44. When Friends Don’t Like Your Book

Someone who was my very best friend when we were children (Vivian in Book One, and our parents were close friends too) started reading the first book of my memoir trilogy, then stopped when she got to the hard parts. Almost a year later, at my second request, she did read the rest. She praised the writing style, but never commented about any of the content, the story itself. She’s a great person, very perceptive, brilliant really, professionally accomplished and financially successful. I wondered why she stopped. I wondered if these truths about me and my family, never told before but never secret either, had somehow put me into a new category. Not so simple as we were then. My life would be full of mistakes and flaws. I took a different path from hers, one that led to much less monetary success, but much more adventure and wild beauty, and I wouldn’t change any of it.

I think it must have been uncomfortable for her to read about what I went through, back then as a kid when my parents’ marriage was falling apart, and then as a young woman when my desolate marriage did also. It’s possible that my truth now was embarrassing or even repellent to her. But to her credit, she stuck it out, and eventually did read it, for me.

I am arguably the black-sheep, the po’ white trash of our peer group. She was probably shocked to learn the painful extent of my birthmother’s descent into alcohol when I was eleven, and me stealing food from the grocery store and the wilted-produce dumpster by the loading dock. I am not ashamed of those things.

In my long life since then, among my careers I was a caregiver in an always-overwhelmed hospital emergency room for two decades. I have seen other souls in trouble, thousands, from alcohol, drugs, or other traps and addictions. I know that people do what they can. I don’t blame my birthmother for her addiction. I know it was not her first choice for dealing with the hardships of her life that were so painful and so many. Now, older and wiser, I don’t devalue her for her mistakes, or devalue myself for taking whatever means I could to feed myself and keep my spirit alive, as a child and as an adult. My story gets rough at times, it isn’t all pretty, but there are some incredibly brave and beautiful times too.

Another longtime friend (Lois in Book Two) read the first two chapters of Book One for me when I asked her to be a beta reader and give me some feedback. She marked a few typos and said nothing more. No comments about content, or having found any sort of meaning in the story, though there was some, for sure. She didn’t “get it.” She too is someone who is well-established in the traditional model of success. She didn’t need it. But I reminded myself that this doesn’t mean that nobody will “get” my book, or that nobody will need it.

After my initial disappointment, I wondered, Why don’t these intelligent, kind, honest women get it? Why don’t they see anything meaningful here? And the answer that came from the Wiser Voice Within said, “Maybe it’s not so much that they can’t see, but that they don’t want to see.” 

So there it is. If your friends and family give you lukewarm or even chilly reviews, consider that they have baggage too, unknown to you, that may be as heavy as your own. Or – maybe they really are dumber than a rock, and have no literary intelligence whatsoever. (The first one is much more likely than the second, though both are often found.) I know only too well– The truth is dangerous, and often painful. As I look back from a distance now, one possibility seems embarrassingly obvious:

Maybe these friends don’t want to know the person that I really am, or who I was back then, unknown to them. They want me to be forever the person they knew, or thought they knew, back when.

Victory Is My Name is not about that. Victory is an adventure tale, a mystery story, and a love-letter to Life. As for myself, telling the truth has set me free. I love this latch-key kid from the not-so-great side of town. I admire her resourcefulness, her survival instincts, her courage and grit. I respect the young woman she became who tried so hard to do things right and then was used and abused for her innocence. I respect her courage in breaking away, more than once, from everything she had, and the sheer ferocity with which this least-likely darkhorse sought the most brave of dreams, and got there.

And I respect my absent alcoholic birthmother just as much, who did her best even while her life fell apart and the trap of alcohol made everything so much worse. The truth is, millions of good people have made the same mistakes. I know, as you know, that even now these things are still happening to many of us, and we hide it in some sort of undeserved shame.

When you write your truth, no matter what it is, you’re going to find that some of your friends or family may not like it, may not be able to embrace it, or even accept it. This is not your fault, or theirs either. And this is not a reflection of your writing’s value and worth to the waiting world. To write from Life is a calling. It’s not a job, not a beauty contest. It may cost you some things that are more comfortable in life. Write anyway. Tell your truth anyway. You know you must. And share it whenever and wherever you can.

Traditional storytellers, Nonfiction narrative and memoir writers of the world: Take courage, take faith, and take honest pride in your gift. Not everyone will want it, so don’t harbor any regrets for the ones who don’t. You aren’t here to do it for them, but for your own spirit’s calling. Write for the many more who do need it, who have made mistakes while honestly seeking life, just like you.

