Bye-Bye Blogger

Yesterday was it. Today is the formal farewell.

All good things must come to an end. All bad things, too. Thirty-one July, 2020, after nine years and three months and change, my blog on this platform comes to an end.

This second iteration of my 1988-1997 hardcopy zine has lasted nine years, four months and 20 days, very coincidentally close to the original zine’s lifespan. I didn’t write every day, of course. Sometimes I missed entire months. My output was so sparse and sporadic at points I wondered why I bothered. A lot of times I ended up deleting posts because they were just plain dumb. I was writing for the sake of being active. If you’re writing a blogpost for the sake of making yourself write, you’re doing it wrong.

Over time, I was able to build enough evergreen content to keep an interested reader engaged. Unfortunately, Blogger has become increasingly difficult to work with. Yesterday was the final straw. When every hyperlinked line I made disappeared after saving the post, when other saved changes reformatted with every save, when a simple 15-minute post took two hours to correctly format in HTML because the Compose feature doesn’t work as it should, I realized this was more trouble than it was worth.

I mentioned in my last post that I would wait until my blood pressure went down before I made a decision. My blood pressure thus down, the decision is made. This is my last post on the Google platform.

♫"The road goes on forever/And the party never ends."♫

Mind you, I don’t leave angry. Like everything else this year, it’s a passage that was happening sooner or later. This was the year and today is the day. It’s time I learned a new platform, preferably one that works.

I’ll leave everything up for a while as I copy posts into an archive I’m building in Microsoft Word. But as that archive grows, the post list will shrink. I hope to have everything down and a new blog underway by the end of August. In the meantime, I thank those precious few readers who have followed this most sporadic enterprise.

I’ll announce the third iteration of Rockin’ Roy’s Rage ‘n’ Romance! on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and whatever alternate platforms for social media I get involved in. It looks as if the big Internet monopolies are entering their endgames and it’s past time I started searching for something else.

Lord willing, we’ll talk more about this later. Better still, we’ll talk about other things. Until then….

L. Roy Aiken

31 July 2020

Monte Vista, Colorado, USA

  

High Summer, Comin’ Down

More Notes on the Current Crisis and State of the Post-Apocalypse.

As of today, the 30th of July, the quack doctor in charge of maintaining the pandemic panic is encouraging the mandatory use of goggles over the eyes. Although we still see no evidence whatsoever of corona virus even being a pandemic — our homeless and vagrant issues would be halfway solved by now if it was — the Powers That Be are doubling down on a “second wave” of phantom flu cases. In the middle of summer, mind you.

Oh, I could go on. I’ll simply sign off on this with the final stanza from the most necessary poem ever written:

Let boys want pleasure, and men
And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes
     to be duped.
Yours is not theirs.

 

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn there is a COVID-20 around the corner, and it’s the gosh-by-golly worst of the worst, and that’s why we need to cancel Thanksgiving and Christmas. And all the bright-eyed fools — and there’s so many of them, God help us — will eagerly go along.

Whaddya gonna do? For my part, I’ve got to finish this book, pray it gets optioned for film, and look for a place even more remote than where I am now. The fewer people around, the better.

This is the hottest its been since we moved here. Keep in mind I'm at 7,600 feet in elevation.

If nothing else, this has been a breakthrough summer for the last book in my zombie post-apocalypse action-adventure series. I’m now at page 330 and Chapter 29, which is the Fun-and-Games run-up to the Darkest Hour. Once I finish these two critical chapters I’m onto the Vengeance Trail.

I may very well be finished with “Well, this year was a real stinker, but at least I finished writing that darn book.” I have sometimes wondered if there is some deep-seated fear of life without this project in my life that is holding me up. Maybe so. I can see the ending so much more clearly now, though, and I cannot wait to get there.

