Category: Life in Dunwich

My Adventures in the Mythical New England Town of Dunwich

New Year’s Resolutions – 2025

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At this dawning of the rolling year, it is more than normally desirable that we make some slight provision for improving our behavior.  Some people try to lose weight or stop smoking.  Others look for a better job or start a hobby.  I’ve vowed to finish my book.  And to accommodate that effort I will be clearing the mornings for writing and editing the book.  This may impact my posting schedule (from time to time) but I think it’s necessary.  Time slips by too quickly if there are too many competing priorities.

Now I don’t intend to abandon the website.  OCF will have its daily photo and quote.  And whenever something needs my approbation, scorn or explanation I will promptly respond.  And I will link to anything that I think interesting or thought-provoking.  But when there’s a slow news week and I’ve already gassed off about the usual suspects I may just take a pass.  On days like that maybe I’ll link to a song I like or a clip from a movie that makes me smile.

And from time to time, I’ll put up a chunk of my story to get feedback from the readers here.  And I’ll write about writing sometimes!

So, none of this is dire.  With Trump entering the White House in a couple of weeks I’m sure I’ll have all kinds of stimuli for posts that will make it impossible to do my fiction writing work.  After all, the world is drifting into troubled times and that is sure to goad me into taking to my little soap box and barking out condemnations and propounding simple-minded plans of action.

But I do see that I’ll have to prioritize writing if I ever hope to finish that darn book.  I do think there is some writing in me.  And I won’t know how hard or easy selling books is until I give it a good old American try.

As for the news today, we’ve all been watching the attack in New Orleans and then listened to Biden try to string a few dozen sentences together without sounding like Max Headroom (and failing).  I love how he tells us the guy is a follower of ISIS but not to jump to conclusions.  So, because he’s a Moslem whose parents came from the Middle East and he’s declared jihad on America we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that he’s an Islamic terrorist?  Would that be insensitive to the various followers of the religion of peace?  Well, never mind.  Biden is so laughably irrelevant that he might as well have started to read from a Dr. Seuss book as the words of that speech his handlers handed him.  More interesting would have been a statement from Trump advising the federal law enforcement agents not to destroy any of the evidence before his team has a chance to see what really went on.  Well, this is a small part of what I expect at the border for the foreseeable future.  So, it barely merits comment.  Let’s pray nothing bigger is in the wings.

 

And just to show that my heart is in the right place, I’ll put together a few things that might lighten your day.

 

 

Gear Acquisition Syndrome in 2025

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I’ve been very happy with my Sony A7 IV camera since I bought it a few years ago.  It does everything I need it to do and I’m not sure what would tempt me to trade it in.  So, I haven’t bought any photo gear in quite a while.  But recently a new lens has tempted me.  But it’s a long story (and thus the reason it’s a post). About fourteen years ago I bought the Sony (badged as Carl Zeiss) A-mount 135mm, f\1.8 lens.  It was an extremely extravagant purchase at $1,500 and I couldn’t justify it in use terms because basically it was a very long portrait lens for which I had very rare need.  But after seeing some of the extraordinary results it could produce, I plunked down the cash.  And it was every bit as sharp and contrasty as the critics claimed.  And I managed to find quite a few excuses to drag this big heavy lens with me to places and events where longer and shorter and lighter lenses make better sense.

But not too long after this purchase, Sony, in its infinite cruelty, stopped making A-mount cameras and went mirrorless.  I won’t repeat my long sad story of enduring the e-mount introduction.  But I will mention that Sony salved over the initial problem of having no lenses for their new mirrorless cameras by producing a line of attachments for adapting A-mount lenses to e-mount cameras.  They were designated with the prefix LA-EA and numbered successively 1 through 5.  And with each introduction I dreamed of my e-mount cameras working with my A-mount lenses as if they were native lenses.  Well, that never happened.  Granted they got better.  But even the LA-EA-5 never allowed my A-mount lenses to enjoy the full capability of the camera’s auto-focus or special features like magnified view, in the same way as my e-mount lenses could.

