This last weekend was the Tucson Festival of Books. And for the fourth year, I had a booth, and I offered my pirate books, the three volumes of The Adventures of Damnation Kane, for sale to anyone who: 1) Saw my tri-corner hat and pirate-themed shirt; 2) Noticed the name of the booth, or 3) Paused to look at the INCREDIBLE art that my wife Toni DeBiasi created for all three Volumes of the series.
And that was a LOT of people.
I went there with, I think, about 65 books.
The first day, Saturday, I sold 42 of them. (The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything!) I sold every copy of Volume I I had with me. I went home, got the four other copies of Volume I at my house, also grabbed my VERY FIRST copy, the first printed copy of any book I have ever written, and brought that on Sunday. I used the very first copy (which was NOT for sale) as a display copy.
I sold the other four. And six more copies of Volume II and Volume III. And I unfortunately had to turn away a few other people because I didn’t have a copy of Volume I to sell them, at the end of the day, or else I would have had at least two or three more sales.
I now have 13 copies left of the 69 copies I brought with me to the Festival.
I have never done that well. The Festival has always been pretty good to me: I have a good book (Three of them, I think), I have a good hook — “Can I tell you about my time-traveling Irish pirate?” — and the aforementioned three attention-grabbers (sign, cover art, and stylish chapeau) brings people close enough to get drawn in by my elevator pitch. But my previous record was, if I remember right, 29 books sold. So I almost doubled that.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, to everyone who came and bought my books. I am honored beyond belief. And now I am anxious as hell that you all won’t like the books, or that you won’t like the third book, or — I dunno, something. So if you could see your way clear to tell me if you do like the books: go to the Contact link at the top of the page (Under the three lines, on mobile), or click on the Feedback link that should be floating in the bottom left corner of the page, and send me a message. Send me a Facebook message or Instagram message — @TheodenHumphrey, in both cases. (Also the same handle on X, if you are a glutton for punishment — or Threads, if you’re a glutton for social media.) Or if you’re really feeling good about my work, post a review somewhere — Amazon, or Goodreads, or Lulu.com where the books are produced — and then let me know that you did so. Thank you.
Thank you, as well, to my fantastic booth partner Amanda Cetas, who stood with me on a patch of sole-stabbing gravel for eighteen hours over two days, who covered me when I wanted to take a break (And made sales for me, too), who directed people to my side of the booth when they seemed more interested in fantasy than in historical fiction, and who stayed positive and energetic all the way through. Thank you, also, to all the people who bought Amanda’s books — she said she did better this year than she has before, too, so it wasn’t just the Pirate who made out like a bandit.
Amanda also shared my confusion over our nearest neighbors, who were… intactivists. Anti-circumcision activists. With whole books. About… circumcision. Now, I actually know the arguments against circumcision, and — how do you fill an entire book with them? Let alone TWO?!?
Needless to say, they did not send many customers over our way, and we didn’t send any their way, either. I didn’t have any people come to my booth and say, “Pirates, huh? You wouldn’t have anything about foreskins, by any chance?”
(I would have sent them over if they did. But they didn’t. The people over there still had people at their booth all weekend, so I think they did fine, too.)
If you didn’t get the book or books you wanted, or you now want more books, then please use the links on this page to Contact me or to order yourself a copy from Lulu.com. (If you Contact me, I will sign the book for you before I ship it.) If you didn’t make it to the Festival this year, then come to next year’s — Amanda and I will be there (Hopefully with our partner, the Poet, Lisa Watson, who wasn’t well enough to attend this year), and I will have all of the Adventures and at least one new book, as well. Amanda will probably have nine new projects, all of them as wonderful as the ones she has right now.
And if you bought books, two things: thank you for reading. You, along with the rest of the literate people, are the bulwark holding back the tide of Fahrenheit 451. You are giving my world meaning. You are joining me in this weird sort of slow-motion conversation that is a novel.
And also: get off the internet and go read. Like I’m about to do.