A final note: I have spent way too much time trying to make this post than I should have. Posting should be as simple as write/format/add images/publish, but nothing works that way with Google Blogger anymore. Imagine formatting for a large font and getting extra-large every time. And then you have to go into HTML mode to fix it, as you must do with all formatting repairs, because Compose mode simply will not do what you ask of it. It was bad enough before with the old interface. The new Blogger is nigh-impossible to work with.

You can’t upload photos direct from your machine anymore, though they still pretend you can by keeping the button there. Every photo has to be uploaded into the Google Photos app and transferred from there. Several times in the course of typing, formatting, re-formatting, and saving this post, I’ve lost entire lines of text. This happened especially with my trying to link to the Robinson Jeffers’ most necessary poem above. Creating a link now nukes the entire line. 

How does one screw something like this up? Don’t they hire the best and brightest there? I have spent a full extra hour writing and re-writing and repairing something that should have taken all of 15 minutes to do.

I see nothing getting better and no way out. I’m going to have to learn WordPress. The next post you see here will likely be the announcement of my quitting this platform. I’ll figure out what I’m going to do when my blood pressure goes down. Stay tuned.

4th of July After-Action Report and Year in Review

From the Year of the Flu and Race Riots, Too, so you know it’s got to be special. Like Special Education students are special.

First off, I’m sounding off on a peeve of mine, namely, the expression “I hate to say this, but—” Stop lying, dirtbag. You relish this. You can’t wait to see the hurt on people’s faces when you say what you supposedly hate to say.

Such gross dishonesty really grinds my gears. And, now, the news....

One month after moving out for his new job, our son came down to visit us for the 4th of July weekend. The first night we stayed up and drank and listened and talked about music and stuff. We hit the bar around the corner on the Fourth itself, then walked to the convenience store a mile down the road like a couple of bored teenage dudes on a summer evening’s adventure, then walked home. 

We didn’t shoot off any fireworks. There are at least three houses on my side of town good to shoot off an arsenal each on these occasions. On Sunday, my son changed his oil in our garage before driving to the southeastern Colorado town where he’d be working the next week.

Angel came back to visit for the first time since just after Spooky died. He looked much better than he did the last time I saw him. Angel even came by my upstairs office window to cadge treats, something he hadn’t done since autumn. This whole weekend was one big sunbeam break from the clouds.

Thus ended the best weekend we’d enjoyed since Labor Day weekend, which marked the last weekend Otis T. Cat could control his bladder and bowels. If 2020 has been nothing but darkness since March — and it most certainly has — the twilight began that first day Otis missed the litter box in September. What might likely have been the Last Normal Autumn of the United States was just the usual stuff in between cleaning up after an aging cat who was not getting any better. There was nothing special about my birthday or Halloween. Thanksgiving went well. Christmas wasn’t quite a disaster, but it would have helped if I’d waited a while before getting into my cups on Christmas Eve. 

Thinking back on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, it occurs to me there was no excitement about that last third of 2019 from Labor Day until then. We were simply marking time. A particularly bitter and ugly irony occurs to me when I realize I should have had Otis put down in October, to spare him the loneliness of not sleeping with us upstairs that was his fate for the last six months of his life. Putting Otis down in October would have definitely “enlivened” (the best word I’ve got) those perfunctory final months of the year.

Instead, we did what we did, and January and February went slow, gray and ghastly, as they are most anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. At the last of February we realized we could wait no longer. So Otis was put down on 3 March, and when the Great Pandemic Panic and lockdown got going two weeks later, it was just another sad and awful thing in a sad and awful year following a long prologue. 

Ginger Tom took sick and died in late April; I found Spooky dead by the side of the road in early May. I buried three kittens born of two different litters among the ferals. Then my son, who had quit his job sometime back, I forget, decided he was ready to go back to work. As of the first of June, my wife and I were empty-nesters again.

But my son came down to visit last weekend. We’re not alone and forsaken. That’s something. A very huge something, for which I am grateful.

My forward progress with The Wrong Kind of Dead has exploded entire finished pages at a time since then, in glorious contrast to the depression-enforced writer’s block that crushed my fingers when we left our grown children behind in Colorado Springs four years ago. More on that later. Meanwhile, I’m counting up the blessings and keeping my brave face properly starched and ironed. So far, so good, and here’s hoping you’re the same.

