, there should be consequences, there should be punishment. So…one must know the rules of engagement before deciding to play the game, because there is no forgiveness or grace in this glorified Fight Club. And the first rule of Fight Club is…we don’t talk about Fight Club.


The concept of justice in our country was essentially contrived by Europeans a few centuries ago. That’s not a horrible thing, we had to start somewhere, but our concepts have not evolved. We’re still putting people in debtor’s prison because they can’t pay their debts, or stole goods in order to pay their debts, and once in prison they … can’t pay their debts. Why they were in debt to start with may be because they’re fundamentally irresponsible, or lazy, or simply of poor character. That happens. It could also be, however, because of systems at work on another field of play. None of us have a good “balcony view” of the interconnected systems that govern our lives. We decry systemic injustice, but frequently don’t know which systems we’re talking about. When ordinary humans, or even extraordinary humans, attempt to map the immense web of factors that contribute to one individual’s incarceration, they quickly become overwhelmed and declare the task impossible. Since it’s impossible, let’s keep our focus on the afflicted individual that prompted the exploration, and their personal choices. That is far more manageable, and that’s frequently where the analysis remains. Sometimes that looks like blaming the victim, and sometimes it just looks like neglect. In either case, it looks like it doesn’t work.

Unitarian Universalists have a core principle that affirms “respect for the interdependent web of all existencec of which we are a part”. I’m not entirely sure what all that means in practice, except maybe the respect part. The interdependent web of life…does that include things not possessing organic life? I say it does. I say the interdependent web of life can be contextually very different for people. My interdependent web involves a great many things over which I have no control, and a great many things that I choose. My eyes are brown, and a bit near-sighted. I can’t control that. I’m just over 5’1″ tall, and probably shrinking a bit, and I cannot control that. There are other attributes over which I exert total control, like which eye glasses I wear and which optometrist I choose to visit. The attributes I can’t control inform the choices I make, and those inform other aspects of how I interact with, quite literally, the World Wide Web. There are numerous opportunities for various webs to interact every day, every minute, every hour – the optometrist I choose has a web of personal and professional relationships, and I become proximate to all of those when I become proximate to her. Every aspect of that visit depends on some other web of existence…the eyeglass frames I choose have a web of their own, from materials procurement to marketing to manufacturing. The optometrist has a web that includes business realities, suppliers, professional associations, education. So, in the very simple decision to visit the optomoetrist, complete the diagnostic examination, select the glasses, and of course, pay for the services I have experienced the intersection of my web with an amazing number of other webs. It is mind-boggling how many intersections of this nature one may experience in any given day.

So many of us presume the interdependent web is primarily environmental, flora and fauna and things associated with terra firma. I say that doesn’t go far enough. I say the interdependent web is every thing I touch and everything that touches me and how that intersection came to be. Gotta dig deep for all those points of intersection, points of proximity. The principle statement says “the interdependent web of life”, not “the interdependent web of living things”. Life includes things living and not living, and some of the inorganic things are brought to life in ways we don’t think of as living. Music…notes on pieces of paper, strings vibrating according to principles of physics, wood resonating according to entirely physical properties. Is there life there? There is life, based on the intersection of the intersection of the sensory organs and the vibratory tones produced by the musician. Who made the strings, who carved the wood to produce the instrument, who instructed the musician, who wrote the music, who transcribed the music to paper, those are all interdependent webs…of which we are a part.

So, when people are running around claiming they want THEIR country back, I can rightfully say that it’s OUR country. No man is an island and all that stuff…not one paint chip in the U.S. Capitol stands alone, and did not depend on some other web of existence that produced it and caused it to be there. Every shard of clothing we are wearing, every bit of knowledge in our heads, every crumb of food we eat are part of an interdependent web. That would imply that we have some responsibility, some accountability, for whatever depends and connects with our web. Those connections are broken in so many places, fragmented in so many ways…not a good thing. This is how the Universe works, I assume. Celestial bodies circle each other, approaching and retreating in endlessly repetititve cycles. Just because. If one tilts slightly and comes too close to another, tidal or other physical properties will change on one or the other. It’s just the way our world rolls. It’s also the way humans roll, on a much smaller scale. What I do affects other stuff I can’t even comprehend, so I would be wise to spin my web correctly lest I catch something I really don’t want.

One final thought…as I am contemplating my interconnectedness and web intersectionality and interdependence and all that inter-work…i almost lost sight of the fact that if there’s a web, there’s a spider. A predator. A life form with one goal, one mission, one instinct – survival. I have met the spider, and she is me. There’s another train of thought entirely.

