Posting has been sparse on the blog of late. Same goes for any creative writing – not much happening. I suppose you could call it writer’s block, but it feels worse than that. It’s a lack of enthusiasm about things. Writing is hard work, and to work hard you have to be motivated, ideally by positive forces (negative motivation works, but the end result may not be pretty). I’ve done a lot of thinking about this lately, and haven’t come up with any single cause for the creative malaise.

Last night’s news about the Feds sending troops into LA to control protests is shocking, but is consistent with the Trump regime’s ongoing moves toward autocracy. If there’s a line defining Presidential power, they’ll cross it to determine exactly how much they can get away with. This is no exception, and it has the added MAGA benefit of shitting all over California and Gov Newsome. An ugly pattern emerges – ICE comes into a city heavy-handed, ignoring citizen’s rights. A protest(s) ensues, and DHS then uses that protest as the reason to send in other Federal agents (troops, the national Guard or even regular Army) in response to “the violence”. Even if the protestors are peaceful, the fact that they dare confront ICE is enough for DHS to declare “violence”. Next weekend and the national “No Kings” protest should be…interesting.

Next weekend is also the golf US Open, held at Oakmont this year. I have a love-hate relationship with Oakmont, having played there a few times. It’s a memorable course, very difficult. Some say the most difficult in all of golf. It certainly was for me, as I played it in mid-summer (temps around 100 degrees each day), overweight (you have to walk the hilly course; no carts allowed), sleep deprived and at times hung over (very dumb, self-inflicted wound due to my golf buddies and I bringing fantastic wines to the weekend). So a lot of regrets about my times at Oakmont – I wish I had played it in my best shape. But it’s unlikely I’ll ever play there again (I’ve come to really dislike the person who hosted us there – he is/was a friend of a friend, but no friend to me). So I’ll have to watch the show and try to remember the good parts of my experiences there.

I’m 80% finished reading Demon Copperhead by Kentucky’s finest author, Barbara Kingsolver. It’s quite the book, but a bit depressing. The title character Demon (Damon) has a shitty orphaned life, and is caught up in Appalachia’s opioid epidemic. There are many, many things I recognize in this story, as they were part of my childhood and teenage life:

• The country families, the aunts-uncles-cousins in Demon’s Lee County – they could easily have been Boyd County
• The extremely hard work putting up tobacco and hay by hand – I did this several summers
• The weird high school glory of being a football “star” and how it warps your teenage mind
• The damage that pain-killer addiction does to people – in the book it’s Demon and his friends – in my life it was my Dad
• The childhood pleasures of just playing in the creek
• The country sayings of Demon’s friends and family – that Appalachian lexicon that Kingsolver slings around is so familiar to me

The book won the Pulitzer Prize, and rightly so. I avoided reading it for quite a while because…well, I’m not sure why. But I’m glad I got past my reluctance and I’m looking forward to how Kingsolver will end the story. I think Demon may turn out OK.