 

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Victory Is My Name, Book One: The Burning Barrel
Paperback 288 pgs   ISBN#  978-0-9841730-9-9
E-book   ISBN#   978-0-9841730-4-4
Read a sampler:
http://www.darkhorsepress.com/sampler-victory.html

38. Take My Love and Shove It…

People let me down sometimes, even people I love. Ever happen to you? Mostly in things that don’t seem like a big thing to them, but they are to you? Me too. Not much we can do about it but try again. I do get weary of trying again though. I get angry at people, though they meant well, probably.

I’m sending this link with an email to a few good friends and some people who have been friends but have changed as I have changed. After all, the whole nexus of life is change. This is a web-link to the first book of my memoir trilogy, Victory Is My Name, Book One: The Burning-Barrel.

The response from earlier invitations has been a bit sad and disappointing. They start and then they stop. That may be a failing in my craft as a writer, or partly the reality that most people now don’t read. It’s just not a thing they do. Most people don’t talk either, they text or tweet. But the people in the out-there world who do read, talk, think and wonder about life are reading and writing more than ever.

A tweet is brief and momentary. A book is a solid object in space that may hang around for 100 years or more, if it has value in it. So it can be accessed more than once, and farther into time. It doesn’t vanish into the void of cyberspace. Even so, cyberspace is useful. I’m using it now to share these words with you.

The grandfather of all storybooks of course is the Bible. I’m not a concentrated student of it myself, and yet I have read some of it, and learned more of it from sources in my environment. I don’t expect to understand the amazing and inscrutable being, Jesus. That may be beyond my capacity to comprehend. But I have learned some very useful and effective life-tips from him. Like “turn the other cheek.” This actually baffles your enemies, and they usually back off feeling confused and guilty. Another one is double-edged: “Seek and you shall find.” This is true. If you look for the best in people and things, you will find it. If you look for the worst in people and things you will find it. What you/we hold most often in thought will play out in our physical material lives. “Be careful what you wish for” without realizing you are doing that with where your habitual thoughts are.

Here’s my book, Victory Is My Name, Part-1, The Burning-Barrel. You can read it or not. You can buy it of course, or download the e-book here, now, for free. I won’t know who did or didn’t read it, unless you choose to tell me. Your comments are welcome but not required and/or can be anonymous if you want.

So here’s my truth, my real self, the one you didn’t know. Here’s my love, take it or leave it.

 

To download or read on screen as a .PDF file
  http://w2w.victoriachames.com/beta/beta-V1w.pdf

26. In Defense of Editors

Editors are a bloodless lot. Ink runs in their veins. Like street paramedics, firefighters, and ER caregivers, the editors are the people whose job is not always lovely work, but it’s the work that must be done to save the savable lives. I spent 25 years in the emergency service and rescue professions, and people often asked me how I could do this, when it was obviously something that’s hard to do. It occurs to me now, that editors might be asked the same question. I have done a little bit of editing and I have some very modest skills in that, but I’ve got to say, as people have said to me about what I do – “I wouldn’t want that job! It’s not my cup of tea.” The truth of the matter is, life tends to call us each to some path or other, and provides us with the skills and tools and temperament we need for it. If we have the courage to do that thing we’re called to do, even though it’s not always easy or fun, we will be good at it. If we do something else, either because it seems easier or because other people tell us we should, we never are as good at life itself as we could be. Momentary digresion:  Expunge the word “should” from your vocabulary permanently. Strike-through it any/every time it pops up, and you will find that all of your thorniest decisions become astonishingly clearer and easier. The editor’s calling is very different from mine, which is one of the reasons it’s so valuable for me. It’s the perspective I can’t see by myself. It’s the reason my editor battles me, to make my work the best it can be. What we are doing, what we are creating, depends on us both. Dear editor: I hate you and I love you, because for better or for worse, you are my partner on the fire-line and in the trenches, and I know this. ___________________________________________________________

Of the trilogy, Victory Is My Name, Book 1: The Burning Barrel is now available from Internet or brick and mortar bookshops. The e-book is available at your favorite web booksellers. Search by author, Victoria Chames.

If you are interested in being a Beta Reader for the first draft of Victory Is My Name, Book Two: The West Bank, now in progress., please contact me through “Victory” at Darkhorse Press. Thank you.

