My ideas come in herds. Some days, some weeks, some months, the creative bubbles are few and far between. Then some weeks I can barely keep ahead of them. There’s no rhyme or reason to the clusters. It isn’t related to how much writing I’m doing or the regularity of it, and it doesn’t track with the weather or the seasons. (YES I AM THE DATA DORK WHO WILL TRACK SUCH THINGS.) July was a creative flood month, with ideas like “Pachinko Life” which would be a story about how we bounce along from event to person to event from birth until death (complete with sound effects), Winter Cold Kindness, which is only a title and a non-wordable concept in my head so far, and a Felicity & Justin short that would frame some of his backstory. That one really, really wants to be written but I have two other worlds requiring my time first. Alas.
A thing that’s been bugging me because I keep seeing articles about “duty” applied to people’s jobs. As in, “you have a duty to show up.” NOPE. No employer deserves the level of life investment implied by the word Duty unless oaths of fealty were sworn (see: military & religion) Employment is contractual: by definition it means employees commit to doing a job as defined in return for compensation. PERIOD. Belief that any job or a career is anything more is the result of cultural brainwashing and insidious corporate propaganda. I say this despite also believing passionately in the goal of doing work that means more to the world than bringing home a paycheck. Conflating the importance of the work with the intrinsic worth of the institution administering that work is a dangerous error.
I’ve been recording a lot of life stuff on this blog that I haven’t published and likely won’t ever publish. They may be too personal or private or plain too surreal to inflict on others. I can’t judge right now, the world is too surreal, and until I can, they stay in draft mode. I needed to write them. (this blog is my version of the neat little notebook many writers have. I don’t do handwriting. At. All. DON’T JUDGE ME & I WON’T JUDGE you) But I don’t need to share them. I think everyone should have an outlet like that. Point 2 up there almost ended up being one of those unposted thoughts, but I decided, meh, why not.
This may end up being My Year of Series Re-Reads. So far I’ve revisited the Liaden Universe, caught up with the Chronicles of the Kencyrath, and re-read all the Valdemar novels, Dresden Files, and Guild Hunter books. And I am now embarking on an October Daye marathon that should keep me booked for a month. If none of these series sound familiar, I recommend all of them, some with caveats, some without.
Expect more listish posts like this one when I have no major ideas to expound on, or reviews to post, and I forget to post the little things one at a time over teh course of a given week.
Until later!
Look, a pretty picture of a book & other buyable things!
If you’re one of the people who’s felt my scorn about your take on The American Plague Situation, please know I am not sorry. (If you are not one of those people, be warned this rant is long and…um…exceedingly ranty.) So. Onward.
When you sigh about overwhelming information, muse about lockdowns maybe being too extreme, express concern that the doom predictions aren’t coming true but your friends & family are going bankrupt/ being evicted/ losing their savings, if you wonder if the prevention is worth the effort and cost, or maybe it’s exaggerated and it’s definitely confusing and we can’t go on like this forever..this is what’s going on in my brain:
OMFG OH MY FUCKING GOD NO YOU ARE WRONG AND I AM TOO SHOUTYCAPS ANGRY AT YOU & THE WHOLE FUCKING WORLD TO DEAL WITH YOUR IGNORANT BULLSHIT.
I am happy to have rational discussions about issues, and I think I have achieved that standard in most cases despite my above feels…
BUT. When you hear that edge in my voice, when you sense I am less patient than usual, less inclined to accept the validity of your ideas, and not treating your positions as reasonable, there is a reason, and it is this:
You are not reasonable. You are fucked up, AND you are identifying yourself as a direct, immediate threat to my life and the lives of people I love. I will not be chill about that.
Bad ideas come in gangs, and they beat up on rationality. “It’s all so confusing” runs with “They’re all equally bad,” “I can’t keep up,” and “I don’t know what to believe,” and they are all shitty excuses that play right into swearing allegiance to the ringleader of rational assassins, Denial.
When you hang out with the “it’s so confusing” mindset, you become the “It’s fine” meme dog. People deny their way into death by smoke inhalation every year. True story. No joke.
I’m actually in favor of letting people endanger themselves on their own time. But in the case of this pandemic, you are endangering others. Me.
