I am me

 

I never lived alone until my divorce in 1998. Then, for the first time I had my own condominium and a job that I relied upon for paying part of my bills.

In the beginning I was lonely and afraid. I thought I needed to look for the old stability, a husband or steady boy friend and yet, I felt ridiculous calling a grown man a boy friend.

I had good friends and they helped me make the transition from part of a couple, a mother, a daughter, a child of my father, to me. A woman.

It took time. The first ten years were wildly fluctuating periods of time where I did many of those things women today do in their early twenties. It ended when I moved to North Carolina for a few years to be near my youngest son. 

Another couple of fractures in the family brought me back to here, a city I have lived in for almost fifty years, but I was still flailing a bit, trying to find my own place, my own feelings, my own ways. Ones that reflected how I felt and how I wanted to live.

I've heard it takes two years for every year lived to let go of old ideas. I think that may be true. This past year, forced into quarantine because of the virus, I have had to live with myself consistently and it has changed me.

I hear my impatience with people being vocalized when it feels necessary. I do not feel constrained to please others, or make them like me so much. I am more comfortable than I can ever remember feeling since I was probably four years old. 

My nightmares have turned into dreams so sleeping is no longer scary. My preferences are not critiqued, or laughed at, so they can flow one to another. I am reading, eating, sleeping, living in ways that feel good to me.

Life is not perfect. Is it ever? 

But it is much more tolerable and comfortable than I can ever remember it being in the past.

Thinking

It seems to me that the average person doesn't really want to think. He, or she, wants their thoughts, their ethics, their entire world, spoon fed to them.

Churches pour out dogma, one dose at a time, carefully indoctrinating small children with love before pouring all sorts of other outlandish ideas down their throats later on. What started out as love often becomes slightly veiled intolerance and hate, confirmed and sealed under a safe authoritarian God.

Justice plays out much the same way, varying in actual existence depending on the mores of the day. Free love bad. Narrowly defined heterogeneous love good. Theft of hard goods like possessions and jewels bad. More creative white collar crime clever. Whatever lines the judgers pockets and lives acceptable.

For them.

Education is good for a certain class of people. Not so good for those who might call them to account. Teaching children facts rather than thinking corrals them into a more amenable class of underlings.

People ultimately often come around to vote the way their fathers voted. Go to churches their grandparents attended. Expect little Sally or Dick to hang out with the "right" sort of people, right color, right sex, right social mores and manners, desires, and dreams. Anything else is threatening.

Anyone gulping from the bottle of open minded thinking is likely to become drunk on dangerous ideas. Ideas that might change the safety of the norm. And anyone taught to think could figure out how to explain their thoughts to other people in ways that produce change.

Thinking creates hardship for those in charge. Better to teach facts. If you do that right, it won't really matter what facts you teach them, because they will never really use them for much more than mundane things like counting their possessions. Life becomes simple one-up-man-ship and souls are left floundering.

Freedom

I made a conscious choice to have all the things that were important to me for Thanksgiving dinner. In spite of the fact that I would be all alone and share it with no one. That ended up making me feel immensely grateful for my decision, my situation and my being.

After all, if I do not treat myself the way I would like to be treated, why would anyone else? How would they even really know what that was? I wasn't sure myself until I began to weigh how much I looked forward to the smell of some things cooking and the way they tasted against how much money and work it would be to produce them.

I think that may be the major difference in the quality of many lives. There are more choices than some people are willing to acknowledge and how we decide those choices define who we are and our reaction to life. 

I know people who seem to choose to suffer. They tell themselves they must perform jobs and live with people they do not like. Then they tell themselves they have no choice. They have to work, or they cannot ask someone to leave their home. 

I have left jobs that I found intolerable and in the end the new jobs I found myself in were infinitely better! I have sometimes been a little bit lonely, but I have been lonelier living with people who make me unhappy.

It takes a little, maybe sometimes even a lot, of courage, to do what I feel is right, but it generally pays off. And if it doesn't? I can make another decision to change that.

Believing that life is a journey and I am at the helm of my own ship, no matter how humble it may be sets me free. Free to be happy. Free to accept the results and free to change things again. It is the absolute basic foundation of a good life.

The Whitehouse has eyes

 

A place of historic beauty and tradition becomes the stage for unimaginable horror when a family of oddly bred miscreants take over.

Bland perfect faces topped by perfect hair and punctuated with cold searing eyes, the creatures dig up the rose gardens, break traditions and see no value in art, music or any other sort of refinement not present in a gaudy Florida golf club.

