Local Warming Is a Fact

My part of the world is tilted sunward at this time of year, and we have really been feeling those solar flares. Even in the cool green hollow in which the Cat Sanctuary nestles, far enough up the Blue Ridge Mountains that our water boils at 218 degrees Fahrenheit, we've had temperatures well over ninety degrees Fahrenheit. How often, and by how far, downtown Kingsport has broken the 40-degree-Celsius mark, I'm glad I don't know. The temperatures at their official weather station always run so much closer to ours.

Downtown Kingsport, like downtown inmost cities and large towns, has been miserable. It's hard to say how much of the misery observed in our cities has been caused by the heat, by chemical pollution, by delayed reactions to the coronavirus and/or the vaccine, or by the combination of these things. All I know for sure is that the rate of disabling, even hospital-room-worthy, symptoms among people I know has been fierce.

Four out of six people with whom I'd been working, this spring, have been hospitalized: two cardiac cases, one case that started out with a simple accident and then went on from there, one case for which I've not heard an official diagnosis. Plus the odd-jobs man was hospitalized after an accident, but not for a full day--he's still drifting around the neighborhood, working when hired. Of the crowd that used to hang out on the porch of the retirement project in Gate City, I've seen two of the better preserved ones, still on their feet. They were the ones who drove and did errands for the others, last summer., They no longer drive or do errands.

My Significant Other wanted to be one of the first to try the COVID vaccine, because he hadn't noticed having the virus and wanted to reassure people about the vaccine. Bless him. He had no immediate reaction. He'd been fighting chronic Lyme Disease for ten years. In December he went into the hospital for an operation that sounded horrible. He's ot up yet. He's still maintaining a cell phone, but he's not getting much use out of it.

I had the virus, advised the State to send my vaccine to one of the countries that reportedly needed it, and what I hear these days is "You're looking well--gaining weight, and didn't you dye your hair? I've seen it starting to look grey, but now it's black!"

That's the part of glyphosate poisoning that shows. That's what pain looks like, Gentle Readers. The rest of my body looks the way it always has, but glyphosate reactions cause the midsection to puff out, with inflammation and fluid retention more than actual gas or blocked bodywastes. It's like being pregnant with poison. I hate it, feel disfigured by it, don't find it physically comfortable either (especially when wearing clothes that have waistlines). And both white and black hairs fall out, but the white hair falls off faster and grows back more slowly. And I feel tired and bummed out, and arm starting to show various nutrient deficiencies due to being unable to digest nutrients, so between the lack of energy, the continually lurking sub-nausea, and the black hair, I really feel as if I might be twenty-nine again.

Remember We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Gentle Readers? It was a very literary, credible, brilliant study o a young psychopath. Merricat Blackwood expressed annoyance with her family, when corrected for some childish fault, by poisoning all but two of the extended family gathered for dinner. In the present reality of the story we see her heading into another family conflict. It's one of the few really well written horror stories in English literature.

Can you imagine the law saying to Merricat Blackwood, "Of course you mustn't buy any more arsenic, but you must go ahead and use up your existing supply"? No? But that's what our government is currently doing about glyphosate. The day when it's actually going to be taken off the market keeps being pushed back. The corporations must be allowed to sell, and the fools who still buy glyphosate and other poisons must be allowed to use up, their existing supply. Possibly some of our legislators and judges ought to have dinner with Merricat Blackwood.

The name "Merricat," you might like to know, is explained in the book as a childish variation on "Mary Catherine," but it's also been documented in other countries as a term of hate for Americans. (And of course one of Al Gore's kids thought that would be a great name for a charity...bless her heart.) The Trump Administration applied pressure for countries like Thailand and Korea to lift the glyphosate bans their people unanimously want. I've not read that the Biden Administration has done thing one about this situation. So calling American poison sprayers "Merricats" does seem sort of appropriate.

"I've been spraying this, instead," said the Grouch cheerfully, as if expecting commendations. 2,4-D? Where'd he ever dig that up? I tried to remember what I knew offhand about 2,4-D. In 1974, the last year my Drill Sergeant Dad was asked to teach a class about this kind of thing, that name appeared on a list of known carcinogens, which I remembered because the names rimed:

chlordane

lindane

malathion

parathion

cyperquat

paraquat

2,4-D

2,4-T

Then I seem to remember paraquat distracting me. It was then suspected, and is now known, to cause Parkinson's Disease. I had a great-uncle who had that. Call him Great-Uncle Park. Dad got the whole neighborhood turned against the idea of spraying poison because look at him. I'm one of the last few living people who remember hearing Great-Uncle Park speak. He had been a preacher, a muscular Christian, farming forty acres and rearing seven sons. My sister remembers him mute and bedfast, harmless but horrifying, the Nightmare Life-In-Death. He went down that fast. He was disabled for almost twenty years before he died.

"Are you feeling suicidal?" I said to the Grouch.

"What's it do, besides causing cancer?" he said. "I'm seventy-five years old. We all have to go some time."

"What does the label say it does?" I was curious. The label didn't mention 2,4-D causing cancer but did warn that the stuff is so corrosive that a person who has swallowed it should not be allowed to vomit. Allowed. The person would want to. The label also mentioned that the poison would kill various desirable plants in the Grouch's yard.

"I can't believe it's not illegal to spray things like that in town, where they'll destroy your neighbors' gardens and make your neighbors ill," I said.

"That neighbor sprays glyphosate," the Grouch pointed, "and every time that one mows his grass I get hayfever. I don't care about them."

It is hard to dispute that, if people are still spraying glyphosate, their greatest achievement in this life will probably be as cadavers donated to medical science, and the sooner they perform that service, the better. However, inflicting yet another carcinogen to the toxic waste we in the Point of Virginia inflict on innocent people in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana is not the right thing to do with the feelings any rational being would naturally have about the glyphosate-spraying neighbor.

"That neighbor has children, and that one has dogs," I said. "And I have relatives in Tennessee who never did you any harm."

The Grouch wanted to change the subject. "Doesn't it seem to you that this summer's the hottest one you can remember?" he said.

"Actually," I said, "it reminds me of the summer of 1987. Though 1994 was a miserably hot summer, too. And although you and I were too young to feel it, a lot of older people died of the heat waves in 1977." In 1977 the Grouch was working full time. I was still lazing around the house, listening to the reports about heat-related fatalities on the Mutual News & Sports Radio Network.

