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.

O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, I love your plastic branches

 
There are people who would rather eat a bug than get a fake Christmas tree. I am not one of those people.

I used to be, especially when the kids were little. Going to a tree farm or a tree lot to get our Christmas tree was a fine family outing. Sometimes.

The kids loved the tree and some years took the initiative to help decorate it, but mostly it was a mom project, and let’s face it, they were more interested in what went under the tree than what went on it.

In 2000 my mother told me that she wasn’t going to get a tree that Christmas because it was too much fuss. I could understand what she was saying – she was 85 and we know now was not feeling well – but I hated to think of her having no tree.

I was working at the then-True Value Hardware store, and we had these adorable little trees that had fiberoptics in the branches, and a color wheel in the base so the fibers changed colors. It was maybe two feet tall, if that. For most people it would be a decoration, not the Christmas tree, but I thought it would be just right for my mom’s little house, and she could set it up and plug it in and voila! Christmas tree! I bought one and mailed it off to her. She got it, and stowed it in her car’s trunk, unopened, and there it stayed.

Well.

On the 22nd of December, she began to feel poorly. She’d been having “terrible stomach aches” for a couple of years, and this was a bad one. She eventually got home and collapsed in bed, where she stayed.

Some neighbors of hers wondered how she was the morning of the 23rd and came over to check on her. They called 911 and my mother was taken to Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, where she was diagnosed with a heart attack. Two of the arteries in her heart were completely blocked. A couple of stents later she was booked into their critical care unit and put into a medical coma so her body could recover.

I hopped a plane down to San Jose, where I rented a Geo Metro, a car about the size and stability of a soda can.

I spent a lot of time at the hospital that week. My brother and sister-in-law flew in from New Mexico, and together we all waited to see which way our mother was going to tip. Her cardiologist told us to get ready for the worst.

But she hung in there. I stayed about a week, until she was stabilized, and it looked like she was going to survive this. I realized they were not going to wake her up for a while yet. I flew home.

When they woke her from the coma and I talked to her on the phone, I realized that her brain was scrambled from her coma experience. She was in a hospital room, and she told me, “This is a funny house. There are people coming in and out all the time.”

So now I know not to be alarmed when someone wakes up from a coma with a scrambled brain. She regained her sense and her senses in the days that followed.

She was transported to a recovery/rehabilitation center in Capitola. My cousins, Charlotte and Nancy, went down from the Bay Area to visit her. She loved that – they really did cheer her up.

When she was ready to leave rehab, my brother and sister-in-law came back, picked her up, and took her home with them to New Mexico, where their yellow lab kept trying to grab the tennis balls on the end of her walker’s legs.

I went to visit her in early March. She wanted to go home to her house in California. Which was not to be.

The last day when I was getting ready to leave, she sat down at their piano and began playing, and I sang the songs she played. She was my first accompanist, way back when we stood around her piano and she played and we sang I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover, and The Caissons Go Rolling Along, and the Army Air Corps song – “Off we go into the wild blue yonder …”

Those aren’t the songs she played that day. I don’t remember what she played, only that she did play, and I did sing. I knew this was the last time I would see her, and it seemed like a perfect ending for us, music.

After she died, that Christmas tree, still in its shipping box, was one of the things I brought home. For Christmas, 2001, I got it out and set it up, and hung jewelry ornaments on it – mostly pearl earrings I picked up at Granny’s Attic for $1.50 a pop – and that was our Christmas tree that year. By that time the boys were 19 and 16 and not so into Christmas. They still got presents, and we still had our silly string shoot-out at the end of opening presents – that was a tradition for a few years, and I have seldom laughed so hard.

For a few years, that little tree was our Christmas tree. Rick and I loved it. It was no fuss, no big deal, and it got the job done. I’m not sure when or where I lost it.

Since then I’ve had a succession of fake trees. Sometimes I’d buy them at Granny’s before Christmas and donate them back after Christmas.

