be back.

Hello. Just in case anyone’s reading this site, wanted to mention if there’s an interruption tomorrow, I’ll be back. Hopefully there’ll be no issue with a new payment method. [addendum: PAID! I’ll leave this post up anyway, as who knows what the future brings] I have this domain name through December. Researching & writing this then posting it is the hardest project I’ve ever worked on, which probably makes me sound wimpy. Maybe I am. I’m definitely done with long projects. I started out as a poet & somehow drifted to the dark side, as my thesis advisor warned me about 25 years back. Anyway, if one person out there is finding something to like or learn here, I’m…. relieved?

I hope people are having a good summer & not getting shot at in your towns & countries. I periodically hear gunfire where I live late at night. Sometimes it’s close by. I crouch down, turn the lights out, check the police log online, go on with my night. I have candles anyway. A well-regulated militia never meant this, in case anyone’s reading this from, say, China. But outlawing guns like Canada did this week isn’t any kind of answer either. I have a S&W for self-protection only after all these decades being anti-gun but pro-2nd. Getting randomly assaulted by a stranger will do that; so will getting old & weak, tiny to begin with. That it’s young men doing these sprees says something. So does the fact our media glosses over Chicago. We only know, just like in the Civil War, what the media run by corporate/political interests tells us. What shows up in print or pixels is their choice, not ours. Word-of-mouth or first-hand witness remains the sole way to know what happens. It’s to the point we’re all going to be running around in bullet-proof vests soon. The cops? Robb Elementary? Didn’t go in? Now not “cooperating” with the investigation? Maybe they need to stop resisting? Then everything will be alright?

I screenshot Dr. Hays’ testimony, which is coming mid-June. The guy got railroaded. Also mid-June EB can’t take it anymore, so gets on the train through the Manassas Gap headed north. He first stops in D.C. & walks down PA Ave. He’s so understated but you can read the thrill beneath the words. It’s a kind of breaking of his 4th wall. It’s really lovely. This has been such an emotional ride the last 4 years, from starting out not giving a flying rat’s ass about the war, not even knowing where it was fought or when, to finally getting “a glimpse,” as Whitman puts it, into the center of the earth’s hellscape these men went through. They were so unlike us, yet we still have so much in common with them. I still have way too much for an intro. so have been quite successfully putting that off. For some reason that’s turned out to be the most challenging section to write. I’m sure a historian could cut it down to a handful of pages. Getting to the core of any of this stays a mystery– to me, anyway. It’s that felt sense I can’t experience. These are all just words lacking the smoke & blood, the tinny smell of it in the wind coming toward the men for years before & after the war. What a time that was.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading.