The Shootings and Other Sad Stories

 

On November 19-20, 2022, a guy went into Club Q in Colorado Springs during a drag show and opened fire. He was tackled and disarmed by a battle vet and a couple of other patrons. Five people were murdered, and nineteen wounded.

While my perception of this shooter is that he’s a bona fide nutjob, a lot of the shootings and other violence to LGBTQ+ people are being fueled by right wing rhetoric these days. They like to say that children are being programmed to be transgender and/or queer, that children are being sexualized by exposure to LGBTQ+ people – drag queens and trannies and queers, oh my - and that families who love and support their trans/queer children are abusive.

The haters call all LGBTQ+ people and Democrats(!) groomers and pedophiles.

What?

I have too many friends and family in the LGBTQ+ community not to speak out against this toxic tripe. (Apologies to cows) As a culture we are beginning to grow up and start to accept people as they are, and these sloth brains are trying to undo it all and take us back to the good old days of destroying lives and killing people. (Apologies to sloths)

Your children will tell you if they are queer, or transgender, or non-binary, or living at any point on the gender or queer spectrums, if they trust you. If your children do not trust you, they may allow you to dwell in the comfort of your delusions until they can get a safe distance away from you. Too many queer children are thrown out when their parents learn the truth about them. 

Staying in the closet is the traditional safe option. Although it is soul-destroying and confusing pretending you are someone other than yourself, billions of people have done so and still do so, to stay alive, to have a home, to avoid being ostracized by their families, their friends, their church.

Now in the last few years it might seem that queer and transgender and non-binary people are coming out all over, which has led some of the fearful to call it a fad, or the hip thing to do, or, in the Right Wing Book of Lies, their abusive parents are forcing them to be transgender, and mutilating them with gender reassignment surgery.

Are queer and nonbinary and transgender people made, not born?

Um, no.

It’s not that there are more transgender and queer people now, or it’s a fad, or parents are forcing their children to be transgender/queer. No. It’s that more people feel like maybe they will not be murdered for being their authentic selves.

The shootings at Club Q and other places would argue that you still might be murdered for being your authentic self. It is certainly a calculated risk. Of course you could be shot because you happen to be sitting anywhere minding your own business when a shooter walks in. You can get shot pretty much anywhere in America these days.

The evolving openness about gender identity and sexual orientation has made some people lose their minds. It is too big a change from what they’ve always been taught and believed.

By the way, it is a cliché that many gay bashers eventually realize that they are gay.

If you feel the need to be violent to people who are gay or transgender: Stop. Just stop. Stop hurting and killing innocent people. Stop repeating vicious lies. Stop ruining or ending lives, including your own.

If you are hetero/cisgender, you have more things in common with transgender and queer and non-binary people than differences. For example, being a good person or being a jackass happens in every human group I’ve run into. (Apologies to jackasses)

Growing up and accepting people as they are, especially yourself, asks a lot of you.

No one asks to be transgender or queer.

It would be good to be left in peace, no matter your gender or orientation, and I believe that is a deeply felt and common human aspiration. It is too bad that we are so violently bad at minding our own business.

Groovy Man, Far Out

 When the Loop folded its tent and crept away last summer, I thought, well, that’s that.

I was recovering from a broken back at the time, and that took up a lot of time and energy. So I blessed the Loop and let it go in peace.

Then word came that the Loop is being resurrected. As long time readers know, I am a big fan of resurrection.

So what is there to write about these days? Politics? Religion? Money?

Or the chores with tiny steps that bog us down like the La Brea tar pits? That’s what I’m up to.

I have started sorting through the gazillion family photos, again.

While going through some old pictures from my dad’s side of the family, I came across a picture of two deceased aunts with one other woman. Someone had written on the back, “1932. Nell, Thelma, Chick”

Thelma and Chick were my father’s sisters. But Nell? Who the heck was Nell?

The picture was taken at my grandparents’ fishing camp at the mouth of Smith River, in California, north of Crescent City and south of the Oregon state line. It is now the Ship Ashore trailer park, restaurant, and motel. You can’t miss it. The ship is right up by Highway 101.

My brother and cousin Charlotte didn’t know who Nell was, but a call to my cousin Jimmy brought enlightenment. Thelma was his mother, and Nell was her bff, he said. Mystery solved. I must admit that I was surprised he said, “bff.” The man is 81. But he has children and grandchildren and does not live under a rock, so.

