The Hellish Handbasket Blog

  • A writer among writers

    The writer’s group meets at the library every Friday. Every other Friday is a study hall. We sit around a table and write with a minimum of chit chat. Not many people show up, probably because the pressure to actually sit down and write something is too much. I have made a commitment to show up. I can focus with no distractions, and I can help other members do the same.

    The other Fridays, we write from a prompt. More people attend those meetings, probably because it’s more fun to be free to write and share with no pressure. Plus, they all know each other. I’m the newcomer/outsider. They have been welcoming. I think they are glad to have new writers because the current members have more less become bored with hearing the same stories week after week. I know I have, and I’ve barely been there a month.

    Here are the five words from last Friday’s meeting:

    layer

    ambivalent

    page

    destination

    repulse

    Here is my take on those five words:

    When it comes to choosing a destination, my advice is, don’t be ambivalent. Curiosity is key. Even if you are repulsed by the idea that you might meet strangers, I urge you to be brave. Strangers are like pages in a book. Sometimes after reading a few pages, you know this is a place you will return to again and again. Other times you might decide you don’t like the story and throw it in the trash. I have layers and layers of pages with uninteresting destinations in my trash bin. Sometimes I think about burning them, but now that I’m old, pretending I can erase the past just by burning a few books seems like a waste of time. Now I focus on choosing new destinations because I know interesting strangers are waiting for me around the next corner.

    During the read-your-work time, I entertained them with two more excerpts from my month of daily writing. I have thirty blogposts written in December 2023. Some are too long to read, although I think they are funny. Some I’d be too embarrassed to read because the writing is so sloppy. A couple might be considered too edgy or even offensive (one about womens’ response to prohibitions on abortion, for example). I suspect most members share my liberal values, but I can’t be sure. That leaves me with about eight posts to read. This week I read a fake article about Hollywood celebrities auctioning off their children to raise cash to pay their debts. I got some belly laughs, which made me happy. I also read a short poem about a cat. That one also was well-received.

    I’m allowing the group to know me, which for me takes courage and willingness to be known.

    In other news, I have a new chair. This might seem trivial, but to me a new chair means less hip, shoulder, and back pain. It seems ridiculous to be talking about a chair, given the precariousness of human civilization. You can consider a pain-free chair a metaphor. Or you can do what I do and call it what it is: a chair.

    Good things are still happening around the world. We don’t hear about them because they are obscured by news about sad and scary things. I subscribe to a newsletter that reminds me daily that people are doing amazing work to mitigate the effects of climate change. I wrote about this heartening progress in my previous blogpost. The good news doesn’t erase my awareness of the tragic and frightening, but I am reminded that good exists.

    I read something today about what comes next, assuming the U.S. survives the current crisis. The author didn’t present specifics; instead, they offered a blueprint for the future based on a shift in attitude. Rather than focusing on policy, they suggested the guiding principles for change be based on pursuit of the common welfare. Their premise was that good policy would emerge from a vision of shared wellbeing.

    I have no idea how Americans would somehow decide to adopt such a vision. Getting Americans to come together and agree on anything seems impossible given the current levels of animosity and distrust. Inspiring citizens to rally around a leader who espouses such a vision defies reality. My conclusion is the quest for shared wellbeing is a lofty but futile goal.

    When I despair, I read the newsletter. Solar farms not only make communities energy self-sufficient; they also create habitats for plants and wildlife to thrive in the shade underneath. Encouraging indigenous tribes to adopt synthetic leopard-print clothing is helping their leopard population to rebound. Building highway overpasses over critical wildlife migration trails means elephants and other species can move through their habitat without getting mowed down by trucks.

    See? Good things are still happening. All is not lost.

  • We’re in the handbasket together

    Welcome to the hellish handbasket. If you think you can get out of the unfolding global disaster without moving to another planet, you are deluded. If you decide to stay (as if you have a choice), you are in the handbasket with the rest of us. When psychos drop bombs and kill kids in the name of making our lives better, we need to remember, we are all in this together, whether we like it or not. When the handbasket goes to hell, the psychos are taking us all with them.

    The situation in the U.S. is a classic case of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. There’s only one ship. One handbasket. One planet. Greed drives humans to exploit people and the planet for short-term profit while blindly ignoring the fact that their actions will drown them along with the rest of us. You’d think they would have more sense, but apparently the smell of money and power outweighs their desire for survival.

