This weekend presented very little that was outstanding but a lot that was quite nice.

Saturday in addition, to our routine early morning walk around the condo complex with my sweetie-wife and a neighbor, my sweetie-wife joined me in walking around the neighborhoods of Kensington and Normal Heights as I took photos to help inspire my next novel.

These neighborhoods were two that I have been familiar with since the early 80s and lived in for a few years in the 1990s. The point of the photos is to help with atmosphere as I write and jog memories from decades earlier about what has changed since the time of Reagan. I also discovered, with my sweetie-wife’s help, that the location I thought had been a fabric store throughout the 80s only became one in 1988 and in ’84, when my book will be set, it was a punk rock music venue.

In the evening, I ran my tabletop role-playing game of Space Opera. Sadly, a coughing spasm reduced the running time to just about 90 minutes. The ‘long covid’ I acquired is far less debilitating than what many people suffer, and I’m glad for that, but it is annoying as hell.

Sunday morning was a trip to the San Diego Zoo, another opportunity to break in my new camera. (It’s not brand new; it is a used DSLR, but at a great price and in great condition, replacing my former camera that began killing lenses.)

While the controls are a little different and a few shots came out a little underexposed, overall things went swimmingly.

Robert Mitchell Evans

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Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering a health care executive, will face a federal death penalty if the DOJ and Pam Bondi get their way, and I admit that doesn’t sit right with me.

Now, it is not that I am ideologically opposed to capital punishment. That debate is far more complex than the space here would allow me to elaborate on but in closely defined cases I think it is warranted.

Nor is it that I think the troubles and evils of the for-profit health care system in any wayjustify that murder, Our  for-profit health care system trades lives for cash and that is fucking repulsive but Mangione’s actions, if guilty, saved not a single life. I understand the rage that propelled such action, but understanding and condoning are very different things.

I can see and even condone the use of the death penalty for calculated premeditated acts of murder for political purposes.

What I know for a fact is that this Department of Justice, this vacuous-headed Attorney General, and this administration has zero interest in fair, dispassionate, and unbiased justice. Luigi Mangione is facing the death penalty not from any sense of justice or cool logical conclusion but because this is the sort of crime that has deep personal meaning to the corrupt people of this administration. While conversely, they liberated the criminals that they see as allies and fellow travelers. The violent terrorists that attempted to overthrow a free election received pardons, allies under investigation find those investigations dropped.

This is the fascist heart of the Trump administration.

For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.

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We have hit the busiest portion of our annual work at the day-job and last month I worked more overtime days and non-overtime days. However, this week I am scaling back for health reasons.

For the last three days running I have had on each day some level of migraine headache with Saturday evening and Sunday morning being the most intense pain days. Sadly, that forced me to cancel my role-playing game on Saturday night and my zoo trip on Sunday morning.

That said, I have been able to get to work and contribute to the massive backlog created by people who waited to the very last minute to submit their enrollments.

I have also been able to continue work on my folk/cosmic horror novel and have now passed 75,000 words with perhaps 10 or 12 thousand left to completing the 1st draft. Then the revisions begin, and this will take a lot more than any other novel I have written. While life is easier with an outline, I am glad I have written this one by the seat of my pants if for no other reason than to experience that process.

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The crunch time at my day-job has begun and with it the loads of overtime hours that are extended to the workforce. Luckily this is not retail or some construction type work, I work in an office, listening to podcasts while processing endless reams of paperwork helping people get the non-profit health insurance plans that they seek. So, while it is not physically taxing, but it saps energy and takes time.

This means the early morning time I usually employ for writing this blog will vanish most days and with it the posts. Mondays are different I tend not to work overtime on those days, so I am going to attempt to maintain at least a weekly schedule.

Good news is that lunches remain productive for my novel writing and with 60,000 words down and 30,000 or so to go I still look to complete the 1st draft of my next horror novel before the end of the year.

The election results here in the USA are concerning. If the president elect does as he has threatened, then in all likelihood terrible times are ahead. Perhaps he will be satisfied with merely looting the treasury and a civil war among his staff will limit damage, but it is not an outcome I would wager on. There is naught to do but fight in every legal way possible and preserve strength for the upcoming battles. World War II was not settled when the Allied force fled from Dunkirk, it looked dark, but in the end the fascist were defeated. Last week was a battle, not the war.

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So, not the classic album from Fleetwood Mac but rather the black comedy/satire film starring Cate Blanchett.

Elevation Pictures

Written and Directed by the team if Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, Rumours is set during a working dinner for the G7 leaders, the chief executives, Presidents and Prime Ministers, of the leading democratic economies, as they attempt to draft a provisional statement concerning some crisis left by the script undefined. Dur the course of the dinner, which takes place in a gazebo, the supporting staff vanish, and the world leaders are left to their own inept devices while confront by undead bog bodies and mysterious giant forest brains.

With haunting cinematography from Stefan Ciupek and a striking color pallet the film has an impressive look to it and is further enhanced by a cast is excellent actors including Charles Dance as an American president with a wholly unexplained strong British accent.

The script provides numerous humorous incidents and character studies and yet for me failed to land fully. The target of the satire, ineffectual leaders providing only rehashed, recycled, and generic observations on problems facing the world is sharp enough the point of the satire seemed to have passed me by entirely. It was clear that the filmmakers have little regard or respect for world leaders but provided no other path or course of action.

The film doesn’t go as far as to live wholly within a realm of ‘dream logic’ like something from David Lynch yet and it is beyond our own sense of reality. (The lack of any ‘protective services’ is simply never addressed. In the film’s world the U.S. President, not to mention the others, simply have no one guarding them day and night.)

What enjoyment I derived from viewing this film lays entirely with the cast and their performances, particularly with Cate Blanchett who simply commanded my attention every moment she existed on the screen.

I honestly am glad I took the time to see this in the theaters, but I also cannot recommend this film as anyone reaction is likely to be so idiosyncratic as to make recommendations pointless.

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The fundamental forces are fascinating and mysterious elements of the universe. Electro-Magnetism harness and yoked by humanity powers our modern life. The Strong nuclear force binds the cores of atoms together. The Weak Nuclear force drives decay and radioactivity. Leaving gravity exerting the least force of the four through teamwork that extends across the universe proves stronger than all the rest creating black holes and breaking physics itself.

But the ultimate fundamental force is Motivated Reasoning.

Motivated reasoning is the power that makes 1984’s Big Brother a terrifying possibility. It is not that everyone knows the truth of a situation and simply complies out of rational self-preservation but rather once a desired outcome is formed how easily we craft elaborate justification and logic chains to bind ourselves to the fiction that produces the satisfying result.

It powers out divisive and partisan politics. As parties move and reform around new priorities and populations very few former members leave for pastures more in line with their stated positions but rather the people find circuitous routes of reasonings that ‘justifies’ their loyalty to new positions.

Motivated Reasoning extends its deceptive grasp beyond politics. It reaches wherever emotion and identity impact. Show me something that is important to a person sense of self and there you will find motivated reasoning.

This force is particularly dangerous because it is so subtle. Working its way on us from our subconscious influencing the very things we give any weight to before we are even aware that we have given something a value of importance. People rarely ask themselves, ‘Why do I think this?’ ‘Why do accept this?’

I am no more immune to motivated reasoning than any other person walking this planet. I try, I try very hard to interrogate myself as to what is beyond my acceptance of a fact or my ‘gut feeling’ on any subject, but being human, being a creature of socialization, I fall short as we all do. But we must try.