Apparently the word of the day yesterday was “pussy”. The word was uttered at some point during the impeachment trial, and the interwebz are buzzing. Not sure anybody remembers why the word came up, or whether it had anything to do with the substantive business of the proceedings, but…don’t say “pussy” over the airwaves. Unless you’re the President, or a candidate for President. Or unless the intentional broadcast delay misses it. Because we’ve had a President with no sense of decorum and somewhat of a potty mouth, the dark overlords of the online communities have suddenly become a bit overzealous in cleaning up everyone’s language and hate speech. Hate speech has been a part of the online experience since the first day we had internet communications, way back to IRC and bulletin board services. Americans have a penchant for cussin’, and I am a proud example of that. There are just some emotions, feelings, sentiments that cannot be adequately expressed without using certain expletives. If I say “I really hated the weather forecast this morning”, it’s fine…it’s understood that I didn’t like the forecast. If I say “I fucking hated the weather forecast this mornning”, I’ve now quantified AND qualified the emotion of how much I didn’t like the forecast. It’s now apparent that I REALLY didn’t like it, but there’s more emotion built in. I am totally invested in full body communication, so while I’m way over here emoting, I wanna get the biggest bang for my buck. So. I am fucking all in.

I was penning some necessary drivel last night, attempting to capture and gain insight from my feelings of discontent, and irritability, and general “what the fuck am i doing here” feelings. (See? That expletive made that sentence come alive, didn’t it?) Anyhow, I suppose I do feel a little more grounded today, although still a little untethered. Maybe untethered is a good thing, although it’s a little more risky…you never know where you might bounce, what you might hit while bouncing. It’s pretty much random, which appeals to me intellectually, or maybe spiritually, but which is very scary. Riskiness…vulnerability…weighty concepts, scary territory. Vulnerability implies risk, I suppose, but risk can be overwhelmed by the process of intentional vulnerability. E.g. when I am intentionally putting myself out there for all to see, when I am intentionally trying something new and don’t know what the fuck I am doing. Risk, in general, says I know this might not work, I know I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, but I’m doing it anyway. I suppose vulnerability says all of that, but also says that I know I might get hurt, but I’m doing it anyway. Risk also says I know I might fail, but seems to me it’s more concerned with matters of the brain, such as making financial investments, or betting on a sports contest. I know I can lose a significant amount of money, but I do it anyway. Vulnerability says I’m opening my innermost self when I play this song, or make this presentation of what I think about. I know I might get hurt, but the hurt will likely be at a much deeper and more tender place than my finances. When dealing with my finances, any risk that I assume is pretty well detached from my spirit, from my heart. When dealing with playing my song, or presenting something from that deeper creative part of me, that feels like vulnerability, like my heart is out there with no defense.

I just got done with my bi-weekly therapy session, and talked more with her about all of this bouncing off walls feeling. We talked about love, or the absence thereof, and i connected on feeling as though I may not even have the wiring for that. Maybe it’s the wiring for receiving it, but I’m thinking such wiring is full-duplex, going both ways. Feeling as though I may not have the wiring for it seems to be my bizarro way of saying that I am not capable of it, either the giving or receiving of it. That I don’t know what the fuck it is, actually. We talked for a bit about this, and returned to issues of attachment. I connected with the realization that I have been confused about this love stuff from nearly the beginning…when I found the little index card from the hospital where I was born, the kind the baby formula companies give new mothers, it said I was breast fed. It was somewhat a shock to find that out, because I was so afraid to be in physical contact with my mother, since I was an adolescent, at least. I suppose it wasn’t safe to be in physical contact with her, but that’s another story. So, having the information that I was breast fed was a huge disconnect for me, and sad; it must have been safe at one time, but that went away. Hmm.

The other part of the breast-feeding issue that is confusing is that not long after I was born, my mother had to have surgery, not once but twice. She had to have her gall bladder removed, which in those days was a major incision, and she had to have a hysterectomy. She got hepatitus from the gall bladder surgery, I believe, so her recuperation time was pretty lengthy. During that time, she was mostly in bed, in my grandmother’s house, and my grandmother was responsible for my very early development I believe. I thought she WAS my mother, so when I was ripped away from her a few years later as we relocated to New Orleans, that was a big deal. I have believed that my father’s leaving the family when I was 11 or so was the source of my abandonment issue, but maybe it was this forcible separation from my grandmother that started it. Maybe that’s also why when I see my heterosxual female friends making ridiculous choices to please their male partners, I lose so much respect for them, and can’t even listen to all the drama of that. It just appals me that a woman gives up her power to please a man (or a woman, for that matter). It’s very irrational for me, but…that’s also another story entirely. Irrationality may be my middle name, but I own that. It’s the lifeblood of creativity, dammit.

