My Road Tripping Is Done

 I finished “Road Tripping” two hours ago. . I melded three handwritten chapters of a novel I was working on in prison into a novella. That has taken most of this week, and it has been tiring. I feel as punchy as if I had gone 16 rounds with Muhammed Ali. I would type and then get distracted or my eyes would burn out, and I had to stop. The voices in my head stopped talking when I got too tired – that is where I play out my dialog.  It needs spell checking and all that, but it is a whole story now. Rather different from what I wrote back in 2021. The whole of the ending was ripped out and done over again with more characters, more dialog and what I understand now to be the point of it all. I touch on racism, sexism, history, politics, capitalism, American music, crime and punishment, ghosts, and the weirdness of Indiana in 96 pages and 31,342 words Either I turned out something excellent or some truly awful crap. I am in a state of mind that cannot tell the difference.

I did take a McClure's break. Around 10, I think. That seems like ages ago. More RC. 

I put off lunch until I finished. Sugar and caffeine fueled me most of the day.

Howling Wolf helped me out in the morning:

 

With a little help from Robet Johnson

And Hank Jr.

In the afternoon, It was Esoterica over at WPRB and right now it is Greaser's Lunchbox over at KDHX. Without music, I would be feeling worse. I do like my free Wi-Fi.

I tried calling the attorney, no answer. I talked with food stamps, I kind of got blown away. There is a message on voice mail that I will attend to later. CC called, said she would be on her way, but has not been seen as yet.

 Some light reading from Crime Hub:

• The Best International Fiction of February
• The Boogeyman Buildings 
• Steve Berry Talks History, Research, and Preservation 
  

From Indiana Historical Society, I learned of Indiana’s First Poet? and Our Favorite Things.

I am ashamed to admit not having the energy for Democracy in Color, but with all that is going in this country, I want to give t shout out.

I skimmed Daily Kos' Death is the New Republican Badge of Honor. I remain convinced that Republican talking points against the Democrats are nothing but them projecting their own plans. There must be something about human beings we share with lemmings. Why do the working poor favor those willing to kill them?

I have to admit spending yesterday getting Stoned.

Trying to clear out my email. I should not do this, but Trump seems out of place in Ohio. The man complaining about infrastructure is the guy who never tried to get an infrastructure bill through Congress. Another thing I felt compelled to read about another Republican idiot: A post I didn't want to have to write. Thank you, Chris Cillizza. Now, if the country were populated with enough rational people. 

I got another rejection:

Thank you for thinking of NewMyths. Unfortunately "Exemplary Employee" is not quite what we are looking for at this time. We wish you good luck placing it elsewhere.

Susan Shell Winston, editor

I think I am getting to the point, I would like to hear my stuff sucks.

We like to balance each quarterly issue between science fiction and fantasy, dark and light, serious and humorous, hard and soft science fiction, and longer and shorter works.
Our readers are not fixated on a single style or tone or genre, but prefer a
 quality sample of the field. Think tapas or dim sum. Maximum length is 10,000 words.

From LitHub, and after a dinner of potatoes, I got the following:

• Top 10 cads in fiction (I knew some of them, but no Flashman?)
• ChatGPT books flood Amazon (Not Artificial Intelligence, just old-fashioned plagiarism).

The Times Literary Supplement came in today.

I read American paranoia, and here is some history to share with those wishing to make America great, again:

Yet whatever American entry did to the balance of the war, it had a most drastic effect in and on the US itself. The country was convulsed by a spasm of nativist hysteria and hatred – as Hochschild says, “Never was the raw underside of our nation’s life more revealingly on display than from 1917 to 1921”. For him, the events of these years amount to a crisis in America’s democracy, one that he thinks too few people know about today. A friend of Wilson’s reported his saying apprehensively: “Once lead this people into war, and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance”. Hochschild cautions that this might be apocryphal, but, had Wilson said it, it would have been all too true.

