IWSG: Unease

     This isn't going to be much of a post.  My glasses problems still aren't fully resolved (I have new glasses en route that are more or less the same prescription as my old glasses, which should let me work on a computer without eye pain and without looking through the fog of scratches on the old lenses) so I haven't been able to do much writing over the last month.  And most of what I've been doing has been preparing for a game jam I'll be participating in during July and August.

    A game jam--for those who don't know, which I kind of expect to be most people seeing this, as they're rather a niche thing--is a lot like NaNoWriMo, except that they have different time limits (this one is two months, but some are only a weekend!) and the goal is to produce a game.  (Typically a video game, but sometimes it's to create a tabletop RPG.)  I'm going to be writing a visual novel, and have gotten together with a programmer, two artists (one for characters and one for backgrounds) and a composer, so I'm actually going to be under huge pressure not only to get it written but to do it well, because these four other people's entry into that game jam is dependent on what I write.  And I'm beginning to wonder if I'm capable of writing anything good enough. :(  But I'll probably devote next month's IWSG post to talking about the game (and likely August's to talking about how it's going), so that's not actually what I want to talk about here.

    So, I've been posting both fan fiction and some mythology-based fiction to AO3, a major site that hosts such works.  And I've been reading some of what others write, which is often a frustrating experience, since so many people don't have a very good grasp on how English works.  (Sometimes this is because it's not their native language.  Unfortunately, in just as many--possibly in more--cases, they don't have that excuse.  But it would seem rude to point it out either way, so I just have to suffer in silence.  Or more accurately, rant about it to the empty room I'm sitting in and then not post anything online about it.)  And in the case of mythology-related works, a lot of people have some bizarre and frustrating misunderstandings about various aspects of Greek mythology and/or ancient Greek culture, particularly where the Trojan War is concerned.  And again, most of the time I feel like I can't say anything about it, and often it doesn't seem worth it, because there's not much to the work in question.

    But then there was a work-in-progress that was really good, except for the grammar and mythological confusion.  I didn't say anything about the grammar, because I got the feeling from it that English was not their native tongue, but I did mention some of the mythological problems, accompanied by compliments on various aspects of the work that I enjoyed.

    The compliments were not enough.  The author replied, having taken considerable offense.  (And based on the grammar on display in their reply, English is their native language.)  And yes, my phrasing was not good, which made the situation worse.  I have a terrible tendency to get too comfortable in a place--real or digital--which makes me relax and then causes me to say or do something thoughtless and inappropriate.  This was that moment for AO3, so I am suddenly feeling very uncomfortable about being there, and have neither read anything else there nor posted anything (despite that I had a work in the process of going up at the time) since then.

    What bothers me most about the author's reply is the formulaic nature of it.  It was exactly what I had heard people on the "pet peeves" threads in the fanfic forums on the NaNoWriMo site complaining about before the site was ruined and I abandoned NaNo in disgust.  The author first said how not all fanfic authors want criticism, and then said that they didn't need to improve their work because they were doing it "out of love."  It's one of those things that I wanted to think was made up just to complain about it.  How can someone claim that being motivated by love is license to create a shoddy product?  When something is a labor of love, you're supposed to work extra hard on it, because you want it to be perfect, because it's something you love.  Using love as an excuse for laziness and unwillingness to improve...has the meaning of love changed, or am I just such an old fogey (at 45) that I cling to ancient and abandoned practices?

    Whatever the explanation, I am left feeling like I don't belong on AO3, like it's the home of the "I don't want to improve my craft because it doesn't matter to me even though I claim to love it" tribe, a tribe which is necessarily hostile to me, an inveterate over-proofreader of and eternal fiddler with my own work.  I mean, is that secretly the reason my fics don't do well, because I actually go in and fix 99% of my grammatical errors before I post the piece?  (I know it's not:  the reason they don't do well is because I suck as a writer.)

    The bigger question, though, is what do I do with my writing if I don't post it there?  I've kind of gotten to liking sharing it with the internet, even though the 'net is entirely uninterested in it.  Maybe I should start a third Blogger blog and post my novels there instead of on AO3?  (Or just post it to this one since I'm barely even using it anyway?)  I've seen people on Kickstarter trying to fund print editions of their novels who have said that the full text of the novel is posted on their website already, so maybe posting a novel to a blog isn't that strange a practice.  I don't know, though; it feels like a weird thing to do somehow.  Fortunately, it doesn't matter yet, since I haven't finished the rewrite of book two anyway.