(By some synchronicity, I then went home and turned up an old newspaper I saved for some other reason. On the back I read: "North Dakota's all-time high temperature was set here [in the town called Steele] in July 1936, at 121. [Interviewee Paul] Smokov, now 81, remembers that time and believes conditions this summer probably are worse," because the drought had "started in the late 1990s. 'The 1999 to 2006 drought ranks only behind the 1930s and the 1950s. It's the third-worst drought on record...' [federal meteorologist Brad] Rippey said.")

"If it snows in July," said the Grouch, "would you say you remembered that having happened before/"

"No," I said. "That was in 1920. My grandfather remembered it, but I'm not quite that old."

This was on the day the POG lay down and died. The POG, or Piece Of Garbage, was the miserable excuse for a laptop I used for two full years. I was surprised, and in a way disappointed, that that thing lasted a month. I don't like any computer that's infected with Windows 10, but it was the way the POG tried to force me to use battery power that gave me the time to entertain all those fantasies about taking it down to the lake and throwing it in. This laptop has a battery too feeble for almost any purpose...and that's actually an improvement over the POG. There are attempts at Green changes that turn people against the whole concept of Greenness.

Nevertheless, it occurred to me that this web site needs a post about climate change.

Here's the deal. Climate change is not just a science fiction trope any more. It is as indisputable as that spraying glyphosate is a way of torturing and killing people.

The downtown core of Kingsport, Tennessee, is about ten miles south oft he Cat Sanctuary. It is slightly closer to sea level, and is located on the banks of the Holston River. In the 1980s the temperature in downtown Kingsport ran three to five scrawny Fahrenheit degrees warmer than the temperature at the Cat Sanctuary. In theory "greenhouse gas" emissions are suppose dot have been better filtered since the 1990s, so in theory this "greenhouse effect" on temperatures should have become less noticeable now. Has this actually worked the way left-wingers claim? It has not. Today we routinely see temperatures in downtown Kingsport twenty Fahrenheit degrees hotter than the temperature at the Cat Sanctuary. Whatever has been done to reduce the greenhouse effect in the 199s has been offset by other factors.

The climate at the Cat Sanctuary has not changed noticeably since the 1970ps.The weather changes from day to day, from year to year. There are hotter and milder seasons, wetter and drier ones, colder and milder ones, earlier and later springs, more and less colorful autumns, richer and poorer harvests. The traditional rule for people who have orchards has always been to plant both peach and apple trees so that, more years than not, the orchard will produce one kind of fruit or the other. Usually it will be apples. In 1981, we had a cool wet spring followed by a sunny summer, and people harvested both peaches and apples. I've not heard of that happening twice; it was probably my generation's equivalent of Grandfather's having seen snow on the Fourth of July. This year's early, warm, dry spring, followed by a wet summer, is not making farmers happy. But this kind of year-to-year variation is not what is meant by terms like "climate change." Weather changes, sometimes from hour to hour. Climate is the whole general range of weather that can be expected in a given part of the world.

But the climate of downtown America has changed drastically since the 1970s. Even in the 1970s it was true for the big cities that, e.g., temperatures on the National Mall ran eight to ten degrees hotter than temperatures in Alexandria and Takoma Park, whose temperatures ran eight to ten degrees hotter than in Fairfax and Columbia. That gap has not closed, or even narrowed. If anything it's grown. The climate along the Maryland-Virginia border is generally mild, pleasant, and what the majority of humans like. The climate in downtown D.C. is too hot for almost anybody's comfort.

(Tip for those who must be in the city in the summer: Buy those huge cheap styrofoam cups full of ice chips. Never mind the soda pop; just carry around the ice chips. You might be able to use them to save a life.)

We know this change is human-made because it's observed only in "downtown" areas. Heat pumps push more hot air outdoors, downtown. More pavement traps more heat. More glass windows and metal vehicles reflect more heat. More human bodies emit heat into the ar. So the temperatures in and near cities rise, while the temperatures in the country stay the same.

It could still be called the greenhouse effect, if the activists who were screaming about the greenhouse effect in the 1990s hadn't promised to shut up when they got the legislation they wanted. If fewer "greenhouse gas" emissions are causing it, other factors are aggravating it more.

Meanwhile, "global climate change" was supposed to refer to the ice age in the 1980s. If you don't remember that, that would be because no such ice age ever arrived; in fact several heat records were set in the 1980s. Then "global climate change" was redefined as referring to a global warming effect that raised sea level to the point where the Atlantic would be lapping around the beaches of Asheville, North Carolina, by 2010. Oh wait, that never happened either. "Global climate change" still refers to any of several other theories, none of which has been proved, several of which have been disproved, but a vague general sense of which ha become an article of faith in the Socialist substitute-for-religion that wants to worship global dictatorship.

Traditional religions allow room for counterfactual beliefs by postulating a spiritual dimension of reality where people may feel effects of what they know to be true, without being able to measure any effects empirically. The radical rabbi Yeshua ben Yosef from Nazareth died in the early first century; the God he incarnated lives on in the hearts of His followers. Socialism, which began by explicitly denying that possibility for "spiritualizing" counterfactual beliefs, will have a harder time selling its dogma that "only global dictatorship can save us form global climate change." Still so many apparently rational people currently claim to believe that, a rationale for it is sure to be found or invented any day.

So far, some temperature readings, which some regard as evidence of global climate change, have shown a steady warming trend. It's certainly possible that this warming is dangerous. It won't be scientifically proved so unless, and until, the dangers have become facts.

Socialist readers, if we have any, please pay close attention to this:

How much are people likely to want to sacrifice to avert the possibility that one more theory, proposed by people who proposed some other theories that have been disproved, might turn out to be true? Not much.

How much are people likely to want to sacrifice to reduce their own personal misery, which they feel, and see their neighbors feeling, as they swelter in our cities? Not much, at first. Nobody wants to leave the windows open when the neighbors' heat pump start spewing out heat. Nobody wants to be the first one to report for work with a sweaty face from walking instead of driving in an air-conditioned car. But people are more likely to endure that kind of thing to make a difference they can see and feel, in the local warming nobody can deny, than they are for the sake of some theory espoused by somebody like Al Gore.

Now I know left-wingers have an agenda and won't let themselves be confused by mere facts. I know that, for example, they kept screaming for same-sex marriage as opposed to an end to legal discrimination against the unmarried--never mind that half of every same-sex couple is going to end up without a living spouse, just as half of every heterosexual couple is, so at best same-sex marriage would only benefit half of the people who wanted it. I know the only effect presenting reasonable ideas to these people is likely to have is to make them screech and throw nasty stuff in all directions, just like the animals from whom they used to claim physical descent.

Well, y'know what, Gentle Readers, I am already old enough, biracial enough, non-wealthy enough, and female enough, that haters are going to hate me anyway.

