the sun is going down on a very spring=like friday night. my job from about three on is to drive teens around. they are pretty much dysfunctional in getting license & car yet still have all the needs of modern teens. i enjoy driving even the driving i do for a part-time job so things could be worse. i struggle to keep up on the car.

my wife is out of town for the weekend. my opportunity to do some writing, but i'm occupied driving, and also eating and shopping, not to mention working. i should be marketing my books more; got the wind taken out of my sails when the country went fascist, and all the good things came tumbling down. firebombs aimed at museums, concerts, galleries, anything the "woke" might enjoy. the purpose being, i guess, to run us out of here. but where would we go? canada? he's about to annex that. it would "make america a bully again."

enough of that; i'll try to keep it out of here. this blog is about the road, the stuff on the side of it, the spring popping out in the fields near it. i shall not get railroaded into bitterness.

i will however have to find a different direction for my writing. stories about the gentle ways of americans, etc., or about history of education, immigrants and pioneers, they have no place in the modern world.

a cousin keeps calling me, and she just called. it's that she saw an owl today, like a spirit tugging on her, and she was convinced that our cousin died. now the problem is, it's very possible, and it's also possible that it would have happened without me necessarily hearing about it. i'm a little out of the loop, not maybe as much as she is, as most of the eleven cousins won't talk to her at all, but it's not like they get right on the phone and talk to me either. and in fact the two who did talk, including my sister, no longer talk as much. it's like things are falling apart at the end. some could die and we wouldn't even know. that's a widespread family of eleven cousins, just kind of dis-assembling into the mist.

might go to another rally tomorrow. last week i went to one, the hands off rally, and it felt good. one has to make one's voice heard. even a silent protest, or, i just stand there with a sign like a mime, that's good enough. i don't have to get acquainted with all the spies in the crowd.

we used to live in a world where those of us on the left were watched pretty carefully. we didn't always know who, but we knew that if we got out there and demonstrated enough, people knew it. peoplle knew and kept track. they didn't necessarily bring charges, or make our life difficult, or haul us off to guantanamo, or disappear us, but they knew we were out there. it was their job to know. it was their job even to find out which of us were into more serious trouble, in terms of causing real damage to the status quo. i guess they thought, if you're just out there carrying a sign, you're the least of our problems. it was more the people who were blowing up buildings and such. like the tesla vandals are today, maybe.

i myself feel too old to go down that way. i just want to live out my last decade in peace.