Staving off the inevitable?

Yours truly from summer of 2001. I still have the shirt and canvas bag behind the purse.

If I write about calamities, am I hoping to ward them off within my personal life?

I'm in a wonky headspace right now. This post was going to be about the sentence above, but I don't feel like analyzing that. I'm.... Meh. Sometimes one just feels meh.

A dear friend became a grandmother again this morning, a little girl entering this world that at the time of her conception didn't seem as crappy as it now feels. I'm trying to keep that stiff upper lip, but all my years of living in the UK feel like a dream as this year begins, as so many unknowns linger. I feel like when my mom died in 2018, lost and bewildered with a major case of WHAT THE MUCK! I didn't write for a couple of years, trying to sort out my brain and heart. Therapy helped, time's passage did too, making quilts up the friggin' wazoo because the whole noveling gig was mired in grieving. Maybe that's why writing now, or thinking about writing, feels overwhelming because my nation is about to head into a BS administration and with less than two weeks to go, the reality of that is hitting me hard.

The book I did write after Mom's death became a series, and within that series I substituted muck for the F word. It was liberating in a way, mucking this and muck off and muck you, mostly spoken by a former soldier who didn't take shit off anyone. I wish I had Yarzel Nasri's presence of.... Not optimism, more like what is is what is despite war, death, injustice or any other shitty thing that occurs. Usually I do, my faith reminding me, bolstering me, keeping me together when life gets truly unbearable. I've endured some heavy crap, who hasn't? Yet I've always known, truly grasped with both hands, that this particular piece of crap isn't the be-all end-all. Today is not one of those days.

Yet it's a great day for some, like a family welcoming a new baby into their lives! That's pretty damned fantastic, even if I think the world sucks galore. This baby's grandmother and I met when I lived in the UK, that family moving to Yorkshire in time for two sisters the same ages as my daughters to start school. They all started school, then 9/11 happened, dude! Now that's been over twenty-three years in the past, good grief. I'll be eighty-one (if I'm still around) in twenty-three years, fascinating. Things to ponder, I suppose.

I felt old this morning, doing my stretches, gazing at a panel for a possible quilt, Christmas themed, but it was something new to put on the design wall. I was tired of the Red Sky at Night blocks that obviously aren't turning into anything more than something to hog up surface area. Hog up, no hogging, the latter being a Bluey term. No hogging Muffin, no hogging all you rich white men who can't seem to make enough money to satisfy yourselves. No hogging you despicable world leaders invading other countries. No hogging our incoming president who makes me wanna...

I could tell that man, that FELON, to muck off. HAH! I can edit a novel about a corrupt leader, release it on the twentieth of this month, and a part me will feel less.... Fragile, downtrodden? Hell if I know, but I will publish a book this month, and maybe another in March, and maybe I'll start writing something new in between those stories. Maybe I'll sew a Christmas quilt. Or finish RSAN, or who the muck knows what. Muck! I so wanted Kamala Harris to be my country's next president. I so wanted America to rise above its racism and misogyny and devotion to the almighty mucking American dollar. Instead, we got mucked.

Except... A baby was born today. A healthy little girl, dearly loved. Something new happened today in my world, and I'm gonna cling to that, to my faith, to the whisper-thin sense that this is not the end of the mucking world. 9/11 was terrible. Nazi Germany was TERRIBLE. The next four years will suck big time, but like all other catastrophes, this too will pass.

Somehow, it will.