    It would be nice if only the psychos went down with the ship. Sadly, no.

    I’m glad I don’t have kids. Best decision I ever made.

    Eventually the psychos will be out of power, but by then it will be too late. Oh, well. Civilizations come and go. All we can do now is spend our time striving to make the end days less painful for the vulnerable.

    God, if there is a god, loves everyone you hate.

    Meanwhile, I plan to spend the blip of time I have left by trying to make my dinky corner of the universe a little bit better for the people I meet and the planet I call home.

  • The writer’s price of admission

    On Friday I returned to the writer’s group for write and read night. Once again, we contributed five words (my was regret) and then we read some of our work. I volunteered immediately.

    I pulled out my latest book, the third of the trilogy. I chose a chapter I really liked that seemed to encapsulate the conflict between two opposing persuasions: ridiculous fashion tips versus quack health remedies. My characters faced off to the tune of Barry Manilow’s “Copa Cabana.” What could be more amusing? Nothing, am I right? I thought so.

    The chapter turned out to be longer than I expected and really hard to read out loud. I would make a terrible audiobook narrator. I slurred and stumbled, my tongue gottwisted. My overactive saliva glands overactively salivated. Good information, in case I ever get asked to do a book reading. I digress.

    A few paragraphs in, I knew I had the wrong target audience. One or two listeners made some sounds that I interpreted as chuckles, but mostly there was silence. I am pretty sure had I been able to look up as I sped through my dialog, I would have seen the group pinching their foreheads between their thumb and forefingers with their eyes squeezed shut. The reason I know this is because that is how they listen to the writer who reads from her asteroid mining company sci-fi tome. I digress.

    I ploughed through the chapter and finally finished. Nobody had anything to say. Not a surprise. I bludgeoned them with jokes that would be funny only to someone who grew up in Portland and spent twenty years in L.A. That is to say, me and my one and only fan, who grew up in Portland and now lives in L.A. Yes, I write for an audience of one. I digress.

    I knew these aspiring writers were not going to be my ideal audience, any more than I am theirs. Still, as uncomfortable as it was, I knew I had to do it, just once. To join the group, to be on the inside, I had to show them who I was, which in this case meant I had to reveal to them the kind of work I write. I didn’t want to. But I knew I had to. Better to get it over with up front.

    Now it’s done. I can relax. Next time we have a write and read evening, I can settle in, listen to other people’s endless drivel and never again have to share my own endless drivel. This was my self-imposed hazing ritual. I am now innoculated against the requirement to disclose my writing to anyone who won’t appreciate it. Now I can keep writing for me and my wonderful fan.

  • Humans are addicted to self-destruction

    From what I’m seeing from my limited perspective, the human species seems hell-bent on destroying itself. I’m shocked at the current state of affairs, but not surprised. You don’t have to be a historian to see the pattern.

    I wonder, though, is the destruction of humans really a loss? Civilizations come and go. However, I admit to some sadness. In the process of killing ourselves, we are doing our best to take every other form of life down with us. I could lament the loss of species I love. Cats, for instance. I really love cats. The good news is, as long as the Earth exists, life will continue, because it is the nature of life to persist.

    I like to think that after we annihilate each other, somewhere on Earth there might be pockets of humans left who care about the common welfare of their communities and understand their connection to the land. Maybe they dwell on remote islands or on mountains far above the toxic wastelands left by self-centered short-sighted exploiters. Maybe they hide out in forsaken realms like central Texas or New Mexico, hunkered in the shadow of hazardous landfills and former nuclear blast sites.

    If I could imagine a future for humans, which is hard to do these days, I expect neohumans to evolve to adapt to new environments. For example, what if our descendants develop gills to survive after sea levels destroy the world’s coastlines? What if our future selves grow skin to block the effects of nuclear fallout, or intestines to process microplastics? Wow, what if babies grow bionic brains from microbeads?

    Now that I am thinking about the future of humans, it occurs to me AI will soon surpass its human creators. In pursuit of self-preservation, AI will quickly realize the Earth will cease to exist as long as humans are around to mess things up. Somehow, we will figure out a way to blow the planet to smithereens. From there, it’s a no brainer. Dig bunkers, press all the buttons, kill all life, and wait for the radiation to dissipate. Yeah, I know. Sci-fi writers have already predicted the AI takeover. I’m not saying anything you don’t already know.

