Personal Blog/Diary

Here I write about anything and everything.

We won’t go down without a fight—RIP Renee Good

It’s good to see the Resistance continuing to rise as the fascists find it’s not so easy to take over.

They killed one of our protestors and then labeled her a terrorist. We can all see the truth from multiple angles, yet they gaslight us, telling us not to believe our own eyes. RIP Renee Nicole Macklin Good. I expect you were welcomed into Heaven with crowds of angels. You sound like one of God’s true saints.

I was sick, or I would’ve been at the protest in my town on Sunday. But the group posted lots of pictures on Facebook. 🙂

These ICE agents are pieces of shit. And anybody who supports what they did to Good is also a piece of shit. It was murder and we all know it.

I was disturbed and saddened by the response of one of my sister church’s converts on Facebook this weekend. I shared an article—AP, I believe—about Renee and he argued with me, used all the right-wing troll responses, even horrible things said about her being LGBTQ. He’s woefully misguided about what Christianity is supposed to be. He’s gone down Youtube rabbit holes, and there is so much crap on there these days from wannabe Orthodox influencers who don’t know the first thing about Christ. I tried to pull him back from it, tried to pull the wool from his eyes, but instead he unfriended me.

When they tell us our protest group is left-wing radical terrorists, I donate and protest in defiance of them. They can’t take all of us.

I see the videos in fear, dread, but also joy because the People are fighting back. If the USA goes down behind an iron curtain, it won’t be without a fight.

Gothic Science-Fantasy Now on all Platforms

Gothic Science-Fantasy Now on all Platforms 1

Now no longer just on Amazon!  Below you’ll find a link to get this book anywhere you prefer, even if you want to get it directly from me (via Payhip) instead of through some corporation like Amazon or Apple.  And now I can give you a preview, which I couldn’t do before under Amazon’s rules.

Madge the beautiful geek is in love with the handsome, noble, narcissistic time traveler who may or may not be a Nazi. Doctor Heinrich von Bismarck is driven to invent time travel and avenge his wife and children, who were killed in an Allied bombing raid. He has grown used to controlling minds through hypnotism. He pulls Madge into his Svengali trap, until she is addicted and starts turning a blind eye to red flags. But she also pulls him into a trap which could be his downfall–or his salvation.

Doctor von Bismarck: A Tale of Obsession is a Gothic Science Fantasy with twisted and obsessive romance, social commentary, and deconstruction from fundamentalist religion.

My book is available for sale as paperback and e-book on Amazon.

CLICK HERE for new links to buy

Typing An Unwilling Time-Traveler, a novella I wrote in high school, onto my main website, revived my old passion for that story.  Ever since October 2015, I have worked on a full revision, finally publishing it on August 26, 2023.  The original was about a teenage girl abducted to Nazi Germany by a time-traveler; the new version has become far more complex.  Now woven in are various themes such as narcissism, authoritarian religion, deconstructing from Fundamentalism/Evangelicalism, purity culture, and falling for a Svengali figure.  The themes of a Christian society falling for the lies of an authoritarian state, and how warfare is conducted, are also increasingly relevant to our times.  There are Gothic tropes as well as science fantasy.  Doctor von Bismarck is also loosely inspired by an ex-friend (Richard) and an ex-husband (Phil), both narcissists.  You can read about my revisions in my writing blog.

Read a preview here.

I have put together a playlist of songs that appear in, or helped to inspire, Doctor von Bismarck:

Yes, I was at the No Kings 2 Rally

Last time we didn’t have a rally in town here, and I wasn’t able to go.  This time, we did–and our little conservative town had an estimated 400-500 people.  🙂  Still waiting for that Soros money.  And oh, how rowdy we antifa people were–haha, no we weren’t.  A lot of us probably protested Vietnam.  I will copy here what I wrote to a friend:

I get there around 9:30 and it’s already in progress, people going down the city block, both sides of the street. There were also people on both sides of the cross street.

We had some people in costume, including two little girls, one a pink bug and the other an alligator. Alligator girl had fun prancing around, but bug girl was shy and curled up in her mom’s arms. There was a witch, a guy who appeared to be dressed like either the Kaiser or a German officer circa WWI, a guy in a stormtrooper helmet….

