Posts Tagged ‘writing’

Egregious, Possibly Lethal, Most Likely Unintentional Disinformation

October 18, 2025

In June of 2018 a relatively unknown author published a book titled American Dirt. I didn’t hear anything about it but I’m not a fan of Oprah’s picks in general because I’m a literary snob and don’t start me on the New York Times. To be fair, they rate and rank what the public snarfs up like Scooby snacks and that does say something about us as a culture these days and I’ll just let that go. For now.

In any event, American Dirt was extremely well received. My first edition has a copyright date of 2019 and a publication date of 2020 despite the fact that the interwebs insist on June 2018. This is only relevant because I like to be precise when I get ready to pan a book. It looks like American Dirt hit the Oprah list first and then spent 36 weeks on the NYT best seller list. However, in January of 2020 the book got slammed. And by slammed, I mean enough significant writers slammed Ms Cummins into the proverbial wall so hard I didn’t think she’d ever find another publisher.

The cover of my book reads: “A Grapes of Wrath for our times.” Don Winslow

I didn’t know who Don Winslow was, so I looked him up. I don’t get it. Did he not read the book? Is he utterly out of touch? Does he write pulp fiction under the guise of an educated political activist, or did he fail to read the book? Unfortunately, there were internationally acclaimed writers pretty much spewing the same thing, not to mention Fucking Oprah. And yes, I do put Stephen King in this category because he is aware of what’s happening in the world. He didn’t read it. He could not have.

Which brings me to why I own this book. I am sensitive to cancel culture. Sometimes oversensitive. I don’t believe in book banning. Of any book. That means I don’t agree with the ‘cancelling’ or ‘unpublishing’ or ‘let’s be honest, banning’ of six books by Dr. Seuss published in a time when the racism we experience when we read them today would not have been relevant when published. They are, for better or worse, part our history. So we wiped them out. Ehhhh…. yeah, no. Bad. Same as banning The Grapes of Wrath. Or the Anarchist’s Cookbook. Or the Joy of Cooking (I made that one up).

I wanted to know why the literary community had turned on this author with a ferocity that I’ve honestly never seen in that industry. I ordered, received, and read the book because I believe we have in many cases gone too fucking far with what we define as appropriation. And that’s what I expected to find. A well written book about crossing the border written by a white woman. You know, like Barbara Kingsolver who I would never accuse of cultural appropriation despite the fact that she writes, primarily about cultures that are not her own. She’s also made some pretty serious political statements, and I believe they stand.

I read the book.

I actually cried. I wept. I sniveled. I threw the book across the room (that’s a one and only for me).

The Grapes of Wrath of our time.

My opinion, understand that, but it’s strong and I can defend it, but my opinion.

This is one of the most dangerous books in circulation today.

Why? Well, it’s a story about a family in Latin America. All but two, mother and son, are executed by the local cartel. Dad was a journalist. OK. I’m following.

Somehow, mom and kid actually get out of the home during the mass execution and get out of town. Somehow, they make their way to the border and find a coyote. So far, I’m following but I am having trouble with the logistics, but I make a leap faith because she writes well and the story is compelling.

It’s at the kind coyote point where the narrative falls apart and never comes back to any sort of reality.

When I read the book in 2022 immigration was an issue. Where I live, if people crossing the border can somehow get to this part of the country, this part of the country is prepared to receive them, protect them, house them, help them obtain legal status, and if necessary (Somalia specifically), get them across the other border.

Three years later all hell has broken loose and even in my state, where this shit simply does not happen, ICE is arriving and we’re trying to figure out what the fuck we’re going to do.

Circle yourself back to American Dirt. Oh oh.

Now. To my point (you knew I’d get there eventually). If you, or anyone, wants to read this book, that is your right and I hope it’s in your local library and if not, I hope they can get it for you.

But it can’t stay in my house on my shelves. It can’t.