    In sum, I'm just generally feeling weird and off.  Hopefully, my mental situation will improve once my new glasses arrive and I can start writing again.

IWSG: "Progressive" Bifocals

 

    Ugh.

    I've actually had these new glasses for over a month, but I stopped wearing them entirely within a few days...only it took me a month to get up the nerve to call the optician's to see if I could get some other arrangement going to allow me to see properly.

    I kinda got a serious lecture out of it. :(  And I sorta promised I'd wear them for a week without switching back to my old glasses to try and get used to them.

    Which means I basically can't write now, because I can't read the computer screen.  I mean, I can kind of read it, but I keep having to shift my head around up and down because the "sweet spot" moves every time I blink.  And even when it's lined up right, it's still...it's hard to describe the problem, but do you know how it is when you're at the eye doctor and they're doing the "better 1 or better 2" thing and one of them is just off even though you can't quite pin down what's wrong with it?  It's like that.  Only it's what I've got.  And just looking at the screen long enough to write this far has already made my eyes hurt a lot.

    So although my writing had been doing a little bit okay, it's now about to drop off a freaking cliff until I can get these glasses sorted out.

    I want smart glasses that change the prescription on the whole lens to suit the distance of what you're looking at, darn it!  Or at least ones that have three settings which you can change at the touch of a button.  It shouldn't be that hard to do, should it?   (I'd settle for having my magnetic sunglasses' lenses replaced with reading or intermediate level lenses, too.  That wouldn't be as easy, but it would work better than this catastrophe!)

    Anyway, due to the stupid glasses thing, I'm posting this about six hours early.  Sorry.  I don't want to have to deal with this again so soon.

IWSG - Screaming into the Void

 

    As you can probably guess from the title of the post, I am not in a good headspace right now where my writing is concerned.  I feel like everything I do is just so much wasted time, especially concerning getting anyone to actually read what I've written.

    Last month, while I was trying to get the interactive version of my novel ready to post, I found myself suddenly and unexpectedly confronted with a question from my mother regarding how I was spending my time since losing my job.  (Normally, this does not come up, because she's much too busy telling me about her latest health problems to ask anything about my life.)  Without any backup plan, I ended up telling the truth, that I'd been working on a rewrite of an old novel.  Then, to my horror, she prompted that of course I was going to try to submit it to a publisher.  I was not being pushed back down that road again (bad, bad, terrible story, that), so I went ahead and told her the truth that I had added some interactivity and was releasing it as a game.

    Her response?  "Oh, you should send it to your father so he can see it!"  (My father did not echo the sentiment in the slightest, and in fact remained silent for the entire conversation.)  Then she turns to my brother and says that of course I must have shown it to him already.  His response?  "Yes, it...contains words."

    Seriously, the only thing he could say about it was that it "contains words."  (Admittedly, it's not as though he's read the current draft, because he hated the first one so much because of one incident (that I repeatedly assured him was no longer there) that as far as I can tell he never even opened the file containing the new version, despite claims that he was going to beta read it for me.)

    I was reeling from that, so I tried to defend myself a little by telling her--the honest truth!--that I had already posted the first chapter as a demo of sorts, and that a few people had shown interest in it, and in possibly reading the rest.  (As the number of my "followers" on itch.io leapt up by six after the first chapter came out, I feel that to be an entirely honest statement.)  Her response?  To repeat the story of a character in a comic strip who was distraught when the number of his Twitter followers dropped in half over a single day, because his wife stopped following him.  Because evidently she assumed that my "few" had to be "one" and could only be my brother.

    With my supposedly supportive family being like that, it should of course come as no surprise that I could use some actual response--preferably at least mildly positive, but I'd settle for honest and insightful--from someone who has actually read what I wrote.  Of course, I have no way of getting that, except just putting it out there on the 'net and hoping.

    I released the game, and it is an abject and undeniable, catastrophic failure.

    Almost no one has even looked at the game's page, and less than a third of the people who have looked at the page have hit the "play" button to try it out.  I have no way of knowing if any of the few people who did play any part of it actually read it all the way through, but I suspect the maximum number of people who actually bothered is 1.  (And, in all honesty, I doubt that any of the few people who have clicked "play" bothered to come back and read the rest.  And as it's about 145k words long, it's pretty much impossible to read it all in one sitting unless one is a massive speed-reader.)

    Blogging is no different, really.  I post things, and almost no one reads them.  Even these IWSG posts don't get that many views.  That's okay, of course; I do nothing but complain about what a loser I am or about how much trouble I'm having with whatever project I'm working on.  If I was everyone else, I wouldn't want to read my posts, either.