All photographs Copyright © 2020 by Lawrence Roy Aiken.

Random Thoughts on the First Day of the Second Half

My last post was my 666th. Not that I’m superstitious, just uncomfortable. And I really do have stuff on my mind.

NOTES ON THE CURRENT CRISIS: It’s interesting how much the events of this year have made so many of us appreciate the changing of the months. It’s as if we’re all hoping that this will be the month everything gets back to normal. Naturally, they don’t. Things seem to loosen up on one side, then things get stupid-weird on the other.

As far as this Panicky-Demic Lockdown mania goes, the people making these stupid and arbitrary rules aren’t giving up their power. Fourth of July is canceled and so is the rest of the summer. If you think the snickering-smug authoritarians are going to let you have your Christmas shopping and parties this year, I advise you to think smarter, not harder. Thanksgiving family dinners will be discouraged, if not outright prohibited before that. Whatever happens in the November U.S. federal elections will only serve as further excuse for tightening the screws “for public safety.”

For those sniffing about for Socially Unacceptable Political Thought on my part, I remind you that the will to power uses ideology as fig-leaf, a beard to distract from its primary purpose, i.e., acquiring and exercising more power. It was the Big Lesson of George Orwell’s 1984, that the power to be able to spout any kind of nonsense unchallenged — say, “2 + 2 = 5” — is the ultimate goal. 

Everyone seems to have missed that point, but I’ll say it anyway, if only to be able to say “I told you so,” and if only from beyond the grave. Despite repeated proofs of inflated infection and death statistics, despite empirical, see-for-yourself proof that the big scary virus has turned out to be a nothingburger used as a boogeyman to frighten and intimidate and control, people are still playing along with this second wave thing. 

As I say, I don’t make human nature. It is what it is. Whaddya gonna do?

That no one on the Internet believes the official 9/11 narrative, that most even suspect an inside job, says much for lost public trust over the years. That said, the Internet is not the world. The fact that so many people are going along with this is discouraging.

“CAN WE PLEASE COMPLAIN ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE?” DEPT.: I’ve managed to find workarounds for the increasingly unworkable Google Blogger. So far I can still switch easily between “Legacy Blogger” and “that mess they’re forcing on us now” so I can make the smart quotes work. 

However, I am unable to load my photos directly from my computer onto a blogpost in either version. The workaround for this is to upload the photos to the Google Photos app — yes, it took ‘em from my PC folder just fine — and “Insert” the photos from there. I suspect this was something done on purpose by way of forcing people to use that app, but that’s just me, and so what? Nothing’s changing until it does.

There is one bright note to all of this. It used to be that I had to go into HTML to fix how any word I italicized became twice as large as the text around it. This bug endured for years. Someone finally thought to step on it.

That said, New Blogger still doesn’t get its own font sizing commands. Large text becomes medium-sized text and captions are illegibly small, however many times you highlight and hit the “Normal” button. As always, it’s fixed in HTML or not at all, and you still can’t count on what you saved to stick. You’ll come back to an already published post and see all kinds of haywire formatting. Why? How? I don’t know, I don’t care. I just wish it would stop. 

It won’t, of course. This is on me for not following through with my Wordpress account. Moving along, then....

Like I don’t have enough on my desk already.

TEN YEARS GONE: This morning as I fed the cats I was impressed by the autumnal quality of the air, and on the first of July, at that. Then I remembered walking out from my house in Colorado Springs on the first of July ten years ago. It was sunny and hot, the clear blue sky of another world because this was the first day in 20 years we were not getting paid and taken care of by the Department of the Navy.

My wife had officially retired the day before, just in time for the Great Recession to hollow out the IT industry I was hoping to break into with my MCSA and CompTIA certs. We had both hoped to land GS jobs on the Air Force Academy but abused wage-slave NAF was the best we could do. 

