To hell with it.

  I didn't write anything Tuesday for no real good reason. I don't feel bad about it, though, as I had nothing to write about. I did write about the Headhunters (Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rogers, Little Walter, and Baby Face LeRoy) and how they helped influence the development of electric Chicago blues. Plus, there's a nifty performance of Jimmy Rogers from back in the '90s. Dig it.

 And that's probably all the writing I'm going to do today. I did a nifty explanation of what this whole "debt ceiling" business was about, or tried to best I could. Check it out.

Nah, I'm not even going to bother.

  I'm going to go ahead and get something down. I plumb forgot Thursday, didn't think about it until 4 a.m. Friday morning, and was too lazy to do anything about it. I had tried to remember, honest.

 I didn't even try to fill in Friday. Had a doctor's appointment and ran some errands in Tupelo, so by the time I got home, all I wanted to do was nap. I did know, I just didn't care. I got a really sharp piece on the News about the Mississippi Legislature coming up with a medical cannabis bill that's actually better, best I can tell, than what Initiative 65 would've given us. The rest of the week is pretty decent, too, despite having plenty of Actual Paying Work to do.

 I've been putting some serious thought into making a major change. Specifically, cutting this bullshit out. I might get one or two good pieces out of this shit a month, and the rest is just me trying to fill space. It's no fun and discouraging. I started this just to get back into fighting shape and hopefully make some interesting boil out of it. That hasn't happened.

 So, what I might do is go ahead and keep an MWF-plus-weekend schedule for The News. The music stuff will stay on Tumblr just because it's easier to plug in music or videos and is easier to retweet. Blogger is pretty rickety and I don't believe it'll ever get much better. It seems like it's an afterthought that isn't irritating enough for Google to dump like they did Google Plus.

 Anyway. I'll kick it around but I'm pretty much settled on it. Like I said, not only is it rarely any fun, most of the time it just makes me feel worse. I don't see the point in all that.

 Just got back from Otis' late afternoon walk. He never wants to go far - down to the curve, up to the Old Place, or just around the property - but he wants to keep going out. He's been having a worse time getting around, full-on balance issues. And they're worst after dark. Getting old is a drag but watching your dog getting old is much, much worse.

 Watching a Cinematic Excrement episode on "Mommie Dearest." I've never seen it, but the Smeghead (that's what he calls himself) is talking about how perception can differ, particularly when it comes to abuse in a family. Momma can completely ignore the abuse she suffered from Daddy and Poppaw and then in the next breath tell one of the most horrible stories you ever heard about some of the shit my father pulled. I'm not condemning nor complaining, it is just an interesting stroke to ponder, I think. The mind plays tricks on you, sure, but not near to the amount you play tricks on it.

 I don't cotton much to child abuse. I think corporal punishment is child abuse. I think yelling at your kid is child abuse. I think preventing them from something they enjoy for an extended period of time to punish them is child abuse. I don't have kids and that's one of the reasons why. I do not understand how even what I consider proper parents do it, not going to lie. Not strangling my dog because he spends an hour-and-forty-five minute going inside and out at 3 a.m. So, yeah, forgive me if I judge and take it with a grain of salt.

Programming note.

  I have some Actual Paying Work to do tonight, so this is going to be short. It's an interesting topic, on dram shop laws, and I'll let you look that up for yourself. Considering how infertile my brain is as often as not, I'm thinking about stopping this.

 That is, stop writing Gibberish every Tuesday, Thursday, & Saturday. Half the time I forget about it because most of the time I have no interesting ideas. I'd still write something from time to time when I had something to write about, but I have to wonder if trying to squeeze toothpaste from an empty tube is doing me any good.

 I'm going to think on it. I wonder if I've run this experiment into the ground. The News is still doing what it needs to do for me, but there's just no way I can turn that into anything but a hobby. How all those Substack folks can do what they do and live with themselves, I don't know.

 Anyway, it might just be my blues talking. Once Fall comes around or the pandemic breaks, maybe I'll be in a better, more productive mood. Time to get to work. I'm drifting and if I'm going to drift, I'm going to get paid for it.

I'm not going to even pretend, man.

