Sunday, May 22, 2022

Three Years in the Making: Aztra's Mirror is Finally Here

Almost finished in 2019, calamity after calamity delayed the completion of this story.  But it is finally out in e-book and paperback, available on Book-Blip.com, Amazon, and (in a couple of days) at libraries and Indie bookstores.  I'm happy with the final version, and I hope you will find it was worth the wait.  




Monday, March 8, 2021

THE REALITY WE WANT VERSUS THE TRUE REALITY

 I worked in  healthcare in a very rural part of West Africa in the 70's. I saw a few epidemics, including one or two that had been "eliminated" and as a result anyone who diagnosed that would be considered a "reactionary" and "enemy of the people." As you might well imagine,  neither of those two things was a good thing to be.  Denying reality for political reasons is not a good thing. People die needlessly. I was almost one of them. (And I'll keep the details of that to myself, thank you--not everything needs to "shared").

So when COVID  raised its ugly head, I took one look at the Administration, and knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that we were in for a rough ride, and that FUBAR would most likely best describe the administration's response. I was, unfortunately for 500,000 Americans, correct.

We went into self-isolation back in February of 2020. It's been over a year. Yes, it's getting a bit tiring. But I know from experience, that moving too quickly to end our self-imposed restrictions would just negate the entire year's efforts. So now, we've gotten out first vaccine injections, and are quietly sitting out the first two week period to maximum immunity.  We'll relax a little bit--go to more than just one store. (double-masked of course, and at a time when we know there will be little foot traffic). And then the next vaccination and another two weeks. 

Yes, it's been a tough year for almost everyone. But we're almost through the worst of it. So let's hope we learn something from the experience. We live in the greatest social experiment ever attempted in the history of this planet. An experiment to see if the wildest mixture of people ever can come up with the best society ever. We've come a long way in a short time (250 years is not much in the history of the world).  And we have a lot we could do to make things better for most of us. Lots of things we  like to think are "eliminated" are not. As I saw in Africa, hiding from the truth is never a smart move.

Maybe, just maybe, it's time to stop mistaking the reality we would like for the true reality. 



Wednesday, November 25, 2020

A DRIVE IN THE BACKCOUNTRY Today, the day before Thanksgiving, we took a drive out of our little village, up the escarpment, past Mount Baldy, to the next little town, then further up on the hills south of that into one of the most rural areas of the county. The sky was gray and threatening, typical of this time of year, but the countryside was beautiful in its open starkness. Stands of what had to be hundred-year old birch trees stood like sentinels between packs of conifers and the skeletons of leafless oaks and maples swaying in the brisk wind. Rows of rolled hay, black Angus beef cattle sheltering against the wind, chopped cornstalks, half-fallen barns, single-wide trailers, houses clearly in need of repair, and whitetail deer near the tree lines.. It’s a beautiful area, the northernmost tip of the Appalachian Mountain Chain, magnificent in summer, brutal in winter when the snow fall is measured in feet, not inches. It was rural America. And it was easy to see how the people who lived out here in the back of beyond could feel that their government had left them to their own efforts to survive, much less thrive, much less chase the Great American Dream. To wonder how many times they had listened to a politician’s promises, only to find them empty husks that blew away the day after election. It was easy to see how they could lose faith in politicians. I remembered the old joke, “It was so cold today I saw a politician with his hands in his own pockets.” To say this is a conservative area, is an understatement. Two out of three votes in this county went for Trump in 2016. Three out of six in 2020. And out here in the back of beyond, five out of six. We drove out here the day before Election Day. And were shocked at the preponderance of Trump signs and Trump flags. They were everywhere, dozens of them, it seemed like almost every house had one. They stood out even more against the apparent poverty of run-drown trucks and ramshackle buildings. And there was a defiance in the air that one could not dismiss. Today, three weeks after the election, something between six and ten lawn signs and a few flags still cried out at passers-by, “You can’t forget us! You can’t just forget we exist!” These people had been driven to the end of their rope by elected and appointed officials who only paid attention to big donors, powerful, rich men and corporations. The land was back to what it had been and would be--- and I could only pray that for once, something might change, and someone in power might feel empathy for these people and this land, and act as if they did matter.

Thursday, August 6, 2020

GETTING OUT OF TRUMPISTAN

So I have fired up the engine on the Magic Bus called “True Facts” and was glad to find it was still working, albeit a little dented and bruised from four years in Trumpistan. Welcome aboard, we’re on our way out, back to the land where “alternative facts” are simply called “lies,” and what we see with our own eyes and hear with our ears is not denied.  

It appears that a lot of those people who sold their souls to the devil have just seen the check bounce. Fox News—of all places—ran a series of displays of Our Glorious Leader unable to read, garbling words, and spouting world salad. Yes, he is decompensating and descending further into madness, and even they no longer pretend what we all see and hear is not what we see and hear.  