All that, and I was Class II obese. I was still two years from figuring out how to write a novel, and three years from being published. It would be five years before I finally gave up on temporary work, as the gigs were only getting worse on top of so few and far between that I might as well not bother.

So I wrote and published two novels, lost 50 pounds, then another 30, moved 200 miles from where I’d been living for nearly ten years, got cancer, got over it, and here we are now, 308 pages deep into the last novel of my series.

What a ride, is all I have to say. Hands down, my 50s have been the most inspirational and productive decade of my life. I thought I should say something about it.

It really is like this, For me, it describes mid-2012 until now, so, whoa. Eight years.

Curious Customs of a Faraway Country: Cussin’ in the ‘70s

Another transmission from that tricky, shimmering horizon called “the past.” As in, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” (L. P. Hartley.) Also, “[F]or time is the longest distance between two places.” (Tennessee Williams.) 

For most people’s lifetimes they remember their parents cussing, and profanity everywhere except maybe the Disney/ cartoon channels and the teachers at school. Up until somewhere in the 1990s this wasn’t so pervasive, even among some of the working class.

I’m old enough to remember when cussing in front of a girl shut you down forever in her graces. She’d have nothing to do with you ever again. You were common, and despite a few popular songs on the radio glorifying “the street” (urban peasants and their ways) or “the common people,” there was not one atom of dignity to being common. Just as there were “the kind of the girls you diddled and the women you married,” there were “no-account men you have nothing to do with and eligible bachelors.” Common men used coarse language among women, and were thus dismissed. 

Then, and now. Res ipsa loquitur.

Cussing among the upper classes had its place inasmuch as men would cuss around men. That was why it was called “man talk.” Neither women nor children were in the vicinity as they must not, under any circumstances, be permitted to hear such speech, let alone participate. For that matter, the language was shared among only the tightest of a man’s clique. He rarely spoke “frankly,” as the euphemism went, to outsiders.

Again, a man who cussed in front of women and children was common, and while that was certainly disqualifying, a woman who cussed was pure-T trash, no better than a whore. A man who married such a thing brought his own status down if he wasn’t already a no-account.

Calm down, ladies, I am fully aware that what passes for manhood these days is emblematic of our decline as a culture. It says much about the times that the men’s self-improvement movement which involves lifting weights, eating well, abstaining from pornography, reading classic literature and philosophy, etc., is condemned as “toxic” by men who look like this in a (largely futile) effort to bed women who look like the lower part of the previous image.

This began to change with my generation, we late-boomers born in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Some of this may be blamed for the increased use of profanity in the movies, and, to a lesser extent, television—few appreciate just how serious it was to hear so much as “hell” or “damn” even in the movies until maybe 1967—and while I appreciate the influence this loosening of standards may have exercised upon people, I put a lot of the blame for the (much deserved) erosion of respect for authority occasioned by that meat-grinding money pit that was Vietnam. To rephrase one of my favorite lines, what good was all this propriety in language and manners if all it led to was young men in body bags in a southeast Asian jungle no one knew existed until so many years ago?

I must emphasize we were not griping over the war, per se. We weren’t getting drafted; we didn’t care. (It was the height of cool in the 1970s to affect an attitude of “don’t care” about pretty much everything.) It was the lesson of Vietnam that guided us, namely, that our elders, these people we were supposed to respect, even love, lied to us. They would always lie to us, waste our money, send us away to be killed while their children avoided service and were never held accountable, because, well, that’s the way of the world and you better learn your place in it, boy. 

That these hateful, hard-faced oldsters, doing Moloch’s work with Jesus on their lips, would dare tell us how to speak...yeah, well, ya know what? @#$% those smelly old hypocrites. And so it came to pass that a man who used “hell” and “damn” in casual conversation was no longer a common vulgar peasant, but a brutally honest guy tellin’ it like it is.

A play on a vulgar expression popularized among the hip-hop community in the late 1980s. The humor is in the ironically anodyne translation. Not cussing to be funny. What a twist!