So what to do? I guess I had a couple of choices. I could take it to my local library and get my face slapped. I could bring it to Goodwill, and they’d take it and someone would pick it up and I would be responsible for circulating something I find reprehensible. I can’t do it. Could I leave it on my shelves? Nope. I could throw it in the burn pile. That’s a statement, except I don’t believe in burning books unless they have become so worn and degraded as to be unreadable. I mean, the pages have to be falling out, the spine shot, and the pages so yellow the text can’t be read. If it’s a classic it gets a pass.

So. I can’t burn this book. I can’t keep this book. I can’t throw this book in the trash or recycling. I can’t put this book into circulation. I just can’t.

So. I buried it. I dug a hole this morning right up against my marsh as if I was going to bury a pet (except not so close to the marsh). I removed the jacket and tore off the cover and binding because those parts don’t always compost very well. I didn’t say anything over the corpse. I didn’t even take a picture. I just filled in the hole, knocked the dirt off my shovel, and walked away.

This post is not meant to be a book review. All that is context and without the context, my conundrum is meaningless.

It’s a look into my conscience, what I struggled with and why, and how I resolved what was a very real problem for me in a world where I have some very big problems right now.

Books matter. What we do with them matters. Just ask Ray Bradbury.

If you’d like to read about what happened when the literati (is that a word?) tore Ms Cummins to shreds, this is a good Op-ed from the NYT.

The Long Shadow of American Dirt – Pamela Paul, January 26, 2023

Note: For the record I don’t agree with the literati. I do think the book is way off base and dangerous, full of misinformation. But it was published. It was sold. It was read. By a lot of people. She had a right. She still does, and I’m glad I purchased the book because I wanted to support an author who had been exiled by her tribe. Bet you weren’t expecting that.

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Measure Thrice

October 1, 2025

I am now aware that my bed is out of alignment. Dammit. And also, the protective film is still on the outside of one of those windows and getting to it is going to be fun but not as fun as removing the wasp’s nest that is bigger than a football from the overhang at the peak of my house. Just outside the guestroom… there’s a thought. No, stop that. Thou shall not engage in wasp warfare.

I moved in before the house was finished. That was middle of June, 2024, and also, the house is still not finished but I ran out of money and it’s good enough. Except. Except it failed the blow test and I really need to resolve that. In any event, I moved in approximately fifteen months ago and failed to nest. Mostly. I did unbox and shelve the books and managed to purge between 100 and 150 of them which brought me down to under 600. I hoped.

When I say, unboxed and shelved I mean just that. Totally random. There’s a built in downstairs, one in the bedroom hallway, one in the bedroom, and another in the itty bitty guest room.

Several temporary homes ago, my youngest daughter asked if I really meant to read all these books again. I said, maybe. She asked, why haul them around? I thought about this and came up with one answer. I came up with another earlier this week. The first answer was because what I read affects how I see the world and therefore, who I am. When I walk past the shelves and run my fingers over the spines I am reminded of how I felt and what I thought when I read those books.

Many years ago, more than twenty, I’m sure, my second husband kept a log of the books I read. It should be noted that my second husband continued to give me books for my birthday and Christmas until the day he died. He researched them all year, and that guy got me. This is important.

One hundred books were logged. You read that correctly. One hundred books. Big books. Not many little books. Books that required focus and weren’t easily accessible (in other words, not beach books). When I read the list, there were at least half a dozen I didn’t recognize at all, but I believed him. There were many books I knew I’d read and I might be able to give you a basic plot line, but that was it. I consumed too fast. I left no time between the last page of one and the first of the next. I still do that. I think I do that to let go. Maybe.

This is the second reason I keep those books. As I run my fingers across the spines I notice that I don’t recognize all of the titles. Well hot damn! It’s as if I have an entire list of unread books just waiting for me to pick up. To be fair, there are one or two or twelve that I intentionally reread periodically but we won’t get into that just now.

Oh. There’s a third reason. Of all the books I have not purged, my second husband gave me eighty percent of them. How can I let those pieces of him go? I cannot.

Phew.

Where was I? Nesting. I didn’t do it. The books remained completely random and every photograph and piece of art lived in a closet or under my bed. Photographs of my children I carefully hung in gallery frames. Photographs of me and my brother. A photograph of my step-mother and another of my father that tug my heart hard. A wedding photo of my older daughter and my son-in-law.

