"But maybe everything that dies someday comes back."
Nice weather today. Mostly sunny. Our high was 84˚F, with heat index at 86˚F. Currently, it's 83˚F.
This morning, I wrote another 1,308 words on The Night Watchers. I am now at that point where I live in fear it will suddenly cut out on me. If I can just make it to 20k words, I think I'll be in the clear.
I know you guys have been waiting on a new novel for a long, long, long damn time. Thank you for not losing interest.
And I talked with Jun at McWane; I'll be there tomorrow afternoon. And I sent an email to the collections manager of the vertebrate paleontology collection at the University of Kansas. And I spoke with Mike P. about one of the mosasaur papers I'm coauthoring with him. All this almost makes me sound social, which of course I'm not. It's just pixels in the void. Oh, and I dig out some extra signature pages I needed to sign for Centipede Press weeks ago, for their edition of The Haunting of Hill House, for which I wrote an introduction (or an afterword). I signed those today (see below), a shamefully long time after they were sent to me.
That was my day, give or take. I got no work done of Mosasaur Paper #1 and no prep work done on Winifred. Oh, I promised to tell the story of what happened yesterday. A day later, it's not all that goddamn interesting. The dental tool I was using sent a tiny bit of sharp glauconite sailing towards my face, and somehow it got around my safety goggles and my safety glasses and landed in my one good eye, the right. I dashed to the bathroom to clean my eye and gashed my left forearm open on a protruding bit of wood, and suddenly I was bleeding like the proverbial stuck pig. I got the glauconite out of my eye, no harm done, and I washed the wound, got it to stop bleeding, and then bandaged it. But I can't help but be amused that this beast that's been dead ~85my can still draw blood. Good for her.
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More politics? Sure. Why not? I am reading a lot (and I mean a lot) of history about the World Wars these days, and it is impossible me not to listen to the hysteria and hatefulness and name calling being showered upon us by the fascist Trumpian cultists and not hear in their voice the same contempt that Nazis held for intellectuals and scientists, artists and professors, queers and the "anti-socials" and Jews and so forth. Indeed, the way Trumpians spit words like "authority" and "scientist" and "experts," they might as well be Nazis talking about Jews. This is what is happening. This is what is really happening. A war not only against non-European races and women, but a war on science and education, and it will destroy us as surely as any nuclear missile. COVID-19 gave the masses of uneducated and willfully ignorant something they have longed for as long as I can remember, a chance to deny science when the consequences of doing so are life and death. Yeah, I don't know why either. But I see the huge chip on their shoulders. I hear the insecurity in their voice. I see their shame, and how they want to bury in darkness everything that makes them feel less. And kiddos, you ask me, ignorant people are not anything but a chance to educate and make less ignorant people. I have no contempt for the uneducated, unless they seek to elevate ignorance to a virtue. Which is exactly what the Trumpian cultists are busy doing. And if, over the next two years, they win, where does that leave the scientists and the scholars and the artists upon whom civilization depends for its survival? What do you think will become of us and all we have accomplished? And, by the way, I'm not talking about what will happen if the "Republicans" win. Near as I can tell, the actual GOP is all but extinct, and, in no small part, it was a suicide. What I'm talking about is the victory of the Trumpians and all they represent and all they want to see come to pass and all they long to burn to the ground.
It has taken a lot to make me ashamed to be American, but these fools have turned the trick.
---
Please take a gander at the current eBay auctions. The taxman commeth. Thanks.
Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast
11:17 a.m.
This morning, I wrote another 1,308 words on The Night Watchers. I am now at that point where I live in fear it will suddenly cut out on me. If I can just make it to 20k words, I think I'll be in the clear.
I know you guys have been waiting on a new novel for a long, long, long damn time. Thank you for not losing interest.
And I talked with Jun at McWane; I'll be there tomorrow afternoon. And I sent an email to the collections manager of the vertebrate paleontology collection at the University of Kansas. And I spoke with Mike P. about one of the mosasaur papers I'm coauthoring with him. All this almost makes me sound social, which of course I'm not. It's just pixels in the void. Oh, and I dig out some extra signature pages I needed to sign for Centipede Press weeks ago, for their edition of The Haunting of Hill House, for which I wrote an introduction (or an afterword). I signed those today (see below), a shamefully long time after they were sent to me.
That was my day, give or take. I got no work done of Mosasaur Paper #1 and no prep work done on Winifred. Oh, I promised to tell the story of what happened yesterday. A day later, it's not all that goddamn interesting. The dental tool I was using sent a tiny bit of sharp glauconite sailing towards my face, and somehow it got around my safety goggles and my safety glasses and landed in my one good eye, the right. I dashed to the bathroom to clean my eye and gashed my left forearm open on a protruding bit of wood, and suddenly I was bleeding like the proverbial stuck pig. I got the glauconite out of my eye, no harm done, and I washed the wound, got it to stop bleeding, and then bandaged it. But I can't help but be amused that this beast that's been dead ~85my can still draw blood. Good for her.
---
More politics? Sure. Why not? I am reading a lot (and I mean a lot) of history about the World Wars these days, and it is impossible me not to listen to the hysteria and hatefulness and name calling being showered upon us by the fascist Trumpian cultists and not hear in their voice the same contempt that Nazis held for intellectuals and scientists, artists and professors, queers and the "anti-socials" and Jews and so forth. Indeed, the way Trumpians spit words like "authority" and "scientist" and "experts," they might as well be Nazis talking about Jews. This is what is happening. This is what is really happening. A war not only against non-European races and women, but a war on science and education, and it will destroy us as surely as any nuclear missile. COVID-19 gave the masses of uneducated and willfully ignorant something they have longed for as long as I can remember, a chance to deny science when the consequences of doing so are life and death. Yeah, I don't know why either. But I see the huge chip on their shoulders. I hear the insecurity in their voice. I see their shame, and how they want to bury in darkness everything that makes them feel less. And kiddos, you ask me, ignorant people are not anything but a chance to educate and make less ignorant people. I have no contempt for the uneducated, unless they seek to elevate ignorance to a virtue. Which is exactly what the Trumpian cultists are busy doing. And if, over the next two years, they win, where does that leave the scientists and the scholars and the artists upon whom civilization depends for its survival? What do you think will become of us and all we have accomplished? And, by the way, I'm not talking about what will happen if the "Republicans" win. Near as I can tell, the actual GOP is all but extinct, and, in no small part, it was a suicide. What I'm talking about is the victory of the Trumpians and all they represent and all they want to see come to pass and all they long to burn to the ground.
It has taken a lot to make me ashamed to be American, but these fools have turned the trick.
---
Please take a gander at the current eBay auctions. The taxman commeth. Thanks.
Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast
11:17 a.m.