I should now attend to my dog, who is not-so-patiently waiting to go outside, although she took herself outside inside earlier. Shithead, she is. Literally. So, on we go, she and I, moments of great brilliance followed by periods of abject and ordinary monotony. Life is good, or something like that.

This is a weird place to be, in my head. Had an MRI on Monday, and the report came back in a flash…they must have read the scans while I was still walking to my truck. Nothing remarkable, it said. No active lesions. Nothing to see here. Alrighty then. The neurologist hasn’t called, or messaged, so I figure no news is good news. Still no prescription refill, though. Insurance companies are just previous, and bless their hearts. They are…special.

As I said, though, I’m in a really weird place in my head, and not because of any disease or medical issue, thank goodness…although I suppose one could point to depression as a disease, and then addiction, so I guess I do have disease, but not sure if any of that chronic stuff needs to be considered in this episodic occurrence, if that’s what it is…but, I digress. The point is, we are willing to grow along spiritual lines. Wait, that’s the Big Book. Wrong meeting, although this is not a meeting. But maybe it is. See? I don’t know what the hell is going on in my head right now.

I’m militant, combative, ready to rumble. I don’t even know why. Just want to fight, tell people to back the fuck off, even though they’re not really on me. I feel a little testy, irritable, restless, discontent (i just had to change the order of those words because they are Big Book as well and I can do that if I want to). More nervous than a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, as they say in these parts. I am taking issue with everything these days, though. I am just not in the mood for people bouncing all around me with deadlines and sense of urgency and we need to get this out and somebody else is doing what you are already doing. Say WHAT? who told y’all to go and ask people to do things I’m supposed to be doing? Oh, that’s right, I forgot…if I’m not doing it fast enough, you just go around me and get somebody else to do it. Somebody with credentials and stuff. I forgot. My bad. Always my bad. But, that’s OK, and did I mention…fuck all y’all? I just really don’t care at this point. Do what the fuck ever you want, since it has to be done right fucking now. Did I mention i don’t care? Good. You’re welcome.

I do kind of want to know exactly what’s underneath all this irritability, though. I’ve gained a few pounds, which is annoying and causing me to feel a trifle bloated. My self image right now is that of Jabba the Hut from Star Wars. Just kind of evil and blobby, slimy and lascivious, with a deep rumbling chortle. Yeah. He was a ruler of far off lands or some such thing, and had minions. I think I may just need minions. People to do my bidding, people who are loyal to me. I aspire to be Jabba-like, just maybe not quite so evil and sadistic. Maybe not quite so blobby. Maybe.

Many years ago, my therapist who went MIA and then dumped me without notice a couple of years ago, said that when I found the person who really loved me, what I look like and what is wrong with me wouldn’t matter. I think I half-believed her, but also believed that person just didn’t exist, at least not on this plane or on this planet. It is just not for me in this lifetime. I feel as though I’ve accepted that, although as I age I am getting a little antsy about what that will mean when I can’t be quite so autonomous. A lady I know from the Fellowship is moving into assited living, right down the street from me. She has a son, who lives in San Diego, and he came down to help out with her move, but she’s going there on her own. I think she’s in pretty good cognitive health, so that’s not an issue. But she’s fine. I don’t feel like I’m fine, and I’m not entirely sure why.

I will say that I know I’m tired of screwing up, tired of being denied the respect of controlling things I do well. This is a recurring pattern, where people want to control my “intellectual property” when I don’t have that “sense of urgency”. That is what did me in where I used to work, and thank goodness. I literally have PTSD when people are tapping on my shoulder asking me where is this, where is that, this has to be done before Friday and that has to be done before the end of the day. I’m a fucking volunteer, you dimwits, and this is a community of faith and not a Fortune 50 company. Before I know it, though, I’m just pushed to the side and people are taking what I’ve set up and running with it. Fuck all y’all. Again.