  I suppose I should put something down. I plumb forgot Thursday and didn't think about it until around 3 a.m., and by the time I got good and woken up, I just wasn't feeling it. Nobody cares, though, we all know that. I regularly get a "like" at the WordPress site from one guy, but I'm pretty sure that's a bot. There's no way he could read all that as quickly as it says.

 Speaking of which, we should get that out of the way. Monday was about Joe Biden's attempts to raise taxes on the wealthy; meaning, probably not you so calm down. We looked into the recall attempt against California governor Gavin Newsom Wednesday and why it was a waste of time. Friday was a run-down of the "Justice for J6" rally that was supposed to go down in Washington, D.C., today yet turned out to be a humorous bust.

 I haven't heard of anything similar happening anywhere in the rest of the country but the D.C. to-do drew something like 400 people, more or less. The running gag is the protestors were outnumbered by the press and police, and that probably wasn't far from the truth. I imagine there are a couple of reasons for this. For one, this didn't have the money behind it the Great American Temper Tantrum had. Lots of folks spent lots of money to get people to Washington on that day and that was nowhere to be seen today.

 Plus, I imagine the increased police presence had something to do with it. There was no fooling around by the fuzz today. They were thick on the ground and loaded for bear. In any event, this whole thing had deflated in on itself by the time this week came around, with so-called organizers trying to keep protestors from raising too much hell or from showing up at all.

 Running commentary on Twitter from the wingnuts was that the thing was a joke because it was mostly press and/or fuzz instead of Real Americans, which really isn't a ringing endorsement for that bunch. But that whole scene has been screwy from day one. Some are trying to say that this represents a dwindling of Trump's influence on the GOP. I don't know if that's so. By the time the election came around, he'd pissed away most of his support among the non-faithful.

 I really think the vast bulk of never-Trump GOP had no problem with his actual policies so much as the vulgar way he went about them. For the most part, they were ranch standard Republican policies. Fewer taxes on the rich, less oversight for corporations, more restrictions on women's bodily autonomy, more emphasis given to religious extremism, none of that is all that weird. What were his babies - like the disaster economic dealings with China and him getting rooked by North Korea - weren't really enough to make them lose hope but they certainly didn't help after he salted the Earth.

 He still has the true blue and I doubt anything will shake them too much. That's sort of the definition of a fanatic, a lack of clear thinking when it comes to their precious. How is this going to play out for 2022 or 2024? I don't know and anyone who says they do is full of shit as a Christmas goose.

 So there's that there then. If something comes up, I'll come back but don't count on it. It's just one of those days.

Yeah, well.

  I didn't completely forget to write anything yesterday. I thought about it around 3 a.m. this morning. That has to count for something, right?

 I'm in a deep funk, so I doubt I'll even bother to catch up. Maybe, if I get a chance to load up, but right now all I want to do is go back to sleep. After breakfast, I might.

Every day is like survival.

  I let time slip up on me. It's twenty after eleven and I'm not going to bust my ass about making the deadline. We'll see how it goes.

  I finished Jonathan Howard's After The End of the World, the second book in the Lovecraft & Carter series. Long story short, an ancestor of H.P. Lovecraft and one of Randolph Carter team up to deal with the gibbering horrors from the dawn of time. He's a detective and she owns a bookstore. Together, they fight Deep Ones.

 It's not bad. Actually, it's pretty good. First time in a while that I've dealt with an actual page-turner. It does some decent stuff with Lovecraftian horror but the characters and pacing make it worth the effort. Howard also writes the Johannes Cabal: Necromancer books and they're fun, too. Anything where the main character is introduced by storming Hell and demanding the Devil quit screwing with him can't be bad. In any event, check 'em both out.

 I still don't care for multi-book stories, but I read the first book and got hooked before I knew what was what. I don't know what I've going to read next, though. I'm in one of those moods where my brain feels damp and nothing brings joy. I wish I knew what to do about that.

 Ain't going to lie, I sort of hoped that access to regular smoke would make things fall into place, but that ain't how life works. Especially my life. I don't think people really appreciate how untethered from reality I feel, even the people that know me well enough to know that my wiring's all messed up.

