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Around four years ago... I got very drunk on here and started paraphrasing, among other things, Vonnegut. Which is where I added calling people "babies" to my written tics on here, along with usually mincing swear words for anger management reasons.
It has been a long, strange, and winding road to this place where there are 40,000 people following me on here, more people than ever followed me for fiction.
A pox on anyone who says no one could have predicted how bad things would get, back in 2016, because we did. In 2015. Heck, back when Trump was floating presidential runs earlier in the 21st century, I was talking about him on Livejournal as a dangerous failure and a fraud.
We knew things would be bad, but what I didn't know... what I couldn't have known.... is how so many of us would rise to the occasion. My father told me, during one of our late-night talks when I went down to look in on my now-late mother, that he thought I was made for now.
What I'm saying is, whatever happens tonight, and whatever happens tomorrow, and whatever happens between now and January 20th, 2021, and whatever happens after...
It has been an honor and a privilege to be your weird Twitter politics mom friend.
It has been an honor and a privilege to be your weird Twitter politics mom friend.
Biden has never been my guy but he was dead right about one thing: we are heading into a dark winter. Nothing that happens today or tonight will change that. We are heading into a dark winter where we will be ruled over by an ogre with nothing left to lose.
Either he loses and has nothing left invested in keeping any of us alive or he wins the last election he's allowed to run, but either way, starting tomorrow we are ruled over by a very dangerous man who has no more uses for illusions or insititutions.
I know, at this late a date, that I don't have to rend my clothes and scream that we need to take care of each other. Because I have seen that we do that, how we do that. Imperfectly, but naturally.
We are the ones we've been waiting for.
We are all we have.
No one's coming.
We are the ones we've been waiting for.
We are all we have.
No one's coming.
Around this time last year there were Twitter trollbots going around going "Relax, sweaty. ;-) she's got this." And before that there were people saying "If Trump was really that bad they wouldn't let him run."
We know now: there is no she, there is no they, there's just us.
We know now: there is no she, there is no they, there's just us.
There's just us, and that's okay, because we are enough. We *are* the ones we've been waiting for. If you're reading this then you've made it this far, and that's not nothing, is it? We didn't all make it. We won't all make it through the winter.
But we won't go down easy.
But we won't go down easy.
I've been posting lyrics from Les Mis these past few days, a sort of coda to the story in the finale, the reprise: "Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise."
I love musicals. I love showtunes. To tie this back to Vonnegut, I think of them as foma.
I love musicals. I love showtunes. To tie this back to Vonnegut, I think of them as foma.
Foma in the Vonnegut sense are harmless untruths intended to comfort. Are they real? No. Do they need to be? No. "Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy." I feel like you can just slot "showtunes" in where "foma" is and the sentence works fine.
So let me just about close this thread out with the simpler, shorter, sweeter, more foma-tastic formulation of that lyric I quoted above:
"The sun will come out tomorrow."
"The sun will come out tomorrow."
And let me actually close this thread out with something I said on November 8th, 2016:
"There's just one rule that I know of, babies: God DAMN it, you have got to be kind."
"There's just one rule that I know of, babies: God DAMN it, you have got to be kind."
...at the instigation of some of my patient followers and supporters, I'll tag some pay links onto this thread.
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Tip Jar: http://www.paypal.me/alexandraerin
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