Well I must say I was initially pretty relieved to see the Big Cheezie, Donald Trump, lose the election last week. I found his pouting and unsportsmanlike behaviour a refreshing change from his gloating and lying. But then he started challenging the election process itself, saying his ‘victory’ was stolen from him, claiming massive voter fraud. In itself, this would be par for the course. The thing that was bothering me was the sycophantic horde of uneducated zombies who agreed with him, usually to the point of screaming and yelling at reporters or threatening election officials with violence. “This is what the 2nd Amendment is for,” is a message left for one official, referring to the right to bear arms being linked to having the ability to kill tyrants who become a menace to the republic. What ever happened to being gracious in defeat, and maybe even hoping the new guy does a good job, since you’re going to be stuck with whatever he does? We’ve gone beyond that now. (Americans more than us, although I hear some of this bullshit up here too) The bullies and poorly educated masses who can’t distinguish between truth and conspiracy fantasy have been brought out of the basement, into the light, and given some encouragement in terms of numbers and political representation.

I wonder how long it will be before some beer-bellied huckleberry in a muscle shirt assassinates a public figure? He will believe himself a hero, protecting his vision of America against the “deep state” and the “socialist whackos” who want to give him free medical coverage. Sure, he will get taken down and maybe even executed, but there will be other people from the trailer park tattooing his name on their arms, too. This is Trump’s legacy, aided greatly by the internet and its open sewer, social media. The suspicious, technologically lacking people who relied on jobs now done cheaply in China, have been fed nonsense that makes them feel like victims of secret elite groups. Who will get that genie back in the bottle? How do you explain to them that those manufacturing jobs left their country because greedy, rich American companies moved their operations to Asia, where labour is dirt cheap and doesn’t get a benefit plan or pension? They believe those jobs were stolen, like Trump’s election. I think if the political sides were more clear, geographically, like the north/south division of slavery in 1860, they might even launch a civil war.

Maybe America should start teaching critical thinking again. Soon! And maybe a few greedy, rich companies could bring some jobs back home. Sure it would hurt their bottom lines, and their products would cost more, but think of the social benefits of having that armed, paranoid dude working at the running shoe factory instead of reading about QAnon, polishing his assault rifle.

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Anyway, I hope my little rant is stuff that never happens. I hope this is the high water mark of craziness from down south, and soon we see it receding and becoming another mania from another time. Joe Biden talks about healing, but he is dealing with people – Trump got over 70 million votes! – who feel threatened and angry. Is it too late to spike the water supply with magic mushrooms and let everyone have a big laugh?

When Trump becomes a vulnerable citizen again and has to answer for his obstruction of justice and tax evasion, I hope it will expose him as the new Wizard of Oz – a sad little man behind the big scary machine. And hopefully he will lose his lustre as the world’s top bully and braggart.

I find myself at home alone again which is my cue to write something in the old blog. It’s been quite a while, and the last post I wrote didn’t even get put on Bloglovin’ which is sort of the default site for my stuff.

Anyways, as to why I am alone. My daughter rescued a dog. No, not from a local shelter, but from frickin’ Morocco. She had to pay a bunch of fees, and the place in Casablanca would send her dog to Vancouver. Except when the time came, the Moroccans told her they were only sending the dog as far as Montreal and she would have to pick it up. Montreal, she explained, was the same distance to her, give or take, as Casablanca was to Moscow. In the end, after much arguing and some testy texts, a rescue group in Montreal is forwarding her dog on to Vancouver.

My wife is going with her, so our daughter can love her new pet up on the ride home and try to keep it happy. Of course, she had to pay some extra fees to make this all happen.

Today is our 25th anniversary. Yay Us! It seems odd to spend it apart, but there wasn’t going to be a parade either way.

