SUNDAY MORNING SUN DEFIES HORRORS OF WAR

THROUGH THE DRAPERIES OF MY BEDROOM COMES THE SUN.  Have to get up early to take my dog out.  Go back to bed.  Snuggle for warmth. Have to go to the store for groceries this morning. Don't feel like getting dressed. Would like to read one of the books I ordered in but have been watching one YouTube video after another to follow developments and listen to opinions about what's happening in Ukraine.  Of course I support Democracy over Dictatorship. 

Musk links Ukraine to the Internet from space.

McCain was right.

Our intelligence was right. 

Thinking of various people I've met over the last couple years - in stores, in coffee houses, taking walks... who informed me that they did not TRUST our government.

Walmart dog food isle:  Man and his wife and I start talking about all the dog food coming in from China on those backed-up ships and dog food shortages and prices going up.  Start talking about nonprofit groups that spay and neuter at no charge. Man says they called everywhere after having cats and dogs - kittens and puppies - arrive to their yard.  Have you tried Sam Simon? Conversation, lead by husband, turns to why they are not wearing masks, not taking vaccinations, and fast forwards to his list of governmental agencies you cannot trust.  His list includes the FBI.  "They are all corrupt," He says.

I know I have to get out of the conversation at that point.

I still think the United States of America is the best.

I wish them a good day and move on.

On my list of things to buy today is dog food.

I see the film of refugees heading for the Polish border especially and people in their winter coats and hats, pulling wheeled suitcases, and some of them have brought their pets along.

A  white chihuahua in a lady's arms.

HUMANS IN A DOG'S DISGUISE

My human in a dog's disguise is sleeping a lot.  Some days she wants to half run around the block, some days she doesn't want to get out of bed, or goes right back in...

Has Putin gone mad?

How will this play out?

We are on high alert for nuclear war.

C 2022 Christine Trzyna

MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT : LOOSE CANNONS : TALKING TO STRANGERS

Went to the library to order in some books. A memoir and a biography.  It seems these are the two genre's I read mostly these days.  Distanced from fiction.

But every few hours I check the news on the war being staged in UKRAINE.

I try to imagine what it would be like if there was combat in the streets here.  If apartment buildings were being hit by missiles here.  If thousands of women and children were taking shelter in the subways, without food and water. If men eighteen to sixty were told they must not leave the country but must stay and fight in any way they can. 

Reports that Putin is actually mentally ill.  Suggestions that he has been affected by a Covid infection - something wrong with his brain - not thinking straight.  Notions that he wants to recreate the Soviet Union as his last effort before he leaves office.  Notions that he will never resign or retire.

Sean Penn in Ukraine filming.

At the library there was a woman who told me that she had just gotten out of a mental hospital. She said so much was going wrong in her life that she just couldn't take it any more.  She's been trying to find her adult son.  She suggested that he was involved in criminality and was an addict.  She had to find him.   He was somewhere in LA. I had to wonder if he was the main cause of mental distress or if she hoped he would help her.  Too many people lost to the maze of drug addiction.  Too many criminals, sociopaths, who deliberately seek out those who need escape, to hook them, to traffic them.  Too much evil.

A boom goes off in the neighborhood.

Somewhere down the street - possibly in a house - there is someone who likes to shoot off something once in a while.  A gun or perhaps something in the category of a firework. This person always does this at the exact top of an hour.  I imagine this person to be a man and imagine the man going outside into a yard. And usually at a time when many people are sleeping. Just one loud and unexpected boom.

Does he feel relieved after he destroys the sleep of others?  Is he discharging an emotion?

Is he someone who should be bearing arms?

"I feel overwhelmed," I said to the woman at the library.  "It's all so much bigger than me."

On the walk home I encountered some workman blocking a sidewalk in front of a house that looked like it needed some refurbishing.  Old trees had been beheaded months ago and their trunks stood in front of the house. I asked a man," Are the trees dead? Is there any sign that they are going to sprout?"

"It's been six months.  No leaves," he said in accented English.

We agreed that the trees were too traumatized from beheading to be alive.

