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.

Let me just say, I never meant to hurt nobody, though I guess there's some I couldn't look in the eye.

 I don't think I'm going to get this one under the gun, but what the hell. What is time? Something I really don't pay attention to all that much anymore.

 And why should I? It's rare that I have to interact with the outside world at a specific time, and I like drifting around wherever and for however long I want. So, it's a waste of time, for me anyway.

 I'm not going to lie, this might not get done until tomorrow morning. It's past midnight already and we got word from the good people at Tombigbee Electric that the ol' internet would be done for some terribly good reason that I can't remember. I was playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker all evening, working on a "serious run" and I'll probably go back to that. Beyond that, I don't know.

 August 31 came and went, and best I can tell, the U.S. didn't leave anyone in service in Afghanistan they didn't mean to - apparently there's going to be an armed presence for a little bit - and they, along with the EU, cut a deal with the Taliban to get Afghans out of there if they want to go. Money talks and bullshit walks on that, so we'll see.

 There is much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over this, by both conservatives who don't want to give Joe Biden a win and the big-time press because war sells newspapers. Plus, a lot of them were big cheerleaders for this back in the day and they've all been proven to be dumb bloodthirsty bourgeoisie shit asses.

 One wonders what the next thing that will be used to wind up the gibbering masses. The yacht-left Substackers are still banging on that being disagreed with or, worse, mocked is akin to brutal, Orwellian censorship. But I don't think they really pay attention to anything else, which makes sense if you think about it. These people have convinced themselves their words and thoughts are golden.

 They might circle back around to "wokeness" and Critical Race Theory, but I imagine it'll be another round of refugee panic as they forget the whole "bring our partners and helpers out of Taliban tyranny" by the middle of the month. They haven't had a good reason to build up a serious hate-on for Arabic folks, that's always a favorite.

 Moving on, at least four wingnut talk show goons have caught COVID and died over the last couple of weeks, and all except one were fanatically anti-mask and anti-vaccine and pro-"this is all a hoax to make Trump look bad and, anyway, it's just a light cold only old people and fat people die from and we don't really care about them." The other might be, too, but I'm too lazy to look.

 We've also seen a passel of just regular jackasses who scoffed at the vaccines and the masks, only to wind up with a tube down their throat begging everyone else to get the shot. I should be more empathic with them, but I'm not. They need to do more work on their own because we've still got ding-a-lings showing up at school board meetings accusing vaccination efforts to be Satanically inspired.

 Two of my cousin's kids tested positive. They're both under 10. Another cousin tested positive and I've been directly exposed. We're averaging 5,000 new cases a day in Mississippi. More kids died from it last month than the entire 17 months beforehand. The hospitals are past strained further than they need to be, and more people will die.

 And it's all their fault. I don't celebrate an anti-vaxxer going down like I don't cheer when a drunk driver wraps their car around a live oak tree. It's the damage they cause to others that piss me off. Because of them, we're going to have to let COVID burn through us like the 1918 influenza plague, and not all of us will survive it.

Lord, if you won't take care of us, won't you please, please let us be.

  Y'all, Hurricane Ida hits land tomorrow and by all accounts will be a booger. If you're in the Gulf Coast area, take the proper precautions and split if you're told to. If you're in the rest of the South, get ready for some bad rain and possible flooding. And that's on top of everything else kicking us in the collective teeth. 

 Okay, it's 3:25 a.m. and I slept on this. We took Little Brother back to the airport today, and driving to-and-from Memphis wore both me and Momma out. I remember thinking I need to get something down but it was a losing battle.

 In any event, it was a good visit from the LB, who I haven't seen in almost two years due to COVID. Granted, now is not the best time to come to Mississippi, in re: COVID, but he'd already bought the tickets and couldn't refund them. That tells you, if nothing else, just how quickly this Delta variant slipped up on us.

 He brought me some good smoke, which is great, but I think he really enjoyed spending time with Momma. I won't go into details, but Momma grates on him and he usually spends his visit avoiding her as much as possible. This time, though, they'd spend hours talking, even when that meant listening to Momma spin her conversation roulette wheel and hope to keep up.

 So it was a good visit and I'm looking forward to him and the Sister-In-law visiting this winter. Visit with your people, y'all, it recharges your batteries. Okay, then, onto the News. Good week. Big week, too. Between the FDA's approval of the Pfizer vaccine and the ongoing Afghanistan withdrawal, it has been interesting times. Add a Category 4, potentially devastating hurricane into the mix, and you can't help but wonder why the Washington Press spent so much time on Biden's dog. Good god.

 I'm not sure what else. I have noticed that even a couple of sessions has reset my brain somewhat. Now and then, I'll do this thing where I'm sure I've been thinking about something but I forget it. I can't for the life of me remember what it was or even if I was actually thinking about it. May not sound too deep but it always serves to shake me some. Man, I've missed this.

 Well, it's been at least a half-hour since I wrote the above paragraph. I don't really have anything to roll with, nothing particularly noteworthy I'm reading or watching or playing. My PowerBender harp came in the mail yesterday, but so far I really can't tell much difference. I find bending notes sort of easy, which has to mean maybe I'm doing it wrong.

 This last little bit is like pulling teeth, man. I think I'm going to go back to bed. I've been scrolling through Tubi but I don't think I'll mess with crap cinema. Just wrap this up, finish my drink, and call it a whatever-it-is. Seriously, though, y'all. Hurricane Ida looks to be no joke. Be safe.

Programming note.

  I have some Actual Paying Work due tomorrow, so probably no Gibberish tonight. I know, contain your disappointment. But my brother's visiting and he's keeping Momma busy. Plus, he brought me a bit of the good smoke, so that's nice.