The first victims were German Americans. Over the previous century 6 million Germans had emigrated to the US, more than any other nationality apart from the British, and they had played a large part in everything from musical life to building both the Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches. Now anyone with a German name was treated as potentially disloyal, and many such names were quickly changed: Koenig became King, the frankfurter became the hot dog. Hochschild himself hadn’t realized that the Lenox Hill Hospital, close to where he grew up in Manhattan, had once been the German Hospital and Dispensary, with a Kaiser Wilhelm Pavilion. But changing names didn’t stem the violence. A Methodist minister said that it was “the Christian duty of Americans to decorate convenient lamp posts with German spies and agents of the Kaiser, native or foreign-born”; a Minnesota pastor was tarred and feathered after he had been heard praying in German with a dying woman; and in Collinsville, Illinois, a gang set upon Robert Prager and killed him. The murderers were tried, holding little American flags in court, and were acquitted by the jury in forty-five minutes.

When a war bond was floated, anyone who failed to buy bonds was liable to be denounced or subjected to physical violence. Congress legislated for a draft, but with mixed results. Three million men eligible to register for the draft failed to do so, 338,000 who were registered never turned up, and altogether, as Hochschild observes, a higher percentage of Americans resisted the draft during the First World War than during the Vietnam War (although in the latter case many Americans, especially the better-educated and better-off, found easier ways than open resistance to avoid the draft). In Britain conscientious objectors were sometimes harshly treated, but the American story was more savage, with conscientious objectors hanged all day by shackled wrists, with their feet barely touching the floor, and sometimes forced to watch military executions.

###

Another might have been quoted in American Midnight. In December 1920The Times reported that “America is seriously alarmed by the wave of immigration from the poverty-stricken portions of Europe … In Poland alone 311,000 persons have applied for passports to the United States, and a commissioner of the Hebrew Sheltering and Aid Society, who recently returned from that country, states that, ‘If there were in existence a ship that could hold three million human beings, the three million Jews in Poland would board to escape to America’”. But as the report added, “The leaders of the Republican Party regard the flood of immigrants as a menace to America and the Americans, and have decided to give it immediate attention in Congress”.

So they did, with harshly restrictive immigration acts passed in 1921 and 1924 designed to maintain the predominance of those sturdier stocks, leaving those 3 million Polish Jews, among others, to their fate. No one who reads Adam Hochschild’s admirable but sombre book, while also watching Ken Burns’s harrowing new documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust, will feel quite the same about the land of the free or the Statue of Liberty. A hundred years ago the tired, poor, huddled masses may have yearned to breathe free, but that was just what was denied them.

My mother's mother's was a Democrat candidate in Ripley County for County Clerk in 1912. That this grandmother once told me Woodrow Wilson was the greatest president, I put it down to her campaigning with her father. I had to study Wilson in college. Since then, my opinion has declined more than for any other President. Jefferson and Jackson had their failings; they also began movements that rose above those failings. The only upside for Wilson is that he led to FDR, a better politician and a better man and a far, far better President.

Also, coming was The CounterPunch's newsletter with The Chinese Balloon the Biden Team’s Hot Air.  Yes, there is a Chinese hysteria. I can say that because I share some of that worry. On the other hand, the Republican reaction has been juvenile. 

I am thinking of a longer post on What Can Federal Courts Do About Extreme, Outdated Sentences?

 I do not have a paid subscription to Mental Health on Substack, but the free newsletter's The Upside of a Mental Breakdown had a paragraph of importance:

One of the problems with human beings is that we can be too good at pressing ahead when we desperately need to slow down. We can go about habits, cycles, and routines on autopilot for months or decades at a time without examining whether they are truly serving our needs; we can pursue ambitions regardless of their correlations to happiness or personal fulfillment. If we do this for long enough without checking in on ourselves and performing basic maintenance, as I learned the hard way, we run the risk of breaking down in dramatic fashion.

This is the voice of experience speaking: pay attention to what I quoted. There is more truth than we like to admit in that paragraph. 

I ran up to the office for ice. It is cold, and the wind is blowing hard. CC called over an hour ago, she got confused about bus times, and I said just worry about seeing me tomorrow. Mail came in from my sister and food stamps. Paperwork tomorrow morning.

I have some more specific stuff to read. And write about. Maybe more later.

sch 8:38 pm