And so, one by one I sold off my A-mount lenses and mostly bought the e-mount equivalent lenses (or just didn’t replace them).  But not the 135mm f\1.8.  By the time the equivalent e-mount lens appeared my A-mount lens was no longer very marketable.  A-mount lenses had a fairly small pool of users and so the market prices sank to fairly low prices.  And when the new lens came out in e-mount they wanted $2,100.  And that seemed a bridge too far for a lens that wasn’t really needed for a major part of my shooting style.

Over the years third party manufacturers have come out with their versions of this lens in the e-mount.  First Sigma, then Samyang and now Viltrox.  Each time I looked at the combination of price savings and quality and I shrugged my shoulders and said meh.  But finally, it’s reached the breaking point.  A review of the Viltrox lens (actually several reviews) claim that it is very slightly better than Sony’s $2,100 version but at about 1/3 the price ($760).  So, I checked the trade in value of my old A-mount lens and finding it to be about $350 I mailed it out and now await my thirty pieces of silver (figuratively) before finishing off the transaction to buy the Viltrox.

Wrapping up the lens gave me a pang of regret.  It was a beautiful piece of kit that had worked flawlessly when attached to the camera it was designed for, the Sony A-850 DSLR.  It wasn’t the lens’s fault that the geniuses at Sony had almost simultaneously with buying the Minolta camera line, relegated all of its products to obsolescence by going mirrorless.  But such is life.

Well onward and upward in 2025.  I will record the arrival of the new lens with photos it produces.  After all that’s the real reason they make these darn things.

View from Campsite 5 at Toroweap

SONY DSC
SONY DSC

Getting in the Spirit

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SONY DSC

Some snow falling today surprised me into remembering how close Christmas is.  Of course, I dasn’t say such a thing aloud in Camera Girl’s presence or she would toss an oven mitt or a ladle at me for my oblivious attitude as she soldiers on in her pre-Christmas baking and cooking marathon.  She is calculating cooking and storage times down to the nanosecond as enormous quantities of baked goods, meat, pasta, cheese and vegetables are processed in the run up to the big event.  My party line is that I am available to help in any capacity she sees fit.  This merely elicits rueful head-shaking and eye-rolling.  Well, that’s my story.  And anyway, I serve many useful functions.  I am the snow removal department and I also serve as chauffeur if the roads seem too tricky for her.  And I have a thousand and one other jobs.  For instance, I’m in charge of the yearly Christmas card design and procurement.  Well, of course.  I’m a photographer.  But such things are easily forgotten by someone who can point to a table groaning under the weight of a feast.  Well, we also serve who wait and eat.  But who’s keeping score anyway?

I have all of next week off and I’m looking forward to the get togethers.  But I’ve been keeping an eye on the situation in Washington.  It’s almost unbelievable how feckless and dishonest the Biden administration intends to be right up to the final day of their reign of terror.  Biden’s pardoning of hideously evil people would be shameful if Biden and his cronies had any shame.  I have to assume that there was a price list posted somewhere for the scum of the earth to figure out whether they could afford to be freed by Hunter and Jill and whoever else wrote out the pardons for Joe to scribble his signature on.  And the Republicans don’t disappoint with their nitwitted attempts to pass legislation in the House of Representatives.  Only the dishonesty and corruption of the Democrats allows the GOP to seem better by comparison.  But it really is a sad sideshow to behold.

The clowns and the cretins, the monsters and the madmen; the whole cast of this insane drama that is playing out on the deck of a sailing ship headed straight for an iceberg.  And at this point Donald Trump is the captain and he and his crew are locked in a cutlass fight with the usual pirates and so no one is steering the ship.  Well, it should give us a reason to pop popcorn in 2025.