________________________________________________________________

The book is Victory Is My Name, a Memoir. This is a trilogy, and the first section, Book One: The Burning-Barrel launched in February and is available everywhere in paperback and e-book. Publishers’s sampler: http://www.darkhorsepress.com/sampler-victory.html

22. Good Writing / Bad Writing

I love going to readings at local bookstores, like Diesel on College Avenue, Berkeley. Often there are great people there. The guy who wrote Kite Runner was there, with his wife and son. Maxine Hong Kingston read there, and the godfather of Poetry Flash, Richard Silberg is a regular. One week it was a guy who had a good opening chapter which he read, so I bought the book. The rest of the book turned out to be a rather corny contrived 1950s detective story, crammed with gratuitous violence and cardboard characters, seeded with bits of jargon and dialogue he must have picked up from reading old True Detective magazines. The book was dreadfully boring (to me, with my own tastes and prejudices) so I skipped ahead looking for something interesting. I got all the way to the end of the book without finding that. Hmmmmm… As writers, we are prone to getting so deeply immersed in “our thing” that we forget there is someone else to consider – the reader.  You could tell that the writer loved his ending, reveling in his own brilliance. It was a long, drawn-out, TV-style scene of meaningless violence, clumsily written in slow motion. (Hey, here’s a thought: When ya write about violence, dontcha think maybe the writing should be sharp, fast-moving, or in other words, violent?) When you slow it down and do a close-up of every punch, every gory detail, and every button on the detective’s overcoat sleeve, it has no power. I would hate to have to write a newspaper literary review for something like this, and have to say “The plot was glacier-like, and the characters had no flesh, no bones and no heartbeat.” (Okay, that’s awfully harsh, girl. Who died and made you the chairman of the Pulitzer Prize Committee?) I actually have no experience or expertise in book reviewing, only that tired old basic principle I heard so many times when I was a young artist: “I don’t know much about art, (literature, music, fill in the blank: _________ ) but I know what I like.”  Many thoughts this morning about writers and writing, and about how many books get published that are definitely not literature. The publishing business is not about literature, it’s about selling books, and schlock sells better than art or literature. In a group I once frequented, the teacher/leader had two published books. I only recently got around to reading one of them, the most recent one. (It wasn’t in the pubic library so I stalled around for years.) The book wasn’t very good. In fact I was shocked at how weak and unimaginative the first page was. (I’m no expert about professional writing or publishing, but I do know, Ya gotta have something pretty good on the first page, or else nobody’s gonna turn it over and read the second page.) I might be a snob-reader, it certainly could be justifiably argued. I tend to be too critical, of myself and others. But is there really much point in putting pen to paper for stuff like that?  Unless you do it to make money… well, after all, that is a necessity in this world, to pay the rent, and writing is an honest profession, mostly.  So I admit, shamefully, that I’m a snob (or something equally wormlike) in my tough standards for writing. In my defense, I’m as hard on myself as I am on anyone else. Anyway, I have put the group-leaders’s book into my goodwill collection box. Somebody will love it. Which brought me to the bottom line of what I think is true.  Whether you write for an audience, or for the benefit of humankind, or simply write for your own pleasure, writing is expression, which is always a good thing. It’s a natural thing, like the wordless songs babies sing in their cribs in the morning that wake you up with a a laugh.  It’s not exactly music… or is it?

______________________________________________

Of the trilogy, Victory Is My Name, Book 1: The Burning Barrel is now available from Internet or brick and mortar bookshops. The e-book is available at your favorite web booksellers. Search by author, Victoria Chames.

If you are interested in being a Beta Reader for the first draft of Victory Is My Name, Book Two: The West Bank, now in progress., please contact me through “Victory” at Darkhorse Press. Thank you.

Victory Is My Name, a Memoir. This is a trilogy, and the first section, Book One: The Burning-Barrel launched in February and is available everywhere in paperback and e-book. Publishers’s sampler: http://www.darkhorsepress.com/sampler-victory.html