That is the problem with sorting photos. They are a gateway to riddles and reminiscence. You start thinking about things and people from years ago and being mystified wondering who the people in some of the old photos might be, because so often no one bothered to write names and dates on the back.

Did this sort of thing teach me a lesson, so that I faithfully dated and labeled the backs of all my photos? Hahahahaha. Nope.

I took way too many pictures of my own kids, more than I need and a lot more than they want. I was thinking they’d like to see them after they grew up, but photos are all digital now. Why would you want to load yourself down with hard copies?

We boomers are a dying breed, literally. I wish that didn’t make so many people happy. My generation dropped out of college, hitchhiked around the country, slept with strangers, and used various illegal drugs, although LSD was still legal when it came on the scene, and people really liked it. This made other people panic, and the next thing you know LSD was an illegal substance. Kind of closing the barn door after the horses were hallucinating.

But I digress.

Not all boomers lived the “sex, drugs, and rock & roll” lifestyle. Many stayed in college, got degrees, grew up to take over the running of the country (those who did not die in Vietnam), and brought us to our present state of peace, love, and dope.

Well, dope, anyway.

Considering that we marched for peace, civil rights, and human rights, we boomers didn’t make much progress in the peace, love, and ending racism and sexism areas. Our parents were the Greatest Generation. We were the “Groovy, Man; Far Out,” generation.

We are now relics of fogeydom and probably the last generation that wants to hand down pictures, sets of dishes, silver(plated) eating utensils, and other family heirlooms that our children have no desire to schlep through their lives. Our children and grandchildren have more immediate issues – like trying to make our planet remain habitable for humans – might be too late for that – and trying to keep the nuclear powers from turning humanity into so many radioactive cinders, assuming the wildfires don’t get us first.

I get it. They want to have a future, not cling to the past. Right on, kids. (NB: “Right on” is a slang phrase from the late 60s, usually done with a fist pump, roughly the equivalent of, “You go, girl,” except political. And NB is short for the Italian/Latin “nota bene,” meaning, pay attention, damn it.)

Still, kids, you might enjoy having that picture from 1932 of Chick, Thelma, and Nell, living through the Depression, which, my mother told me, was not a big deal there on the Central Coast of California, especially if you were a farmer. She made a whopping $10 a week at her bookkeeping job, and paid for room and board, and took piano lessons down at the Notre Dame Academy, a Victorian fantasy of a building. But that’s a story for another time.

God Bless Her

 

Life has been overwhelming the last couple of years. My personal experience has been that the isolation brought on by the covid pandemic has made me starved for human interaction, but it is difficult to get out and be with people when you know you might catch covid and die as a result. Yes, I am vaccinated, and boosted. So were both my kids when they got covid, and they are young, but I am old, which makes me vulnerable. I find that fear of death puts a real damper on my enthusiasm for socializing.

Then there is Mr. Putin’s war. I am heartsick, as are millions of people – heartsick that this irrational, pointless aggression is causing the deaths of thousands of people, many of them innocent civilians, and destruction of the Ukrainian homeland, and for what? So Mr. Putin can have the pleasure of waving his little Russian dick around? This is not reason enough to die or kill. But here we are.

Then there are the shootings in America, of which we have a sporadic flurry of awareness, which soon gets superseded by another news cycle or singing competition, so we forget until the next time. Right now the slaughter of innocents in Uvalde, Texas, is uppermost in our minds. Children. Beautiful, innocent children, cut down by another child with an AR-15. What will we do about it? I’m waiting to see.

The January 6 hearings in Congress remind us of the brutality of that day. What we have here in this country is a lot more than a mere division of people, but what may be a terminal illness of the American experiment.

I almost forgot to mention climate change.

Whew.

Life is difficult – an easy day is the exception, not the norm – but this persistent, ongoing high stress and dismay, and the way it keeps piling on top of our regular lives (which are hard enough) is wearing some of us down, adults and children alike.

But now comes Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee. God bless her. She has served seventy years on the throne. She promised to dedicate her life to serving her people, and she has done that.

She grew up with parents who loved her, and for the first ten years of her life did not bear the weight of expecting to become the monarch. Her Uncle David, Edward the VIII, screwed that up, although that may have been a lucky escape for the world, considering his sympathy for Hitler. In Edward’s place we got Bertie, Elizabeth’s father, who became George VI, and when he passed, we got Queen Elizabeth II.