 But what are you going to do, and anyway, no one wants to hear all of that nonsense. I haven't even been able to nail down a movie worth watching, so I'm making my way through the Cinematic Titanic to-dos on the Shout Factory website. I think they're my favorite of the MST3K offshoots. They're not as condescending as Rifftrax can be, there's just more fun to it. I say it's due to Trace Beaulieu. He strikes me as a guy that always has a good time.

 Beyond that, I don't know. I need to figure out another 140 words or so. Gavin Newsome won his recall, but not being tied into California politics more than I absolutely need to be, I think that probably has more to do with Larry Elder's crazy ass more than anything. People forget the last time they tried this goofy shit, it was to put Arnold Schwarzenegger in the statehouse. Never underestimate the desire for Americans to give celebrities political power. We will climb a tree to do that, and frankly, a B-lister radio nutcase ain't quite it.

 Okay, then. By the time I finish this nonsense, I should be able to get the forty words I need. I may watch another Cinematic Titantic or read a bit or hell, I don't know. Most of the time it feels like all I do is pass the time, but it's even worse these days.

 Ah, well. Nothing lasts forever.

That's the news.

 My cousin's youngest boy plays for the Duke Blue Devils football team. He plays on the special teams and last night's 45-17 stomping of the North Carolina A&T Aggies was his first game. It was also Duke's first win, bringing their record to 1-1. I ain't sayin' that's because of Little Cousin being in the game, I'm just saying.

 Anyhow, his birthday is in November and he'11 be 18 years old. That means he wasn't born when the Twin Towers went down. I think his older sister might've been a baby, & she's at Ole Miss. His oldest brother's finishing up at Mississippi State this year and he was building bridges back then. That's another story, though.

 Twitter has been filled with 9/11 thoughts today. It's not only the anniversary, that's wild enough. It's the twentieth anniversary, and the reason I mentioned my cousin's kids is that it's been 20 years since that morning, and that is a big deal. Where were you when they fell? If you were old enough to remember, you know where you were.

 I was two hours into my shift in the kitchen at the Grill in Athens, GA. I had just recently come back to working there almost exclusively, having just quit my music editor's gig at Flagpole. I was still writing but was rapidly losing interest/hope/enthusiasm for making that lifelong goal a reality. I was also dealing with a broken heart and a bruised ego, but that's another story.

 We had a CD player in the kitchen and I was playing probably AC\DC or the Beat Farmers when the manager came up. Turn on the news, he said, and we listened as the second tower went down. I don't remember if anyone came in apart from the street people. It was like a holiday when the kids were gone, Downtown was so empty. We were all glued to the radio.

 Around 10 a.m. my brother came to work his wait shift. Listen to my heart, he said. Do what? But I listened and his heartbeat was... erratic. It's really hard to explain, but the beat was off, but there wasn't a recognizable pattern. [Girl he was dating] noted it this morning, and within 30 minutes, enough people had pointed out That Wasn't Right and he went to see a doctor.

 So that was my 9/11, spending all day worrying that my 23-year-old brother might have a heart problem. I really didn't give the goings-on in New York City until I'd heard back from him. For the record, there's a particular name for what it was, but it's not arrhythmia, and so long as he stays off the cocaine train, he's okay. Might be something to worry about when he's older, like my damaged heart valve, but it's okay.

 Anyway. I get home from work and realize, holy shit, the world changed today. I spent the evening watching the nonstop news, like most of the world, and I remember how curious I was when blame was laid on al Qaeda the next day and learned the name Osama bin Laden. I remember hearing everyone from German anarchists to homegrown dirtbags. It was a couple of days before the conspiracy theories about who was really involved and what really happened and why everything we saw on tv couldn't have happened.

 For the record, I think a group of 19 or so assholes hijacked a couple of planes. Two hit the World Trade Center, another hit the Pentagon, and a third was brought down in Pennsylvania. I'm not sold on that being either a case of the plane being shot down or brought down due to the actions of the passengers or a combination thereof.

 The internet is filled with how 9/11 changed people or how they were forced to change the way they made it through the world. This isn't that. My brother pointed out that something like this happened all the time in the Middle East or South America or somewhere that wasn't us so we didn't worry about it. I will say the reaction the U.S. government had and the steps they took helped push me even more to the left but I was going that way, anyway.