We just got back from a whirlwind trip to Alberta that will have to be our holiday for the year. We weren’t comfortable hanging around other provinces as there is still some hysteria about COVID-19 and incidents of abuse and vandalism, so we did a hit and run. My uncle was visiting his old buddy in Alberta and we agreed to come pick him up as the central theme of our holidays. We bolted here to Calgary on the first day. When we got into town our GPS guide got drunk and sent us back and forth all over town which of course initiated yelling and irritation in our vehicle. Before any actual hand-to-hand combat broke out, we called my niece and who gave us calm and useful directions to her house where we ate and crashed for the night. She also gave me a couple new ideas for enchilada assembly, which I plan to put to use soon. The next morning I scraped the frost off our windshield, knowing that back home in Abbotsford it was forecast to be 31C that day. Once we could see and had our prissy little heated seats ready, we waved goodbye to my lovely niece and headed northeast to Irricana. There we scooped up my uncle who was, like us, grateful to be headed back to summertime.

Day one on the road home we dawdled around, stopping at Canmore first, then Lake Louise. Alberta is mostly flat and grasslands, but the Rockies are amazing! We paid our $20 and entered the Banff/Jasper National Parks. This drive is 230 km of non-stop mountains and jagged peaks, usually reflected in some glacial lake.

We were stopping every beautiful spot we encountered until it dawned on us that we had driven about 30 km in an hour, and were on pace to hit Jasper by Christmas. So we picked up the pace, clicking pictures of nature through our car windows until we became fatigued of glaciers and wildlife and towering peaks.

Once we got out of the parks we drove to Valemount and checked into our hotel. It was a little downtrodden and sad, but we slept like statues for 9 hours and started over.

Day two of the trip we stuffed our faces with muffins and coffee in the continental breakfast area, then left town. First stop was Well’s Grey Park north of Clearwater. We stopped at Spahats Falls just inside the park boundaries to see the sights. It was a dizzyingly high waterfall that dropped into a narrow rocky gorge. Creepy thing: there was a cross and some flowers there for some young woman who went around the protective fencing and slipped off the cliff a couple years ago. Why? Believe me if you haven’t been there – it doesn’t look like a good idea.

We were nearly on empty so we had to turn back and not explore any more of the park. We fueled up then drove to Kamloops where we bickered about lunch, got shit from some woman about getting too close to her with my germs, and had a little picnic in the mall parking lot. Then we set off for Merritt. We decided to take the old highway through the Nicola Valley, expecting it to add a little extra time to the trip, but what we got was multiple construction delays which set us back quite a while. Still, it is a gorgeous valley so it was worth it in the end. After that was the mundane and familiar highway home, another year’s vacation expended.

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Nearly every day I stop and think: it’s been a long time since I wrote in my blog. But despite the fact I mostly sit at home doing not much, not even watching TV, I can never find the time to write anything. I think that being inactive breeds inactivity. Isn’t there some Newtonian law about bodies at rest tending to stay at rest? If there isn’t, there ought to be.

It’s Saturday night and find myself alone again, a bubble of one. The kids all have stuff to do, my significant other is working, and the cat is zero company at all. I understand staying away from people in general is a good idea right now, but I would really like to have an adult conversation with someone. And guess what? That person is you. Oh sure, you won’t get to say much, and you might find this lacking as far as a “conversation” goes because you can’t respond, but it will be cathartic for me, and, yes, I may just be that selfish.

Not really.

I need a haircut badly. It is long and straggly and keeps getting in my eyes. When I shower, it takes hours to dry, and if I open a car window, it gets so knotted up I can’t brush it. I have gone in search of a haircut a couple times but have been repelled by long lines and haircutters who have gone broke waiting for normal life to return. Your hair looks good. (This is me trying to converse with you.) Of course, when it comes to anything fashion-related I am mentally challenged, so who actually knows? Long hair wouldn’t be so bad if I could grow a beard, but I have the stubble of a grade 8 kid, and my arms and legs are so hairless I have been accused of waxing. I can grow a mustache if you have some serious time on your hands, but I mostly look pubescent for weeks while it gets going.