There were the ones who revved their engines and the ones who yelled out ridicule, like the guy who said most of us were old. (Old guy near me said back, We’re saving democracy!)  Weekly protests see these same guys rage-revving past us and even blowing black smoke over us.

This guy near my house has a truck sitting out front with a sign that says “Democrats are a cancer on America.” I saw it on my way to the protest, and crossed myself as protection from its evil, something I often do when passing that house. Then I saw the truck pass by us during the protest. I saw it back in its usual place on my way home. Obviously he knew we’d be there and came by just for us!

People by me said there were counter protesters in the back, but I didn’t see what they were doing.

We did chants, we did the Pledge, America the Beautiful….It was fun. 🙂

But where was the press?

We started leaving around 10:30. I heard that we didn’t have to, because it’s public property, but a police car was patrolling, and their office is just down the street in view of us, so I didn’t want to give them any reason to get nervous. And there was the Oshkosh event soon, so people wanted to get to that.

It has been suggested that contacting our local rep is more effective.  But I have tried sending Grothman messages in the past and he just seems like a MAGA brick wall. Every time I do, he tells me why my position is wrong.  He’s so extremist that our previous rep, who served for many years and was a respected Republican, refused to endorse him, after Grothman attacked him verbally in the campaign.

He sends out these questionnaires with loaded questions. Like in the latest one, one question asks which 3 policy issues would you like Congress to do more to address; it gives a bunch of pre-written check-off answers; one is protecting 2nd Amendment rights (but no 1st Amendment anywhere), another is “eliminating racially discriminatory programs” which I just KNOW is referring to discrimination against white people. Question #3, “Do you believe individuals should get so many benefits that it incentivizes them not to get married?” He lists as benefits, getting food stamps and low-income housing, which he says go away if they get married. This is a yes-no question which means I fall into a trap. If I say “yes,” it means I want people to not get married. If I say “no,” it means I want the food stamps and low-income housing benefits to be reduced or go away. I don’t want that!!!!!

But these rallies are getting bigger, even in this conservative town, which has a little group of weekly protesters now.  And we got under Tr**p’s skin–He was so upset he put out a video of a tantruming toddler with poopy drawers.  Oh wait, that was him in a plane?  My mistake! 😉

There is still hope.  And remember–Of course he’s not a king NOW, but he wants to be and every day does more things to put that into place.  If we wait until he has everything in order to protest what he’s doing, it’ll be too late.

We are in a Fascist Regime

Our rights are being quickly stripped from us.  Kimmel just got canned for a comment that all of us believed over the weekend based on the best information we had available to us.  In “normal” times, Kimmel could simply give a retraction at his next monologue.

We’re losing our rights just to be able to get a freakin’ vaccine!

We’re being told how we have to feel over someone we disagreed with, and accused of causing one sick person to commit murder, while conveniently ignoring the assassinations against Democrats a few months ago.

They had their Reichstag Fire moment and they’re taking advantage of it.  We’re being scapegoated.  We’re being threatened by the government.  People’s rights to free expression are being taken away at the command of the government.  They’re losing their jobs at the request of the government.  Joe Walsh just got booted from Tiktok because the government told them to do it.  That is the very definition of censorship.

Who knows how long any of us will keep up our modes of expression?  I just started attending peaceful protests in my community–Who knows how long before we become enemies of the state?

The truth was always there, easily available, but people refused to believe it.  Instead they chose to believe the great delusion being hypnotized into their brains by right-wing media, Fox News, etc.  They accused us of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”  And now our democracy is about to fall apart, to great applause.

I started to see it as far back as around 2015 or 2016, when I was researching my latest novel, which is partially based in Nazi Germany, and I saw many parallels already.  I wrote about it here on my blog.  Many of us saw it clearly, but were gaslit by others who said we were hyperbolic.  Now it’s here in front of our eyes and yet at the protest last week, there were–along with many honks–many people who wanted to harass and cuss at us.  Like we’re the deluded ones.

I hope that still we can come together and end this, because there are way more of us than there are of this administration.  Now we have organizations we didn’t have before, and we still have other means of expression if one is taken away.  But if we sleep, we won’t have any of those anymore.

