#tim barrus FB

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Take notes. I had to make a judgement call. I got my family out of North America. My decision was based in what the New York Times take is. In all the talk about vibes, the publication has one, too. It's dark. It's fearful. It's nervous. If it wasn't, something would be very wrong. Pollsters are beginning to look like stunned deer in headlights. One question dominates journalism. How Bad Is It Going To Be. What I hear in the voices of these conversations is a reckoning with defeat. Is there anyone at the New York Times who thinks he won't go after journalists. Journalists often feel immune to what to what is happening around them as they are there to cover it. A calm before the storm. No one has ever talked about a dynamic that is inherently stalking Trump. There is a psychotic link between suicide and homicide. It is not uncivil to say that because it is simply fact whether it is polite society or not. Trump is not stable. I have always seen him as being suicidal. Homicidal ideation is as toxic as suicidal ideation. He dreams of executions, and no one is pushing back because we cannot bring ourselves to believe it. Believe it. Ideation can swing like a pendulum back and forth. Them or me. Them or me. There is no us. There is no Other. There is no there there. The internal and the external is a contest between pitbulls in a cage. One of those caged dogs will win. And then both dogs will die. America is not immune. Trump is a junkyard dog. Let's fight. We remain transfixed.

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Take notes. All flights (to anywhere) on November 6 are filling fast. I have already got my family out. The trick is to know when to get out of Dodge. The American people simply do not believe Trump will do what he has pledged to do. The threat to execute people he doesn't like seems to be, to most Americans, overkill. He wants you to be afraid, and we are. What will we be in 2028. If we are left standing at all. We are worried about 2025. 2028 seems so far off we refuse to examine the possibilities. Exactly how does he trash the US Constitution. How do you trash something you have vowed to protect. Do you burn it. Or do you rip it up. Question: Where are the other voices who have sworn to protect the Constitution. Why can't those voices do what they have vowed to do -- protect the Constitution. From Trump. What would that mean. Civil war. When the Confederacy was defeated in 1865, Jefferson Davis was captured, arrested for complicity in Lincoln's assassination, accused of treason, and imprisoned at Fort Monroe. Trump and Davis share analogies. A commitment to enforced institutional racism. We never really ended slavery. We just call it other names. Black prisoners working for the man (suits) do not represent an antithesis to slavery. That is slavery. Selective punishment, revenge, and it placates white people who are threatened every other minute. We have never settled the War Between the States. Fort Monroe is a museum. Bit it could still contain one old man.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/28/opinion/kamala-harris-dignity.html#permid=137174224

Take notes. Dignity in the face of screaming rage. By someone who has been burned before. This was very well written. I could never get into the whole nonviolent affect that speaks to us of calm. Calm is a problem. Anita Hill is pointing to a bigger issue. Her focus is rational and restrained. Sexism and racism are not compatible with human rights. If I were Anita Hill, I would be putting out feelers as to what flight she can pop into before Trump gets on the train toward his first day executions. It sounds downright dizzy, but we have all looked into the heart of Donald Trump and finding only an old man's venom.

The US prison system would volunteer to put on shows with hangings and beheadings. Do not think they won't. All you have to do is ask them. Small children will be required to watch, too, so they can begin indoctrination. I'm not going willingly when the big bad men from Ice arrive and batter the door down. There is risk in this scenario for them, too. Some of us don't get pushed around. Torture. Televised. Entire cities torched. The noose will be slipped on tight. Margaret Atwood had it right. What they really hate is sex. Once again, sex becomes a political act. Doing dignity does the same thing. It projects the whole idea of the word no. This is the hopeful view. My own is grounded in knowing who these people really are, and what their bottom line is among the wealthy who will win this culture war. Dignity is a great thing. But it will not stop Donald Trump.

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Take notes. Last Church Standing could be a book title. I live in the Blue Ridge. Our little towns all have a kinda strange housing market where $250,000 buys you one bedroom. I lived in a church once in Michigan. My bedroom was the balcony. It was a great place to write. How does architecture play romance with the light of soaring. I'm autistic and could spend an entire day just watching the sun move from window to window in more of a caress than spilling. When is worship worship. We danced in there. We made music (loud). We had a drawing class where (it was rumored) artist models had no clothes. Gasp. Every male for twenty miles signed up for that art class. Art is a den of depravity. "We thought we were getting a beautiful woman to model" I was told. "What we got was you. Can we bring our cameras." I am now a little sorry I said no. The church was haunted. Or. What was it that started playing the organ at four in the morning. That organ was worth more than the church. The building was a big bad box of fun things. We played dress up and put on shows. My favorite was the light show. With flashlights. We made huge fish fries for the entire community. Solemnity is not quite my vibe. Solemnity is a looking down because we are not worthy of seeing the angry face of god. Fiddledeedee. I don't look down. I look up. Soaring.