But this is all beside the point.  We have Christmas to celebrate and the relief from knowing that somehow, we dodged the bullet of a Kamala Harris presidency.  And, sure, so many things will go wrong in 2025.  Trump will waffle, Democrats will lie and cheat, bureaucrats will obfuscate and interfere and Republicans will prove themselves inept and obtuse.  In other words, standard operating procedure.  But things will be better than they’ve been the last four years.  God willing, the wars will start to die down.  Energy prices will come back to Earth and that will tend to drive down the prices of everything else.  And the biggest bonus, we may never see any of the Bidens for the rest of our lives.  That alone is worth a hallelujah.

Top Men Working on It

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My recent thought experiment to determine whether the geometry of our universe is Euclidean or not has inspired me to get involved in the upcoming Trump Administration.  Just as Trump has farmed out budget cutting to DOGE, I would like to volunteer (well not for free though) my services to perform research that is woefully needed by the United States government.  I haven’t come up with a snappy acronym for my team but I’m working on it.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the projects I’d like to tackle for Uncle Sam.

  • Global Warming – Now, this is a no-brainer. Up until now research on this subject has been performed by commies.  And no matter what information they get they “analyze” it until they can work it into a hockey stick graph that warns that the end of the world is imminent.  What is needed is an objective, scientific approach.  And that’s me all over.  I will analyze the hell out of that data and something tells me that my result will be a call for more fossil fuel and nuclear energy to stave off the next ice age which is already rearing its ugly head.  Also, I’ll perform a mass and energy balance and a cost analysis around such technologies as wind generators and solar energy panels.  Something tells me that the cost of each kilowatt hour taken over the usable life of the equipment and including the replacement cost of the equipment (not neglecting the cost of environmental remediation for mining and processing of heavy metals and other toxic materials) will be an order of magnitude higher than either fossil fuels or fission reactors.  Is it too much to ask to have the “climate scientists” hauled into court for fraud?
  • The Definition of a Woman – In a country where this

Is called a woman, things are not going to go well.  What I propose to do is convene a panel of experts.  I will use the most credentialed individuals available.  I will include married men, wedding planners, hairdressers, script writers from the Hallmark Channel, employees at grocery and clothing stores and shoe salesmen.  In addition, I’ll recruit a fair cross-section of guys found habitually at strip joints from across this great land.  Between them all we will work long and hard to come up with a consensus definition and if necessary, a list of qualifying and disqualifying “conditions.”  I’m sure the team will have a contentious and spirited discussion about everything from terminology to visual aids but we’ll make sure that the exhibit shown above or anything like it is never mistaken for a woman again.

  • My team will devote a full year to trying to figure out exactly which mental conditions Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are suffering from. After making an exhaustive study we will try to translate their last four years of speeches into rational English sentences.  Where no meaning can be found we will overlay those sections of the transcripts with pictures of kittens and puppy dogs.

So that will be a start.  Eventually we’ll expand out and solve all the problems of the multiverse.  But I will charge time and a half on weekends.  After all I’m only human.

I Can’t Wait to Get Started!

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I was reading a chapter in a mathematical survey that I bought a long time ago (Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning by A. D. Aleksandrov, A. N. Kolmogorov, M. A. Lavrent’ev).  It was a section in the non-Euclidean Geometry chapter called something like “Real Space.”

The author was trying to make the point that since gravity bends light and light rays were the closest thing to perfect straight lines that you could claim that parallel lines can intersect and triangles can have more or less than 180 degrees in real space.  And to get away from the idea of straight lines in empty space (no matter present) he said that the concept of space only exists in the context of it containing matter.

And I stopped to think whether that seemed to follow.  I never usually question the meaning of empty.  My basic visualization of reality is that the universe is the void of the Bible augmented by really small golf balls bouncing around in it.  Empty space to me is wherever there aren’t any golf balls at that moment.  Now granted, I’ve heard that particles are always appearing into and disappearing out of existence in the “quantum vacuum.”  And I know that many physicists characterize the universe as just a bunch of “fields” of the various elementary particles; the electron field and the Higgs field, etc.  But I don’t understand why we can’t imagine empty space.  I mean I know that at any time a quark or a gluon or some other ephemeral exotic particle can show up anywhere but why is it so hard to say. “Right now, right here is empty space because nothing is there.”

