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She’d been a fool to keep going like nothing was wrong. But for the life of her, she wasn’t sure what the moment should have been to take a stand, or what the stand should have been. Her agency didn’t work on the crazy important things. Did it?

Yes, she’d been part of the dominant culture. Really, she’d been part of the dominant and oppressive culture for her whole life, although it had been hard to see it growing up. Yes, privilege was having two college educated parents that stayed together. That made sense. She had figured that part out as a young teen. But when having that privilege put her in the minority in the tiny town where she was raised, it didn’t feel as much like privilege. It especially didn’t feel like privilege when her parents drove beater cars and stressed about money and didn’t take fancy vacations just like everyone else. But the true privilege had been confidence, she guessed. The confidence and support to go on to bigger ponds. To make her own way. They hated the oppressed that couldn’t make their own way and they also hated her for making it but not being enough of an oppressor, she supposed.

Silva had a weird amount of time for contemplation now. Now that she was in a very strange pond with a very strange assortment of people. There wasn’t much of a common thread among the people held here as far as she could tell. There were a good number of Latino looking people, people whispering in Spanish and English and maybe other languages. It was hard to tell. People kept being hit for whispering in any language at the wrong time.

Her head ached and she felt lightheaded. Twice a day she was lined up with a few others and forced to swallow large sulfuric smelling pills. She guessed they were antibiotics administered for whatever infection had been brewing in her mouth when the cold, impersonal military dentist in the back of an air conditioned semi truck had removed what was left of her broken teeth. She had stopped feeling fevered soon after starting the pills, left only with headaches, sore empty spots in her mouth, an aching jaw and now also the runs. She did not want to be hit hard again. She knew that she could not let herself be the flinching woman here surrounded by these folks. But she took a lot of pains not to be the one sticking out in the guards’ vision. She allowed herself very little communication. Everyone else was miserable also. That made it easier.

When should she have communicated before being picked up? And to whom? Was anyone working on trying to get her out of here? Was there anything she did or anything she could have done to facilitate help coming now? There had been an email window open on her work computer for a few weeks before she was taken- the start of an email to her state representative’s office. If she had finished that email, would that office be more likely to investigate her like the state apparently had, or to rescue her? She had just wanted help getting the federal education department to look seriously at her eligibility for loan forgiveness. It seemed a million miles away from now. Surely as a public servant of twenty years, it hadn’t been bad for her to seek that kind of help. . . But they hated public servants. She shouldn’t have forgotten that.

Her mind drifted. Standing in lines in the sun, with her hands on her head wasn’t too bad as long as she could keep from feeling dizzy. As long as she could keep some kind of equilibrium. She was among the tallest women, so they usually put her in the back row. It wasn’t so claustrophobic as it was for the ladies in the middle. Stand in line. Eyes forward. Hear the whirring of the drones getting pictures of all of them. Video to be run through AI- posted on social media. Hear the guards shouting instructions. Be compliant. Be part of the spectacle, but not the part sticking out the farthest, being beaten. Consider what it used to feel like to have hope spring up.

Behold! Sometimes a word or a phrase would just get stuck in her head. It had been “Behold!” for the last couple of days. She would remember the rush of air, the ability to breathe that came when they had removed the hoods in the back of the truck, and then her vision orienting, seeing that other unexpected prisoner. . . her boss? Behold! It couldn’t be. But it was. It had been. How? Why?

And then, miserable hours later. Hoods removed again. Unloading from the truck. This was a spectacle they were meant to take in. Behold! A blue sign with white letters. Alligator Alcatraz. She was still in her home state. It was not a joke. It was real. Behold! The feeling of sweat pooling. Of dehydration headache coming on. She didn’t typically hate the heat. But her body was always working. It took energy to dissipate the heat. Energy that she supposed she didn’t need for thinking anymore.

The nights were the worst. Not because of tears in the dark, but because the fluorescent lights beat down on all of them and it was always random who was sobbing. Bottom and middle bunks were hotter, but top bunks were right under those awful lights. Behold! Everything was getting so hazy. Silva knew from early motherhood that sleep deprivation could result in a kind of fugue state. Some part of her knew that she needed to try not to slip into that state, but she wasn’t sure why or how. This place made it so easy to dissociate.

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This dark little vignette is a companion piece (although I think it also stands alone) to my piece last week for LJ Idol, Wheel of Chaos! If you enjoyed this, please vote for me there. I will try to add a link to the voting in a comment below this week (getting more organized? Maybe!) once the poll is live.

Life has been crazy busy of late. I hope you enjoy my efforts here.

Silva hurt. Her face hurt. Her ribs hurt. She didn’t want to wake up, but she found herself awake anyway. Awake and ironically, feeling like she’d gotten good sleep. Solid restful sleep for the first time in what felt like weeks. The anxiety cloud had lifted. But of course it had. The worst had happened. Slowly, consciousness coalesced. The hardness of the floor. The jaggedness where a tooth (please not teeth) was broken. The fullness of swelling on her face- maybe on her abdomen. She’d been in a car accident once. So much force and trauma. But being beaten by other people- other people with purpose- was definitely worse.

She struggled to sit up, counting the litany of little pains, thinking to herself that sitting up didn’t matter, that she should just try to fall back asleep. She should rest while she could because there was no telling what would happen next- no reason to pretend that her actions could prepare her. She’d spent so long thinking that she was doing everything necessary, everything right. And none of it mattered. She’d thought she understood the system she was working in. But the system decided to turn itself inside out. So it didn’t matter that she’d tried tirelessly to meet the objectives she’d been presented with. In the end, when they decided they didn’t like her, they just made up lies. The calculus she’d struggled with every day, of whether she was giving too much to a cause that she wasn’t fully on board with- that hadn’t mattered at all. Because they had always been planning to take everything from her. Of course they had. They had not been waiting until she wasn’t useful to them anymore. They’d just been waiting until they could get away with it.

One of the men who’d kicked her the hardest had been familiar. A supervisor from years ago. A person she hadn’t gotten along with, had never been able to communicate with. A person whose objectives she’d never been able to figure out. Maybe his objective had just been control. Certainly he still seemed to harbor a lot of anger about it.

She wanted to turn off her brain and go back to sleep. Instead her train of thought ran on. Hadn’t she just been listening to a story about recent research regarding revenge and how addictive the pursuit of revenge was? Of course people were being encouraged to act in ways that felt good in terms of revenge. Another powerful tool in the toolbox of those who were in charge.

Her body hurt, and she worried about her family. Her phone was gone- maybe doctored up to show evidence of whatever crime they were accusing her of, or maybe just destroyed because evidence wasn’t even necessary anymore if things moved along quickly enough. Maybe all it took to seal her fate was testimony of people who were willing to lie. But there was just a numbness now instead of anxiety when she thought about work. She knew beyond all doubt that she’d read the signs there wrong. She’d thought that she’d been on the same page as her direct supervisor and the people at her agency at least. But surely. . . The violence wouldn’t have happened. Surely she wouldn’t have spent a night on a concrete floor if any of them had gone to bat for her. So, either they believed the lies that the aggressive officers had been shouting about when she was picked up, or they were unwilling or unable to do anything about their disbelief of the story being spun about her.

The thing was, Silva wasn’t an important person. She wasn’t a decision maker. That was why she thought she’d thought it was okay to continue along with her ideas and ideology intact in a crumbling system. She thought that she was completely under the radar because the radar wasn’t tuned to key into little cogs that kept turning smoothly. Who could be angry with someone who was just pushing along at a little government job? Sure, she’d pointed out true things at times that might have felt inopportune to some. But the things were true. And it had been her job to point them out.

She had taken too much solace in thinking that she was on the same page with her direct supervisor. And now here she was, thinking about her friend Lenny- how scared he had been the last time they ran into each other for drinks. How he had told her that what really mattered- the only thing that really mattered was whether you were friends with the right people. She had laughed it off. But it didn’t seem funny now.

She shuddered, suddenly realizing how cold she felt. She should try to find a wall to sit and lean against. She should open her eyes more, catalog the hurts, try to get on with living. But her mind drifted and she considered concussion in a distracted way. Maybe there wouldn’t be a chance to get on with living even if she tried.

Her mind drifted to where she’d been before she was taken. Her morning run. She’d started driving to a trailhead, never one afraid of bears or the down-on-their-luck characters that sometimes orbited around the trailhead parking. And sure enough those weren’t the things she should have been afraid of.

She had felt good that morning on the trail. Sure her joints were sore and some muscles were tetchy. She wasn’t young anymore. But the pace had felt right. The dew on the bracken and the smilax climbing the pines. The wildflowers and dewberries and sumac. Names for old friends that it felt good to know, and it had seemed like it was going to turn into a good day. . .

A few hundred yards from the trailhead as she finished her out-and-back the voice of the first man in black had reached her ears. “Silva Moorehaven, step forward and get down on your knees!” No good morning. No hello. No friendly cyclists in sight.

***

They didn’t hit her again. And it became clear that she wasn’t the only person in her predicament when some different people in black appeared some unknown number of hours later. These people added plastic restraints to her arms and legs and put a cloth bag over her head. Soreness and dizziness made it hard to move the way they directed her to, but eventually she found herself stepping up and being pulled up. It seemed they wanted her somewhere else geographically and it seemed that they wanted to move others as well. She was pushed down onto a bench, which mercifully backed a wall that she could lean on. She could feel others at her sides. Then there were diesel fumes and jostling and she tried not to think of nausea. Her abdomen hurt. But she was afraid to say anything.

An interminable time later she found herself jolted from reverie by loud retching and moaning a few body widths down the bench from where she sat. There was a terrible acid and organic smell. The moaning turned into panicked yelling. Silva heard someone beat the metal of the vehicle and then someone else yelling, "They won't stop until the fuel runs out. We're on our own with this scum back here."

Then from across a short divide she heard a familiar sounding voice. Her head spun. The voice was muffled, as though it came through a cloth cover like the one she wore. It couldn't be. . .

Silva thought about her boss, about how he had always seemed like a true believer in what the new order was doing. Sure, he also seemed reasonable. But a true believer couldn't be back here with her. Someone like him wouldn't be rounded up and abused.

"If you don't remove these masks, you're going to be smelling a lot more of that kind of thing before this ride ends," was what the familiar voice said. Then there was mumbling from what sounded like two or three guards. And then the moaning and yelling stopped, replaced by gasping breathing. And then Silva heard a few other groans and sounds of relief. And then Silva was blinking and gasping and breathing more deeply herself with her own bag removed.

She took her time letting her eyes focus. The guards were yelling at them. Yelling at each other. Silva didn't think she could stand up without a pull or a shove if she tried. But the man across the aisle from her was indeed familiar, and both of them smiled a little as they made eye contact, even if Silva was definitely also openly weeping. Apparently it didn't even help to be a true believer. Why did it even feel good to see a familiar face? They were so screwed.