20. Illegitimi Non-Carborundum

Tobias Wolff’s memoir, This Boy’s Life, was the book that sparked my literary/artistic ambition to the point of making a rock-solid commitment to completing and publishing my book. Before that, I was just working on it quietly, privately, as a maybe-someday-author. But after that, I took the pledge, literally, out loud to myself one night before I went to sleep. I told God I would do it. Well, lots of never-published-authors do that. That was important, but still safe. Then I read Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, and it resonated with my own life and mistakes, the circus-characters of my family and my expatriated state of Texas. (Her town in The Liars Club is a disguised Port Arthur Texas, where Janis Joplin was born and her troubled lonesome soul never really escaped from.) I went to hear Karr in one of those interview/conversations at an old hall at UC Berkeley, and that clinched it for me. I had been genuinely writing my book, but still on the down-low. Anybody can do that. I realized that I had to take the leap into the abyss. I had to become A Writer, publicly, brazenly, and make myself emotionally bare-ass-naked to the world. OMG. From that moment, things started to change. The lens shifted, somewhere out in the universe a gear clicked, and it was scary as hell. Now I was no longer invisible; anybody could take a shot at me. I took a few hits. I said ouch. But I had served eight years as a line firefighter a decade before, where I’d learned how to take a hit, get up quick, and get back on-task. But this was different. It wasn’t physical. It wasn’t bad reviews that stung, I didn’t get so many of those. What I got was, strangely, entirely unexpected subtle but discernible bad vibes from other writers. Veiled snarkyness. We writers are a jealous lot. Hypersensitive and neurotically vulnerable, most of us. Perhaps it’s this artist’s temperament that enables us to receive profound meaning and God-sent talents of expression, that also makes us easy victims to insecurities and self-doubts. Sometimes we fall into something less than our truest and best selves. Lately I’ve been learning and practicing the Buddhist concept of non-attachment. (It does take practice, like a foreign language.) It works like this:  When you feel yourself being snagged and pulled down by an emotion like jealousy, self-doubt, fear (the worst one) or any negative feeling, first, just notice it. Notice how it makes you feel bad/ uncomfortable/ unhappy, and you don’t like that. The action to take to change this circumstance is simple but effective. Admit it to yourself, (yes, I’m feeling like this) and then Let the feeling go. Push it away, and go on to something else you do like. Easier said than done of course. So I devised a trick upon myself. (You could try it if you like, it might work for you.) I say, out loud, right in the middle of the feeling, “I don’t need this.” And then I visualize myself picking it up with two fingers, (like something nasty) putting it into a plain white business-size envelope, securely sealing the flap, and dropping it into the trash. Done. I actually do feel noticeably better, lighter, and I feel like a real smarty-pants for so cleverly handling myself and refusing the annoying aggravation. I smile a smug little smile, think to myself, I win. And I go back to work. The truth of the matter is that in the expression of the gift that has been given to you, no one else’s opinion matters as much as yours.  Every day remind yourself. Recognize, (“re-know”) and commit to this truth: This person may be either trying to help you, or hurt you. It doesn’t matter which, because nobody else can tell you how to be your best you, nobody else knows. You will find the answer inside yourself if you keep on seeking it. Everything else is not “the truth,” it’s an opinion. A perception. A different perspective. These can often be useful and valuable, as long as you don’t forget that they are not necessarily the truth. When you get a disappointing response to a heartfelt endeavor, the problem is not that there’s anything about you that someone else should or could fix, the problem is that they didn’t know this. What they don’t know, as well as what they think, actually can’t hurt you unless you choose to let it. Don’t choose to let it. Don’t give in to doubts, misunderstandings, or insecure jealousies, and never give them squatters-rights in your mind. Get a big box of plain white #10 business envelopes… (and be sure to empty the trash every day.)

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Victory Is My Name, Book 1: The Burning Barrel is now available from Internet or brick and mortar bookshops. The e-book is available at your favorite web booksellers. Search by author, Victoria Chames. For a sampler, go to http://www.darkhorsepress.com/sampler-victory.html

If you’re interested in being a Beta Reader for the first draft of Victory Is My Name, Book Two: The West Bank, now in progress., please contact me through “victory @ darkhorsepress dot com  Thank you.