It's nice to look for points of agreement with everybody who's willing to find them, but it's a waste of time to try to please people who aren't going to be pleased.

Anyway, for those who are thinking rationally, there's an obvious call to action here. Leave the speculation about what might happen in the year 2050 or the year 2120 or even the year 2023 to the fiction writers. Speculation can be useful too. But, meanwhile, when calling for people to change their habits, we should back away from theories and dogmas, and stick to facts. If you want to reverse climate change or prevent even more harmful future climate change, you talk about what's happening now, what people can see and feel, ideally, this summer.

Greenland is losing valuable ice. It's possible that the local warming felt in Boston, Montreal, Stockholm, or Vladivostok may be contributing to this loss of ice. It's certain that more people are living more comfortably in Greenland, in ways that affect Greenland the way the comforts and conveniences in Boston, Montreal, Stockholm,  and Vladivostok affect those cities. It's possible that more Green consciousness in Boston would help Greenland keep its glaciers; if that happened it would be a weaker side effect of the stronger effect Bostonians' Green choices were having on Boston.

Sometimes we can be like the toddler whose hand, while clutching six cookies, is too wide to slip out of the cookie jar. In order to eat a cookie the toddler is going to have to release the whole fistful of cookies, unclench the fist, and draw out one cookie between fingers. If left-wingers seriously want to feel less miserable they need to release their dogmas about "global" anything and work with the local facts, which are unlikely to backfire on them as yet another global theory bites the dust. When it comes to that, it's also good to release the dogma about bigger government doing anything to help anything. We've all seen what the Obama, Trump, and Biden Administrations have done to reverse the effects of glyphosate, and we can reasonably expect any other big government, U.S. or foreign or "global," to do about that much--which is to say, to do nothing--about any climate change that actually happens.

Stick to propositions that relate to what can be objectively verified in the real world. A line I've seen work to change people's behavior was, "We have X number of parking spaces that will remain in available during reconstruction. We have X number of spaces that will have to be closed. We have X number of cars parked outside tonight. Obviously a solution to this problem will involve car pools. Will everyone who wants to keep these events going all summer please sign the car pool form and make yourselves known to the people in neighborhoods near yours."

Similarly: "Showers are being installed in the restrooms, and enclosed closets with space to store clean work outfits, clean outfits to walk home in, and the outfits you wore while walking to work, are being added to every office. While no questions will be asked about physical disabilities, a general policy will be that raises and promotions go to people who walk to and from work."

It's easy to get carried away with our own little ideas of how to make the world better. If I were the mayor of Kingsport, I'd be tempted to declare a state of emergency. Publicize "Code Red Days" and order city bus drivers to offer free rides to anyone walking on those 90-degree-heat, 90-percent-humidity days. Tax people to build free cold shower devices and install one on every alternate corner. Use heavy preaching, restrictions, and bans to reduce the use of motor vehicles, heat pumps, and heat-trapping pavement. Tear up the pavement on Center, Sullivan, Fort Henry, Eastman, and Stone Drive; cover those streets with grass and gravel, and limit their use to motor-free traffic only. Require all gas stations to replace all but one gas pump with solar-powered battery stands. Give people tax breaks for making better use of low-energy-use climate controls like separating rooms, opening windows, and burning biomass instead of gas or electricity. Require schools to give students "Green points" for doing all their research from printed material with no use of heat-generating, air-conditioning-dependent computers. Fine stores for using computerized price scanners instead of price stickers and solar-powered calculators. Give tax breaks to businesses that install shower stalls and remove computer terminals. Sponsor a factory where people build replicas of the world's best word processing device, the Royal Standard typewriter, and make it the standard for all school and office communication.

And, because these measures would be all about me, my ego, my good idea over your bad habit, Kingsport would be howling for a special election to replace me within a month. People would claim that they had arthritis and couldn't bear to type on real typewriters. Messy garbage would be dumped in the shower stalls. It'd be similar to the way even people who'd been wanting to ride bicycles around Kingsport reacted to the bicycle lanes, only moreso.

True Green changes come from the grassroots. People in government can certainly encourage Green choices; Green choices work best when nobody tries to force them on anybody.

One of the easiest ways to stop local warming is to stop using motor vehicles. But even on a college-campus scale, top-down bans on motor vehicles can backfire. People with major mobility impairments need to be able to drive. They should be able to win friends and influence people by making every drive a social event. The rest of us, when we see one of our number driving, could be sighing and clucking. "Poor old John Doe, I just realized how much older he is than he looks. I saw him driving, alone, just from his house to the hardware store!" With corrections: "Biomass burns hot. Biomass-burning furnaces are very heavy. Maybe he needed the minivan to haul his new biomass burner." But meanwhile anyone who wanted to be seen as young and fit would be bringing home, e.g., a new bathroom sink, in a handcart. That's an achievable Green change we can make just by agreeing that it's trendy. And it would do a lot to reverse local warming.

Other realistic approaches to the indisputable fact of local warming would work in similar ways. Land use regulations can favor conversions of property back to small farms, away from stack-and-pack apartment blocks. Every child deserves a room and a garden of per own. Most work can and should be done in the workers' homes, and no, no invasive camera technology is necessary, just digital text messaging is enough to allow communication and supervision. Most people need to go downtown only once a week, but can't we work up to only once a month?

A problem in public health and safety is that people seem often to have an unconscious set-point of "acceptable risk" that they try to maintain. When things they do are made safer, people do those things in riskier ways. When every car had seat belts, people demanded higher speed limits. Those who really want to reverse warming should probably bear this in mind. Better filters encourage people to feel less guilt about driving when they could walk. One way to offset this is to redirect the focus of campaigns away from "safety" to the benefits of the target behavior. Instead of talking about even local warming at all, we might want to talk about the benefits of walking for weight control and the convenience of removing electrical power grids from our lives.

"But 'warming' is part of another campaign," some people might say. Consider Elon Musk, the genius car designer and would-be Twitter renovator. One of those friends who had a project going on early this spring, then spent the summer in and out of hospitals, was (is! is! person is still alive!) a fan of his. "Battery cars work! I could build one! I want to buy a couple dozen battery-powered cars cheap in China and resell them here. We could buy that old convenience store and convert it to a battery charging station!" I read about solar-battery-powered cars in grade seven and wrote science fiction in which the cool guys converted a trendy sports car to solar battery power. For some Americans the idea of solar vehicles is a self-seller. When it's not, the major point of doubt is "Could all those batteries be charged by solar power alone?" From my point of view, it seems as if Musk's main communication challenge now is (1) being sure he actually has a workable plan to charge all those batteries, and (2) convincing my neighbors.

