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.