19. How To Learn How

When I was much younger than I am now, I wanted to become a firefighter.* Never mind why – it’s a long story. I was small compared to the male firefighter Wanna-Bes I was competing with. I went to the gym and pumped a whole lot of iron and didn’t get much bigger but I got  hecka-strong. (It took a while.) I applied at every fire department hiring opportunity that came up and took the tests. First is the written – easy enough if you study hard. (You should study really hard.) Next, if you pass the written, you get to take the physical agility test. I failed the physical agility tests of first three departments I tried for, at first by a mile, and then by inches, and finally by 2/10 of a second. I went back to the gym. I applied at more fire departments and took more tests. I failed another one. Maybe two. I forget now. Once I passed, It didn’t matter, I would pass some more… I had to fail, to learn how. I had never encountered those kinds of challenges, or even those kinds of objects, lifting and carrying heavy rolls of fire-hose, climbing the 100-foot aerial ladder, dragging the 160-pound dummy through the tunnel. (At first I only weighed 115 pounds myself.) Very early I learned two Essential Truths, and I’ll share them with you in a minute. There are wonderful things you can learn from Brooks, that’s one of the reasons I love them so much. But there are some things you cannot learn that way. You can’t learn how to play home-run baseball…   out of a book. You can’t learn how to downhill ski… out of a book. And you can’t learn how to be a firefighter and perform the skills a firefighter must do extremely well, very quickly, and absolutely reliably… out of a book. Here comes one of those Essential Truths I mentioned. (You may want to take notes.) Essential Truth #1: The only way to learn how to do it is to do it. Take downhill skiing, for example. The first day when you go out to the bunny hill with awkward boots and slats for feet, what’s going to happen? Right! You fall on your butt. Not once, but many times. And there will be people around who will see you fall on your butt. Little kids will laugh. Some adults will smile smugly. Others will be annoyed because you’re messing up the good snow with your sit-splats, besides getting in everybody’s way. “She shouldn’t even be here! She doesn’t know how to ski at all.” The next day, you will again fall on your butt in front of everybody. A lot. But probably you will be doing a little bit better, and there will be thrilling moments when just for short distances, you get it, and miraculously, it works. It feels like flying! Your heart, for sure, is flying. Now when you fall, you get up quicker, you want some more of that good feeling. By the third or fourth day,  your spirits soar more times, for longer moments, right before each time you crash clumsily again. But now you will be up more time than down, and though not exactly smoothly or elegantly, you are skiing! We must expect the same from our writing.  In the beginning, it’s the beginning. While the first levels of success in skiing may take a few days, writing more likely will take a few years. We’re learning how to express our gift. For every great writer, there was a beginning. Thus, Essential Truth #1 about writing: The only way you can learn how to do it is to do it. But don’t take my word for it, try it yourself. Oh, and the skiing is fun too. Essential Truth #2: Failure is a necessary part of the process. Falling down is one of the first things we do in life. It is necessary, inherent, and valuable. Failure is how we learn what to do and what not to do. There is no other way. Besides, we never learn as much from success as we do from failure. Therefore, allow yourself this. Expect to not be a brilliant writer right away. Expect a cartload of disappointments and possibly humiliations along the way. These do not prove you are un-brilliant. They only mark a serious commitment to the truest and best expression of whatever is your unique personal gift. It will be different from most people. Most people live their whole lives without expressing their truth, not because they don’t have any gifts, but because they don’t have the enormous courage it takes to do it.

Don’t be one of those. Fly down the hill, again and again. Fall on your butt with determination, and with embarrassed, wounded, but unconquerable pride, Get up.  Fall down. Get up, keep going. You can do this,  if you want it bad enough. Because if writing is truly your path, you will do it. __________________________________________________

*I did become a firefighter and served eight years with Alameda County OES Fire Department as a line firefighter and officer.

Victory Is My Name, Book 1: The Burning Barrel is now available from Internet or brick and mortar bookshops. The e-book is available at your favorite web booksellers. Search by author, Victoria Chames. For a sampler, go to http://www.darkhorsepress.com/sampler-victory.html

If you’re interested in being a Beta Reader for the first draft of Victory Is My Name, Book Two: The West Bank, now in progress., please contact me through “victory @ darkhorsepress dot com  Thank you.

11. It CAN Happen Here

The American so-called “democratic” so-called “election” has shocked and stunned the world. I too have found this bizarre turn of history beyond my ability to bear. That this could happen in what has been a democracy shakes me profoundly. We have leapt into the abyss of mindless, godless violence, irrational hate and war, unaware that this could ever happen here. It IS happening. We are at the trembling brink of it. An irrational, power-mad dictator is already taking actions, (illegal ones because he is not yet sworn in) to start a third world war, apparently for the fun of it, and to show us all that he can. He is eagerly planning greater nuclear proliferation, and inciting countries worldwide to do the same. He is not a rational person, and his psychotic arrogance is more than dangerous, it is deadly.