Such a difference the passing of time makes. I guess it has been less than a year since I last participated in an Idol Mini season. But still, such a difference in so many directions. It feels nice to sit with a laptop in a coffee shop and write. It feels nice to open a nostalgic window on Dreamwidth and see a slice of the internet that hasn’t changed much in the last twenty years or more. There used to be a lot of talk about how the internet was actually getting much worse, back at the dawn of the forms of social media that have taken over most of our devices now. I added my voice to those choruses. But ultimately, like everyone, I was dragged along on this wild ride consisting of so many media and culture shifts. And now here we are.

Do not fall horizontally. This mandate was issued multiple times in the instructional videos that Anson and I had to watch in order to sign the waivers required by the climbing gym that hosted roped/sport divisionals earlier this year. It became one of the quotes of the trip; one we would just say during silences in the car. It was delightfully ironic given that her routes had lots of overhangs and roof sections, making it more likely that her body would be positioned horizontally during a fall. As it turned out, both of Anson’s falls were pretty clean during the competition. But then in the evening after the competition, I took a big spill trail running- one where my whole body managed to get way out in front of my feet and I had that horrible moment of realizing I was falling with nothing I could do to stop it before the big smack. That was three weeks ago, and the skin has all grown back on my knees now. Do not fall horizontally.

June 21, 2025. Yesterday night was the solstice. Today is technically my 17th wedding anniversary! It’s before eight. And I’m sitting in my neighborhood coffee shop writing. The world is moving too quickly. Much too quickly. But just as some things are spiraling badly out of control in our world, our family’s chaotic rhythm seems to be in sort of a good place? Maybe? Dare I write that?

This fall, Rog will be two years post big brain surgery. He’s 60 this year. Almost twenty years with young onset Parkinson's and, honestly, things could be a heck of a lot worse.

Our girls are Juniors in high school now, eagerly awaiting the revelation of their AP exam scores. This is going to be such a big year for them. They’re both starting to drive which is part of why I’m actually able to pretend that I can breathe a little bit at this moment. Anson just finished a week of cello camp at FSU. Jasper is finishing up her summer synchronized swim training ahead of Junior Olympic nationals which are held over the week leading up to July 4. She’s swimming four routines at nationals this year. And I should be adding a final round of finishing touches of glitter and rhinestones to her solo suit right now. Jas decided to take the lifeguard test with the city while Anson and I were up in Georgia for climbing divisionals, and she came out of it with an offer for summer employment. I’m so proud of both of them, working hard for the things they want to go after.

The girls keep on learning and making connections. People change and grow. And the world burns around us. It’s hard to wrap my mind around.

I finished the couch-to-five-k running program again a couple of weeks ago. My own health hasn’t been my priority for an alarming couple of years. Work has been both intense and satisfying and family hasn’t been easy and I just let my health go to the back burner. My schedule hasn’t been consistent enough to let me exercise with friends or cultivate new exercise friends. I actually had to start C25K from the very first week this time, and it even threw in a few extra bonus workouts over the course of the program based on what it saw from me. But I’ve finished it again- midforties-Toni style, I guess. I’m figuring out what that means now. Perhaps primarily a lot of ibuprofen. I rolled directly into 5k speedwork with hopes for a hot summer race toward the end of next month. I still don’t honestly know if I will ever run an elusive sub-30-minute 5k. In the deeper past when I was in close to the right shape to knock one out, I was always aiming for longer races. But I might dust that old goal off again as it starts to cool down this autumn, depending on what else is happening.

I’ve never been a fast runner. My advantage in running was always just that I can slip into a frame of mind where I am genuinely happy while running and that I’m built for the long haul. Forty-inch-inseam legs make for long strides. But I’m quite heavy for me right now and that doesn’t help the running.

One thing I have done this spring is to undertake my running on trails. In times past I did a lot of road running around home, but the trails do something for me other than just giving me a place to strive cardiovascularly. I love being out in the hot north Florida green. One of the parks where I’ve been running has a gopher tortoise burrow along the loop trail I use. A little over half my laps there, I’ve been able to say hi to a tortoise friend as I go by.

The other trail that’s closer to home has been a riot of wildflowers over the last few weeks. One morning, I discovered that mushrooms had popped up along the sides of the trail, which led me to long ponderings about what the designer of the Mario Brothers games was thinking about when he made it so that the characters could power up by punching mushrooms. I’m sure that there are interviews out there where people have asked questions about this. But running that morning, and finally starting to feel good in places had me thinking that for me, running through wildflowers was the real power-up move. Running past pretty flowers and dew-covered bracken ferns. . . There are certainly worse things.

Anyway, do not fall horizontally, kids, if you can manage it.

This is not a good idea. I have way, way too much on my plate right now. There’s an entry due tomorrow already! But fine, I’m in. Gonna play LJ Idol, Wheel of Chaos! And you should too. Sign up here:

https://therealljidol.dreamwidth.org/1182845.html

Well, Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, 2025. Here I sit in a very familiar place- a place that I started to love when I was first finding my community as an adult person, and continued to love as I also somehow managed to have a family that is now on the cusp of starting to shrink down a little bit itself, as my girls start to spread their wings and find their own communities in the world.

It is so very much to contemplate.

I’m trying to finish Jeff Vandermeer’s Absolution, which I am really enjoying, but also. . . That novel is such a strange dark headspace to be in. Especially on inauguration day, too. And have y’all looked at the weather? Crazy weather for me to have gone north with my family. But last year was such chaos; weather for the whole year, Rog’s big brain surgery and dental surgery recovery, and kid needs, and everything. And I am very much realizing that we are on a countdown of years remaining for family traditions to be enacted. The babies that I nursed beside the fire in the cabin that used to stand where this one now stands are Sophomores in high school now. Part of me is so deeply grateful that they are about to start driving themselves. They have their own passions and their own stressors and hopes and dreams which is how it is supposed to be.

But, man, I hope I have been able to give them enough of a framework of understanding of how to relate back to a still point, whether they find it in a state park cabin in the Georgia mountains on the coldest day of winter, sharing charcuterie with their family while working on science projects, or in a kayak in the middle of a river, or on a Florida beach.

So we did this trip; the old family and found-family tradition of a Vogel cabin for MLK Jr. weekend. The money for paying for two nights in a row- which was required to get a cabin on a holiday weekend, even doing it the late way we’re doing it (taking an extra day off because of sports commitments Jas had on Saturday) was tight. So we got the smallest dog cabin, even though it is tight with Roger’s nightly Parkinson's perambulations and Alfie’s need for a large safe crate space of his own. And I am so happy to be able to be here. I have done my once-a-year cooking of a big pancake breakfast for all of us. I’ve napped and read by the fire and chatted about experimental methodology with the girls who are using the cabin wifi to work on a science project that they are doing with their student astronaut club.

The very first time I came to this place, it was with three good friends, and I desperately needed a still point. I had just returned to the second semester of my 1L year of law school, and I needed to remember what was important. In many ways law school felt easier than my biology degree had been, but the other law students all fought so hard for position grade-wise. My first semester of grades were not the cum laude grades I had pulled down in undergrad. They were middle of the road. I was very interested in the material in law school. It was interesting. But I also felt like the number of hours of work it would take to make straight As was just untenable.

But that road trip helped me recenter. And now 24 years later, the cold beloved mountains have helped me recenter again. I have no doubt that this year is also going to be a wild one. But I am going to do my best to remember the beautiful places and still points that make it all worthwhile.

The day I started writing this, I kept thinking to myself, “Holy smokes, I am sore.” But I haven’t been on an awesome climbing trip for a while. I haven’t even been on an awesome regular weekday trip to climb, myself, to my climbing gym, that I am a member of for far too long. I sit in the gym lobby and work a couple of nights a week, waiting for Anson to finish climbing. The schedule is just too stacked with other priorities right now for me to get the exercise I need, although I am trying to remedy that.

(And in fact, since it has taken me a couple of weeks to even finish writing this post, I did finally make it in for a nice evening session for the first time in [gulp] six months or more last week.)

Anyway, instead I was first sore because Jas and I helped my folks with some flood recovery chores, which included lifting furniture and bringing a refrigerator up a small set of steps. And then there was another week, too, where the lactic acid in the muscles was from helping get the oven up the same set of steps for them.

It is crazy how flood recovery forces contemplation. I mean you would expect it to bring the kind of contemplation of stuff that you normally associate with Marie Kondo.

Does this bring me joy? If not, I guess I don’t need to recover it.

And I guess you would expect it to bring contemplation of climate change, since every recovery decision you make is haunted by the specter of the next climate event.

Can I rebuild this in a way that is more flood tolerant? Should I use carpet here?”

I feel haunted by the specter of so many things right now. The other weekend, on the way back home, Jas and I listened to some episodes from Kai Ryssdal’s new season of the How We Survive podcast. It is absolutely surreal to me that we’re staring down the barrel of a second Trump presidential term, in a country where the Department of Defense, like the entire scientific community, agrees that human-caused climate change is a real threat that must be met head on and dealt with. Guys, the listening stations are sinking into the no-longer-permafrost. What is it going to take to make us wake up and change?

I was on the road last week, giving a couple of talks at my agency’s district offices. And I have been on the road every weekend between my house in Tallahassee in my parents’ place trying to help with flood recovery. I have burned a lot of gas. I’m still not sure I am saving the right things.

My parents are retired. They were both public school teachers and I like to think that for a lot of students, they were the kind of teachers that their students will remember. The marine science program that my mom used to head up got kids out on the local river and into the Gulf and introduced them to the kinds of things that hopefully they still care about. My dad taught hunter safety and archery in a community where a great many families hunt.

There was a big trailer parked outside their home for much of the last few months. One day, as I was leaving, I noticed that among the water damaged things were the cross stitched birth announcement my mom had made when I was born. It was a Beatrix Potter theme: My name and length and weight at birth, surrounded by Peter Rabbit and his family, Mrs. Tiggy Winkle and Tom Kitten. Beside it was my mom’s framed Master’s Degree diploma. Both things were wet enough that they will never be the same. I felt like I should try to save both things. Like I should pry the diploma out and see if I could dry it. Some of the embroidery floss in my birth announcement was apparently not color fixed to be washed in water. But, I thought, if the color ran, maybe it will wash out if I try to wash it. It was easy to pry the cross stitch out of the frame and toss it in the back of my car while resting in between tasks. I haven’t tried to fix the staining and color running yet, and I still feel like I made the wrong choice in leaving her diploma on the pile to be hauled away. I should have tried to save it, too.