I think a lot about politics and the pandemic, but I don’t have anything to say that is going to help. At some point a person can just complain too much. What do you think about the upcoming US election? Race riots? Flocks of intermingling people spreading disease? Pipelines? Oh the interchange of ideas we could have! I would like to watch the news one day and hear about people having a 75th anniversary, or puppies being saved from Cruella DeVille. Some good news to put a lump in your throat and a big smile on your face. Maybe we could have contact with some aliens who could cure cancer, give us infinite clean energy and look like Jane Fonda in Barberella? Good news, large or small, would be welcome any time.

What I would like to see, although it seems naive to suggest, would be a gathering of people from all countries and societies and religions. They could come together and compromise, with the idea of conjuring up a societal model that everyone could live with that maximized everyone’s chance of prosperity, health, happiness. And also gave the world a lot less to disagree about. Dictators who are incapable of empathy and only want their egos petted would be turfed. They took a bunch of languages one time and cooked up an “international language” that was a Frankenstein made of words from all over the place and called it Esperanto. It never really caught on, but in a larger sense this is what I think the world needs. I don’t expect my idea of compromising on the big issues would work at first either, but maybe as a concept to be handed down and refined it could work. It should at least be run up the flagpole and see who shoots at it. Too naive? Too John Lennon? Too hippy?

When I was a kid, I wrote to some Esperanto group and got them to send me a starter kit of the language. When it caught on, boy was I going to be ready! Anyway, either they never responded or stopped responding after that, I don’t remember, but I do know they were out of business shortly. And it was sort of local, from Oregon I think. Kids, eh?

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In the first few days of the coronavirus pandemic, I worried about my health. I was middle aged, overweight, diabetic, and running around the country ringing doorbells, talking to people. I read the statistics and found a person in my predicament would have roughly a 9% chance of dying if I contracted the virus. Eventually I learned to relax about it and decided to let my fairly good immune system take it on, if necessary.

My next wave of anxiety about the disease was the number of cases. I was ridiculously relieved when the number of new cases each day started to go back down and stayed level for a couple weeks. I may have even ventured forth from my musty hideout without hand sanitizer a time or two. There were parts of the country and the world that still had rampant death and illness, but things close to home were on the mend somewhat.

Then began my third wave of worry: the contrarians of the world – mostly gun-toting Americans – had banded together to demand an end to the “tyranny” of social distancing. God himself had bestowed upon them the right to live free or die, so what government had the right to stop them? My question is, does the government have the right to stop you from killing someone? Of course it does. (Making it illegal doesn’t always work, but it’s a pretty necessary step if you ever plan to prosecute someone.) In my view, if you’re just going to go stand around waving your gun and drinking Schlitz, and that is potentially going to kill thousands of people, shouldn’t that be frowned upon? Of course it should. Unless of course you are a contrarian who knows better than all the immunologists, doctors, and scientists of every kind, and happens to know, in spite of excepted wisdom, that mingling about is harmless. And this is what God surely intended when he granted you all those freedoms. Despite some evidence you could use – you live in a trailer, you can’t even spell ‘tyranny,’ you didn’t quite make it through high school – you are smarter than everyone else! Yes, everyone else is fearful because they watch too much TV, or they think all them fancy scientist fellas are telling the truth. Ha! Not you! You have decided to buck conventional sense and go it (almost) alone, on the merits of your ability to think things through, unlike the libtards and snowflakes you see around you. Surely at this point you deserve to be rescued from the slight discomfort of your confinement, damn the dying people!

One stubborn group of contrarians that has made its presence known at some of the protests demanding the country open up again is anti-vaccine people. They still cling to the idea that vaccines are linked to autism. That argument got put to bed a while ago. What happened was this: the health community got sick of hearing about vaccines causing autism, so they handed over all their data on vaccinations and autism to the anti-vaccine people, and after examining the data the anti-vaxxers were forced to admit they couldn’t find any evidence of a link either. Get this, Contrarian Nation: the scientists were telling the truth all along. Maybe that isn’t always the case, but when the government tells you to stay home, ruining the economy and forgoing trillions in income tax, you can be pretty sure this isn’t the common flu, as was repeated on Fox News and by Rush Limbaugh, King Donald and other far right nut jobs.

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I haven’t heard it linked, but if I was looking around for flat earth believers, I’ll bet you I could find some at these protests, too.