"Where are you from?"

"Hungary."

The man told me he had gone back and forth to Hungary for some years and then one day he realized he was not going back.  He was from the southern part and had been born in what is now Yugoslavia.  He talked about Hungary being chopped after World War II, so that it's now one third the size that it was before.

I knew about that.

"Do you think refugees from UKRAINE are going to flood into Hungary?"

"No, they will go into Romania.  The border with Hungary is small.  Romania," he said.

What is it like to flee with nothing but a rolling suitcase, not knowing where you will be safe, where you will sleep, where you will find a bathroom when you have to use one? 

Here in America, our refugees are the homeless.

One place to go is the library.

C 2022 Christine Trzyna

YESTERDAY and TODAY : TALKING TO STRANGERS

Yesterday outside the library there was a woman laying on the cement under the porch with a little viscous dog protecting her.  I thought I heard her moaning.   I asked her if she was alright.  

"My arm hurts" she said.

"Can you sit up?" I asked

"A little," she said.

Then she curled into a fetal position and started to cry, openly..

"Are you OK?" I asked

She cried, "I want my mother."

***

My eyes feel strained.

My chair is uncomfortable and my back feels tweaked.

Actually, I've been typing for hours today, lots of things to attend to and several long letters I may never send. Really, I want to stay in bed all day tomorrow and read, and pretend I have no problems.  I would feel guilty if I did.

What is the point?

To what shall I turn my attention to now?

I saw a librarian I like smoking a cigarette.

We await definitive news about the possible invasion of Ukraine by Russia.  I hope not. 

The ships are coming in, the empty containers are stacked, there are ads out all over for truck drivers.

I'm still wearing a mask every day when I go inside buildings.

I got one of those free three-mask packs that the government sent out to pharmacies for distribution. 

The prices at the grocery store are so high so suddenly it's frightening. What really got me was seeing gallons of water, supposedly bottled in the mountains north of here, at fifty cents higher. 

Children who are getting free food at school are littering the neighborhood with it, not appreciating it, just throwing it to the ground on their walk home. Pizza, salad, carrots, apples, oranges, nuts, burgers, in wrappers, littering the lawns. I have lost my pity for them.

My dog is still alive but more fragile than ever. I know she cannot live forever. I'm not ready for her to die.  I check on her when she's sleeping. I tell her I love her more frequently.  She is going blind, one eye much worse than the other.  She moves her head from left to right to scan. She scares more easily.

The slum lord with the empty building near me fake-tried to rent the remodeled unit. We all know that she does not want to rent it. 

This past weekend garage sales started.

After three days of unseasonably hot weather, it turned cold and it hailed!  Tonight I will be under blankets again.

AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT...

STOP BUYING THIS HORRIBLE ENVIRONMENT CRIPPLING STUFF NOW! (OVER A DECADE OF CHRISTMASTREE-LESS CHRISTMAS!)

TOTALLY UNNECCESSARY - OFTEN CRAP FROM CHINA (or some other place that manufactures easily breakable and discardable crap) - YEARS - SOMETIMES HUNDREDS - TO "BIODEGRADE"  - the WORLD does not need the pollution!

ARTIFICIAL CHRISTMAS TREES.  A Germanic Pagan custom that spread throughout Europe and brought to the U.S. and other parts of the world - supporting electric lights, various decorations - sure a tree can look beautiful, even inspiring.  Those little lights are so fragile that they easily malfunction and break so you have to buy more.

If you must, buy a live tree that can be replanted, use your old decorations or make new ones from biodegradable materials - or go without.  If it's Christmas in your heart, it will still be Christmas.

So much razzle dazzle decorating is crap that breaks and needs replaced.  You do not have to recreate Whoville to have a beautiful holiday.

This will cut down on the Christmas tree bonfires too.

Consider putting your ornament collection in bowls to set on tables...

ARTIFICIAL PLANTS and FLOWERS.  Ever think it's a real succulent and it's plastic?  Some people use fake plants outdoors as well as indoors.  If you are too busy or lazy to water or don't have a green thumb go without.