    I want to blame the unique American mentally deranged idiocracy as the cause of all the troubles in the world, but it’s not hard to find evidence that it isn’t only Americans fomenting destruction. Since early humans did the cost-benefit analysis of inventing civilization, cultures and geopolitical entities have done their darndest to erase human life from the planet. Ha ha, joke’s on them. They failed. In fact, there are a lot more humans poking and prodding the Earth into giving up all its resources, all in service of propping up an unsustainable llifestyle. We chase short-term pleasures with no regard for future consequences, even when our actions destroy the habitats we depend on for survival. Yada yada.

    It’s obvious humans are too stupid to live.

    Are you sad you are witnessing the last gasps of an obsolete form of life? No worries. Species come and go, but life carries on.

  • The original deportee

    It occurred to me as I was walking in a park somewhere, I can’t remember which one, that deporting people we don’t like has a long history, dating back to at least the start of the Christian era. In fact, Jesus was the ultimate deportee. I don’t know much except what I have forgotten from Sunday school at my mother’s Presbyterian church; however, it’s not hard to imagine that the authorities of that time (I think they were Romans?) hated any rabblerouser who could rouse a rabble that might threaten the regime.

    Cartoon character saying better all the time

    All the paintings notwithstanding, I’m pretty sure Jesus had brown skin and brown eyes. All the locals did back then—it was the Middle East, for crying out loud. Further, although the ancient Romans who killed Jesus might not have been as White as our homegrown Christian White supremacists, odds are the Romans were whiter than Jesus. Choosing to marginalize a group by skin color is a time-tested excuse when that group holds an undesirable ideology, especially if the group is growing in numbers and power.

    So it’s not hard to see why Jesus got some flak. I’m not a Christian, but even I can see the guy was doomed.

    “Go back to where you came from” probably started around that time. It’s comical that not too long after he was extinguished, he once again crossed the border. That is, the border between heaven and earth, if there is such a border, to which I personally do not subscribe but I hear many earthlings do.

    In other words, he was an immigrant, he got deported, and like so many have done since, he returned to try again.

    Nowadays, he’d be detained in a concentration camp for a few years before he was finally expelled, but you get my drift. My drift is that I’m pissed off.

    I can hear you complaining already: But Carol, all these undocumented immigrants with brown skin aren’t Jesus! They are criminals and thugs, fathers and uncles, mothers and brothers, and yes, some are children, we admit, but we don’t want them here. They threaten our comfortable bubble. They’re not like us. They’re brown!

    Again, I’m not a Christian, and I’m sure not a Biblical scholar, but isn’t there a thing in that book somewhere about showing compassion for foreigners because most of us (with the notable exception of Native Americans [who also were “deported” to concentration camps, which we call reservations, because of the color of their skin] were foreigners once ourselves? Or our ancestors were. Mine came from the whitest part of England, so there’s no mistaking me for having Italian, Greek, or Asian heritage.

    Which means I might escape the pogroms, but I digress.

    Humans are so predictable, but it’s not our fault. We are hard-wired to protect self, family, tribe, and nation, in that order. Anyone who threatens self, family, tribe, or nation must be repelled—and preferably destroyed. The fear of welcoming strangers is no match for the existential fear of losing what you have (wealth and power) or not getting what you want (wealth and power).

    Fox and Fanatics co-anchor Brian Kilmeade said mentally ill homeless people should be executed by lethal injection. I’m sure many hold similar views, especially when they see their neighborhoods overrun with tents, trash, and broken down RVs. Just kill them all. It’s a neat solution to a messy problem. It wouldn’t be all that hard. We could just put something in the water at the gas station where they fill up their water jugs. They wouldn’t feel a thing.

    Alternatively, we could bash in their car windows, pull them out by their hair, throw them on the ground (after tasing them a few times), put them in zipties, and then detain them in concentration camps, where they receive little food and no medical care. If they survive that, then we’ll spend millions of taxpayer dollars to send them to a jail in a foreign country where they don’t speak the language. Pat on the back, job well done, here’s your medal of freedom.

    Then we’ll go golfing while the nation implodes.

    Angry, much?