    I know a lot of people turn to social media in times like these--both my general mindset and the current lockdown situation--but I know it would only be the same thing if I did.  If I took to a social media platform (beyond blogging, which is technically a social media), I would post whatever random content came to my mind, and maybe a few people would look at it, maybe a tiny percentage of those would even half-heartedly hit a "like" button, but mostly no one would even see it.  Because sometimes it feels like I'm invisible.  No, actually, it feels like the lyrics to this one song from the soundtrack to Reality Bites:  "I only exist in negative, no, no, no, bad!"  (Sorry, I forget the name of the song, or even the singer.  As soon as I realized I could use a flash drive to listen to music in my car, I ripped every CD I had into .mp3s and stuck them on a really big flash drive to listen to, which leaves me a little less clear on things like song titles and artists from mixed projects.)  I know that reference both marks my age and makes me sound appallingly shallow, but...well, if it makes me sound any less pitiful, I don't think I've actually watched the movie in this century, just listened to (about half of) the soundtrack album from time to time.

    Once upon a time, I would have tried "retail therapy" to help me get out of this funk, but with no income at the moment (and for whatever reason I was deemed ineligible for the last two rounds of stimulus checks, so I don't even have that money coming in) not to mention that I won't be getting my first COVID vaccination shot until two weeks from now (and as I both have asthma and am seriously obese, contracting COVID would be my death warrant), I can't really just go out shopping and buy something fun to cheer myself up.  Though I don't think it would really help even if I did, at this point.  (And online shopping just doesn't have the same effect.)

    At times, writing has helped me get through things like this, but I don't feel like it's helping right now.  It's hard to concentrate on it, in fact.  Though I am trying to get moving on the rewrite of the second book in the series.  (I've decided I'm going to post the first one's text onto AO3, so I can at least feel like maybe someone might read it.  Or at least get a better idea if anyone reads it.)

Released!

    So, this morning I finally released the lightly interactive version of the first of my kinda-YA Greek mythology novels.

    I ended up going with the title Scions of Troy, which was my original idea for the series title.  I had discarded it as a series title because it didn't do a very good job of representing the series (especially since it made it sound like they were the children of Trojans, not of the Greeks who had fought in the Trojan War), but as a title for this first novel...well, it's still not great, but I think it has a bit more pop than any of my earlier attempts to title this, and there is at least one character in the novel who is the son of one of the Trojans from the Trojan War, so...

    Yeah.

    Best I could do, I guess.

    Here's hoping at least a few people will read it.

    I'd hope that some people will enjoy it, but that's probably asking too much.

    (It can be found at this url if you're curious about just how bad it is.)

IWSG - Title Woes

 

            Everything about my writing life feels clenched up in knots right now.  From the simplest things—like that I got new glasses last week only to find out that I couldn’t read in them, because while my optician kept saying “bifocals bifocals” he didn’t actually explain that the muscles in the eyes start working differently when you hit mid-forties, so now I’m having to get new lenses with progressive bifocal lenses so I’ll be able to read and see things in the distance with the same pair of glasses—to the much more complicated situation regarding the upcoming release of the lightly interactive version of the first novel in my series about three illegitimate children of the Greek heroes of the Trojan War.

            A few days ago, I posted a question about how to handle one of the behind-the-scenes details of the release (which did not get a useful answer in the least, I’m sorry to say) on one of the forums at itch.io, in which I stupidly said that I was going to be releasing “in a few weeks.”  Now, this was not any kind of formal announcement, and likely no one who saw it is in the slightest bit interested in what I’ll be releasing—and the few people who are interested in it absolutely had no way of seeing that post.

            But I still feel like I’m bound to honor that date if I can.  (Without, you know, going insane.)

            And so long as I don’t have to do too much editing on the current draft, I should be able to, since the programming involved is minimal.  (It would help if my beta reader had actually read the darn thing and given me feedback, but it’s pretty clear at this point that no matter what he claims, he’s not actually going to do so.  And I promised him last time I brought it up that it would in fact be the last time I brought it up, so there’s no helping that.)

            Honestly, at this point, I’m more worried about the title than anything else.  I don’t think there’s too much I can do to improve the text without detailed feedback from a reader, after all.

            But the title!  OMG, it’s terrible.

            I have prepared a title screen for the game:

             So, yeah, you can see how bad that title is.  (The graphic behind the title is fine, of course, being a photo from Wikimedia Commons of a (heavily reconstructed) Mycenaean fresco.)