From Psychology Today, via the internet:
“What is the definition of a sociopathic personality? Antisocial personality disorder is characterized by a lack of regard for the moral or legal standards in the local culture. There is a marked inability to get along with others or abide by societal rules. Individuals with this disorder are sometimes called psychopaths or sociopaths.”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201305/how-spot-sociopath

Once again, “our government” has placed the LOSER of a so-called democratic election –WHO LOST BY THE LARGEST MARGIN IN HISTORY and yet was given to the LOSER of an election, into the seat of power, against the will of the people and to the shock and horror of the rest of the world.

There have been dictators before, but not here. There have been other hideous murdering madmen, many in fact – Adolf HItler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Idi Amin, Benito Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, all the ISIS wave of mindless hatred. All of these men were/are sociopaths. But not here. What they did, and what they stood for, has always been, up to now, what the U.S. has stood against, as the polar opposite of what we believe in. Now we have joined those tragedies too. We have “chosen,” even  thought it was against the will of the majority of the people, to give absolute power to a sociopath who has no allegiance toany established rules, and no regard for human life. There is evidence that the Russian leadership influenced this election as well, but even so, Trump lost the election, but was given the post of President, Commander in Chief, of our military forces, maker and destroyer of laws.

The purpose of this, I know, is Life’s way of waking us up, and it will be a terribly painful waking. There was so much to be done, and we didn’t do it. Now an utterly dehumanizing dictator will take over one of the most powerful nations of the world and PLAY with it like a video game, with no intention to serve anyone but himself, and no desire but to glorify himself, and to destroy all the other “players” and to “win.” If this sounds extreme, please Wake Up. Start by reading the truth of the matter, and realize that this person is not going to change or suddenly go sane. Now, Unless the Grace of God somehow miraculously intervenes, we are powerless to stop him.

for a detailed picture to compare that will make your blood run cold:   http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.htmlhttp://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html

And so, in fear and dread and sorrow, I asked myself, What can I do? What can I, myself, possibly do? And The answer was the same one as yours – tell my truth, my story, and let the love and humanizing of it reach whatever hearts are willing to receive it, and use it in their lives to make better choices than these that now darken the skies ahead for all of us, for years, perhaps decades, to come.

We have started down the path of death. All our news and entertainment media show it – nothing but bloody guts and murders and mutilations on every channel, 24 hours a day, including commercials. We have chosen violence, war, hatred and rage of the most demonic kind, such as we have never experienced in our history of having been so blessed and free. But Freedom is too easy to poison and misdirect, and all sociopaths are masters of deception and manipulation. The deranged Emperor Trump is already moving forward as fast as possible (even though illegally)  with his actions of destruction of everything the American people have built in 300 years. He cares nothing about humanity, why should he care about law?

I entreat you to read this, all who are not afraid of the truth, and make your own judgement. http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html

The voters could not stop him. We can blog, and we can talk, and we gather together to seek ways to survive this. At best, millions of us will lose our homes and our livelihoods and even their lives to one man’s insatiable greed, as he toys with global politics and upsets world trade balances display show his godlike power.

And so, Here we go, all of us, willing or not. If you are someone who prays, pray that Spirit/God/UniveralConsciousness/Allah/The Source, or whatever sacred name you know to call upon the grace of your soul’s highest power and loving protector, will find some way that we as human minds can’t see. In the meantime, we must do what is ours to do. Seek your mission, if you don’t already know it, and do commit to your highest work here. Whatever you can do to bring more of honesty, integrity, kindness even in the smallest simplest ways, do it. Love whoever you can, and forgive who you can’t. This is what we can do, and must do, to add more of that and less of hate to the world we must all live in together.

I have my work to do, my small part of whatever shall be the future for humankind. I turn again to that, and keep my own soul’s promise to do it.

The American so-called “democratic” so-called “election” has shocked and stunned the world. I too have found this bizarre turn of history beyond my ability to bear. That this could happen in what has been a democracy shakes me profoundly. We have leapt into the abyss of mindless, godless violence, irrational hate and war, unaware that this could ever happen here. It IS happening. We are at the trembling brink of it. An irrational, power-mad dictator is already taking actions, (illegal ones because he is not yet sworn in) to start a third world war, apparently for the fun of it, and to show us all that he can. He is eagerly planning greater nuclear proliferation, and inciting countries worldwide to do the same. He is not a rational person, and his psychotic arrogance is more than dangerous, it is deadly.