When a person denies themselves these things they are denying themselves a home, a home base, a safe space. I hung in the balance of not there and not here and it sucked but I couldn’t move. About a week ago I started moving.

I photographed all of the bookcases, shelf by shelf, chunk by chunk and then emailed them to myself. I expanded each photograph and made a spreadsheet. Author, title, shelving title (remove The and A at the start of a title), location, and go to. I had to guess at go to based on the number of books on each shelf. Then I started pulling books from shelves and putting them sort of in order so that I new where they should land. I carried them up and down the stairs in a laundry basket and this took days.

I got to know my library all over again. Some books made me cry, some left me with a profound sense of grounding, some made me laugh (because Christopher Moore and Tom Robbins are REALLY funny), some are from other people that I will never read again but will keep forever, and there’s Stephen King’s Gunslinger series. I finally tossed all the REALLY old paperbacks that were no longer readable. I had some that belonged to my mother with her name on the inside. Books she would have read in high school or college. That was hard and I might retrieve them from the recycling bin. Maybe.

My library contains five linear feet of nonfiction. Half of that came from my father’s library (historian), a good chunk from my university years, and some I just seemed to acquire. I’m not counting the cookbooks. I have a lot of books about Israel and also Palestine. I have medical books and mental health books and biographies. Who knew?! Not me.

In all that I only have four hundred and forty books. This very exciting. This means I can acquire one hundred and sixty books before I consider myself the cat lady of books. My intention is to liberate most of my father’s Napolean collection (it’s kinda big) and anything prior to WWII. I’ll wait until he’s dead. He’d notice. He’s already lied and said he got rid of all the Napolean and then he hid those books so I wouldn’t find them. Hoarder. I’m also going to take anything by Bernard Cornwell unless I already have it.

About those paintings over my bed…

I measured THREE TIMES AND ALSO USED A LEVEL. I’m leaving them as they are for a bit. I’m not sure why. They’re very important and my second husband matted and framed them for me. Blow up the photo if you can. They are three watercolors of the same still life. I picked the flowers from the garden and stuck them in a small pitcher. I sat with my oldest daughter (the last baby wasn’t there yet) and my son on the floor with sun streaming into the woods and helped them draw out the forms. I made up their palettes, taped down the paper, and we got to work. This was the summer of 1996 which makes us five, ten, and thirty-two. I remember exactly how I felt and if I had to leave everything behind, including my books, those are the three things I’d take anyway.

There is very little white space (blank wall) in my house because the lower level, facing east is ALL window, one end to the other. The southern side is window, back door, and wood burn stove area. The west side has a little room and so does the bottom of the stairwell. This house is a story and a half which means no attic and four foot walls before the pitch begins. If the middle of the house staircase didn’t have walls on either side, I’d have a problem.

With two exceptions, everything is up. Nothing else was measured or leveled or anything except me pounding a nail into a wall and slapping the painting or photo up. It looks like this:

Bang, bang, bang and done!

One photograph with each baby in order left to right, dob 1986, 1991, and 2000.

Because I went on and on about them, here are two of the three upstairs bookcases. Why yes, that *is* the top of a china cabinet. Heh.

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Well, This is Shit

September 19, 2025

My dad is dying. I’ve never written about this before and it’s been going on since early 2018 which sounds a little odd when you say it because that’s more than seven years. However, he is, indeed, dying. Slowly.

The initial prognosis was three to five years, leaning to possibly less than that. I heard a groggy voice croak out 18 months but that was before he broke out of the hospital and escaped with the help of his local war game buddy. Don’t ask.

Why did he abscond with himself (it’s called elopement these days)? Because there were three back to back events that were all extraordinarily important to him and he had no intention of missing any of it.

Even if he dropped dead when it was all over? My dad doesn’t think that way. Not even now.

Before I continue, here’s what it is: Myelodysplastic Syndrom, most often refered to as MDS because nobody can ever remember mye-lo-dys-plastic. MDS is not a single form of cancer or red blood cell disease. I had a friend with Lukemia who came through his two solid years of chemo, et al, and has been in remission for nearly three years. It’s called MDS but Lukemia is not what’s going on with my dad. His is a lot easier to explain. I think. Also, he is not elible for any invasive treatments like bone marrow transplants or any other organ transplant should another organ bite the dust. Too old to survive surgery although, with my dad, I find that somewhat dubious. I’d give him pretty high odds. Or I would have five or six years ago.