 It is a pivotal moment in American history, though, like when Kennedy was shot or the Challenger exploded. If you were there, you remember it. I don't think the death of either bin Laden or Saddam Hussein had the same impact, not really. I remember being more weirded out by the college kids partying, but as a friend pointed out, the boogeyman of their youth had been killed by the U.S. government and all was right with the world.

 I think what's stuck with me most about 9/11 was how quickly we got over it. Really, it's been a bloody shirt nationally for quite a while and the death of 3,000 people happens every two weeks in Mississippi because of COVID-19. You kids who were around or weren't paying attention really don't understand how the culture was and the press was. You were called objectively pro-terrorist if you disagreed with anything from the Bush Administration, even if it had nothing to do with national defense or terrorism.

 There were marches, huge marches in major cities and smaller ones in places like Athens, but they were basically ignored. The media was embarrassingly pro-war, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq. They gave Administration claims little or no push back much less scrutiny, and the Administration said some dumb shit. Columnists called protestors the fifth column and didn't admit those marchers were actually right until a decade later. Seriously. Andrew Sullivan, Conor Friedersdorf, S.E. Cupp; they all dropped the ball and they all try to pretend they didn't.

 And life on the internet? Well, social media wasn't as ubiquitous as it is now. You actually had to have a probably expensive computer and pay the phone/cable company for access, and even then, you might not have been plugged into politics. There were blogs and chat forums and message boards, though, and the same crazies you see now were flapping their word holes back then in much the same way. You just didn't know about it.

 There is so much more to it, like how it affected Muslim-Americans or people who looked sort of Muslim, and that was good enough. There was the realization that something significant had changed since the '60s since all the marching and protesting accomplished squat before it was all over, mainly because The Powers That Be didn't have to pay us any attention.

 There was no togetherness or unity. There was "us" and "them," and where you fell on that line seemed to change from day to day. Freedom fries and Old Europe. The only verified case of cancel culture happened when the Dixie Chicks barely escaped with their lives. For the only time in his life, Bill Mahar said something truly controversial and was punished enough that he never did it again. Every hiccup was the terrorists' second shot, be it a power outage on the East Coast due to a spilled Diet Coke or a mislaid backpack in front of the law library on campus. Why would a backpack be on a college campus, after all?

 To wrap that all together like some particularly depressing Christmas paper, there was the distinct possibility that the most powerful man in the world was a goddamn idiot being manipulated by some of the worst human beings in history. It was a weird, stupid, silly, scary time and if you were paying attention to national politics or the big-time press, nothing that's happened in the past five or so years is inexplicable. You just now started paying attention because everyone has a smartphone and computers are cheap nowadays.

 So, what did we learn from all this? Did we learn anything? Was there anything to learn? What was crazy then - the PATRIOT Act, taking your shoes off to fly, weaponized patriotism, etc. - is common nowadays and we probably won't go back. I don't know what to think about that. I don't think I'll ever know. 

 

 Do you? Anyhow, have a nice weekend.

Raised by the graves.

 I spent a good chunk of the day helping Momma clear out Bean Cemetary. It's an old, old cemetery up in the hills that hasn't been kept up. The current owner is letting us go in and clean it out, mainly because some of my grandfather's people are buried there.

 Frankly, outside of Peaceful Valley, I really don't care one way or another about cemeteries. There's some off-putting about the whole concept of "eternal rest" to me. The tombstone, the coffin, the whole nine yards. I'm dead, I don't care one way or another. If Momma's still around, I tell my brother, do what makes her happy. If she's not, do what's easiest on you.

 But the ones around here are never-ending sources of fascination. Back before the Civil War, the little community I live in was one of if not the biggest in Itawamba County. Had the railroad come on this side of the river rather than Fulton's, my life would have been slightly but significantly different. Y'all really don't grok how country I am and my roots are.

 There are a number of graveyards around here, most of them date back to the 1850s and most of them have been closed for decades. My father's buried in Bourland Cemetary and I've got a plot there for when I go. I don't think I've been back since I moved back home unless Momma needed me for something. I really can't deal with my father's grave still.

