Delete Button - Reboot

Trains of Thought

Had to leave that train of thought there… or risk shorting out my laptop with tears. Today is my birthday. I am feeling pretty numb. I just really don’t want to feel right now, yesterday was rough. The roughest part was that it was so ordinary. Inside I feel like it should be a national holiday, but people still made plans, went to work, ran errands. I ran errands. I… I don’t know what I feel about that. What is a birthday supposed to be when you are grown up? Do people even celebrate them anymore. Today is pretty much sucking. It would take a lot for it not to suck. I fell down, hard, last night I am covered in bruises. I physically hurt. I am emotionally hurting. It is all so much my mind has really shut down. I was going to talk about things today. I had things to say. I was going to wring meaning out of this weekend. There is nothing there but a dull ache.

How about some polite conversation? The weather is positively dreary today. It is cold, which I don’t mind, but it is also wet, which I do mind. My dogs love this kind of weather. They race outside and wallow in the chilly mud then whine to come in and shake it off, sharing their “fun” with me. I had to shower after my shower. I had to mop the kitchen floor. They had made it slippery and I did not want to fall again. There have been days like this I have had to completely change my outfit because I had perfectly formed muddy paw prints on my chest, or butt.

I hurt. My arm is sore and it is making typing unpleasant. My neck has a kink in it and, I just hurt okay? I feel like being unreasonably grumpy today. Nobody deserves it but I still feel like just being a plain argumentative bitch. Lucky for them I didn’t sleep well. I just do not have enough energy to manage it. I could probably take a nap right now. Some asshole called at dawn thirty and woke me up. I won’t mention his proper name but he is on my official s*** list today. I don’t foresee that position down grading any. Especially when I really want to be bitchy! Crappy birthday to me, Crappy birthday to me, who gives a f*** that it’s my birthday, crappy birthday to me.

Bad mood’s happen. The key is to roll with them until you roll out of them. If you fight them too much you can end up wrapped up in them for much longer. Then you are the bad kind of brooding, sullen. I like words. They can express so much. Especially when they are written. Stringing them along like beads can soothe or it can rile. Words have started wars and put ends to them. Words are the seeds of revolution and of common sense. We would not be an independent nation without the written word. There is no way that the signers of the Declaration of Independence would have had the balls to walk up to the king and say it to his face instead.

How powerful does that make a picture? In the math of things, they are supposed to be worth a thousand words. Written ones? That is powerful. One picture taken by a journalist in Vietnam turned an entire country against the veterans of that war. It took more than a generation for them to receive the respect they deserved. The journalists in The Gulf were a little less sensationalist, and we sort of won those wars…. Is there any such thing as winning a war? Even with the best in training and weapons both sides both loose troops, living men and women that are no longer there for their families. Property is destroyed, sometimes property of great cultural value. Even when the war is contained, overseas, that doesn't mean the loss is nothing to the country not being invaded. A great deal of history and prehistory has been lost, often to the point that the civilization that “loses” becomes a myth. With as often as they have been invaded and conquered, there has to be a divine force protecting the Jewish people, since they still exist, heck they have even been restored as a nation. When was the last time you met a Babylonian, or a member of the Olmecs? Not every society has been so favored. You know that is probably why many Arabic people hate them so much. No one has given their fallen civilizations much of a do-over. It smacks of favoritism. Or guilt… maybe because Hitler nearly wiped them out? A lot of countries considered Jews a nuisance until “The Final Solution,” was put in motion. Then the world did a collective “My Bad.”

Cultural groups, races and countries aren’t the only things that are persecuted. I am talking bullies. Juvenile humans can be the worst behaved animals. Mid-teenaged individuals can be the worst. They go from moderately civilized in junior high, to completely inhumane over one single summer. Most blame it on the changes involved in puberty. I agree, the main one being their sense of empathy. I would put forward that they do not lack empathy, rather they suffer of an overabundance. Unfortunately, it is not finely tuned or understood. They see the fronts others put on and mimic the “okayness” of their peers, while inside they feel alienated and confused. Since everyone is fronting they believe they are the only one who feels like s***. The baser instincts and a warping of the “golden rule” leads teens to attempt to do unto others as they have done unto you. So they are caught between clawing for independence from their parents and trying to get into the group of “Happy People” in school. The teenage years are s*** served up on a rusty hubcap.

That was the first two years of high school for me. Then, somehow I managed to find a high school full of people who were decent to each other. I went from “Lord of the Flies” to civilization. I loved my last three years of high school. I was active, I lettered in Drama, though I am not the best actor. I was really good at sets and costumes though. I was also on the Knowledge Bowl team. It was like Jeopardy, only with teams of four. I didn’t have the reflexes to buzz in fast enough but I usually had the answer, I wasn’t necessarily the smartest on the team, but I knew the most trivial things.