For gifting stop the bouquets that will be dead in a week and go for live plants that can be transplanted or kept in the house. If you must have cut flowers, consider using them in a compost heap.  For weddings and other events consider live plants with just a few cut flowers woven in.

PLASTICS:  Plastic has it's place but everywhere should not be that place.  Oh the plastic shit all over the sidewalks waiting for landfill pick ups.  Especially children's broken toys,  

It's out of your site but not really gone away.

FAKE GRASS which is really plastic or synthetic carpet. Really bad for the environment.  Weeds will still poke through at the perimeter.  Whatever you use as a grass substitute, you still need the natural drainage that actually filters into our aquafirs.  Consider having your own little subterranean clay "pot" beneath your soil that will retain rain water.  Plant over it and you'll reduce how much water you need to grow native plants and small bushes or trees.

BOTTLED WATER.  More plastic - and it will leach into the water if you reuse the bottle.  Three reuses is all that's suggested for most of these plastics.  Some of us remember life when we did not take water everywhere with us.  Maybe the earth was cooler then, but we were alive and well without guzzling huge amounts of water.  Water can be filtered at home and taken with you in aluminum or other containers.

This is the short list.

EVE BABITZ DIES

LA TIMES EVE BABITZ WHO CAPTURED AND EMBODIED .... the culture of Los Angeles, dies at 78 by Mark Olsen, Staff Writer

EXCERPT : Her writing described a world of decadent glamour with fine-tuned detail but also a sense of open-hearted joy, often shared with the dishy candor of a close friend deep into a soggy late-afternoon lunch.

ANNE RICE DIES

LA TIMES OBIT ANNE RICE DIES AT 80 

I'm not a huge vampire fan but I loved the book and the film Interview With A Vampire. The film has a scene in it which has informed a particular nightmare I had a few years ago. Anne as a writer of these and other Gothic tales, often played with the grays between bright white good and dark black evil, between animal instinct and human morality.

OVER 150 HAVE SIGNED ' A MORE SPECIFIC LETTER ON JUSTICE AND OPEN DEBATE" RESPONSE TO CANCELL CULTURE

DAILY MAIL : DOZENS OF ACADEMICS, JOURNALISTS BLAST CANCELL CULTURE 

***

As soon as you're thinking "I better not write that" or "I better edit that" because you are afraid of being not politically correct, not woke enough, or because you fear being punished for not cancelling, you have basically SELF CENSORED.  I agree, this blocks creativity.

Worse than that, we begin to feel we cannot report our personal experience or our own reality because IDEALISM is supposed to replace it.

Sometimes I think this is all part of the whole POSITIVE THINKING culture as well.

ANNE LAMOTT on WRITING : WHY PERFECTRIONISM KILLS CREATIVITY

THE MARGINALIAN: ANNE LAMOTT - PERFECTIONISM KILLS CREATIVITY 

Excerpt: What makes Lamott so compelling is that all of her advice comes not from the ivory tower of the pantheon but from an honest place of exquisite vulnerability and hard-earned life-wisdom.  She recounts her formative years and where she headed once she e3ncountered that inevitable fork in the road, where we can choose between being shut in and shut down by our traumatic experiences, or using them as fertile clay for character-building.

JOYCE CAROL OATS DOES NOT WRITE QUICKLY

THE GUARDIAN; JOYCE CAROL OATS :PEOPLE THINK I WRITE QUICKLY by Hermoine Hoby

EXCERPT :  Oats, a five time Pulitzer finalist, might be "very intensely interested in a portrait of America", but clearly she has no truck with the ego-vaunting, personality driven paradigm of contemporary celebrity.  She appears more to belong to some other, long-passed era, with a pronounced gothic streak colouring much of her fiction, which tends to be peopled by powerful men and introverted women who frequently experience sexual shame.

TRIVIAL or SUPERFICIAL or LIGHTHEARTED THE LIST OF THE MOMENT

 AM I WHO I KNOW? (or DON'T?)