I’m just not sure if that’s the proverbial burr under my saddle, though. I guess I’m just a lot dissatisfied with where I am right now. I need to sell that fucking house, I need to deal with the confrontation that will ensue. The renter isn’t renting any longer, she’s squatting. She knows it, and I know it. When I go to sell, I’m afraid she might pull some crazy shit, like burn the house down or something. And right now, it’s uninsured. So…another fine mess I’ve gotten myself into. Loser. So, yeah, that’s making me a little…anxious. I need to go down there, but you could not pay me enough money to get on a plane and then stay in a hotel during this COVID mess. I won’t be on a list to get the vaccine any time soon, and I don’t necessarily trust that enough to lower my infection risk all that much. There are new variants popping up all over the place; it’s like epidemiological whack-a-mole.

So, right now, I suppose I am feeling a bit trapped. Also feeling a lot useless. I need to be productive, I need to be working and having my efforts valued, and not just by people who like me or figure I’m the best they can do because they can’t fire a volunteer. I feel like I’m too old to get started on anything new. i feel like my life is all but over because I’ll only be here for another 20-25 years, so should I even bother? I suppose I’ll have to bother on some level because I need the money. I don’t like that equation, not at all. I don’t really want to HAVE to do anything. Right now, I am being fed on some level by this writing every day, but it would be nice to have an income without having to do the rat-race routine again. I am not sure I feel respected in the world, I suppose, and I don’t want to go into another situation where I am respected even less. Less than not at all. That’s pretty bad, and I don’t want pretty bad ever again. I don’t think I’m headed off for living under the bridge any time soon, but my fear is that I’ll have to start going into deprivation to live more frugally. That ain’t gonna work.

I have no idea what I want. No idea what I want to do, what I want to have, what I want to achieve or acquire or even what I want to dismiss and be done with. Well, that last part may not be true; I know I want to be done with being in situations where people use the fuck out of me and then kick me to the curb when they’ve gotten what they want. I know I want to be done with trying to figure out, when that kicking to the curb part happens, whether or not that’s about race or about class or about gender or about fat or about me just being an asshole. I never know. I compulsively compare myself to what I think I’m seeing in everyone else in the system…if my work is basically reassigned to someone else, I typically see the someone else as more favorable, occupying a higher status in the system, more favored. I feel little, small, inconsequential, disrespected entirely. I’m pretty tired of that dance, because what I usually see in the other person is skills no better than mine, if that. So why are they chosen? Whenever I’ve tried to sort that out with the people involved, I’m just looking at it all wrong, or how do I want to handle that? How do I want to handle that is, I want you to not do that shit anymore. How’s that? I want to handle that by not being forced to handle YOUR anxiety, and your vision of how you want our shared project handled. If you want to do it your way, do it your fucking self. How’s that?

I am thinking I want to give up my committee chair position at the Fellowship. I’m just too tired of all this control nonsense. I’m just too tired. This is not how I thought my 60th year was going to go. This is not how I thought my life was going to go. Back when there was “promise” and hope and everything seemed wide open, a lot of possibilities. Now, I am feeling like I’m just biding my time until the inevitable decline, when my choices are virtually nonexistent. I suppose underneath all of that is fear, fear that I have worked all this time and have literally nothing to show for it, no retirement security, no legacy, no comforts. No. Nothing. I figure I’ll get what I need, but I’m tired of not getting what I want. Strike that, because I don’t know what I want. But, I’m tired of not getting more than what I need so that I have the choice of doing something more than just surviving. I know the cage door is open, but I don’t know if I can make it out there in the great wide open. What will I do with my one wild and precious life? Fuck if I know.

While I’m thinking about what I want, I’m trying to think about what I enjoy, what gives me joy, what is beyond survival, what I do for no good reason. I do enjoy playing my guitar, truthfully. I have gone through some fairly long periods without playing, but if I thought I could never play again because of injury or disease, I would be extremely unhappy. I’m not sure if I would really want to live. Music has been a part of me for really long time, and I don’t want to lose that. I also enjoy doing this, writing and kvetching here, about nothing and everything and making no sense just because I don’t have to make sense. Making sense is highly overrated, and I think I enjoy not making sense on a regular basis. I also enjoy discussing, debating, opining on things…politics, current events, people, my history. That does nobody any good, except me. What I have written here tonight is chaotic and haphazard and makes only a bare minimum of sense, but there is catharsis here. There is healing on some incomprehensible level, that level you feel in your soul as a layer of scar tissue is lifted, that level you feel in your cells as they vibrate at an imperceptibly higher frequency. When the colors are just a tink brighter, the air just a droplet more clear. Clarity. What a concept. It seems to come and go for a time, but I believe it will remain constant after a time. I hope it’s a short time.