It’s still a long way to the border, but we can watch the scenery unfold as we putter along.  Oh look, there’s a stand selling UV lights to stick up your butt at half price, and another offering a BOGO deal on hydroxychlorine tablets. And oh yes, the Mad Revs waving their “Repent and Return to the Fold” signs at us. Ouch! One of them gave the old Magic Bus a whack. Just up the road a piece you can see a group of old, white businessmen wringing their hands, and wait a minute, yes, I can hear them singing and dancing the “I was not a Trumper” polka. They’re even wearing face masks.

But I’m buttoning up the doors and windows on the bus, because our Glorious Leader still has some rabid followers, and as the great Yogi (Berra) said, “It ain’t over ‘till it’s over.”

We have some bumps in the road ahead, but we are getting out of Trumpistan.  


Tuesday, January 21, 2020

SNEAK PREVIEW--Chapter One of Aztra's Mirror

                                   Twins
   “My strength and my weakness are twins in the same womb.”                                                                                              Marge Piercy

The blade slid across Zakan’s throat. “Brother,” his mind called out, before consciousness slipped from his grasp as he tumbled dizzily out of this world into the next.
     "Brother mine," Javek groaned, startled awake, trembling. “Do not leave me.”
     Zakan hit the floor. His forepaw clutched at his throat. It was dry, hot. His eyes popped open. He stared at his fingers, looking for the blood that should have been there.
     Javek was shaking him awake. From somewhere above, he saw himself on the zorka skin rug next to his bed.
     “You be here Zakan, in the Labyrinth. You be alive.”
     “Tej,” Javek called out. “Bring your poultice bag.”
     Tej dashed into Zakan’s room, leather pouch in his forepaw. “It be the dream again, be it not?”
     Zakan stared into nothingness. The words, ‘consummatum est,’ rang again in his ears, and he pitched forward, half in this world, half in the next, one part of him lingering above himself, watching his twin catch him. Watching Tej crush five baneberries in his fingers and spread them in a a five-pointed star of black paste across his raging hot forehead.
     Hearing Tej as if he were under water saying, “Air, fire, water, earth, aether, bring health, power, knowledge, wisdom and happiness through the everlasting grace of Amara.”
     Feeling the soothing, cooling, cream and Tej’s healing fingers kneading his spirit back into his body. Like a cold stream pouring itself back into the river, whirling, unable to control the spinning until it stopped by itself.
     He drew a long breath. He was once more back to being Zakan, acolyte of the Grand Vizier, in his room inside the sacred mountain, in the arms of his twin and his brother’s lover.
     “It be the dream,” he and his brother Javek said at the same time. The dream that would not pass. The dream, again.
     “Goddess Amara help us.” They made the sign of the star.
      “Aye,” Zakan muttered, struggling to catch his breath. “One more time, the sacrificial blade across the throat. One more time, white hot heat, across my whole body, but not a drop of blood.” He gasped. “And this time I felt the spirit leave my body.” His whole body shook. “For the fifth time, those strange alien words assailed me from the netherworld.”
     They all made the sign of the star again.
     Zakan broke the pregnant silence. “It was the fifth time it came this moon-cycle,” he said. “Five days to—"
     “the new moon-cycle,” Javek finished the sentence with him. “Aye. Five. And today we will cast the fifth intruder this moon-cycle through the Sacred Gate.”
     “That be not all,” Zakan added. “This time, I knew for certain I was on Saetana in the dream.”
     “That hell-world?” Javek said with a shudder.
     “And a voice, half feminine, saying “You know me.”
     “Aye, I heard that as well,” Javek said, hugging Zakan to his chest.
     “Did you see her?” Zakan asked his twin brother.
     “Nay. But this time I felt the hot blade as if it were across my own throat and heard those words you say came for the fifth time. In what alien tongue I canst not imagine.”
     “It be a sign, sure. A vision. But of what?” Tej asked.
     “Aye. We have asked Bodan,” both twins said simultaneously.
     Zakan slowly shook his head. “Bodan knows more than he be willing to tell us. He said the words were of an ancient tongue from another world, agreed it be a sign of sacrifice, and cautioned us to take such forebodings from the spirit world as symbolic rather than specific. But he will say no more.”
     “One thing be specific enow for me, brother, I do not want to go to Saetana,” Javek said. “It be accursed. Nothing could be more different from our heaven-world on Saecula. Even though it be our twin planet, Saetana be naught but the evil twin. But this dream suggests that, and the foulest of outcomes.”
     “It be my dream, brother, not yours.”
     “And you think I could let you go alone? We be twins, and so we love each other more than any other beings.”
     Zakan laid his fingers along his brother’s cheek. “Aye. How could we stand to be separated?   Whatever comes, we will go together. But how could we go to Saetana, save in a dream state? The Sacred Gate be closed, and only Bodan be able to open it long enow to cast an intruder from the hell-world through it.”
     “Aye. But I like not the fact this be the fifth time the dream has come, the fifth intruder we shall cast out, on the fifth day before new moon. Five be a magic number, be it not, Tej?”
     Tej did not answer.
     Javek frowned. “It be the five points of the sign of the star. The five great elements of existence,” Javek insisted in a sharp tone. “And did I not see you crush five, not more nor less, baneberries?”
     “Calm yourself, Javek,” Tej demurred. “No number be magic in and of itself.”
     “You think I canst not count? That I only imagine danger looming large before us?”
     “I think because you always be the cooler-headed of the two, the less inclined to jump at conclusions, that you would be calmer,” Tej replied.   
     Javek bared his teeth. “Calm myself? As you have pointed out, I tend to take a more considered approach to life than my twin. And as I share his thoughts, more sometimes than I like, I can see what he imagines this recurring dream and coincidence of numbers means.”
     “I think we should go back to bed,” Tej suggested, placing a forepaw on Javek’s shoulder.
     Javek shook his forepaw off. “Don’t patronize me. I know Zakan better than anyone else. Maybe better than he does, since I do not live inside his skin, as he does, and can observe him from a point of vantage. I know when he feels called to do something, even though he wants not to do it, naught will keep him from it.”
     “When all the signs point in one direction, brother,” Zakan said, “one must see the hand of Amara moving vapor and matter.”
     “And what?” Javek asked. “Step off the precipice as if you be dreaming? In the hope that angels will come to keep you from the rocks below? Let me tell you something, brother mine. Today, Bodan will cast another intruder from Saetana through the Sacred Arch. Another grasping fool from a race of beings who covet the jewels that lie underground and be more than willing to lie and cheat to get them. What have the intruders shown us? Let me tell you. The Goddess Amara’s hand be visible here on Saecula, where life be simple and direct. But Saetana be the accursed home of the fiend-God, Kharv. A fouled world ruined by greed and deception. Your dream should tell you only death awaits you there.”

