Why My Hair's Getting Blacker, and That's Not Good

This started out as a quick status update, but no, I think the existing level of confusion on this topic is enough to make it the full-length post for which someone paid...

I'm over fifty years old. Most White people who are over fifty years old have either grey hair, or hair that's been dyed some uniform and unconvincing color. The options used to be raven black, brassy yellow, or weirdly uniform brown; normally brown hair grows in a mix of shades, so when every single hair on the head is the same shade of brown, you know it's been dyed. Then there was henna, a natural plant extract that actually coats the hairs, making them look thicker and healthier, but also either a shade of red that can look very nice on some people, or else black with a greenish tone. Now the dye options include all kinds of colors in which human hair does not normally grow, which are quite popular with people my age. We know nobody's going to believe our hair ever was golden blonde or raven black. We don't want to look like some pathetic old thing trying to look younger with that almost-lifelike-but-not-quite brown dye, and we don't feel that henna suits us. Some of us feel that purple, or some other sports team color, maybe even team colors in sections, shows a sense of whimsy or irony instead of just fear of grey hair.

In my thirties I started saying I was keeping my white hair to prove the black was real. Like most mammals with black hair I have a few random white hairs that grow in and fall out, here and there; the first white hair grew down to collar length, and was noticed, when I was thirteen. At thirty I had about a dozen white hairs at the point where I part my hair. I liked them, and hoped they'd form a streak, like the white streak I admired in a friend's hair. They have yet to form even a patch of white hair. I still part my hair, when I get up in the morning and comb it, right above that potential patch of white. It's still just a highlight, because the individual hairs don't grow long enough to form even a tiny streak, but I keep hoping.

Then of course I walk out to work and the wind and humidity rearrange my hair...I never get into town with my hair looking the way it did when I left the house, and have given up fretting about it. It is not the kind of thick, heavy Real Cherokee Hair that weights itself straight down at all times. Neither is it the kind of Real African Hair that grows in coils like tiny wire springs. Though dark, it is basically European-type hair, which is relatively thin and thus absorbs humidity from the air and forms little waves. Hardly ever will any individual hair form or hold a complete ring shape; hardly ever will the hair lie down straight and flat all the way down, although when it's allowed to grow long it will weight itself down toward the ends. Very rarely will all the hairs wave in the same direction at any given time. Some White women have been able to "organize" this kind of hair, so that the little waves form one consistent shape all around the head, by wrapping their hair around rollers or applying chemicals to it. I have not. My hair is too wispy to "organize" but, when it's healthy and not split off into little tangled mats of split ends, its random waves do at least resolve, visually, into the look of thick healthy hair.

For which I am grateful...because in youth I had thin, brittle, "problem" hair that split off and fell out when it grew more than three inches long. It would have looked better if it had been chopped off short, but that was the 1960s. Boys and men had to have their hair cut short to prove they weren't potheads or homosexuals or draft dodgers, and in my parents' household, at least, girls and women had to have long hair hanging down their backs or piled up on their heads to prove the same thing. When I piled my long hair on top of my head it broke at the scalp and formed bald spots, so mostly it hung down my back and looked ratty and tatty and matty, until I was paying my own rent and cutting off my own split ends. In my twenties I didn't achieve healthy-looking hair, but at least from a distance the split ends looked like ordinary "problem hair" rather than the sort of messy rat-tail effect Dad insisted was necessary to prove I was a girl, just in case anybody failed to notice the C-cups below. (Only in a father's wildest dreams does anybody ever fail to notice C-cups on a thin female. Anyway. While living with my parents I had waist-length hair--the twenty or thirty individual hairs that lasted long enough to reach waist length.)

One of the things that changed when I went gluten-free was that I finally achieved normal-looking hair. "Problem hair" looks repulsive because it indicates ill health; it goes with little bags of saggy, sickly-looking skin around the eyes and jawline, and acne, and irregularity, and other manifestations of chronic nutrient deficiencies that visually advertise when a young person is not going to be much of an asset to a team. Around age thirty I shed all of those visual liabilities, and everyone agreed I looked much better at forty than I did at twenty. "Thick black hair," some people said enviously. Well, by White standards it was either thick or black. By Cherokee standards it never was and never will be either of those things, but I'll take what DNA has given.

Around age fifty I noticed that while the front view of my hair, which I normally see in a mirror, was still black with that tiny potential patch of white, the back side of my head was showing several random white hairs. Definitely "black lamé," if not "salt-and-pepper." And I thought, well, that's normal for a White person my age, and I am more White than Cherokee, so why not consider white hair my form of White pride. One of my younger sisters has been a henna redhead for years. I've not given any serious thought to that option; for one thing someone might think I was trying to look like her.

A funny little quirk of the DNA in my family, though, is that my White relatives' white hair tends to grow in slowly. Relatives who have Real Cherokee Hair may keep solid black hair until they're fifty or seventy or in a few cases even eighty, but when the white hair does appear, it spreads fast. I remember one of the cousins' hair showing grey in July and being almost snow-white the next time I saw him--in February. Whereas Mother and her English-and-Irish relatives tend to have salt-and-pepper instead of black, or brown instead of red, hair for thirty or forty years.

This is more thought than I usually give my hair in a day. It's there, right. I don't need to wear hats all the time, as one of my teachers told the class he did, to prevent headaches from cold or heat exhaustion from exposing his bare scalp to the weather. I give thanks for this small blessing and move on. The only hair problem I really think about fighting is "bed head," which takes about one minute per day to fix, and then once a year, on the first hot day, overgrown hair overheating my head, which takes about fifteen minutes to resolve for the rest of the year.

But this week I had some other, heavier thoughts to think about. My Significant Other had a birthday this week. One more birthday not celebrated together but we all agree that he's done all the driving in the rain God can possibly expect him to do in this lifetime. I may have some driving debts to pay, and I expect to be called to start paying them soon, but the way my eyes feel about driving is that it's not to be done for a mere birthday party.

We're baby-boomers, a generation that currently is being made to feel afraid to mention any health problems we have. On the Glyphosate Awareness page I'm the only one who ever mentions a symptom. People expect a callous, even hateful response--"Well, so what, you're getting 'old'!"

I mention this every few months because of all the confusion. There may be families where it's normal for people over age seventy, or fifty or even forty, to go home and bar the doors, declare themselves disabled, and just sit around getting sicker and more disabled for the next thirty years. I am not related to any such family.

For my elders it's normal that, after age seventy, we do notice longer recovery times after injuries and greater vulnerability to some types of infections. The Bible says "Thou shalt rise up before the white head." Seventy is when we usually acquire white heads, and it does become appropriate for younger people to protect older people from those injuries and infections, as well as defer to the reality that they have less time to finish their work in this world than other people have. Retirement is not something we do...well, people retire from one specific job or another, but people have work to do after age ninety. The usual pattern is that disability is part of a "final illness" that may last two weeks or two years. Some of my relatives have chronic disabilities, some due to injuries at birth, and work around those...but we don't do that rheumatism-and-memory-loss thing. If we have rheumatism, it's a symptom of something to be cured. Many of my elders have died before age ninety but it always seemed sudden, and as if they were far too young.

My Significant Other's family have mixed DNA. Some of them grow old the way my relatives do, and he obviously got that gene. Some of them are sickly and die young, and he's buried a lot of relatives who didn't live even forty years. There doesn't seem to be much in between. There are chronic disabilities due to injuries, of course. He's been working around a few of those for most of his life.

What we had in common, when we met, was a surprising ability to do heavy physical work and like it. We met on a construction job, restoring a fixer-upper house, working young people into the ground every day.

Well...he's had Lyme Disease. It's not a chronic disability, but it flares up into an acute disability after every glyphosate poisoning episode on his side of the mountain.

I've been working around being a celiac all my life, and nature did not intend that to be a disability at all. It's a trait, a distinction. We can't eat everything other people eat. In the process of finding this out we also find that we're stronger and hardier than most of those people are, and probably more resistant to some diseases. Who knows, maybe we'll turn out to be immune to coronavirus. In the normal course of events part of the celiac journey is saying to other people, with regretful empathy: No, unfortunately you probably will not become as healthy as we are by going gluten-free; your genes have their potential for health, longevity, looks and so on, which you should try to reach, and for you eating unsprayed, natural wheat may help you enjoy your full potential, which may or may not fall short of ours.

Unfortunately, in the United States today, wheat is almost by definition sprayed and unnatural. And a lot of people who aren't celiacs are suffering from pseudo-celiac reactions, and although going gluten-free can offer them some relief from those, the relief is only partial and temporary because there's enough glyphosate to trigger their reactions in a lot of things that aren't wheat, too.

Wednesday afternoon, I came in from work. I'd felt fine all day but suddenly I felt dead-dog tired. I kept dozing off on the bench in front of the computer in the office. I gave up, turned out the light and pulled the quilt in the office up over me, and anticipated feeling ready to get back to work after a nap. No such. As I lay down I had just a slight touch of vertigo, the illusion that the bench was on a boat. I like boats, so would I dream about summers on the Eastern Shore, or Saturday afternoon "river-cleaning" kayak rides?

Neither. Instead I had tics...not dog ticks, but muscle tics, the kind of tiny involuntary muscle spasms that sometimes cause the skin on a person's face to twitch visibly for no obvious reason. I had them from head to toe, in between and sometimes overlapping with sprints to the bathroom from the celiac reaction I also started to have. I could see the skin twitch on whatever part of the body was uncovered at any time during the next nine tedious hours. Sometimes the tics formed uncomfortable cramps during the celiac effects, and sometimes when I lay down and started to relax they jerked me awake. "Good Lord, what's this all about? It has to be a symptom of something, but what? I've not read about it being a symptom of coronavirus...I've not read about it being a symptom of cancer, either...I've not heard about it being a symptom of Norwalk Flu, although this wrung-out exhausted feeling of being faint and almost sick from weariness, after such an effort as standing up and walking from bathroom to bed, is like Norwalk Flu. What is the matter with me?"