(If you’re wondering, I only bought two books this year. But that’s because this is my TBR pile.
Sorry this is coming in late (But also, my WordPress stats counter tells me that people are looking at my archive of old posts, and I have to say, there’s a lot there. So please feel free to look back through what I’ve written in the last 8 years on this blog) and it is only a link, not my words.
But. I have made a decision.
I am going to stop arguing. Online, at least.
In all the years that I have been arguing online, and arguing in person, and also hating myself for doing it, I have never been able to come to this decision, because I have always felt there is value in arguing the point, in standing up for my side. I don’t always see that value, because the internet is a terrible place for argument on the topics I generally argue, which are almost all political; but I have constantly told myself that there is value, and thus I need to keep doing it, even to my detriment.
Until I read this.
This is the culmination of a series of essays, which the author lists and links in this one; I recommend reading all of them — but also, he, like me, is wordy, so that’s a lot of sauce to drink down at once. Maybe just start with the one I’m linking. It’s on Substack, but it’s free to read. I will have more to say on this, which I’ll try to post next week on the usual day. For now, read this.
And if that made you think of the Sweathogs and Mr. Kotter, then we are friends.
Okay: lemme ‘splain.
No. Is too much. Lemme sum up.
School ended on May 25th. That was at the end of a week including Graduation, which I hosted as Master of Ceremonies (A student of mine expressed distaste for the term “emceed,” and when I told her what it stood for, she said the full term was MUCH cooler than the phonetic abbreviation, so I’m going with that from now on.) and the usual grade-fest, necessitated by the fact that I accept all late work up to the last minute. Then I took a week or so to relax — though I did make a bed, as I described in my last post nearly a month ago.
And then the rocks arrived.
These first three pictures are my front yard. Notice it is nothing but dirt and a few plants. (This is after I weeded it, by the way. Bottom right corner of the first pic shows the weeds I had not yet gotten to, in front of the sage bush.)
And this is eleven tons of rock being dumped in my driveway.
The ton or so of dust is complimentary. And inevitable, in Tucson, which is mostly dust.
So then I started working on getting the rocks spread out across the yard. That means digging up the dirt to turn it and remove all the weeds I could get; then putting down weedblocking cloth; then hauling wheelbarrows full of rocks over to the cloth and dumping them. Since the temperature here has been well over 100 degrees for several weeks, it was hot, dirty, difficult work.
But my wife still made it look good.
I joked that this was her Jackie O. pose; the scarf is actually weedblocker cloth. The gorgeousness is all her.
I’m not as pretty.
In addition to the rocks, on June 10th I started my usual summer job: scoring essays for the Advanced Placement program’s Language and Composition exam. So that meant about eight hours a day staring at a computer screen trying to understand student handwriting — and spelling. I’d get up as early as I could (which is no hardship as I have always been an early riser) and lie in my hammock and grade for a few hours; then I’d go out in the yard with my wife and spread some rocks.
The rocks are not done, by the way, but it’s getting close; and it looks great.
Progress. Improvement.
Until June 18th, when I flew to San Diego to attend a three-day AVID conference.
This one had a roundabout genesis: back in March or so, a good friend of mine asked if I would go to the conference, because she was going and she wanted someone along whom she got along with. At first I turned her down, because I do not generally like pedagogy and conferences; my style and philosophy of teaching are not what other teachers’ are, and so most of the time, pedagogical instruction is lost on me — and it makes me feel bad, because I have just enough self-doubt and imposter anxiety, even after 23 years of teaching, to suspect that I’ve been doing it wrong all along. And the people who present at these conferences always seem so sure that their system is right.
AVID has a little more credibility with me, because when I started teaching in California in 2000, the school where I taught had an AVID program, and the teacher whose room I shared, who took on something of a mentor’s role for me, was the AVID teacher. So I had first-hand experience of how well the program can work, and I was more interested in being involved in bringing AVID to my school than I would be in most teacher conferences. I’ll write more extensively about AVID at some point, but the basic idea — it stands for Advancement Via Individual Determination, which I both love and hate, as I love and hate all good acronyms — is that it helps students who would struggle going to college and being successful there for reasons other than intellect, and tries to make those students more successful through teaching organization and study habits, and how to work with people and advocate for yourself, and so on. It’s a good system.
