It is the end of January and I have been sick for a couple of days. It started off as a general malaise on Wednesday, morphed into a migraine by Thursday afternoon and by Friday I was in my dark bedroom wearing sunglasses and reading my way through the newest Charles de Lints* like a perfectly normal person. Because I always wear sunglasses in the house and the sunlight in the kitchen is always physically painful, right? Sigh. I don’t know why I gaslight myself into believing I’m not sick when I actually am, but I always do. I don’t believe I was sick until I get better and then I say, damn, I was really sick! But at the moment when it’s happening, I’m convinced it’s all in my head.

I think that is a specifically, horribly American / capitalist delusion, thinking that you could totally heal yourself if you would just pull on the bootstraps harder. It’s fucked up and it messes with your head. It’s like perfect attendance awards and stuff like that: congratulations! You didn’t get sick, which is purely luck, or, worse, you came to school sick and infected everyone else. In this country that’s a virtue. Hell, nowadays you’d probably get a medal if your disease succeeded in killing off a member of an inferior race. Ha ha! Does that trouble you? It should. All of this should. And in fact if it does not, get the fuck out of my blog. You are not welcome here.

I wish I could laugh about this stuff but I can’t, actually. The latest murder at the front – you know, the front from the war? Civil War II: Electric Boogaloo? – has broken my heart in pieces again. And the news and the social media takes and so on and so forth are not helping at all. I increasingly think that if we want to win this war we will have to get rid of the internet altogether. I’m sad. I loved the old internet. But the billionaire’s internet we have now will not publicize the general strikes, people, and CBS news belongs to MAGA and they say that Pretti and Good (a little heavy handed there, gods, with the nomenclature) were terrorists. It’s all over, you know. There is no coming back. The only way this ends is with more blood, more death, more fire and we aren’t going to emerge as the United States. That country is dead. It’s dead and it’s never coming back and pretending nothing unusual is happening isn’t helping. If you think there’s going to be a real election and we can vote our way out of this with the help of our pals across the aisle, I have a beautiful bridge to sell you. Sorry. I wish I was not so doomer myself. And I do think we will come through, eventually. But not as one country and not soon.

* Verdict: meh and dude, why all the gore and combat? That’s not really your scene. But T. Kingfisher has a new um novella I guess out called 9 Goblins which also has combat and gore but a lot of other very wonderful stuff; I read every single thing she writes with awe. So yeah even the fantasy authors are writing the zeitgeist: combat and gore and death and sorrow. FUCK the 21st century, it bites. And FUCK ICE but that goes without saying.

So, yeah! On to the week that was!