How is it that there is still enough tension between birth announcements and graduate diplomas, as my daughters prepare for college that I have extra-tasty-crispy guilt over this choice of mine? How is it that almost certainly more real life friends of mine will see the Ballerina Farms latest homemaking posts on IG than will see anything that I write? This 2024 life is crazy. Helping mom and dad with the literal home-making of reinstalling appliances while the culture wars still rage about what the ideal of homemaking should be.

I hate what the flooding from hurricane Helene is doing to the community that I grew up in. In the country, it always seems like the ideological camps are more circled up than they are in suburban spaces like Tallahassee where people mix more as a matter of course. I hate that one of my aunts asked me whether my parents were going to build back after this flood. I hate that there is a subset of people online who blithely generalize that everyone who lives on the coast of Florida is just getting what was obviously coming to them. Don’t they see? Don’t they see that people who were flooded in Helene lived miles inland or feet higher than people who have been flooded in recent history. It has never been 100% vacation rental properties impacted in these recent disaster storms. And did y’all want the entirety of the coast of Florida to be short term rentals? It is already trending that way. A lot of investors are picking up properties that once were homes in the wake of this disaster and renovating them. It is easier to manage some properties as short term rentals that provide an income stream than it is to keep living in them. But what do we want our communities to be?

I was glad that there was never much question of my folks staying in their home, because that place has been an absolute anchor for me. A reminder of who I am and why I do what I do. But I know that even my intrepid mother looked at some properties in other states. There are plenty of reasons to consider it, even if, ultimately, the call of home is stronger.

I have a dream of moving back home at some point in the future, after the girls finish high school, but I have an addition to that dream now- I want to look at how much it would cost to put a tiny house on very sturdy stilts close to mom and dad. Building anything that will really last post-2024 is going to be a lot more expensive than it would have been before this watershed year. But we were always racking up these carbon emission debts. It’s going to take me a minute to re-calibrate to the realization that we are already living the climate disaster. But I am getting there. I wonder whether most of us will get there before it is truly too late.

The Story of Ollie and The Gauleiter

or Y’all May as Well Know I am Sticking It Out and Sticking Around

I really didn’t think the presidential election would go the way it did in this, the year of our Lord 2024. As time has gone on and I’ve read people’s thoughts and processed my own thoughts, I’m seeing that I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised. But on Wednesday morning I found myself pretty shocked.Our family group chat got fired up early. We were seeking each other out.

One of my cousins wrote, “America almost made it 250 years.” That made me think about how Tallahassee had its bicentennial this year. And Yankeetown just celebrated the 100th anniversary of its founding. There is so much history that is really just right around the corner from where we are today.

One of my good Tallahassee friends always used to say, “Dear old Yankeetown. . .” whenever I’d wax poetic about my home. And she was right-on to rib me. Yankeetown is dear to me. Not just nostalgic, but truly a place I love. I nerd out about it. Today it is dear and a little bit downtrodden with the massive flooding that so many folks experienced in Helene. My parents are still living in an Air B&B and fixing the damage to their home.

I keep thinking about my grandparents and great grandparents and what they might think of these 2024 happenings. Of the changes in the weather and in attitudes everywhere.

Will it be okay for us to go back under a Federal government led by those who hate government? There is so much hate swirling around. It is true that I am a person of relative privilege in this world, though I fear that ignorance about how our new leader’s platforms will affect the economy is ultimately going to hurt most people who aren’t billionaires, regardless of privilege.

One thing I do know is how my grandfather, Richard Allman F. Lynch, dealt with some instances of swirling hate that happened in his days. And I think maybe now is a good time to tell a story about that.

My grandfather was in college learning to be an engineer at Purdue before World War Two broke out. He hadn’t fallen in love with the first daughter of Yankeetown yet at that point (she spent some time at the Florida State College for Women before transferring to Purdue- our first proto-‘Nole). It’s wild to me to think about my grandparents when they weren’t much older than my girls are now. Wild, but fun. I have a few really fun pictures of my grandpa as a young man. He was in a fraternity at Purdue- my grandparents were the last generation of my family to go Greek. He helped put on fun drama shows. I always got the impression that literature and shenanigans were included in his college education in addition to hard engineering. And he also did engineering study-abroad in Germany. Engineering study abroad in pre-World War Two Germany. Very directly pre-World War Two Germany.

If you know me, you know that my nose is not exactly the smallest feature on my face. My nose is pretty exactly my mom’s nose, which is pretty exactly my grandfather’s nose. I have southerners ask me if I’m “from New York” from time to time, given the shape of my nose. I know that they are really trying to ascertain my religion with that question.

Anyway, my grandfather went by Ollie, short for Allman, I guess because there are a lot of Richards in the family. One of the stories he tells of young Ollie in Germany before the war was that he noticed an officer once, in a train station, who kept staring at him and then looking up and then staring at him some more. It wasn’t until the train arrived and he moved to get on it that he realized that on the wall behind him was a big poster pointing out the features that could be used to “Recognize a Jew” and the caricatured drawing on the poster did not look completely unlike my grandpa. When he used to tell that story, he would always end it by saying something like, “I didn’t realize at the time how afraid I probably should have been.”

But he also used to tell another story about how a regional leader (my grandfather always likened the position to a regional governor- it was not until I looked the term up this week to write this story that I learned that it was actually a position within the Nazi party), known as the Gauleiter, came to the school where he was studying one day and gave a fiery speech all about how foreigners were bad and lazy, and how the pure German people were about to take the world by storm. It was a real sturm and drang presentation and then at the end of the presentation, the Gauleiter asked to see all of the exchange students that were present up on the stage. The Gauleiter then proceeded to individually and roundly excoriate each one of them for the sins of their home countries, and when he got to my grandfather, the only American, he apparently laid it on heavily about how America was the absolute worst at very long length.

Speaking of long length, my grandfather was my height; six feet and five inches. Apparently the Gauleiter was a smaller guy, but he attempted to make up for that in volume.

When the Gauleiter was all done and went on his way, one of my grandfather’s Norwegian friends approached him. “Oh Ollie,” the friend said (and my grandfather always did an impression of this friend saying his name with an accent, so he was saying “Oh Oh-lee”), “Ollie, I can’t believe how casual you were with the Gauleiter! I can’t believe you just leaned over against the wall and crossed your arms and legs while he was talking to you! Ollie, the Gauleiter is an important person!”

To this, my super-cool college-aged grandfather replied, “I don’t see what the big deal is with him anyway. He puts his pants on one leg at a time, just like anyone else!”

Teenage me so wanted to be as cool as my grandpa in that story.

I mean, I’m also super glad that my grandpa survived to come back home, finish his degree, fall for my grandmother, marry her and ship out with the Army Air Corps where he also managed to survive the war and then come back home to eventually settle in Yankeetown near his in-laws.

Teenage me wanted to be as cool as my grandpa, but mid-forties me doesn’t want to have the chance to be cool in the face of sturm and drang nationalism right here in America. I certainly didn’t want or have any inkling that my daughters would be turning 16 in the dawn of “Your body, my choice” memes spurred on by the emboldened antics of the devotees of a 78-year-old convicted felon who has been found liable for sexual assault and is currently under indictment in multiple jurisdictions.

Nevertheless, here I am. And despite the tornadoes that ravaged my neighborhood and the floods that have ravaged the southeast this year, here I will stay. Because in the long run, I believe in the legal system that I serve within, and I believe in the ideals of my grandfathers and grandmothers, and all of the good people that brought us to where we are today.

I don’t know what more I can do to prevent a slide into chaos, but I am galvanized to do what I can.

I’m going to try to write and read more long-form and less fast-social online. I’ll see if being the change I want to see helps. Come along with me if you like.

There’s something in the wind tonight,
Some kind of change of weather
Somewhere some devil’s mixing fire and ice together. . .

I almost used the Open Topic of the write off to write something Jimmy Buffett inspired, given that the state’s declared Jimmy Buffett day (yes!it is a thing!)fell within the writing time. But then the yard fairies came to me and I wanted to let them be heard.

Not that my great hero Jimmy isn’t well heard already, even in absentia.

I’ve been thinking of him and his music a lot, not just because of his day but because Labor Day weekend has a place in the fandom, and also I was in a super contemplative place this time last year because I was traveling with family in a trip that was rare and spectacular.

Really that trip was exceedingly rare, come to think of it, because I was able to take it in between my husband’s brain surgery and his battery pack installation. The trip in the middle of the great cyborgification.

I wish I had more time. More time to process everything that’s flown in the last 12-18 months. More time to devote to the important parts. That’s what I really want to understand. It’s just so hard to know which parts are which. Two fifteen year old daughters and everything that’s old is new again. What do you hold onto? What do you let go? And what gets forced out when you can’t make a decision. There are so many things that get caught up in the net, but to paraphrase Jimmy you don’t know the oysters from the pearls in the moment.

Also, guys, I love oysters. Both as food and as organisms that are the base of an important food web!

Anyway, cheers to all of you, idol friends!

Trillium was the most ephemeral of the spirits gathered in the yard. She was not the youngest by any stretch of the imagination, but she was slight and her outline was faint- barely discernible against the backdrop of the nandina thicket that bordered the house. As English Ivy watched her, she addressed Bee Balm, whose outline was much clearer.

“If we don’t get some rain before the Corn Moon,” said Trillium, the lines on her face almost deepening with the words, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to make much of a showing this spring. I haven’t got any of that irrigation help that you ladies of the front yard benefit from.”

Trillium’s shoulders straightened and Ivy could see that under her seedy armor, shaped like her leaves, those shoulders were thin, but wiry still with muscle. Trillium had been on the lot for a long time. Longer than most of the shrubby plants. But the recent changes to the backyard weren’t helping her.

Bee Balm laughed a little ruefully. “I wouldn’t call what they do for me irrigation,” she said, smoothing her hands over the tiers of her skirts, which were green and white with jagged purple slashes of color overlaid around her waist. “It’s more the occasional splash when they remember that there are still some plants they care a little bit about in the front. I mean, I appreciate that they mow around me instead of through me, but they are not making it easy for me.”

“It isn’t easy for any of us,” said Cedar, her wild green hair forking into a thicket of platelets around her head. Ivy could see chartreuse and black lines twining across Cedar’s arms and face, constricting her burnished skin in what appeared to be a painful way. The shadows under Cedar’s eyes were like dark bruises. The pattern of the lines was a familiar one to Ivy, rather like her own growth pattern- and she shrank back a little more toward the house. But then she steeled herself. She had shared the side yard with Cedar for many years, but she’d never climbed onto Cedar’s person. They competed for nutrients, sure, but she’d never actually tried to strangle the fledgling tree.