Also I was feeling hypertensive all night. This is new for me. Everyone has felt their blood pressure rise to a point that would be called "high," but for healthy people it drops back to normal in minutes. I've learned to raise or lower my blood pressure at will, through meditation. I don't lead the kind of life that promotes the kind of cardiovascular disease that many middle-aged Americans have, but in just the past year I've noticed that during some especially bad celiac reactions, all of which have involved glyphosate poisoning, my blood pressure goes up and stays up.

I suppose the subconscious part of my mind is angry. It does know that this particular form of discomfort, and damage, and if it lasts long enough disability, is something someone else has done to me, just as if someone had broken my leg with a sledgehammer. And my conscious mind does feel that it would be good for those people, if they don't feel their own reactions to glyphosate vapors as such, if somebody did break their legs with sledgehammers. Of course I don't think people should do those things as private acts of personal revenge that start personal quarrels. They should be done formally, and publicly, as a demonstration of society's refusal to tolerate this kind of physical abuse of innocent people.

I always wonder how many two-year-old children are going through whatever I'm going through, and how many are having reactions that feel even worse. The day people who watch television realize that "weed killers," not even applied to tares in a wheat field but to crabgrass in a lawn, are what's making a toddler or baby twitch and fuss and cry all night, there is going to be a public demand for punishments of glyphosate sprayers to be carried out in a less detached, humane, official spirit than the Final Solution to Timothy McVeigh.

I did not come out to work on Thursday. I told myself, and texted to a friend, that since my job was writing fiction I could use the day to visualize a small town completely different from either of the two about which I've written other "small-town romance" fiction. Then I sat at the computer, still twitching, still emitting those awful drainpipe noises celiac reactions make, and still feeling the need to lie down and rest, all day, more or less as I'd done all night, although the pain subsided as the digestive tract emptied. Of a thirty-page novelette I wrote one page. The first page of a work of fiction is usually slow, with time out to visualize where things are in the fictional town and what sort of things the fictional characters remember and so on, but I can usually verbalize more than one page in a day.

It was a beautiful day, too. This is the eighth day in a row of extra-whippy March-type weather. The old saying is that "Sunshine and shower won't last half an hour," or "Sunshine and snow, more's to follow, we know." If the sun is shining while some sort of precipitation is falling, we can normally look forward to a sunny afternoon, then more rain or snow the next morning. But this year the mix of sun with rain, or sun with snow, or sometimes rain with snow, has not moved on in the usual way. So yesterday morning the sun and rain finally gave way to a few hours of warm sunshine...during which I went out and burned the trash and trailed switches for the cats to chase through the not-a-lawn for half an hour, and came in feeling so exhausted by this hard work that I slept for the next three hours.

My scalp itched, slightly, in the way it does when hair is falling out. I combed out, not a handful, but enough to look like the tail of an actual rat. How grey it looked in the comb. I don't usually bother looking at the back of my head in a mirror, but last night I did. How black the hair on my head looked.

White hairs are more brittle than black or red ones. White hairs break off and fall out. The hair on my head is thin and brittle, fuzzed with split ends, tatty and matty and ugly, but it is black, or at least sable...because I've been too ill, too often, to maintain that nice healthy growth of black lamé.

I thought what a disappointment this hair will be to my Significant Other, when we meet. The body shape below it, too...I'm not fat, but during these celiac episodes I puff out and look practically pregnant. In a dress the overall look can pass as merely fat, but in "fat pants," or relaxing inside with my Significant Other, no. Even when people want babies, nobody wants to look at a pregnant woman's body shape. Nature tells us to get our germs and curiosity away from her and her baby. If there's not going to be any baby? Eww. Ick.

Then I wondered whether my Significant Other worries about becoming disappointing, too, due to "old age." Well, admittedly, I do like for the other people I know to do the driving. Not always realistically, I think anybody else who can get a driver's license, however many restrictions they may have, must be a better driver than I am. I have generally avoided travelling with people who weren't. But I have to be fair. All of my elders and most of my friends have older eyes than I have, and the fact is that some of them are not better drivers. In cloudy weather, more than one friend's driving has caused me to volunteer to change seats. Grandma Bonnie Peters did most of the driving for most of the people she knew, for fifty years, with no major accidents and only one ticket, but now if we go out in a car we have to agree that it's my turn to drive. I hate the actual driving; I do not think any less of the person.

But the "old age" part? Spare me. What we are is middle-aged. What go wrong with our bodies are illnesses and injuries that people can have at any age.

I keep banging on about this because, although I've never had nonstop tics like I had on Wednesday night, before...even the tics are a regression to symptoms of, before glyphosate reaction, the gluten reactions I had continually through childhood. They weren't conspicuous or chronic. Only once, in grade four as I recall, did somebody notice one in my face and helpfully tell me that it might be a symptom of one of the chronic nutrient deficiencies all undiagnosed celiacs always have. But no, muscle spasms and the stiffness they leave behind them are not a new thing for me. When I began seriously studying neuromuscular therapy, around age thirty, I had about two-thirds of the patterns of muscle stiffness associated with a life of hard work and with all kinds of injuries I never actually had.

I see a lot of people who are showing symptoms they were not showing ten years ago. Some of them are in fact going through midlife; some of the changes in their faces are normal aging, rather than reactions to illness. Thinner, drier skin, and white hair, are normal aging. Puffy, sick-looking skin is a reaction to illness. These are two separate things, though often seen in combination. Really old faces often look beautiful; sick faces inspire pity at best.

But even though the stereotype of aging as a combination of white hair, rheumatism, and memory loss has to have some basis in the real world, and even though actual illness is more common and harder to control as people grow older...hello? If you've been told "So what? You're getting 'old'!", ask yourself since when vomiting blood has been part of the stereotype of aging. It never has; it's not part of aging. It's a reaction to an acute illness, and although a hundred years ago the illness that caused that symptom was likely to be tuberculosis or cancer, today it's more likely to be glyphosate poisoning...which the commercial media are trying so hard to tell you does not exist. So get tested for tuberculosis and cancer. Surprise! Neither of those things exists--in your body, or that of your blood-gushing relative. Push your doctor, if you go to one. Demand a test for glyphosate poisoning. Surprise! That does exist, in your body or your relative's! Demand tests of the blood in the toilet bowl during the week after the poisoning occurred, compared with tests of the blood in the same person's fingertip at times when the person's use of the toilet is normal. I guarantee that 99% of Americans who do those tests will find themselves muttering "Ber-lood! Ber-lood!" when they think of the makers and users of glyphosate. If people actually need transfusions, by all means, let's think of those reckless endangerers...and let's drain'em dry!

I don't particularly like the look of grey hair. Well, my Significant Other has it, now, after all those years with just a few random white hairs to prove the black was real. He still looks good to me. If his Cherokee hair ages the way my relatives' did, in another year he may have snow-white hair, and he'll look good to me that way too. I've never actually looked forward to seeing myself with grey hair, even in back...but when I consider the way my hair has actually grown blacker in the last few years, I want that look. I want to be healthy enough to grow visible white hairs, instead of picking clumps of white hair out of a comb every morning and shuffling into town, feeling miserable, looking sick, but showing, yes, the black hair of the particularly sickly and unttractive teenager I used to be.

Yes, of course we're getting older. Of course, if we don't die young first, we will one day be "old." In the year 2020, not being able to out-work the young people on a construction job is still something that happens to either one of us for a day or two at a time, as a symptom. If those symptoms recur often enough and keep us on the sidelines long enough, it may become normal; we may become as inactive as those young people. (That's where the rheumatic shuffle and clumsy "old" hands of the stereotype begin.) In a glyphosate-free world, however, we should be able to expect another twenty years, at least, of out-working young people, on most of the occasions when we work beside them, while flaunting our grey hair.

I want my full genetic potential lifespan of ninety-plus active years.

I want my grey hair. Which will probably stay grey, lightening barely enough to be noticed, between the ages of fifty and eighty, before it goes completely white, and even then it'll probably still show random black hairs. I don't mind matching my Significant Other, nor do I mind looking like my beautiful mother. What I mind is looking like the sickly teen-troll I was as a young undiagnosed celiac, in any way.

I want people to stop trying to pretend that symptoms I had before I was even half-grown have anything to do with normal aging. As a child I had all kinds of minor chronic symptoms of ill health because my body does not metabolize nutrients when its digestive tract is exposed to wheat gluten. As a strong healthy adult I had none of those symptoms because I stopped subjecting myself to wheat gluten. As a less healthy adult I'm having those symptoms again because other people are poisoning me with glyphosate, which affects me in the same way wheat gluten does only moreso.

And stop trying, while I'm here, to pretend that symptoms The Nephews have when some of them are barely half-grown are natural parts of a mysterious "celiac disease" that's not cured by a gluten-free diet. And stop trying to pretend that symptoms my friends' children (and grandchildren, nieces, nephews, etc.) are some other mysterious disease...clutching at straws..."He's far too young to have mononucleosis, but this gland was swollen, so maybe it's some rare form of mononucleosis. Her blood tests don't usually show any kind of anemia, but she did show iron-poor blood one day, so maybe it's some rare form of anemia." Look at the big picture! We may all have different reactions, but we're all having them at the same time...what else is going on at that time? Time after time! If doctors started testing blood samples for glyphosate every time they had a local epidemic of "flare-ups" of symptoms on the same day...we'd soon know why the chemical companies have been pouring so much money into efforts to discourage them from doing that!

I want a global ban on all sprayed poisons, whatever specific lifeform they're supposed to be "-cides" for. I want to grow old, the way nature intended my kind of humans to grow old, in a world where any fungicides or insecticides that may be necessary to protect humans or our crops are applied in non-volatile, very target-specific forms, producing no vapor drift and no reckless endangerment of other people's lives.