Another startling absurdity from the far right is that they say they’d rather have people die than hurt the economy. Aren’t these, by and large, the religious people who value life so much they can’t bear to hear about an abortion? These elderly should be happy to die and save America, they say. Actually, these elderly are the generation who fought wars, paving the way for you to be born safe and prosperous, and your time to shield them from harm comes and you circulate the virus and bring death to many because you’re bored of Netflix? Very heroic.

Well, well, well, nice going! I sure hope you had a good time eating that pangolin, asshole. Thousands have died, many more thousands are sick. Panic has turned ordinary people into survivalist lunatics, stuffing their minivans with toilet paper and Purell. Everything has been cancelled. Is this because of nuclear war or global climate change or alien invasion? Nope. It’s because some dipshit(s) decided to order something off the human menu and eat a pangolin. One look at it should tell you all you need to know: it’s too ugly and too covered with body armour to be edible. Besides, it is has chubby little legs and no natural athleticism, so it is bound to be a crackling little grease fire anyway. Not to mention it is on the endangered species list! Still, people traffic them for their scales which are used in medicine. Another theory that I think has been disproved, is that the virus got into humans through someone eating a bat. Eating a bat, I imagine, would be a lot like eating a leather purse or maybe a baseball mitt with some bones in it.

Our chess club is cancelled too, but then again everything is cancelled so saying it is redundant. I sure am missing hockey already. My Canucks were doing fairly well and looked poised to make the playoffs for the first time in five years. That is, right up until Mr Curious cooked up his Asian armadillo. And we’ve probably just begun being effected.

I heard of an experiment done at the University of BC in the Physics department. If you read this and know of it, please let me know how accurate what I’ve heard is. Anyway, the professor fills an empty room with mousetraps, each loaded with a ping pong ball. The experiment is about chain reactions. To start the reaction, he tosses one ping pong ball into the room and – Snap! – one trap goes off and launches a second ball in the air. After some seconds the whole room is a cacophony of mousetraps snapping and balls bouncing around. When it settles down, every trap has gone off. Think of passing an infectious disease as the mousetraps. One dumbass eats a pangolin, then that infects someone etc. Today we are at the stage where there are about two balls in the air and the world health governing bodies are trying to catch them before they land and accelerate the reaction. They might succeed, but they probably won’t completely. In some places they are already at the next phase.

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I don’t mean to be doom and gloom, there is already talk of an early vaccine being tested, and people are getting ready to hunker down and avoid others for a while. These are good signs. Can they catch those two balls before they land and set off all the traps? Time will tell and I certainly wish them well. And I hope it happens before the Stanley Cup playoffs get cancelled too!

Well the final results are in. I didn’t place among the top 10 in the writing contest. They don’t arrange the 70 participants who didn’t win in any order, so I really don’t know where I finished other than at least eleventh. The feedback from the judges was mostly positive, but their main complaint about my story was they generally didn’t care for the ending. They also made a comment or two about it being too long a story to cram into 250 words. Fair enough. I still did better than I thought I’d do, and I may go in another one and see how it goes.

To make not winning more palatable, instead of turning to beer or ice cream, I decided to seek therapy by googling the people who finished in the top five to see what sort of competition I was up against. The winner was another Canadian who has at least nine published books, mostly fantasy and children’s book. Next was a poet from the eastern USA who has been published prolifically. Third was a science writer who has, among other things, contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Fourth was a person whose bio describes him as an award winning writer and film maker. Last among the top five is another novelist who is only 25 years old and will likely write many books in her life, but so far has only nine novels published. So, being an unpublished and often grubby civic employee, I was sort of in over my head. Still, that little exercise made me feel better about how I did, as somewhere in all of this I likely finished higher than some other published novelists.

