I feel pretty drained right now. I’ve been turning out writing at a pretty good clip. Some pals and I are going to shoot a movie I wrote called “Live and Let Spy.” That should be in internet form for consumption in a few months. It’s pretty short too, so no excuse for not seeing it!

I feel like the writing part of my brain is on auto-pilot, and is doing pretty good. But the political part is numb. The fire has kinda petered out. I don’t know how some of these people can keep at it day in and day out. It’s exhausting. I kept thinking maybe I need a better system to organize my time and effort and what not in order to get more articles and the like, but maybe I only have one a month in me.

Like the Schumer amendment, which would have given us a gimpy public option in the finance committee bill. It lost because of three Democratic senators. Those Senators are from North Dakota, Arkansas, and Montana. Each of those states has less than a million people. Combined, they are less than 1 percent of the population. Those states are all less than 30th in GDP, compared to other states.

I’d be cool with Senators having so much power, 6 year terms, filibuster, etc, if they were smarter and more responsible than most House members, but Senators are just as dumb as any other legislator. At this point, states are just arbitrary political organizations. Why should the 600,000 people in Montana get as much say as the 20 million in New York? Because of lines drawn on a map 100 years ago?

But, honestly, I’m not that pissed about it, not pissed enough to actually try to convince other people. If anyone objects to my analysis here, I’d just think, “Sure, whatever.” I mean, this seems so obvious to me that it doesn’t make sense to argue for it. It’s like arguing for how grass is green.  If someone tries to argue grass is transparent, it doesn’t sharpen your argumentative skills by arguing with them.

But moreover, I don’t want to argue with anyone. I just want to kick back with some beers and not have to face the real world, or the truth. It’s easy to see how post modernists can argue against the existence of reality when you regularly encounter people with views that are so divergent from yours that they don’t make sense. I think we all accept that other people have other opinions, but how is it that other people can have other “facts”?  Other “facts” then build other “realities.”

I posted a screed about healthcare a while back, here and on Facebook. I hoped my sister Colleen, who works in healthcare, would respond. She didn’t for a couple of weeks, so I guessed she didn’t read it or didn’t care. I happened upon that note the other day, and saw that she did reply much later. She wrote one sentence, basically saying she was disappointed at how little I knew about health insurance.

I wonder now if she felt the same way I do. We both have our divergent set of facts, building our own realities, but they are opposed to each other. Rather than try to hash it out, and risk crumbling those realities, we just don’t talk about it. We keep filtering our information so it reinforces our worldviews.

I’ll be back in form soon enough. Just thought I’d try to get some of these thoughts out while I’m here.

Assistant Editor

As this is my first blog here, I will quickly say hello and thanks for reading. On other blogs I’ve written, I’ve started by apologizing for mistakes I’m bound to make, overgeneralizing important issues, becoming melodramatic, resigning myself to coming eschaton and in the same post cheering with wild-eyed faith in the human spirit. However, I won’t make that apology here.

Although fiction writing is my first love, I am very interested in journalism and read tons of it. In any kind of writing, the writer has to deal with the filters of editors and such. For screenwriting, it’s armies of development and marketing people. There are fewer overt filters in journalism, but the MSM is still putting out a polished product. It’s only in papers like the Underground that writers are freer to speak truth to power. Mainly because there’s no money in it.

Christopher Ketcham has an interesting piece at Counterpunch about the agony and fulfillment of freelance writing.