Just stop poisoning me, and my Significant Other, and just about everyone else we know, and then you'll see what aging looks like. Thin, translucent, brittle skin on hands that can still do whatever young people's hands do, and better than most, as long as we're careful not to break the skin. Thick white hair that glistens in the light like snow, above shoulders as straight and strong as they ever were. That's how we Highly Sensory-Perceptive types show age...as distinct from illness.

David French on College Debt

Because I don't have the time to dig into this topic today, but I know it's of urgent interest to The Nephews and a lot of other people in cyberspace...Universities have changed since I last attended one. They've received many gifts of computers and invested heavily in computerizing the educational process, in ways that help some students and harm others. Now they're sticking it to the students to pay for each year's newest computer "updates" and "upgrades," plus of course pay raises for the teachers. They're certainly not teaching students two or three times as much as they were in 1980, and they're a long way from being able to place every student in a job that will pay off those tuition loans. The value of an associate's, bachelor's, master's or even doctor's degree, for students, is less than it was for most of their teachers. Why, then, should it cost so much more?

"
The exploding cost of going to college is understandably a hot-button topic this election year, as young people’s anger over the Faustian bargain of college debt helps to fuel Bernie Sanders’s outsider presidential run. But while the Sanders conversation has focused on whether the government should step in to help relieve that debt burden, there’s another question worth asking, too: Why should universities be charging as much as they are? That’s what makes this Atlantic profile of Purdue University president Mitch Daniels so interesting: the former Indiana governor has brought his famously parsimonious management style from the statehouse to his current role, and the result has been a blossoming college that hasn’t raised its tuition since 2013. As an added bonus, the piece is written by the ever-dependable Andy Ferguson. Read the whole thing here.
"

That came from David French, who's launched his own'zine, The Dispatch, together with the brilliant Jonah Goldberg. The'zine's not exactly like getting Goldberg's books every day, just as posts at this blog are not exactly like the e-books I've been writing for paying clients or like the e-book of my own I'm working on when I find the time. But it is like getting an e-mail from French and/or Goldberg every day. If you'd like to do that, here's a link you can use to subscribe to their'zine...the actual URL is outrageously long and messy, such that when I pasted it here I didn't even see all of it on a single screen with Firefox, so it's hidden behind the word below:

link

Tim Kaine on Coronavirus

From U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA):

"

Dear friend,

This week, my colleagues and I called on the Trump Administration to provide details on their preparedness and response plans to protect students, teachers, school staff, and American workers from the threat of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19).  We must work together to ensure that school districts, institutions of higher education, and employers have the health and safety resources they need to help prevent the spread of the virus in our communities. 

Unfortunately, the President's budget slashes the U.S. contribution to the World Health Organization by 53 percent. It cuts funds to CDC and HHS by 9 percent and cuts funds to NIH by 7 percent. At a time when we need to dedicate more resources to combat the coronavirus, it would be irresponsible to take an axe to our public health infrastructure. We need to listen to the experts, not take away their funding.

The Virginia Department of Health is sharing valuable updates and information on COVID-19. In the coming weeks, I will continue calling for maximum transparency and close collaboration with health experts and scientists as we work to contain the coronavirus.

Sincerely,

"

Editorial comment: If the CDC can't get glyphosate banned, it deserves to be cut by more than a mere 9 percent.

Is Goodreads Popularity a Good Thing?

Goodreads started out just simply trying to build a page for every book everyone Out There has ever read and display every "review" or "question" everybody took the time to type.

Well...within reason. In the process of reclaiming my reviews, I scrolled past a "question" on a Newbery Award children's book that many students have been required to read: "Is this book [word this site does not use] or what?"

Well, I thought the author set himself a tough job but did it rather well. Obviously there's no use answering a "question" that's meant to attract attention to somebody who wants to be known for disagreeing with the Newbery Awards committee. On a nonprofit, grassroots, free-for-all book site people are supposed to be able to find their own friends. The guy who hated the Newbery Award book probably has his own community who agree with him that books about certain topics, or books that reflect certain themes, or books that students are required to read, or whatever, are [a word this site does not use]. Good luck to them and let them have it.

But Goodreads grew fast, and now they're trying to sort which reviews people see first. The most ethical way to do that is the standard option for blogs and social sites: newest posts on top. Goodreads wanted to get fancier. For this year they announced a Secret Formula that takes into account Popularity! And Other Factors!

Sort of like Yelp...which is admittedly corporate-censored rubbish that will raise your blood pressure.

Popularity is controllable. Early adopters of Internet technology have sooo been there and done that. "Like" other people's posts, "follow" their discussions and reviews, spend as much time reading as you do writing: those were the formulas by which older sites like Associated Content, Chatabout, and Bubblews used to pay some of our Internet service bills.

Except, hello? Goodreads isn't offering to pay anybody. Who's going to sink that kind of time into a site that's not paying even a penny a post?

Goodreads' appeal used to be that it was all about the books. No incentive to socialize. If you liked a book and wanted to thank the author for writing it, Goodreads was a place to do that. If you didn't like it but thought someone else would, Goodreads offered the option of posting whether or not you still owned a copy, on the chance that someone else would want to buy it. Obviously that's an option for readers, not full-time booksellers.

Like most of Goodreads' original set of users, I posted the kind of brutally honest reviews there that I've posted here, only shorter, and I appreciated that Goodreads provided the purchasing information complete with Amazon photo links. (I was willing to let Goodreads have the referral bonuses since, although the links Amazon provides me have been durable, Amazon's monthly updates indicate that youall have not been using them every month.) Sometimes I read other people's reviews in order to write about the aspects of a book that stood out for other people. Sometimes I liked someone's review, and clicked a button to tell them so, or disagreed with something they said, and typed a comment to that effect. Sometimes people liked or quibbled with my reviews. Either way, it was all strictly about the books. Nobody seemed to be sinking time in trying to build e-friendships at Goodreads.

At a non-paying site, that really helped. Nobody has the time to load a big picture-cluttered page of information about some random person who happens to be visiting the same non-paying site!

Well...during the past year, Goodreads grew, and writers noticed that it was a way to drive sales for their new books.

I know somebody who knows somebody who's written a few books. They are books about the local history of our little town. I'd had them on my Wish List before this mutual friend hosted a book party. I wasn't in town that day, but mentioned that I would have liked to have bought a book to blog about it. "Oh, if you're going to blog about it, take this copy!" said the mutual friend. So I did. And I was glad. They were very good reads. It was jolly high time somebody wrote a novel about Gate City that was like the stories older people tell--about Gate City, as distinct from Appalachia.

(Appalachia deserves its own book; it's always been a completely different place from Gate City.)

But what was going on? My reviews weren't showing! Rita Sims Quillen, known to Twitter as @hillbillypoet, had appealed to all her Tweeps to post reviews on Goodreads. Dozens if not hundreds had given her new novel, Wayland, four or five stars. Nothing suspicious about that if you've read it; allowing for an unusual narrative structure, it is an excellent novel. But Goodreads had chosen to balk all of our reviews, because apparently some authors have taken the time to burden Goodreads with loads of copy-and-paste, five-star, lame-brained reviews of lame-brained self-published books.

Well, hello, Goodreads... "Knock knock."

"Who's there?"

"Meretricious."

"Meretricious who?"

"Meretricious and a happy New Year."

A New Year, that is, of watching the site we built up last year die, as we your faithful readers remind ourselves that life is too short to keep watching for our reviews to appear, or worry about trying to build "popularity" (and then have our reviews suppressed, anyway, if we happen to like too many independent or small-press publications?).

Goodreads was fast, easy, and convenient to use. Now it's not. Good luck finding your next jobs, Goodreads staff.

And so...yesterday's e-mail contained a notice that somebody liked one of the reviews I posted on Goodreads.

Last year I would have thought, "How nice." Last year, if I had happened to open Goodreads before I'd forgotten which review or who it was (I've forgotten that now), I might have checked to see what else she'd read, maybe posted an extra review if she'd read something I'd read, maybe "liked" her review of it too.

This year, I noticed myself thinking, "NO. DO NOT GO THERE." Life's too short to encourage people to play the "popularity" game at a web site that's not paying by the line.

So hello, fellow Goodreads user, whoever you are: It's nice if you liked what I said about a book. Maybe we have interests in common. Maybe we should become e-friends.

But not on Goodreads...because Goodreads doesn't pay, and Goodreads is not and never will be as big as Twitter, and so Goodreads is not a viable place to build e-friendships.

Book reviews will be moving back here this year, Gentle Readers. You're welcome to comment; if you're not logged into Google, use Twitter; if you don't like Twitter or Google, use LiveJournal. E-friends and e-conversation are welcome but I'm not going to sink the time in doing them on Goodreads.

I think Goodreads needs to watch its numbers drop until it publishes a policy statement that it's going to trust readers to recognize for ourselves which reviews reflect an intelligent reading of a book, avoid mechanically filtering comments for anything it can't clearly define in the Terms of Use, and quit monitoring "popularity" altogether. People who want to use Goodreads for its intended purpose do not have the time to build "popularity" there, and shouldn't bother.

Let me repeat this. Middle school is a long time behind me, Gentle Readers. My objections to Goodreads' tracking users' "popularity" has nothing to do with wanting to be "more popular" on that site. I do not want to be "popular" on Goodreads. Nor should you. If we want e-friends, we want them on our own sites or on the big social sites--not on product review sites. We want Goodreads, if it can be saved at all, to focus exclusively on the "popularity" it can build for deserving books. We want our Goodreads screen names to serve solely to help people cite specific comments in their reviews of books.

Web sites can be about users' social "popularity," or they can be about the numbers of people who do and don't like books (or other products) and the reasons they give. Not both. People who are concerned about building social "popularity" follow other people's recommendations and echo their opinions and thus generate misleading publicity for products at review sites.

In order for Goodreads to be useful, it needs  to eliminate all traces of social "popularity," perhaps even removing screen names from comments and tracking them by numbers instead. To help readers find books they will like, people need to post their own opinions with no regard for "popularity."