I guess I’ll have to read more deeply.  After all, if the empty space between galaxies (and everything else) is always and ever more rapidly expanding as the universe itself inflates at an accelerating rate, it seems logical to me that there’s more and more “empty space” everywhere.

And so, I propose the following thought experiment:

I posit that using the James Webb Space Telescope, we find a spot in the sky where there aren’t even any really, really old galaxies hanging out.  There’s nothing along that line of sight.  I then take two flashlights (or “lasers” if anyone insists) and using a protractor and some really straight two by fours I line them up parallel to each other in the direction of that cosmic empty spot and turn them on.  Why wouldn’t those two beams continue on to the end of the universe exactly the same distance apart?  Now, sure, a few photons here and there might be deflected by a some randomly situated gas molecules or by the odd quantum vacuum quark that appeared for a femtosecond along the line of sight but for the most part the laser beams should continue on forever and ever, amen.

So, if that is the case.  What’s the problem with imagining empty space (mostly) with my two flashlight (or laser) beams going out and out and out forever?  And forever parallel.  After all there’s nothing close enough to really bend those light beams.  Now to prove this result there will need to be someone on the other end of the universe to do the measurement.  This presents something of a problem.  However, there may be a solution (well, a thought solution anyway).  It’s a well-known part of the Big Bang Theory that there should be equal amounts of matter and anti-matter in the universe.  But here we are with basically none to be found.  I theorize that at the end of the universe is the anti-matter we’ve been looking for (just like those ‘droids).  Granting this, then there should be an anti-matter me at the end of the universe.  Let’s call him anti-photog.  Now assuming he’s extremely long-lived (which anti-matter life forms always are) and that he thinks precisely as I do, he’ll be waiting for those two beams of light and he will measure the angle between the beams and find them to be parallel and thereby prove the Euclidean (or in his case anti-Euclidean nature of empty space.  Then he can send a return beam back in our direction (somehow) and we will have the answer.  Of course, the sun and probably the Milky Way Galaxy will have long ago been absorbed by the local super massive black hole and cosmic lichens will possibly be the only form of life remaining but that’s how science works sometimes.  You have to take the good with the bad.

So, Lobachevsky, Gauss, Riemann and all you other “non-Euclidean” geometricians (I’m looking at you A. D. Aleksandrov, A. N. Kolmogorov and M. A. Lavrent’ev!) shouldn’t put too much stock in all this curved space hand-waving.  Until the results of this wonderful research of mine are available, they should sit tight.  Estimates for the return trip signal are still being calculated but I’m sure it won’t be too bad.  I’ll be starting my crowdfunding page to buy the lasers and the two by fours very soon.  I’ve still got my third-grade protractor somewhere around here so I don’t need that.  I can’t wait to get started!

Update:

I asked an AI image generator to reproduce my thought experiment rig

It came up with this!

This may take a while.

The Mass of Men

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Henry David Thoreau said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”

Well, I don’t know.  I’m not sure I’m the quietest (or the loudest) of individuals.  And as for desperation and resignation that seems a bit much.  For most people work can be a rat race but, is what we do just resignation?  I hope not.  Now, sure, we all have to reach that endpoint and when that gets a lot closer, desperation and resignation start to sound more fitting, more apt.  But Thoreau said the mass of men.  Well, most men aren’t about to face death.  We get a decent shot at a pretty decent span; “three score and ten” the Bible says.

And even when the end is in sight isn’t there any consolation in reflecting on the fact that you spent your life doing what you thought was best?  Maybe it’s a matter of temperament.  I guess Thoreau was a product of Yankee New England upbringing.  And those people have always seemed a little cold and humorless for my taste.  Maybe it’s a combination of puritanism and bad weather but they always seemed like they just bit into something that tasted bad (or maybe it was their reaction at seeing me).  Maybe I’m just naturally cheerful.  Call it my Mediterranean predisposition but I just think that every story has a happy ending.  And this even though I look around me in every direction and I see wrack and ruin out to the horizon.  And sure, when it’s time to start hauling away the wreckage I’ll swear and grumble and complain.  But I’ll still look forward to a lunch break and quitting time.  And then there has to be some human joy somewhere in that mess.