            I mean, it’s not necessarily a bad title, as such, but it sort of promises a different novel than the reader would get.  And it doesn’t fit in with the rest of the titles in the series:

            Bonds of Blood and Water (formerly The Vessel of Athene, then briefly The Walls of Troy)

            The Golden God of Aiolia (formerly The Golden God of Thessaly, only it turns out that the name Thessaly is anachronistic)

            The Martial Maenads

            The Tablet of Destinies

            Warriors of Pontos

            The Golden Swan (formerly The Goddess of the Cabieri)

            The Awakening (though that’s kind of a spoilery title and should probably be changed)

             Hmm, you know, looking at those titles, I feel like I was trying to pick out titles that would have worked for story titles on the original Doctor Who.  (Well, the novels did start out with the intention of being a YA series, and the original Doctor Who was viewed by the BBC as “children’s programming” so that’s not necessarily a bad metric to use.)  Which only makes the current title for the first one even more wrong.

            I released the first chapter already on itch.io as The Cousins, which actually feels like the best title for the novel so far, but it’s also very underwhelming.  I feel like the title really ought to at least imply the setting (hence the second title I briefly gave it) or do something to indicate that this is not set in the historic Late Bronze Age, but the Greek Heroic Age, in which the gods were very much real and took part in events.

            The plot of the novel can be summed up thus:

            Cousins Atalanta and Ariadne are brought up as slaves on the island of Lesbos (having been fathered during a single night’s visit by Achilles and Odysseus respectively in the final months of the war, probably at most a week before Achilles’ death), and on learning that their master is thinking of separating them, they decide to escape together.  (This makes up the portion already released.)  Following their escape in disguise as boys, they make their way to the remains of the Greek camp outside Troy, where they find a ship has landed for the night; among the men on board was young Eurysakes, the son of Telamonian Aias, first cousin of Achilles, making Eurysakes Atalanta’s second cousin.  Eurysakes was actually waiting at Achilles’ grave, having been told by an oracle that he would there meet companions who would help him repair his father’s honor and help his shade rest in peace.  Atalanta is eager to travel with him and help in his mission, but Ariadne distrusts him in every way; in spite of Ariadne’s misgivings, they do accept a ride on Eurysakes’ ship the rest of the way to the partially-rebuilt Troy, where they are welcomed as guests by the new king, Korythos, the son of Alexander.  (This may sound odd, but guest-friendship was very important in the Late Bronze Age.  Also, in my version (unlike in the original myths), Eurysakes has been raised by his uncle, Teukros, whose mother was Hesione, sister of King Priam.  So Korythos and Teukros are also cousins.  There are a lot of cousins in this book.  Though Teukros is only talked about, never present until many books later in the series.  And Teukros is now a king in Cyprus, which was the major source of copper in the region in the LBA, which made it supremely rich and powerful, since everyone needed copper to make the bronze they needed for their weapons and armor, so that’s also a very large part of why Korythos is so eager to welcome Eurysakes as a guest.)  There’s a little friction at the court between Korythos and one of the other nobles, Ganymede, but mostly their initial time in town just serves to set up the presence of a virtual army of bandits operating on Mt. Ida and terrorizing the region.  The trio decide to set off to fight the bandits, and following their successful return, things become surprisingly weird and fraught with tension.  It’s hard to sum up the rest from there, but they have to stop a plot that threatens the gods themselves.  (Though I’m sorry to say that I really did not do a very good job at setting up that possibility earlier in the text, even in the rewrite.  I did try as best I could, but…the problem with secret cults is that they tend to keep their secrets, well, secret!)

            Aside from the general theme of kinship, there are also themes of descent from watery gods (mostly just the king’s descent from the local river gods, and Atalanta’s being the granddaughter of a Nereid), guest-friendship, and the tension between trust and deceit (particularly deceit in the sense of people claiming to be someone or something they’re not).  The Trojan temple to Athene eventually becomes a very important part of the story, but its importance isn’t revealed until late in the book, hence one of the reasons the first title was something of a spoiler and had to be rejected.

            Unfortunately, I can’t even look to the ancient works as a suggestion of how to title it, because they tended towards very simple titles, often either the name of the lead character or a name adapted from that lead’s name (eg Odyssey from Odysseus).  While I’m currently planning on calling the series “The Adventures of Atalanta and Ariadne” (which isn’t very fair, since Eurysakes is just as big a part of the series) since I can’t come up with anything better, I can’t really name this after its “lead” because there isn’t one:  it’s very much a shared lead for the three of them.  Well, no, in this particular case, it’s more like Atalanta and Ariadne sharing the lead; Eurysakes doesn’t get full shared lead until book two.  (All seven novels were written back in 2014, btw.  These are just rewrites/adaptations.)