With a deep sigh I leave the pleasant memories and drag myself back across the border into “Impolite” territory. The government is about as coordinated and logical as a manatee on land. I don’t want the government to collapse under the weight of its collective stupidity, but it is incredibly likely. We elected a businessman I know has been in bankruptcy at least once into the highest office of our land. It is probably because he was a reality TV star. Now I know the fear my parents must have felt when an actor was elected. That didn’t go too badly. Maybe this will end well? I don’t know about that though. He seems intent into starting a war with immigrants that just want asylum.

Said president is bent on building a wall to keep illegal immigrants out. He is willing to shut down the government not once but very probably twice to try and get it built. I have some strong reservations about this wall. A wall which is secure enough to keep people out, is just as good at keeping people in. Considering I am not sure the president isn’t the Antichrist, I really don’t want something like that blocking me from fleeing into “uncivilized” areas. If he is the Antichrist, then I figure the only safe places will be in South America, there is still plenty of rain-forest to hide in. Actually that is the biggest argument that he isn’t the Antichrist. I figure before the Antichrist comes along that we will have successfully destroyed the wild places of the world. There will be nowhere to run. Still, I wouldn’t mind having that back door left open. f*** the wall! The way the dumbass is going he will run our country into another Great Depression, and all the illegal immigrants will be running across the border in the other direction for a better life. I might join them. At least they know how to treat one another.

There are times that I really worry that some kind of Armageddon is soon to come. I fully admit I have fantasized being able to create a self-sufficient compound for friends and family. It would have everything culturally necessary to restarting civilization. The fact is though, if civilization did collapse, there aren’t enough of the easily accessible resources necessary to restore it. We have mined all the easily mined minerals, we have to move mountains to get at them anymore. Oil is running out and the cheap energy it provided was necessary to fuel civilization to reach as far as it has. Most of the post petroleum technologies rely on a continued supply of oil to reach levels where they are self sustaining. If we use up oil before establishing them, we might get knocked back into the stone age, permanently.

The damage we have done to the natural world is such that any survivors of the collapse would be hard pressed to survive. We have lain waste to entire swaths of rain-forest, they are so nutrient poor it could take millenia for them to support even a quarter of the diversity they once had. Of course that diversity will have been long gone by then and nature would be doing its damnedest to refill niches. The nutrients in the soil of our farmlands have been depleted by factory farming to the point that they require fertilizer to grow nearly anything. Unless we correct these practices soon, a lot of people could go very hungry in the deserts the farmland will become. Civilization is affecting weather patterns and global warming doesn't help in the least, even if it is not entirely our fault. I am not really optimistic about the future.

Heck we might not have enough time to worry about environmental collapse, the turd in the presidential seat might just get us nuked by our allies before we can totally f*** the environment. I really don’t feel optimistic about his legacy. I think I would even vote democrat to oust him, and I am not a democrat, or a regular voter.

How much about me is regular? My feet are too small, I can wear size three shoes. My waist is larger than average, my BMI is in the obese range. Actually that might make me average. I think of myself as too short and too fat. The family I have fallen into thinks of me as skinny, and they aren’t that heavy. I have noticed something anecdotally. When I go to church, I tend to be one of the taller people, and yes I appear thinner, but compared to the population at science fiction conventions I am short and fat. Is the forward thinking nature of science fiction more attractive for the tall beautiful Darwinian success stories. Does that make churchgoers the next replacements of neanderthals, an evolutionary dead end? No, religion encourages reproduction and the dystopian nature of science fiction encourages birth control. It really is not uncommon to hear many variations on, “I don’t want to bring children into the world as it is,” coming out when sci-fi fans discuss children and reproduction.

Church and sci-fi fandom are the two major groups I have identified myself as a member. Recently I have been considering participating in the LGBTQ community. Even consideration was more than I ever thought I would get to, Hellfire and all. I don’t really understand myself completely on this account. If I admitted to my feelings, I spent the longest time contemplating my damnation, but I have had friends and acquaintances with non-standard preferences and never thought of them going straight to hell. I remember the gay couple that lived in our driveway while they renovated their camper home for a cross country excursion. I remember the transexual woman my mother worked with at drywall finishing. There were others, none of them seemed damned at the time. They were good people that happened to feel differently about their sexuality. Even knowing them I was courting damnation for the longest time for my own feelings.