“Indeed, this has been a year unlike any other,” rumbled Basswood, and Ivy shrank again as the tree’s personification joined Cedar and Bee and Trillium in the side-yard clearing. Basswood was easily twice the size of any of the others, but even in the faint light of the waning crescent moon Ivy could see that Bass’s head was grossly misshapen now. One of her arms terminated just below the shoulder, hidden beneath her tunic of unevenly lobed leaves, and the misshapen side of her face was mercifully masked in tannish-grey bark to hide whatever features may have been left underneath, “and I fear that we may actually succumb to the new threat if everything continues the way it seems to be moving.”

Basswood’s personification turned her back on the part of the backyard where two of her trunks were splayed, one of them still sitting as it had fallen across the back yard when the tornados pulled it over, and the other cut up into chunks that still hadn’t been moved. Ivy had twined her way up Basswood before, and she remained in awe of the tree’s strength. They had always gotten along. Ivy decided it was time for her to make herself known to this council.

She took a deep breath and cleared her throat, and she bowed toward Bass as she stepped out into the clearing with her friends materializing beside her.

“Good evening, my native sisters,” she began as they turned toward her with surprised faces, “We want to join your conclave tonight, not because we hope to overrun you, but because we think that there could be strength in combining our might against a common enemy.”

Cedar stared at Nandina, who had materialized bright and whole, green berries bouncing along her bare arms and legs beside Ivy. Nandina was almost the size of Basswood now. The native plant avatars all looked at her in disgust.

“You must listen to Ivy, ladies,” Nandina intoned.

Beside her Spiderwort was short and stocky, but her powerful build looked bright and healthy despite the drought that was plaguing them all. Spider’s skin was a deep green, and her little white blooms danced around throughout her long deep green hair. Spider’s voice was high but strong, “We come to you because there is a greater enemy in the yard than any of us, one that we would unite with you to overcome.”

A hot wind shifted the leaves of the plants in the backyard as their avatars stared at each other, each taking the measure of the others. Away to the south, heat lightning danced in the clouds and then, abruptly thunder rumbled as the wind picked up. From all around them, the avatars began to hear dry, crackling cackles that gained in strength and volume.

It was clear that skunk vine was everywhere, and she could obviously hear them.

_____________________________________________

tonithegreat is dreaming of fae costume details like she's at DragonCon instead of sitting home in the middle of a yard that badly needs her help! She hopes you'll consider her kindly when the poll goes up for this write off!

The first thing Miranda noticed was a remarkable lack of pain. No aches. No fever. It felt like she was in bed. A bed with a perfectly firm but giving mattress, and soft, clean, linen-blend sheets. But the temperature was. . . perfectly temperate for her and it also seemed like she was outside, under trees with a gentle cool wind and robust, but not muggy, humidity. She stretched a little bit, with her eyes just cracked.

Everything she perceived was impossible. She couldn’t be in a perfect bed outside. She couldn’t be in her favorite clean nightgown. She was supposed to be tossing and turning in her little bed at home, wearing the dirty t-shirt she'd gone to bed in, ridden with another round of Covid. Trying to keep her family from catching what she had, but also just trying to rest and survive. She loved her family, but there was no way they had cleaned up her room and embiggened the bed and opened the windows, and even if they had, it would be hotter today. . . She gave up on just enjoying the sensations she felt and sat up and opened her eyes.

She was not in Kansas anymore. Nor did it seem that she was in her home in Tallahassee.

She was in a fairly perfect little bed- a queen, probably, and it did seem like it was outside, but as she looked around her at the vegetation of a Florida mesic hammock in autumn, the sweetgum and loblolly pine and live oak and magnolia sort of twisted and faded, in favor of a warm wood-paneled wall like the ones in her grandparents’ old house, with a window out on the landscape and a pair of people seated on stools.

One of the people was Robert Redford, circa the mid 1980s- the way he looked in Out of Africa. He smiled at Miranda and said, in his own voice, “You are correct, of course. All of this is impossible with the technology and developing science that you understand. But it isn’t impossible for us.”

“Nor even is it illogical for us,” said early 1980s Leonard Nimoy, complete with Miranda’s favorite starfleet red naval uniforms from the Star Trek original series movies II through IV. Nimoy was sitting on the stool to the right of Redford.

“Simply put,” said Redford, “We are aliens, and we have abducted you. We are using our technology to read the thoughts you are having as you have them. We read your dreams for a day and a half or so while we cured you of disease and attempted to re-calibrate your parasite load down to something more optimal for you. You humans are complicated creatures, with quite the biome carried around in your guts and skins. Luckily we’re quite good with your particular style of. . . neurobiology, so where we weren’t sure on what to preserve with that biome, we were able to see how different mixes made you feel, and we tried to go with what felt best.”

“We’ve also used these thoughts to put together this room interface where we can talk to you, because we abducted you for a reason,” he continued. “But my colleague is better with sensing your thoughts and emotions, so I am going to let them explain.”

“We do not actually look like you,” said Spock. “Our. . . basic chemistry is different than yours, giving rise to a completely different biology as you would understand it. We actually look something more like one of your shrubs, or large algae, crossed with a rock,” he said, and as he said it, his form sort-of dissolved and reappeared as something like a glistening and fronded red-brown rock, which made some very biological sorts of sounds. Then the fronded-rock being dissolved and was replaced by Miranda’s mother, who said, “Oh, I am sorry Meer, I’m not trying to shock you,” she dissolved and returned as Barack Obama, “I’m just trying to take on a form that will give you. . . maximum confidence to communicate with me.”

“I think maybe you better just pick one human,” said Miranda, “The dissolving and coming back is pretty scary to me. You can stay as Obama, or go back to Star Trek. This all feels pretty star trek-y.”

This time she closed her eyes when they made the switch and found that they chose Bones, also from the movie era, which seemed appropriate enough.

“You’re doing an amazing job of taking this all in, Miranda,” said Doctor McCoy, “Which is good because we need your help. Our kind have abducted 100 different humans from all over your Earth world, because we think your human society, while very flawed and problematic, is worth saving, even though all of you don’t seem able to mobilize yourselves to work on the right problems. There are multiple possible pathways you humans could take to save yourselves from yourselves, and my job is to prepare you to help your fellow humans optimize one of those pathways. Do you feel ready to begin?”

Surprisingly, as she watched Doc McCoy morph one more time into Dr. Samantha Carter from Stargate One, Miranda realized that, in fact, she did.

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Tonithegreat tested positive for Covid this morning after a very rough night of respiratory symptoms last night. She is taking fever reducers now and the right otc meds, but still cannot guarantee that the trippy nature of this little tale is unrelated to fever. She hopes you enjoy it nonetheless!

This summer, I did not have our main summer vacation planned out to the degree that most people would plan out a driving tour from Florida to Oregon and back again, with an important stop in Spartanburg South Carolina.

People who know me weren’t that surprised that I just went ahead and went anyway, but my closest friends knew that I was worried about leaving you, husband, even though you weren’t being left alone. We had plans, or at the very least, half-plans, for you in place. And our daughter for whom the trip was planned had a set schedule for her week of competition. Those were going to have to be plans enough. And then our other daughter wound up attending a debate camp that sort of came together last-minute, and of course it happened, in-part, over the first two days that I needed to be driving, which meant that both kids had to fly for different legs of this trip. But the trip did come together. We made it happen!

Thursday, June 27, 2024 - Tallahassee to Panama City Beaches Airport to Little Rock, Arkansas ~720 miles

It is weird dropping J at the airport and knowing that I needed to continue driving down the road myself. It is nice having the deadline of knowing when we must leave so that she would have plenty of time to board her flight. I tend to run things later into the night than is comfortable without set parameters. Given my druthers, I would sleep late and drive uber-late. But if I’m going to drive with any stops at all, I pretty much need to drive all day today. It’s less than 36 hours between dropping J off at the airport in Panama City and picking A up at the airport in Denver. And I need more sleep thrown in there than I used to these days!

It gets to me a little when I’m driving alone. I think about how fun it would be if you were here with me. But also, I have 700 plus miles to log today. I know you would be miserable going that late without more stops to look forward to. I feel guilty- it’s hard not to think that people are judging me for leaving you alone while we take this trip as well as letting the girls fly unaccompanied as young adults when they are just 15. But I’m not really without you. And you’re spending most of the time with my folks.

Soon I’m going to have our girls with me again. None of this would be happening if we weren’t all in it together. I know that you want them to be able to have this adventure. I know that we all wish we were doing this together. But this cram-a-jam, slam-a-jam, occasional tent-sleeping travel is too high octane. I know people with no disabilities at all that wouldn’t enjoy this. It’s okay for you to let ten and twelve hour driving days followed by tent camping go when you’re 20 years into a Parkinson’s diagnosis.

But I enjoy these kinds of shenanigans so much. And driving alone I can listen to whatever I want to. I can stop or don’t stop when I please.

I’m tired. But also, I am exultant. I love the open road. The open road alone is exactly what I have been craving for the last few months. Still, I am so tired by the time I pull into Little Rock that I run way up onto the curb to get into the hotel garage parking and further disintegrate my stalwart bumper in the process. Of course, I do this before figuring out that the digital key on my phone would have opened the dang gate of the hotel garage.

Sunday, July 21, 2024 - No miles, just a day at home, a week after the trip

“I want to help,” you say, “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

I am trying desperately not to let my anger at our situation flare into anger at you. This isn’t your fault. None of this is your fault. And it is 100% what I signed on for. But it is frustrating. I’ve been cleaning our kitchen for almost the entire day. I have cleaned so much. We really let it get bad before the girls and I headed out, and the cats did not do any cleaning for us while we were away.

I need to be logging hours of legal work this weekend. I desperately need to be exercising this large carcass this weekend. I want to walk/run at the coast. I want to walk the dog. My back is killing me just from deep-cleaning maybe 20% of our kitchen after deep-cleaning 80% of our bathroom yesterday.

I take a deep breath. I hate being the project manager of housework. Hate it. I did not run for this office! But apparently I feel the most strongly out of any of us that certain Standards (involving as close to a total lack of indoor insects as possible) should be maintained. So it falls to me first. And I keep finding myself in this awful position with the kitchen in particular. This was supposed to be the summer of the girls becoming independent cooks. They were supposed to find a love of lentils! Or rice! Or baking! Or anything as long as they also cleaned up!

“I’m sorry,” I say, “It’s not as simple as that. If I break off part of a task happening in here and give it to you, we’ll be tripping over each-other. Or you will need to sit down and I will need that task finished. It’s a small space. It’s the same rote tasks that cleaning always is. Just leave me alone and let me do it.”

And you do. And we’re getting through this. Together.

