it's a bleak day out there; it's been. snowing since last night, off and on, with it on at the moment, snowing pretty hard but not amounting to much. it will die off in a couple hours, then get very cold, then stay that way and then get colder, according to the weather station. i guess we shouldn't be surprised.

i lead a pretty busy life, usually dashing in the cold, running stuff out to my son about three miles away, sometimes three or four times a day. in this case we made sure he was well-stocked and i don't think he'll pressure us to go to the y, even though obviously on a bleak day it would be good to get some exercise. the driving is bad but i did it anyway, got up, went out there, drove some poor girl over to their house. three miles of pretty bad roads and then three back home again. the bad part is she'll probably need a ride later, and it won't probably get any better.

it's lincoln's birthday, and that makes me smile inside as i remember a history of living in illinois eighteen years before going out southwest. it was a classic stray-dog holiday, because the state honored lincoln but not presidents, and nobody knew it, so they put their garbage out on the wrong day and garbage on the curb for a few days brings the stray dogs. this year, celebration of lincoln is pretty much finished, since we're all about veterans and mlk these days and something has to go. but a nice big snowstorm means they called off school and everyone is sleeping in and not going anywhere. that's what a holiday is supposed to be.

in my promoting i'm really in a funk, just don't feel like getting out on social media at all. not facebook, not bluesky, not x not nothin'. i watch the government being dismantled like a demolition project and it makes me sick, the last thing i want to do is go out there and say hey buy my book. at least half of these people voted for him and what's worse, my people don't really like amazon, and all my ads lead people to amazon. i'm beginning to think it would be better to go entirely indie, away from amazon, yet it's such a staggering operation that i can hardly imagine it. amazon has made it easy - print on demand, only the ones i want for myself or someone else, no waste. i can't imagine how it would work if i really cut that cord.

more later...the night clamps down, traffic stops, but i have one more trip - to pick up the girl, three miles each way. wish me luck.

a week or two into my andrew jackson project and i'm wracked by self-doubt and uncertainty.

first, the gathering and reading was relatively successful. i hauled four or five books out of the library, and opened up one on the computer and one on the phone, and the one on the phone went so well that i'm already quite a bit through it even with a fractured life and more distractions than ever. it's a relief to delve into history when everything else seems so chaotic and democracy is tumbling down.

on the other hand, jackson was himself a racist and a violent one at that, so pretty soon i got to the creek massacre and the battle of new orleans (where i am now) and things will clearly not get better as he will be responsible for the trail of tears and other atrocities. and that leads me to question: do i really want to put my energy into writing about such things? on the one hand it's good to be a historian, to be able to say with authority, i know the differences between jackson and trump, jackson didn't rape anyone, etc. but i can do that by reading alone. writing is trying to put myself in that group of about two dozen biographers who have all taken a crack at his life and tried to put their own spin on it. my spin would of course be unique and would hopefully take the others into consideration. but at the rate i'm going it would take me more like eight or nine months, not two, to really know what's out there. that's a lot of time pondering ruthless racist ethnic cleansing.

one of the rules i've had and stuck to is to write what only i can produce. only i care about my great grandfather, for example, and can pore through crinkly copies of the magazine he produced in 1897. i've put that project aside (it was stalled anyway) but now i'm thinking - it's better, for my own writing, to create unique though admittedly non-best-seller books. the problem is that under financial distress it becomes harder to relax into non-profitable things and i feel the pressure to create something that, even only gradually, would bring in some income to someone sometime. i'm a little discouraged on that front too. if it takes eight months to write this, and then it needs other similar ones to truly get off thhe ground, how is that helping anyone? i'd be better served writing a novel if i can just focus on it long enough to finish it.

the hardest thing about the jackson project is that i can't really write anything yet, and won't be able to for quite a while. i have trouble picking up print books these days and getting information out of them, but have trouble taking notes on other things too - in other words, time is catching up to me on my quest to become a true, careful, methodical historian.

it could be that i started out by going in the wrong direction. i chose jackson because i already knew quite a bit about him, and i do. but he's a guy that has a couple dozen biographies already - some three volumes - and reams and reams of historical scholarship. if i started with a guy like harding there would probably be far fewer biographies; therefore i could have a unique product fairly quickly. i don't feel the need to be exhaustively thorough, but rather just accurate, and to be like a gateway for people who want to study an era or the management of the government throughout a period of time. i delved into the early 1800s to get my mind off what's happening today, and it worked, but how much government-management can a person take? every time i get back to the news it's some other government office being dismantled or put to the wrecking ball, so that trump can give his millionaires another raise. does reading about the massacre of the creeks help this? no not really. nor would reading about harding helping sell the government off to his business cronies. it would just show that what we're going through isn't completely new.

so i have an existential crisis about how i could be spending my time, besides driving kids around. ayubba.

things are picking up since a little girl was dropped in our household, a temporary foster child but nevertheless #12 and a sister of #11 who we fostered a little bit ago. while #11 is 16 years old, almost through high school, this little girl is still in elementary and has a long way to go, so we might not be her best option, me being 71 and all. for her it's like being brought up by your grandparents. but we're her fifth or sixth placement in less than three months. could be trouble.

on the writing front i started a project to write a biography of andrew jackson. i did this because delving into the 1820s is one way of not becoming too grieved at the wrecking ball that is being used on our own democracy today. jackson was also a fighter, a power-grabber, but he was more of a man of the people, and never raped or assaulted women as far as i know. he also was a soldier, not a draft-dodger, but enough history, the point is, by knowing a little of this, and lining them up a little, i can put them in perspective and get on with my life. i find that ten or fifteen minutes of the 1820s is enough to help with the fact that i will have to, and will, read the daily news one way or the other.

more later...