Feelings, I find, are best put down on paper. It is easier to trace their source when you are staring at them. The sense of damnation could have come from my long ingrained belief in my own inferiority. I couldn’t put a finger to anything I was inferior at, but I always felt I was never… enough. I can trace why I feel I am overly short, I went into school a year younger than everyone else, and was quite reasonably shortest of my peers. The feeling of being fat stems from my growth spurt where I began growing out of waistbands before length. I am clumsy and uncoordinated. I am not technically mobility impaired, but I am not much more than adequate when it comes to getting around. I have good stamina. When I have to I can walk several miles to get where I need to be, or I can stick to a job until it is done, without breaks. Why do I think I am so inadequate? My eyes are dry but the question threatens tears.

Writing, that is one thing I can do well. I have written over a dozen sci-fi books. I rely on spell check but who doesn’t anymore? I don’t like writing reality based things. I usually write to escape the uncomfortable questions and problems of reality. Writing lets me turn the unfixable circumstances into a tiny bump in the plot easily solved with one Maguffin or another. When my characters need a safe place, I create shields that somehow block their enemies from entering. When my characters are injured or sick, nannites or scanners and laser surgery fix them. Heck they can read each other’s minds, so crime is something nearly impossible to pull off. In my little universes no one is murdered or raped, war is over in a few chapters, and the worst of all evil is contained in what appears to be a marble. (Actually the marble bit hasn’t been written in yet, but it is outlined.)

All that said, why am I still writing this over twenty pages in? Short answer I let some trusted people read it. They raved and insisted I keep going. But that is not why, if I am honest with myself. I think that is it, these words are the first time I have really been honest enough with myself about any of this. Well, not the first time, I wrote an essay in college. The assignment was to commemorating someone or something. Hey want to read it? Here it is.

November 21,1996




I love You!




A young child sits with a box of crayons and her little spiral notebook. She calls it her Book. It is February 13, the day before Valentine's day. Today she made valentines in her first grade class. The girl is proud she learned to write "I love You!" Now she sits with her crayons and decides to make a valentine in her book. It will be for someone special! The crayons are not grown up enough to make this special valentine for this special person, so she goes to get a pen.

First comes the gigantic letter "I" it goes from the top of the page to the bottom. Then a slightly smaller " love". Below the love she writes a tiny little "you", because she made the love so big there was little room left. Last comes the huge bubble exclamation point that she fills in with black ink.

A young girl sits in the center of piles of spiral notebooks and other papers. She calls them her books. It is the day after her father tried to hurt her mother. It is the day after she called the police on her father. She did nothing in her fifth grade class, because she did not go to school. The girl is angry and afraid! Now she sits with her notebooks and decides to tear them up. It will be because she lost someone special. The books are not grown up enough for someone that called the cops on her father, so she goes to tear them up.

First out comes a page of gigantic numbers. The rip goes from the top of the paper to the bottom. Then the page with a slightly smaller alphabet. On the page below that are teddy bears and flowers, ripped out because he made the love so small they didn't fit. Last page comes the huge "I love you," with the exclamation point filled in with black ink.

She stops. Who was the special person she wrote this to? It was someone proud that they could write "I love you," and happy because she meant it. That was who she wrote it to. Her eyes fall to the paper, she reads emphasis in the gigantic letter "I." "I love me?" the girl asks herself aloud, not knowing if the, lost someone special can be found. It sounds good. She says it again! "I love me." It feels good! She shouts it. "I love Me!"

A young woman sits at her computer, near a disk she calls her book. It is November 27, the day before Thanksgiving. Today she boiled potatoes and defrosted turkey. The girl is stressed she needs to write an essay. It must be about someone special! None of the people she can think of are any more special than any other. So she goes to get her files to find someone she wrote about before.

First comes a gigantic file labeled history reports. Then a slightly smaller file called TV people. Below the files lies the cover marked My Book. Last beneath that cover lies the page with the huge "I love you," with the exclamation point filled in with black ink.

So she-I commemorates this woman, girl and child.

I’m back, funny that essay comes back to me so near Valentine’s day. I don’t know what happened to My Book, it was safely packed in one of the boxes stacked in storage in the house I had to give up. That was before a couple of preschool children moved in with their mother. I have little hope that I will see it again. That page should be mounted and framed. It has helped me so many times when I was very deep in the dark places of my mind. I could recreate it… I just might. Maybe I will play with the words in my art journal. Here I am making myself cry again, and I wondered why my English composition teacher referred me to student services for counseling.