When I say “we,” I mean the whole world, not just Britain. She is the only British monarch I remember. I was born in 1948, and by the time I was aware that there was an England, and she was its queen, her presence was something I took for granted. She has always been there, steady, gracious, non-dramatic, doing her duty, surrounded by people whose lives are all about serving her, protecting her, making sure everything runs smoothly. She is the center of what her family calls The Firm, and all the people who depend on The Firm for their livelihoods.

Many Americans are fascinated by the Queen and her family, including me at times. I got up in the middle of the night to watch Charles and Diana’s wedding. Years later I got up in the middle of the night to watch Diana’s funeral service, with my mouth hanging open as Diana’s brother Charles, Earl Spencer, tore the Royal Family a new one for the way they treated Diana.

The Royals. They distract us, amuse us, outrage us, remind us of a time and a way of life that has been dead and gone for decades. Centuries.

I speculate that many Americans today would prefer to be happy subjects of the crown, with all the questions that would answer, knowing royal rule as familiar and comfortable. It is fun to watch and feel ownership for people who live lives so different than our own. Apparently. When I think of all the political scandals and wars over which QEII has reigned, I am sure that America’s political and imperialistic hijinks would have been usual days at the office for her.

Our story would be so different if there had been no Revolution, although I think that we might have done as most of the rest of the British empire and declared ourselves independent nations by now. I like to think I’d be living in the country of Baja Canada, with its three states, Oregon, California, and something other than Washington, because he was a hero of the Revolution.

Anyway: Queen Elizabeth II. God bless her. She has given seventy devoted, stable, consistent years as Queen. Seventy years of living her life in service to her people, inspiring us and being one stable fact in this unstable world. She will live in history as an example of the best of us.

If we have a history.

And Yet

 

I get a feeling that there is a consensus in the world that we are in deep kimchi. Putin’s troops are devastating Ukraine after their action that was supposed to rush in and take over Ukraine in about three days but did not. Turns out the Ukrainians had other ideas, but still their country is being battered with artillery, bombs, missiles, and I don’t know what all the Russians are lobbing. 

The Russians are aiming for civilians and civilian sites and buildings – apartment houses and other homes, schools, churches, public buildings, some hundreds of years old. Ukrainians and Russian troops are both dying by the double handfuls. Today I heard of Russian troops torturing and killing Ukrainians, even children, one to one.

Putin tosses out threats of using nuclear weapons. Why? Because he is an asshole, that’s why, surrounded by sycophantic assholes, although at this point, I doubt that asshole is a strong enough label.

Picture; the first dandelion of spring in my yard. Many more soon to follow.

You know, Vlad, just because you have the capability to end all human life doesn’t mean you have to do it.

So there’s that end-of-our-favorite-species (us) worry that makes our hearts heavy, but like they say on the infomercials, that’s not all.

Climate change continues to pummel the earth, which is also threatening to our favorite species (us). I have read speculation that homo sapiens (boy, naming ourselves “man the wise” was a fine bit of hubris, wasn’t it?) will no longer be able to sustain life on earth after about 2060, which is awfully soon.

You know – the Neanderthals were so much more successful that we have been, lasting more than 300,000 years, about 200,000 more years than we homo sapiens have been around. Even though we probably caused their demise, and even though most of us have about 2% Neanderthal DNA in our genetic makeup, a fact that tickles me no end, they adapted so much more successfully to life on this planet than we have done. Basically, we wiped them out, and ever since have gone on destroying species, the earth, and each other. I guess that’s a kind of success. We excel at screwing up and bringing death to all living things. Not that I’m bragging. But I digress.

So yeah, Putin is waving his nuclear dick around, and climate change seems to be accelerating faster than anyone expected, and we are experiencing extreme weather: fire storms, volcano eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, avalanches, heat domes, and atmospheric rivers. Rising water levels in the oceans. Melting icecaps. We are reaping what we have sown.

Then there’s Covid. Remember Covid? As of 3:33 pm today, April 5, 2022, 6,177,324 people have died from Covid worldwide, THAT WE KNOW OF, and 1,008,198 of those dead were Americans. This is not a matter for civic pride, that almost one-sixth of the entire human race’s deaths from Covid have been American deaths.