From Psychology Today, via the internet:
“What is the definition of a sociopathic personality? Antisocial personality disorder is characterized by a lack of regard for the moral or legal standards in the local culture. There is a marked inability to get along with others or abide by societal rules. Individuals with this disorder are sometimes called psychopaths or sociopaths.”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201305/how-spot-sociopath

Once again, “our government” has placed the LOSER of a so-called democratic election –WHO LOST BY THE LARGEST MARGIN IN HISTORY to be given to the loser of an election, into the seat of power, against the will of the people and to the shock and horror of the rest of the world.

There have been dictators before, but not here. There have been other hideous murdering madmen, many – Adolf HItler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Idi Amin, Benito Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, all the ISIS wave of mindless hatred. All of these men were sociopaths. But not here. What they did, and stood for, has always been, up to now, what the U.S. has stood against, as the polar opposite of what we believe in. Now we have joined those tragedies too. We have “chosen,” even  thought it was against the will of the majority of the people, to give absolute power to a sociopath who has no allegiance toany established rules, and no regard for human life.

The purpose of this, I know, is Life’s way of waking us up, and it will be a terribly painful waking. There was so much to be done, and we didn’t do it. Now an utterly dehumanizing dictator (unless the Grace of God somehow unexpectedly intervenes) will take over one of the most powerful nations of the world and PLAY with it like a video game, with no intention to serve anyone but himself, and no desire but to glorify himself, and to destroy all the other “players” and to “win.” If this sounds extreme, please Wake Up. Start by reading the truth of the matter, and realize that this person is not going to change or suddenly go sane.

for a detailed picture to compare that will make your blood run cold:   http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.htmlhttp://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html

And so, in fear and dread and sorrow, I asked myself, What can I do? What can I, myself, possibly do? And The answer was the same one as yours – tell my truth, my story, and let the love and humanizing of it reach whatever hearts are willing to receive it, and use it in their lives to make better choices than these that now darken the skies ahead for all of us, for years, perhaps decades, to come.

We have started down the path of death. All our news and entertainment media show it – nothing but bloody guts and murders and mutilations on every channel, 24 hours a day, including commercials. We have chosen violence, war, hatred and rage of the most demonic kind, such as we have never experienced in our history of having been so blessed and free. But Freedom is too easy to poison and misdirect, and all sociopaths are masters of deception and manipulation. The deranged Emperor Trump is already moving forward as fast as possible (even though illegally)  with his actions of destruction of everything the American people have built in 300 years. He cares nothing about humanity, why should he care about law?

I entreat you to read this, all who are not afraid of the truth, and make your own judgement. http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html

The voters could not stop him. We can blog, and we can talk, and we gather together to seek ways to survive this. At best, millions of us will lose our homes and our livelihoods and even their lives to one man’s insatiable greed, as he toys with global politics and upsets world trade balances display show his godlike power.

And so, Here we go, all of us, willing or not. If you are someone who prays, please pray that Spirit/God/UniveralConsciousness/Allah/The Source, or whatever sacred name you know to call upon the guidance and grace of your soul’s highest power and loving protector, will find some way that we as human minds can’t yet see. In the meantime, we must do what is ours to do.

Seek your mission, if you don’t already know it, and do commit to your highest work here. Whatever you can do to bring more of honesty, integrity, kindness even in the smallest simplest ways, do it. Love whoever you can, and forgive who you can’t. This is what we can do, and must do, to add more of this, and less of hate to the world we must all live in together.

I have my work to do, my small part of whatever shall be the future for humankind. I turn again to that, and keep my own soul’s promise to do it.