Virginia Legislature Gets More Strange Every Year

This came from the group that first registered the name "Virginia TEA Party." All links are to legitimate sites, and wouldn't it be cool if Second Amendment rights supporters gave our sheriffs more than Senator Saslaw admits having taken away.

"

Democrats Punish Law Enforcement Officers for Supporting the 2nd Amendment

Democrats in the General Assembly refused to amend the state budget to give the Sheriff's departments a 3% raise. According to Senator Bill Stanley (R-Franklin), the Democratic Majority Leader Dick Saslaw admitted to him that their refusal was in retaliation for our Sheriff departments standing with us for our 2nd Amendment rights. You can read more about this in the links below.

https://bearingarms.com/cam-e/2020/02/21/va-dems-deputies-gun-control/

http://thebullelephant.com/democrats-in-the-general-assembly-threaten-law-enforcement/

If you wish to thank our law enforcement officers who are standing with us for the 2nd Amendment, please show your support by generously giving at
https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-our-virginia-sheriffs"

Roe V. Wade: Can We Stop the Reruns? Please?

Here's the text of an e-mail I sent to one of the correspondents who claim to have their knickers in a twist about yet another proposed bill that has something to do with surgically induced abortions. Short version: Feh.

"
Exactly at the time I became old enough to read such news, Roe v. Wade established an "unenumerated right to privacy" that banned abortion bans. This is no longer news. Pro-abortion or anti-abortion debates have been generating heat not light ever since and they are boring, boring, BORING. They go down a dead-end road to "Are you Catholic or not?" I respect people's right to be Catholic; I'm not Catholic. I believe abortion is neither morally nor medically sound, so I didn't have one. Others can make that choice for themselves too.

I'm more concerned about murders of babies or of their mothers by reluctant fathers than I am about abortions by reluctant mothers. If you assume an either-or choice, which usually does not exist in the real world, then yes, I value women higher than fetuses. I also think valuing women is a valid reason to teach girls that abortion is not an option they should consider for themselves. But pro-abortion versus anti-abortion reruns merely distract attention from that.

To interest me in anything remotely associated with abortion issues you'd have to move beyond the lame old twentieth century arguments and consider things that are at least fresh:

(1) Tweaking sex education back to its original purpose. "This is how people make babies. It is what you should NEVER do if you don't want babies. All the other ways people express affection and pleasure are 'better' when they don't start unwanted babies, including playing Scrabble if that's what comes to their minds, not even to mention all the other things that are likely to come to your minds after you've played a few rounds of Scrabble with the Significant Others you will eventually meet. When people under the age of eighteen are present we can focus on Scrabble." Seriously, I like what Joycelyn Elders said, but I agree with those who think she said it in more explicit terms than would be appropriate for a sixth grade class discussion. Teenagers should find and read her book for themselves.

(2) Encouraging more adoption and fostering of children, including older children, including singles as foster parents for teens with profiles that suggest problems for opposite-sex foster parents. Being a custodial foster sister was my big coming-of-age experience and has worked for other big sisters/brothers too. Foster care in a single-sex household, especially if that household has access to a better school environment and/or job opportunities, can prevent teen pregnancies. More social support for the reality that some people form single-sex households in order to practice abstinence, rather than homosexuality, might help both babies and teenagers grow up in supportive, ethical home environments.

(3) Recognizing that among the other harmful effects glyphosate has on all living things, it can cause abortion, problem pregnancies, and/or birth defects. For a minority of pregnant females of all species, glyphosate is an abortifacient. Instead of fretting about people who choose abortion (counsellors say it's more often the man's choice than the woman's), consider the people who really want to keep their babies and aren't able to, because someone in their neighborhood is too lazy to dig up a dandelion!

Or share your own strategies for reducing the incidence of abortion, if you really want to save the life of a fetus that might have become a baby somewhere. But, meanwhile, I delete pro-abortion and anti-abortion e-mail.
"

Morgan Griffith on the Trouble with Socialism

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA-9)...The various members of this web site don't agree completely on much, especially on things correspondents tell us by e-mail. I used to envision it as a forum for different voices; I seem to be the only one who actually sits down and writes. I think (without checking, I could be wrong) that this E-Newsletter may be the first of its kind with which we all completely agree:

"
Friday, February 21, 2020 –                                
The Trouble With Socialism: First in an Occasional Series
Knowledge is Power
A Gallup poll released in late 2019 highlighted a disturbing trend in public opinion. It found that 39 percent of Americans view socialism positively. Of even more concern, 49 percent of Americans aged 18 to 39 view it positively.
Anyone considering socialist policies in our country today would do well to look at what happened where and when they were tried.
The great British statesman Winston Churchill observed, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
He said that to the House of Commons in 1945 as his country embarked on its own socialist experiment. Churchill’s Conservative Party had lost the parliamentary election earlier that year to the Labour Party, which promised to look after Britons “from the cradle to the grave.”
Its tools for doing so included nationalizing important sectors of the economy including coal mining and the steel industry. The National Health Service (NHS) was established. Local councils were given the power to buy housing.
Exorbitant tax rates were needed to support these initiatives, and the food rationing implemented during World War II was maintained for years after the war had been won.
The rationing particularly irked C.S. Lewis, the great author and apologist, but he benefited from his American fans, who shipped him simple comforts and food across the Atlantic. In response to the gift of a ham, he wrote back, “Such a thing could’nt [sic] be got on this side unless one was very deep in the Black Market.”
Food was not socialism’s only failure. Government control over housing meant that by 1951, Britain had 750,000 fewer houses than required. NHS prescriptions skyrocketed, as did its costs.
C.S. Lewis recognized that socialism’s grandiose promises failed to meet even basic needs and welcomed Churchill’s return to power. But when Churchill resumed office in 1951, although he ended the food rationing that had so irked Lewis, many socialist policies were entrenched. Unfortunately for Britain, this meant decades of sluggish economic performance, high unemployment, and labor unrest.
In the 1970s, this combination even took on the nickname “the British disease.” In 1976, the British economy suffered from inflation of almost 17 percent and unemployment of 5 percent.
The “winter of discontent” of 1978-79 seemed to bring the country to another low. As the government struggled to cope with inflation, it imposed wage controls on public sector workers. Union strikes in protest led to garbage piling up in the streets and many hospitals providing only emergency treatment.
When the general election campaign began in 1979, the Leader of the Opposition, Margaret Thatcher, vowed, “The slither and slide to the socialist state is going to be stopped.”
When her party won the election and she became Prime Minister, Thatcher introduced major reforms to the British economy. She rolled back tax rates, returned many nationalized entities to the private sector, and reduced the power of union leaders who had previously shut down the entire country.
Throughout the 1980s, inflation plunged, millions of new jobs were created, and the economy grew.
As Thatcher said, “Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money.” She had seen this in Britain’s post-World War II experience. There is no need for the United States to discover this truth for ourselves.
Britain suffered economically from the implementation of socialism, but it should be said that at least it remained a largely free country politically. That cannot be said about other countries, and there is no guarantee that our country would be so lucky.
In the United States, where we treasure the freedom to speak and believe according to our conscience as well as keep what we earn to use as we see fit, we should be on guard against the restriction of these rights.
If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office. You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405, my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671, or my Washington office at 202-225-3861. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov. Also, on my website is the latest material from my office, including information on votes recently taken on the floor of the House of Representatives.
"

Morgan Griffith on the Equal Rights Amendment

Comment below this message from U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA-9):

"
Friday, February 14, 2020 –                                
No Road Back for the ERA   
There are few things from 1972 that you could just pick up and dust off for use today. Clothes would be out of fashion if they even fit, cars would need plenty of maintenance and care to be driven, and disco music had not even made its way onto the music charts.
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) passed Congress in that year! It proposes a solution to a problem that existed prior to 1972 and was being resolved with good legislation at the federal and state levels.
For an amendment to pass, the United States Constitution requires the approval of two-thirds of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, followed by ratification in three-fourths of the states. It is not supposed to be an easy process, and only 27 amendments have been added since the Constitution’s adoption.
The ERA included a seven-year deadline for ratification. By the time it arrived in 1979, 31 states had ratified the ERA. Four others had ratified it but rescinded their ratifications by the deadline. By no measure had the required 38 states ratified the ERA.
Congress then passed an extension to 1982, although the extension only passed by a simple majority rather than the two-thirds vote required for constitutional amendments, rendering the extension legally very suspect. A federal district court in Idaho found the extension invalid in 1981.
In any event, no more states ratified the ERA by the 1982 deadline. The Supreme Court that year declared a lawsuit about the extension moot because the amendment had failed. The House of Representatives in 1983 tried to pass a new Equal Rights Amendment, another concession that the ratification process begun in 1972 was dead, but that new ERA did not attain the required two-thirds vote.
You don’t have to go back almost four decades to find Supreme Court justices who think the ERA is dead. Liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an ERA supporter, said on February 10, 2020, “I’d like it to start over,” noting the controversy with states adopting it late and others rescinding it before ratification.
Nevertheless, supporters of the ERA are plowing ahead. Virginia’s new Democrat majority in the General Assembly spent valuable legislative time on ratification, and the Democrat majority in the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution by simple majority to remove the deadline.
ERA proponents cite the 27^th Amendment, which prohibited congressional pay raises from taking effect before an election of representatives had intervened. This amendment was proposed as part of the original Bill of Rights in 1789 and only ratified in 1992, but unlike the ERA, it never had a deadline.
Other amendments, such as the Eighteenth Amendment imposing Prohibition, did include a deadline but were ratified in time.
In light of these facts, the recent activity regarding the ERA is little more than a sideshow.
But what of Justice Ginsburg’s suggestion that supporters of the amendment start over?
The country is in a different place than it was in 1972, when the ERA passed Congress. It is certainly in a different place than it was in 1943, when the text was first introduced, or 1923, when the original ERA was proposed.
I am sympathetic to those who advocated the amendment prior to 1972. In the 1960s, my mother sought a loan for our house on Broad Street in Salem. The house I grew up in was at risk of being lost. At the time, she was ineligible because she was a divorced woman. A divorced man earning the same would have had no problem. That was wrong. Fortunately, a sympathetic loan officer checked the box that she was widowed, thus making her eligible.
By the 1970s, when she applied for a loan for a house on Main Street, that legal barrier had been eliminated by good legislation without the need for a constitutional amendment.
In just a few years, the situation had changed and my mother was treated more fairly. ERA supporters overlook our ability to make progress, whether by specific legal changes, cultural shifts, or other means apart from the drastic step of amending the Constitution.
Any injustices that exist today should be remedied by legislation. The ERA is a blunt instrument. Its very broadness could lead to applications that are far from promoting “equality.” For instance, some states that have included ERAs in their constitutions have been forced to support abortion. Courts could very well force the same outcome at the federal level.
Legally, the ERA has been long dead, and it should not be resurrected.
If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office. You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405, my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671, or my Washington office at 202-225-3861. To reach my office via email, please visit www.morgangriffith.house.gov.
"

Editorial comment: I personally think the right to privacy should be enumerated in the Constitution, anti-abortion activity should focus on the men who cause abortions, and the problem with the E.R.A. back in its day was the military draft...but there is a certain bottom-line agreement here. I agree that constitutional amendments should be difficult to add. In the absence of an overwhelming popular demand, they are a boondoggle.