One-half century later as we enter the third decade of the 21st century, we are long accustomed to adult cartoon shows in which the cartoon children drop that once most-dreaded of epithets, the legendary “f-bomb,” like it was nothing. At this point there’s no shock value to children using foul language anymore. It’s the way people talk. I’m impressed there were some people dismayed at how coarse language is celebrated on the current Star Trek series, as if that were some kind of modern artistic breakthrough. Of course, they’re dismissed as old and irrelevant, which is funny considering the star of one of these series is almost 80 and reprising a role he hasn’t played since the last movie bombed out of theaters at the turn of the century.

I used profanity quite freely in my writing, as well as real life, throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and up until about 2012, for all of the reasons described above and more. I’m not proud of it, but at least I understand why. Even now, I struggle to get the reflexive obscenities out of my speech. I have found it more difficult to quit than cigarettes. Fine. Challenge accepted.

It’s been said that if you want to be a rebel these days, don’t get a tattoo. The same can be said for what we used to call coarse language. I’ll stick it to the Man by making mine nice and smooth again.

The Day After the Lottery

...everyone gets the piece of paper with the black dot on it.

June 27 is the day upon which Shirley Jackson’s infamous “The Lottery” occurs. “Lottery in June, corn heavy soon.” One unfortunate person takes it for the village while the rest of us ponder the wisdom of our traditions and maybe “this is the way we’ve always done things” isn’t an excuse for barbarity.

Swiped from the Warhammer 40K Techno-Barbarianposter Facebook page.

In real life, the day after is even more interesting. It was on this day in 1914 that a 19-year-old anarchist changed the world for the worse with multiple gunshots into the car of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. It was the excuse used to start World War I, known then as the Great War, because no one had seen anything like it. The royal families of Europe had especially lethal toys to play with this time around. 

There would be no more watching the battles from a picnic blanket on a nearby hill for civilians as troops shot and stabbed at one another. (Seriously, this used to be a thing.) Now there was death from above as machine guns in flying machines strafed positions from the air. Clouds of mustard gas blinded and sometimes killed. The death toll at either the Somme or Verdun was an obscenity justifying putting every last member of these royal families against a wall. The bloodlines of countless families were ended because of Kaiser “Little Willie’s” (as his relatives called him) need to make a royal spectacle of himself.

So much pain, ruin, and death came of that one 19-year-old kid with a pistol on 28 June 1914. I haven’t even gotten into the sequel to this war, which came about as a direct result of how the original finished. Let’s just say this calendar page is redder than most.

Two of my favorite people from back in the day when science fiction (or speculative fiction, as Mr. Ellison more aptly insisted) meant something died on this day, namely, Rod Serling, creator, writer, and host of The Twilight Zone, in 1975; and Harlan Ellison, in 2018.

I know a couple of people who have birthdays on this day as well, so it obviously isn’t all tragedy and loss on 28 June. Just a little more tragic and lossy than most. It is what it is.

Halftime in the Year of the Plague

I’m down to recycling Facebook posts, and why not? It’s not the worst thing I’m doing here. I’m noticing stuff. You know the drill.

It’s the last day of June 2020, the halfway point of a spectacularly emotion-driven year. From “just wear the masks like the TV man told us to, you’re such a Kaaaaren, I’m telling on you! [whine, fuss, splutter, shriek, nag]” to “everything is racist, let’s mob up and tear down all the statues, set stuff on fire!” in one weekend. 

And for that extra comedic, ironic touch, the worst participants will pause spluttering just long enough to tell you their irrationality is based on SCIENCE! and “studies.” (Spoiler alert: they couldn’t name you one. “But the consensus is there, so there!”) 

On one hand, A.D 2020 feels like one of those fourth season hour-long Twilight Zone episodes that didn’t work because of the length. On the other, it’s a great study in mass hysteria, and how some of the smartest people you know can start talking about “numbers” from the same media that told us Hillary Clinton was going to win by 90% four years ago and Saddam Hussein would nuke everyone if we didn’t drop everything and invade in 2003. 