From Musk's point of view, it's obviously product-supportive if people believe that some version of some "global climate change" theory is true. But that's a dangerous marketing ploy; people who believed that Florida was going to be underwater in 2010, the way Al Gore said, have cooled to the point of frost on both "global warming" and Al Gore.

I'd suggest to Musk and company that they consider the set-point model and then think about ways to market solar-powered cars that do not depend on theories of global climate change. Plenty of facts can be made to support the product:

* Battery-powered cars are new, youthful, trendy, and they can be made cute. (The ones I've seen bordered on being fubsy. For a car I prefer the small-and-efficient kind of cuteness to the fubsy kind.)

* Battery-powered cars can be made waaay cheaper than gas-powered cars.

* Battery-powered cars could in theory be cheap to operate. Cover your garage, not even your house, in solar collectors, don't use a lot of electricity around the house, and stockpile charged-up batteries.

* Battery-powered cars could be made so hip the newspapers print the short list of celebrities waiting to buy one, the way the Post marketed the Prius in Washington twenty years ago.

* Battery-powered cars are as close as humankind has ever come to perpetual motion. The sun will eventually burn out but it's not likely to happen in our lifetimes.

But as far as warming is concerned...if the same number of people drive the same number of miles in battery-powered cars, that's still a lot of friction on pavement and heat reflected off glass and metal. The question for Musk thus becomes whether he wants to reverse confirmed local warming, or sell cars. If the former, he might do better to focus on the health benefits of walking and the improved efficiency of working from home. Battery-powered cars are a nifty notion but, in order to reverse the warming effect, they'll still need to be driven much less than gas-powered cars.

Morgan Griffith Visits the Flood Zone

U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith describes what was taking place just fifty miles away while, as usual, Gate City had rain:

"

A Wild Day From Wise to Washington

Serving as the U.S. Representative for Virginia’s Ninth Congressional District has meant putting a lot of miles on my car. Getting around the 29 jurisdictions in the district’s current boundaries as well as to Washington, D.C., requires frequent travel here and there.

Even so, the driving I did on July 28-29 was quite a lot for one day.

That legislative week in the House of Representatives began on Tuesday, July 26, and ended on Friday, July 29, and involved more than 30 votes on bills, resolutions, and amendments.

While I was in Washington, Southwest Virginia was again struck by heavy storms that caused substantial flooding. Just weeks after floodwaters swept through Buchanan County, the same disaster befell Dickenson and Wise Counties.

Serving in Congress requires choices, in how I vote and how I spend my time. As damage reports came in on Thursday, I decided that I needed to see the situation for myself. I try to avoid missing votes whenever possible, but the bills expected at the time on the floor Friday were not controversial and likely to pass by large margins. Being on the ground at the site of the floods was more important.

We often vote in the evening, but the Congressional Baseball Game for charity was taking place that night. So after votes concluded on Thursday afternoon, I skipped the game, packed up my car, and headed for Southwest Virginia. My staff coordinated with law enforcement to set up the visits.

I arrived in St. Paul to stay overnight around 12:30 am on Friday and woke up around 5:30 am to head to my first stop, Clintwood. There I met with Dickenson County officials and inspected the flood damage.

Following Clintwood, I visited flooded sites in the Towns of Pound, Wise, and Coeburn in Wise County to see how the storms had affected them, joined by county officials and Virginia House of Delegates Majority Leader Terry Kilgore.

At some locations, the waters had not yet receded. Roads and bridges had been washed away, The result of this damage for two neighborhoods in Dickenson County was to cut them off from the rest of the public road system. A ballfield in Coeburn had been covered by three to four feet of water.

Fortunately, no lives were lost, but recovery from the physical destruction will take time and require cooperation at all levels of government and with support from nonprofits, businesses, and individuals.

Just as I left Coeburn, I was notified that a controversial bill would be coming up later that day in the House of Representatives after all, thanks to some procedural trickery.

Earlier in the week, House Democrats had been negotiating between themselves on a package of bills that included a ban on some guns and funding for police departments. Negotiations had appeared to be at an impasse, so these bills were not scheduled for floor action. But overnight Thursday into Friday, a deal was reached so Democrats could proceed with a gun ban. Apparently, they could not agree on supporting the police, but they could find consensus on taking away some guns.

Typically, bills must be available for 72 hours before they can be considered on the floor. The Democrat majority evaded this requirement by passing a rule allowing for “same day authority” to bring up any legislation they wanted within one legislative day.

Knowing the vote would be close, I raced back to Washington from Wise County and after the six and a half-hour drive arrived just in time to vote no on the gun ban. It had been a long ride, but our Constitution, including the Second Amendment, demanded my support.

Ultimately, the House passed the gun ban by a vote of 217-213. If just a few more Democrats had joined the five who voted against the ban, or if the two Republicans who supported it had not, the measure would not have passed. But the narrow margin and strong opposition may have given the bill a “fever,” as we said in the House of Delegates: the bill was now sick and its prospects for survival doubtful. In this case, the Senate hopefully will not want to press forward with the gun ban.

It was a long and demanding day, but I am honored to serve the people of the Ninth District on any day, whether in Wise County or Washington.

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.

"

New Book Review: Recollections About Race

Title: Recollections About Race 

Author: Janis Leslie Evans

Date: 2021

Publisher: Jahmerican Press

Length: 104 pages

ISBN: 979-8-9851559-0-7 (hardcover) ISBN 979-8-9851559-1-4 (paperback) ISBN 979-8-9851559-2-1 (ebook)

Quote: "I’ve led a pretty uneventful and boring life as a mental health therapist...but my gut told me I had something important to say about the African American experience through relatable stories worth sharing at this moment in time."

Some insects bite through each other's outer shells, not in search of food, but apparently just for fun, while mating. Years ago I read a researcher's description of a specimen as a "minimally damaged female." At the time that seemed a good phrase to describe my experience with the dating game. Now, that's the phrase that popped into my head while reading Evans' Recollections About Race.

Evans is a minimally damaged Black female: middle-class, Jamaican-American, nice family background, successful at school and in her career, with memories of "race" stereotyping that seem like little things, but they do add up. Boys picked fights on the street, but several White boys started a fight with one of her friends while he was with her. Newspaper photographs aren't usually high quality, but the picture of her the hometown newspaper ran reduced her dark face to a shadow. A teacher gave her a low grade for the term despite her higher grades on individual projects because he said she'd never succeed--interesting that she classified this as race rather than gender prejudice; she knew the man, but her basis for classifying his prejudice is not clear to me as a reader. She got into a decent university, made friends, joined a church, found a job, in Washington where she was in the majority "race" category. Nevertheless, she felt insecure. Sharing her memories, being part of a community, and demonstrating support for causes her community supported, helped her heal her emotions.