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Another odd thing that started happening during this contest was an author named Jerry Jenkins has started emailing me writing advice. At first I thought he must be a judge or someone from NYC Midnight – how else would he know I exist? The tone of the first email was “you probably have no confidence in your writing ability, and I would like to help.” I wrote him back to tell him I have enough confidence, but that if he felt that way after reading Lieber’s Report, then it must have really sucked! This was why I was so surprised when it came 4th and put me in the final. Up until I saw the results, I thought the judges were trying to console me! I googled my new pen pal Jerry, too, to see if he was a real person or some kind of literary Betty Crocker trying to lure me into a writing course or some other scheme to get in between me and my paycheque. Turns out he is real and has written over 200 books, a number that has probably increased since I started writing this post, and sold over 70 million copies. I got another email from him today. He never asks for anything, but I’m still a little skeptical.

A few days ago I heard back from the NYC Midnight people with the results from the second round of the writing contest.  For some reason, my story Lieber’s Report came in 4th in my group of 50, good enough to get me through to the final round where the final 80 writers would go head to head, with the top five winning cash prizes.  The genre was up to the writers to decide, which in a way made it more difficult.  The action we must include was holding hands, and the word was ‘secret.’  I figured about 75 of the 80 would be turning in a romance story, but they specifically said original ways of using the action would be encouraged.  After I got my assignment, my son suggested a fixed horse race.  I had nothing better, so I went with his idea.  Like the first two rounds, I’m not in love with my story, and will be surprised if it isn’t a middle of the pack entry.  Still, coming in 40th, let’s say, out of 4000 isn’t necessarily a failure.  Anyway, here is round 3, The Fix.

 

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Swabby sat silently in the racetrack bleachers and watched the parade to post.  An atonal loudspeaker introduced the horses in a nasally drone.

He had successfully paid off only five of the nine jockeys to lose, leaving uncertainty about the fixed bet.  He popped an antacid, inhaled deeply and dug in his jacket for a cigarette.  In his view outside the grandstand stood the other two members of his gang, a young couple, watching the horses.  They had been in the locker rooms to bribe the remaining jockeys, then relay to Swabby by way of a secret cue which horse was designated to win the race.

His wife and baby girl were gone, and his share of the bet money represented selling his car and emptying his savings.

“Number Six, West End Wally,” continued the loudspeaker, “Owned by Hamilton Stables, ridden by Oscar Mendez.”  At this point the young couple reached toward each other and held hands, the signal he had waited for.
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He threw down his smoke and headed for the betting wicket.  He glanced at the tote board: number six, 28 to 1.  “$10,000, six to win,” he told the cashier and slid her the money.

He paced outside, too nervous to sit.  The tote board recalculated and flashed 15 to 1.

There was a sudden commotion near the rail to his left.  Two cops and a Racing Commission official were handcuffing his friends.  Someone had squealed.  He wasn’t arrested, but if he ever cashed the ticket he would be.  It was over.

 

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So that’s it.  It’s not knocking my socks off, but I hope it surprises me like Lieber did.  The name of my character is a little unusual.  Swabby is a nautical nickname used mostly for deck-swabbing deck hands.  In the horse racing sense, Swabby was a small time crook who got caught fixing some races at Fort Erie racetrack in Ontario in the early 1950s.  He succeeded for a while, netting him and a couple friends around $200,000 before he got busted.  In that sense, my story might be called Historical Fiction as it is the fictionalized account, more or less, of a real guy named Swabby.  The other stuff is purely made up, and I checked to make sure.  I don’t need any lawsuits.

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Several weeks ago I wrote about a writing competition I had entered with my daughter Crystal.  I said there were 5000 entrants, but I was mistaken.  The first round only had 4000.  Anyway, to survive the first round you had to finish in the top 10 of your 50 person group.  My RomCom bit actually shocked me by finishing 3rd in my group, when I had prepared myself for failure.

Here is round 2, in which I now must finish top 5 in a group of 50, all of whom have had top 10 finishes.  My genre this time is Sci Fi, and I have to include the action of shivering, and the word never.  I have never written anything Sci Fi before, so it’s terra incognito to me.

 

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Aboard the Exoplanet Investigator, the cryogenic system was waking up Lieber.  He shivered under the foil blanket and his eyes burned from the intensifying light.