Book Review: Hiding Ezra and Wayland

Sad news, Gentle Readers. Goodreads is now hiding real individual book reviews just like Amazon. Amazon can get away with a little discrimination, because it's huge and commercial. Goodreads is neither.

Underwhelmed, to say the least, by typing in mini-reviews of these two novels-from-family-history, hitting "Post," and having the book's home page pop back onto the screen with a smarmy little message saying "Priscilla King, write a review of [the book I just did]!"--I don't like web sites that bark orders at readers, in any case...I'm going back to my own blog. Which Google, of course, will try to hide from people, and Goodsearch will try so hard to hide that it'll even redirect readers back to cached copies of the posts for which Blogjob paid. Goodheavens, the corporate would-be rulers of the world cried, we mustn't let people discover a blog that blows the whistle on sneaky corporate censorship on the Internet!

If the Internet doesn't pull a U-turn and require human review before even the ugliest porn images and hatespews can be censored, how long do you think it can last? Two years? Three? It's been fun, and I look forward to getting paid again for my special talent for creating decent-looking documents on manual typewriters...

Here, while it lasts, are full-length reviews of two short paperback novels. They can be read independently; they're best read together.

Author: Rita Sims Quillen

Title: Hiding Ezra

Amazon details:

• Paperback: 220 pages
• Publisher: Little Creek Books (February 18, 2014)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1939289351

And the sequel: Wayland 

Amazon details:

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Iris Press (September 16, 2019)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1604542543

I'm late to the Internet today, Gentle Readers, because I started reading Wayland and couldn't put it down. I already knew from Hiding Ezra that this author is not averse to making readers cry, so I had to find out what she was going to do with this study in Human Evil...

Rita Sims Quillen is best known as a poet. No worries for those who don't like poetry; these stories are not told in the sort of lush  prose that tends to be described as "poetic." Landscape descriptions like "She also loved to go to a cool, shady bend in the little branch [creek] below the church where the trees created a canopy like walls" are as "poetic" as it gets. These novels get full marks for clear, straightforward prose that's not wordy, sentimental, or difficult to read. In fact one reviewer has quoted the first sentence of Hiding Ezra as an example of a good opening line for a novel.

They read like family history. Hiding Ezra is in fact based on family history--an old journal kept by a soldier who deserted from the Army in order to help his last few friends and relative survive a set of epidemic diseases that swept our part of the world in the 1910s and 1920s. Wayland might easily be based on another old journal.

Hiding Ezra is about the oddly enjoyable summer Ezra Teague spends hiding in a cave, leaving game near the homes of people who leave bread and ammunition near the cave. It's also about his grieving sister Eva, his faithful sweetheart Alma, and all the other friends and relatives they lose to the epidemics. It's also about Lieutenant Nettles, a nettlesome outsider from Big Stone Gap who connects with his inner decent human being after exposure to the grieving and loving people of Wayland, Gate City, and Fort Blackmore.

Wayland was the real name of one of the little rural settlements outside Gate City up to the 1940s, when it changed its name to Midway. Gate City had changed its name a bit earlier--in the nineteenth century it was called Estillville. Moccasin Gap, on the other side of the gap in the mountains formed by the Big Moccasin Creek, also changed its name, in the 1950s, to Weber City--spelled Weber, as in German, but pronounced Webber, as in English--after a radio comedy about a new subdivision: "The characters were having so much fun with their Weber City, we thought we'd have one too." In these novels place names are used as they were at the time.

When I read this novel, I enjoyed its dramatic climax, but wondered why the denouement was so long and so sad. A more tactful reviewer posted online that she wanted the story to be even longer, to resolve the new issues the denouement raises for the characters. Readers be warned. The last few chapters of Hiding Ezra are the trailer for Wayland.

In between reading the two stories, I cried. I won't spoil the denouement, I think, by explaining that I don't cry about fictional characters. No, but once when the words "rock hall" triggered a memory an 85-year-old great-uncle said, "My sister and sister-in-law used to take bread to the fellows that hid in the rock house." (Actually he used their given names, and one of them was still alive to confirm his claim.) My mother wondered if he was remembering the story she'd heard about my great-grandfather leading a party of soldiers to the nearby "rock house," a cave big enough for people to camp in. No, he said, this was in his lifetime...but he was weak and never had much to say at one time, and never mentioned the cave story again.

In my family the young spoke more frankly to the old, and asked more questions, than in some neighboring families. Still, I never asked for more details about feeding the deserters in 1918. I knew the cave was real; my brother and I had been shown how to find it on condition that we not try to get inside it. I knew Great-Aunt belonged to a pacifist church, and her sons were conscientious objectors, but her husband, Grandfather's brother, was exempt from military service because he was a minister. The great-uncle who first mentioned the story had one of those given names that commemorate a family friend's given and family names: Otto Quillen.That's all I can add to the facts behind Hiding Ezra.


What made me cry was that this story made me realize how lucky the elders were. My grandfather and eight of his younger siblings lived to ages between 75 and 99. Many of their generation did not. Physically and emotionally my elders survived by keeping a healthy distance between themselves and any friends they'd had as children...and even in the 1960s I still grew up hearing "Don't get closer to town children than you can help, don't go into town unless it's necessary, don't EVER go into a swimming pool, don't go to other people's houses and if you do don't eat or take off your shoes..." Two generations later, my extended family are still known as a stand-offish bunch. Possibly the elders' losses of friends to the epidemics had something to do with that. I've heard a lot of rot about possible kinds of "hurt" might have caused our family subculture to be so clannish, but this insight rang true. And it did hurt, briefly, wondering how many school friends my elders had buried...Grandfather was one of fifteen children, eight of whom lived to ages between 75 and 99. In another family of fourteen, six children born before 1940 were still alive in 1970.

Anyway: Ezra Teague survives his adventure, but the epidemic diseases and early deaths aren't over. In Wayland Ezra has left his daughter for his sister to raise. Eva has indeed married Lieutenant Nettles, who is now a nice guy but still insecure enough to be impressed by a stranger's show of respect. That insecurity places the Nettles family at risk when the lieutenant offers a job to a "hobo" who calls himself Buddy Newman. Newman's real name is Deel, as in Scottish "de'il," and his character is a study in Human Evil. He wants to set people against each other, ruin the reputation of a pious but sex-starved old lady, and do even worse things to little Katie Teague.

The suspense of the story is finding out whether Newman's schemes will be foiled, and how, and by which of the decent local folk. There is an interesting and thoroughly local delineation of the relative vileness of Newman, an otherwise likable hobo who has an icky relationship with a teenaged boy, a rude drunk, and a murderer. Newman is a bigot, a pedophile, and also a murderer, but his evil runs deeper than that. (The narration of his evil won't embarrass readers in front of their children but the single telling details, when they emerge, may upset children.)

Did an ancestor really keep a diary that narrated such events? At least they're not the local pedophile story I always heard: it would have been fifteen or twenty years later when the man I heard described as "an escaped mental patient" did some physical damage to a local primary school girl. And I was glad. I did not want that girl, who survived but never married, to have been the real model for Katie. (Katie is characterized as pretty much the perfect niece in Eva's diary, but aunts know to allow for another aunt's auntly perspective. I think each of The Nephews is pretty much a perfect child, too, in his or her own way.)

Once again, after the main plot has resolved itself, the last two chapters go on. I didn't cry while reading Wayland but I found the denouement somewhat sad. Others may like it but I think they'll agree that, once again, the last chapters of Wayland are a trailer for another story.

I gave both books five stars on Goodreads for Keeping It Real. These are not just another stereotype of "Appalachia," the whole mountain range, from Georgia to Nova Scotia and possibly also Britain, confused with old pictures of the coal-mining town. Anything looks grim in a black-and-white photograph. In these books we see Scott County much closer to the way it must have been, between 1917 and 1930, to have become what it's been in Quillen's and my lifetime. I'm delighted.

Three-Colored Lawns as Evidence of Glyphosate Poisoning

Flu has made its rounds during the past three weeks. There was talk of closing the schools. A school in Tennessee really was closed for a day or two as all the teachers and students stayed home to sweat out the virus.

I had it, after what's become my usual fashion in the last ten years. Nobody else would have noticed. I could tell I had the virus because I felt chilly even in a room where people who hadn't been walking briskly outdoors were comfortable, because my eyes got tired easily, because I felt tired by ordinary routine chores or even by eating...you know, that fighting-the-flu feeling. It was not a stomach flu (norovirus is the one that always gives me noticeable symptoms). It did not affect the digestive process.

