Guest Post on the Smell of Patriotism #KeepFamiliesTogether

Please welcome my guest, friend, occasional boss, and cousin-in-law:

J Lenni Dorner

Thanks, Jamie!

I didn't know where best to share my feelings on this subject. But, since Jamie is my NaNoWriMo ML and her blog gets political sometimes, this seemed to be the best place.

On Tuesday night, the local writing group got together in a public place. They do that weekly. Picture, if you will, a handful of writers sitting around a table with their laptops, pens, books, snacks, and whatnot. I wasn't there, but Jamie was, and she's told me about it.

A man came up to the group and asked about the gathering. He was told it was a group of writers. The man said he would soon turn 91. The writers congratulated him on staying alive so long.

Then the man spouts off about the greatness of the current President, says something about social security, and states his joy that immigrants are being tossed out.

Again, I wasn't there.

Either he wouldn't have addressed the group if I was, or he'd have implied that I (a Native American) should be deported back to "my native country." I assume this because of how often that's happened to me since the last presidential election. #ThanksForTheHate

As a mute, I wouldn't have been able to respond fast enough anyway. (Though I'm told there's a hero in this story, another writer who gave a verbal smackdown and ended with, "Bye! Don't come again!" in an ironic customer service voice.) But here's what I'd have liked to have thrown out there:

There's a relative of my spouse, let's call him John Doe. He was visiting his parents who live down south. Or LIVED. They retired there. John Doe's father served in the military. The Doe family owned a small shop in Minnesota, where John Doe was born. The raiders came to call on the town in the south, taking John Doe and his parents and deporting all of them. Never mind that his parents had both been legal citizens since the sixties. Never mind that John Doe was born here, served this country in the Army and was decorated for doing so, and has a wife and child here. The three of them are gone.

I'm using an alias because his Army buddies are using back channels to try to get him back. They're trying to smuggle a United States citizen back into his own country, assuming they can figure out where he and his parents were shipped off to, and assuming they're alive.

Meanwhile, his six-year-old daughter, Pennsylvania born and raised, has cancer. The worry is that they'll come for this child. Throw her in a detention center where she will most certainly die because the treatments are the only reason she's alive right now.

So someone, and I'm not saying who, has to sneak the poor girl in under a costume to get her treatments. You know what her vomit smells like?

PATRIOTISM.

That's what it smells like inside the costume. And the wetness of her tears feels like morality. Mind you, it sounds like the opposite of patriotism, considering the current political field. But I don't believe the current rule will last. Not as long as people are willing to fight for love.

Congratulations to the man who lived for so many years and yet would deny this child her father, and her own life. I regret not having the authority to throw you off the land of my people. #KeepFamiliesTogether

IntenseDebate Comment Problems

For whatever reason, IntenseDebate no longer works on this blog.

Perhaps there was an update I missed. Maybe there was a problem with the HTML I couldn't find. The only instructions on the site were how to reinstall it (and none of those are relevant or understandable without a working knowledge of the last dozen updates) or how to remove it (and even that took an hour to figure out because they're for an old version). The Twitter feed hasn't been updated for years, so I'm guessing this is something that was abandoned and no one told me.

The comments are still available for me to see if I log into the Intense Debate website. However, after removing it from my blog, they are no longer visible here.

I doubt my comment counter will continue to work now that I've uninstalled Intense Debate. It was the only way to get comments to turn back on, unfortunately.

Sorry if something you once said has now vanished. Please know that I'm grateful for the words and read all of them. I even managed an occasional reply! They still exist, but I have no idea how to move them to this blog from the IntenseDebate site that has them held hostage.

WTF last 48 hours Hate to Say It

Why so angry?

The last 24 hours have been nuts. But this is MY BLOG. So I'm gonna go ahead and rant and you can't stop me.

I had to do laundry. But one of the two dryers has been out of service for two months now. I put my wash and the last of my detergent into one of the washers, added my quarters... IT DID NOT TURN ON. It'll be three weeks until I get a refund. Which will be a check. That I need to take to the bank and then need to get turned back into quarters. And it's summer, so I can't go out during the hot hours, which is when banks are open, so I have to go to the seedy carwash (because the nice one is gone) to buy quarters in the middle of the night like a freakin thief, while one of the local drug dealers offers to sell me things. That's... thanks. 