So, fuck your willful ignorance. “Looking at both sides” and “I can see their point” acceptance of all ideas as equal spreads hot takes like “we can’t stay locked down, people are going bankrupt,” “But the children ARE FALLING BEHIND and having their childhoods ruined” and “cloth face masks don’t prevent disease, so are they worth the hassle?”
All those chunks of bullshit can be disputed and debunked point by point, but I have neither the patience or interest for it. No one who accepts them is doing so rationally. No one who even ponders them is thinking straight.
Look. I know news comes at us from all sides like fire hoses of fact & fiction, pouring data into the burning building of The Year 2020. But complaining that you don’t know how to interpret it all? That it’s too haaaaarrd?
TOO FUCKING BAD. FUCKING LEARN. I WOULD FUCKING TEACH YOU.
Wading through a neck-high flood of information isn’t fun. But it isn’t HARD. It’s just time consuming. Engage in source-checking, recognize and filter out data that’s tied up in bias phrasing and hidden agenda red flags, and translate hyperbole based on the facts you learn from the first two activities, and there you will find consistent, reliable information.
Please understand, my passionate horror of your attitude has deep roots. I have pushed back against the American devaluation of expertise and lived experience for decades now. The whole, “doctors disagree, so I’ll believe the conclusion that feels right,” makes my blood boil. The eager embrace of anecdote-as-proof, the trust in uninformed intuition, the erosion of respect for intellectual rigor and basic math…I have been howling and growling (and calmly educating people) about these problems for years.
But now the worship of snake oil over science is LITERALLY killing people by the dozens each day. COVID-19 is on its way to becoming endemic, and it didn’t have to be this way. We’ll be lucky if it doesn’t hammer at the fracture points in our society until they shatter and send us careening into open civil warfare. (as opposed to the undeclared war already being waged by federal & local military forces against American citizens right now. BUT I DIGRESS. Sorrynotsorry. Recognizing the seeds of dystopia is kinda my thing.)
And okay, fine. I can’t resist. I will bring the hammer of reason down on a few points.
There are social safety nets that could catch EVERYONE facing personal or business losses due to the collision of a pandemic with a private sector Gone Wall Street Wild for 30 years. Mostly in the USA we’ve gone the “full-on blatant corruption & skimming” route instead, but that isn’t the POINT.
The point is, helping people through financial and educational loss is possible. Bringing people back from the dead isn’t. And don’t get me started on the “that which does not kill us leaves us damaged” aspect of COVID-19 which is becoming clear as cases pile up.
Pitting lives against economics is a rigged game, and if you’ve been tricked into playing it, you’re a fool. Period. There will also be economic devastation if factories shut down, ports shut down, stores close, utilities fail BECAUSE TOO MANY PEOPLE WHO RUN THEM ARE SICK OR DEAD.
Is that possible? Oh, hell, yes. Likely? Maybe? We are NOT under control. We squandered the initial shutdown time without developing resources for identifying & containing outbreaks. And now the spread is skyrocketing because too many people are tired of taking simple precautions. (The dangerous magical thinking goes something like this: we did the shutdown, we flattened the curve, it’s all over and now everything is fine!)
Uh. No. We barely flattened out the curve, and never came close to stamping it out anywhere. I expect we will face breakouts for years the way we used to see with measles & polio and still see with flu…and oh, yeah, we could have TWO pandemics at once this winter if it’s a bad flu season. Viruses don’t care if they’re inconvenient.
While I’m ranting, forget the phrase “herd immunity” forever unless you are saying you are a-okay with hundreds of thousands of people dying from COVID-19 and far more facing lifelong medical complications for your hypothetical, temporary protection. At least 20-40% of the whole damned herd has to get infected to matter at all, and its benefit assumes the immunity lasts. WHICH IT USUALLY DOESN’T FOR CORONAVIRUSES. If you are okay with that, GTFO of my life, you are a monster.
Don’t believe me? Look up the tweets by the governor of Mississippi, who lays out the gruesome toll.
Oh–and all your friends who are a) swearing they had Covid last year, or b) insisting lots more people had it already and never got sick and that means the fatality numbers are inflated and c) besides, it’s mainly old people? A) No. Just. Ugh. NO. B) Check your arithmetic, even if Covid only had the fatality rate of a mild flu, that’d be 325,000 dead people or more if left unchecked, so C) GTFO, monster. And some of those healthy folks walking around are breathing death, and we cannot know who they are.