Thursday, December 12, 2019

Northern Spy

Sometimes when I tell people about the rural community of Western New York where I live, they get this strange look in their eyes that says “Really? How could anyone willingly live there?” Yes, 150 inches of snow every winter—and that’s on the lake plain, a stretch along the southern shore of Lake Erie that runs from one to three miles deep. The folks who live just up the escarpment from us, get about 220 to 240 inches. Today, I dug my car out, and cleared the snow and ice off the back porch and back stairs so my three Maltese dogs could get out into the big back yard again. They ran and ran and ran, leaving little pawprints in the snow and were very happy to come back into the house and settle down in front of a radiator.

Even if you don’t like frolicking in the snow, there are advantages to this rural lifestyle. People along the lake plain grow grapes, berries, apples, even a few hardy souls manage peaches. And today, in my little village in the middle of nowhere, I stopped at the local pie shop one of two local bakeries--(the local cake shop, is also well worth a stop)-- and brought home a fresh-baked apple crumb pie, made from Northern Spy apples grown along the lake plain about ten miles west of here. Northern Spies are a very late season, large and stout apple with carmine red skin married with streaks of yellow and pale green. Their creamy yellow flesh has just the right bite of tartness to offset the sweet, juicy, cidery taste. They make a fantastic pie. Just the right firmness, and a knock-your-socks-off flavor that lets you know this is a real apple in a real pie.

I’m on the tail end of a ten-day-long cough/chest cold that everyone seems to be getting this year. It laid me low. I couldn’t write, could barely think, blew my nose until it bled, coughed until my ribs hurt. Started to feel like a human being again yesterday.

The Northern Spy pie was dinner. Half of it anyway. My three Maltese dogs got their fair share of the apple crumb crust.

I’ll get back to writing tomorrow.

Sunday, September 15, 2019

The Muse Has Returned

My third eye injection has come and gone. This one was easiest of all: took only two days to feel normal again. My vision is still blurry in one eye, but the Retinal Specialist says there is "slight improvement," in the condition, --it's early to predict, but signs indicate I am in the 25 percent of patients who actually might get better--and definitely in the 50 percent who don't get worse. 
So the muse has returned. I have cut back on social media and I am back to writing my Work In Progress. So this will be a short note. I have my band of intrepid souls safely on their twin planet, which has nearly devastated its environment by unfettered greed. They've had one run in with the gestapo-like police force, and are hiding out in a rebel encampment, trying to figure out who their friends and enemies are, and how they are going to accomplish their seemingly impossible mission. They don't know it yet, but things are about to get worse. The tyrant Rhondal is aware of their presence and has stepped up his own actions to invade and conquer the other twin planet. And the Galactic police--the warrior race Krieg--who have sworn to annihilate everyone on Rhondal's planet if he tries this, have an itchy finger on the trigger.