The I got one last year that I really like, so I kept it, and when it was time to set it up this year, I discovered that its base was gone. So I got another base, meant for a real tree, and somehow made it work. Duct tape, my friends, duct tape.

It is standing in the living room, and has a slight list to the right, but has not fallen.

So far.

Maybe today is the day I’ll start putting on the ornaments. Probably should put most of the weight on the left side.

Where Is the Life That Late I Led? (thanks and a tip o’ the hat to Cole Porter)

 

Warning: this is Grandma talking about all the things that are wrong with her body. You might be bored reading that sentence, much less the essay. So feel free to stop here if you don’t think you want to read about my gripes and complaints. I don’t blame you. I’m not proud of this lament.

Most of my life I was a hearty soul with a functional body. Now I have trouble hearing, seeing, and walking.

I have hearing aids. They make a difference but are not the same as my original hearing. Every time I speak, I feel like I’m talking through a PA system. I have trouble making out what people are saying sometimes, but I’m not saying, “What?” to everything.

I was up to blended trifocals when I ran out of money for eye exams and prescription lenses, and as we all know, Medicare does not cover glasses. I have not made it a priority to accumulate enough money to have an eye exam and get new prescription glasses, so I have a whole clutch of reading glasses of various strengths, which are usually lost around the house. My distance vision is still pretty good, which is a mercy, and when I’m not trying to read or write or look at Tik Tok on my kindle, I don’t wear glasses.

After I fell and fractured my L3 vertebra last spring, I was astonished – how could I break my back twice in one lifetime? The L2 was broken in a rollover car accident in 2000. Now L2 and L3 are a matched pair of compaction-fractured bones in my spine. This is one of the conditions that make walking difficult.

Funny (to me) side note: when the L2 vertebra was broken, I ended up with a pinched nerve down my right leg that hurt most of the time and sometimes it felt like my right thigh was on fire. At the time of the fall in which I broke the L3 vertebra, I had sciatica in my right hip and leg that was brought on by sitting in a lousy seat on Frontier Airlines* when I flew back from Denver a few days before I fell. When I fell, the sciatica went away! I still have pain from the pinched nerve in my right thigh, but not as much. Not worth breaking another vertebra, but it is nice to have one good thing come out of the experience.

*Digression:

FRONTIER AIRLINES: They are soulless vacuum cleaners of money. They lure you in with ads for cheap fares, and then after you have paid your cheap fare and think you have bought a ticket to somewhere, you learn that you have only paid for the right to pick out and PAY FOR your seat. My ticket was $31! What a deal! But I paid $47 for an actual seat up near the front of the plane. Seats from about halfway back to the tail were $19, and they were all booked by the time I got to the website.

Then the clerk at the airport told me that it was $39 for luggage, whether you stowed it or carried it on. That’s right: $39 for carry-on luggage.

So. $31 “fare” plus $47 for a seat plus $39 for luggage: $117 for that $31 ticket. The tiny bottles of water they sold on the flight were $3, no cash, plastic only.

That $47 seat brought on sciatica.

So a big thumbs down to Frontier Airlines for their misrepresentation of what it costs to fly on them.

My left knee was ruined in a dog-walking incident a few months after my car wreck in 2000. I was still wearing a metal back brace. Our two dogs and I were out for a stroll when our Doberman, Sadie, took off after a cat, and jerked me sideways and because the back brace held my back straight, something inside the knee was the first thing to give.

As you may be aware, torn ligaments do not heal. They deteriorate. Twenty-one years later I can feel the bones in my knee rubbing together. The fall that tore one of my cruciate ligaments didn’t help, either.

Which is why I was using a cane before I fell and broke my L3 vertebra last May. Now I use a rollator, which is a little sportier than a regular walker, with four wheels and a shelf for carrying things, and for sitting when I’m feeling exhausted.

In 1994 I fell and broke my right arm at the cervical neck – that’s where the ball on the end of the bone goes into the shoulder socket. My arm is shorter, and my shoulder is frozen and hurts every day.

