Weird Panic

I was going to spend the evening working on the novel, but I about had a panic attack about it today, so when the Redheaded Kid came over to hang out and tell us all about random text messages he gets from people he doesn’t know, I spent the evening doing that instead.

Get this! You know how the Redheaded Kid has been in terrible health his whole life and he had some incident in his teens, right before we moved here, where he had what they thought was a weird heart-attack (not caused by heart disease, but by some electrical problem with his heart) and how he’s had open-heart surgery twice and even has a pacemaker?

Turns out that motherfucker has epilepsy. Which, on the one hand, whew. Sure, parts of epilepsy suck, but not as bad as being a kid in your early 20s who thinks he’s going to die of some weird heart problem before he’s 30. But on the other hand, he’s thought for over a decade that he was living on borrowed time, could die at any moment, and even has been hacked into.

That’s got to be fucking weird. He seemed a little shell-shocked about it, if you can be laid-back in a shell-shocked way. I don’t think it’s quite sunk in. He’s now debating whether to have the pacemaker taken out now or wait until the battery needs to be replaced. He’s afraid he’ll have a weird indentation, but we told him just to think of it like some cutting-edge body modification–show it off like weird chest indentations are just the coolest shit ever and see if it catches on.

I’m feeling like the book is too hard to revise and that it’s not very good and that I am not good enough to fix it and I should just give up and write a different book, one in which no one has sex with the devil and no one gets shit on.

I know this is just a moment that comes. I’m honestly surprised it didn’t come sooner. But knowing there’s going to be a moment (or multiple moments) when you feel like the book sucks and you’re a shitty writer and you can’t go on and you’re just going to have to move to the back yard because you need to run away from your life, but you can’t really afford to, plus you’d miss your dog, and living through them without having massive anxiety attacks and weird light-headedness are two different things.

Of course, the Redheaded kid has me all worried that the weird light-headedness might be a symptom of something else that I will miss out on because I assume it’s just book anxiety.

Argh.

Mike Turner’s Wiccan Controversy Explodes!

Source's identity has been altered to preserve anonymity.

This morning, on WPLN, Mike Turner was featured making a hare-brained comment about Wiccans in the debate about the “teaching the controversy!” science bill.

“What we’ve said here today, is that you can teach something else, but we haven’t actually defined what they can teach. And I think that’s dangerous. I think it’s dangerous if you had a teacher that believes in Wicca, for instance, up there, injecting what they may think is an alternative form of creationism.”

Yes, I know! It’s shocking. But true. The rest of us pagans have long warned that Wiccans were just waiting to inject a dangerous alternative form of creationism into the science classes of our state. Truly now, the only thing that can stop Wiccans from dangerously injecting things into science classes is for the State Legislature to send me cookies.

Which, um… I will… um… eat… um… and share with the Wiccans as we laugh at your dumb asses?

Anyway, due to my connections in the pagan community, I was able to track down a godless heathen who works closely with Turner. He agreed to talk with me if I took moves to obscure his identity and so I have given him a tiny mustache and a hat and I will call him Mr. M.

Me: Mr. M. Is it true that you don’t believe in evolution?

Mr. M.: Absolutely not. I’ve never seen anything evolve.

Me: And am I correct in my information that you are a pagan?

Mr. M.: Absolutely. I believe in a pantheon of gods–Norelco, Gillette, Bic, Schick, you know, the old powerful ones.

Me: And can you tell us a little about your religious rites? Anything that’s not too secret to share?

Mr. M.: Sure. Every day, I dip myself in anything Mike Turner eats or drinks, and then I offer it up to the great Food Goddess–Napkin.

Me: Oh, that’s rather lovely.

Mr. M.: And it works to keep Mike Turner alive.

Me: And we are glad about that. What is the creation story you believe in?

Mr. M. [who is suddenly and irately shaking his tiny fist at me]: It’s not a story. It’s the truth! I have witnessed it many times. We rise up out of the earth. We grow to glorious fulfillment and then we are cut down. Our shape and form is determined by whim! Not by nonsense like “evolution!” How can a musta… I mean a man evolve? You are what you are grown to be.

Me: Okay, sorry. Calm down.

Mr. M. [Composes himself]: Sure, sure. Go on.

Me: So, what would make the teaching of your theory of the origins of man, to use Turner’s term, “dangerous”?

Mr. M.: Because anyone who got it wrong or made fun of it would get popped right in the kisser by me.

Me: That does sound dangerous. Would all pagans be punching people in the mouths if they got their creation stories wrong?

Mr. M. [shrugging]: I’m working on convincing Turner to file a bill requiring all science teachers to punch everybody in the mouth.

Me: That sounds like a terrible idea!

Mr. M.: Yeah, but sometimes he does stuff without really thinking it through. I think I can sneak it past him.

Me: Mr. M., you are not very nice.

Mr. M.: I don’t have to take this crap. This interview is over.

Holy Cow!

I don’t remember having an iris this color before. I wonder if this is one of the ones we pulled out from under that tree, where they came up but never flowered.

Edited to add: Ha, this is what I get for trusting technology. In real life, that iris isn’t blue. It’s purple. But I still stood in front of that iris, saw it was purple, took the picture, came back in here, uploaded it, saw that it was blue, and trusted my camera over my own eyes. But I just went and rechecked and that thing is purple. Which means it’s probably one of the irises from Andrew Jackson’s house. Also, weeds, yuck. Also, my Salomon’s Seal is back up above ground and appears to have spread some!

One Interesting Thing about Tennessee Politics that Doesn’t Make Me Want to Weep

So, yes, of course it’s hilarious to hear the Republicans claiming that they’re all about jobs in the same week they’ve admitted that no one believes they’re doing anything about jobs.

And I laughed and I laughed when I read that Tennessean article. Because it’s not that they’re not taking up social issues. They’re just spinning them as being about jobs. Shoot, to look at the Republicans, you’d think that there are a shit-ton of multi-million dollar corporations who would just love to do business in a state that oppresses gay people, erases transgender people, and dicks over women and children, but they just can’t find one, so Tennessee must strive to be that place.

But it’s also true that they aren’t getting as much nonsense up for a vote. And ponder this:

The GOP’s large class of 21 new House members could benefit from the delay, Pope said. “When they get there, they are full of expectations and vinegar,” Pope said. “But they don’t have to be up there showboating and passing 30, 40, 50 or more pieces of gun legislation. … The slower approach is fine.”

Now, ask yourself: How much would it suck to be a new Republican? You already didn’t get any juicy committee appointments. Now they’re blatantly saying that the Republican leadership is stonewalling them. So, is the leadership signaling that they’re not sure how firm those seats are? Are they freezing out the radical elements of the party?

This is interesting–watching what we might call the Chamber of Commerce faction try to play nice with but also disempower the Tea Party faction.

I don’t know how it’s going to turn out. I think Harwell might be smart enough to play that kind of nonsense, but I’m not sure Haslam is. And eventually, the new kids are going to get restless and figure out that they’re being dicked over. If you thought they didn’t like being patronized by the Dems, just wait…