The situation: I finished the last novel I was working on, The Wizard in His Keep. I like it. It is not the best book I have ever written, but it might be the fifth best. I am now in the between-projects doldrums. There is no wind in my sales. And I have a cough that is making me miserable, especially if it turns out to be COVID 19. If that’s actually what it is, then the only place I’ve been where I could’ve caught it is the voting precinct. That means voting against Donald Trump may have cost me my life.
I have no real reason to go in and get tested, though. When I was in the most misery yesterday, I took some of the antihistamine the doctor gave me for the last illness I thought might be COVID, and my head cleared up during the night. I have no fever today. And the virus plaguing me now might actually be a cold brought on by allergic reactions to California smoke in the Texas air and the gawd-awful astronomical pollen counts created by global warming.
If it is the start of my final illness, I definitely blame Trump and the Republican Party of Texas. My mother in Iowa got to vote by mail-in ballot. My sisters got to vote by mail. But Texas requires you to get approval of your excuse to get a mail-in ballot. This I could not obtain by the deadline over two months ago in early August because we were in quarantine as it expired. And I had to go into a polling place that has mostly Republican voters coming in to vote early. I didn’t see any maskless wonders there, but the potential for virus in the poorly-ventilated air was pretty good.
And these sour grapes really do make for very poor whine. Even though they ferment pretty easily and stink to high heaven, they are not very funny or delivered with the least bit of dramatic irony. It will only be more sour if I manage to live to election day to see Trump, Cornyn, and their evil minions manage to win by cheating. The eternal pessimist in me is expecting that result. It has a 95% chance on Rotten Tomatoes.
So, I will leave the idea there for now, a moldering stew of sour grapes and rotten tomatoes. It stinks. And I feel too ill to do anything more with it.
Catch a Falling Star 