I have an unusual personality profile, balanced  just in between FP and TJ. I read this book with the FP side of my brain, mentally going "Really!" and "Say what?" and "Oh, that wretch!" and "When guys start fighting dirty, four against one, the Bible only actually prescribes a punishment for women who jump in grabbing their private parts. It says nothing about kneecaps." Talking about this kind of thing can be a bonding experience. Then I came online, the Twitter page I wanted to read was Scott Adams', and I saw a cartoon where one of the co-workers Dilbert seldom talks to was fawning on somebody higher up the hierarchy. "All of your stories made the same point. Thank you for this wonderful gift," etc., and Wally said, "Is he serious?" Ouch. I can relate to Wally's impatience too; in real life people give  nonverbal cues to tell us whether they're interested in the little stories that converge toward one point, or not.

So, other than the total TJ's who have no use for the process of bonding by sharing personal memories, who should not read this book, what types of readers should read it?

1. Black Americans who can relate to Evans' stories and use the questions she asks to open writing or discussion about their own "race" memories. Especially if they've been tempted to resent the stereotype that West Indians who are Black benefit from being perceived as "so different from other Black people, easier to work with, less embittered." Evans explains why this "lefthanded compliment" is perceived as a microaggression. 

2. Non-Black Americans who genuinely need to know why some things we do, sometimes without thinking about "race" in any conscious way, cause unintended pain. (The older I get, the more I realize what a trial it was for a certain distinguished academic, who was far from being my first Black (school) friend, to be my first Black (close) friend.) 

3. People who are stuck in any kind of hostile, bitter emotions, who can benefit from Evans' terse discussion of things that are likely to help. There's a worksheet. If the source of your hurt feelings is something other than "race," you can tweak the questions accordingly. It's a short worksheet, suitable for people who feel no need to spend months or years "processing" their hard feelings but want to move briskly on to thinking about, and doing, things that feel better.

Is this a Christian book? Well...it's a book by a Christian. It doesn't mention any specific religious belief or tradition on every page, but Evans does identify her church in the discussion of things that help. 

Back at Last

Quick status update...

So the Piece of Garbage, which I expected would have died by September 2020, plodded along in its nasty Window-10-infested way until mid-June 2022. Then it did die. 

Apart from that, I've been as well as anyone separated from the tools of per trade can be. There's a reason why the Bible says that, even if someone gets desperate enough to pawn the tools of his trade, of his own free will, you (the rich person who lends him money) must return the tools to him before the sun goes down. If he had sold his child to you as a slave, you could keep the child for up to seven years, until the official Jubilee when all Israelite slaves were automatically freed. Presumably the child would have better prospects as a temporary slave than as the child of a parent as desperate as that one, anyway. But the tools of a working person's trade could not be separated from the person overnight. Clearer thinking went into this than you might initially have imagined.

Anyway the wonderful wizards of Compuworld found me a better laptop. Improving on the POG did not take a great deal of time or money. Unfortunately the POG tried to take all of my Internet passwords with it as it went, and it's taking some trouble to recover those. 

I still have a Professional Bad Neighbor. 

Serena's three lovely kittens, Biro, Crayola, and Pastel, are still living with us. Serena has expressed no interest in finding homes for them. They are social cats who hunt as a team, but...Serena has a long history of giving birth to mixed litters of normal and oversized kittens, and rejecting the oversized kittens. If she hadn't wanted the little one, last spring, to be reared indoors, she probably wouldn't have let me persuade her and Silver to nurse the three oversized ones. So I've finally learned why. They are cute as all-get-out and even seem healthy, with high tolerance to glyphosate poisoning, but they seem to have inherited their father's intellectual powers. Serena doesn't bring him home. The kittens are friendly, playful and sometimes cuddly, but don't seem to have learned their names or to understand other words. They're none too bright at picking up cues given them by Serena, Silver, or old Sommersburr, either. They don't even pick up survival messages from the world, such as that butterflies aren't good to eat. 

Old Sommersburr positively loves these kittens. Last night, as he came meowing up to the gate, Biro was the first to bound out and sniff noses with him. Normal tomcats don't usually like kittens. Though dumped out by someone who didn't appreciate him, Sommersburr is a social cat, probably a cousin to these kittens. 

We have new cardinals. The male seems to be an early spring chick, son of the male we lost early in the spring. The phoebe was starting to lay claim to the orchard when the male cardinal popped up flashing his bright new feathers and calling "Peep! Peep! Peep!" He has yet to decide whether his grown-up call will sound like "Cheer! Cheer! Cheer!" or "Pretty, pretty, pretty" or "Birdy, birdy, birdy" or something else. Each male cardinal likes to have a different "word" he repeats three times, though many of them sound alike to humans. Other birds (and cats and dogs) can hear some high notes in a bird's warbling that humans miss, so different cardinals' "Cheer" probably sound like different words to them.

Johnny Wren is still here; he tried building some nests the kittens could knock down. I kept one of them, not solid enough for use, as a souvenir. Male wrens do this, apparently to demonstrate to female wrens a message like "See, I want to help, and I have lots of energy. I can't help being an idiot. I need you to show me how to build a nest." Once Jenny Wren has built a reasonable nest, Johnny will sit on the eggs and fetch food for the young, suggesting that he does have a brain after all. Building impossible "dummy nests" is merely an act he does to activate Jenny's protective instincts. 

And, despite the Professional Bad Neighbor's efforts to destroy Mother's flowers, including the gorgeous orange jewelweed that I try to let fill a good half of the not-a-lawn, we still have Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds. When there were more jewelweed flowers, last summer, we had a regular flock of them. 

What made Mother love jewelweed so? Jewelweed is a tall, rather pretty native plant in the touch-me-not family. Different species' orange or yellow flowers are as bright as jewels, and are an encouraging shape for hummingbirds. Mother liked flowers and hummingbirds but also her paper-white English skin was unreasonably sensitive to poison ivy, and jewelweed is sometimes also called "soapweed" because the sap will cut oil like a weak solution of soap, so Mother hoped it would protect her from poison ivy in the garden. Considering that she had nasty-looking rashes on both wrists for a month or so, most of the summers, the fact that she thought washing her hands with crushed jewelweed helped is alarming. I keep the jewelweed in memory of Mother, in case any of her pure-White relatives visits, and because I am partial to the hummingbirds.