In my forties I had this feeling for hours, maybe a day, at a time. This winter I noticed it for about ten days. Is that because I'm now in my fifties? I don't think so. Up to about age thirty, as a young undiagnosed celiac, I did not shake off that fighting-the-flu feeling. I came down with the flu. Yes, and as a child, when I was forced to eat everything other people thought I needed to eat and bundle up when other people thought I needed to bundle up and go outside when other people thought I needed to go outside, I didn't even have separate cases of colds and flu during the winter; basically, if it was winter, I had a cold; the question was whether I was sick enough to distract the teacher when I went to school coughing and sneezing at people. Because the law required children to be sent to school on 145 days of the year, even when what they were learning at school was to stay home when they had a cold, and even when they had one...which was why, as a teenager who was a little healthier and finally able to enjoy some of my classes at school, I was still very keen on school choice.

I don't know about you, but when I talk about changes in the quality of my life during the past ten years, I'm old enough to be told "Well, of course, you're getting older." What is getting old, stale, and tired of living is that cliche phrase. We are all getting older. My Nephews are noticing the same sort of changes, and although not all of them have even reached their full height yet, fourteen years old is older than four. However, the changes in the quality of my life (1) correlate pretty precisely with my exposure to glyphosate, and (2) feel to me like being younger. Like aging backward. I was not a healthy person until age 30 so when I feel sick it brings back memories of youth or even childhood. Not the sort of childhood I wanted The Nephews to have.

There are some changes we can all expect to happen just because, after a certain age (it varies, and seems to be determined by genes), the human body's hormone balance changes. In between one range of birthdays we grow taller, then grow heavier, and the texture of our skins changes to allow the skin pores to become bigger, and some of those pores tend to clog up, etc., etc. In between another range of birthdays we start growing more white hair in place of black or brown or whatever it used to be, and the texture of our skins changes again to allow the skin to dry out and form wrinkles more easily, and those of us who don't get enough exercise find ourselves losing weight in the form of calcium from the bones, etc., etc. I am actually starting to grow white hair, although during glyphosate reactions it falls out so it's not showing yet. The other changes normally start later in my family; no doubt they'll come along in due time.

Illness is a separate thing from age. The two things are correlated to some extent because, the older we are, the harder it is for our immune systems to recover from some kinds of illness--notably flu. However, young people can be ill and old people can be healthy.

One thing that definitely cheats some people out of enjoying a healthy old age is confusing age with illness. No symptom of illness is a valid indicator of age, but the belief that low-grade chronic illness is part of "growing older" keeps some people from correcting imbalances in time to avoid more serious illness...and illness definitely makes the body "older," slower to recover, more vulnerable to the next attack on our health.

So I had this dopey-sneezy-sleepy-grumpy-bashful feeling for ten days, and finally shook it off. Then on Wednesday morning I woke up at two o'clock, sneezing and sniffling. Having been well hydrated to help keep off the flu, I didn't dry out enough to go back to sleep until after six. Then my brain kept remembering that six o'clock is time to get up, so I caught three separate ten-minute naps before it was time to go to work, still losing water as I trudged through the drizzle that didn't become a real rain. At least only water was draining out of my face (nose, and also eyes). When I used the toilet I lost about a tablespoon of blood.

Where had that come from, I asked myself. What had I eaten that might have been contaminated? I decided to stop sweetening my coffee at the cafe, just in case.

It was raining when I went home. I felt dopey, sleepy, sneezy, grumpy, bashful, and a few more little guys Disney overlooked: lazy, weary, whiny--and the last one wasn't "Doc," he was "Blocked." Disney mis-heard that one. He mis-heard "Happy," too, but this web site's contract bans mentioning that Dwarf's real name.

On Thursday morning the junior cats Silver and Swimmer came to breakfast, one with her left eye swollen hut, one with her right eye swollen shut. I was sniffling again, and had the predictable gas bloating that means the sniffles were caused by glyphosate vapors rather than a cold. The junior cats had, too. Poor little things, they probably remembered it from when they were kittens...that was how Swimmer got her name; she was trying to climb up my coat, wasn't strong enough, and fell into water. Most cats hate to swim, but they can.

When I came in on Thursday evening my nose was clear enough to notice just one whiff of a smell I've learned to loathe, as I walked past a house someone has been trying to sell. Then my nose clogged up again and all the water in my body started trying to pour out through my face, again.

Then I came home, and my Queen Cat Serena, who snuggled against me for many a kitten-nap but does not think snuggling befits a Queen...snuggled. Yes. Serena was snuggling. Serena didn't have a real fever but her nose was warmer than it ought to have been, from inflammation, from breathing toxic vapors. Serena wasn't feeling well either. Serena didn't seem positively ill during any of last year's glyphosate episodes. Well, she didn't seem ill enough to be taken to the vet yesterday, either, but she was not her tough and sassy healthy self, not the cat who always shrugs away any petting and tries to redirect me to throw or drag something she can chase. What was bothering her was closer than the railroad.

I went into my home office feeling not just grumpy, but seriously angry. I can be too soft when it comes to forgiving or even pardoning things people do to me, personally. Touching my loved ones is the way to see the fighting side of me. I know who poisoned Serena. I'd always thought of them as a nice family, before. I'd even presumed to pardon them for poisoning some valuable wineberry bushes, because the poor idjit had not looked them up but only asked the guys at the shop, who'd told him they were poisonous. However. I went into the office, closed the door, and I started praying out loud: "God, please heal these cats and all the other innocent animals this fool has poisoned, and transfer all of their suffering to him, now."

Even if I felt any compassion for people who torture other people's pets, I couldn't forgive them. That would not be possible. Only those animals and the God Who made them can forgive those who poison animals. And I hope to live to see those disgraces to humankind suffer much, much more than any individual animal...enough to balance all the misery of all the animals who did and did not survive.

I got up this morning knowing that it might be a good market day, but I had too much to do online. One job  to collect payment for, one to finish, one to negotiate. Cyberchores to wrap up. Yes, although the big glyphosate news story hasn't broken enough to be worth reporting yet, it's been a month; there ought to be a Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter. And also there had to be a blog post about what the cell phone's cheap little camera doesn't quite show you: the three-colored grass. No direct sunlight, no true colors in cell phone pictures. You might think this photograph of the lazy fool's side yard shows just the usual wintertime mix of tiny green plants and frozen dead ones. Look again. The colors are grayed, but you'll see that two of those grass stalks, and a few of the blades of crabgrass, have a much redder color than the other yellowish winter-killed grass...

What produces that three-colored grass? New, green grass (including crabgrass) pops up, even in January, whenever the temperatures are not actually below freezing. Idiot and his sons used, when his children were living in the house, to mow this sloping patch of yard every week. That was bad enough, because the slope is below a road and Bermuda grass will not hold a steep bank below a road in wet weather, as we have all seen along Route 23...but on Thursday, probably in the morning, one of this idiot family had swung by and thought, "I don't have time to mow but I don't want any prospective buyers to see unmown grass--horrors!--so I'll just spray poison on the whole lawn." During the next few hours, glyphosate had no effect on the yellow vegetation, which was already dead, nor on the new vegetation, which continued to pop up, but it dried out the stalks of those other little plants and some of the tips of the crabgrass, producing that brighter, redder color for a day or so before those plant parts will fade to the same color as the parts that died naturally.

What woke me in the night would have been glyphosate vapors drifting up from the railroad, which was lined with three-colored vegetation this morning too; the Southern Railroad Company always spray poison on the railroad in the middle of the night. What I smelled yesterday evening would have been a fresher application of glyphosate to the idiots' yard. Maybe it was even some "helpful" real estate agent, rather than the idiots themselves, who poisoned the yard; I wasn't watching. But that three-colored yard tells us all we need to know.

I'm not going to post the idiots' name here, but I am going to post the picture of the property they're trying to sell, so that they can keep paying taxes on it for another ten years or else pay somebody to take it over.

One thing we can do to build a healthier world, Gentle Readers, is to look for three-colored vegetation around houses for sale. People poison their yards because they think that will help them sell houses for higher prices. We can help correct that mistake. We can publicize the fact that these properties may contain residues of poisons that may make people sick for who knows how long, so their market value has dropped below zero. We can tell owners who are trying to unload real estate with three-colored grass around it, "I might take that place off your hands if you pay me a couple of thousand dollars an acre, just to pay taxes on it while it recovers from having been poisoned! It's not worth anything now, for sure. Maybe in ten years, if the soil is assayed and all that stuff you sprayed on it has completely broken down, it might be worth some money again. Maybe. It's a very risky investment."

 

Do not buy this property, Gentle Readers. Do not let anyone else buy it. That lovely, scenic little brook runs below the poisoned grass shown above. It is washing glyphosate residues, AMPA and other nasty stuff, down toward Tennessee now. Whoever owns it might be considered responsible for making people sick in Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, or even Louisiana. Yes, the idiots who poisoned that grass need to pay anyone who takes the risk of owning that field now.

We should be snapping pictures of poisoned properties, whenever it's possible to snap a blurry image that proves that plants have been poisoned. We should be posting them on social media with tags that include #GlyphosateAwareness and the name of the nearest town, e.g. #GateCityVA, so people will know better than to pay for these properties.

Further along the road, before accepting a lift into town with a neighbor, I saw further evidence of glyphosate poisoning along the railroad. Some poor soul had spewed blood-flecked mocha-colored froth into a napkin and thrown the napkin out beside the road. Since it landed on the passenger's side, who knows whether the sufferer spewed upward or downward, but it had definitely come out of a human body. Maybe the body belonged to the fool who poisoned the lawn; I hope it did, rather than to some innocent child who waited for the school bus at a railroad crossing. It was too cold for frogs, dead or alive, or for birds to be flying and singing. I did not see a dead bird...yet. At least the robins I've often seen flitting over the lawn photographed above are probably still further south.