But I still would never choose to go to a three-day teaching conference if I could avoid it. So I said no when my friend asked me to go.
But in February, my father’s wife, Linda, passed away. It was, of course, devastating to my dad; and I promised him I would come to the memorial, and help him out in any way I could. And somewhere around April, my dad told me that Linda’s memorial would be Saturday, June 24th: the weekend after the AVID conference. My dad lives in Paso Robles, in wine country closer to the central coast of California than to San Diego; but my brother lives in San Diego, and would be driving up for the memorial anyway, of course. So I checked with my brother, and then my principal, to make sure I could extend my return flight from the conference and get a ride — and in the end, I went to the AVID conference, and then drove with my brother to Paso Robles and attended my father’s wife’s memorial.
Where I served as the master of ceremonies.
It was a beautiful ceremony.
This is my dad at the podium sharing his memories of his wife. My brother is the one leaning against the casks — the memorial was held at a vineyard, whose owners are close friends.
***
I’m telling you all of this because I hope it explains why I have not posted on this blog for the last three weeks. I usually write and post on Sunday and/or Monday of each week. Well, last Sunday and Monday I was in Paso Robles, both helping my dad deal with his grief, and also going through my own (far, far smaller) suffering: because my dad is an extrovert, and he and his wife are extremely popular and well-loved among their family and friends and their community, so many people wanted to express their grief about Linda’s loss, and also to help my dad know that he is not alone: so we had four gatherings of people in the five days I was there visiting. Which was a lot for me. The Sunday and Monday before that, I was flying to San Diego and then attending the first day of a three-day conference for a program that I would actually be interested in learning about and bringing to my school, so I was trying hard to keep up with the information; and that was draining. Aaaand the Sunday and Monday before that, I was scoring essays and spreading rocks.
So here’s my plan. I’m counting this one, which I know is a bit of a nothingburger in terms of its value as a blog post (When I told my wife I was going to write “just sort of an update” for this post, she said “That doesn’t sound very exciting. Don’t you want your blogs to be about exciting things?”), and then I will be writing and posting for the next three days, to make up for the three weeks I missed, ending with a post for next week — which I’ll post on the Fourth of July. In honor of which, I plan to yell a whole lot about how the Supreme Court is fucking up this country. I have another idea for one of the other blogs; not sure about the last one — but I’ll think of something.
I don’t have anywhere else I have to go. Or any essays to grade. The rocks are almost done, and though I also need to work on my pirate book, otherwise I am just staying home with my wife and my pets.
This is the last week of school, and my brain is broken, so I will not be writing. But here are pictures.
Every year we get teacher appreciation certificates. And every year, my administration tries to personalize them for every teacher — and every year, they think “Well he likes pirates…”
This appreciation gift, from one of my graduating seniors, was MUCH better. Those darts can really fly.
Last night the graduated seniors did the traditional Senior Prank. We have very nice students, so they try not to damage anything. This is what they did to the Dean of Students’ office:
They also came in this morning to clean up the mess.
And this is what they did to my room. This year’s theme was apparently — cabbage? I’m assuming it was an Avatar, The Last Airbender reference, but — I dunno, man. Cabbage. They left radishes, too.
The ridiculous mess of books and papers, by the way, is all me: I am not a neat man. And it is the end of the year.
See the two radishes? One in front of my keyboard, the other is under the phone.
This was the best cabbage placement. I left this one up for the day. (By the way: on top of the clock is a 3-D printed figurine of the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. He lives there.)
The cardboard head cutout was from Graduation; it’s a good likeness of one of our newest alumni. When he and I took a photo after the ceremony, I asked if I could have the head; so he left it for me last night. The Snickers bar, unfortunately, appears to be a new tradition: last year’s senior prank also included poop-chocolate on my chair. Sigh.