The Professional Bad Neighbor has sneaked into the not-a-lawn and sprayed the jewelweed at least twice, such that walking past it caused a nasty-looking rash to form on my arm. This gave me some more information. I know now why an innocent piece of old wood caused such a nasty-looking rash on my arms, which tan enough that the scars are still prominent, and legs, which tan less. And I have some new insight into how it was possible for Grandma Bonnie Peters to have had that rash she had in 2006, when everyone expected her to lose her left leg, and for the rest of her life her left leg was hardly half the size of her right leg. She walked without a limp throughout the ordeal, but an ordeal is what it was for all who knew her. That rash baffled medical science. It was ugly, and it stank, and because it was so mysterious GBP had a horrible habit of pulling down her socks and showing it to anyone who was careless enough to ask about her health. It was displayed, documented, and remembered from Florida to Maryland and at many points between. It was a frightening rash. It looked remarkably like the rash on the young man's chest in that document showing the effects of glyphosate poisoning at epa.gov, which would explain why it responded so slowly to treatment for either bacterial or fungal infection. 

GBP lived and walked for another fifteen years. There is still enough jewelweed to supply at least some of the hummingbirds. There is a special place where those who "help" the Professional Bad Neighbor with the "little pranks" he is losing the special ability to do, this year, will spend their eternity.

So many times different people have said to me, "Well! If I knew someone had done that to me or my animals, he wouldn't have one cow left alive." One cow is what the Professional Bad Neighbor has. I am mentioning this expressly for the benefit of those people. Cattle pastured near the Cat Sanctuary are being boarded for a much nicer person. Personally, as much as I might enjoy sharing a bit of kerosene with the Professional Bad Neighbor if he happened to be on fire, I wouldn't take my revenge on a man out of some innocent animal. If you have a grievance with a man, which I'm sure hundreds of people do with the Professional Bad Neighbor, you take it out of him. Not his wife, not his children, certainly not animals and certainly not the land. This web site officially recommends lawsuits, with which members of this web site will help. If one lawyer is compromised, we can help find another. The man needs to be locked up with a metal key, and the key melted down. The animals have done nobody any harm.

Book Review: The Sigsbee Deep

Title: The Sigsbee Deep

Author: Richard J. Miller

Date: 2021

Publisher: my copy is self-published

ISBN: my copy shows none

Length: 162 e-pages

Quote: “The Sigsbee Deep is over fourteen thousand feet, straight down. First, there is the corona, an area of two to three thousand feet, then the falloff into the Deep itself—it might as well be bottomless.”

That’s what the characters in this novel are facing in a hypothetical 2052 where Al Gore’s dystopian fantasies from the 1990s are finally starting to become real.

It’s science fiction, of course. Hard science, which is why so many people in an online book review network felt unqualified to review this book. At least I’ve read enough science to tell you that I’m not really qualified to review this book.

The geology is admittedly weak, postulating a new seismic fault that produces a series of earthquakes in Florida. In the hypothetical 2040s most of the coastal cities are wiped off the map, though low-lying cities near the coast, including Washington and St. Petersburg, Florida, are still above water. Early in the novel a big earthquake separates St. Petersburg from Tampa, then Pinellas Park from St. Petersburg.

(Pinellas Park is the suburb of St. Pete where the relatives I call “Aunt Dotty and Uncle Pete” lived, and is the part of Florida of which I have clear, detailed memories. In hypothetical 2052 some buildings have apparently survived but, improbably, the little tract houses of which the suburb-town mostly consists have been re-greened back into farms where people can raise enough crops to live on. Presumably the destruction of towns on the other side of Florida has kept people from pouring into increasingly shabby tract houses as the retirees have grown old and died. On a map of the Gulf Coast Pinellas Park can be described as sitting on a tiny “Pinellas Peninsula,” a little crook of land at the south end of the Tampa Bay; if separated from the main peninsula that is Florida, this mini-peninsula would become the sort of tiny island that could easily slide all the way down into the ocean, as, in this novel, it’s doing.)

The biology is unadmittedly even weaker: In an improbably re-greened suburb-town in central Florida, “global climate change” is as real as the local warming effect feels to people who live there, sea levels have risen, that’s what’s altering the shape of the ocean floor, but people are raising corn and unable to get coffee. If Florida had warmed up that much, coffee would probably grow better than corn...and the people struggling to get off their island before it sinks would be more malnourished for that reason.(The giant fish on the cover is an exaggeration of the concept; according to the text the mutant fish called Krake gape only three feet wide, but they’re big enough to eat humans and attack boats, like sharks, in hope of dislodging humans.)

The psychology is hopeless: The protagonists are multiracial, their antagonist is a White racist straight out of 1952, the protagonists have never done any shooting, the antagonist (true to stereotype) shoots constantly, yet when things reach that point the old Hollywood cliché kicks in and zaps the baddie’s well-practiced marksmanship. Good luck to anyone seriously counting on that effect to win any sort of fight or contest. David killed Goliath, but not the second or third time he’d ever taken a good look at a slingshot.

But good science fiction can use ideas more scientifically unsound than those, if it’s well written fiction (which The Sigsbee Deep is, reasonably) and if the science on which the story is based is not geology, biology, or psychology. Often stories like that focus on astrophysics—“space operas,” if they’re bad fiction; The Sigsbee Deep ventures into more debatable territory by focussing on mechanical science. Mays Jackson’s ability to reunite himself and his children with their mother depends on his ability to salvage junk from a conveniently located motor vehicle graveyard and build a working solar-powered submarine.

So it’s real, hard-core, Jules Verne type science fiction. What makes Jules Verne great is not that his prose style is extraordinary; it’s clear and readable, in English translation or in the original French, but nobody raves over his ability to turn a phrase. It’s not that his characterizations are full of brilliant insights; his characters range from stereotypes to stick figures. It’s that his speculative engineering read well enough to interest real engineers in building the gadgets about which Verne fantasized, and, with some tweaking and fine-tuning, several of them work.

The Sigsbee Deep begs to be read by real engineers and tested, so that, if people do really need to evacuate any island fast, for any reason, they could have the option of building solar-powered submarines. With or without spikes to kill attacking sharks.

Meanwhile, since family problems aren’t the topic of the story, we get a lovely, Little House on the Prairie-like picture of a faithful husband and two hardworking, uncomplaining, tantrum-free teenagers. And, as a special treat for baby-boomers, the third and fourth generations after us are able to bond by laughing at, but dancing along with, an improbably preserved recording of Elvis Presley’s “All Shook Up.”

Like many good science fiction stories this one’s plot boils down to a male fantasy of singlehandedly saving at least the part of the planet the hero cares about from super-dangers, and, if the science is sound, nobody minds. So I can’t judge this novel. All I can say is that I’d like to find out about the science in this fiction.

