Sunday, January 31, 2021

Show & Tell Sunday: Dodie

Not doing too well on the "posting regularly" thing, am I?

Well, since I started a "day" last Sunday, I might as well go with it.

Today's "Show & Tell" picture is of Dominique, the back yard cat.  On a distinctly sunnier day than we have been having lately. 

 

 

Miss Do has moved into the yard for good and all.  

During the summer months, she was content to camp out for the night on any available chair with a cushion on it.  It doesn't rain much during the summer, so open air or slightly under cover was adequate digs for the season.  But what about winter?  I had no covered spot out back that was not going to get wet when winter storms blew in.  

What about bringing her indoors?  Well, not so much.  She has been invited in the back door several times, but doesn't seem to view "indoors" as a place she wants to spend any amount of time.  She'll politely sit by the door for a spell, happy to receive a few pets and some love.  But she resolutely plants her nose five inches from the glass of the sliding door, and within ten minutes she makes it clear she belongs on the other side.  So, as summer waned and the nasty weather approached, I was desperate to make a place, either on the patio or the "shed deck," where she could stay at least dry if not terribly warm for the duration.

Husband and I set about creating a protected space where she could snuggle in and eat and sleep dry while the winter storms raged.

We extended the "shed deck" by six feet to make it 10 feet square.  Then we added a "shelter logic" canopy as a roof.  But a covered 10 foot square with no walls offers almost no reliably dry space when the winds start to howl and the rain blows sideways.  A trip to the Habitat ReStore scored us enough doors and windows to enclose the space on the south and west.  And, voila! 

 


The Dodie deck.

She's content to curl up on one of the several chairs enhanced with blankets, old sleeping bags and pillows.  She stays relatively warm and dry.  And has basically become queen of the back yard.

Husband demonstrating the Dodie-coffee lap sit.

Every morning, I take my coffee outside, she takes up her position on my lap, and we sit and watch the birds and the squirrels come to the feeders.

Makes up a little for the loss of my three boys over the past year.  The Universe never leaves me lonely for long.      

 

Sunday, January 24, 2021

Post a Picture Day: Love This!

 Looks like I just created a new “day.”  

Back in the olden days, we used to have “Photo Fridays.”  So what can we cal this?  “Show and Tell Sunday.”

Needs work...

Anyway, I’ve started this “day” because I have this photo that I want preserved for posterity, and this seems the best place to put it.

After the inauguration, the internet was alive with memes of Bernie Sanders attending the festivities in his beat up old coat and wool mittens.  THIS was my favorite creative interpretation:


❤️❤️❤️ it!

Friday, January 22, 2021

Looking for a Home

 


I joined Twitter in 2017, because I was desperate to make some noise in the direction of Cheeto Jesus.  Some feverish delusion led me to believe that someone higher up the political food chain than the White House doorman would see my tweets and they would make a difference.  Somewhere. 

Yeah, right.  Me and 50 million other disillusioned, desperate Americans.

In June of 2019, I had finally had my fill of Facebook, Mark Zuckerburg and his megalomaniacal view of his “responsibility” (or not) for the havoc his platform was wreaking world-wide, and especially in Trump’s America.  I deactivated my Facebook account.  Closed the door and walked away.  And I’ve stayed away for going on two years.  Going back over old journal posts, I see I had actually been contemplating the move for years before finally pulling the plug.

Now that Trump has been pushed aside, and there is arguably more about the US government to be hopeful about than to (impotently) rage against, I feel it’s time to take a serious look at my social media presence.

I’ve been on Twitter for a little over 3 years.  It’s a cesspool.  But it doesn’t present itself as anything other than a cesspool.  Which has been part of my defense for staying with it as long as I have.  At least it’s honestly a cesspool.  Facebook, on the other hand, presents itself as some kind of warm, fuzzy place of welcome; a fertile ground for building communities of friendly people with shared history or like interests.  That FB makes the most money off, and therefore encourages, communities of warring, polarized political factions is not something they choose to advertise.  Nor officially acknowledge at all, as far as I can see.  Facebook is the classic wolf in sheep’s clothing.  It is founded upon fundamental dishonesty.