Top Model I Think is Most Heart-Stopping Beautiful : Gigi Hadid

Actor With Talent Who Is Also My Heartthrob : Jack Huston

Actor I'll See Any Film She Makes : Jennifer Lawrence

Actor I'll Always Miss - I Like (Most Of) What He Did : Phillip Seymour Hoffman

Poet Who Always Gets To Me : Dylan Thomas

I'm Curious About: Jack White (Musician.)

Enough Already :  Harry and Meghan, especially Meghan

I'd Be Totally Embarrassed If She Were My Mother : Madonna

So Bad - So Good :  Fenty Savage Fashion Shows (For starters, I hate lingerie and never buy it or wear it  Secondly, there's anorexia and then there's ugly fat. The masturbation and sex act indicative dance movement are "savage" and not at all titillating. They are gross.  And if Demi Moore doesn't give it a break soon, she'll be on my Enough Already list. Sorry!  But I appreciate that all a dance production is a cross over with fashion and innovative rather than runway shows where mostly anorexics unnaturally walk one foot almost crossing over with the other: amazing that more models are not going splat on the runway.)

I Might Just Be Done With : Daily Mail Online  (So Obviously Anti-Biden with their hideous headlines it's totally unbalanced reportage.)

Historical Person I'd Like To Interview : Benjamin Franklin  (What really went on in the Hellfire Club Ben?)

If I Could Travel Back In Time : The Beatles at the Cavern after Berlin

I'd Like To Meet But Won't In This Life : Jimmy Page 

(New!)  I Could Care Less : K-Pop

My Favorite Person Is : My dog.

AM I WHAT I INDULGE?

Oldie Film(s) I Just Had to Watch Again : Into the Wild, Titanic

Oldie Film(s) I Want To Watch Again Sometime : Grey Gardens, The Talented Mr. Ripley

Not So Oldie Series I Want To Watch Again Sometime : Boardwalk

Newish Series That I Was/ Am So Impressed With : The Wilds

I Just Watched and Loved It : A series on YouTube about dealing with Narcissists.

Oldie Favorite Album I Blissfully Recently Listened to from Beginning to End : None

Oldie Band I Didn't Grown Up With That I'm Listening To Now : None

Oldie Songs I've Been Listening To A Lot : Don't You Care by the Buckinghams. Easy To Be Hard by Three Dog Night

Book I Recently Read Cover To Cover : None

Book(s) I Keep Meaning To Reread :  Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley series, Erica Jong's Fear of Flying

Person I Get and Nobody I Know Understands : Andy Warhol

AM I WHAT I EAT?

Favorite Cheese Of The Moment : Irish Butter

Tortilla to Beat All : Trader Joes Whole Wheat Wraps Olive Oil

Condiment / On Pizza : Olives - Black Olives

Chocolate : Peanut Clusters

Canned Soup I Miss That I Don't Think They Make Anymore : Campbell's Scotch Broth

Meal I Miss That I Can't Recreate: Pressure Cooker Stuffed Cabbage

I'm No Longer Into Like I Once Was : Pasta

I'm Drinking : Cheap Von's Signature Brand Instant Decaf  (Horrible) and Freshly Roasted Ground Guatemalan out (No Shakes).

AM I WHAT I BUY?

Scent : Pacifica Tuscan Blood Orange

Shower Gel : Hemp Sweet Orange by Clean and Beauty (defunct business)

Winter Top :  Thrift Store Find by a fashion brand company whose clothes I really like though it upsets me to hear that the local store in Studio City is not nice to its employees. (Won't Buy New.)

Casual Shoes : Skechers

.

AM I WHAT I MISS?

Alone Time - A Long Stretch

Soaking in a Tub  (I'm barely showering, trying to save water)

A long deep honest in-person conversation (with a sane and empathic person).

Sleeping nine hours straight no problem.

LATEST FASCINATION(S)? 

Doreen Virtue's Conversion to Fundamentalist Christianity.

The Heidi Planck Disappearance Case - all that Hollyweird Connection.

I SHOULD : 

Take Yoga Again. Go Swimming.