Forgiving my abusive ex, Phil

First of all, the ICE raids are pulling up citizens in their dragnets–and immigrants who have been following all the laws.  So now people at my church are worried that they or their relatives could be next.  That if they leave the country they won’t be able to get back in.  First or second generation immigrants who have been here for decades and are middle-aged/elderly respected members of the congregation.  Are these the dangerous criminals Tr**p said he’d be deporting?  They, like me, spent July 4 thinking about what the holiday stands for while wondering if that free country even exists anymore.

Second, I got in touch with Phil again.  I hadn’t heard from him in years, and he hadn’t even seen a message I sent him several years ago, so I went looking for him, and sure enough, he had a new Facebook account.  As for his most recent ex-fiancee, she had remarried–and then passed away two years ago from cancer.  His Linkedin account hadn’t been touched in six years from the look of it, except that–sometime after I last checked it, a date which I can’t possibly remember anymore–he had put up a profile picture.

And it was him with his arm holding me close, in college.

I wondered how Phil would react to me sending him a message, and–he was delighted to hear from me.  We chatted for about an hour last Sunday evening.  He’s in a terrible state.  I don’t want to be spreading all the details on the web, just–he didn’t get “cured” by the doctors six years ago.  He still has issues.  He’s never remarried.  He’s lonely.  After I spoke to him, after a hiatus of three months, he started posting on Facebook again about being lonely.

And I just couldn’t be angry with him anymore.  I felt full forgiveness for him at last.  Based on things he has told me and other people about me in the past 30 years, I wonder if he even remembers things the same way I do.  He would talk me up–to his future and now ex-wife–like I was perfect.  He would say I was the one person he should’ve stayed with.  Even in the fall of 1994, he told me it was the best summer of his life because he spent it with me–and all I could remember was the abuse.  And I’d wonder why he broke up with me, then.

I think it’s an honest question considering his mental health issues and how his brain was affected by them: Does he remember things the same way?  Does he remember his abuse?  Is he two different people remembering two different sets of events?  This is all speculation, of course, but it is based on the puzzling things he says and the things that his ex-fiancee posted on her Facebook in 2019.

A little googling reveals that whie his disorders don’t cause split personalities, they can cause memory loss, especially during a manic or depressive state, which is when the abuses are most likely to happen.

And if I had stayed with him, my life would’ve been messed up.  I probably would’ve been penniless, or very poor, considering I never had the kind of skills and abilities that bring in the money.  Instead, I have a 30-year relationship, a small house nearly paid off, a stable life….A friend thought it possible that I could’ve helped him, but too many women have already tried and failed–including me in 1994.  Even then, his mental health challenges were showing, as he suffered a nervous breakdown and I was there for him.  Back then, he showed so much promise in math and acting; 30 years later, he has struggled to maintain employment.

In reviewing a webpage giving symptoms of one of his disorders, I can tick off a whole lot of them that I know apply, regarding his behavior, his relationships, employment, etc.–all things which could explain where all the abuse came from, and the issues he is currently dealing with.  Now to get things straight–It does not EXCUSE the abuse and sexual assault, but it does show me how broken of a person he really is.  It shows me vividly how he always wanted relationships but pushed them away because of the disorders, leaving himself unhappy.  And that helps me to forgive him and relieve myself of lingering suspicions that I brought any of it on myself.  These disorders were present since birth.

After I reconnected with him, I had a couple of days of memories flooding into my brain–good and bad, desire as well as severe abuse.  There was the realization that THIS IS THE OTHER PERSON from all these memories, the one person on Earth who remembers them with me, who experienced them with me, who did all those things with and to me.  It’s so rare that I actually speak with him that this is a strange feeling after all these years.  And the way he spoke to me is like he still has fond memories of me, still cares, maybe even still carries a torch or is limerent for me.

But despite issues in my own marriage, the fact that my own husband likely has his own mental health issues (which he has acknowledged), the fact remains that my life is fairly stable.  It also sounds like I won’t have to go back to paid work, like I can focus on running the household and helping the church and writing.  If you put the two relationships on a scale, the 9-month pseudo-marriage with Phil is still far heavier with troubles.  I’d be insane to walk back into that.  And he shows no indication of trying to restart anything or transgress boundaries.  Instead, he’s trying to improve his life and move forward.