            So I am completely and utterly befuddled as to how to proceed in terms of the work’s title. :(

 

            I welcome any and all suggestions…

    (BTW, did you know that Chrome's onboard spell-checker does not recognize the name Atalanta?  It recognizes Ariadne, but not Atalanta.  WTF?)

IWSG - Uncertainty

    I ought to be feeling pretty confident right now, considering I finished the new draft of that old novel, and it's light years better than the original.  (Though there's some slacking off, I feel, towards the end.)

    But I am totally not.

    I can't really describe what the problem is, exactly, but I'm suddenly filled with malaise.  (Over the weekend, I ended up spontaneously crying twice.  Which years ago would be a sign my period was coming, but at this point I don't have them every month anymore, plus I had just had one about two weeks earlier.)  Malaise and a sense of futility.

    It's like, even if I go to all the effort of getting this novel ready and out there in the form of interactive fiction, is it even going to matter?

    The first chapter that's out there as a "demo" is getting a decent "click-through rate," according to itch.io's analytics, which means about 2.75% (as of the last time I looked at the analytics page) of the people who look at the game's page also go ahead and click the button to play the game.  But that doesn't really mean much:  they might click the button, read one or two screens of text and get bored and leave.  (Or decide it sucks and leave for that reason.)  That will be an even bigger concern with the full novel version, and one that I can't see any away around; I'm always going to worry that no one's reading the full thing.  And probably most of the people who start it aren't going to be reading the full thing.

    I've been contemplating moving a lot of my Greek mythology related works of writing onto AO3 (partially as an advertisement for the game once it's up), but would anyone actually read them or like them?  Just because I like them doesn't mean anything.  I like a lot of the things I've written about Velvet Goldmine characters, but my fics have some of the lowest hit and kudos counts in the fandom, so I'm obviously the only one.

    *sigh*

    I know I should be posting about how I need a name for the new version of the novel (there's stuff about that two posts back, or was it only last post?) and a name for the series, but I can't even bring myself to care right now.  What's in a name?  More importantly, what good is a name?  It won't make the work it's attached to less bad.  I mean, yeah, a really awful title will drive off potential readers/players, while a good one might draw a few in, but considering the work itself will drive them all off, what's that matter in the long run?

    I'm afraid a lot of my problem right now is extended house-boundedness, which is obviously not a problem that's going to go away anytime soon, with more dangerous strains of COVID likely to get here in the weeks to come, and of course my obesity and asthma puts me at super-high risk of death if I get it, but my lack of a job or anyone depending on me in any way (plus my lack of a physician, my obesity and my asthma) puts me about down with homeless people in terms of priority to receive the vaccine.  And I don't think my confidence is ever likely to recover from losing my job, not unless I can find a new one, which obviously isn't going to happen until well after COVID goes away.

    *sigh*

    Sorry.  I didn't mean to be just unloading all my pointless worries.  That's not interesting reading or helpful to anyone else.  (It doesn't help that I have pretty much no human contact other than my brother and my parents right now.)

    How is everyone else dealing with the extreme sense of being entirely and utterly housebound, now that most areas will soon have entered a full year of this?

General Stuff, + Sol Mosier on Patriotism

 So, the last time I posted anything, for my monthly IWSG post, I said this:

Yup, I haven't posted anything this year, so of course I had to start with a "thank god it's over" about 2020.  (Though my hopes are not high for 2021 being all that great, either.  Maybe it will be, but as long as it's better than 2020, I'll take it.)

    Hours later, white supremacists were invading the US Capitol building in an armed insurrection.

    I spent the following weeks alternating between tensely holding my breath in terror of further violence closer to home (the advantage of being in the Midwest is that it's far from anything bad happening on the coasts, but the enormous disadvantage is that there are a lot of white supremacists, gun nuts, and other right-wing extremists) and actively trying to think about absolutely anything else, meaning that I really threw myself into finishing that proofreading job, working on the rewrite of my novel, reading, and playing video games.

