Week 43 - Guilt Trip

 

Update – Doing pretty well, for a change. I’ve been game-free for a week now. I’ve been writing instead. I just finished a big info dump chapter in the detective book; from here on out it’s a straight race down the home stretch to the finish. There’s a good chance I can get this second draft finished before the end of the month. Part of that, unfortunately, is because I haven’t gotten any new assignments from my paid job in three weeks. No guarantee I’ll get any, either. For all I know, the company will be shutting down at the end of the year. Things always slow down around Christmas so I’ve been going through this every November-December for at least the past 3-4 years. Each time I’ve been lucky, but now…well, let’s just head on to the post proper, shall we?

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Here’s the deal: I retired a couple of years ago, at age 63, mostly because I finally accepted that nobody was going to give me a full-time job with benefits and a living wage when they could hire some inexperienced high-school grad for a lot less money and lower health insurance costs. For the last couple years I’ve been getting by on Social Security and working as a freelance editor for an e-book publisher. It was a pretty sweet deal, since at the time I was making enough from the paid work to cover my lot rent and utilities, with SS handling the rest. On good months I could even sock a few bucks away in savings. I should have been writing and subbing too, but…I’m not sure what happened. Complacency, maybe. Poor sales on the books I did put out. Isolation leading to depression and the video game addiction. A sedentary lifestyle exacerbated by the Covid lockdown. I decided to turn things around at the beginning of 2023. Keep working, get back into writing. Build myself a future.

And that’s when the fun began. First a change in the tax laws socked me with a $700 bill in taxes and led to me having to pay quarterly (because I’m a contract worker, that makes me self-employed). That decimated my savings right off the bat. Then there was the diagnosis of uterine cancer which led to the hysterectomy. Then the long-time writers in the publisher’s stable pretty much left en masse, reducing my workload to a trickle. Then there was inflation. And new expenses, as both the house and I began to break down at the same time. Again, I could have written more, if I hadn’t been blocked by anxiety.

And then the election happened.

I voted for Harris. I have no regrets. It was a choice between two ideologies; one of the sides didn’t give a shit if women suffered and died, and was making noises about cutting Social Security, at the moment my main source of income. Not exactly a coin-toss decision for me. I was certain the majority of Americans, especially American women, would feel the same way.

Boy, was I wrong. I’m pretty sure men hate us; Republican men appear to, at any rate. I thought women would vote for self-preservation. I forgot how much women hate other women, probably more than the men do. Given the choice between an intelligent, experienced black woman and a white, male convicted felon and established rapist with the cognitive skill of a turnip—well, we all know the outcome. A whopping 52 percent of white women voted for the rapist/felon because no way in hell were they going to put some darky bitch in the Oval Office, even if she’d vowed to save their lives. No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

So I could be losing my Social Security within the next couple of months. To all you sons and daughters of bitches, fuck you very much. I’ll save you a spot at the homeless shelter because your turn will come soon enough.

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Why the guilt, then? Because, even though I have leftist leanings, that doesn’t mean I blindly support all leftists. I think I’ve made my antipathy for “wokeism” and the radical SJWs who pushed it onto all of us clear. I don’t like anything or anyone who interferes in my efforts to make a living. Yes, you have a right to exist and be heard, but when you get into publishing and push your agenda into my chosen genres to the point of excluding all voices but your own, that’s when you and I have an issue.

That’s changed now. The election of the Straight White Supremacist Party means my book, with its straight white protagonist and mostly white cast, suddenly has a better shot at publication. So do a lot of my older SFF writings, which had mostly male leads. Then there’s that series that I started and got blocked on. I decided from the beginning, way back even before Donnie’s first go-round, that the series’ leads would all be straight white men from Texas. With guns. That might have been the kiss of death even a year ago. It would probably be a bestseller now.

I’m sorry a lot of women from both sides of the political fence are going to suffer and die. I’m not sorry the election may have changed publishing enough so that I have a shot at survival. In our new zero-sum society, it’s every gal for herself.

I doubt this will last long. When those in power run out of victims, they’ll likely turn on each other, and We the People should be able to oust them in favor of someone we can bitch about with impunity. Or else we’ll all be speaking Russian. Hey! I might get an answer to my question if Vladdie Boy does invade Alaska. There’s always an upside to everything. See y’all (hopefully) next week.