With the election of Joe Biden and the changing of the guard in Washington, I feel like my work is done, as far as throwing stick pins at the colossal  juggernaut of fascism that loomed over us for four years.  I’m faced with the question, where in the world of social media does an exhausted invisible political warrior go for positive connection with welcoming people?     

Twitter?  After about 30 hours of calm, Twitter is already crackling with combative political wrangling and snarky commentary.  I’m sick to death of it.  I guess I don’t want to pretend it doesn’t exist…I just don’t want to be a part of it right now.  Or maybe ever again.

Facebook?  I did briefly consider going back to Facebook.  Whatever else it was, it WAS a point of connection with some of my old internet friends with whom I’ve not connected since I left.  But then I went back and read my old “Coming to Terms…” posts, dating back to when I first considered  leaving FB.   And I realized the community I “belonged” to was already disintegrating when I left.  It’s one of the reasons I left.  There’s no guarantee there would be anything to go back to…in fact, following the direction things were going two years ago, I think it would be safe to assume there’s nothing left of my connections on Facebook.   So, why would I sidestep my very real moral objections to Facebook’s “mission” to go back to…nothing?

Nope.  Cross out that option.

So that leaves me…  Right here.  In the relative calm and quiet of my own little corner of the internet.  It occurs to me that there is no “community” here.  I’m basically talking to myself. 

But I also realize the concept of “community” on the internet is largely an illusion.  For me, anyway.  Did I belong to a community on Twitter?  Hell, no.  I did a lot of “talking,” in the middle of a very crowded room.  But nobody really heard, and certainly no one, in three years, ever connected with me on a level deeper than a passing, “Hey! I heard that!” And Facebook basically chewed me up and spit me out.  So there’s no community there for me either.

Coming to Terms.  Calm.  Quiet.  A little lonely.  But mine.

I think this is where I’ll set up camp.  I’ve become pretty good at being on my own.  Maybe just being on the outside for awhile is exactly what I need right now.        

 

 

 

Wednesday, January 20, 2021

Let’s Rate Yesterday’s Post

 I give it a 65.  You can't dance to it.

But seriously...I think we'll call this shitty gold.

I'll give myself some credit for actually sitting down and finishing the post.  It took me four hours.

I won't say it was four hours wasted, because I didn't have anything else more pressing on the schedule.

But it's obvious that I've either gotten very rusty or lost my touch entirely (if I ever had it...)  Time will tell.

Too melodramatic.  Too wordy.  Strange metaphorical imagery.  Like I couldn't make up y mind whether I was composing a political opinion piece or an epic poem.

I suppose I could edit it, spiff it up, make it into something I could be a little prouder of.

But the moment is past.  The inauguration is over.  Biden and Harris have been properly and relatively peacefully installed into their official positions.  

So I'll just leave this as is.  I can use it as a yardstick for future improvement.  If future improvement is in the offing.  We can always hope.   


Tuesday, January 19, 2021

The Natural Progression of Voter Suppression


 

For 1459 days, we have been continually astounded by the deep trajectory of Trump’s and the complicit GOP’s dive into fabrication, chaos and fascism.  Shocked to insensibility by one precipitous nose-dive after another, we thought, over and over, “How low can they possibly go?” Michelle Obama’s panacea—“When they go low, we go high”—ceased to have any meaning.  There was not a humanly accessible height which could possibly balance the depths of evil to which Trump and his lackeys dragged the nation in an incredibly short period of time.  Even angels would be hard pressed to negate the darkness with which the Republican Party has blanketed our land.  After awhile, we became inured to the shock.  We could hardly do more than raise an eyebrow and poise fingers over the keyboard with each new plunge into the depths.

Two years in, despite the GOP manipulating the franchise in every state in the union, Democrats took the House.  Victory! we thought.  Now we can at least slow Trump’s juggernaut.  Maybe we can get through the next two years without falling off the planet and into the abyss! 