Having one’s head be full to the brim is exhausting. It’s a heavy load to carry, and I do wish that I could just lean over and let some of the content spill out. I suppose it doesn’t work like that, but there has to be some way to disburse what I don’t really need for the journey. Recovery work tells me to inventory all my resentments (!) and figure out the associated feelings, and what in me is threatened by the situations that birthed the resentment. That’s good. I’ll get right on that. Right now, though, I’m feeling a lot like I just want silliness and no worries and respite. I don’t know if I can really have respite for my own life, but maybe I’ll work toward it by doing what I said I wanted to do a while bacck, which is reclaim my space (i.e. purge unused crap, clear out space, de-clutter and clean up). My mother used to look at my slobbish habits and say that was how my mind was set up. I can see that. I can really see that. She was saying the right thing, but for all the wrong reasons. That happens.

Posted to FaceBook earlier:

So. The beginning of the impeachment trial is done. It was…challenging for most observers. People are still trying to figure out exactly where Mr. Castro was trying to go in his long journey through far away lands of illogic and pointlessness, doubling back on itself at points, and never arriving. never arriving anywhere. he may still be talking for all we know.
onlyl one GOP Senator has changed his projected vote so far, based on the legal presentations yesterday. It’s really hard to juxtapose nonsensical jabberwocky with copious documentation of what happened on January 6th. That exercise, which I have embarked upon one too many times in the last 4 years regarding political matters. It gives me a headache, but I have no choice but to contemplate what possible reason there could be for Senators to return a not-guilty verdict in this case. Party loyalty is not a reason, it’s an excuse for not doing the right thing.
The evidence is clear, at least if you are operating on this plane of reality, where facts and evidence mean something. Where citizenship is an implied contract with other citizens for a common good, for common health and welfare. When you are convicted of a criminal offense, and you go to jail, you may be stripped of your citizenship rights, namely the right to vote. You may regain the right to vote, in particular, after satisfying your sentence, but not always. Even if your crime does not result in losing aspects of your citizenship, you are subject to some consequences. Not convicting the main player in this insurrection event would cause me to wonder whether there are no consequences for bad behavior if you happen to have money and status. I don’t want to keep believing that.
One of the arguments aginst pursuing this trial in the Senat is that…it would split the country, be too divisive. Not sure where the hell that guy has been hanging out over the past couple of decades, but we’re already divid, we’re already split. That’s what the insurrection activity showed. That event displayed, in vivid detail, that we don’t see the same things in the same ways. I believe many of those who were fighting the police and beating people with American flag poles not only didn’t see things the same way that I do, but don’t believe they are being seen at all. Back to Charlottesville – “You will not replace us.” Back to burning crosses in the night, and “Birth of a Nation” – attracting attention (and terror) for “the light of Christ”. See us.
The response to feeling invisible in a teeming society is not new, and not limited to any race or ethnicity in this country, or any other. The KKK cross burning ritual was patterned after Scottish clan traditions. When the invisibilty extends to people of color in this country, there exists the same propensity to illuminate, to provoke observers to “see” what’s going on, to see people who seem to have been ignored. Protests following the murder of George Floyd frequently escalated to fires set in retail establishments, abandoned housing, etc. This also happened in Watts during the Civil Rights movement, and various other protest responses in the country. There is a certain visceral reaction to fire, to burning, when the spirit cries out “Burn it all down. This is not how it’s supposed to be, so burn it down, and LOOK at it. See it.”.
Some of us are still trying to be seen. If people do not want to judge the insurrectionists as anything but “patriots” who are passionate about their country, that’s fine. But you can’t judge BLM protesters any differently. AND…there is redible evidence that fires and property destruction during BLM protests last year were set by non-BLM infiltrators. Even if they weren’t, however, the point remains – you can’t judge that destruction any differently than the destructiveness of the January 6th riots. Those folks trashed the U.S. Capitol. BLM protests resulted in the trashing of retail and business establishments, like CVS. They intentionally targeted specific police stations in certain protests, bringing more light to the causal issue of police brutality. That’s a little different from attacking the house of the federal government.
So. If we’re going to get out of this, I’m thinking one of the big issues to resolve is going to be…how do we see everybody in the room? When you’re in school, the classroom is traditionally set up with an instructor at the front, and students in parallel rows facing the instructor. Hopefully, everyone can see the instructor, but the students’ view is generally the back of someone else’s head, unless you’re at the proverbial head of the class. Why not reconfigure the seating, so that seating is more circular? In that arrangement, students can see each other, and much of the hierarchy disappears. The instructor is able to maintain reasonable leadership status, but students are on more of an equivalent level.
More circular arrangements also enhance the ability to hear and respond to non-verbal cues. When you can hear, you can listen. You can listen and associate the words with a face, a person, and then you can digest what is communicated at a deeper level. This is some of the logic of restorative justice. Maintaining the integrity of the community is more important than simply punitive consequence. When a community member has done something contrary to the implied contract of the community, they are not removed from the community and forced to relinquish both community membership (citizenship) and personal identity (you’re merely a number in prison, and your identity is what you’ve done). Restorative justice intends to make the crime right with the victim, and to restore the community to whole status. Everyone involved in the breach of community standards is seen, and heard, and participates in the remedy. The community does not remain broken, and nobody is discarded.
I’m not saying that restorative justice is a perfect solution for today’s woes, but just saying that it’s one solution we haven’t emphasized, one solution that has shown great results in quite a few situations. We have to start somewhere. We’re trapped in a paradigm that doesn’t work, and it’s working less and less every day. It just seems to me that at least trying something different might get us out of this non-productive (and expensive, and spirutally depleting) cycle that causes us to give up on community and each other.