My left hand and fingers are full of arthritis after sixty years of playing guitar. I don’t feel that, or any, pain when I am playing the guitar. Musicians understand that.

So, yeah, the body is not what it was when it came off the assembly line. I am still here and am happy to be so. But I am downright nostalgic for the functions I once took for granted, not to mention the absence of pain.

Can you relate?

I Don't Get the Insanity

“There comes a time in the course of human events when no amount of cursing will suffice.” – John Barrymore. Maybe.

That quote popped into my mind recently. I think this is one of those times “in the course of human events.”

I just don’t get it. I do not understand how so many people – millions of people – could get so many things wrong. Yes, I’m talking about anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, Trumpers, seditionists, white supremacists, hate-filled evangelicals, conspiracy theorists.

The insanity has taken on a life of its own – Trump was the beginning nexus; now he’s superfluous to the movement. Oh, they still love him and believe he is Jesus’ anointed to lead us out of the valley of the shadow of libtards, but if he crosses his tribe, they’ll turn on him as fast as he turns on people.

Like the time a few months ago when he encouraged people at one of his rallies to get vaccinated, and the crowd booed him. He has not said anything about getting vaccinated since. Even Jesus’ anointed can be thrown under the bus.

That’s the people, the voters. Then there are the politicians – omg, the politicians – who persist in their suicide mission of telling people not to mask or vaccinate; their attempts to keep everyone who does not agree with them from voting; and their ongoing effots to manipulate the country for their own power and greed, and then lying about it. Lying about everything.

I heard a Republican strategist on the radio the other day. He told us that Republicans are willing to work in a bipartisan fashion, and it is Democrats who are slowing down or blocking legislation because “the thin slice of left wing progressive extremists is insisting on their pie in the sky agenda.”

So, everything is the Democrats’ fault because they are all Satan-worshipping-cannibal-pedophile commies who won’t allow the Republicans to pass their legislation for the country’s good.

Lies, lies, lies. And projection. I keep saying this because I believe it: if someone persistently accuses you of something, or rails against something (like being a pedophile), I tend to look at the accuser and ask myself, hm, where did they get those ideas?

I suspect the accusers are the pedophiles, like all those pastors who railed against homosexuality and then got caught propositioning a kid in a public bathroom. Whited sepulchers, the lot of ‘em.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness.” – Matthew 23:27, ERS

It makes me dizzy when I think about how many people are retailing these lies, and how many people are swallowing the lies whole, and there is no way to reason with them, or, at this point, trust them.

One of the privileges of being an American is being able to gripe about the government without getting thrown in prison. So I have complained plenty, but I do not wish to have the government overthrown and replaced with a rotten theocracy/fascist dictatorship. Or whatever it is the rapscallions want, these self-described “patriots” who are trying to bring down the country.

It makes me sad. Polar ice is melting, oceans are rising, storms are becoming more deadly, wildfires rampage every year. There wasn’t a “wildfire season” for most of my life, but now there is. All this is knocking on our doors, saying, “Yoohoo, climate change,” but some people are still too busy trying to amass power and wealth to pull together for the good of all living things, not to mention humans, or to rebuild a survivable planet.

Some people are trying to do that, against all the odds, against all the resistance to reality.

I have tried to be comic relief and social worker combined for myself and others, because so much of how we experience life depends on our attitude.

Now I ask myself, “What can I do in the face of the hopelessness I feel for my country?” and other countries which are caught up in the fervor for authoritarianism.

The answer to what I can do always comes down to, “Write, and sing.” Those are my skills.

Most days I do not want to do anything but read British mysteries and watch streaming mysteries, movies, and baking competitions. Sometimes, though, the energy regroups and says, write something, or record another song. There’s a little life in the old girl yet and a long life has shown me that you never know.

So let us encourage one another. Do what we can. Live our best lives. Pray. Laugh. Have lunch.

Yes. Don’t forget to have lunch.