And … the supreme white European male cohort is flailing around trying not to lose control of everyone else. They are like a wounded animal, aren’t they? The closer they get to dying out as a ruling class, the more dangerous they become, the more desperate to put down anyone who isn’t them. They are doomed and they know it, but they are not going quietly. God forbid we should all live in a world that recognizes people for their merits, not their skin color.

Cops still kill black people with impunity. Indigenous women disappear and are never found. We white liberals sit around talking. Ain’t it awful? What can we do? For most of us, living with all the integrity we can muster is the most we can do, and positive action will grow out of that integrity, we hope.

Oh yeah. There is so much crap to fear, so much stress on all of us, and that’s what I mean when I say we are in deep kimchi. This is a real rotting cabbage era of existence.

And yet:

We go on doing the best we can. We recycle plastics. We volunteer with charities and community service organizations, and we donate money. We drive our oil burning cars less, or get electric cars, which have environmental problems of their own but it’s a start. We see the work that needs to be done, and we tackle it. Some of us do, anyway.

People are still getting married, and having babies, and building houses. Planning for retirement. Trying to save Medicare and Social Security for when they get old, if they get old. Some families are making the leap to accepting their children’s authentic selves. That’s a biggie.

We go on living as if we are going to go on living. What other choice do we have? Suicide? That is like throwing a spear into the heart of everyone who loves you, as well as setting a terrible example, and is not an option most people consider.* The world may be a mess, but it’s our mess and we love it and want to go on living in it and trying to clean up the mess so we and our children can go on existing on this beautiful, blessed, dangerous, deadly planet. Is that a testimony to the resilience of human beings? Or is it simply our genetic hard wiring? Beats the heck outta me, but I don’t think it matters why. This is what we do. In the words of a hero of my generation, we keep on trucking.

*If you do consider suicide an option, please call the Suicide Hotline: 800-273-8255. You will have to work your way through choosing options - but don't give up. Keep going. Keep following the prompts until you connect with a live person. Talk to them. 

Let's Ban a Book!

 A school board in Tennessee has banned the graphic novel, Maus, because it would make students “uncomfortable.” It has nudity and bad language.

Well, yeah. So I pulled out my copy of the two-volume set and started reading it again, for the fourth or fifth time. It is an uncomfortable read, but not necessarily so much because of language and nudity.

The nudity is found in piles of dead naked Jews, skeletal bodies of men (Jews were segregated by gender in the camps). So yeah, dead people who were starving before they died, and on some of them you can see their sad little dead penises. I have noticed that male nudity is considered much more shocking than female nudity. Naked women? You betcha! Bring ‘em on! Naked men? That’s obscene! But I digress.

I do not think the language is anything that kids haven’t heard by the time they are ten, or younger. 

The school board did not mention violence, did it? Only nudity and language as the reasons for banning the book. They say nothing, for example, about where a German soldier picks up a child by the legs and smashes his head against a wall, or other atrocities that are mentioned or illustrated, like a kapo grabbing a prisoner’s cap and tossing it and saying, “Go get the cap.” When the prisoner goes to pick up the cap, the kapo shoots him, reports that the prisoner was trying to escape, and is rewarded with a bonus and some time off. The school board didn’t say a word about those things. Nope. Language and nudity. So American.

The Jews and dissidents and those otherwise considered to be unfit to be pure Aryans were imprisoned, tortured, and slaughtered by the millions, then sent up the chimneys or bulldozed into open trenches. In Kiev, the Nazis had the foresight to dig the trench, send the living Jews into the trench and then kill them, saving the step of pushing dead bodies into a trench. The Nazis were nothing if not efficient.

I think the reality of the Holocaust would be a lot more traumatizing to children than mere “nudity and language.” But what the hell do I know?

Come on – the Holocaust was beyond traumatizing. When you read Maus, you cannot deny that it happened, and if your eyes are open you cannot help but draw the parallel with the dehumanization by one group of people in our country of other people.

Reading Maus this time my breath is taken away by the honesty and artistry of the way Art Spiegelman told his tale. The two volumes are such works of art, both visual and written. It took him eight years to write them, or maybe eight years to write the first volume. I’m not sure. But you can see why it took years to write and illustrate his father’s story. He tried to get his father to tell him as many details as possible, and then he illustrated those details.