Today was a busy day. It seemed way to busy for someone who doesn’t have gainful employment, or any employment that generates an income. I’m just about to need a dip into the savings again…kind of sucks but I am very fortunate to have that option right now. I want to be independently wealthy, so I don’t have to chastise myself daily for not having a job. Independently wealthy isn’t really what I’m after, truthfully…just want enough to maintain the standard of living I enjoy (or accept) now – rent for reasonable lodgings, food, reliable vehicle, health care, a few creature comforts, e.g. internet, laptop, cell phone, books, guitars. Middle class environs. Nothing terribly upscale, just want some autonomy and independence. Not asking for luxury, really. But again, I am very fortunate and grateful for the current circumstances.

This is an insane world right now. Outside this country, there is COVID. Inside this country there is COVID, and conspiracy theories galore. People have lost their minds following a psychopath with no sould who makes fools of them every day. In spite of his exploitation of these people, they pledge allegiance to him, would give up their lives to defend him, seriously believe every thing he says. They’ve spun themselves off from the White House drama and into this nutsy cuckoo Q-Anon conspiracy cult. Some pundits claim Q is the alpha-numeric designation for a uber-high government security level for the Department of Energy. I say it’s the recurring character on “Star Trek:Next Generation” called “Q”. That character is an advanced life form, displaying as human, that delights in tormenting Star Fleet members with clever (at least in its estimation) logical and moral tests. Q appears in the garb of many figures in human history, frequently problematic characters such as martyrs, royalty, despots, etc. He (the character is clearly male-identified) enjoys having the Star Fleet officers, no exclusively human ones, defend the morality and purpose of their existence. To further complicate the dramatic scenario, and because this is an advanced life form, Q is endowed with supernatural attributes, materializing whenever he pleases and is least expected, and manipulating physical reality for the unwilling (and unknowing) participants involved. Frequently, participants do not know they are subject to reality at the whim of Q, so free will becomes a little sketchy. Because this is a television show, some of the plots are interesting thought experiments.

In the case of conspiracy theorists in the mythic Q-Anon assemblage, Q is a real person, no less deity-like than in the Star Trek world. Q has nearly super-human knowledge and big-picture perspective from high-level security clearance that ordinary humans do not typically attain. Accordingly, when Q tells the masses to watch for how many times the former-President or former-Vice President references the number 17, they should interpret that as a sign. A sign of what, I am not sure, but since 17 is the alpha-numerica designation for the letter Q, that has been deemed an esoteric signal. Again, of what I do not know, and I am not sure THEY know, either. But, no matter. In this context, Q manipulates reality for the faithful, who anxiously await the next bit of “evidence” that a giant conspiracy exists. A conspiracy that is meant to trick them, undermine them, give undesirable others advantage over them. Power. Again, it’s all about power. The Q-Anon followers are the people who, for a variety of reasons, are feeling the most powerless, and moreover, the most dis-empowered by external forces. Disempowerment by external forces is a conspiracy if ever there was one.