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Take notes. The historian and biographer Ian Kershaw described Hitler as "the embodiment of modern political evil". Under Hitler's leadership and racist ideology, the Nazi regime was responsible for the genocide of an estimated six million Jews and millions of other victims, whom he and his followers deemed Untermenschen (subhumans) or socially undesirable. The playbook works, but only if you have a population of compliant -- willing to do anything whatsoever -- people who are always ready to give up their human rights, like the right to live, and die for a cause whatever fearless leader wants to shove down any culture's throat. Hitler was impotent. The rage took everything and everyone. This piece is too prosaic. One journalist interviews another journalist. Come on, NYT. You can do better than this. There is nothing normal about Trump. There was nothing normal about Hitler. Both men found their victims, and that led them to a power based on hatred, revenge, and a blood lust that tore the world apart. When Trump comes to power, he will have lots of henchmen to carry out the orders (they will call it process), and comply. These are the guys who knock on doors late into the night. Interrogations will consume us. Hate will consume us (it already has). Revenge is a psychotic dive into the ugliness of the human race. You cannot talk about Trump and look for causation. His hatred means all bets are off.

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Take notes. There is no such thing as identity. Identity is a cultural concept of the self at war with society. I have had many windmills in my life. Those things we shake our swords at. What comes around, goes around. I lied. I said I was someone (I made him up) I was not. I knew I would be busted, that was the point. It was not identity theft because I created him. There is no such person, and I am not him. Cagey autobiographical -- pain -- is a dimension that most writers can flirt with, but they fail to sustain the far reaching impact that pain has on everyone in your life. Especially sexual partners. I cannot even know writers. I tried. It's self-defeating. If you meet a writer, run. I am currently in love with a character who has red hair. I don't know anyone with red hair. I love her. She's a soldier and does very bad things to her enemies. You see plot. I see desire. Desire is not unlike a mouse. You never know what's coming. We rarely even mentioned it, and it is not touched upon here. It's often a message we dance around. We do not claim it. My red head is named Hecuba, and she does claim it. Desire is the prowling animal of the night, and so is Hecuba. As someone who is autistic, I do not identify with prowling animals of the night in search of lust. A sense of lust is what -- pornographers -- do. I am a pornographer because my palette of desire is my mask, and I do not care what you, the reader, wants. You are only there for the performance.

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Take notes. There is no god.

There is no Jesus. There is no heaven. There are no wing rentals for Victoria’s Secret Angels. There are no angels. There are no gates. There is no sane theology. There never was a virgin Mary. Jesus did not walk on water. When Ross writes the word religion, he means Catholicism. He means some form of institutional oversight. The gravitas of vacuum. Be very careful about doors being opened to you. Ross glosses over the whole Boys Being Raped thing. Like it happened but let’s get out of here. Ross cannot see that the relationship between the institution and its behavior is an interiority eager to disguise itself yet again and again. Ross is being provocative. But to what end. The end is called authority. They are worshipping jurisdiction. Our lives are juxtaposed by an authority whose purpose is regimentation. Let us away to stories and legends and myths and illusion. That’s really blood you were drinking and it was not grape juice from Ralph’s. High theatre. Performance art. Kings and princes were created by homo sapiens. It’s not exactly hard to prove. Show me. Don’t tell me. You have no proof that there is a god to subjugate anyone. The greatest fraud in human history. It’s a great story. But it is not real. I am frequently lectured to about faith, and if I cannot find mine, there has to be something bad inside me to get me to ask such questions like what is reality. Maybe I am a witch. I am not a witch.

I am a steadfast heretic.

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Take notes. I have been listening to the whole Let Us Have More Babies And More Babies. So that we can keep the status quo of growth at all costs, development at all costs, overcrowding at all costs, environmental disaster and bring on climate change at all costs, we will pay you to have more babies. Conservatives love this nonsense. What is a time loop. There is something strange about going back to 1950.

Let us away to 1950.

Someone needs to tell these sillies that 1950 is over. 1950 is never over. In 1950, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, begins operations. In South Africa, apartheid became the law. Briton recognizes Israel. The Korean War begins. 39 U.S. soldiers are executed after being captured in battle by North Korea. In 1950, six people have all the money. In 2024, six people have all the money. I am not one of them. The point is that, no one is. Winston Churchill supports the idea of a pan-European army, allied with Canada and the U.S. President Harry Truman sends United States military advisers to Vietnam, to aid French forces.