Children do not laugh, nor do pets galivant in its unhallowed halls.

This is the season of the malcontents. The end of an era when hundreds of thousands are out of work, dying, and fearful that they will be targeted by the petulant, revengeful creatures within .

It is a crime to be truthful, educated, or even logical.

Bedlam reigns.

But hope rises on the horizon.

Respite

 

I took a mini vacation today.

I mean really mini.

I got in my car, went to the bank to get money for my grandson's birthday, then drove around the far outside western part of our town.

In between I stopped and bought two donuts, but I haven't eaten them yet.

All in all it was about an hour and forty-five minutes total, but with sunshine and something that was not political on the radio, it was totally refreshing.

Great

Are we great enough yet?.

Have enough people died in the blue states?

Has enough money been kept back for the wealthy to be at ease?

Are the Proud Boys takin' good care of our super spreader's ego?

Four years of greatness like this could wipe out an entire nation.

But . . .

It is what it is.

The Embarassment

 

The playground is awash in dissension.

The cheaters think everybody cheats, that's how you win.

The losers think it's more about the fight than anything else.

The winners can't get on with it because no one knows where the grown-ups are.

Pitiful.

Misconceptions

I see posts on social media encouraging people to do simple things no one over the age of three should have to be reminded of. Pick up your trash, be nice, etc.

Manners, etiquette, civility, have become less common in today's world.

We have a reverse snobbery that implies there is no reason for any sort of refinement short of not shitting in the street.

I believe it started when people began worshipping money, not for what it can do, but for what they believe it brings with it.

Rich people don't have to open their own doors, pick up their own trash, be nice if they don't want to. But most wealthy people in the past with any sense of security and savoir faire, were perfectly fine doing these things.

Being crass, rude, entitled, does not make you rich. It does not even make you look rich. It simply makes you look crass, rude and entitled. No matter how much money you do, or don't, have.

Like all social fads it is based on a false construct that grows up around frustration. The world is not fair and bullies like to throw their weight around. 

Weight is what you throw when you have nothing else.

Dreams

 

The way is long and winding and what seems unimportant now may turn out to be most memorable later on.

When I was twelve I spent long afternoons with Eliza B. Condell, the woman next door. She was in her nineties and had lived alone since 1899 when her fiancé died. Many of her things ended up in the Illinois State Museum, but to a lonely little new girl on the block she was just a sweet old neighbor with a house full of exotic things.

I played with her music box, a large, glass topped piece with metal bells, played by metal and ceramic birds, bees and butterflies. I had tea parties with a tiny tea seat made out of civil war coins and dressed paper dolls from the early Ziegfeld Follies

She loved to read and I remember walking between our two houses late at night just to get a glimpse of her, wrapped in a huge shawl, reading in her rocking chair by the window.

I had no idea she was famous, but I loved the stories she told about her brother, a world traveler who brought her things from China and other faraway places.

I was hungry for companionship and she filled me up with dreams.

One country indivisible

Minus the constant nagging to divide us I believe we can become one country indivisible with liberty and justice for all. 

History shows us that real change is slow. One step forward, two back, but perseverance pays off in the long run.

As long as just a small majority of people still have honor, empathy, and a sense of justice, we will be okay.

People of color, women, the immigrants who began this country, all walk beside each other and it is possible for us all to flourish. Why would we deny that?

Now we will have the chance to be the people we want to be. Let's show each other this is a good thing.

One last comment

 

The basis of the United States of America has been corruption, incompetence, dishonesty, ignorance, and vulgarity for four long years. Crassness has been the American way. Divisiveness has replaced diplomacy. We took the idea of the Ugly American and elevated it in concrete and steel as our ideal.

Truth be told there is a large under current of ingrained racism, bigotry and hate that most people are smart enough to hide from their neighbors. These people will lie in polls, claiming to be for Biden, when they know they will vote for Trump. They understand what they are doing, but they cannot change. The idea that they might not be as rich, or smart, or kind, or well educated as people with different skin colors, or religions infuriates them. These are Nazis at heart and they live among us.

No matter how embarrassing it is to hear people talking about the President of the United States of America like he is a sensitive toddler who cannot deal with the truth of his loss, we must move on and it is more difficult knowing that there are at least seventy million Americans willing to live with all this just to soothe their debilitated egos.

Biden and Harris have their work cut out for them. 

It's like taking over a special education class mid term when the original teacher allowed the bullies to run the class for four years. There are generations of ingrained beliefs that, once allowed to surface, are difficult to alter. 