Someone I know, and I'm not saying who, but the person had to call out of work today because they do security and right now that post is in a freaking parking lot outside. The person took one look at the magenta spot heading toward work and was all aboard the NOPE train! *cough cough* Called out sick. The person is currently hoping not to experience the near-opening of Wizard of Oz... 

I had a typo in my Facebook post. The app crashed 10 times rather than let me fix it. Look, the fundraiser, they donated $5 just for my making it. I don't give one good damn if anyone else gives through me. I raised $5 by making a damn post. It took less than 5 minutes of my time. Feel me?

This is gonna be all "first world problem" sounding, but whatever. I hate that I put my mug in the dishwasher and it came out DIRTIER than when it went in! What the damn hell? Also, I hate that my dishwasher doesn't drain properly. Yeah, just run the last cycle again. But that uses enough electric to momentarily dim the lights. And I sometimes have to do it twice. It's annoying. And it's because the drains have to be snaked again. Why?

Sigh...

There's a water thing outside my window. And this kid was playing with again today. Just a young kid. But an adult was with him and HANDING HIM ROCKS to put into the water drain thing.

Why didn't I say anything?

This is gonna sound horrible. There's no way it won't. 

I don't want to seem racist. Which has maybe made me racist, or reverse racist, I don't know. Because if the two humans outside throwing rocks into the water drain system, causing it to back up the drains for my apartment and others, if those people had a similar skin coloring to my own, I'd have said something. No, I don't think skin color has anything to do with why they were doing this. 

But there have been lots of reports lately about dumb white people calling the cops on not-white people for doing innocuous things. And I REFUSE to be one of them. Even though it's not the cops I'd have called. But I won't be that person. So I'm now letting vandalism, that directly impacts my day, slide. And that's probably not the solution either. But I don't have one. And I'm not going to have one. And I'm angry about a lot of things right now, and yes, I'm freaking hormonal, and it's not helping!

Anyway, those are my rants right now. And it's all horrible. 

Uncovered Book Genre Reader Truth

Hello. I'm a ghost. 👻
Not that kind!

I'm a ghost writer. That means I sometimes "write the words" for other people. There are a variety of reasons people use ghost writers (the author is dead, the author is stuck, the brand is worth more than the writer, etc).

There's a peculiar-funny "fact" floating around the book publishing world.
"Men don't read books written by women. That's why genres with primarily male audiences, such as sci-fi, are more suited for male writers."

It's not true. Do you know why it's not true? Here, let me fix it:

"Men don't know how often they read books written by women. That's why genres with primarily male audiences, such as sci-fi, are more suited for writers publishing under the identity of male writers."

It's 2018, and we're evolving to accept multiple genders. Will the publishing industry catch up? Will readers be able to disprove these antiquated notions?

Hopefully I've done my part today by pointing out those who think an author's gender is relevant when deciding what book to read. The wool has now been uncovered from your eyes.

For more ghost writer entertainment:

Bones -- The Perfect Pieces in the Purple Pond tv episode
Secret Window movie
A popular example of a male writer ghosting as a female - VC Andrews

📺🎦📚

The Boycott Falls Short #news

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/08/amazon-jeff-bezos-unionize-working-conditions

This is not the first time that Amazon's unsafe working conditions have been brought up. It's nice that those workers have people standing up for them. My issue here is that it is falling short.

Here in PA, the Amazon warehouse has gotten plenty of bad press because of how hot it gets all summer. (Ambulances taking workers away.) That building, that warehouse from that passed-around story,  is rented by Amazon. Do you care that Pillsbury rented the building first? (Worker conditions have nothing to do with why they switched to a third location in this instance.) You would have to dig to figure this out, since they use one of the big five logistics and supply chain management companies and rent it under that name. I assure you that it is the same building. And yeah, it is without ventilation. The buildings out there are designed to store products as cheaply and safely as possible. SAFE for the PRODUCT, not any people.

Buildings. Not a typo. Because there are dozens of them out there. Some are bigger. But they're all big slabs of concrete with metal roofs and no cooling. ( * Attached offices,  and sometimes break rooms,  have cooling. The areas where the bulk of workers are do not.) There's also no cooling in the trailors that are hauled in and out. Yes, you can easily roast a human to death in a shipping container.