Good times.

1950 was a big ha ha. We did not know the future. You want our babies to fight your wars. 2024 is a meat market. The burden of overpopulation is exactly what got us here on the freight train. We already have 14-year-old boys mopping the floors of the slaughterhouse. Analogies abound. In 1950, smallpox, polio, tuberculosis were still still around. Release the doves.

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Take notes. Great piece.

I knew we were in trouble when the Hurricane blew the front door off. I live at the top of a mountain in the Appalachian Blue Ridge. I have survived 22 hurricanes. But nothing like this one. The water was coming at us sideways.

There was no time to say goodbye to my tree. I love all the other oaks. But this one was their mother. Where the squirrels lived. Acorns everywhere.

It's just grief. I sit in stillness. It's a wound.

This mama lived through Edinburgh burning down. The Gregorian calendar. Sweden attacked by Denmark. The treaty of London signed. The poet, John Dryden, died. Massachusetts passed a law: Jesuits & Popish Priests. Making a finding that Roman Catholic clerics have attempted to incite American Indians into a rebellion against the Crown. Deposed King James II of England (James VII of Scotland) dies in exile, at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye in France. The first regular English-language national newspaper, The Daily Courant, begins publication on Fleet Street in the City of London; it covers only foreign news. Russian troops besiege the Swedish fortress of Nöteborg, and capture it after 15 days.

She lived through all of this and the War Between the States.

Every day, I could gaze upon something larger than myself. Something that came from the dirt like I did. I am not quite up to replacing that front door.

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Take notes. There are two Americas. The rich tribe. And the poor tribe. Nothing of significance in between. The senate is the rich guys. They never go down without a blood feud. The House of Representatives is also with the rich guys. They do go down regularly. The bottom is never bottom enough. The Supreme Court is not a tribe either of substance or authority. There are two kinds of justices. The rich kind with their fingers in our face. And the rich kind with their fingers in our face. I would gleefully clap with joy if the justices had to go out into the real world and find a real job. I dare you to go out into the street right now. Take your bullhorn and ask the public one question: Who Thinks We Need These Rich Guys.

No one.

They are expendable. And they have a lot of help. A lot of help. They have minions who fetch books, coffee, and wash the dishes with soap. No rich guy sees himself or herself as expendable. What is it these people do. Beyond the free rides and the camping trips and the best, only the best, health care money can buy. Giving Speeches. But do people listen. We smile because we would like to give a few of those ourselves clocking in at 50K per speech. I want an RV, too. And flags. Little flags that their wives wave back and forth, back and forth. Guess who writes their speeches. Go over to your SCOTUS window. Open it. Put your head out there and scream: "We Need More Money, We Need A Raise." Listen up. You do not need a raise. You need validity.

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Take notes. I get a lot of Reader Flack from readers that strenuously resent: "Why do you always have to deal with dead kids. It's depressing us. Poor us." I write about children I know. Having been in Special Education, I write about what I know. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Multiple Sclerosis. Pediatric AIDS in South Africa. ADHD. Neurodivergence. Autism spectrum. Addiction. Are just a few. Bad things. Like organic brain syndromes. Longevity is relative. I read this stuff where writers talk about raising the average age people are supposed to live.

Unless something goes wrong.

Something will go wrong. The suicide rate for aging homo sapiens has been creeping up for decades. I call them the Happiness Heretics. They do not want to be among us, and it makes us angry. At them. They feel their lives were torturous as they lived them, and death is a security blanket. A promise. Who would want to live a life defined by pain forever. We make them live for us. But we can be circumvented. "Hold still, it's for your own good."

Living forever is not for anyone's own good. When someone can't speak, all the helpers step in to interpret. The helpers have their own message. "If you ask too many questions, you will be labeled as difficult, and we will have to call (authority) the doctor to get you some happy pills that sedate you so we don't have to have these kinds of conversations.

Articulate the quality of life you have right now. Why are you here.

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Take notes. I lie to polls. This is Appalachia. From this perspective, this piece nails North Carolina. The new NC, and the old NC. It's difficult to get folks around here to slide into politics. It begins with a shrug. Then, we tiptoe around: I thought Trump was gonna... You'all know he love prostitutes (they do not say prostitutes), and he never built the wall. I wish he would build us a library (we need a library), there is a lot of talk whether or not to put a computer in there. There are no writers here (town folks do not know I write), so let's just stick to books, and prostitutes (laughs all around).