 This area's mostly forest and mostly owned by Weyerhauser, the lumber company. But back in the 1800s, communities would pop up here and there, five miles from each other but might as well be a world away. A landing on the Tombigbee would start doing business, bring in goods and send out products from the farm, and the communities would drift that away. Another landing would set up further up the river and the communities would shift again.

 Nothing's left of these little villages but the cemeteries. The oldest one at Bean is in the 1850s and the last one in 1987, which comes twenty years after the spouse had already been planted. I find these things endlessly fascinating. For every person that got their three-score-and-ten are infant burials. Wives who died in childbirth, so a husband might be flanked by the first and second.

 A lot of young people, and by young I mean 20s and 30s. A cut thumb might lead to gangrene or a case of diarrhea might strike you down. More people could play instruments then because if you wanted music you had to make it yourself. Most folks could read and write and do their numbers, but an eighth-grade education was probably as good as you'd ever get. Everyone had a Bible but probably no other books.

 As I said, my grandfather's grandfather's people came from that part of the Valley but his grandmother came from pretty much where I am now, so that's where we wound up. That branch anyway. Indeed, that aforementioned ancestor, John Anderson Bean, lived and died on the very hill I sit to watch the world go by today.

 30 years ago, Weyerhauser planted a bunch of softwood trees, and all that's grown up now. I barely recognize it when I used to know every inch of those muddy backroads. It's like coming to a whole new world that's just occasionally familiar, like returning from a trip to the past only to find the present has changed because you stepped on a butterfly or something. The world has Unfolded and I have to find my way around it again.

 We're basically cleaning this graveyard out for no other reason than it makes Momma happy. That's a good enough reason for me to do anything. She's big on family history and our links to the past. Every time she gets a chance to preserve it, she does so. She's outlived most of her life and this brings her some peace at the end of her three-score-and-ten.

 Again, that's as good enough a reason for me.

Just get it out there, son, just get it done.

  I still have some of that yuck, whether it's sinus or not, is hanging around with me and making life unpleasant. I don't really have anything interesting to say, either, and my brain just hasn't been working lately. I knew it wouldn't work out like this, but a part of me hoped that getting a regular lungful of the good smoke would make everything click, like the last piece of the puzzle.

 It hasn't, of course, because that's not how things work. I keep hoping there is something out there, something I'm just not getting, and when I do, my life's waveform will collapse into place like a row of dominoes. It continues to baffle me that there's so much of Normal Life that continues to elude me. My upbringing wasn't so odd nor have my experiences been all that special, but there you go.

 Nothing is really begging to get out. I'm not playing any games, in particular, and have gotten cold on Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and there's no music that needs me talking about it. The only reading I'm doing is trying to finish The Kolchak Chronicles, a book of short stories based on the Kolchak: The Night Stalker character. I don't know why I'm still trying because they are goddamn awful. It's like The Pink Panther reboot with Steve Martin; even if you don't compare it to the original, it's goddamn awful.

 Jumped-up fan fiction rarely works, for me, anyway. The pre-reboot Doctor Who books were tedious at best and all too often devolved into the writer getting weird about a specific character. Nyssa caught a lot of that weirdness; so did Dodo, bless their hearts. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy book by the guy who did the Artemis Fowl books is one of the worst things I've ever read, at least until these Kolchak stories.

 These are just dull. It's not so much they stray too far from the character or the general form of the established stories, they're just dull. And I swear, I don't need to learn about Carl Kolchak's dark past. That's why the television remake was such a turkey. Also, I don't understand why people have to update everything to modern times rather than the '70s - internet, digital cameras, cell phones, etc. - as it really doesn't add anything and just strikes me as lazy.

 I do like William Meikle's take on Carnacki, The Ghost Finder. Good stories, sharp writing, it doesn't monkey too much with the formula, and he makes it all work. Of course, it does help that William Hope Hodgson only got in a half-dozen Carnacki stories, so there's plenty of room to stretch out.  Meikle doesn't add a love interest or too much goofy shit, like people who want to make Irene Adler a recurring character or put any woman at all into Jekyll & Hyde. I have strong opinions about that.

 I don't know what else. The weather's turned cooler here lately and the days are getting shorter. College football season has started but I can't be bothered just yet. I reckon it's time to tie this off. Whatever the yuck that's messing with me wears me out, so I imagine I'll go to sleep after a little while.