It is cool, bordering on cold, and after the heat of the day, driving my air-condition-less car, the cool seems unreal. But I know that if I don’t get moving, the cold will sink in and it will be hard to fall asleep with cold feet. I stop looking up at Long’s Peak, still taunting me in the moonlight and heave myself up out of my comfortable folding chair and start walking toward the “comfort station” with my bath bag and towel in hand. There aren’t showers in this campground at Rocky Mountain National Park, but the bathroom has running water and I can wash up with soap a little and brush my teeth.

I stand up and crunch across the dust and gravel of the developed tent site. The amount of dust up here surprises me. I guess the recent rain that we drove through further down the mountain didn’t make it this far. I can hear my girls moving around a little in the tent. I’m surprised at how early they turned in, but I shouldn’t be. The altitude and the start of the wind-down of summer are affecting us all. This will be our last night of camping in a National Park this trip unless I figure out some kind of magic in the Smokies. Then it is back to the summer grind for me, off to writing camp for Jas, and back to the last few weeks of summer for Annie.

The ambient light is enough that I don’t turn anything on to guide my steps. As I turn onto the road and turn my back on the crescent moon, I’m impressed by the number of stars shining down on me. Framed in the center of the clearing between the trees is the big dipper. My hand goes to the front of my right shoulder and I hear Jimmy Buffett singing in my head:

“Permanent reminder of a temporary feeling
Amnesic episodes that never go away
It’s no complex memento, it’s no subtle revealing
Just a permanent reminder of a temporary feeling. . .”
Was it only last December that I got this tattoo? My only and my first. Just a simple outline with dots for the stars of the big dipper, just under my right collarbone. It spills out past the neckline of more shirts than I had intended, but at this stage of the game, catching a glimpse of it peeking out always makes me smile a little. My sister was the instigator- she actually bought it for me as a 45th birthday gift last year and then got her own little dipper on the same day. And now here I am, clomping to the bathhouse halfway across the country from her trying to think when the last time was that we were in the Rockies together. A long time ago, I suppose. I suppose we were younger than my girls are now. How did that happen? We need another sisters’ trip, but it is so hard to choose what to fit into these fast-moving years.

I hope I’ve chosen correctly. I hope I’m picking the priorities this summer that allow my family to rest and rejuvenate enough, but also let all of us enjoy what we are so lucky to have. I’m overly cognizant of the fact that when this summer is done, I’ll really only have two more summers before my kiddos are mostly heading off on their own adventures. Which isn’t a bad thing, but man oh man, this parenting gig is nothing if not constant adjustment and re-evaluation of expectations. Maybe driving my trusty old car from the panhandle of Florida to the coast of Oregon and almost all the way back again over the space of the last two and a half weeks has been too much, but I don’t think so. The car is still running smoothly anyway, even if the air conditioning is kaput again. And I think I will be refreshed at the end of the trip and not just tired.

Drive time can be such good talking time with my girls. Jasper played me a bunch of the music that she enjoys as we came up into the Tetons the other day. We talked about lyrics and styles and controversies with the artists. Then at Grand Teton, we watched a movie about wildlife in the park and the migrations of many of the species that call the park home. They talked about land management and partner agencies, some at the state level, and about the use of conservation easements to keep wildlife corridors functional. The girls both grinned at me before I even had the chance to say “That’s my jam!” It will be good to get back to work, even.

There is an awful lot of craziness happening in this summer of 2024. But I’m full of hope that we’re bringing the memories forward that we need to pave the way to a future that will be good.

Oho! Here I go! Definitely don’t have time to play LJ Idol in a mini season. Wanna try anyway!

Toni sat at her desk and sighed at the phone she’d just hung up. Support calls where the operator was unable to help were the worst. Toni was sad. She was also mad. And both of those feelings conflicted with the normal desire to be polite and kind to the human on the other end of the phone. How do you politely end something that has left you only with the knowledge that the other party isn’t going to help you? Last week she’d had a call where she’d actually said, “Well, I hope you get some calls today where you are able to help someone.”

But today with Apple it was more of a case of, “Yes you’ve read that script already, thank you. I disagree with that course of action, but clearly it is the one you will continue to utilize. I guess we should end this call since it seems clear that no more will be gained from it.”

Bad timing was the name of the game this week for Toni. Last Sunday night, Toni’s daughter had realized that the screen was newly and badly cracked on her beloved iPad. When she logged into Apple to see what could be done, Toni had been heartened to see that she had actually paid for Apple Care on that device. But the coverage would soon end, so she’d arranged to take the iPad into a local service provider that was on her way to work first thing on Monday morning. The local provider was Simply Mac, which proceeded to declare a nationwide bankruptcy on Wednesday. The local Simply Mac store was now locked and shuttered. They weren't returning calls or sending updates via email.

Toni had hoped that Apple itself might offer some solution, since the little device still had active Apple Care. But the people on the helpline only wanted to point out that the issue was between the device owner and the now bankrupt company. Their “certification” of Simply Mac ended when Simply Mac ended, and there would be no help from their quarter.

Toni sighed and picked up some work. It was time to work on something that she could move forward. She guessed that she would go ahead and file a “lost item” police report on the locked away iPad over lunch.

***

“My bro,” grinned Chase, “I don’t see why you’re being so uptight about this. I was just having a little bit of fun.”

Jennifer looked at him across the sweaty rim of the copper mug that contained her Moscow Mule. It was hot and the fans were working overtime on the big porch of Madison Social.

Good things about summer:

Jennifer’s favorite bar for an afternoon pick-me-up wasn’t nearly as crowded as it was during the year.

Bad things about summer:

Her boyfriend Chase wasn’t taking any classes now, but he also wasn’t working full time and his ideas of fun ways to pass time were likely to get him killed.

It was 95 degrees in the shade.

Jennifer took a sip of her drink, closed her eyes for a moment and then fixed Chase with her soon-to-be chem-degree B.S. graduate gaze.

“Did you tell anyone where you were going before you went to meet this guy? Did you talk to him through your own accounts, with your actual name on them? He can probably find you, and he’s probably just taking his time trying to figure out the best time to kick your ass.”

Jennifer noticed Chase noticing what was probably the glistening of sweat between her clavicles above the neckline of her crop top. God, he probably wasn’t even paying attention to what she was saying. He was really cute, though, she thought, as she watched him sip from his long neck bottle.

“Babe,” he said, “I actually feel kind of bad for the thieving little bastard. He definitely couldn’t kick my ass, and he didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who likely has a posse to help him out with that kind of thing, either. I would have split- just told him I didn’t have the money if I’d thought he might actually come at me. But the beauty of this is that he can’t legit come at me! I’m scamming a scammer here. Winning one for the side of goodness and light! I can’t believe you don’t want to accept this super cool three-month anniversary present I scored for ya.”

Chase took another pull from his beer and then put his elbow down on the table and cradled his chin in that hand, leaning forward and looking across at Jennifer. God, he really was like a puppy sometimes. “You’re right about one thing,” he admitted, “You deserve a better present than this.” He gestured at the iPad and pair of iPhone Xs on the table between them. “I can’t believe that little loser thought he could sell me all this for 500 bucks. The iPad screen’s pretty cracked and the phones won’t turn on. Maybe I need to charge them. But it looks like the pad’d probably work if you just wipe the memory first.”

Jennifer considered her big sweet boyfriend, sitting there in his Alpha Phi Omega t-shirt. Okay, so he was a frat boy, but it was the co-ed service fraternity, and that was where she had met him. And he wasn’t actually dumb, just. . . unrepentantly enthusiastic about some things. While she had been in classes, he’d created his own project based on some other dude’s YouTube channel about a similar thing.

The project:

Find someone on Facebook Marketplace or some other part of the internet that you suspect of trying to sell stolen stuff.

Pretend you want to buy the stolen stuff.

Agree on a possible price and then meet up with your sketchy internet contact to examine the stuff.

Swipe the stuff from the suspected swiper.

Run!

Enjoy good times and profit!

Chase was staring out across the street at the intramural fields, where some soccer was happening. “The little dude had a sob story about how his manager at some bankrupted repair shop told him to take whatever he wanted out of the back room, since corporate wasn’t ever going to cut anyone’s last check. He seemed almost sheepish about the whole thing, but he basically admitted this stuff is all stolen. He didn’t even really try to yell at me when I grabbed it all and just ran off. Honestly I thought about telling him to call my uncle, you know, the one that just got out of law school. . . But I don’t know if even he could help much with that. And then I remembered my mission.”

“Well, I propose a couple of added steps for your mission, my would-be Robin Hood,” Jennifer said as she finished her drink. “First, go get your car. Then you drive me over to the police station where we will turn in this ‘lost property’ that you came upon on the side of the road- you pick any intersection you want to tell them you found all this at.” She could see that he didn’t like the sound of that, so she continued quickly, “Then why don’t we head over to the rock gym for a little bit of climbing, and then you can take me out for a proper three-month anniversary sushi dinner?”

“I guess I could work some more on that new v3 on the overhang,” he said, still watching the soccer, but then his face lit up happily as he adjusted to the new fun plan. “Alright, yeah, that does sound like a good plan, let’s do it!”

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So, it's probably pretty obvious where this week's inspiration came from. When life gives you lemons, write some imaginary lemonade! Simply Mac really did go belly up in our town and across the nation. All this as big Apple keeps fighting new anti-trust proposals to keep their profits maximally maximized and squeeze all the little guys. Jas really is out an iPad as of Tuesday evening as I'm writing this. Apple really was completely useless about it on the phone. But who knows what could happen next? Not me, that's for sure.

That old cowboy hat again. Couldn’t we give it a rest? I like cows. I like boys. But country people are not a monolith, not any more than any other group is. They’re gonna expect you to walk the walk if you talk the talk, sure. But doesn’t everyone?

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been struggling when it comes to writing for social media. The time I spend online seems meaningless compared to more important things. I feel like I need to speak up, because things are happening in the world, even though my audience is limited and consists almost entirely of people who are going to think for themselves, regardless of anything I have to say. Also, is blogging just talking without walking? Wouldn’t real life discourse count for more? But who wants to listen to me, and what can I even bring to the discourse?

Look, I was raised in gun culture. I had a youth membership in the NRA, even. My dad thought that the insurance that came with membership was worthwhile. We lived on a big piece of property and we always had guns around the house. I was comfortable enough using them that it was no big deal to me to fire into the air to get someone’s attention or scare a predator off. If I had to defend myself or my family with a firearm, I’m sure I could do it.

I had my hunter’s education certificate and my bow hunter’s certificate before I went to high school. I never shot a deer, but that was only because my busy life pulled me away from the deer woods just as I was getting old enough to potentially hunt effectively. I have spent some time in tree stands, though. When I was my daughters’ age, I spent a fair amount of time in tree stands. I still love the pine flatwoods. And we ate so much venison and wild pig and turkey and elk. I could write a parallel essay to this one about how I think the world would be a better place if more people were more directly involved, or at least more directly understood how to process their own food as meat eaters. I think it is a particularly ethical thing to eat meat that lived on beautiful property that was managed as a tree farm and a hunt lease.