Those are just two examples, but people still believe whatever gets broadcast at them from a Big Name, however ridiculous, and despite a proven track record of mendacity in the service of someone’s agenda. If I could bring back two people to help me make sense of this, it would be Ambrose Bierce and George Carlin. Both were very tuned into how mobs are raised and manipulated and I pray to avoid their bitterness at the same. 

So, what’s next? I wind up this seething wall of text and get to work, that’s what. And good morning! Among other things, I’m loving this too-short summer while it lasts.

Painting the Darkness

In this season of transitions

as unhappy as they are necessary

with the cat of our children’s childhood 

put down for old age and then

our last child leaving home to seek 

his fortune

In this nightmare year of convulsive changes

my wife and I settle into our irrelevance

another too-short summer dissolving before our eyes

only so many more Christmases to go

My wife set to remodeling when we gave up our cat

and when our son left, she overhauled his entire

room, painting the worn hardwood floor

moving the bed from its corner

to beneath the window

adding a futon sofa

The sadness of my son’s absence

still drifts in the sunbeams 

about the ghosts of his melancholy

(he was quite properly bored and anxious 

here) but they’re dignified 

by the attention

and, honestly, it’s better than what it would

have become had we left it alone:

a museum of dust and inattention

borne of equal parts sadness and

fear

These changes being what they are

this wasn’t enough. Soon our broken

and dusty stairs were redeemed

as my wife’s mahogany brown floor paint

slid smoothly across the filled cracks 

A cool green to match the stair risers

overtook the stained yellowy plaster of the walls

the white trim glowing like redemption

a halo to surround and crown the darker colors

Our stories haven’t changed

laughter and tears alike

lie fixed beneath this now-new paint

and I wonder how many more 

families’ stories will play out

in this century-old pile

when my wife and I are gone

Someone will one day

paint over us
my silent prayer is they at least 

coordinate the colors 

and keep that trim 

gleaming.

Poem and photo Copyright © 2020 by Lawrence Roy Aiken.

The Happiest Sad Week of a Sad Year

A new week, a new month, a new season. So what else is new?

As of the first of this month, this also became the year our son moved out. I keep telling myself it’s a happy day because it is. Still, my wife and I will miss him. He’s in his early 20s, but we would have been content to follow the Italian model and keep him at home until he got married. 

That said, he wasn’t going to find his wife here in the sparsely populated San Luis Valley, let alone the kind of job that would have him certified as a journeyman in two states. In the middle of a pandemic panic-induced lockdown, he had three companies looking to bring him in to work. He could easily have gotten work here in the Valley, but it would have been a lateral move at best, and more likely a step back. It would not be a noble sacrifice on his part to stay here for his parents’ sake. It would be a foolishly squandered opportunity.

What most impresses me is how my son, in the six weeks since he left his last job, never bothered filing for unemployment. He had too much pride and no patience for the paperwork and jumping-through-hoops. He had enough in savings to pay his bills and still help his parents on the side. When all was said and done, he had plenty left to get him started again in Colorado Springs. 

When he moved back in with us three years ago, I told him to take the opportunity to “stack paper,” i.e., put something back from every paycheck. Well, bless him if he didn’t do just that.

He’s long been too big for these toys but we can’t give them up. These, as least we can hang onto.

 

As with the passing of our longtime family cat Otis in March, this was something that had to happen sooner or later, and if we mourn, it’s for us. I scolded myself as I watched him drive away, “If it’s this damned hard on you, make a bunch of money and move yourself closer!”

Maybe that’s just what I’ll do. It’s an incentive to finish writing this last book.

Road Kills

“Well, at least it was quick.”

Swiped from Steve the Vagabond and Silly Linguist's Facebook page.

On the Road is Jack Kerouac’s most famous book for whatever reason but I found The Dharma Bums more coherent and a better representation of what Kerouac was about. (As Truman Capote famously said of On the Road, which was written continuously on a long scroll of paper, “That’s not writing; that’s typing!”) 