    I'm glad to say that last night around 11:00 I finally finished the new draft of the novel, which is now nearly twice the size of the old draft:  the original (well, the most recent version of it, which had had minor edits done from the true original draft) was 134 word processor pages and 79,980 words long (with each chapter having a title), and the new draft is 241 word processor pages long, and 144,730 words long (with chapters not having titles).  Of course, since I'm adapting it not into a new novel version but into a text-based game, there is some extra text involved in the terms of choices to be made by the player, alternate versions of combat scenes dependent on those choices, and of course game over scenarios, but I doubt those added much more than five thousand words, maybe ten thousand at the outside, but there aren't really enough of them to make it likely there's anywhere near that many words involved.  It's not ready for entering into the game engine yet (especially because I realized very late in the draft that my brain kept sabotaging me and defaulting to types of armor that were impossible to make in the Bronze Age, so I have to go back and fix a lot of that text) and I'll need to write up many more glossary entries, plus some post-game information about the real versions of myths I was drawing from (in part because one of the characters most people will assume I made up is actually a very minor mythological figure, though one who met a very different fate), but the hardest part, the redraft itself, is over, so that's great.

    But that's not actually what I wanted to post about.  The main thing I wanted to post was a quote from one of the books I read in the last three weeks.  It's called The Flutter of an Eyelid, by Myron Brinig, and it's one of the many book projects I've backed on Kickstarter.  In this case, it's one of the ones from Tough Poets Press, which finds long out-of-print novels (and plays and collections of poetry) and gets the rights to bring them back into print.  I've backed a fair number of their projects, though most of them are still buried in various places in my constantly growing to-read pile.  Anyway, the main reason I backed this one, I think, was actually because of the description of one of the author's "second novel, Singermann, a semi-autobiographical novel of a Jewish immigrant peddler's family in the early 1900's American frontier.  The novel is notable in that it is one of the earliest instances in American literature of a gay protagonist whose character is portrayed in a compassionate, non-stigmatizing manner."  (Quote from the "About the Author" page in the back of the book, which I believe is exactly the same text from the Kickstarter page, only I'm too lazy to go check.)

    The Flutter of an Eyelid was written in 1933, and it bears the hallmarks of its age in terms of racism and misogyny (though not as badly as many other products of the age do), and frankly some of it feels anti-Semitic to the modern reader, but it sounds like the author was Jewish himself, so it probably wasn't actually anti-Semitism, or if it was, it was merely echoing the attitudes of the era in the increasingly unreliable narrator.  (Or something.)  Anyway, it's a very unusual book, and I don't even know if I want to recommend it, though I did overall enjoy it:  it started out feeling like it might be a less normal, more extreme novel in the vein of Day of the Locust, but it went off those rails pretty quickly and ended up in all sorts of very meta places.

    Anyway, fairly late in the book (pages 244-5 of 298), there's an extended speech (or internal monologue?) from a character named Sol Mosier on the subject of patriotism that felt very appropriate right now, so I wanted to share it:

"If, in school, we had been taught that life is an endless chain of pleasant and grievous futilities, how much happier our adult years would be!  Instead of which, we were taught the beauty of a blind patriotism, the goodness of chastity, the decency of hard work and the importance of conformity.  It is not until we grow up that we learn how patriotism is an emotion that has little or nothing to do with shooting and military drill.  It is only when we are grown that we know how patriotism has everything to do with the picture of a certain street in a small country town, red brick houses surrounded by tall trees and pale green grass in the dawn.  Patriotism has much to do with Fifth Avenue and Michigan Boulevard at two 'clock of a rainy morning; but the saying, 'My Country, right or wrong!' is not patriotism.  When I was a child, the teacher used to make the entire class rise every morning and salute the flag.  I remember it went something like this:  'I salute my flag and the Republic for which it stands.  One nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.'  After several years, I began to speak these words as a parrot would speak them, finding no thought, beauty or affection in them.  How much more beautiful patriotism could have been made for me had the teacher spoken of the iridescent plumes of geysers in Yellowstone Park, the varied scenes of hill and plain in Montana, the golden wheat fields of North Dakota, and the Mississippi River as it drifts, with a slow, turgid charm, past small hamlets in Missouri and Louisiana.  But I had to learn all this for myself many years later.  How much better I would have understood patriotism, if the teacher had told me about the radiance in the faces of immigrants when they first catch sight of the Statue of Liberty!  For it is obvious that the most patriotic American is the one who has just arrived, and does not, as yet, know of America's heartaches and disappointments."

     And, with that thought, I'll close out this post in the hopes that January 6th was actually 2020's last horrifying gasp, and that 2021 proper has now started (though certain Senators seem determined to prevent that), and in the hopes that in the coming days, months and years we'll see more of the kind of patriotism Sol is endorsing at the end of the speech, and a distinct lack of the type he rejects in the middle.