In 2019, Trump flagrantly attempted to blackmail a foreign leader into helping him destroy a political rival. We rubbed our hands together in anticipation.  Now!  NOW we can get the GOP to see reason.  NOW they’ll see he is as despotic as we have insisted since Day 1.  How shocked and demoralized were we when, instead, the GOP closed ranks and gave Dear Leader a pass!  Mere days later, we plunged into the madness of the pandemic and Trump’s desperate reelection bid.  The state of our union devolved quickly into a race to the bottom, a new bottom every day, every hour.

Depressed, punch-drunk and reeling backward, we looked for the sky, the light of which seemed further and further away every day.  We the People—betrayed by our elected “representatives” and left to fend for ourselves, leaderless, ravaged by a killer virus—fell back in despair.  And landed on the only power we had left in our own hands.  Our votes.

Our votes—which the Republican Party had been working feverishly to take away for decades.  Passing oppressive voter ID laws, gerrymandering the hell out of Congressional districts to give every advantage to GOP candidates, closing polling places, limiting or eliminating absentee voting, the GOP had a deep bag of tricks they would use to keep large swathes of voters not slavishly chained to voting Republican OUT of voting booths.  

Then Providence intervened.  As it turned out, the pandemic offered the perfect work-around to most GOP voter suppression techniques.  People demanded to take advantage of absentee voting and vote-by-mail in record numbers.  And in some cases, even states with Republican state houses capitulated to those demands. No responsible state leadership would force constituents to literally risk their lives standing in long lines to cast their votes in the general election.  Except the ones that did. 

But we were fed up.  We had had WAY more than enough of Trump and his antics.  Those who weren’t able to take advantage of vote by mail DID risk their lives.  They DID stand in long lines to cast the votes that, by god, the GOP was NOT going to take away from them.  All the old tricks in the GOP bag couldn’t stop almost 82 million American voters from vehemently rejecting Donald J. Trump and all he stood for.  We won.  Trump lost.  Hallelujah!

Or…not.  Because necessity is the mother of invention, the fascist Trump and his complicit Party had added one more trick to their bag.  And it was a doozy.  The rocket-launched grenade of voter suppression.  One that, if you’d asked any person on the street five years ago, they’d have unequivocally stated that there was no way in hell this would happen in the United States of America. 

Trump and his cabal were so determined that he would serve another term that it became utterly irrelevant that he lost the election.  If the people didn’t vote the way they wanted, they would simply declare that any vote not for Trump was fraudulent.  Using the classic “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”—a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels—the Trump campaign simply repeated, over and over , as loud and as often as they possibly could, that it only appeared that Trump had lost because there was massive voter fraud. Not content to simply cast doubt on the election process (which wasn’t immediately having the effect they desired) the party line was then amplified to the point where they declared that Trump had actually won in a landslide!  81 million people could not possibly have voted for the other guy!  It was obvious to anybody that massive voter fraud was involved. 

And that was it, really.  That was their case.  That was their evidence.  Surely that many people could not possibly have voted for Biden.  They dragged this “evidence” into courts all over the country, chiefly in battleground states where the end result had not gone their way.   So emboldened were they by the lies and the dirty dealings and the outrageous destruction of legal norms they had been allowed to get away with for 4 years, they walked into courtrooms with, basically, nothing.  The stuff they presented to the courts didn’t have to be true or valid.  It just had to be written down and presented by GOP lawyers, and that somehow gave it enough gravitas to be considered in a court of law.

Well, surprise!  The courts weren’t having it.  Despite the last-minute flurry of GOP court-packing to which Mitch McConnell had applied all the resources of “his” United States Senate, there weren’t enough Trump-appointed judges to roll over and bestow legitimacy on GOP lawyers’ filings of meaningless, baseless legal gibberish.  In fact, there weren’t any.  None.  No judge would lend credence to Trump’s bags of crap.  Even Trump’s toady Attorney General walked away from this attempted craven manipulation of America’s judicial system.