Pre-Tortie Tuesday Post: Training Your Human to Serve Water

It's not, technically, Tuesday yet. Neither is Serena, technically, a Tortie, though Tortie Tuesday has traditionally been for calico cats (mostly white with black or gray and orange or buff patches) as well as the tortoiseshell kind (mostly black or gray with orange or buff and white patches). As regular readers know, Serena was born knowing that rules are made for the convenience of Queen Cats, not vice versa.

Like many cats Serena doesn't really like having other cats get too close to Her Human. Ownership of a human is a status symbol for cats. Serena is, however, a gracious Queen Cat who has been known to insist that Her Human feed her cat friends--first, as befitting guests invited by the Queen! So I think we can extrapolate from this behavior that, if Serena had the sort of brain that thinks about cats Out There whom she's never met, she would graciously share with them what she has learned about managing her household. 

That's the way the Cat Sanctuary Interview posts have been written. Cats and other animals don't speak English, nor do I write these things while drunk enough to imagine that they do. I think rationally and soberly about what the animals' observed behavior says, and translate that into an interview format, thusly:

PK: Cats, even in the cool green Blue Ridge Mountains, how has the weather been lately?

Serena: Sweltering. Energy-zapping. Nights can be cool, even chilly, but once the sun is visible above the mountains, nobody feels like doing much of anything. 

PK: How do you cats cope?

Serena: Well, we are desert creatures, built to survive hot temperatures. We don't expect ourselves to do much of anything when the weather is hot and steamy. We find a patch of sand that's not too hot and lie down on it till the temperature gets back to a reasonable range. But, of course, we can cool ourselves a bit by sipping cool water.

PK: How much water do cats need?

Serena: Water is not as much of a nutritional need for cats as it is for dogs and humans. We're built to survive on very small amounts of water if we have to. The water content of fresh meat is enough to keep most cats going. 

PK: So why do you insist that I share bottles of water with you on days when it's not even hot?

Serena: We didn't always. You used to drink water from the same spring that feeds the spring branch where we can go, or else from the town water supply where they leave the chlorine in. Then you and your friends made that deal with the water bottlers and you started drinking Pure Life and Deer Park bottled water. We like Pure Life and Deer Park water.

PK: One better than the other?

Serena: Whichever is cooler. 

PK: I prefer Deer Park myself. It's probably a matter of where people grow up, which kinds of minerals are naturally found in the water they're accustomed to drinking. Dasani is just slightly salty, which I don't like at all, but people from California love it. Pure Life is just slightly bitter. To me Deer Park tastes right. When I was younger the trendy thing to drink was Perrier water from France. Apparently most of the water out there tastes even worse. A lot of Americans thought Perrier tasted awful. Those of us who wanted to be trendy could stand to drink it...but I used to look for some nice cold tap water to chase the taste! 

Serena: We cats aren't partial to Dasani or Perrier water either but we do like a sip of your Pure Life and Deer Park, when you fetch a cool bottle out of the cellar. 

PK: Even in cool weather. I understood your ordering cool water in hot weather last summer, but this year you started the same routine in April, when the temperature was only about 60 or 65 degrees Fahrenheit.

Serena: Well, the kittens had to learn how to drink water, of course. And it didn't hurt for them to learn that I have the right to order humans to fetch water for us. 

PK: And so, any time after midday when you cats see me step onto the porch or into the yard...

Serena: Of course, we send you to fetch water!

PK: There are those who think you cats are spoiled. Some alert readers might suggest setting up a weighted water jug in a dish...taking a large jug with a small hole at the bottom, so that water flows out into the dish just enough to equalize the pressure. When animals drink water because they need a lot of water in their diet, this is a labor-saving device for humans.

Serena: That kind of thing probably saves some animals' lives. We wouldn't use it. For us sharing your water is more of a family bonding experience. It's like the way Silver and Sommersburr and I tried to make sure you had your turn to baby-sit the kittens, every day, while they were little, even if you didn't always take that turn. 

PK: Some alert readers may say, "Sommersburr? Don't tell me that cat is still alive?" 

Serena: Very much. He may outlive his other human. He's had trouble with worms and mites, and with other cats clawing at what's left of his ears, but he is an old survivor. He's had some trouble chewing dry food, lately. He'd be happier if your readers sent him more of those little cans of wet food. But he's a social cat who likes kittens. He's enjoyed baby-sitting my kittens, this spring, lying around and twitching his tail for them to chase. And he and Silver are still very much a couple.

PK: Some readers don't believe there can be cats like you. Everyone knows that cats get together just long enough to mate, and then forget about each other. 

Serena: Social cats are a rare and special minority and the best thing about it is that we're not a "breed" humans can buy. We have to be found, when and where we come to exist--sometimes in alleys, sometimes in animal shelters. 

PK: It's hard to tell whether shelter animals are social or not, but we do know that you cats are part of an amazing social cat tribe whose base is in Kingsport, Tennessee, and that some of your relatives have passed through the Sullivan County animal shelter. With that in mind, here are some adorable adoptable cat pictures:

Zipcode 10101: Ladybird from Yonkers is part of a family of four kittens who reportedly think a small dog is their Daddy. The shelter staff insist she must be adopted with one of her sisters (not the one behind her in the picture) with a strong unstated suggestion that they'd really rather you took all four kittens and the dog. Ladybird's web page is at https://www.petfinder.com/cat/ladybird-55890919/ny/new-york/anjellicle-cats-rescue-ny488/ .

Zipcode 20202: Zion from D.C. is "in a foster home." Somebody would really rather keep this kitten. Somebody says she's the snuggliest kitten in the litter. As we know, sometimes this means that a kitten is just born to be a snugglebunny, sometimes that it's bonded with one person, and sometimes that it has medical problems, but the shelter and foster human think there's hope for the best. Zion (and possibly littermates) can be reached at https://www.petfinder.com/cat/zion-55886359/dc/washington/humane-rescue-alliance-foster-homes-dc03/ .

Zipcode 30303: Mindy from Atlanta comes with a brother Mork. They've been photographed separately and given separate web pages with a strong suggestion that they be adopted together. Meet Mindy at https://www.petfinder.com/cat/mindy-55760967/ga/atlanta/fulton-county-animal-services-ga217/ .

