Ashland, southern Oregon.Saturday, September 19, 2026.
Summer is serving up a last hurrah, taking us into the high 80s today and low 90s tomorrow. Sunshine crowns the multi-colored trees and serves up against a deep blue sky.
I’m going to pass on writing about Trump and politics today, so it’ll be a short post.
Today’s music is “Talk of the Town”. It’s in the morning mental music stream after friends and I were talking about the plight of the bears here in southern Oregon. “Talk of the Town” is a 1980 song by the Pretenders. If I was writing about the current national situation, it would be a good song for today.
Sample Lyrics
The rules and such never bothered you You call the shots and they follow
May this day and every day find you safe, free, healthy and happy.
Jill Dennison has done it again for us, curating a fine collection of net toons. These are so critically needed to keep a proper perspective on Trump’s arrogance and destruction.
Here are my top four. Please click over to her website to see more.
Ashland, southern Oregon. Thursday, September 17, 2026.
Sunny today, but cloudy. 66 F for the moment. 100% chance of thunderstorms, the weather seers tell me, with a high of 78 F.
Mom is back home in the assisted living facility. Suffering laryngitis and diarrhea. Resting in bed, she said, because she feels very tired. Mom has three appointments coming up. She has three medical appointments coming up in September.
I have a new appointment next week. Changing PCPs because my current PCP is leaving to go into private practice, focusing on peptide therapy. I meet my new PCP next week. Hope she turns out to be as good as my last one. Will lightning strike twice?
As expected, Trump launched some more Operation Epic LOOK — SQUIRREL! this week.
Your Trump Quote of the Day:
I’m not a lawyer but I’ve watched some TV. You’d think that if evidence came out about this plot that any law-abiding, intelligent individual would ensure the authorities had it so that due process could take place and law and order maintained.
No. Not Trump. Instead of doing that, Trump went on social media to bray about it. Which tells us that it’s more fact news. Just another distraction. More Operation Epic LOOK — SQUIRREL!
That leads us to ask — again — why did Trump make that public claim? Did US intel get it wrong or did Trump hear someone wrong? Perhaps Russia and Ukraine lied to Trump and said they would, to make him appear weak and out of touch.
Or perhaps, truthfully, Trump just pretended this is what happened in order to make it seem like he’s relevant.
These positions and calamities have led to declining support for Trump and his policies. Of course, something from Operation Epic LOOK — SQUIRREL! was needed.
We’ve seen enough of Trump to see through his deceptions.
I ended up with Bob Dylan singing “Masters of War” in my morning mental music stream. I think the 1963 release accurately reflects how Trump behaves, hiding, making claims, while destroying our world.
Sample Lyrics
You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks
You that never done nothin’ But build to destroy You play with my world Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand And you hide from my eyes And you turn and run farther When the fast bullets fly
Like Judas of old You lie and deceive
A world war can be won You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes And I see through your brain Like I see through the water That runs down my drain
May your spirit carry you through these times to happier places and a more comfortable and secure life.
That’s why, despite all Trump’s expertise, the national debt is skyrocketing.
Measles outbreaks have achieved levels not seen in over a quarter century.
Affordability remains a growing crisis in the United States, with oil, diesel, and energy prices leading the way.
The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t disappear overnight as Trump claimed it would. Over a million in the United States experienced COVID-19 related deaths. We are still coping with COVID-19 six years after Trump made those claims.
Look at the messes Trump has made across the world. Let’s begin with the garish gold he put on We the People’s house.
Shift to how he’s demolished the East Wing, wiping out a heritage he couldn’t grasp, which can’t be duplicated.
Trump then turned his ‘expertise’ to the Kennedy Center, which is now falling apart and begging for money.
Likewise, Trump messed up the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pond. Every time Trump had work done on the pool, Trump claimed, I know better. Every time, Trump disparaged others’ knowledge and efforts. Every time, Trump lied about what happened and bragged what he was doing next.
Trump burdened our economy with tariffs, thinking that will drive manufacturing to the United States, and started a war which he doesn’t know how to stop, which is only worsening the affordability crisis.
That would be the prices which Trump complained about as being too high under President Biden. Now they’re higher under Trump. But under Trump, Trump Double Standards are employed. He spins a new word weave. These prices are not higher. They’re coming down soon. And they’re not his fault. Nor are they a problem — it’s a golden age! Here’s some tariff relief to bring prices down and more pulled from the Strategic Petroleum Reserves to try to reduce prices.
Then, Trump proffered five grand if his party keeps control of Congress.