Also not all the dead will be olds. Hospitals some areas are so full of COVID cases right now that Our Federal Government is hiding the numbers from the public. Young people. Old people. Sick people. Previously-healthy people. Virus doesn’t give a damn. The cold numbers are such that even tiny percentages add up to a lotta dead. Math is unforgiving that way.
And that’s why masks fucking matter. My fitted mask cuts the risk me exposing someone virus by more than half. I can’t know if I’m a healthy spreader. The antibody tests are trash.
But everyone who won’t bother to properly cover their damned noses is doubling MY risk. The sheer, flagrant selfishness of it enrages me. FYI, you will not choke on your own toxic exhalations or suffocate because you cover your face with thin cloth or paper. *FACEPALM*
ANYWAY. Wrapping up now, I promise.
All your musing and pondering comes down to the equivalent of this: “I heard the fire alarm, but I don’t smell smoke, the fire exits are hard to find, and leaving seems like a waste of time and money, plus so many people say we can ignore the alarms because sometimes the alarms are wrong anyway so I don’t know what to believe.”
To which I say, WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU?
If you get to wrap yourself in a comfy blanket of information fatigue and refuse to educate yourself properly or keep a fucking mask over your damned nose, I get to call you a fucking accessory to mass murder.
Yes, I am judging people and finding them wanting. I hate losing faith in so many, MANY people I once respected, especially since they could do better and won’t. But alas, I am disappoint. SO DISAPPOINT.
TL;DR: Stay strong, learn the difference between snake oil and science, remember you are mortal. This ain’t over. Keep a mask on your face, keep your distance from others, and keep your pantry stocked.
And if you’re one of the people who feels the way I do, hail and well met. We shall stand in solidarity. Separately. Safely.
And next post I’ll write about my exciting book revisions, or my upcoming Gen Con events or happy garden projects…or something.
I’ve slid into a bad blogging habit, which is treating this space as a place for Bigger Ideas. It’s not an inherently bad idea, but most of my thoughts aren’t Big or Exciting or Happy. They’re small, ephemeral, personal ponderings.
Or rants.
The tally of my petty rants–drafted but not posted–is well into double digits. I rant on subjects like “How did I waste this whole day?” or “WTF shut UP about my NAME already!” and no one else needs to read the whininess I simply need to get out of my head.
Back to today’s meander. It feels even more petty and unimportant than usual to write about my little life when so many Large Important Events are happening and so many people have Much More Important Things to Say.
And yes, I could leave the blog to languish. The problem with that plan is that if I ignore this virtual space for too long it taps hard on my guilt button. Or rubs at the surface of my attention and leaves blisters. Or gnaws on my mental ankle like a hungry cat. Pick your favorite analogy.
(I’m in an analogy mood today. I love the days when metaphors are easy. And parentheses. It’s a parenthetical day too.)
ANYway. I feel bad if I don’t regularly use all the different spaces in my house, too, so it’s clearly something fundamental in my psychology.
This is my usual long way around to the point, which is that I don’t actually HAVE a point today
Attractive topics are not thick on the ground. I don’t want to bore anyone with another same-old writing update (progress is being made, but it’s glacial & hard to quantify) the house fancification is done, the garden is in an early summer “nothing to see here” phase, I haven’t baked anything interesting, and I haven’t found the right words for dealing with my feels on the Current World Situation.
Plus every time I check the internet I’m reminded all Karens are awful, which reinforces my already powerful belief that the world neither needs nor wants to hear from me. It also feels physically like someone has just kicked me hard in the gut, so that’s fun.
It’s a struggle to convince myself to share anything. And by struggle I mean the kind of struggling you do when you’re walking forward against hurricane-force winds while people beat on you with sticks.
(This has been a digression into a small sample of the rants I write when I’m crying offline. Sorrynotsorry. We now return to the regular program.)
In summary: I wanted to say, “Hello, world!” via blog because it’s been too long since I last posted. And now I have done that. Victory is mine! Check box checked!
I’ll try to prevent more large time gaps from developing, even if I only have more Small Thoughts or stray dream snippets.