I wish I could say that my youth was before the NRA was overtly political, but I don’t think there is such a time as “before the NRA was overtly political.” What people sometimes choose to ignore is that everything has always been political. But I do think that in recent years the NRA has been used by political forces that I disagree with strongly on many fronts, to do things that have nothing to do with responsible gun owner rights. On balance, I don’t think that Marion Hammer and her ilk have been a good thing for responsible gun owners. The idea that the big bad government is coming for our gun rights is as distasteful as it is nonsensical.

I was raised in a tiny town in Florida where my parents comprised almost half of the faculty of the middle school. Most kids’ families back home hunted, not just because they might love getting out into the woods, but because venison and wild hogs were an important part of peoples’ food supply. My dad taught history and coached at our school, and when he got to teach an elective, he often taught hunter education classes.

Have there been tragedies in that small town due to accidents with firearms? There have. There have also been tragedies due to farm equipment and automobiles. There was also a shooting incident some years back wherein a domestic dispute escalated into something that qualified as a mass/multi-party shooting.

I don’t think the answer lies in the direction of outright banning guns. We all already have so many of them.

I believe that there is a middle ground where people own guns for hunting or even just because they want to, but where we would still have more safeguards in place to prevent mass shooting tragedies. I think that safeguards like bans on semi-automatics and bans on certain types of weapons and magazines would help. We know already that in the United States there were fewer of these mass shootings during the years when there was an assault weapons ban. But we repealed that ban anyway and haven’t reinstated it. I think that waiting periods would help. I think that restrictions regarding ages and mental health warning signs would be a good thing. Would that kind of legislation prevent all mass shootings? No, it probably wouldn’t. But I think that even preventing some mass shootings is a worthwhile goal.

In the end, I think this issue is like climate change: We’ve got to do something more than what we’re doing now, but we’re going to have to agree to do some things that are imperfect solutions and some things that make it harder for some people who are making a lot of money now to continue easily making money. Unfortunately, solutions like that are very hard to implement these days.

Kara picked up the pace, almost having to break into a run as she hurried to catch up with her boss.

“Wait, so, you don’t want me to prep that whitepaper on the nutrient levels after all?”

“Nope,” he answered without even looking back over his shoulder, “I’d like to use what the interns came up with on that. We need to show management that we’re using the interns, and this will let me have one of them tag along to the briefing next week. Be good experience for her.”

Kara didn’t think he wanted her to catch up with him. She didn’t think he wanted to continue the conversation. Part of her just wanted to let him speed away into the elevator, let him take the generalizations that he’d given to the interns to flesh out and just go off on the wrong-headed tangent they were moving toward. It was clearly what he wanted to do. She wasn’t going to score any points by trying to convince him otherwise.

She tried to think of something that would convince him as they walked quickly toward the elevator. It was after 5:30. The building was practically empty. She had cleared her schedule and worked on nothing but the whitepaper since lunch. She had other deadlines she could have been working toward, but the more she thought about the issue with the nutrient levels, the more she realized that the situation was complex and deserved more than a cursory briefing.

He mashed the down button on the elevator and glanced over at her. He was a smart guy and he knew that she disagreed with how he was handling the issue.

“Look I’m sorry if you did some wheel spinning on this, but I really don’t think management wants us to get too far into the weeds on this one. Keep what you’ve prepared in your back pocket. Maybe we’ll use it at some point in the future. Whatever you’ve done isn’t wasted effort, it just isn’t the direction that we want to go.”

She sucked in a breath. So, okay, he definitely wasn’t going to let her talk to anyone above the level of her most direct clients about this. The highest person in the food chain that she would have any chance of convincing was him. The path of least resistance was definitely to give him a bright, “Okay then, have a great weekend!” and watch him step into the elevator. Instead she squared her shoulders and followed him in.

***

‘Possum didn’t exactly live in the green space behind the environmental agency. He did sleep there sometimes- there were a lot of nice hollows under the trees there where he hardly missed having the sleeping pad that he used to hike with- but he was more careful than a lot of the other free people that were down on their luck. He almost never slept in the same spot twice. He usually was up and moving before the sun. And he stayed up on how the yoked people were living. He scanned the police reports for where sweeps were happening, looking for vagrants.

He joked with other free people when he shared his information with them. It was best to stay somewhat behind these sweeps as opposed to just ahead of them.

Of course, ‘Possum was luckier than most of the free people. He still had a bank account where the feds still deposited his social security disability every month, which was enough for him to pay for his phone and the whole wide internet. His feet and legs were good, so he could still walk all day if he needed to. If he wasn’t holding an “Anything Helps” sign at the intersection of the on-ramp for the interstate, he could walk all the way into the shelter and maybe get a shower and some new socks, and maybe charge his phone. On the days when he did that, he felt like he could probably pass as one of the yoked people.

On one of those easy passing days, he had run into one of the workers from the big government building and startled the heck out of himself by then proceeding to go get lunch with her, eating at one of the picnic tables between the Dairy Queen and the Harley Davidson dealership. She’d been walking over to the Dairy Queen after taking a walk on the trail behind her building when she ran into him. His SSD check had just dropped that day and he was feeling flush. The government building was so big that ‘Possum figured the people who worked in it probably didn’t think that they knew all of the other people that worked in it, so on occasion, he would even walk the trails during the day, figuring he could pass as a worker.

He found it funny that there was a sign posted at the trailhead telling the workers to be careful on the trails because of all the vagrants that were active in the area. ‘Possum figured that little did they know, the vagrants were actually working real hard not to be harassed out of their places by the workers. But ‘Possum had seen on the police blotter where there’d been some car break ins in that big parking lot. So maybe everyone needed to be careful of each other.

Nevertheless ‘Possum had “done lunch” with that office worker, who went by the name of Kara, and even if she didn’t think of herself as one of the yoked people, he got the impression from talking to her that she could pretty well feel her yoke on the daily. She talked to him a little bit about her “job stress.” The way she figured it, everybody had “job stress” of one type or another. When she told ‘Possum that, he could kinda tell that she’d realized he was a free person, whose “job stress” was very different from hers, indeed. But she hadn’t seemed to look down on him about it. She hadn’t been offended when he didn’t elaborate much about his work.

Today ‘Possum needed some cardboard, so he was back at the trailhead of the government building, trying to figure out if the coast was clear for him to snag a broken down box out of the big recycle box there. He’d done it before, but only in the middle of the night. Today was a Friday, and it was evening, so most of the office workers were gone, but there were still a handful of cars in the big parking lot. Maybe not enough to give him the camouflage of potentially belonging with one of them. He was trying to decide what to do, when he saw Kara come out of the building almost trotting after some guy in a suit.

They got about halfway to the stairs down out of the building and suit guy all of a sudden turned back to Kara and said a few words to her. She’d been talking to him as he walked ahead of her, and she had trouble keeping from running into him as he turned. Kinda seemed like he turned quick like that to shake her up on purpose. ‘Possum couldn’t make out the words they were saying, but whatever the guy told Kara was pretty short and sharp. Her shoulders slumped dejectedly as she took it in, but he saw her manage to conjure a smile to answer the guy as he turned out to the parking lot and then she turned back to the building. Suit-guy pulled out his own phone and started to look for something on it as he kept walking quickly toward a big blue truck.

‘Possum faded back into the trees. He guessed he better wait ‘till after dark for that cardboard piece out of the recycling. But now he was thinking a little bit about next week, too. He had some big nails that he’d collected up in a little cache back in these woods. It might be kinda fun to put some of them close to the tires of that big blue truck one day. . .

______________________________________________________________
Tonithegreat recently had to get a tire repaired that had damage due to a nail. She hopes that her karma is a little bit better than suit-guy's is in this story. Hope you enjoy the read and remember me when it comes time for the LJ Idol poll to be posted!

Dear Internet,

Today I had to call the ball to kill my very dear sweet friend. Wait, that’s not really quite right is it? Well, no, but it is, in fact, true.

I didn’t want to make the vet appointment. I knew that I needed to make it. Zoey was overdue for a shot, and without being current on shots, the vet won’t sell us the flea meds that work. And the fleas, at this springtime moment in the beautiful Florida panhandle, could, if given free reign, possibly take over the world. So, even though I knew that Zoey was feeble and there was something very amiss with her right front leg, I made her a vet appointment of the kind where you go into the room with your pet and the veterinarian. Because I was pretty sure there would be a lot for us to talk about.

I trust our veterinarians. Our longest standing vet, the one the practice is named for, retired last year. But the other two doctors there are also excellent. Of the medical professionals that our family sees, I think I would have to say that tied for first place in the “Toni’s Trust” department you would see the girls’ pediatrician and the nurses and NPs at their practice, our veterinarians and vet techs, and my dentist and her practice. My dentist is now my longest standing medical relationship, because I think I found her over twenty years ago, while I was still in law school. My sister found her, actually, while my sister was still in undergrad and trying to deal with some dental issues, and my parents were like “Toni, you also need to be responsible and go to the dentist.” And so I did. I’m lucky my sister was looking back then. . . Toni, where are you going with this? Of course you were and are lucky. Yes, even the dogs are lucky. You have done what you can. You have to find peace for yourself as well as keep striving.

***

On Sunday night, I ended up hosting friends. I’m behind on all the things. Truly, almost literally behind on everything from synchronized swimming bills, to work backlog, to idol writing and commenting, to basic household upkeep and maintenance and chores. I’ve always had busy periods in my life where I had to narrow my focus down from the long term to the week-to-week and sometimes day-to-day. But it feels like it has been week-to-week for a really long time right now. I’ve got to shake myself out of whatever this is. I think I have shaken myself out of that dangerous mental headspace of “the world is too much with me” a couple of times recently. But ever since the pandemic it has been harder to frame long-term thinking, harder to pan the camera far enough back to catch the right kind of picture.

Some of our closest friends are about to be in Spain for a little while. T teaches study-abroad college classes for a couple of months there for FSU most summers now, and her husband, J, joins her over there for a short vacation most years. It is great fun to talk to them about it all, in part because J and I did study abroad in Spain with FSU waaaaaaay back in the day. Unfortunately though, those friends have had a tremendous run of bad luck since before the pandemic, losing T’s house where her mother was living to an accidental house fire, and then a string of other occurrences related to aging parents. Every one of us is on the clock, human and canine, I suppose.