This is where the head cutout lives now: on top of the large Darth Vader cutout I already had on the inside of my door. This is now #DarthDrew.
And then one last thing, which has made me much happier than I was last week: at Graduation this year, and last year, we had a Flower Ceremony. We gave the graduates roses and asked them to deliver a flower to the person or people who helped them reach this achievement. Last year my favorite student tried to give me his rose (We only gave them one flower apiece last year; we realized the problem there and gave them two this year) and I told him to go give it to his mom. Then this year — I got four. Left me pretty close to speechless. Here they are (The fifth rose is actually an extra one I gave to Toni because she should always get flowers, but I’m letting it stand in for the flower I turned down last year. [Also I got her a new bouquet of flowers today because she should always get flowers.])
Thank you Than, Alex, Julia, Sofia, and Meghan. This meant the world to me.
Right now, I feel like it’s not worth getting into; I did a (kinda) stupid thing, I reacted to it (kinda a little more) stupidly. I had a bit of a tailspin. I got out of it, but it colored my day, my night, and then this morning, too.
So all told, I don’t have it in me to write.
It doesn’t help that it’s the end of the school year, but mainly, it was yesterday.
So: I am going to give myself the grace and the space to have a bad day, and to skip, therefore, writing about anything this week. Instead, I am going to share two links with you all.
The first is an open essay from the author A.R. Moxon. I haven’t read his book yet (I will) but he is one of my favorite commentators, and I love both the way he writes and the thoughts he has. And this thought is a doozy. I also love the way he talks in this about the purpose of persuasion. So let me persuade you to read this.
And then, I want to share an audio file from my favorite podcast, Unfucking the Republic. I think this one has a somewhat similar theme, and a similar purpose: and a second persuasive suggestion. I would like to propose the first link, the Moxon essay, as a thought-provoking read, and this link, this 20-minute podcast episode, as a path forward.
Let me know what you think. And I’ll try to write something next week. Assuming I don’t do anything else stupid.
So, as I frequently do, I assigned my AP students an essay. They weren’t happy with it. Most of them didn’t do it. So I wrote an example for them. The assignment was to describe, with imagery and details, your perfect day: and this would be mine.
I think this says more about me and my life than it does about my writing or about my students and this assignment.
A Day of No Need
My perfect day is in the autumn. Probably November: there is no longer any pressure over getting Halloween exactly right; Thanksgiving is coming, but thankfully, I will never host any gathering larger than myself and my wife and our pets, so there’s no pressure there. But thinking about what food we will eat on that day, and about the four-day weekend, blocks any worries about Black Friday or holiday shopping; this is the time of year when, if you see something you think someone on your list would like, you pick it up and buy it, and feel good about yourself for getting ahead of the game.
The weather is perfect: the sun is out, and bright, but not hot; the breeze is cool, sometimes becoming a wind that bites and makes you want to tuck yourself into your jacket like a turtle pulling into his shell. Jackets are a must: which is great because it means more pockets, and also a layer that you are almost required to take off when you go inside, which means you can be warm outside and not too hot inside. If there are leaves on the trees, they are turning into beautiful colors; if they have already fallen, they are turning into beautiful sounds with every step through them, every stride leaving a wake behind, a surging wave of leaves leaping ahead. The smell of warm, spiced apples rises from the cup of cider in my hand.
But in truth, all of that is negotiable. Almost any weather can be perfect: there is such a thing as too hot, and another such thing as too cold; but hot and cold between those extremes are both fine, and warm is as good as cool. Green leaves on trees are almost as lovely as fall colors, and the bright blooms of spring and summer break up any monotony in the foliage. I like rain, and snow, and clouds, and blue sky – and night, for that matter. I don’t need any weather for my perfect day.
I need there to be no need.