I know some people who live the other way.  And they are quite a bit better off than I am.  That grim determination has its advantages.  You can stuff a 401k plan with quite a lot of money if you’re grimly determined.  And maybe they will have an easier time of it at that last stand knowing that everything is paid for.  I guess it’s kind of the Cheops or Ozymandias option.  But it still feels kind of grim to me.

So, I like to think that most of us try to live lives of quiet or not so quiet inspiration mixed with perspiration.  I think the guy who said, “Where there’s life there’s hope” had it right.  While there’s still blood pumping through your veins and air being sucked into your lungs there’s hope and more than hope.  There’s at least a little excitement.  Even if you’re a hundred there’s still the challenge of trying to get on your feet and remembering what it is you have to do to keep breathing that day.  And until that gets to be too much for your spirit you have a reason to greet the day.

And if you still have anyone in your life who cares whether you live or die you’ve got a world outside yourself to think about.  Maybe people call that quiet desperation.  Or maybe I’m the exception.  Maybe I’ve just been blessed with much more than the mass of men have.  But I kind of doubt it.  I’m just an average guy with the average life.  Well, except for Camera Girl.  She’s pretty great.  But don’t tell her.  She might demand a better contract.

Nature Finds a Way

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In this creepy world we live in where children are targeted by “educators” to redefine their genders and pushed away from the behaviors and activities that they enjoy it’s hardly surprising that things like adventure books for boys have essentially disappeared.

Of course they’ve vanished.  All the authors are women and they have to toe a very definite line if they want to be published.  You can’t have adventure for boys.  You can’t leave the girls behind.  You can’t even have them following along.  They have to be in charge.

So, boys stopped reading books.  Instead, they went to superhero and Star Wars movies.  So, what did the movie studios do then?  They hired female directors and studio bosses and turned the Jedis into girl-bosses and turned Captain Marvel into a girl, of course.

So now the boys are giving up on superheroes and concentrate on video games.  And of course, the game manufacturers are feminizing and queering the video games.

You see the pattern.

Now, there is the flip side of this progression.  First the book industry began to fail when the publishing houses dictated a leftist and feminine slant to books.  No one bought their books.  Now the movie studios are foundering because even their summer blockbuster superhero movies are tanking.  If the video game makers succeed in eliminating the things that males enjoy in video games, they will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

So far, the trend in entertainment has been all in one direction; female.  And the trend in their fortunes has also been all in one direction; down.

Well, I think that is beginning to end.  There is a development in the world of entertainment that seems to be diverging from the pattern.  And it even involves elements of each of the media I mentioned above; books, movies and video games.  And it involves the part of social media that I found the least promising; “influencers.”

Apparently teen-age boys and young men are finding community inside the YouTube channels of influencers who write fan fiction around some popular video games.  These sites have tens and even hundreds of millions of viewers.  And the clout that this kind of following produces even allows these influencers to have their stories turned into movies.  Think about that.  Some guy who writes plots around some popular first-person sci-fi video game can get a movie made from his stories and it has a built-in audience of millions.

Look at how this short circuits the whole woke female industrial complex.  You avoid the woke publishing industry, woke movie industry and woke video game industry by tapping into a ready built audience of young men and boys looking for adventure and violence.  As Jeff Goldblum’s character, Dr. Ian Malcolm said in Jurassic Park, “Nature finds a way.”

I find this both fascinating and encouraging.  These kids have broken out of the feminist struggle session hell of modern entertainment and escaped into the wild.  That is an immensely encouraging thing.  And if it continues to advance it will wipe out the alternative.  No one wants to see Girl-Boss Jedi Knights making the universe safe for middle aged lesbian Jabbette the Hutt.  No one will pay to see She-Hulk bust out of her clothes and rampage through Manhattan’s theater district to catch a performance of Hamilton.  No boy wants to play a video game where his character has to be in drag.