The phenomenon of conspiracy theories has persisted throughout history, and I contend that it has more frequently been disguised as mythology. The ancient Greeks and Romans, the Norwegians, the Vikings, the Africans, and the Hindus all manufactured theories about that which could not be understood. There were myths about where we come from on this planet, why there are seasons, why there is night and day, where babies come from. There are myths and lore to explain the attributes of plants and animals, and to explain the flow of water. In nearly all cases, there is some super-human or supernatural entity that has decreed those circumstances, or who can change and maniuplate our reality. These mythologic perspectives have varied little from theology in most cases, and polarization around those similar explanations of our shared reality can become…war. Persecution. Challenges to physical reality, and physical well-being. Humans conjure a mythology to explain the unexplainable, and then oppress themselves by discounting ordinary humanness. Then, we fight over which version of the deism is correct, and my god becomes more powerful than your god and we’re reduced to playground bullies with complicated weaponry. Damn those opposable digits!

Concocting a story line that personified immutable circumstances like weather is not terribly different from personfifying uncontrollable circumstances of any other kind. The point is the attempt to explain the inexplicable. Why are there poor people? Why are there mentally ill people? Why is there poverty? Why is there drug use, and crime, and homelessness? We have no real answers to those questions, and they seem to be unacceptable to us at this juncture. I believe what is really unacceptable to us is living as feral street animals live, clawing and scratching for every scrap of survival, never experiencing the confidence and security that we will have what is necessary to live. In the case of feral animals, they have not been shown love or nurturing, so cannot respond to caring touch later in their lives, even when the threat of non-survival has been removed. I believe it’s much the same with us humans, where scrapping for survival in the concrete jungles of our reality has rendered us incapable of responding to care, and nurture, and frequently reason. This is the state that produces a mob of people who shit on the floor of the U.S. Capitol because they’re pissed off and feeling that it’s fair play, since in their minds they are the ones being shit upon.

I have tried diligently to listen and try understanding this Q-Anon viewpoint, if there is one. I am not clear they have any view, only rage and darkness, but that’s just my opinion I suppose. Those who have spoken publicly about what exactly the conspiracy espouses have rattled on about Satanic pedophilic cabals in pizza shops, but that’s a little far out even for them. The more centrist of the group seem to believe there is a political conspiracy, designed to strip certain people of their inalienable rights and manipulate certain aspects of legal and societal reality. I can go with that. Where it falls apart logically, though, is their perception of how this manipulation is manifested, and who is ultimately responsible. When this first started, it seemed fairly easy to rationalize the movement as a product of socio-economically disempowered margins of our society, poor and uneducated specimens who are easily manipulated by charismatic figures with ill intent. OK, sure…that has happened before in human history. Hitler, Idi Amin, Sadam Hussein, etc.

Unfortunately, that’s the simplified version. What compicates my attempt to understand this Q-Anon movement, however, is the diversity of their followers. There are people of color represented in Q-Anon ranks. There are women. There are scholars and military officials, law enforcement officers, executives. That the hell? I suppose there are the oppositionally defiant amongst us, and that defiance is equally represented across identity groups. In a way that’s a good thing, because nobody wants to see an entire identity group in lock step like robots who’ve lost their humamn agency. It would be equally simple to explain this away on the basis of race alone, particularly when the public face of Q-Anon seems to be pretty white and pretty male. That could be intentional, or media bias, who knows, but I would really hope that no self-respecting woman of any race or ethnicity would be caught dead wearing moose horns, nonsensical tattoos, face paint, and a 6-foot spear for causes such as these. But, that’s also my opinion.

I suppose the common bond for all these folks is dissatisfaction. Some articulate that as opposition to “big government”. The government intrudes too much on our personal choices, they say. If we want to deny sale of a cake to a same-sex couple, we should be able to do that. If we don’t want to wear a mask during pandemic response, we should be able to make that choice. If we want to go to bars during pandemic, without a mask, and slobber all over each other, leave us alone to do that. Don’t tell us what to do, and let us do whatever we want to do. If people would just get off our backs about liberal radical-left crap like that, everything would be just fine and we wouldn’t have to erect a gallows in the front yard of the Capitol. We live in America, many say, and we are not free when government tells us what to do as much as it does. So…down with government! Down with the liberals! Down with…anything we don’t like.

Well, that’s very nice, people. But…it comes up a little short in reality. And that’s what we’re dealing with here – reality. If you are using public streets, and public facilities, and want to call the police when there’s a stray dog scaring your little Scruffy, then you have to remember that it’s not just YOUR tax dollars paying for those things. All of our tax dollars are paying for that stuff, so even if you want to claim your business is private and your religious preference disagrees with how I live my life, you really shouldn’t get to make any of that an issue unless you’re off the grid entirely. However, if you’re using the airwaves, and you have a brick-and-mortr business on a public street, I don’t see where you get off denying me service. But, the law is not always blind, particularly when the legal gatekeepers are myopic at best. But I digress. My point is, all of this my way or the highway posturing is simply a function of power, our attempts to control things we feel are out of our control. We feel out of control in our lives in general, and this is how we retaliate…let them eat cake, but not MY cake.