Bonus: Zipcode 37662 is the part of Kingsport, Tennessee, where Black Magic and Patchnose were found. Magic was thrust upon a friend of mine by children pleading that "If you don't take her, our parents will put her in a shelter!" Patchnose was found nursing an abnormally friendly son in a den she shared with an abnormally loyal and supportive tomcat in an alley. Unwanted cats from the zipcode 37662, which used to be an upscale section of town, are taken to a shelter ten miles away, in Blountville, where some other members of the social cat clan were found rearing kittens as communally as they could--when the cats were released from their cages at night, the two mother cats would snuggle and nurse each other's babies. It was a news item. Even social cats aren't always that determined to share the experiences of parenting (or hunting), but if it's going to happen again, this is a place where it's likely to happen. The Blountville shelter currently has about half a dozen adoptable kittens. This little fellow is the only one who photographed at all well, but that doesn't mean the others aren't cute; they're black, or mostly black, and therefore hard to photograph well. 

(PK: Serena, are we looking for homes for Cat Sanctuary kittens?)

Serena: Not yet, anyway. If I ever feel that they need homes of their own I'll let you know.)

Book Review: Hekate's Tea

(Not everybody's cup of tea...)

Title: Hekate’s Tea

Author: Anthony Ciulla

Date: 2021

Publisher: Amazon Kindle

ASIN:  B09SCYXXL1

Length: 188 e-pages

Illustrations: color pictures

Quote: “I didn’t know what happened or how it happened, but I was teleporting...I JUST DID IT TWICE!”

“Young adult, noir” doesn’t even come close. If you’re looking for a book to feed into a biochemical cycle of angst, seek no further. 

Only well into the story does Hellana Hoggelmaier explain that she is a German teenager who uses English as a second language. There are clues: if she were American the angst would probably start with her name, but in Germany her friends don't seem to blink at calling her Hell.

The story begins with little Hell sharing fantasy adventure stories with her beloved father, before his murder. Mourning melodramatically, she considers suicide as a way to be with her father again, but stays alive for the sake of her mother, who does seem a bit shellshocked, or perhaps she’s taking drugs to help her cope with the grief. Then the bookseller, who’s always been her and her father’s friend, hands her a book about the Greek goddess Hekate, another netherworld goddess sometimes considered to embody the same concept as Mother Holda or Hölle. From the book flutters a fragrant dry leaf that’s been pressed between pages at a point where the text promises that “who drinks the tea, a goddess will be.” Now suffering from a broken heart as well as grief, Hell tells herself that if the leaf is poison at least it’ll put her out of her misery.

(Auntly Interruption: The Aunts’ Union requires me to mention, although I’m quite sure The Nephews already know, that most natural toxins are more likely to add to people’s misery than put them out of it. Very few plants are deadly. Many plants are indigestible.)

Hell drinks the tea, and right away she starts seeing visions of Hekate, who calls her “my lovely” and encourages her to use the new powers Hekate has give her, but gives her little guidance as to what those powers are or how to use them. Even the bookseller, Mrs. Freeman, who seems to have a similar relationship with a stronger supernatural being, can’t tell her much except that her relationship with Hekate is private; Mrs. Freeman doesn’t want to know. So, on her first adventure, Hell takes delicious revenge on her ex and a couple of street bullies, all at once. Hekate seems to be encouraging her at first. Then Hell finds out that Hekate’s power feeds on human suffering and, because Hell not only used her power but used it selfishly, now Hell’s mother has to die and suffer in you-know-where, the theological concept, where the mother who called her baby Hell is tormented by a demon in the shape of a giant baby. Hell doesn’t have much of a comment on this image. Her immediate concern is to use the power to teleport her mother to the more pleasant afterlife where Mother and Father can be together, watching their daughter careen through the rest of her mortal life with helpless love. Hekate seems to understand. Hell’s punishment for this act of love is intense but short-lived.

Hekate spurs her on, sending her back to the bookseller, who keeps giving her books about large-scale human suffering. (After all, Hell read Harry Potter and Twilight long ago.) Each book rouses Hell to an adolescent energy surge of fierce compassion, but what does a teenager know about using fierce compassion? Hell can snap herself right into the body of a slave trafficker and burst out, leaving him in a gory mess, or stay in the body of a doctor doing a ritual child mutilation and make him mutilate himself, but how much does that accomplish? Forced to leave her next lover lest using Hekate’s power destroy her too, Hell instead uses enough power to destroy one of the slaves she’s managed to rescue. (She wasn’t in love with him, but in a vague, child-of-a-broken-home sort of way she loved his relationship with his wife.) Moving on to bigger targets, Hell bashes her way to the current dictator of North Korea, supernaturally slapping him around enough to make him carry out a few reforms.

But she’s failed to maintain a low profile during her adventure. Before she’s even old enough to buy a jug of wine, legally, in the United States, Hell finds out who murdered her father. Yes, because he was another servant of Hekate. So was a grandmother she never knew. And now Hekate’s enemies are after her, and their powers are a match for hers, and there are more of them.

In short, Hell’s life is...well...you-know-what. Her fantasy adventure seems like a nightmare and ends with a real Perils-of-Pauline cliffhanger. (Yes, a sequel is in the works.) The more anxious kind of Christians can easily read this novel as a story of how the Evil Principle exploits a teenager’s idealism to enmesh her in eternal torment. From the writer’s Twitter page I wouldn’t think that was his intention, but who knows.

A part of me enjoyed this book’s energy and audacity. The e-book version I received looked like a draft that may have been corrected by the publisher. It’s written in good English, in a very simple, direct, translatable style. (Though written in Germany, it's still waiting to be translated into German.) Almost every action is summarized in one sentence, as are the movements of people while they’re making conversation. Conversations read almost like stage directions. Hell narrates her story in the artless way teenagers write, when they have something to write about.

“

Hekate elegantly crossed her legs and shifted in her chair:

“Yes. These are the same men. What do you think should happen to them?”

With no hesitation, I yelled:

“They should be turned into the maggots that they are and then fed to a dog!”

Hekate laughed and stood up with me: 

“A wonderful solution to this problem, my dear. Let’s go, I will show you how.”

Instantly, we were back in the alley...

“

It’s not an easy story to fall asleep over. And the maggot episode made me cackle out loud, though the men seem to be turned into awfully large maggots. 

Some booksellers and librarians seem to be in the confidence of readers who live with high levels of angst, grief, and guilt, who specifically ask for books that will make them cry. Hekate’s Tea is for them if any book is.

And in the end, it made me want to cry—old as I am, and laugh at the crazy teen energy and simplistic teen solutions as I did. My guess is that Hell will survive, probably at the expense of another friend or friends, just because—“You CAN’T end a book for teenagers this way! There HAVE TO be sequels—plural! I want to see this character grow in the direction of not just ‘helling around’ but picking a cause and actually working for it.”