Of course, the powers that be may try to squelch this latest attempt at non-feminist entertainment.  But at this point even Google is probably seeing which way the entertainment dollar is moving (and where it’s not).  I could be wrong but I think there may finally be a reaction brewing in the entertainment world.  And it might be that the future isn’t female.

2024 Election Follies – The Recap

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Today was the first weekly zoom call I had with my work buddies since the election.  It goes without saying that high spirits and hilarity were the order of the day.  We compared the high we were getting from watching the compilation videos of despairing Kamala voters to the 2016 Hillary scream fests.  I think we agreed that the 2016 psychos were probably funnier but since we are more grateful in 2024 it was basically a wash.

We talked about some of the Trump cabinet picks and agreed that the panic and despair we had heard about inside the Deep State was a very good sign.  There was much schadenfreude expressed.

We compared notes on how things were going in our lives outside of politics and everyone seems excited about Thanksgiving this year.  Then we traded stories on “the Company” and how awful and woke it had become and how the stock price had dipped.  But even that hadn’t dampened our enthusiasm for the future.

I regaled them with stories about the elections here in Dunwich and they told me about the follies in their communities.  All very familiar.  One of the guys is an Indian American who used to be a Democrat.  So, we gave him a bunch of grief about how his relatives will now consider him a traitor for voting for Trump.  He told us the rationale that he uses to justify himself to his parents and other relatives and we hooted at how lame it all sounded.  We told him that as our official token POC and Indian American he must take all the blame for Trump winning and he must apologize to Kamala face to face.  He proceeded to say some very rude things in his best subcontinent English and that was that.

I had hoped this week would be a calm after the storm.  But commitments piled up and my first real breather doesn’t come until Thursday afternoon (I hope).  But from that point it should be clear sailing.  The last two years have been a kind of great experiment getting involved in elections and politics.  I’ve learned how it all works and now I know what is likely and what is unlikely with respect to election fraud.  What seems clearest is that mailing out absentee ballots and allowing “voters” to access ballot drop boxes is the weak link in election integrity.

There are well-documented cases of individuals stuffing drop boxes with dozens and even hundreds of ballots.  This is completely illegal and also extremely hard to prevent.  Other irregularities weren’t part of my experience.  I suppose if the ballot tabulators in some jurisdictions do not use paper ballots and are connected directly to the internet that any kind of skullduggery is possible.  I have to assume that any reasonably intelligent person would know that.  What happens going forward will depend completely on the state government in power.  Places like California and New England will allow whatever irregularities they deem helpful to the Democrats.  Hopefully, the red states will protect themselves from voter fraud and election fraud.  But many of the cities are run by Democrats and the state government will have to provide oversight to protect against it.  So, my great experiment has been somewhat successful.  Now how do I separate myself from this quite onerous responsibility?  Well, we’ll see.  The First Selectman doesn’t like to be disappointed.  To be continued.

Plotter and Pantsers

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Here on the other side of the bright line of demarcation that is the post-2024 election decision I selected outlining the plot of my poor neglected novel “Sniper” as this morning’s project.  Last night was a long planned and greatly enjoyed family party celebrating Princess Sack of Potatoes’ sixth birthday.  It was a good-sized gathering of about thirty people and featured the Princess’s food of choice; multiple versions of pizza.  Now I personally do not believe that something called “mac and cheese” pizza could actually be considered pizza.  It is an abomination in the same league as anything called pizza that contains pineapple.  But I am a tolerant man.  If the children demand mac and cheese pizza then so be it.  I found a giant box that contained something that was garnished with sausage and pepperoni on it and so I was content.  And I even managed to introduce the grandchildren to a small snippet of the classic W.C. Fields movie “It’s a Gift” before it was drowned out by the torrent of talking that erupted when their parents followed us upstairs after the majority of the guests left.  Well, I’ll just have to wait for an opportunity during the Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays to screen that cinematic gem for their viewing pleasure.