On my perfect day, nobody needs me. My parents don’t need to call, my in-laws don’t need to call me to tell me to tell my wife to call them, like some bizarre game of phone foursquare. I don’t need to get up, I don’t need to walk my dogs (though if I feel like it, it would be fine; I like walking with them, as long as I don’t need to), I don’t need to shower, I don’t need to pick out and put on my teacher clothes; if I shower, it will be only when I feel like it, and if I get dressed beyond my pajamas, it will be in whatever I feel like wearing. If I eat breakfast I won’t need to cook. I don’t need to make the coffee for my wife, I don’t need to get her up for work, I don’t need to feel bad for waking her up to go to a job she mostly doesn’t like. I don’t need to find or make lunch, don’t need to fill a water bottle, don’t need to make my coffee just right, because if it’s not sweet enough I can just go into my kitchen and add more sweetener, any time I want to. I don’t need to go to the bathroom before I leave, because there will be time to go whenever I need to. I don’t need to check and double check that I have everything before getting into the car, and I don’t need to drive through traffic for 30 minutes to get to school. I don’t need to change the radio 65 times over that 30 minutes just to find some goddamn music instead of radio DJ blathering or used car salesmen yelling (LOOKING AT YOU SCOTT LEHMAN).
I might go to work, because I like seeing my coworkers, and even some of my students sometimes; but I won’t have duty, and I won’t have to period sub, and I won’t have to run a lunch meeting, and I won’t have to have meetings after school where I have to report on a student’s progress, or even worse on my progress, and I won’t have to listen to somebody or other telling me that I’m not doing my job well enough. I won’t have to stay to watch a sportsing event, or to watch my NHS students sell snacks at a sportsing event.
And most of all: I won’t have to teach. My students will be ready to learn on their own: I won’t have to drag them behind me, or drive them before me, to force them to gain an education for their own good. I won’t have to argue with them about learning, or about what we are learning, and I won’t have to listen to them complain about and criticize everything I do, over and over and over again, even though they probably won’t do it regardless of how they actually feel about it, which is only rarely the same way they say they feel about it. I won’t have to listen to students lie to me about how hard the class or the assignment is, because they want to lower the bar so they don’t have to work as hard. I won’t have dozens of different people trying to wear me down so they can have a day off, even though they have ten times the down time that I have: after all, I don’t have PE, or study halls; and while they have to write the essays, I have to read them – and you figure if I assign an AP essay to my 40 AP students, and they average 2-3 pages per response, that’s somewhere around 100 pages of writing I have to read and respond to, while they ask me if I’ve graded that essay yet.
But not today. Today they don’t fight me, and they don’t argue with me, and they don’t complain at me about what I do to help make them and their lives better. Most of all they don’t need me: they do the work on their own, without the need for me to pressure them. I don’t have to walk around the room and check on them, don’t have to make sure that none of them are cheating or sleeping or skipping, I don’t have to monitor their bathroom visit duration, or make sure they are signing out like they know they have to. I don’t have to tell them to put away their phones or close their Chromebooks. Because today, on my perfect day, my students do what they know they should do, what they know they are expected to do, what is entirely rational and reasonable for them to do: learn the material without being cajoled or coerced, and without disrupting the learning for themselves or others, and without being rude to anyone involved. They act like young adults, today, and so, they don’t need me. If they ask me any questions, it’s only because they’re curious what I think, not because they want my answer so they can write it down so they don’t have to come up with one themselves. None of them will have a test or missing assignments for another class, so they have to ask me, once again, to let them ignore my subject because the other class is more important than mine.
Today none of my students, and also none of my friends, are in crisis, and so nobody needs me to listen to them tell me what’s wrong. It’s not that I don’t want to listen when someone needs me: I just want nobody to need me, for nobody to be having a panic attack, or an explosion or righteous anger, or a bout of severe depression. I want to not need to find a way that I can help even though there’s not really much I can do: because the one thing I can do is listen, and empathize, and I don’t want to have to do that. I want nobody to need that, today. I don’t want to have my own bout of righteous anger or an explosion of panic or a depression attack. I just want to be okay, and for everyone else to be okay. Just for one day.