Essentially, his bone marrow stopped making red blood cells. A drop in red blood cells starts with anemia and rapidly turns into stupid low hemoglobin. Stupid low hemoglobin delivers super low oxygen to the brain. You can probably do the math on the end game. There are several treatments, the second of which is periodic (twice a month on average) blood transfusions. If you do this long enough you build up odd antibodies (so you have to have blood work to identify exactly which antibodies to add or subtract to the blood order prior to hooking him up to a bag or two of Vampire Juice.

Before he agreed to the port catheter (which totally freaked him out) he got stuck with a lot of needles because his veins are no longer interested in being poked. He hates needles. I mean REALLY hates needles and this turned his four hour process into escalating trauma and we thought he was getting close to throwing in the towel at which point he would eventually go to sleep and not wake up. The port was a game changer. Now he sits in his chair and binges Big Bang Theory, laughing his ass off until he decides it’s nap time.

That said, the other issue is an iron build up in his liver. Well, that’s a problem. The next solution is Reblozyl which is an infusion of (something, I’m still not clear) that has a 40% chance of reducing the frequency of his transfusions. He’s only had two of those so far so we don’t know yet.

There are other things going on that make it harder but we just keep going. My dad, my step-mother, and me. It’s good to live just one mile down the same road. The fact that my step-mother has remained even remotely sane is a mystery to me. I think it’s a mystery to her as well. Last December her mother died shortly after her 95th birthday. She’d been taking care of her mother since just after my dad’s diagnosis. It’s like watching your husband and your mother circling the drain together. A shit ton of work and more heartbreak than all that. It helps that I’m here. Not just for the added hands (I do almost all his four hour transfusions with him) but for the fact of family.

My step-mother is from Oklahoma and moved east to marry my dad in 1983. Or 84. That long ago. This means a lot of things (she’s never going back under any circumstances). First and formost, it means that she has almost no family within reach. She has me and I will never leave her short of expiring myself. There are only seven years between us and I’m pretty sure she’s going to outlive me.

As she put it, friends are great and she has a lot of them, but family is something else entirely and she once told me that she was afraid when my father died that we (me and the kids) would all forget her.

Imagine the pain of that. My heart still hurts.

I cried for two days about that, had a come to jesus meeting with myself and figured out how to behave in a way that she’d trust that I loved her as if she were my own. Because she is. We got through that. She’s pretty clear I’m not going anywhere and she certainly knows how much she matters to me. That was a big deal because I tend to wander off the map unless you’re one of my kids or my second husband but he’s dead now (so that sucks) which means I’m down to paying attention to three unless I teach my brain that someone else is as connected as my kids.

So here we are, more than seven years later and my dad is officially two years past his expiration date. Yes, we do think this is funny. We also think Vampire Juice is funny as hell.

When shit just keeps happening and my step-mother just keeps going (as if nothing was wrong at all), this is the song that goes through her head. I highly recommend you give it a listen because it, also, is funny as hell. It’s playing in my head since she shared that little tidbit. The mini banjo is perfect. He’s a standup commedian and, again, this is funny as shit. Have at it.

Well, This is Shit – Thomas Benjamin Wild Esq

This would be a good place to stop except I think it’s important to acknowledge the reasons he broke out of the hospital back in 2018. In order:

The last grandchild graduated from high school. All rites of passage like this are extraordinarily important to my dad. She would have forgiven him. Would completely have understood and was actually a little alarmed when he showed up in a wheel chair (he doesn’t need on except for long walks anymore) looking like death warmed over. But show up he did.