The End, right?  Roll credits.  The serial attack on American’s voting rights should have stopped, right there.  But we all know it didn’t.  GOP legislators took up the cause—a cause they had no legal or Constitutional power to affect in any way.  They grabbed the “Stop the Steal” banner and led Trump’s troops straight up into the Capitol Building on January 6, where they attempted to take the election through violence and intimidation. They reached deep into their bag of tricks, to the very bottom, where crouched the demon to whom they had sold their souls, and wrestled from its craw the final, desperate tool of voter suppression.  A tool… no, a weapon we never, ever thought to see unleashed in our nation’s capitol in our lifetimes.  Insurrection.  Coup d’etat.  Take, by force, what they couldn’t lawfully win.  

But they failed.

Today, because of the actions of a lawless, despotic POTUS, his complicit party and his violent, deluded minions, our nation’s capitol looks like a war zone.   Tomorrow, surrounded by a protective shield of fences, barbed wire, bullet-proof glass and armed bodies, our new President will be handed the keys to the kingdom.  A tarnished, damaged, divided kingdom.  Why would anyone want to take those keys, to be responsible for trying to repair the damage, heal the rape and pillage of our government, of our land; to find some way to save our national soul and resume our place as that “city on a hill” that Ronald Reagan spoke of, even as he was laying the groundwork for its destruction.

Who would sign up for that?  Joe Biden wants it.  He’ll take it on, as the 46th President of the United States. And Kamala Harris has committed to stand at his side as our first woman vice-president.  History will be made tomorrow; some glorious, some...not so much.  But none, we pray, shocking or horrific.

May the Universe protect these two good people; guide them, and lead them—and us—back toward the light. 

  

Monday, January 18, 2021

Is It 💩 or Is It 🥇

 


“I need to do something about this.”

Ok.  Here’s “something.”

I want to preface by saying this is in no way a “New Year’s Resolution.”  I don’t do those, for obvious reasons.  I have a REALLY hard time with failure.  This is the chief reason my life has been mostly about not challenging myself overmuch.  I never want to start something I don’t have at least a 75% chance of completing without trying very hard.  No New Year’s Resolutions for me.  365 days is just too long to promise (and fail) to keep doing anything.

Back to “something.”

I’m going to start posting regularly.  Not because I have this backlog of wonderful, thoughtful, stupendous commentary swirling around in my brain (though by all rights, I SHOULD have...)  But because it’s a helluva lot more stimulating than playing four hours of solitaire every day. 

Or hanging around Twitter, where I am reminded daily that I am merely an insignificant pimple on the colossal ass of social media.

I’m going to spend the hour between 10:00 and 11:00 AM writing.  Something.  Anything.  And then I’m going to post it.

It will either be 💩 or it will be 🥇.  Or golden shit.  Or shitty gold.  Maybe I’ll even give each piece a rating when I post it.

I’ll be back tomorrow with my first attempt.

    

Sunday, January 17, 2021

This Didn't Go Where I Started Out To Go...

 

A thought came to me this morning.  It went something like, “Why am I letting this historically awful set of circumstances bombarding our everyday lives derail me to the point of taking away what used to be one of my greatest pleasures?”

Why can I not write?  If there were ever a gold mine of things going on to inspire an arm-chair political opinion writer, this should be it.  Shouldn’t it?  What happened to the indignant fire that used to course through my veins?

I’ve come up with a theory... 

Back in the infancy of social media, I was a voice in a crowd.  Small, faint…but audible.  I commanded the attention of maybe two dozen other people who would comment and engage, approve or argue.  It wasn’t much, but it was enough.  Enough for someone whose voice had echoed around only in her own head for the first 48 years of her life. 

A couple of decades later, I’m not even a voice. I’m a mouse scratching at the door of a coliseum overflowing with screaming, crying, roaring voices…all talking at once, so loud and so incessantly that no one really hears or understands any of them. 

Without my little audience, I feel like Puff the Magic Dragon. 

 

“One gray night it happened Jackie Paper came no more

And Puff the Magic Dragon Sadly ceased his fearless roar

His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain

So Puff, that mighty dragon, sadly slipped into his cave…”

 

I need to do something about this.