Anyway, T is already over there, teaching, and J was looking for social time and then it turned out that some other friends also wanted to share a drink, so we ended up at our place, and even though it kept me from work that I wanted to do on various things, I was glad for the company. The Sunday blues have been strong for me over the last year or so. Each week asks a lot of me and of my girls and I never feel like we’re ready to face the next one. It was good to chat instead of worrying about it. For a long time we talked about TV; mostly the various Star Trek shows that are on now and some of the Star Wars shows, too.

But finally towards the end of the visit, we started talking current events and it felt good to discuss and vent. We talked about the leaked Roe opinion. I was forced to consider the fact that my daughters are very likely to attend college in a state where abortion will not be legal. Unless we can turn things around faster than I imagine, they almost certainly won’t have that right in our home state when they graduate high school, anyway. And we also talked about Russia’s war against Ukraine. And although that seems to be going better for the Ukraine than anyone had any right to expect, I was utterly chilled this week by something I heard second-hand from my mom that I had to share with everyone.

I have an aunt, L, who immigrated here from China. She and her kids, who are actually close in age to mine, spend the holidays with us when it all works out because my mom loves to host holidays for everyone at her house. Because mom is retired now, she keeps us all in the loop and she told me that L and her mother, who is still in Beijing, were having a really hard time arguing over what is happening in the Ukraine. Apparently Chinese media is solidly on the side of Putin, and reports there have him acting against terrorism as a righteous leader in the Ukraine.

I knew that there were certain elements here in the US that sympathized with Putin, but it chilled me more that the Chinese state appears to be coming down on his side. There are going to be a lot of ugly battles between dinosaurs here in the US in the coming years, and I feel like I’m braced for those end-stage capitalism woes. But I had somehow thought that China would stay on the sidelines for things like Putin’s war and some of those dinosaur battles. I don’t know why I thought that. A lot of dinosaurs still have a lot of legitimate power.

Anyway, it was nice to share that shock with friends, and nicer still that one of them was like “So what do we do about it?” Because I think that question gets to the heart of how someone could actually feel better about any of what’s happening now.

The painful part is that I don’t actually know what we do about it. I told him what I thought, which was basically just “Stay the course. Keep writing and calling the elected representatives, even when you know that many of them are so closely allied with the dinosaurs that they’re sure to ignore you. At least some staffer will have to tally your dissent. At least then you’ll be trying within a system that they’re actively dismantling around you.”

Don’t get me wrong, I still have a lot of hope for democracy. It’s just that from here, in Tallahassee, a lot of that hope is pinned to democracy in India more strongly than it is pinned to the voter-disenfranchising politicians that run things here and now. I also told my friends that I really think an awful lot is up to China and India now. Because just as Putin may have already started world war three, I think there are far too many signs to ignore that we are also already in the starting years of the global climate crisis, and we’re too hamstrung in the US to do much to contribute to setting good policy on that.

Ugh. They are all such big worries. And I am so very privileged and lucky to have enough space to pan that camera back and worry about them. And so very privileged and lucky to have friends to bounce thoughts back and forth with about all of it.

***

And in the end perhaps the biggest privilege for my family and for our pets is good health care. Dr. S sat with me this morning, down on the floor with Zoey, smiling a sad pretty smile, as we went over all the possibilities and then I choked out my question; Was there anyone who could provide euthanasia at home for my sweet Zoey dog? There was. Dr. H will come tomorrow evening. We’ll get one more moonlit walk together tonight if Zoey’s up for it, but she won’t suffer another painful night tomorrow night.

Texting with my friend E after the decision was made, I lamented that human health care didn’t make as much sense as veterinary medicine when it came to the end and palliative care. And she agreed it was true. But we are moving in the right direction, I suppose. That arc of the moral universe just bends damnably long sometimes. And we definitely live in interesting times.

Morning. No one wants to be awake yet in my house. I love the feeling of cool morning air from the window in the springtime, but having the window open makes me feel bad for the neighbors when morning alarms ring. Sadly, at this stage of life, I’m a multiple-alarms person. Multiple alarms starting at 6:40. And then some raised voices trying to get the kids up. I don’t leap out of bed with a plan when first I wake. I roll over and try to find something inspiring to scroll. Maybe something in the New Yorker, maybe Heather Cox Richardson has some wisdom placing current events in the broader historical perspective. What is happening in the Ukraine? Will there be something on the news this morning that I need to talk to the girls about?

Climbing felt good last night. Now I am sore, but it doesn’t feel too bad. Why do I awake before my alarm goes off when I am this physically exhausted? There have been times in my life when waking early was probably due to anxiety. Today it doesn’t feel like anxiety. Is this peri-menopause? Do I just need to be better about physical therapy and exercise for my back? Maybe I should read a little fiction.

What on earth am I after?

Partway through the workday. I don’t even know how to write about this feeling, because it can be so different from day to day. I really like my job. But it can be combative. People go after each other sometimes. The law is not called an adversarial system for nothing. Most of the time the flow of work is too fast for much in the way of navel gazing, especially these days. But on bad days, I dream of other realities. I look at the years that I have accrued toward retirement. 17.5 years in the system isn’t nothing. Retirement would be a lot more certain with more years, but if it becomes untenable. . . There are other things I can do. There are other things I want to do. So many things I want to do and almost definitely not enough time for all of them.

The first time I ran was to the end of the block
But I didn’t know then, that it never would stop
Now I look around, and what do I see
More and more people running faster than me
These days, everybody’s on the run

Jimmy Buffett is always a good choice for me. Even the sort of cheesy older stuff. Driving between Atlanta and Montogemery on I85, I’m in a race against time. It seems like I’m going to make it to my Aunt’s wedding with 20 minutes to spare. Thank goodness for the time change in my favor. I forgot how crazy ATL tends to be. In the two pandemic years, I forgot that sometimes even when you have a car reserved, they might not have a car ready for you to pick up right away. But they got one ready eventually, and I’ve got my cute outfit on and it is a beautiful day, and unless traffic deteriorates, I’ve got this. I get to be there for my family and relax for a minute.

When did the paradigm shift from a world where you’re with your family all the time, creating community, with breaks for work, to a world where you strive all the time with breaks for family and creating community?

Am I pursuing goals, or are the goals I’ve chosen driving me now?

Night-time and the cool humid embrace of Tallahassee spring are a sweet mix this year. In my neighborhood there are crickets singing and owls hooting and unless it is very still there is always something of a sound of the wind through the trees. I try to walk our young dog Alfie every night just before I settle down, usually around 9:30 or 10:00. He is still bursting with energy at 25 months old. He’s a strange sort of heavy-bodied hound mix, weighing in at over 65 pounds. He can be a lot. He’s smart, with herding and protecting instincts from somewhere. He’s red-brown colored with a cute face and a liver colored nose. He needs to roam more than he gets to, and I love to walk our long block in the late late evenings with him. I’ve learned that he does better if I let him carry something when we walk, so we pad through the night with him carrying a three-foot long stick that one of the neighbors pruned out of their yard.

He’s happy, doing his dog’s work, taking that stick around between the quiet yards and houses. And I am happy, loving the feeling of the familiar streets and little park along the stream. I hope I’m doing more than just dog’s work, but on jasmine-scented quiet evenings sometimes it feels like even dog’s work might be okay- might be enough.

Somewhere in suburban Maryland, in the mid 2020s

On sleepless nights it was always easier to remember her renegade days.

Krys tossed and turned all night, her head aching and her dreams cycling between tents on hillsides where pipelines were scheduled to be built and PTA meetings that she was late for.

In the first set of dreams, she felt again in her belly deep excitement at sharing a tent with Aaron that rainy night when she was 18, making love between bursts in the thunderstorm, trying to keep themselves and especially Aaron’s computer and burner phones dry enough to function.

It had been hard not to sit up too high into the ceiling of the little two man tent, not to force the nylon of the ceiling into that of the storm fly, causing leaks to trickle coldly down her back in startling contrast to the heat between the two of them. It had been hard not to distract Aaron later as he went online and hacked his way into the security system the contractors were using on this section of pipeline construction.

He’d managed it finally around 2 AM, disabling their security cameras somehow unnoticeably. Then the two of them and another couple had made a rampage of damage through the construction site, according to premeditated plans, dancing half-disrobed in the continuing rain, stealing bits and disabling equipment in clever ways. Toward the end Aaron had found two tubes of lipstick in the cab of one of the dozers, and he’d used it to scrawl pictures and nonsensical messages in all the dozer windows.

Anarchy As were emblazoned in circles. Stick figures made love in improbable positions in flowery fields. Dollar signs had exes slashed through them. “¡Viva revolucìon!” He had scrawled. “Aarokrys forever!” She’d slapped him playfully for scrawling the message with their names intertwined, but her heart had felt like it expanded to fill her whole rib-cage, and she felt it again in the dream, ready to burst.

In the second set of dreams Krys was back in the now. Her husband was at his soccer league’s yearly tournament, and she was alone. She was alone and she had dressed too casually for a PTA meeting, and she was needlessly worried that the other parents would see her not in business-casual and assume that she didn’t hold a job important enough to excuse her relative absence from PTA meetings generally. She didn’t want to be the mom dropping hints about how busy her work life was, but she felt herself sliding into that mindset. . .

It was a disgusting juxtaposition. Between the rain starting and stopping outside, her heater kicking on and off, and the mixed up dreaming, she felt like she’s barely slept at all. It was a terrible way to start the day, knowing that work was going to be super intense with the new team still in charge and so tight with this new administration.

Krys stood at the kitchen counter with one hand on her forehead and poured a big glass of sweet, cardamom-laced iced coffee into a Margaritaville branded tumbler with a picture of a pirate’s treasure map emblazoned on the side, with the captions “Retirement Plan / Growing Older But Not Up.” The cup was a lie. She worked for the Man now and was comforted by the quarterly earnings statements on her supplemental retirement plan.

Her head was killing her. She’d only had one beer last night and not stayed up late at all, but her sinuses were apparently in complete rebellion. She had to buck up. She’d been selected to help comb through the evidence left in the wake of the last big hacking attempt on one of the defense contractors. She ran her hand through her hair, wondering where her college Aaron was now. She bet he’d be shocked to know that she was in the field of cyber security at all.

They’d both been so full of confidence back then. She wouldn’t have guessed that organic chemistry was about to unravel her dreams of a biology degree- that it would be six long years later before she walked across the stage to receive a degree in computer science. She wondered if Aaron were out there somewhere, selling insurance or property now, or maybe a professor, which was a picture that made her aching face crack into a smile. Then she realized that her kids were going to be late to school if she didn’t get herself out to the car and get the day started for real.