And because that gathering ended late, I had no time to look around for a theme for last night’s post.  And honestly, I was exhausted.  And if I had tried to post something in that state it would have been stale and derivative and a waste of everybody’s time.  And in this new regimen of mine that is anathema.  I’ll write when I have something I want to say.  And when I don’t, I’ll work on my projects.

And getting back to the theme of this post, my project for today is to review “The Sniper” holistically and identify plot line and character development and quality issues that need to be worked on.  And come up with an outline for the whole story and an outline for the series of stories in this “universe” and then a plan for completing this novel this winter. And then scheduling this work to be finished by some reasonable date.

And this is exciting for me.  It’s an intellectually interesting process that I’ve never tried before.  Up until now I’ve been what’s called a discovery writer or more colloquially a “seat of the pantser” or just a pantser.   This is the opposite of an “outliner” or a plotter.  A discovery writer just sits down and starts writing based on some idea or even just a gestalt of a story and keeps writing and let’s the story write itself without any direction from the author’s conscious mind.  I’ve always done this.  The positive side of this process is that the author’s natural creative instincts are in control and many exciting characters and plot events bubble up.  It is the natural method for producing realistic dialog and emotional insight into the characters.  The negative side is that the story direction is kind of random and you very easily can paint your story into a corner that can only be fixed by a massive re-write which is lethal for story-telling and for the morale of the writer.

And as someone who has run up against this dead-end scenario several times, I have decided to make the effort to do a formal outline and learn the skills it takes to plan my story in a disciplined way so that it won’t fly off the rails at the end and cause me massive mental anguish and confusion.  If I find that working on this outline is interesting, I’ll probably write more about and might even consult some of the sci-fi fans in the audience for their opinions on some of my story choices.

So here I go.

Segueing Into a Brilliant Future

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So, the fireworks are finished and now we go a couple of months until Trump enters the White House.  In the meantime, the Deep State tries to figure out how to destroy his presidency.  And they’ll also try to save the Ukraine misadventure.  Although I can’t see that working.  Without tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and support Ukraine is going to collapse.

But from our point of view there’s really not much to talk about.  Whether the Republicans have a three or a four man lead in the Senate or Mike Johnson has a ten or eleven man lead in the House isn’t all that important.  The fact that Mike Johnson isn’t Paul Ryan is somewhat significant.  But all of the action starts happening in January.  And really, we won’t know anything right away because it will take a bunch of weeks for Trump to get his Cabinet sworn in.

My point is that there’s really not much of substance to say.  Basically, Joe Biden destroyed the country and Kamala Harris was his Vice President.  And on top of that she is a terrible candidate.  So, Americans rejected both of them and hired Donald Trump to fix the country.  Yay, for our side.

So now I have to figure out a new tack for my writing and my on-line existence.  I can’t see the need to document the Trump/Washington war on a day-to-day basis.  Undoubtedly there will be events that will inspire me to write at length.  But a daily journal of that will be excessive.  Instead, I want to spend the majority of my writing time on fiction.  Also, photography is the other focus I want to feature on the site.  And of course I’ll provide reviews of books, movies and music as I find it.

So, let’s see how all this goes.  Probably the difference will be hardly noticeable to the casual reader.  And the extra time for writing will allow me to finish my first book and see how that works out.  I’m of course expecting at least a ten million books sold in the first year and then up from there.  I’ll probably be asked by the Trump administration to become a key advisor to the President on all cultural matters.  I suppose that goes without saying.  But it won’t affect my trademark humility and love for the common man.  My only extravagance will be an exact replica of a Packard Eight constructed almost entirely of tantalum.  Well, maybe I’ll get Camera Girl a Dyson vacuum cleaner too.  She’s been good.

So, the future is upon us and it’s all sunshine and sharkskin suits as far as the eye can see.  We all will march into this bright future thanks to the final humiliation and banishment of Biden and Harris and the ascension to the throne of the once and future king; Donald J. Trump.  Long may he mock our enemies and exaggerate his accomplishments.  Let’s just his (and our) luck holds out long enough to staunch the bleeding of this once great land.  We really could use a break.