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road works because the author’s odd, is-that-really-a-word? vocabulary enhances the Uncanny Valley unease of his post-apocalypse world. (Recall how this worked for the then-celebrated/now-forgotten 1980s post-apocalyptic Riddley Walker.) The ending was aw-gedouttahere unbelievable but after so many pages of relentless misery, you’ll take it. 

Still, for all that goes down, The Road wasn’t nearly as brutal as McCarthy’s 1984 masterpiece Blood Meridian. Those who have read that one recognize it as the most horrific horror novel ever. That it isn’t in the Horror section of the book store makes sense when you read it. McCarthy’s monsters-in-human-form are far, far removed from the turbo-charged Halloween beasties of Stephen King and Dean Koontz, et al.

The Corners We’ve Turned

...in the Year of the Panicky Demick. A not-so metaphorical State of the Apocalypse.

I would have had a post out days ago but Blogger refused to accept my photographs. I like my blog illustrated, like a magazine. It helps break up my text, provides a sort of sidebar while illustrating my main thesis and...look, I like my pictures, all right?

I’d wondered if this was the end. I was even thinking of making a post to that effect: “Blogger won’t take my image uploads, so stay tuned until I figure out another platform, which is probably never, because frankly this thing wasn’t that much fun to begin with. Just in case, and most probably, Goodbye.”

At last it occurred to me to attempt uploading photos using the new Blogger interface that I’d tried a month ago and found detestable, a load of change for change’s sake that didn’t fix the problems with formatting and required a learning curve figuring out where all the buttons were, besides. Sure enough, New Blogger took my photos just fine. I could try and learn to endure New Blogger, but it doesn’t work with my smart quotes plug-in.

Therefore, I’ll be flipping back and forth. Trust me, I don’t hate the big tech companies, Microsoft and Google in particular, because it’s cool.

Not even halfway through and we’ve seen the sun set on so much this year.

One of the sharpest corners we’ve had to navigate is the fate of the Blue Porch Kitty Committee. It’s a sad tale that requires its own post, but the précis is we’ve been brushed harder by the darkness than I expected this year, even knowing we had to euthanize elderkitty Otis, even knowing we’d been getting by far too long without incident regarding the outdoor feral colony that called our front porch home.

What was once a steady complement of nine cats, then eleven cats, is down to six. Angel has been so depressed by the poisoning deaths of his fellow toms Ginger and Spooky he refuses to re-enter the very yard he grew up in. We have some kittens in the garage that may yet grow up to fill out what’s left, but we’ve contacted the local cat shelter and we hope they get around to taking them away soon, as well as fixing as many of the un-fixed cats we still have around.

We found the opening through our foundation under our porch where the cats were getting in to have their babies. After a couple of winters without incident we’ve had to fish one dead kitten from the crawlspace, as well as the body of Ginger Tom, who needed a dark and lonely place to die. Heartbreaking and unsanitary are a heck of a combo. 

We already knew we had to renegotiate how we handled the feral colony we inherited with this house in 2016. We used to leave part of the skirting under our porch open so the cats would have a safe place to go in the event one of the many dogs running loose in our town made an appearance. Again, we were renegotiating. If they needed shelter they could duck through the cat door we’d installed in the side of the garage.

Last week all that wood latticework, much of it rotten or soon to be, was torn out. My wife raked decades of debris from under the porch, including one entire newspaper dated 1981. My son then went underneath to make sure both vent/access squares in the main foundation were covered. 

This bit of home improvement alone was a milestone. But the party being over for the Blue Porch Kitty Committee weighs heavy on our hearts. It’s not a mere metaphor; for years we enjoyed a festive atmosphere among the animals lounging about our porch. With the deaths of Ginger Tom and Spooky, who were kittens only two years ago, chasing each other around the poplars in our front yard, it’s as if the music stopped, the lights came on, and it’s cleanup time. Naturally, we’ll feed and take care of who’s left. It will never feel the same, though. Because it isn’t.