What it is to be the child of a death camp survivor, or to be a death camp survivor, is such a deep and lasting wound to the body and soul and the universe. I can witness that in Maus, but I am incapable of imagining it. There is nothing in my life that compares. It is a whole other horrible level of atrocity, treating Jews (Blacks, Latinx, Asians) as the feared “other” who must be eradicated.

Which is why students should be able to read Maus. So they can see what they cannot imagine; yes, be traumatized; and, I hope, become determined that the holocaust will never happen again. That is pertinent to present circumstances – the rising tide of anti-Semitism is full of the mindset of “kill all the Jews.” Many of these people have the same attitude toward Jews and black people – they are not human beings.

Of course there have been other mass murders, murderers of innocents – Stalin comes to mind. Pol Pot, in Cambodia. Vladimir Putin is bucking to get into that club. Maybe he already is.

Us, in our undeclared wars.

We are too far down the slippery slope of fascism and racial hatred here. I keep hoping that the kids are all right and will be so fed up with the mess their elders have made of the world that they will turn it around.

So, Maus. My hat is off, once again, to Art Spiegelman, and all the people who made his graphic novel a reality.

The banning of the book has led to a rise in sales of Maus, which makes me happy. So yay for that. Nothing like a good book banning to increase a book’s sales.

Is It So Much to Ask?

 

I was sitting at the kitchen table this morning, trying to remember the last time in my life that it was usual and customary for me to go to the bathroom alone.

Certainly not since my first baby learned to walk, so about thirty-nine years. The kids outgrew that, but by then we had dogs and cats, and if you have lived with dogs and cats, you know that they have their own ideas about boundaries, and the bathroom door is not one of those boundaries.

The last cat standing is Mellow, the tuxedo cat, and this morning he came in and flopped down at my feet and stretched out like he was luxuriating in the summer sun, not on the bathroom vinyl flooring in mid-winter. It bothered me a little bit that he looked like he was settled in there for the long haul. Okay, okay, I do a lot of daydreaming and reading and playing games on my phone while I’m in there, but it seemed kind of high-handed (high-pawed?) to me that he assumed I wouldn’t be moving any time soon.

It also gets my attention when a cat gets comfortable in a cold, hard place.

Years ago we had a long-haired tabby named Miss Kitty who gravitated to cool, hard surfaces, and seemed happy to sleep there. I had never seen a cat that preferred hard and cold to soft and warm, but that’s how she rolled. Maybe it was that long hair.

She was the queen of the cats here until Beanbag came along. By that time Miss Kitty was getting on in years, and Beanbag, a tuxedo cat, arrived with a belly full of kittens (hence her name), so she really was a Queen. She gave birth in a box that Rick put on the back porch, after checking us out for a couple of weeks. I guess she decided we were okay. She was with us until she died, and she ran a tight ship. A cat of a lifetime.

We had a lot of feral cats in the yard that we fed in those days, so she had plenty of cats to herd. We only kept one of her kittens, a blue-gray tuxedo cat who was named Playfully by my older son.

When the kittens were old enough, I tried to drop them off at a VIPP adoption day, held at McFeed’s at that time, but I burst into tears as I drove away and had to turn around and go back and get them. The kittens may have been ready, but I wasn’t.

Playfully was the favorite of Rick’s and mine, because one day our younger son, in the spirit of scientific inquiry, tossed her into a wheelbarrow full of water. Rick spotted this and came running out to save the kitten. “Cat floats, Dad,” our son said. Rick was furious, but he rescued the kitten and brought her inside after telling our son not to throw cats into water.

She had inhaled water and became ill. We put her in a box, with towels and a heating pad, on a chair at the kitchen table that was next to the baseboard heater. Rick would occasionally carry her around in his shirt. It was touch and go for a few days, but then she turned a corner and recovered – almost. Her lungs were permanently compromised. She had gargle-y breathing and respiratory problems the rest of her life.

You can’t give away a kitten after bonding with them like that.

We found homes for the rest of the kittens individually. There were times in later years I wished we’d kept them all, but that would not have been practical, would it?

Would it?

Beanbag was the smartest cat with whom I have ever lived, with the biggest personality. She ruled around here for years. She even intimidated Sadie, our 85-pound Doberman/pit bull. Beanbag would stick her head deep into one of Sadie’s ears, and lick, while Sadie stood there cringing, afraid to move. Beanbag would put one paw on Sadie’s head, and if Sadie tried to pull away, she suffered the wrath of the paw.