He trembled as he stood for the first time in seventeen years and pulled on his suit. Trillions of miles away, Earth was becoming a hostile environment, and Lieber and others were tasked with helping to find mankind a new habitat.  He climbed into his landing pod and sealed the hatch.  He would never see home again.

Planet Wolf 1061c kept the same face toward its star, and half broiled mercilessly while the darkened half froze solid.  Between the hemispheres was a warm twilit band with liquid water and an oxygen rich atmosphere.  It was here his lander descended.
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Stepping from the landing pod, he was amazed to see lush grasslands and glittering lakes, untouched by malice.  His probes found the ground rich in nutrients and the atmosphere warm and breathable.  He stood on a mesa high above a vast plain that spread for many miles before him toward a distant rim of intense light.  Millions of people could survive here.  The gravity was slightly stronger than Earth, but muscles would adjust in time.

Lieber’s hands shook as he wrote his log entry.  “Rocky environment.  No growing medium for crops.  Poor atmosphere, trace toxins, carcinogens in water.  Hostile native species, airborne insects.  Oppressive gravity.  Recommendation: not suitable for settlement.”

The report would reach home in 13.8 years.   Wolf 1061c would be better off without us.

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Well, I’ll find out in January what the judges thought of this.  A few notes: Lieber is Kurt Vonnegut’s mother’s maiden name, and he is my writing hero and he began by writing science fiction.  Wolf 1061c is an actual planet that astronomers have identified as having the right conditions for life, and it does keep one face baking in the sun while the other half freezes.  After I submitted this story, I went to the store and basically diddled around for a while. Then for some reason I checked for an email from NYC Midnight confirming they got my story, but I didn’t get one.  I re-checked the submission form and found it had rejected my story because it had 251 words.  I chopped a word out and got it in under the wire.  The deadline for submission was 9 pm PST, and I got my confirmation email at 8:55.  Whew!

A few weeks ago I entered a writing contest along with my daughter Crystal.  It is run by NYC Midnight and is being judged by NY publishing people.  The parameters of the contest are pretty restricting: you have no more than 250 words for the entire story, and they give you a genre, an action and a word you must include.  And, you have 24 hours to complete the assignment and hand it in, so to speak.   Crystal and I wound up with exactly the same assignment, a pretty unlikely event since there were 100 different categories assigned randomly.  Our stories were Romantic Comedy, making a wish, and the word ‘bargain.’  Here is my entry in all its glory.

————————————————————————————————————————————–

The fresh snow crunched under their boots as Jeff and Ruby wandered in the park, holding gloved hands.  There, under a pale light, was a brick wishing well, awaiting their desires.

“Hey Jeff, let’s make a wish,” Ruby giggled.

“What’s the going rate? Payday isn’t until next Friday.”

Ruby took off her glove and rummaged up two quarters from her purse.  “Two bits, tightwad!”

Ruby backed up to the well, eyes shut tight.  She ached for Jeff to marry her, but it had been three years already.  She tossed her quarter.

Jeff walked over and dropped his quarter, vaguely wondering how deep it was.

“Well Jeff, what did you wish?”

“That the Broncos can make it to the Super Bowl.”

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“What’s wrong with that?” Jeff protested weakly, trudging after her.

It took Ruby several wordless moments of marching to get back to Jeff’s car, the night suddenly cold and damp, the mood shattered.  Stupid men!  She wiped her cheeks and took a moment to compose before turning to him.  There was Jeff, on one knee, holding out a little  box.  “Well?  This isn’t exactly how I pictured asking, but will you marry me?”

She laughed with relief and threw her arms around Jeff.  At last!  “Yes, you immature cheapskate, I will!”

Jeff’s long arms bundled her tight, radiating joy – fifty cents for a fiancee and a Super Bowl was a real bargain.

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We will find out our fates on November 20.  Success in round one is being among the top 10 stories in a 50-person category, which will move the winners on to another group of 50 from which you must be among, I believe, the top 5.   I was mortified that I got rom com as a genre, but it was better than some of the other ones!  If you’re curious, Crystal’s story is published in her blog “Beauty in Life.”