How do you teach kindness to people who believe it is only a mask to make their job easier? How do you teach tolerance and empathy to people who are totally blind to anything but surface decoration? How do you teach integrity to people who believe cheating is part of winning?

Entitlement is a disease that has been allowed to replace everything good in our country for way too long. Truly successful people are not measured in dollars and cents, but in honesty, empathy, and a determination to leave the world better than they found it.

Breathe!

 

A collective sigh of relief can be heard all across the United States and most of the world. 

We are about to have a president who is concerned about our country and not just himself. 

Civility will once more define us.  We will cease to be the laughing stock of the world.

Hope is now possible. Relief during this pandemic will be more important than the president's personal hoodlum friends, or his beautiful daughter, or whatever little tiffs fly in or out of his tortured mind.

We will, once more, have a real government with real policies, real goals, and realistic expectations.

There will be disagreements, but they will be dealt with in a sane matter, not by someone saying, "I can do whatever I want." Not by someone who tries to keep the world enraged and divided, but by someone who is sane.

We have taken our country back!

Hard

 

It is hard not to share in the fear and hate spread by Trump and his litter of greedy children.

They are like sophisticated zombies out to feed off the ignorance of their cult following. 

A true horror movie come to life in a country that once celebrated science and sanity.

The patriarch rages around, throwing his weight and power against everything I believe in and they stand behind him, pale, sloe eyed, enablers, waiting their turn to gobble up everything they can.

If we don't oust these people now more and more people will continue to crawl out of the depths to join them and soon we might truly be powerless.

The nightmares of people who know history will come true as a dystopian world begins to rise. Real abject poverty and lush wealth will hang in an unholy balance where the military replaces the police and kangaroo courts are simply tools of the very rich.

It is hard not to feel desperate and depressed even knowing this election will probably bring us some relief, at least for four more years.

Dangerous

 

I have been physically ill for a while now, but it has been worse this week.

All I can do is sleep.

I know it is a coping mechanism, but it's the best I've got right now.

Awake, I am so angry at the stupidity of Trump supporters and the people I know who are one of them.

I'm afraid that this is the end of some of these relationships for good.

How can I look at people who believe in a man who does so many evil (yes, evil, not just bad) things and not see his face reflected in their eyes and soul?

The very thought of these people upsets me. I have no desire to ever see them again under any circumstances.

It would be more convenient to say forgive and forget, but it would also be stupid on my part to forget. 

People who condone this type of behavior are not reliable relatives or friends.

They are dangerous.

Hope

The nightmare isn't over yet, but there is hope.

I could never have imagined the people in this country electing a Trump, but they did.

The fact that so many continue to vote for him now disturbs me.

Who are we? 

What kind of stunted understanding and dedication to vulgarity acts this way? This is a man most of us wouldn't have allowed in our homes in the past and certainly a man who had no use for us in his either, unless it was to clean it, or cook for him, (Or, if we are of a certain type, get laid by him.)

My view of the American people will never be the same.

But now there is hope. Hope for the average American just trying to do the right thing, work full time, support a family with medical care, and a hope that qualified people will be in charge of education, conservation, the justice system and the military.

We have been on the precipice of another Dark Age where superstition and the rich use and abuse the masses of poor ignorant souls dancing around honoring false idols and absolving their anger with guns.. 

Let education reign! Let health care include everyone! Let justice be based on truth. 

Hope once again raises a weary head above the horizon and reaches out to help, even those who do not understand.

A whole new world

Tomorrow is the election that decides the fate of the once glorious United States of America.

Can we rectify the mistakes of four years ago when the Republicans elected an eight year old bully who is willing to lie, cheat, steal, threaten and kill to stay in power?

Our complacency has cost the entire world.

Who knows how many people have paid with their lives due to the virus, our border antics, our poor policing, and the constant egging on of white supremacists by the man who calls himself president.

We have had our own military sent against us and done nothing when another country puts a bounty on the heads of our soldiers.

We have mocked the disabled, denigrated prisoners of war who fought for our country, and allowed a rapist to go free.

Our country is burning, flooding, closing down and over run with the dead and dying.

How much more does it take?

Temptation

 

She whispers quietly from her island amidst the chaos.

Long arms reaching out of the darkness, offering the ultimate hug, a breast to lean against in stormy seas.

A siren whose dark magic slips quietly in between the words and the reason.

Always calling, she is a jealous lover willing to let others weep with emptiness.

To silence her, turn a deaf ear and move away,

Love is the invisible shield.