Some Miscellaneous Thoughts in Rain

Hard May rain pummels my domicile. I am cooking up a mushroom and rice soup. Rain and soup always go together.

Quail make their monkey noises in the hedges.

I am reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man for the first time in 35 years. Naturally it is holding up and searing and relevant. Didn’t a black man just get lynched in Georgia a few months ago?

I took a walk earlier and rain had somewhat stopped and I dreamed up a new story about a couple on a suspension bridge, a true story about something that happened on the Drift Creek Falls bridge just south of Lincoln City. No, not murder. The exact opposite.

I am writing more words per week than I have in a long time.

A new part time job has presented itself. I get to be out in nature and work by myself.

I think a lot about the state of my nation. We seem base and pathetic and almost unworthy of a future. Before the virus hit, we were already weak. Now we are so much weaker. Are we finally dying? One minute of watching the US Senate try to govern on C-SPAN seems to suggest that it really is over. There is no wake up call for America. We had one—the Civil War—and we didn’t listen.

I liken us to the Ottoman Empire. They once stood at the pinnacle of many fields. Then they weren’t and disappeared. They didn’t leave anything behind except mosques and that’s not much.

I almost dread picking up Invisible Man and continuing. I forget how it ends, but of course I know how it ends.

I put the word out the other day that I wanted someone to buy one of my books. Someone did, and I truly appreciated the effort. He found my work in the most unlikeliest of places. I tend to always find the best readers that way. How about someone else reading this buy a book? I’ll throw in some goodies!