My voltital take on NC is that Trump is in trouble. He had always walked a fine line here. Everyone and their grams knows he's in trouble because: That naked woman from Czechoslovakia is for sale. I saw it (they didn't). Fox News. We lied to them pollsters. Great laughter ensures. The reality is that this little southern town, the courthouse is Big on the Confederacy and is a museum. Trump was coming with condos. Bulldozers came. No Trump. Many folks have never been over twenty-five miles from home. A lot of us grow our food. We went with Hillary. Town voted Hillary, and we still need a library. We lied to you. They chuckle because pollsters are not from here. Anyone not from here is suspect. NC is unpredictable. You'all lied to us. That you will make things better. We live hard scrabble lives with chickens. We laugh a lot in Our Town. I vote computers for the library.

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Tim Barrus Art

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Sometimes writing speaks. Sometimes writing unspeaks. Sometimes writing comes from truth. Sometimes writing comes from a symbolism of the nuanced truth. I do not care what you believe. I literally do not know that there is an audience. It feels like a very deep cold loneliness.

Rooney doesn't channel Sally Rooney. Good for her. She's awesome. What publishing needs is a few quick kicks by Irish writers.

Within the context of the relationships Rooney she writes about, what I am hearing is that as a person -- she's still a writer person -- who is a person, she's decidedly not too procedural. She is, indeed, focused on her characters. I admire her tremendously. Here's why.

Great writers never Gatekeep.

They do not become editors, publishers, teachers, and agents. Writers say no. Authenticity is an LA dive bar at four in the morning and it's dark inside because we have a darkness trapped internally in all our second selves.

Rooney seems mystified about readers. They're shadows. Editors are shadows. Agents are in a cattle call. I see no valid reason they exist.

Rooney gets tended to. She sells.

You swim with sharks or go home. By the time an editor is done, I have no idea what the thing is anymore. Editors have changed my endings for pablum. I say nothing. Paul lynch in Prophet Song hands the phone up on punctuation. I bow before him.

Rooney is true to herself. Yes! Characters and relationships and power are all she needs. If you build it, they will come.

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I was working in my office in the Hotel across the street from the Capitol building in Michigan. Our guests were legislators.The Secret Service wanted to speak to me. George Wallace was coming town and he was staying with us. I lived at the hotel, too. “There will be a lot of security.” You bet there was. They were on the roofs of every building. Snipers. Rifles. Suits. People hated Wallace. I was one of them. I had Room Service serve him bad cold food. Our roof had the snipers, too. Trump is Wallace on steroids. No one shot Wallace on our watch or in our hotel. He gave his speech, spent the night, and left. Inflaming the town. Trump is the equivalent of George Wallace. His racism drips with a concomitant disease called dementia. The mouth works and the eyes are somewhere else. His messages to Springfield are rants. His point is himself. He brings with him his emotional luggage and cruelty matching the cruelty of the place they came from. Haitians were in the way. Security for Trump. They’re vulnerable. And Trump is hunting them down with his rhetoric of rage. After all of this, you have to ask the question: What will he throw at us when he loses. Is there anyone who thinks he will go away. But no. We know who he is and the dark shadows he brings with him to the next town, and the next town, and the next town. Call out the National Guard. Yet we just bumble along. When he starts his executions, who will be next. Will Americans tolerate this. Yes. Apathy is the real enemy.

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The rains have finally left the Blue Ridge. All summer, I've been building a remote (understatement) tree house for the Big Cat Kittens and Mama. They will have to find it on their own. Bakers use those big plastic buckets for their icing bakery products. Then, they throw them out. I find them and cut the size down a bit. I use a base paint, and then I paint them forest green for camouflage. I put water in them and hang them from trees. Birds love it. During this last drought, the bird baths were a big hit. Then, the big birds showed up. Everyone gets a bath. I cannot name the big birds. It could be trouble. As I write this, they're outside the cabin. Building a very serious mansion of a nest. Not really twigs. But sticks. Finally, my mouse problem is solved. I usually get song birds (cat birds, a favorite), or turkey buzzards. The cold is already biting the morning air. I learn stuff from my guests. Mainly, what I've learned is that I am the guest. Not the other way around. I did not chop enough wood this summer. I should have nine cords out there, not two. No chain saws. Too noisy. And the minute I leave to ride into town on my bike, I am in your world. Which is in no way, shape, or form, my world. That feather on the ground is the result of seventy million years of genetics at work. My shine corn is what I have faith in. I love it, and so do the birds. It has been a difficult year for wildlife. If I can make it better for the animals, that is why I am here.