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10. Real Books Will Live On

When the Internet was born, they said traditional books would soon die out, but so far the opposite has happened. People are buying and reading more books than ever. E-books, though easily accessible, have not caught on as readily as expected. I think it’s partly because they simply are not as satisfying as a real book you can hold in your hands and sit by the fire all cozy and lovely, while another world comes alive with the delicious turning of real pages. I went to a poetry reading in Berkeley last night. I thought it was an open reading, so I brought some of my poems. It wasn’t. It was a group that meets once a month to read poetry from books,  anything from Keats to Dickinson to Ferlinghetti, nothing too “edgy” or avant-garde. It was a small group of adults with knowledgeable tastes. It was old-fashioned and surprisingly refreshing. We read from thick anthologies and thin paperbacks of individual poets we personally liked. I read from Wilfred Owen, a rather obscure poet of World War I, whose very beautiful poetry was the first to use consonantal rhyme. He was a significant trailblazer, though he was not recognized for this in his lifetime. Most of the credit for this went to a more well-known  but much less innovative contemporary named Sassoon, who urged Owen to return to the battlefield at the front lines, where he was mortally wounded and died. I still love books, real books. Solid physical-entity books with hardcovers and paper pages sometimes old and gilt-edged, sturdily bound, built to last. Books are important to the future of the world for a lot of reasons, but the first one that comes to me is that they connect us to some of humanity’s finest moments, deepest feelings, and highest thoughts, so that those are not lost. Real books are not trivial. Real books are not temporary, not made to be disposable like Styrofoam cups and razor blades and 90% of what’s on the Internet today, mostly “throwaway” art and culture, existing only in thin air or the flickering flash of the small screens of cold, hard, “devices.” E-books are useful of course, entertaining, informative, or educational, but they serve a limited temporary function and then are automatically discarded when the screen goes dark. Real books, living physical-entity books, have an inherent permanence that few things in our world have today. Style, legend, and legacy are easily lost on the Internet,  swallowed up and drowned in the ocean of minutiae, trivia, intelligentsia, jibber-jabber, in the rude, “edgy” and soulless fashion of our culture, in which there is too much of everything, and so, as much as possible is designed to be disposable and as brief as possible. “How RU? Im fyn.C U latr”  Sorry, that’s not enough for me.

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Of the trilogy, Victory Is My Name, Book 1: The Burning Barrel is now available from Internet or brick and mortar bookshops. The e-book is available at your favorite web booksellers. Search by author, Victoria Chames. Publishers’s sampler: http://www.darkhorsepress.com/sampler-victory.html

If you are interested in being a Beta Reader for the first draft of Victory Is My Name, Book Two: The West Bank, now in progress, please contact me through email:  “Victory” at Darkhorse Press dot com. Thank you.

#9 Seeing

This morning when I looked out my window at the huge old oak tree that I see every morning, again I marveled at the loveliness of it in the glittering morning sun, and a thought came to me: I am grateful that I have eyes that see beauty so many of us here on earth at this time don’t notice– don’t see what I see. The same kinds of beauty I have seen always, since I was a child, sustain me. Amazingly many of them don’t go away like other things do. Beauty has brought solace to me even in my darkest hours. The beauty of the Mississippi Riverbank in snow, the winter sky at night, ink-black and gleaming with tiny stars, each one securely set in that vast silent infinity. Beauty brings a little bit of joy into anything. There is some kind of beauty almost everywhere, if you look for it. And even when I’m surrounded by everything else that’s not beautiful, there is still an immense supply of remembered beauty inside of me, that never leaves me; I carry it with me. Autumn days, beautiful songs I have heard and felt, the thrill of the first warm day of spring, when the fine green needles of first-grass are pushing up through an ocean of mud. I have seen beauty in 10 million ways, and all of it is still mine, soaked into my soul. That my eyes can see what only they see, has made me an artist and a poet. I didn’t choose these things, they chose me, because this soul could see. And this morning, more than ever, I am grateful. The book: Unintentionally I am writing the last chapter. Even though the Hunger Years and the Fire Years chapters are not finished yet, the last chapter is pushing to get out. More parts of it are coming forward, and I’m willing to let them, happy to receive them. There is more to the ending now, and it is more complete. It closes the far-reaching wandering circle of the story, and quietly speaks the simple truth of it all, the secret that never was really a scret. This is a wonderful book. I continue to be astonished that I am the one to whom this book is given, amazed that I am the one somehow chosen to make the marks on paper. I am humbled, and grateful, and scared. It’s an assignment that’s so much bigger than I am. But I’ve been scared before, and so, hoping that somehow that I can be enough, I’m committed to giving it the best I have.

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Of the trilogy, Victory Is My Name, Book 1: The Burning Barrel is now available from Internet or brick and mortar bookshops. The e-book is available at your favorite web booksellers. Search by author, Victoria Chames.

If you are interested in being a Beta Reader for the first draft of Victory Is My Name, Book Two: The West Bank, now in progress., please contact me through “Victory” at Darkhorse Press. Thank you.

Victory Is My Name, a Memoir. This is a trilogy, and the first section, Book One: The Burning-Barrel launched in February and is available everywhere in paperback and e-book. Publishers’s sampler: http://www.darkhorsepress.com/sampler-victory.html