I wrote another short story yesterday. You can find it under the Fiction pull-down "A Day Late and a Dollar Short." This is the first thing I've written about Madge in a long time. Madge is back! I'm not sure if I'll ever explain her back story, how she got to that place, or if it will be revealed what happens next. Madge came to visit me and that is what I captured.

My writing recently seems lately to take a dark turn more often than not. I hope readers will find it entertaining, but will perhaps need their own road map to get back from some of the more difficult places I'm driving through or to. (Through which I'm driving. Bah.)

I have plenty of cheerful life-affirming things going on in my life . . . but as Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." By this I mean that all happy stories are alike . . . and not often very interesting.

I find that I do not generally have the capacity for long works of fiction. I did write a novella when I lived on Noyo Court; It's not book lengthy but is the longest work of fiction I have produced. I would like to find it to share here. First things first; I'm working to organize this website so that the good stuff is not buried three layers down in the Archives section.

I have certain ideas that WANT to be told, stories that come to me with intensity and realism. They are like crazy people (nuts) escaping from the asylum (nut house) and they deeply desire to be seen and heard. The character Alex, from No Way Out is like that. I had a vision of how he looked and his whole back story was just there. I knew this man like a boy I watched grow up.

I think of what I write as "vignettes." I hope the reader will be taken to a different place and dragged around against their will, always wanting to read the next word, the next sentence, the next paragraph until "boom." It's over. You're dumped back on a sandy beach with waves lapping up against your ankles. 

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? The short answer is no.

I create art and measure its effect by the number of views and responses I get from my audience. Facebook is currently throttling my account, so that my posts are pushed down in the newsfeed - which is where my friends are most likely to see my posts.

My FB account has been restricticted for weeks now. The number of days it will be restricted never goes down from 90 days. Perhaps in May the throttling of my posts will be lifted, but FB is vague in its sentencing. My current crime is posting "false information."

The first item on the list is something I shared from a reliable friend of mine. I cannot see the whole post to fact check it. I cannot review why it is considered to be untrue. Robb Wittman supported Trump through thick and thin and I have shared many examples of this over the four years of 45's presidency. Wittman was the only Republican Congressperson from Virginia to attend the fascist-in-chief's nominating convention. The photo below is a rare picture of the two of them together - at a speech 45 gave at a Naval base. We know Wittman (Wittless?) loves the Navy. Well not so much the sailors, more the contractors who supply the Navy.

The next item is something attributed to Anthony Hopkins about how to deal with people  who are bad for you. After I learned that it was not actually written by Hopkins, I changed the comment to mention that fact and said that the text was still worthwhile and worth reading.

The next item is a post about Clarence Thomas' wife Ginny. I ask if the meme is true that she helped organize the January 6, 2021 Insurrection. 

The next item is truly bizarre. It is a meme drawn from news reports about the number of days the Berlin Wall has been down. The day it was published, it was true. The next day it was dated. To label this as "false news" and then punish me for sharing it is a consequence for no crime.
One can say the same thing about Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. "Four score and seven years ago . . ." is a LIE. 

The final item on the list - well Facebook can't be bother to tell me what it is. The information on phone is a somewhat different list, oddly. This item could be their complaint that I shared false information when I blamed CEO salaries and corporate price gouging for inflation. Their source relied on a think tank funded by our corporate masters.

Facebook also marks as spam my efforts to share my website blog, so if you are reading, PLEASE leave a comment. Or at least a like. Otherwise, this tree that is falling in the forest will make no sound.