 So there's that there then.

A bust.

  Man, I feel awful. I woke up feeling crappy and felt like death warmed over this afternoon. I don't feel quite as bad as I did then but I still feel pretty shitty. I don't know what it is. I don't think it's COVID, just a random cold. Let's hope not, anyway.

 This week's News is heavy because this week was heavy. Afghanistan, Hurricane Ida, and Texas going full bull-goose loony, it kept us all pretty busy. I think I did some good work with it, so check it out.

 I don't know how far into this I'm going to get, to be quite honest. My head is killing me and my face hurts, and it all gets worse the longer I sit up but lying down is uncomfortable. We'll see, but I'm going to step back for a moment. In any event, I have nothing interesting to say.

 The next day.

 I thought I posted this. Ah, well. It's almost 3:30 the following afternoon from when I wrote that and, apart from the sense of discombobulation you get for sleeping a lot and a bit of a headache, I'm fine. Momma's convinced I had a light case of COVID, between it and my eye. I think it's just an infected tear duct or something like that being a pain in the particular area. My sinuses felt like they were on fire.

 In any event, I'm much better now. I'll get on the News and see you there.

Another man done gone.

  It's ten o'clock but I'm not going to be caught out bad tonight. I got nothing particularly interesting to say, but that's never stopped me. So here we go.

 I've been playing a lot of Pathfinder: Kingmaker lately, getting back to where I was in my initial game before I drifted away and forgot what I was doing. I'm bad to do that, particularly with long, involved games. I still need to get back to Dragon Age II and XCOM 2. Don't ask me why beyond I don't really care for endings. I chalk that up to a love of comic books as a kid. Honestly, Spider-Man is 20 years older than the last time I paid attention and he's still in his mid-20s.

 Watching a movie called Coven. It's about witches and it's not good, so far anyway. Granted, I'm not an expert on all things witchery, but it does seem to me like they're just making shit up as they go along. Of course, there's no reason to not just make shit up as they go along. The witch lady who's the boss of the coven is also a massive pill even before a demon posses here. I don't think I could meddle with the darker powers of the world with someone that obnoxious. So far, I do not recommend it.

 I have been watching a lot of horror movies. They're almost like detective novels, in that there's a familiar path they all take and all that really matters is how well the story's told. Well, it's not exactly the same, I guess, but a bad horror movie's easier to take than a bad comedy. I will note that I don't care too much for slasher movies or what's deemed "horror porn" and extreme horror. It's not so much the gore that bothers me, it's that there's plenty of examples of humans being absolute bastards to each other in the real world. If I'm going to deal with fiction, give me demons and movie witches and werewolves and cosmic horrors and whatnot.

 For what it's worth, I know there are real witches in the world but they're not like fiction witches, mainly because they're not as shitty as movie witches. That's neither here nor there, though. The witches in this movie make me think of the witches Terry Pratchett was making fun of in the Tiffany Aching books. All black leather and revealing clothes and impractical boots.

 I wonder if chaos magic is still a Thing. Fifteen years ago, it was the go-to hoodoo bullshit middle-class yuppie spawn used to pretend they had a solid grasp on the universe. The Wikipedia entry has a section on "post-chaos," but that mainly reads like practitioners pissed off they didn't get their ponies. There's also a guy who's mixed chaos magic with Lovecraftian concepts like the Great Old Ones, which seems like a really bad idea. I'm half-tempted to buy the book just to see how bad an idea it is to invoke the concept of massively powerful entities that don't even consider us insects.

 Hey, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is out and it's getting good reviews. Excellent. Kingmaker was apparently a lame dog on first release and took nearly six months to get playable. There's a Season Pass which means there'll be DLC, which means I'll be waiting until all that DLC comes out before I drop a nickel on it. Just my personal rule and, usually by that point, any and all stompable bugs are fixed. Besides, the Season Pass version is going for $80 so screw you, man. I got enough to keep me occupied until the price lightens up some. I mean, I'm all for supporting indie developers, but come on, man.

 Well, this is as good a place as any to stop. Don't watch Coven. It's a turkey and it's sort of dull.