It's Been a While

Image: AI generated image of IV bags

My last post--three weeks ago!--was in celebration of Mom's 90th birthday. We had about 25 family members coming from all over the US to celebrate. And I missed it. I ended up spending eight days in the hospital fighting a terrible infection. I'm out now, still doing multiple IVs a day to be sure we root out any hint of infection. I'm grateful for all the nurses, techs and doctors who have supported my recovery. These folks were great.

That said, hospitals suck as a place to get meaningful rest or have any level of creative thought. I could barely read (I want to call out William Finegan's Barbarian Days, A Surfing Life - fabulous read), let alone write. These are the first words I've written in three weeks. I'm so far out of touch with my current novel that I think I need to read it from page 1 just to find out where I am. Disruption is terrible for my writing process, which is a practice of same time, same place every day, trying to find the same level of consciousness that I was in the day before to bring a level of continuity to the work.

So much crap has happened in the world in the last three weeks, but two things feel important to mention. After the Stonewall National Monument scrubbed its website of all mentions of Trans people, it was reported they also removed any reference to the term Bisexual. I think the idea of 'born that way' has resonated strongly, even with conservatives, but clearly the idea of sexual fluidity scares the hell out of this administration. I don't know if they worry that if they acknowledge fluidity as a real thing, it puts their own identity at risk or if they just live for cruelty, but something weird is going on for sure. I know pettiness and cruelty are this administration's standard operating procedures, but as I've said before, you cannot put these stories back in the bottle once they have been told. And they have been told (not enough of them) in ways we are never going to forget.

I have written in the past that the ability to write about a "probable impossibility" creates a stronger narrative than an "improbable possibility." As a writer, if we rely on coincidences, even as we know coincidences happen all the time, we lose our readers. The narrative just doesn't feel real. I once was at the movie theatre watching a James Bond movie, and after the opening action scene, someone behind me said loudly "that wasn't real." We set aside our disbelief all the time, but a poorly crafted narrative can still disrupt our willingness to believe.

Which is why I cannot understand what Trump hoped to gain by having his former personal attorney and current deputy attorney general interview Ghislaine Maxwell in prison. There is simply no upside to this, no outcome that puts Trump in a better light. It has been reported that she was offered limited immunity to testify and that she discussed around 100 people. It doesn't matter what was said, or how truthful it was, people are going to look for two things. One, if she is pardoned or has her sentence lightened in any way, the world will think she was offered a quid pro quo for not naming Trump. If she is not pardoned, or see her sentence is not lightened, everyone will assume she did not cooperate and therefore she is being punished. Any list of 'other people' who participated in Epstein's crimes will be viewed with distrust, no matter the names on it. Why did they not understand this? They have hundreds of folks in this admin that make up stories out of whole cloth. Did not one of them have the imagination to think this through? Or all they all so scared to speak truth that they allowed this to happen knowing there is no possible upside for Trump?

We cannot abide cruelty. We need to speak out against the terrible human crisis happening in Gaza. Letting children starve to death is morally wrong no matter your view about Hamas or Isreal. Of course, the US has cut foreign aid everywhere, so maybe we no longer care about those who suffer and need help. So much for being a 'Christian' nation. And I say that as a person of faith.

Win a free Kindle edition of Love: a novel of grief and desire: I work with Reader's Favorite on the Kindle book giveaway. If you go to https://readersfavorite.com/book-giveaway/love/1 you can sign up for the monthly giveaway. You can scroll through the list of giveaways (over 500 each month) or sort the list by title or author to find Love: a novel of grief and desire and put your name in for this month's drawing. Good luck!