This is the core group as of yesterday evening, 30 May 2020. Angel, not pictured, blessed us with his presence for the first time in a while, but he refused to come into the yard. He used to be one of the most aggressive eaters and never missed a meal. I couldn’t even tempt him with chicken.

Today, the last day of May 2020 will be the last night my son spends here at our house. He’d quit a deteriorating situation just as the lockdowns were getting going this spring. My wife and I never thought to ask if he was looking for something else, especially as there didn’t seem to be anything else with all the restrictions in place due to the pandemic panic.

Besides, we knew boredom would get to him long before the lack of cash-flow became an issue. And so it came to pass he was interviewing via webcam with a company out of Kansas. They took all of one hour after the interview to make their offer. It’s the kind of respectable, living wage with benefits his father never knew, and he’ll be doing it at age 23. 

He will, of course, have to move back to Colorado Springs. The seats are out of the back of the van and we’re moving him there tomorrow. Cynthia and I will be empty nesters again for the first time since January 2017, when he moved in with us for lack of opportunities in the Springs. Now the polarity has reversed. He learned his trade here, but the money is over there. 

It is at once a cause for joy and mourning. I’m going to miss having my son around, even if we only talked to each other maybe twice a week because we both prefer to do our things at our computer workstations, his thing being electronic music composition and video game level modding. (He was also out of town a lot on his last job. Hell, out of the entire San Luis Valley. That says something right there. He could not stay.) His moving out the first time in 2016 as we left Colorado Springs for Monte Vista was a prime cause of my writer’s block that year. I didn’t know it until he moved in with us in Monte in 2017, and I was making coherent sentences again.

We’ve had some lovely pre-sunset Golden Hours, with a few post-sunrise Golden Hours that made me glad I was awake for them.

For what it’s worth, I do not expect to suffer from that kind of block again. I’m not the same man I was in 2018, let alone 2016, and thank God for that, too. Despite the melancholia stinking up this post it must be understood that, with the obvious exception of Blogger, all of these changes had to happen. Otis T. Cat was old and I would have had him put down sooner if I’d known then what I understand better now. We’d enjoyed a smooth ride with the feral cats outside for years. We knew we had to clean out and close up under the porch. The murders of Ginger Tom and Spooky, as well as the stillborn kittens, forced us to do something we should have done last year, if not the year before that.

Meanwhile, the great social experiment in how much suffering governing bodies can inflict upon vast populations in the name of a so-called emergency continues. It’s obvious this Chinese Coronavirus isn’t stacking bodies, nor will it ever outside of the nursing homes several governors and health officials have forced actual sick people into for safety. But the governors and the local health officials are enjoying themselves too much. So what if one business after another goes under? So what if families go bankrupt? 

So what are we going to do about it? 

I, for one, have had all worry and care about this stupid panic bludgeoned out of me. I’ve come to appreciate that there was much good among the bad this month, and that’s where I’ll put my focus. I got my old laptop up and running again. I finished reading some books I’d put off. Best of all, I solved the problem of integrating Agnes’ and Elyssa’s backstories and made massive progress with my novel. That’s a post all by itself which I hope to get around to tomorrow.

With respect to those who have taken personal hits from the Great Pandemic Panic of 2020, I can’t help smiling to think that, for all everyone’s hollering about in the media, including and especially the Internet, it’s been nothing more than a minor inconvenience for me. Passages and transitions, changes as painful as they were inevitable, are how I’ll remember this year. It just so happens that all the notable, life-altering corners turned since Otis T. Cat’s passing in March were turned this month.

I’m grateful to be here for it. That said, I’ve lost all enthusiasm with arguing about wearing a mask in public. I miss my cats; I’ll miss my son. I still have a novel to finish. I can only do so much. 

Don’t miss the kittycats for the trees. Back by poplar demand!

All photographs Copyright © 2020 by Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved.