Bone Spurs!

Yesterday, I found out I had bone spurs in my hip. 

It took me a while to get out the apartment and to Central Indiana Orthopedics. Frankly, I was worried. E had me thinking of hip replacements, and I had no idea how to deal with that. Same for arthritis. Bone spurs were good news. Ibuprofen for treatment for now.

Napped when I got back here.

No writing last evening. I was out early. 400 mg of ibuprofen does that to me.

I did check my email.

"Colonel Tom" rejected again:

We are grateful for your willingness to share your writing with us. However, your work was not selected for our Winter issue. We wish you the best with all your writing endeavors.

Sincerely,

The Good Life Review Team

The Indiana Historical Society is presenting Equal: A Work in Progress – Defining the “Ideal Citizen” on 11/22 at 7 pm which can be viewed virtually.

 For the third conversation of Equal: A Work in Progress we will explore the complex and controversial intertwining policies surrounding eugenics, public health, classicism, racism, and immigration restriction.

On March 9, 1907, the Indiana Legislature passed the first-ever compulsory eugenic law, making sterilization mandatory for certain individuals with mental and intellectual disabilities. This ongoing pursuit of an ideal society gave power to a select few to curate citizenship rights around those whom they considered “undesirable”, through theories in reproductive rights, immigration restrictions, and other policies.

Indiana’s constitution declares “that all people are created equal”. Though this revolutionary idea is a foundational principle of our state, it is marred by a myriad of contradictions. This ongoing series of interdisciplinary conversations examines our collective definition of equality at key moments in Indiana’s history to better understand who is considered a citizen, who gets a seat at the table, and who maintains power in our society.

I signed up for that.

The Library of America has The Unknown Kerouac, a video presentation that I have not yet viewed. 

Up this morning and out to work.

I made it to halfway through my work day. The ibuprofen wore off about 10 am. The pain is really low-grade, like a hum, except this hum leaves me a bit queasy. And I was getting tired. I walked down to the sheriff's to do my weekly obligations to the government. My left leg is numb by the time I make it there and sign on the sheriff's signature line, acknowledging my presence as a dangerous person still living in Muncie. From the courthouse, I catch the bus downtown. Fighting being tired, I almost miss my bus home by my semi-napping in the station. The #5 gets me home. Snow blowing through a gray sky, the wind cold, I make a beeline for my room. After eating lunch and dosing myself with another 400 mg of ibuprofen, I give up weeding emails to take a nap. Maybe I can through off the headache starting to take shape behind my eyes.

My nap gets interrupted 8 minutes in from the cable guys putting in a new box. When they left, I had about an hour before the alarm was to go off.

Up and about close to 4 pm, slept through the alarm, or I did not set the alarm correctly. No pep in my step now, just a feeling of mushiness.

On the computer, thinking I can accomplish something after all. Listening to Uneasy Listening's Halloween show, Monsters.

I read Colors of the Immortal Palette by Caroline M. Yoachim that is published in Uncanny. A story of vampiric artists, or is it a story of vampiric art? Whatever, I had a rough start with my frame of mind, only to realize it is very good. If this is what they publish, I have doubts about my speculative fiction here. Lucky me, Uncanny is closed to submissions. Do take a look at Ms. Yoachim's story - race, art, love intersect to point a way to a meaningful life.

Read Trump’s Authoritarian Promise while trying to decide what to do about dinner. Vacillating between pizza and what I have left here. Foregoing the fast tonight. Complete lack of energy. So, Trump wants to kill drug dealers immediately after arrest. Could we do that to p;people stealing top secret documents?

I found Orthodox History blog. That is Orthodox Christina history. Good-looking site, what I read was quite good.

 I settled on pizza. From Domino's. Would be nice for my stomach to settle a bit.

Waiting, I read Defiant testimony by Capitol riot defendant at Oath Keepers seditious conspiracy trial, I went looking for something from the Left. I was sure that there had to be something more stirring, more certain in the rightness of their beliefs than this mewling idiot with his shirking of ideals, reminding me more of a fourth-rate St. Pete. I did find this from Emma Goldman:

To the indefinite, uncertain mind of the American radical the most contradictory ideas and methods are possible. The result is a sad chaos in the radical movement, a sort of intellectual hash, which has neither taste nor character.

Well, if this guy has the character of the radical right, then he has no character but that of an opportunist and an idiot. Not that idiots are not dangerous. Dangerous in themselves, and dangerous in there being so many of them. Which seems to me the point of this cartoon.

And then there was Dream of a Past H.D.’s writing and rewriting of herself, I have a few of H.D.'s poems, and have heard ab out the reprinting of her novel. Americans used to be more diverse, is the greatness Trump wants back?

In her “long-short story” “Kora and Ka,” H.D. creates in her protagonist, John Helforth, and his lover, Kora, a portrait of two people at odds with themselves and the repressed trauma of the war that they have lived through. It’s a veiled depiction of the personal and professional conflicts that afflicted her domestic life, and a somber reckoning with her feelings about marriage and childhood. Writer and parent are two positions so diametrically opposed—one necessarily selfish, and other selfless—that when John tells Kora to “forget sometimes that you are a mother,” it seems H.D. is grappling with her own deep internal fractures. Louis L. Martz perhaps put it best: “Her poetry and her prose, like her own psyche, live at the seething junction of opposite forces.” In both her work and her life, H.D. flew in the face of convention.

Pizza arrived and I have eaten. It is almost 7:30. A bit more piddling, then finish the night with one of my "Dead and Dying Stories". 

Looking for places to land my speculative fictions stories. While not having great luck, I found The Jameson Theory, which was another slow start for me, and one I am not sure the prose is as interesting as the form it takes and the story told. Landing Zone is a possibility.

"Problem Solving" went off to Sequestrum, Epiphany, and The Lakeshore Review. More Hail Mary passes.

No places for my spec fiction stuff until I reformat them.

No writing done.

Shower and bedtime following.

sch