I came in, sat down, bought coffee, went to the bathroom, and instead of anything a healthy person would see floating around a water-flush toilet, what I flushed away this morning was about a tablespoon full of blood and little separate semi-solid blood clots. That, too, is now on its way to promote the growth of cancers, the loss of valuable native animals and birds and insects, and the growth of Bermuda grass and Johnson grass and Spanish Needles and kudzu and very little else, in Tennessee. Sorry, Tennessee readers, that's what youall get for having sewer systems so you can keep those nasty old water-flush toilets. Nobody in Virginia would be dropping poisoned blood into your water supply if we could help it. 

Maybe it's a symptom of glyphosate poisoning, too...I think people need to have the evidence of the harm glyphosate does shoved in their faces. I snapped a picture of blighted grass. Maybe I should have snapped one of the blood clots. Maybe I should have saved the actual blood clots, themselves, and thrown them at the idiot's white door frame. Maybe what worked for the homosexual lobby is what it will take to convince Americans to stop the insanity. 

There is not, there never was, and there never will be a "weed" as ugly as glyphosate. Friends don't let friends spray poisons...especially on yards they are hoping to sell.

Postal Worker Fails Test of Mental Competence

The test of mental competence given to a geriatric patient with whom I stayed included an item: "What would you do if you found a sealed envelope with a new, uncancelled first-class postage stamp on it, lying on the ground?"

The answer was, of course: "Put it in a mailbox. The mail must go through."

If the stamp had been cancelled and the letter dropped or misdelivered, the correct answer would have been "If unable to take it to the person to whom it was addressed, send it back through the mail."

It seems my town now has a mail carrier who would not have passed the test of competence. Maybe this mail carrier has early Alzheimer's Disease.

My neighborhood does not have mail delivery direct to our doors. We still have the old Rural Route boxes, out on a rail beside the highway, and those of us who ever receive anything but bills and junkmail have post office boxes in town.

As mentioned in a previous post, I've been involved with the Encourage a Legislator campaign where we pray for a legislator outside our own districts during the General Assembly Session, along with our own, and send bland, encouraging, church-lady-style postcards to the one outside our districts. Political messages go to our people in Richmond. Encouraging words go to someone else's.

It's not gone well for me in other years. The post office is all the way on the other end of town; I don't usually walk out there. There aren't any big public mailboxes along my route. Some years I've not even had the money to buy six or eight postage stamps. Last fall I e-mailed the program coordinator that, if the Concerned Women could find enough other people to send out these postcards, that would be the best thing, as my income was still preposterously low and I didn't want to promise to buy postage. She e-mailed back that the organization would send postage.

So I received a packet of postcards with stamps and resolved to pray for the Delegate assigned to me--that was another post. And, of course, dropped the postcards into a Rural Route box I passed and raised the little flag on the side.

The first time, the card was apparently mailed.

The second time, it lay in the box all week, until I opened the box to drop the third card in and found the second one still lying there, with a note stuck to it, saying "This mailbox is not serviced."

I thought about putting it in a different Rural Route box; looked in a few and saw letters inside. Then I thought that the recipients of those letters might think the card had been misdelivered to them.

I don't think the U.S. Postal Service should continue to employ people who don't know that, when you find a bit of mail with an uncancelled postage stamp on it, wherever you find it, the correct thing to do is mail it.

A Ship Named for a Pedophile?

Seriously, Gentle Readers.

The U.S. Navy has announced plans to name a battleship after Harvey Milk.

That Harvey Milk.

He was a trailblazing homosexual activist, which some of you may think was a good thing, and he succeeded as an "out" homosexual because he was competent at his job, or jobs, which was definitely a good thing. He served honorably in the U.S. Navy.

But hello...can the Navy not think of other people who were competent at their jobs, who served in the Navy, and who were not child molesters?

In Harvey Milk's time the homosexual lobby hadn't grown big enough to dare to separate themselves from pedophiles; they took whomever they got. They got many same-sex pedophiles. They didn't repudiate the National Association for Man-and-Boy Love until, what, 1990?

To be fair, in Harvey Milk's time mainstream society had not reached a consensus about the precise definition of child abuse, either. People were more willing to believe that a sexual act involving a teenager had been non-consensual, but in some states consenting teenagers could marry each other, or older people, at thirteen.

Like a lot of "gay" men, Milk didn't publicize his sexuality unil he was fairly well settled in his career (and out of the Navy). When he did, all of his known boyfriends were younger than he. At least one was only sixteen. 

If you thought Judge Roy Moore's merely touching teenaged girls, when he was thirty and still single, was more discrediting than his "rogue judge" reputation, then to be consistent you must agree that Mayor Harvey Milk's having a sixteen-year-old boyfriend, when Milk was over thirty, is also discrediting.

Personally, I can't imagine what anyone was thinking--even if they knew nothing about the man's life--to propose naming a battleship Milk.

Unfortunately the petition linked below doesn't offer a place for those signing it to nominate other Navy veterans who weren't pedophiles (and whose names would look less ridiculous on a battleship than "Milk"). This web site, however, does. Please name your favorite Navy veterans and tell their stories below. Disqus will give you about 200 words.

https://www.returntoorder.org/petition/tell-u-s-navy-not-to-name-vessel-after-a-pedophile/ 

(This link will eventually expire.)

Virginia Citizens Defense League Lobbying on Monday

Fellow Virginians, do you want your daily newspapers reporting a murder a day? Mostly young men, mostly shot in the back, as happened in Washington during the gun ban?

Do you want to take advantage of the January Thaw, with the opportunities this year's expected long thaw is offering to get away from farm responsibilities? Pay someone to feed the animals and off you go?

Do you like Richmond? As a day trip destination, I mean. Personally, if I were going to spend a day or two in Richmond I'd want it to be during the January Thaw. I'd pack a trench coat, unlined, and expect to leave it in the van.

If you do not want to read about our young men being shot in the back on a daily basis, do want to travel during the thaw, and would like to see Richmond at the time of year when the climate is likely to be most bearable, you might want to join a group called the Virginia Citizens Defense League and go and visit your Delegate and State Senator on Monday.

The whole thing, I am credibly informed, is being staged for maximum TV drama. Expect to stand in line outside, waiting your turn to go in and chat with your people (or their office staff) for a few minutes, while remembering that others are waiting. The idea is to show the world what a well spoken, nicely if casually dressed, Perfect Virginia Lady or Gentleman you are. The official purpose of the trip is to walk in and say, probably to the office staff, "How do you do? I'm (Priscilla King) from (Gate City); I'm here to demonstrate support for weapons right with the Virginia Citizens Defense League," leave a business card if you carry them, and then have time for sightseeing and socializing. That's all.

The e-mail they sent out was worth reading, even though I trust Terry Kilgore already knows where people in Gate City stand on this issue. I considered reposting the whole e-mail here...No. You should visit their web site, get to know the organization, and consider the networking potential before you decide whether or not to go to Richmond. Swapping cards with these people might be worth the trip.

Virginia General Assembly Is In Session

...And it opened yesterday, my first day back in town, and I didn't make the time to post anything. I've not even read my men's bills yet. I had cherished an idealistic hope that, given the proposed gun regulations and the number of people who can be counted on to oppose those, this would be another quiet year when the General Assembly could get along just fine without us bloggers nipping at their heels.

No such luck.

Once again, this web site is officially following and praying for three men (yes, all of them are husbands and fathers) in the General Assembly. Fellow Virginians, I know some of you can do this too; it's a safe, friendly way to engage with the process. Christian women, specifically, join a project called "Encourage a Legislator," which sends out postcards expressly for the purpose of sharing non-political encouraging words with a Delegate or State Senator other than your own. This person is not there to represent you, so you can't tell him or her how to vote; you just pray for the person, that s/he will be blessed with wisdom and courage and good health and so on, and let the person know that Christians across the state are watching him or her.

Out here on the point of Virginia, this web site is represented by Delegate Terry Kilgore (House District 1) and State Senator Todd Pillion (Senate District 40). Links for them should work if you're in Virginia, and should track which part of Virginia you're in.

Delegate Kilgore of Gate City has been representing us, or at the very least our Republican majority, quite well for many years. While the bills he's proposed this year are (I note with great relief) of more concern to other people than they are to me, legislators' commendations of their constituents are always fun to read... http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?201+mbr+H56C .

Fiscal conservatives's eyebrows may rise when they read the bill of which he's listed as a chief co-patron. It doesn't raise taxes, but it does allow local governments to raise taxes. I will forward concerns from readers in other districts if they are expressed in a parliamentary way. None of us is getting any younger and the General Assembly always guarantees sufficient stress at best.

About Senator Pillion of Abingdon, so far, I can say that he's been very "conservative" in spending money to file proposed legislation: http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?201+mbr+S111 .

The object of this web site's special concern this year is Delegate Ronnie Campbell of Raphine. Reading his collected works at http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?201+mbr+H309C is likely to motivate this web site's original primary readership to pray earnestly for him. Notable for its unacceptibility to all True Greens and Libertarians is his proposal to allow local jurisdictions to order people who don't even live in cities to "mow grass and weeds."

http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?201+ful+HB875

Hello? Most of Virginia is not flat land, and you do not ever want to see mown grass on a steep slope. Mowing grass on a steep slope...

* guarantees erosion

* promotes the growth of the invasive nuisance called Bermuda grass (and other things prohibited under this web site's contract)

* encourages the unwary to build new dependencies on poisons like glyphosate and dicamba, not to mention "fertilizers" that can build up to toxic excess, and ultimately replace lovely native plants with more Spanish Needles, Johnson grass, and kudzu

* makes it more difficult for glyphosate-sensitive people to find and cultivate survival food in their back yards, which is certainly what's keeping me alive at this point, when nearly all commercially grown fruit and vegetables are poisoned

* disproportionately increases the burden of land ownership on the elderly and on young working parents, to no particular gain for anybody

* reduces much-needed biodiversity and "wild" land

* promotes un-neighborly meddling and petty personal harassment

* and also looks ugly...we don't need more Astroturf!

Am I ever praying that God will add an extra boost to the amount of wisdom the General Assembly should share with this gentleman, by killing this bill. (He proposed a similar bill last year. They killed it.)