I want none of my students to need me to grade that one assignment, or to help them figure out how to do that one assignment, or need me to find another copy of that other assignment. Nobody should have a field trip form, or a grade check for their parents, or a failing grade the day of the big game, or a letter of recommendation they need, or advice and editing help on an application essay.
Nobody thinks they need to take advantage of me. Nobody does things they know they shouldn’t do just because they know I won’t get them in trouble for it. Nobody says “Oh, Humphrey doesn’t care if we do nothing.” Nobody lies to me. Nobody cheats on my assignments. Nobody insults me or my subject, calling school useless or saying that reading is boring. Nobody even thinks that the only reason people need to read is so they can learn more vocabulary words. Nobody asks if they can re-read a book they read before, or if they can just watch the movie, or if watching subtitles on an anime counts as “reading.” Nobody asks if we can watch a video on YouTube instead of reading today. Nobody forgets what I taught them the day before. Nobody asks if we can just do nothing today. Nobody even mentions the word “chill.”
Nobody asks if we can play Head’s Up Seven Up.
At the end of the day, I don’t need to drive home, don’t need to go to the grocery store, don’t need to make dinner. I don’t need to make or keep any appointments, and I don’t need to pay any bills, or do anything for extra money. If I write, it’s only because I want to. My bird doesn’t scream at me, and my tortoise doesn’t try to eat my foot, and my dogs don’t whine at me when I’m petting the other one and not them.
The only one who needs me is my wife. Because I need her, and I need her to need me. She will need me to hug and kiss her, and tell her I love her, and she will need to tell me she loves me. We will need to eat together, and share stories about our day together, and then unwind in front of the TV or in our office/studios making art. Though I won’t need to make art, and I won’t need to write an angry rant about anything, and I won’t need to tell all the idiots on Twitter that they are idiots: if I want to play Minecraft, then I can. I would not mind if my dogs needed to greet me when I come home, or need to lie next to me so I can pet them while I eat or while I relax.
And when I go to sleep, I won’t need to take Advil to get rid of my headache, and I won’t need to take melatonin to help fight off my insomnia. I won’t need to lay awake for an hour in the middle of the night, worrying about what happened in school today, or what’s going to happen tomorrow. Nobody will send me late night messages, or early morning messages, because they need an extension on an assignment, or because they are having a crisis and need to vent to me, or because they need me to cover their first period class in the morning. And I won’t have to worry about how I’m getting older, and things about my health are starting to scare me, and how my life has not been everything I want it to be: and I will not need to be more than I am, because I will, the whole day, just. Be. Happy.
“Why am I feeling so melancholy?” he asked himself as he sat down at his computer, preparing for another long day of repetitive but difficult tasks at his second job — the second job he needs only because his first doesn’t earn him enough, no matter how hard he works at it, no matter how successful he is at the work.
“I’m just feeling so down, and I don’t know why,” he told himself, as he reminded himself to purchase the tickets sometime today so he can go visit his aging father. He adamantly doesn’t let himself think about how this could be the last time he sees the man who raised him, the man who will always be just slightly disappointed in him. Or about how he also needs to figure out how to go see his mother. He definitely doesn’t think about all of that chaos.
“I wonder what’s bothering me,” he ruminated to himself, seeing a notification that he would need to not eat anything for two hours before his appointment tomorrow, when a giant magnet will scan his head to see if there is a growth inside his ear canal which is causing the hearing loss and constant ringing he has been trying to ignore for the past year or two. His doctor assures him the growth, if it’s there, will be benign and slow-growing; the constant ringing, never getting much better or much worse since it appeared (which was probably just when he noticed it for the first time), says that the doctor is right. Though that still means that if there is a growth, then only surgery on his ear canal will alleviate the problem; and if there’s no growth, then he will have to live with this irritating sound, louder and more noticeable whenever there is a quiet moment, slowly growing louder and louder until it is the only thing he will ever hear again.