I WISH:

It Would Rain

I HAVE:  Lost My Patience with:

Snobs.  (Including Organic Foodies.)

Garcetti and any other politician who criminalizes homelessness when there aren't enough affordable housing units anywhere. (A statistic I would like to see is how many people voted but chose NOT to vote for an individual in a category. You can vote on what you want or who you want on a ballot but NOT VOTE for a person too. This is better (i.e. None of the Above or I'm a Democrat but Not This Guy) communication than NOT VOTING AT ALL.)

Malignant Narcissists 

C 2021  Christine Trzyna

Ask yourself the same questions.

Don't let me influence you. 

LOVE IS ALL AROUND ME : THE TROGGS

TRAFFIC DEAR MR. FANTASY

THE SHIPS NOT COMING IN

There are over a hundred ships full of containers waiting to get into the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.  There are trains backed up 35 miles into Chicago.  Truckers with empty containers and nowhere to put them are dumping the containers on streets in Wilmington - even blocking driveways. 

Tied into this is that Dollar Tree and 99 Cents Only Stores can no longer stick to their nothing- over- a -dollar price policy; sadly this is also effecting the pricing of food that they started selling when they got sensitized to the fact that millions of Americans rely on some form of food money from the U.S. government. 

Yesterday a woman told me that at her son's school each child has been given a card with a $300 food benefit.  No questions asked.  No income verification needed.  

When I took my dog for a walk this morning we went past a school and saw that some children had dumped their plastic bags full of food onto the street. These contained yogurt, sliced apples, a tiny burger, chips, and a couple other snaky items. As children they do not have to earn the money to buy these things and neither do their parents who cannot afford to feed them. We the People are trying - some of us anyway - to take care of our own.

I think those ships waiting to come to port are full of junk and mostly plastically easily breakable throw-away junk that will be in our land fills for hundreds of years, crap that people do not need, but I know they are also containing food.  Canned food, including cat and dog food which does not have to bear the place of origin on the can, is also coming from China. 

On my way home from work I stopped in at these stores looking for some inexpensive canned vegetables and there was none.  But I noticed there was meat and fish - protein - at Dollar Tree while the shelves had not one can of beans.

I have to admit I never much thought about one of the nations largest ports being in Los Angeles County or how that factored into the economy here.  It's still a mystery to me.  I know this, however, all that incoming means that the American economy is depending on factory production elsewhere and those manufacturing jobs were exported too and that is the fault of both Democratic and Republican administrations.

I met a Longshoreman recently.  He has spent his life, it seems, driving vehicles off ships, but he owns a house because of it. He can barely stand to do the last few months before he retires and keeps stalling them out, not sure what is next for him.

At Vons, a local grocer not known for the lowest prices, I couldn't believe it when I saw some ground turkey for $6.99 a pound. I skipped the produce section entirely.

The woman with the son who got a $300 food benefit card at school tells me she just spent near $300 sending a box of things to her mother-in-law in Guatemala - including dried beans.  They don't have beans in Guatemala?  I suspect she is married to an "illegal" and there is some form of fraud going on there but I don't really know that.

Meanwhile, I follow what's happening with President Joe Biden, who is under attack because he is trying to do the right thing.  Yes, his age is showing, but then, so was Ronald Reagan's.  Not the constant crisis, the constant self promotion of Trump, who got us used to daily doses of anxiety and flash, Biden seems dull, but he has gumption and morality.  Remember that? Remember the Real Gospel - the feed, cloth, and shelter Gospel - rather than the "Prosperity Gospel?"

You have to have a fortune in the bank not to feel what has happened in our economy due to the Covid-19 shut downs. In recent years I've met more people who not only believe the End Times are coming but cannot wait to be raptured.

C 2021  Christine Trzyna

POSITIVE THINKING and THE INABILITY TO EVALUATE - FICTION and NON FICTION by CONTENT CREATORS

I've been posting on self censorship because I can tell you that as soon as you start EDITING for the professor, the TA, the church, the "religious philosophy" of the school or the company you work for, or really anyone, you are out of flow. 

