I finished a novel rough draft today. But the end is not the hardest part to write. Well, this one was, but not because it was the end of the story. It was the part where a character you have carefully crafted over time, and really learned to love, has to die because that is simply how the story goes. It was not a sad death, or an unresolved death, as such. It was a fulfilled life of meaning and magic that simply came to its ending point. My own real-life story may come to an end sometime in near the future too, and I can only hope it is half as much a satisfying completion as this one was. And yet, my heart is sore from having written it.
The novel is called Recipes for Gingerbread Children. It is a story of a little old lady. She is alone in the world, except for the people in the little Iowa town where she is now living, especially the middle school age people who gather at her house to eat her gingerbread cookies and listen to her German fairy tales. She was also a concentration camp survivor, so this story has Nazis in it. Don’t worry though. They are dead Nazis. And there is a werewolf in it. But only a baby werewolf. Oh, and there are two twin teenage girls who are practicing nudists in it. But you probably aren’t worried about them. There are also fairies in it. She tells fairy stories, after all. And the whole book is more or less a collection of fairy stories. And there is a lot of magical gingerbread cookies.
But I had to write the “character dies” part that I knew was coming for about six months. It is the part that will make or break the story. It is the part I will most need to polish and rewrite. But the fact remains, the story ends with a death. So there is that. Life with gingerbread in it is also life that eventually comes to an end.
And that part of the story is always really, really hard to write.
Catch a Falling Star 
Apparently, What Winning Looks Like
Somebody who has an orange spray-tan on his face, a wig made out the remnants of the Scarecrow from Oz after the Wicked Witch was done with her revenge, and tiny, tiny hands once promised that if elected, he would make us sick of winning. Heck, I was sick before the battle started. And winning so far this week has meant merely that the Trumpcare/no-care/death-care plan failed spectacularly in the GOP controlled House. And why did it fail, providing me with a backhanded win? Because the Freedom Caucus couldn’t agree to a plan that wasn’t cruel enough to the old, the sick already, and the poor. Seriously, they wanted a healthcare plan that didn’t cover mental health, prescription drugs, hospitalization, or basically everything that I might need an insurance policy to cover. They want, ideally, to give us health insurance where we must continually pay premiums month by month and then, when we get sick, choose to die at home and get no benefits. So winning for me means that I can continue to get the crappy insurance coverage I already have under Obamacare to keep me perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy. And it IS a win compared to what the Evil Republican Empire wants to do to me.
But one thing that makes me even sicker about this kind of winning is that it is simply a temporary stay of execution. They are going to do it again. How many times, after all, have they voted to repeal healthcare already? I have lost count. Republicans really, really, really don’t want us to keep any of our own money when we can give it to some soulless corporation instead. And the budget that lurks around the corner is just as big, bad, and brutal as the whole healthcare kerfluffle. They mean to roast and eat Big Bird like a Thanksgiving Turkey, steal food from school children, fire everybody who works for the government and even thinks about preventing corporations from pouring poisons into our water and air, and cut funds to the State Department so that diplomacy and prevention of wars is seriously impaired.
So what, as a concerned citizen, am I gonna do about it? Well, I’m a sick old former school teacher who likes to write humor pieces while I’m busy slowly dying. So I’m going to make fun of the bad guys. Seriously, the best I can do is try to ridicule them to death.
So let’s start with the Trumpinator’s penchant for hiring evil leprechauns to torment us.
And I want to take a moment to talk about the perils of allowing turtles to do politics.
It is true that “slow and steady wins the race” but, come on! It also apparently allows you to steal Supreme Court nominations and have no clue what “hypocrisy” means. He is offended when Democrats refuse to accept and love his party’s proposals, but demonstrated absolutely no ability to say the word… you know the word… the one that means the opposite of “no”… when Democrats were in charge.
And then there’s the lovely zombie-eyed granny hater that we have allowed to eat the social security system. His plans for Medicare, Healthcare, and Social Security are all featured now on posters in the Grim Reaper’s public relations office.
So there you have it. That’s the best celebration of the recent win that Mickey can come up with in his stupid little head. It’s no wonder we are tired of winning already.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, humor, politics
Tagged as evil leprechauns in politics, healthcare, humor, Jeff Sessions, Mick Mulvaney, Mitch the Turtle McConnell, Obamacare repeal, Paul Ryan, politics, Trump winning