YES, PANIC.

By which I mean come see us tonight, Vancouver, and tomorrow, Seattle!

My mom, God love her, has a touch of Marianne Williamson to her, a vestige of her 30 years with healing crystal friends in Southern California. She doesn't have Williamson's anti-science crazy, but she holds the idea that if I talk about my paranoia, my deep suspicion verging on certainty that His Lunatics have already started their shooting war, I am putting it out there in the universe and creating it as fact.

I always yes her. Yes, Mom, yes, I know. Of course, yes. I never argue that we need to be alert to the dangers around us, and that refusing to name the monster will not make it go away. 

I am supposed to plump you up here, to assure you that in the case of that shooting war, we will have the military on our side, and we may. But we won't have the small town police departments, or even the Portland PD. I am not supposed to let the shooting war enter my brain at all, or I will ideate their bullets with the 3D printer of my mind. I must be a cheerful warrior, pure of heart and without fear; paranoia is bad for readership, unless your readers are stupid wingnuts desperate to SELL GOLD and BUILD THEIR BUNKERS for the HOLY RACE WAR they've got their sad old boners for.

I have been on vacation I think a week now, and the paranoia hasn't receded a bit.

My husband's grandparents passed down to all the hundred cousins a share each in a 60-year-old cabin in the middle of the ocean in the Puget Sound, or, I'm told, the Salish Sea. There is no electricity. You boil the water for the coffee, and the crab you just caught with a turkey leg, and the dishes. Everything takes a long, peaceful time. You do puzzles at the massive table for three days straight; you take a hot tub stoked by a wood fire and filled with water from the sea; you make sangria and wave to the boats; you do not, like an idiot, check your phone. It isn't until the ferry ride back to land that you look at Twitter and see the president wants to nuke a hurricane. How silly. Everyone knows nukes are for asteroids, and perhaps a volcano. You can not fight wind , you dope. You must call her Mariah!

This vacation has not heartened me, or strengthened me for the (metaphorical) fight, but it has been a cessation from the constant . The constant embarrassment. The constant whiplash. The constant bad-faith whipped-up bullshit. The constant Mitch McConnell, and the constant Trump, more and more and more of it each year that used to be called a "day." And that's as much as I can ask for at this moment in the alternate timeline that produced President Biff. I don't need to be vigilant for another five days; I can look out the goddamned window and try to stay off Twitter; Evan and Dok and the kids are being eagle-eyed for me. Well, I can ask for more: I can ask for more money, as last month and this month have been low-tides for donations, and with one more like them -- no, I'm not going to threaten, or ideate that into fact.

If you are in Vancouver, I hope you'll join us tonight, Thursday, at Spanish Banks (look for the banner!), let's call it 5: 30 to 7:30, since we got an RV park way the fuck out of town. (But we'll doubtless stay late with you.) And if you're in Seattle, please do come and see us tomorrow (Friday) at Golden Gardens, let's call that 6:30 p.m. We will potluck, and in person I won't bum you out or get my melancholy on you, it wouldn't be good host-man-like. Instead we will laugh and be gay; we shall potluck and dance. (We probably won't dance, unless you have a feeling you want to interpret through movement, oh fuck it, we totally will.) Whatever it is, we'll do it together. You, knowing you are out there, are my strength.

Aloha nui loa.

Your editrix (me)