Immediately following graduation my dad and step-mother got back in the car and drove the remaining twelve hours to the beach. My step-mother was a blasted mess at the time. This was all new and I remember her nearly crying out the words, “I just want my husband back”. I drove down for a day and a half to get my own kids settled. They were all adults, OK, the baby was seventeen, but the other two are nine and fourteen years older. At that point they had a tendency to still assume all adults older than they were would take care of everything. My step-mother needed to do absolutely nothing for at least a week. She didn’t even want to talk to anyone and my understanding is they did a passable job.

They left the beach two days early to get back in time for my middle child’s wedding. That one makes more sense, right? I will admit that if he were forced (as if THAT could happen) to pick one event he would choose the wedding. But those other two events are things that root him to his life. We’ve been going to that beach since 1972 and we all pretend there are still only seven rental units and avert our eyes as we walk past those things that house thirty people. We also pretend we don’t see all those other people on the beach and wish massive huricanes and shark attacks on them (OK, not really).

While my father’s long term memory remains pretty much intact, his short term memory isn’t very good. This is fun for me because I can tell him all sorts of egregious untruths and he will believe me because I do it with a straight face, and 99% of the time he won’t remember anything I said during the hour drive to and from UVM. The other 1%. Well, shit. I’m caught.

Things I never tell him: anything related to childhood trauma, mine, my brother’s or his. I made the mistake of talking about one of the most minor events late one night and he cried because he didn’t know. The man was in agony and wouldn’t let me go.

My step-mother happened to be up at the time and I told her what I’d done and I was crying because he was crying and she said, very gently, he will never remember this. And I will never do it again.

Love your people gently.

(damn, that was a long one)

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I’ve been here before. I think.

September 15, 2025

In another time and place, said time and place was active between January 2007 and sometime in 2003, I used to write periodic letters that began: “Dear NSA”. I thought they were funny, maybe not so much now that I think about it.

This was before what we now think of as AI. Keep in mind that we had intranet communication long before we started throwing random shit into the VERY (stop fooling yourself) public interwebs. The NSA always collected data. Where do you think they got it, wire taps? Yeah, that too. But think about it. Long and hard if required.

While mass quantities of data became available, we, and the NSA, and all other entities collecting our pulically aired laundry very quickly ran out of sorting, parsing, and analyzing bandwidth. We got better at that. Google ‘data lake’ and then ‘Internet of Everything’ (IoE). Both of those terms and concepts are dated, but it’s a good place to start if you’re unfamiliar with those terms and concepts.

STOP RIGHT THERE: if you’re suddenly finding the need to add a quick comment educating me and any other poor soul who accidentally stumbled on this site, stop it. Don’t. Do your splaining elsewhere. I’m just trying to make a freaking point. OK? Good.

Where was I? Right. AI as we know or think we know or sorta know as of today. I don’t need to bait the NSA by calling them out via blog letter. Now all I have to do is start writing shit and click, Publish (might not even have to do that, who knows).

Do I think I’m that important? Absolutely not. On the other hand, that woman who just had a four year old snatched off the street by a well armed masked man with possibly very little training working for the Federal government? She wasn’t that important either. Not even a little bit. The four year old? Never had a chance at relevance.

Reread that paragraph.

I’m not paranoid, I don’t even pay much attention these days because I tend to froth at the mouth and that’s not useful. I’m not paranoid, I’m appalled. I’m not even astonished, just appalled. Gobsmacked. Flabbergasted. Dumbfounded. Thuderstruck. Stupified. Horrified. Pusillanimous(ed?). Etcetera.

Also, I hijacked this blog (legally). Because I’m unwilling to pay for an upgrade or use another email and just start over, you’re probably seeing the original name (ailishe) by the profile thumbnail. All content associated with the user name ailishe has been deleted. You may now refer to me as mister joyce. I’m not going to bother explaining that. If you slogged through Ulysses or had the audacity to think Finnegans Wake is even remotely accessible to all but four living people, it should make perfect sense. If not, let it go.

That’s not me in the thumbnail. Don’t be silly. That is, however, my cat in the banner (unless you’re trolling my blog from the bottom and I’ve already changed it. I like changing banners. It’s fun for me.

That’s it. That’s the opening post. I’ll probably be back because my daughter has suggested strongly that I start writing again. I’m not willing to pick up the original blog for a lot of reasons, so here I am.

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