It seems like every time I let the real words inside me out on paper, someone asks me if I want to hurt myself. One of my beta readers for this, whatever it is, essay, book… one of my beta readers asked me if I needed to go in (to the hospital.) Okay, so my real words come from a dark place. I have seen a lot of dark places. Shortly after my dad left us my mother saddled me with the knowledge that if she hadn’t aborted my older sibling or siblings, she would never have gotten pregnant with me. I wouldn’t exist. What child is ready to hear that someone had to die for them to be born…. Sorry mom, you weren’t perfect. You did make mistakes and telling me that was one of them. She had named him, her or them PB, every so often she would wistfully mention PB and I got a knife to my gut. I would spend the next two days worrying that she felt ending them and making me possible was a mistake. I was a planned mistake. My sister has it worse. She was conceived to fix my parent’s marriage, and the experiment was a failure, probably because my dad repeatedly argued she wasn’t his. I am absolutely sure my mother slept with no one but him.

God, this is dark. I need to light things up. Polite conversation time, but wait even that has been deteriorating into a dark place, global warming, debilitating depression, hellfire and brimstone. How about a light and fluffy subject? Puppies! Puppies are good. Have I mentioned that I had a dog my sister was named after? I can’t remember and I don’t want to lose the flow by looking over what I have already said. So, yeah, I had a dog named Melissa for over a year before I had a sister named Melissa.

Melissa Puppy was never a mother, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. We tried for puppies. We got her a male companion she was quite fond of, but there was never a litter. I also remember my first cat. It was a gift from Charlie. I am fairly certain I have mentioned him if not I will… I named the cat Mikiki. Miki never had kittens, even after we brought her home a male for the express purpose. We also had 40 guinea pigs at one point but I only considered one of them mine. Her name was Flan, like the Hispanic pudding. She was less than a month old when I got her from the breeder. Her mother had died or refused to nurse her and she was a vet trip away from heaven. The breeder gave her to me for free because after taking care of Sophia, I was willing to try to save Flan. We grabbed Mexican food on the way home and I fed flan some of my flan on the way home, instant name. Flan probably had some internal defects. She never reached the normal size for a guinea pig. She had other issues, like when she got too upset she would pop her eye out of its socket and we had to put it back in. We gave her a cage mate at one point, and it was the biggest mistake. We thought he was a she, and Flan got pregnant. The babies didn’t make it to full term and delivering them left her back end paralyzed. She had to be put down. It about killed me.

Anyway… I know I haven’t mentioned the belief I carried from some point between Mikiki and Flan that their being barren was god gently explaining to me I would never have a baby. I was never desperate to be a mom, but… I still believe it was a message from above, just like Cinders. None of my animals had any offspring until after I formed that opinion and accepted it. That acceptance made a continued message unnecessary. My cat had babies last month.

There have been lots of points where I could practically feel god yelling messages at me like that. The main ones were the April fools kidney stone, Cinder Sue getting diabetes, and the one about my fertility. I know god exists as completely as I know water becomes ice. Coincidences seem to me to be far too coincidental. I think the great big author in the sky inserts foreshadowing and symbolism as much as I do. I wonder sometimes when I am manic if god is having a hard time sleeping, or when I am sleepy if god is trying to sneak in a few pages before going to sleep. Seeing god as an author is the way I can best understand his, her existence. I wonder if she outlined things or if we are off the top of his head. Does god edit things. Does she have a giant delete button? Does he ever have to ctrl+alt+delete reset things? How many times has god lost a hundred pages because of a faulty memory card? Or does god write longhand. Is prehistory prehistory because god lost the section he wrote about it?

If the universe is god’s novel, who are his main characters? Jesus of course, and Moses, Methuselah? God help us all if Trump is a main character, I pegged him as comic relief. I don’t know which archetypal descriptor worries me more, comic relief or Antichrist. If he is the Antichrist, then hello Armageddon. If he is comic relief, does that mean that the plot is about to take an ironically unfunny turn? Hello, Armageddon. God must be sleepy, I am yawning as I type. Maybe I shouldn’t put too much reliance on this metaphor. It was fun to entertain.

Good morning all, today is positively dreary. The sky is white, and the temperature is low, possibly below zero. Snow is probable. It is winter. Winter, what a strange word. If you didn’t know its meaning it would be one of the stranger ones, I think. Then again, most words are fairly odd, especially in their written forms. How natural is it that certain assemblages of patterns should have such specific meanings. Words, chimpanzees don’t possess many and they survive just fine. They still can go to war, but their wars don’t risk every life on the planet. Imagine world war chimp, not going to happen. We have far more words, what is worse is that they each can possess so many meanings. Just a change in tones can even turn, “I love you,” into a sarcastic insult.