Power is addictive, and corrosive, and totally necessary. Power makes it possible to move, to move our bodies and change our reality. The necessity of power transcends context, transcends politics and philosphy and religion and gender and race and any other context. There is horsepower, firepower, mind power. In every context, the presence of power is immutably contrasted with the existence of powerlessness. We like to have power, we don’t like to be powerless. We perceive of powerlessness as inability, stasis, restriction, limitation. In some cases, those may be the inevitable outcomes of powerlessness. I contend, however, those are temporary situations, and power may be dormant but not eradicated. When a bird, flying at full speed, crashes into a wall or a window, it may crash to the ground, motionless. It is stunned, and will lie motionless for a time, unable to gather its faculties (literally). Barring external intervention, when left to its own devices the befuddled avian traveler will literally shake off the cloudiness and return to the skyways momentarily. Unfortunately, sometimes the initial crash puts the creature out of business permanently, and therein lies our decision point – how do we avoid the crash? We should be allowed to fly, wherever and whenever we want to, and we shouldn’t crash into walls. Whose fault is it that we crashed?

Therein lies the rub. Why does it have to be anybody’s fault? Shit just happens? Indeed it does…shit just happens. There are accidents. There are walls. Sometimes we don’t look both ways when flying, sometimes the wall is in a bad place. But when you have to share your space with several million other birds, the sky gets kind of small. You have to look out more carefully, you have to put walls in decent places, maybe you have to slow down a bit, or put warning flags on the walls. Whatever it takes. Whatever you do, though, won’t eradicate the opportunity for a crash. It may give you the best chance of avoiding one, but there’s always a chance. There is no guarantee that you’ll be able to fly whenever and wherever you want to, without risk of intersecting with someone or something else and needed to modify your course. That is not a limitation on your power, that’s an acceptance of reality.

This Q-Anon stuff, and just about all of the -isms (sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, heterosexism, etc.), reflect a bitter and hateful way of controlling what we cannot control. If you don’t sell me a cake for my same-sex marriage, that’s kind of mean, but it won’t change the reality of me having a same-sex marriage. If you don’t agree with same-sex marriage, I would advise you not to have one, but you’re not going to change anything for me by throwing me out of your cake shop. That is just your little pissy effort at controlling something you find uncontrollable, and about which you feel powerless, which is homosexuality and same-sex marriage. Go ahead, knock yourself out. If that’s what it takes to get you through the night, then have at it. I figure it’s not enough, because trying to control other people doesn’t stop with cake. It goes to pharmacists ruining COVID vaccines because they don’t agree with it and think injections are planting tracking capability in the recipients (not sure what they are thinking, since the vaccine is a clear liquid, but whatever). It goes to unethical teachers teaching children misinformation about American history, about reproduction, about sexual orientation. It goes to politicians lying to citizens about issues that will impart terror in the minds of those dependent on them for information. Those are just a sampling of places our powerlessness can lead us.

The bain of powerlessness is despair. When you can’t get up, and you feel that nothing is ever going to change, that’s a hopeless spot. When you’re in a hopeless spot, and a chauffeured Rolls Royce speeds by and splashes mud on you, you not only feel that nothing is ever going to change, but that you are the lowest of the low. There are obviously better circumstances for other people (hence the Rolls Royce) and there must be something fundamentally wrong with you if you’re the one in the mud puddle. It takes a lifetime to realize there’s nothing wrong with you, there’s something wrong with the system that separates the Rolls Royce passenger from you. There’s something wrong with all the people who fight to keep the Rolls Royce passenger in the back seat of that luxury car, as though it is deserved in some way. And if that is deserved, your place in the mud must also be deserved. I say that’s a lie. I say it’s just too difficult for some of us to get out of the mud on our own. We need help, but if we’re climbing up the walls of the Capitol and shitting on the floor inside, we’re not helping anybody. I don’t always expect the Rolls Royce passenger to help anybody – things are working quite well for them. I do expect, however, the other people in mud holes to help each other. We don’t do that, preferring to believe the Rolls Royce chaffeur about how the world works, not even for them, but for their boss. They lie. Of this I can attest.