I think we need a ban on any local requirements that anybody maintain a "mown lawn" even in a city. Native plants are much better. I don't know that we need to empower government to ban the bad habit of monocropping for Bermuda grass to maintain that Astroturf look, but we certainly don't need to tolerate any encouragement of this practice.

Long-term readers will remember the intensity with which Americans rejected the foreign-born land-grab proposal known as "Agenda 21." The United Nations disowned this agenda, but that in no way prevents people who supported it from insinuating little tendrils of it, like those first little sprouts of poison ivy in early spring, back into the edges of even Republicans' philosophical "lawns."

Their proposals sound so reasonable. So nice.

Scott County unanimously opposed the whole idea of a local zoning ordinance, ten years ago, because we opposed the kind of discrimination against low-income families that is involved in things like banning trailer houses. (Remember, "Agenda 21" was all about promoting all kinds of bans and regulations that would force all but the richest to give up owning private homes and land, allowing greedheads to take over large amounts of real estate whose owners refuse to sell it.) Our county board of supervisors assured us that nothing in the ordinance would keep anyone from putting a trailer house on their rental property and renting it out.

Yet, with some dismay, I already hear of people on town councils giving in to what sounds like a harmless reasonable proposal to boost town and city incomes by...banning trailer houses.

"But the reason why these people want trailer houses is that they don't have to pay property taxes on them." Once trailer houses are set up as permanent residences, not in camps but on privately owned land, what in existing state law prevents them from being taxed in the same way other houses are? Not that I think we need more taxes on more kinds of property; I think we need more frugal budgets. But the people who are really interested in land grabs don't want to think about removing a tax loophole that might be discouraging people from improving their trailer houses. Their real goal is to put more people out of their homes!

I already hear of people on town councils wanting to segregate "high-end" from midrange or minimum-investment businesses.

"But high-end businesses generate more profit and pay more taxes and allow cities to do more for the people." Maybe so, but do the people really need higher taxes to enable more dependency, or do they need more encouragement to keep themselves off welfare through low-investment businesses?

In Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, we learned the hard way about gun bans, and we also learned the hard way about how those nicely-nice proposals to yuppify neighborhoods create what I've always hoped would remain a unique kind of homelessness. We need to be vigilant about allowing this kind of ideas to spread into Virginia. One of Montgomery County, Maryland, is all...is probably more than all the world needs.

Maybe what we really need is legislation to establish a Free Enterprise, American Way, zone including all of Virginia under one nice, clear, simple rule: If you own land, you have no right to use it in a way that does harm to other people--which would include putting a chemical plant in the middle of a residential suburb, or keeping hogs in a pen adjacent to a restaurant. But those other people have no right to object to anything you do with that land that does not materially harm them.

Under that kind of clearheaded legislation, neighbors could petition a city government to impose a fine on people who fail to allow native plants to displace any lingering messes of Bermuda grass, or who persist in spraying the kudzu their "weed killers" have nurtured with things whose vapors kill songbirds--but they could not complain about native plants. Or trailer houses. Or the colors of other people's paint...I suppose Reston has a right to exist somewhere, but I'm not at all sure that it ought ever to have existed in Virginia.

Remembering that Agenda 21 also called for Delegate Campbell's and my generation to die younger than we grew up expecting we would, I urge Virginia's Republicans to be as vigilant about these sneaky little appeals to whatever little furtive traces of greed and snobbery they possess, as they are about the attention-grabbing gun ban. Not that gun bans are a safe experiment, as far as human lives are concerned. But land-grabbing is not a safe experiment either. 

Those who choose are welcome to join my prayer for the Virginia General Assembly for 2020:

Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon You, and we beg the blessing of Your guidance to preserve our common wealth from the influence of malevolent patrons who gamble on our shortsightedness.

Help our elected representatives to remember, always, that individual freedom and accountability only to You are ideals that have served us well in this world, while European notions about "gentility," dependency on government, and concern for appearance had destructive effects on all those who succumbed to them.

We ask Your particular blessing on Delegate Campbell, who is not a young man but is new to the General Assembly, and on Delegate Kilgore, whom You have placed in a position to guide and correct him.

Invitation to Gloat: The Goodreads Challenge

The challenge was to read 300 books and post something about each one on Goodreads in 2019.

I read the 300 books--and more, easily, because Goodreads counts recipe and pattern books. (And doesn't everybody reread the whole pattern book while they're knitting their version of a printed pattern? I knitted a lot of printed stitch patterns into original, one-off blankets in 2019.)

But I made the time to post mini-reviews of only 224.

Because I'm still on Goodreads and I still want to encourage those of the writers who are still alive (and online), I will eventually make the time to post about the other books I read in 2019. Unless I've reread them in 2020, I will list the date read as 2019. Eventually my Goodreads list will show more than 300 books read in 2019.

But the challenge included posting the reviews...therefore, I failed.

If this year's challenge is still open, I plan to enter again. 300 books will be read, whether or not I'm able to publish reviews of them...I am still hoping to get back to the Amazon links and direct sales through this web site, but that'll take a new bank account as well as a new laptop...sigh.

If I fail again, I fail again.

If people want to gloat because they finished their challenge, no problem; I'll be glad they're glad.

People may or may not want to know what happened in the last few online days in December. Norwalk Flu is what happened. I missed some online time in the last week before Christmas when I had it. The cafe was scheduled to be open half the day on Saturday and on Tuesday. I was mulling, "Which day should I use for Goodreads?" The cafe is, technically, the front room of the owners' home. They had relatives visiting. One of these relatives is a fellow celiac. In order to keep any lingering virus I had well away from that person, I took the laptop home early and dug into my holiday projects.

No Internet. Maybe half a dozen phone conversations. No Glyphosate Awareness...will I ever be glad when that's finished! Some visiting with friends and family, and lots of time for writing and knitting and housekeeping. It was like the pre-Internet era, only without the incessant clatter of the manual typewriter and the stacks of wasted paper. I enjoyed every minute of it.

It cost me a writing job to which I was really looking forward, too. Wail! Moan! Whine!

It was a lovely Net-free winter break, even so.

Meanwhile, I have a Goodreads review of a new book to expand and improve for an actual paying magazine.

Status Update: I'm Back

After two and a half pleasant weeks offline, I'm back. I have 24 pages of e-mail to sort through...and that's after checking the real mail.

Meanwhile, a funny thing happened on the way in, worth sharing...

I was walking briskly along, hauling this poor old laptop on my shoulder, watching where I was going in my astigmatic way. Generally my left eye stays focussed in such a way as scan the road ahead and my right eye stays focussed in such a way as to see what's immediately under my feett.

This leaves several yards of middle distance of which my vision, unless I take time to refocus on something in that distance, is blurry. Mostly what's going on at that distance is that vehicles are moving, and I move further to the side of the road as indicated.

Occasionally, two or three times this morning because the rain had just stopped and people were just going out to do their morning errands, a person speaks to me from that distance. What I see of this person is a human-shaped blur. The voice is what tells me whether it's male or female, whether it's friend, nuisance, or stranger.

So this blur said "Hi," and the voice told me it was a male stranger, so I said "Hi" back and kept walking.

I usually do say "Hi" back to people who do this kind of tedious greeting, or greeding, routine, if only because that's the quickest way to brush them off. Since I have the type of aging ears to which my voice sounds louder than it does to other people, and I don't intend to shout, people don't always hear me say anything.

Extroverts have this sick, crazy need to assure themselves that, even though they have nothing to say to each other and no reason not to ignore each other, they're not ignoring each other in a hostile way. A lot of hostility seems to fill in the gap where a positive purpose ought to be in the extrovert mind. Yes, I do feel that throwing them the scrap of attention indicated by saying "Hi" is a bit like bowing to Haman, but I suppose they deserve a little crumb of a treat for waiting till they get into speaking distance and speaking quietly rather than screaming across the street. (I do ignore people who scream, or who blurt out names--whosever names those might be--in a, not really hostile, but actively discouraging way.)

Anyway this particular man apparently felt a need to prove he was a vague long-ago acquaintance rather than a street terrorist, because as I kept walking away and his voice told me he kept walking in the other direction, he said something like "I'm John Doe! Used to be married to Jane!"

And I caught myself thinking, "Mercy, Lord. Does this fellow now expect I'm going to recognize him? Is that why Jane left him?" (I don't know or care why they separated. It's none of my business.)

I caught myself trying to remember the visual impression I had of this John Doe. Well, he seemed to be of average size. I did not actually see his skin color, much less eye color, or whether or not he had hair or was wearing a hat. His shape suggested he was wearing a jacket and trousers, but leather jacket or denim jacket, jeans or khakis, boots or shoes? I had no idea. If he'd needed a witness to something that had just taken place, I would've been the world's worst. All I saw of him was an average-man shape with the light behind it. No details whatsoever.

So now what happens? If he's a nice quiet introvert with a life, he'll get on with his life. Good. If he's a tiresome extrovert, he'll start fretting about whether I was ignoring him in a hostile way and how to reassure himself that he's taking control of that situation. Not good.

I really think we need a solid rule of etiquette that, if you don't have something to say that makes it worth stopping and focussing your attention on each other, you don't speak.

But the funny part is that probably 95% of all humans, including visually impaired humans who imagine that all people with 20-20 vision see everything in detail right away, would imagine that I'd actually seen this man's face--and I didn't see his face at all. I saw that he was moving in my direction, which would have been hard to do without its having been possible for me to have seen his face if I'd stopped and focussed my eyes on it...but I did not do that.

If asked to testify in court whether he was Black or White, I would have had to say that I believe that I did look at his face once, twenty-five or thirty years ago, and if he's the same person I believe him to be then he's White--but I did not actually see that.

Such is life with astigmatism.

If you know any of the people who fret about what it "means" that someone didn't speak to them on the street, you might do people with astigmatism the courtesy of reminding those people of the possibility that those who don't speak to them may not see them.