It's not just Amazon.

http://www.businessinsider.com/10-companies-control-the-food-industry-2016-9

All those brands and sub brands and more. They use the SAME warehouses. And so does Knoll. Never heard of them? If you've watched television or seen a movie from the last two decades or so,  you've probably seen their furniture. It's "upper class" office stuff. They moved their warehousing out to those facilities a few years ago. They know how bad it is. They don't care.

My point is that skipping Prime Day on Monday might, maybe, get help for workers in one place, but that's like your house being on fire and you managed to keep one kitchen chair from turning to ashes.

Perhaps Toyota and other forklift making companies need to be part of this. Why aren't they built with air conditioning and a cup holder for a bottle of water? (It doesn't solve the lack of a bathroom break issue, but it'll maybe help with the rules against heat and water breaks. YES, THOSE RULES EXIST.) And before any of you tell me that letting someone use a sports bottle could lead to product damage because they could spill... Cardboard boxes wrapped in plastic. High humidity. Plastic sweats. The cardboard gets wet. The towers fall. Thousands of dollars in damage. That happens right now. So don't pretend you really care about the precious product when you've got buildings without a dehumidifier, much less cooling.

I went on Twitter hoping to get the media to write about this. Don't think it's happening because investigative journalism is apparently fictional.

https://twitter.com/PenMinion/status/1014813072488267777?s=19

So if you really want to have an impact, we'd need 24 hours where no one shopped  watched any recorded entertainment, and most people didn't go to work. It would have to be global. And notices would need to be in as many languages as possible. World Boycott Everything day. 

Just call her Joanne

I came across an online discussion about how the Harry Potter books can't count as representation (for the LGBTQ+ community) because things were only implied not flat out stated.

My problem, where I take issue, is that everyone in the thread called her JK, JKR, or or Rowling.

If this is going to be a fair debate, EVERYONE needs to call her Joanne (maybe Jo). Because she wasn't allowed to publish under her name. "Boys don't read books by women."

This matters because the argument is that she could have gotten away with being more blatant about the characters she,  AFTER THE BOOKS WERE OUT AND HER CONTACT WAS FULFILLED, now says were gay. Joanne told people that the subtle hints were real. Joanne did that publicly.

The argument is that Joanne had the ability to make that distinction clear in the books, but that she, JOANNE, made the choice not to do so. No one in the debate stated if they had read her contract. No one in the debate claimed to be on the editing team or working as someone in that publishing house who was in charge of approving the words JOANNE submitted.

All I'm saying is that we should use her name,  Joanne, because she wasn't allowed to. But yeah, she probably could have been plain as day clear about gay characters and had zero repercussions... as long as she didn't write the name JOANNE on the cover,  because that was a power she didn't have at that publishing house.

Just call her by her real name when you're criticizing her for not wielding power that you've proven she must have had.

And maybe drop a statistic about how many books that do have representation have come since she made her announcement, forcing the publishing company to no longer say they don't publish that sort of thing. Just throw out a stat.

Because when book one came out,  Joanne was a zero-power no -influnce author and she signed whatever just to get the book out there.

You can say a lot of things about her,  but at least call her by her real name when you do so. Why? Because boys read her books, and kept doing so even after she CAME OUT as being a woman. (Feel free to also drop a stat about how many books the first one had to sell before she was allowed to reveal that.)

Another Letter to Officials

A copy of the letter I sent to my Congress people  (Congressmen, since they're all male right now). The ridiculous things Americans like myself have to beg for:


Please do not support putting innocent children in detention centers. Please support reuniting the taken ones with their families. And if tax dollars have to go toward building a wall, build it out of Lego bricks so there's something fun to give away on the glorious day when that wall gets torn down. Please let us stand with our allied nations, such as Canada and those in Europe, etc.

Please do not bring back pre-existing conditions. Please don't let our fellow Americans die from treatable health concerns. And please don't take what little health insurance people have away.

Please protect Net Neutrality.

Please give Americans better options for recycling.

Please make America a better place,  or at least don't make it worse.

Thank you for your time and consideration of the values of your constituent.