“I hate when I feel this way and don’t know why,” he complained to himself as he walked past the thermostat, which told him both that it needed servicing (The system had cost them more than they could afford a year ago, right after they bought the house they couldn’t really afford. He also doesn’t think about the inflation that has been moving up the price of everything, but never moving up his wages.) and that it was 80 degrees outside at 6:30 am. Seems like it never gets any cooler, these days. (He doesn’t think about the climate that would cost all of humanity more than they can afford in a generation or two. But he can’t do anything about that. That is, he hasn’t been able to solve the problem all by himself; he does what he can, and doesn’t think about what more he could do. He doesn’t think about this any more than everyone else does. Which is, of course, the problem. But he can’t solve that. Any more than he can solve the inflation or the political turmoil that the inflation is driving, which seems to be moving his country closer and closer to fascism. But he can’t do anything about that, so it’s better just to not think about it. Right?) But he needs to get to work.
He sits down at the computer, and as he begins to log in to the online test system where he will be scoring student essays (Always the same essay, over and over and over again) for the next several hours, he decides to stop and write about what he is feeling. “Maybe this will help me figure out what’s wrong,” he tries to convince himself, though he knows he shouldn’t be spending time writing, he needs to get to work, needs to get his hours in because they need the money, and writing — his passion, his calling, his greatest gift — has never been enough to earn a living. He has never been good enough to make a career out of it. And so he keeps teaching, and grading essays in the summer, and trying as hard as he can, every single day, not to let himself think about how he doesn’t ever have the time or the energy to write, and when he does find the chance to write, he has to keep himself from reflecting on how this writing, too, will not be good enough to get him what he wants, what he has always wanted. Because if he thinks about that, he won’t be able to find the words he wants, and finding just the right words is a great joy — and the only reward he gets from his writing, most of the time.
Himself, tired at last of listening to all this nonsense, tells him, “You’re kind of a fucking idiot, you know that?Maybe you should actually think about your thoughts, and actually feel your feelings; then you wouldn’t be confused by everything you suppress all the time.
“Dumbass.“
But he doesn’t listen to himself.
Instead he takes another sip of coffee and goes to work.
It’s tough, I know. Tough for me, too. So very tempting to just let it all go. Just say “Forget it.” There’s too much to deal with, and too little that we can do to deal with it.
That’s pretty much why I haven’t been writing. I can’t find the confidence, can’t find the belief in myself and the value of my writing, to commit the time and energy to it, when there are so many other things I need to spend time on — and so many more things that take my energy away from me, that drain my faith and my hope. So many voices whispering in my ear, telling me to just– stop.
But.
This is not a sprint. It’s not a one-shot. Nothing is. Ever. You never get only one chance. Maybe only one chance at a specific target on a specific occasion; but there’s always another occasion, another target, and though it isn’t the same, it is as good.
So you never give up.
Ever.
Certainly not now.
And not next Tuesday: nor in the days following. Whether we win or we lose, don’t stop. Just don’t stop. Keep pushing until we have what we want, what we need. If we keep going, we’ll make it. We’ll do it.
This morning I do not have time to think. Sorry: I have seniors who are graduating in two days, and I need to grade their work. I spent part of last night arguing when I should have been grading, and so this morning, I need to spend time grading which I would rather spend writing.
This is a good substitute, though: since I started my gun posts with a discussion of what needs to be done to fix school shootings — but I never got to a practical answer — here is a reasonable and practical answer that actually has very little to do with guns, from a teacher in Colorado. Please do read it.
This morning — and now, this afternoon — I am sick. Not terribly, just enough so I am uncomfortable and determined to rest so I do not get worse. I have nothing to say that isn’t cranky, unhealthy bitchery. I’m torn between wanting to feel better, and wanting to stay vaguely ill so I don’t have to do anything other than be vaguely ill. It’s a handy excuse for doing nothing productive: not even feeling content.
I suspect that a fair amount of our conflict in life comes from the fact that contentment takes effort.
Just Dusty 