Finally, in a desperate effort to displace blame and responsibility, Trump pivoted, blaming Ukraine for high diesel prices because Ukraine bombed Russia while pretending the war he started with Iran isn’t the single largest driver of rising prices.
Just as a reminder, Trump said he would end the Ukraine Russia war by the time he took office in 2025, eighteen months ago. Despite that claim, the war continues.
In short, Trump has created a shit show.
Now Trump is claiming that he knows more than AI experts. Eschewing their warnings, just as he dismissed warnings about tariffs, war with Iran, COVID-19 — just as he’s ignored every warning any true knowledgeable expert gave.
Last night’s dream was a masterclass in chaos. Had a lot of fecal matter, too.
Backing up a little, I was again in the military, running some operations center. They’d been having issues there and I arrived to fix them. Which I immediately started doing, explaining it to the young airmen there. They began to understand what I was doing.
Weird thing was, the operations center wasn’t the classic secure and windowless, vaultlike facility where I usually worked during my military career. No, this place was part of some kind of large and busy convention center. People were coming and going. Loud, it was getting busier.
After arriving and doing some things at the ops center, I drifted out and changed clothes. Well, I basically took off everything except my underwear. Then I decided to go back to work to ensure everything was okay. To do that, I donned a short, furry pink robe that barely covered my rear end. Wearing only it and my undies, off I went to work.
Musicians were finishing a conference in the ops center, something which was entirely aligned with what I expected. Although they didn’t have instruments, I knew they were musicians, holding a meeting in the ops center conference room. I talked with them a bit, asking about how it had gone, small talk.
Others were impatiently waiting to use the conference room. I rushed around to get it ready for them but so many people were going in and out that I struggled to get anything done. Part of my cleaning was to check the commodes.
The first was out on a busy floor’s center. On carpet. No walls, no way to have privacy.
Which didn’t surprise me. Getting to the toile, I found – OMG, it was completely full with feces!
I was disgusted and angry. What was wrong with people that they kept using it when it obviously not working? How did they even do it? They would have had to squat over the toilet to avoid the piled crap.
I had no idea how to clean it out; there was no water, no way to use a plunger. I would need to shovel that shit out first. I was going to find someone else to do that, and that was an issue for later.
There was another toilet availab. I rushed to check it, confirm it was okay, and tell everyone to use it. But guess what? It, too, was stopped up. It at least had water and wasn’t as full but as soon as I put a plunger in, feces-filled water slopped out.
Nuts. Filling conspicuous in my short pink robe and bare white legs, I decided to go change before trying to fix this mess. Along the way, I ran into my superiors and gave them an update on the twin messes. Then I went on to change.
I wrote a brief post about writing novels and searching for agents the other day. My friend, Nan, commented on it and asked how I go about finding an agent. I pointed her to one of the places, MSWL, which I use to search.
Nan commented back.
Way back when I was ready to publish, I did my own research for potential agents and contacted a few with minimal success … which is why I ended up self-publishing.
I suppose a site like this is helpful, but from a quick look-see, it appears more like a resource for “agents” that aren’t getting enough submittals through regular channels.
But it’s been a loooong time since I wrote/published my book, so what do I know? 😉
Nan’s problem before remains my problem now. How do you find an agent?
MSWL is one of five online resources which I use. The publishing industry is changing, though. Traditional publishing and agents are still out there. So is self-publishing. But either one requires editing, marketing, sales channels. Doing these things yourself is a challenge when you self-publish.
As far as I can tell, all the agents which I review are getting many submissions. But they all have different requirements for submitting, whether it’s by snail-mail, email, or online tools like QueryTracker. Some want only the first five pages. Others request a light synopsis or outline. Some agents ask for the first ten pages while others request the first fifty. There are asks for bios, previous work, comps.
Will you hear back? Probably not. You’re generally submitting into a void. The agents are upfront about that.
The many sites are themselves problematic. It’s a challenge for agents to define what they’re looking for and how they’ll accept submissions. But keeping up with keeping sites up to date is yet another challenge. All too often, I find an agent which seems like they’ll be a good fit my offering only to begin the submission process and find that that they changed agencies or are closed to submissions.
It’s a familiar lament. Writers have put out many stories about how many times they’ve been rejected and how long it took them to find an agent and get published. More stories are rising about how writers self-published and achieved success, and then had agents and publishers come calling on them.
I began years ago with a simple question, how do you write a novel? I read books, magazines, blogs, and spoke with successful published novelists. The bottom line: you find out what works for you, and you do it.
It feels like that’s the same answer for publishing: find out what works for you.