***
Two Weeks Earlier
***

Vancouver, BC, Canada

Thunder crashed loudly enough that the sound penetrated Aaron’s underground apartment. Vancouver, it turned out, was a fairly expensive place to live. But the mostly subterranean nature of Aaron’s converted basement abode suited him. On mornings like this it was cozy with his lamps and monitors glowing. One wouldn’t guess the delightful spaciousness of it’s living area and one bedroom from the size of the passageway down to his door. One also wouldn’t guess how easy it had been for him to co-opt his way into the fibernet cable than ran along the easement between his building and the street.

He did miss having more natural light. But his high narrow windows up by the ceiling let in more light than he had originally guessed they would, even now with rain streaming down them and into the gutter under the stairs. He didn’t live in the sunniest city on the west coast anyway, and that was fine with him. Weather could be dressed for. Humans didn’t melt.

He sipped as his mug of hot tea and smiled at the idea of being a 1337 h4xor who cared about spending time outside in the elements. But the outdoors had always been important to him. It was ecological activism that had brought him to the darkweb in the first place, after all. He looked down at his watch. 9:36 AM and he was just finishing up a particularly inspired bit of program. With any luck, he’d get this finished up and out to his deployment colleagues in time to get some sea kayaking in this evening if the weather cleared up as it was supposed to.

In direct conflict with another stereotype; Aaron was a morning person. A lot his best work came to fruition between 7:00 and 10:00. But he didn’t waste energy bemoaning the fact that everyone’s internal clocks were set differently. He had sympathy for people that didn’t do their best work between nine and five, even if he wasn’t one of them.

What he didn’t have sympathy for was simple greed. It didn’t take that much effort in terms of money added to the bottom line to add some protections for whales and other marine mammals into projects like the one Defensecorp had just completed. But adding those kinds of protections would have eaten into their bottom line just a little too much, apparently. Aaron smiled a tight little smile and cracked his knuckles. He and his colleagues were about to eat into their bottom line significantly. But he wanted to make sure they understood why.

It was time to craft the signature that his work would leave on their servers. The message that the cyber security teams would find when they were cleaning up after the hack. He typed a few lines of code and considered. It didn’t hurt to be a little oblique with these things.

“Cetaceans cannot compensate,” he started, feeling poetic. He knew he wasn’t a very good poet, but if he wasn’t writing code, poetry seemed a better form than prose for this barbaric yawp. He continued:

“Their blood, brains, bile are on your hands
Slaughtered innocents like our future
The world still burns
Aarokrys, Shellaron, Aarocyn: none lasted
And neither will you
But the revolution continues
Love continues
We will prevail”

Not his most inspired piece, he figured. And almost certainly, pieces of it would never be understood by any of it’s readers. Still sometimes one had to employ some creative flourish, if only to flex little used muscles. It did often get lonely fighting the good fight. But it was important to hearken back to inspiration. If he wasn’t doing this for love, what was he doing it for?

_____________________________________
Tonithegreat may have started watching Mr. Roboto this week and been overly inspired. You be the judge. Still only two episodes in, and it is darkly compelling. We’ll see how it continues to unfold. If you enjoyed this entry, please vote for it in the Idol poll! I’ll edit this sig to include the voting link if/when it becomes available.

Embers pop. Steam and heat and light are released skyward. The desert air is cold, but layers of fleece and down keep Bryn’s tired muscles and core warm. Cool beer is a balm by the warm fire, as are fleece socks bounded only by toe-freeing sandals. Bryn is sitting among friends, watching sparks pop upward toward the stars spangled across the sky. Energy that has been released hurtles briefly toward space. It dissipates as it goes, like grief and sadness will if you can release them.

The fire is a foolish thing. Everyone has stoves that could warm water and food more efficiently, but nothing is better as a social center than a fire. To a woman and man, the whole group are environmentalists of one stripe or another. Most of them teach leave no trace ethics to the friends they bring into the wilderness regularly and some teach wilderness skills by profession.

Bryn has no doubt that the same young man who packed in the wood will pack out any ashes left after tonight. Still, no one is complaining about the carbon footprint of the burning logs tonight. People are enjoying smiles and eyes reflected in warm reds and oranges.

Some of the crew sits on empty packs, but others brought in light chairs or sit on the ground. People are physically tired, but filled with that positive mental energy that is replenished by a day striving hard under the sun. It had been great weather for climbing, just crisp enough to prevent one from noticing their sweat, but not so cool that hands exposed directly to the rock suffer. One threesome is still at the base of the wall, having cleaned their last route by headlamp. Bryn almost envies those three their energy as she stretches her feet toward the fire.

The companions who have been back at camp long enough to eat and start to relax proposed some order to the raucous conversation around the flames- a game of sorts. A topic would be given and they each had a chance to respond to it in turn. It was a big enough group that she found it fun to learn more about some of the newer friends.

It was fun to think about how they envisioned her, too. She and her friend Ky were the oldest in this group by far, the only ones that had made it to retirement age, though she still worked different jobs seasonally. Sometimes it was easy to forget how significant the age gap was, between her and the youth, especially with some of the middle aged folks here who also had families. She could see herself in all of them. It was an animated group of the younger people who came up with the idea and the first of the questions in this game, though, and a young woman not long out of college that she had climbed with today asked the next one.

“What has been your lowest point, emotionally?” She asked, eyes falling toward the fire as her long hair slid forward, following them as she briefly dipped her head. “How did you get through it to be here tonight?” She continued as feet shuffled near her.

The man who’d packed in the wood started his answer, and Bryn realized that this was going to be an answer that likely emphasized her difference in age with most of them. What would they expect her to answer, she wondered. Most of them knew that she’d lost her spouse after a long battle with a nasty disease and knew that she had daughters who were grown now.

Would the expectation be that the hardest times were the break points when loss happened? The girls leaving home? The loss of her parents? Losing her partner that final time, or one of the hundred losses for him that came before that? The milestones hadn’t been easy, but she was certain those hadn’t been the lowest time for her. Yes, the aftermath of wrenching milestones had been hard. But the lowest time for her was before those transitions.

The young man was talking earnestly about a period of indecision during his undergraduate years, of how the agony of not knowing how his path would unfold had brought him to a dark and anxiety-ridden place.

Maybe the younger folks wouldn’t be so surprised that the lowest times for her weren’t the big adjustments, but rather were in the years leading up to them, coming to terms with the inevitability of some of the bad things on the horizon.

What _would_ she pick as her lowest time? Probably pretty early on, when a lot of the struggle still stretched ahead of her and she wasn’t able to balance everything. There had been a time when her mental health strained to the point of breaking. It was hard to look back on it, even forty years later- hard to remember just how she had felt. She’d been so sure that people were out to get her specifically and so cripplingly sad about everything.

The thing was, even now, she felt a pang of anger for the sad, cornered self she had been. The world had, in fact, been unfair. Some people really had been out to get her. But the world had also been too much with her, then. She’d been certain she was the center of things that were happening- unable to face the reality that she, like so many others, was mostly just collateral damage for a great many things spun out of control.

She was glad that over half of this group was comprised of women, but sad that a lot of them faced very similar stereotypes and career hardships to the ones she’d lived with. That damned arc of justice just didn’t coincide well with human lifespans, she supposed. Though she also chided herself. Weren’t she and some of her companions here tonight also working to shorten that arc?

She had managed to keep a fulfilling career, and one that kept her sick husband in good health insurance, but she hadn’t risen through the ranks as far as her talent would have supported. It didn’t matter that she put in longer hours and made just as many controversial calls well as anybody. It took something even more than that if everyone knew you were also a woman with a family. Even if you were shorting that family when it came to your hours, because you were always at work, the assumption was that your heart was with the family first, much more than any such assumption dogged family men. Those assumptions were changing. But slowly. Too slowly for her taste.

The young man was wrapping up his tale, explaining how moving away from substance abuse, getting outside more had slowly helped him come to the realization that things weren’t so bad and that his fears weren’t so warranted. Bryn watched him struggle between a desire to put a pat satisfying ending on his story and the need to let it end with the realization that he wasn’t so very far away from that dark time yet.

“Maybe none of us really are,” she thought to herself as she searched for the right way to start her own story.

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LJ Idol, Wheel of Chaos! Week 3 - ECCO
LJ Idol Wheel of Chaos - Week 2 - If its any consolation
LJ Idol, Wheel of Chaos! Week 1 - Quality
LJ Idol - Declaration of Chaotic Intent!
The Dispatch from Vogel State Park, Cabin #6
Flood Recovery Mode
A Post that isn't Idol related!? Why not! Here is a Story.
LJ Idol Presents: Idol Mini - Week 8 - Bycatch
LJ Idol Presents: Idol Mini - Week 7 Write Off - Open Topic
LJ Idol Presents: Idol Mini - Week 4 - Uncanny Valley
LJ Idol Presents: Idol Mini - Week 3 - Without You
LJ Idol Presents: Idol Mini - Week 2 - Sankofa
Idol mini season declaration of silliness.
LJ Idol Three Strikes Edition - Week 10 - craic
LJ Idol Three Strikes Edition - Week 9 - All hat, no cattle
LJ Idol Three Strikes Edition - Week 8 - You are an opossum living in the trashcan of my heart
LJ Idol Three Strikes Edition - Week 7 - Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
LJ Idol Three Strikes Edition - Pursuit - Week 6
LJ Idol, Literary Prize Fight - Week 11: Long Distance Dedication
LJ Idol, Literary Priize Fight - Week 10: Nadir

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Circus of the Barking Dead, Redux

Less from Russia, More with Love!

Recent Entries

LJ Idol, Wheel of Chaos! Week 3 - ECCO

LJ Idol Wheel of Chaos - Week 2 - If its any consolation

LJ Idol, Wheel of Chaos! Week 1 - Quality

LJ Idol - Declaration of Chaotic Intent!

The Dispatch from Vogel State Park, Cabin #6

Flood Recovery Mode

A Post that isn't Idol related!? Why not! Here is a Story.

LJ Idol Presents: Idol Mini - Week 8 - Bycatch

LJ Idol Presents: Idol Mini - Week 7 Write Off - Open Topic

LJ Idol Presents: Idol Mini - Week 4 - Uncanny Valley

LJ Idol Presents: Idol Mini - Week 3 - Without You

LJ Idol Presents: Idol Mini - Week 2 - Sankofa

Idol mini season declaration of silliness.

LJ Idol Three Strikes Edition - Week 10 - craic

LJ Idol Three Strikes Edition - Week 9 - All hat, no cattle

LJ Idol Three Strikes Edition - Week 8 - You are an opossum living in the trashcan of my heart

LJ Idol Three Strikes Edition - Week 7 - Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

LJ Idol Three Strikes Edition - Pursuit - Week 6

LJ Idol, Literary Prize Fight - Week 11: Long Distance Dedication

LJ Idol, Literary Priize Fight - Week 10: Nadir