I love words, but I have to wonder if humanity wouldn’t be better off if we did not have so many. Two people can be speaking the same language but can place far different meaning on words than the person they are sharing them with. When talking the tone and body language helps, but written or “texted” words don’t have those cues. It is up to the mood of the reader and the context to decide which tone is being used by the writer. Texts are the worst. There aren’t by necessity enough words to catch contextual cues and the short-cut acronyms can cloud things up even worse than that for anyone not familiar with them. ROTFLMAO, my grandmother would think I was speaking in tongues. The meaning of many words depends on context and shared understanding.

In the past, like my grandmother’s childhood, “Gay” was a feeling of happiness, “Queer,” meant odd or puzzling. How did they become derogatory terms for groups of people who just come from a different point of view? I have heard of “Boston Marriages,” which were an acceptable form of same-sex relationships way back when. Words can exclude people or include them. Words, despite the rhyme, can hurt very much. My sister is not a Worm, she is a person. My beloved is a woman but we are not Gay. We love each other. Why do people want to hurt us with words because of that love?

Will there ever be a time when “Straight,” will become a swear word. Has it in LGBTQ circles? I can’t rightly say. What I can say is that if it has, then the ones using it as such are hypocrites. I guess that would make them human. I think I found another human superpower, hypocrisy. It isn’t as powerful as screwing things up, but racially speaking, it is a newer ability. We were screwing things up before we learned our advanced language skills. We are like children we have learned about swear words and we are really taking advantage of them.

Hey, I just had a disturbing thought. If humanity's main superpowers are screwing things up, and hypocrisy, then our electing Trump was inevitable. Follow the logic, superpowers, Trump. He is the poster child for screwing things up, and hypocrisy. We were destined to elect him. SCARY, huh. I wonder if we have any other disturbing superpowers. Dear God, I hope not, but we will see.

If you could see me you would see a plump woman sighing deeply at our species stupidity. It frightens me that Trump is swimming in the same gene pool. His mere existence means it is much shallower than I would prefer. I would like to blame the population bottleneck that anthropologists theorized occurred in prehistory. We came very close to extinction before we had much of a chance. I think our survival alone demonstrates the reality of divine intervention. Us being here is one of god's true miracles, though the autocorrect gave me the idea that “mistake” would be a good replacement word. I wonder how many times a decade he sits back and hangs his head in disappointment at our collective behavior. Why is it when I think of god's disappointment that he becomes fully and decidedly Male. Decades of fatherly disappointment?

My dad has never had a single reservation about outlining my every flaw. My hair tends to be mussed. I never smell pleasant enough. I don’t have a “real” job. I waste my time writing. Boy if this gets published will it prove him wrong on that account. Actually in the last few years he has been almost supportive of my writing.

Actually I kind of miss him at times. He still lives in Colorado, I haven't seen him much since I moved east, but that isn't his fault. That concession is a big one on my part. There was a point in my life when I felt like he was a supervillain, but then aren't we all. I said we had superpowers, not that we were superheroes. At best humans are the kind of antihero you could almost root for. We don’t exactly have a sympathetic backstory. We started raping the natural world almost as quick as we could depersonalize it. I seriously wonder if, as a whole, humanity is at all redeemable.

What we need is to have God spank us good and send us into the next decade without any supper. Here We Go Again, an odd word. Supper, where I grew up we called it dinner. We had breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Now there is brunch, supper, and high tea too. I would also like to mention the second breakfast of the hobbits. There are an awful lot of words relating to food. Hmm I am kind of obsessing about food now. I wonder if God is hungry right now.

I just ate. Now I am feeling tired. My eyeballs ache. I might have a sinus infection or I could just be a hypochondriac. I do have a history of psychosomatic illnesses. My brain doesn't always act like it is on my side. I know I mentioned my history of depression. It is due to a chemical imbalance. I am a bit more unbalanced than many. There is a family history. So I probably shouldn’t make an issue of other people making the gene pool shallow.

I have written a lot today. I have shuffled alongside many a train of thought today. Sometimes I overthink things. Okay, a lot of times I overthink things. Another name for overthinking things is worry. I am addicted to the art of worrying. I can worry myself up into a fine state over nearly nothing. I am not sure if it is a superpower or a weakness. Hmm, superpower, I am Worry Girl. Duh da dun, I can turn any anthill into an insurmountable mountain, or a slight drizzle into a deluge. Some f***ing superpower, add to it f***ing things up and hypocrisy. I am truly dangerous, but mostly to myself. I am my own arch-nemesis. Who isn't?