But where was I? Oh yes – going to the bathroom with company. Mellow will come right in and lie down, as he did this morning, and sometimes he’ll jump up on my lap and proceed to my shoulder, where he snuggles in and purrs.

My late beloved AmStaff, Marley, usually would not come in, but she would stand outside the door looking in at me, checking on where I was and what I was doing, and seeming a little worried. Did the dog want to be part of what was happening? Usually, no. Sometimes she did come in, to give me a nose touch and then head back out to the living room, assured all was well, I guess. I really don’t know what went through her pitty mind.

Mellow is a senior cat now, eleven or twelve. He likes to go in and out several times a day. I don’t let him out after dark because I know there are coyotes in the neighborhood.

When he feels like it, he’ll jump in my lap and climb up to do a neck snuggle, then walk around and jump down from the other shoulder. When I’m on the couch or in bed he’ll come and lie on my nice soft stomach, or, sometimes, lie next to me. Then, according to some schedule known only to him, he will suddenly “chirp,” and stand up, and leave, to go tend to whatever occurred to him.

His only real downside is that he drools uncontrollably when he’s lying on me, purring and happy. I try to keep a kitchen towel handy to throw under his drooly mouth. If I don’t have that I can end up soaked.

I suppose when Mellow is gone, I’ll be able to go to the bathroom in solitary splendor.

I’ll miss him, though, like I miss Marley now.

The Fault-Finding Gene

 

 

What kind of a year will 2022 be? I think I’ll try to stay in the present and take it one day at a time, like I do with everything else. I will try to be a good person, which is not a given for me.

Just to show you what a terrible person I am, there are few things that cheer me up as much as seeing a death notice for someone I did not like. That happened recently, and as the warm glow spread inside, I thought, I’ll never have to deal with that person again.

This may be the acme of schadenfreude, but I console myself that whoever it is will never know, because they are, you know, dead.

I do not talk about it to people. I keep it to myself. I mean, saying you are glad someone has died is bad form, you must agree. Well, unless it is someone whom we have as a culture agreed would leave the world better off by departing. Then it is still bad form, but we are not alone.

At the same time I cannot help but wonder who and how many will breathe a sigh of relief, or maybe say, “Yahoo,” and do a little dance when I fall off the perch. I am not the only one who feels a certain satisfaction at the passing of someone who was a pain in the butt.

Why do I imagine people being happy if I die? Because I have lived around human beings for a long time, and I know what they are like. Plus I know I can be a real pain in the butt myself.

There’s always someone wanting to criticize and find fault. In my experience people can find fault with other people for anything and everything, and make up stuff to criticize, no matter how nonsensical.

I do not know what evolutionary purpose this serves.

For an illustration of fanciful fault finding, I hold up One America News, which is slightly to the lunatic right of Fox News. They like to tell their viewers that Joe Biden has an uncontrollable stutter, and they offer doctored video evidence of him stuttering, which is another proof that he is a morally derelict commie cannibal.

Because that’s the kind of leap they like to make in Delusion World (A denizen of which told a friend of mine that today is the day the UN starts throwing people in jail until they get vaccinated. Sometimes the conspiracy theorists come up with a good, if not legal, idea).

Going from the political to the personal, that fault-finding gene seems to be present in all of us, and if we don’t like someone, we will find all kinds of things to justify our dislike. They are too fat, or too thin, or too bitchy, or too nice, or too sloppy, or too anal, or too slow, or too fast, too loud, too quiet, too late, too early, or too good to be true – it must be an act. Or they think they are so darn smart.

When I review the people who have given me the pip, I realize that mostly they were people who looked down their noses at me. I do not object to people having a good opinion of themselves. I do object to people who have a lousy opinion of themselves trying to make themselves feel better by dissing me.

If I felt better about myself, I wouldn’t notice this behavior, or I’d feel compassion for people who are mired in their own emotional soup and try to make themselves feel worthy by throwing their soup around.

Okay, that metaphor is exhausted.

So – anyway – I see this less than admirable trait in myself. Sometimes when someone dies, and it is someone who has always treated me as a lesser being, I am relieved, and glad.

If I have not sorted that trait out of myself by now, I am probably stuck with it.

Back to work, trying hard to be rational and behave well and fluff up my compassion.

It’s a struggle.