You have lost the ability to declare an alternative position. You may not be a radical. You may simply think otherwise. You may be capable of debate - of stating your opinion in a civilized manner without intent to create upheaval. You will be quickly shut down by someone with a more dominant status or bearing. You will perhaps decide it is no longer worth communicating with an individual because you can tell it will always be combative - if you are honest.  And you may hate your coworkers or your job because you're secretly so uncomfortable with the form or degree of political correctness involved.  But where you gonna go?

Imagine my friend who is volunteering for a nonprofit thrift store with a oversupply of jeans in sizes 7 and below for women. (i.e these are for such small hips one wonders how such a woman could give birth and survive.) She suggested they have a sale for these sizes - skinny people - and was told that would be DISCRIMINATORY!  I'm beginning to wonder if they will be able to continue to hang women's clothing separate from mens (that said, I'm sometimes partial to the unisex look and don't personally care if a man wants to wear women's jeans or visa versa but I can tell you, having tried it, that clothing patterned for the opposite sex rarely fits.) In actuality, it would be discriminatory to only sell those sizes to skinny people but it is not discriminatory to sell them to anyone who wants to buy them.

I've been thinking about these issues which have become increasingly prevalent in recent years.

People are expressing themselves all over the Internet but I wonder if this is because they cannot in their ordinary life? (What to call it? Personal Life (is there such a thing?) Real Life?  I suppose it is real if you are living it. Ordinary - as in NOT in the virtual world of the Internet?)

For those of us who remember life before there was Internet - or cell phones - we remember a certain feeling of connection with other human beings as well as overall, MORE TRUST that people would be honorable in their intentions.

I've TRUSTED a people who proved to be UNTRUSTWORTHY, and I understand.  But you have a choice in life to go around paranoid and to put everyone you meet on trial first, or trust them and let them prove themselves worthy of being hung. (It helps if you believe in karma and think you would not want theirs.)  There are so many con artists out there, for instance people who say they will pay you and then profit from the theft of your intellectual properties, that really we all need lawyers. (Now there's a thought.)

I would say that I meet few people these days who TRUST anything or anyone - not the government - and often, not even their partner they're having sex with. While being open minded to ideas and opinions and information in general, THERE IS A SEVERE LACK IN THE ABILITY TO EVALUATE THE SOURCE.  

Also I see that POSITIVE THINKING - combined with certain forms of religiosity - Christianity - can wipe out your ability to grumble to others as well because they won't hear you. Complain and someone will be negating your pain while telling you to BE GRATEFUL. Positive thinking or talking yourself out of what you're experiencing or feeling is a form of self censorship.

Gratitude is not for the things you earn or deserve. Gratitude is for the things you are given without earning or deserving. (Saying please and thank you can still go a long way.)

Following the Gabby Petito /Brian Laundrie case, I lost hours of my life clicking on YouTube videos with FAKE VOICES providing SPECULATION and THEORIES in search of information with some foundation. I wondered at these people who post these things - is it for hits - and eventual payout by YouTube?  Some of the more sickening stuff was a person who posted cartoonish videos of Brian being eaten by alligators. These people are called CREATORS or CONTENT CREATORS - and I wonder if their work should be labeled as FICTION. (How about it YouTube?)

i.e when it is the news  = journalism - it should be called NONFICTION.

VERY FEW OF THESE PEOPLE WHO WERE SUPPLYING CONTENT had the ability or reason to RESEARCH so they were basically supporting their take on the situation by leaning on others who also were not supplying content based on research.

A BUNCH OF LIARS.

SOME OF THESE PEOPLE WERE INDULGING IN NEGATIVE THINKING.  They indulged in character assassination.  They put Brian and his parents on trial.  They apparently do not endorse Americanism.  (OK, I get it that the legal process has not been trusted since the spectacle of the O.J. Simpson trial.)  They do not believe in the law or the legal process, or an individual's rights.

I know - I'm meandering and this needs to be edited.  But I'm in flow.  I'm letting my thoughts out.