The Fallows of the Year

It's been a long day already, and it's only mid-afternoon.

I woke at five to the shrilling alarm in the dark. Shuffled to the kitchen to light off the coffeemaker, then to the toilet, then back into the kitchen to find provender for the ravenous maw of the small domestic predator that bosses us around the Little House. He's affectionate but a demanding master, the furry little bastard, and will let me know in no uncertain terms if his breakfast isn't served up quickly enough.

From there it was out and about Oregon all day. I had driven two hundred miles before noon, and that wasn't the end of my travels.Fortunately today I ended up at a site close enough to my house to take a detour to the local pub - the Lucky Labrador on North Killingsworth, no more than a long pint-bottle-toss from the Fire Direction Center, where I could have a pint and some peanuts and write up my field reports and, now, this post.

And that's many of my days; up early, off to work, home, dinner, bed. Desultory conversation with my Bride and the Girl (the Boy has entered the Dormant Phase of adolescence, where he will not speak unless 1) directly compelled, or 2) about some kind of gaming - he's at the extreme endmember of "videogamer", and if there was a way to make a living at playing Fallout outside of Seoul he'd be on it like a Republican on a tax cut.

Speaking of Republicans...

Actually, no. Fuck, no. Instead, let me start with this.

I've been thinking lately about this place. About how I wrote it off this time last year, about how I had decided that it was a ghost blog, and that I had nothing more to say here. And how I felt about that.

And I've concluded that I feel like shit about it.

I've written a lot here in this place. I've been slowly collecting the "battles" pieces into a Word document with the idle thought of possibly submitting it to a publisher and realized that I am up to almost 200,000 words (and I'm only up to Verdun, back in February of 2012!) I wrote some brilliant invective. I wrote some that I, rather vainly, consider some genuinely fine prose. Some pretty damn fine prose. Sometimes even containing some genuinely worthwhile thoughts.

And a lot of crap, of course.

But I thought about how I'd chosen to let this blog die like so many others and thought...no.

Goddamn it, no.

I'm a good writer. I have some more worthwhile thoughts and ideas and emotions to write in this place.

So I've decided to make a concerted effort to bring it to life again. There'll be more "battles" pieces, but only discussing events that entertain and amuse me rather than the famous ones that make the history books and the "decisive battles" compendia.

There is one thing that will probably not be here.

U.S. politics.

And there's a simple reason for that; there is nothing more to be said about U.S. politics that I haven't said over and over again. It is a worthless subject to discuss because there is no "discussion".

The "conservative" faction in the United States has given in entirely to cargo-cultism. There is no more remaining intellectual rigor or political throw-weight to movement conservatism. It has devolved completely into a sort of...well, here's what I wrote seven fucking years ago:

"...the modern GOP has become...a windsock for the gales of the unhinged reactionary Right..."What's mine is mine and what's yours is also mine."

You might be able to compromise with a ravening wolf over a pork chop. You cannot "compromise" with the Congressional GOP; there's just nothing there but a reptile brain full of hateful shit and hunger."

And that was seven fucking years ago. Since then the prion disease has engulfed the "conservative" brains. There's just nothing left there. It's all God, guns, gays, snowflake babies, tax cuts, and Islamophobia (now with 100% more racism!) all the way down. Trump isn't a symptom, he's part of the disease, and the third to two-fifths of the American public that are infected don't want to be cured.

And that's the problem.

No republic can survive that percentage of its citizens immune to reality and reason, committed to nonsensical idiocy like "trickle-down economics" and white pride.

No.

We are, instead, living in the final years of the American Republic. Like Rome, we will either preserve the trappings of republicanism as the workings are replaced with open oligarchy, or we will devolve into a low-grade sort of civil cold war. Watch the ridiculous charade now enacted in the capital, where the reality of a moronic Chief Executive whose behavior reflects what we knew of him before the creaky mechanisms of colonial oligarchy installed him as our First Citizen cannot be accepted by his "conservative" cult for fear that, once the nonsense of Ptolomaic geocentrism is exposed as the nonsense it is, the remainder of the edifice will not stand. That a criminally cretinous fool must be defended at all costs, because the costs of accepting the criminal reality and cretinous truth would destroy the cult just as the first broken tapu brought the entire Hawaiian religion down in a heap.

These people would rather burn the republic down than hand over power, and that in itself is what destroys republics.

I cannot stop that. I cannot change it. I see no point in being the Shirer of the Fall of the American Experiment. I may touch on things from time to time, but I cannot imagine what earthly good it would do to repeat and repeat and endless string of posts that amount to a rewording of "WASF if the GOP is not destroyed!!!"

So I'll resume the one-sided conversation here. I'll talk about home and work, life and love, my home in the Pacific Northwest and other places I love or have come to love. There will be battles, and there may be poetry. There will likely be random posts where I talk about nothing but what amuses me.

But there will be, once again, posts.

Long-form blogging may well be dead but, goddamn it, it's not going to die here, not now, not in the fallows of 2019.

I sit. And I listen.

When I return to California,
to my life with its many engines—I find myself changed,
the city somehow muted, frenetic and fully charged with living, yes,
but still, when gifted with this silence, motions have more
of a dance to them, like fish in schools of hunger, once
flashing in sunlight, now turning in shadow.

~ Brian Turner, Phantom Noise