Background Clamor

This is also the time of year when I give up all pretense of being a nice human being and just simmer along in my own psychic stew of irritability, spite and petty vindictiveness.

People are just so fucking annoying.

Although it would be just as accurate to say I am so fucking annoyable, I suppose.

In particular, people on the Internet are fucking annoying, and of course, there’s an easy method of dealing with that: Just don’t deal with people on the Internet!

In the time of Covid, though, people on the Internet provide what I can only describe as “background clamor.” You know. Those random, often oddly personal encounters you have with people in train stations and hardware stores; those conversations you overhear when you are standing in line and which you imagine yourself participating in.

Covid means you can’t do those things in real life.

But background clamor is an essential part of my social experience since I like talking and listening to strangers.

Without it, I get even more misanthropic and bitchy.



One of my preening points is that I’ve always tried keeping—and to a large extent am successful at keeping— my likes and my dislikes apart from my politics. In consequence, I know—and for the most part like—far more Trump supporters than most people of my demographic niche, The Elderly Female Cat Owner With Progressive Tendencies.

But I am done listening to illogical rants about the election.

Trump lost the election.

Trump is a complete jerk and clown, but that’s not the arguing point (though sure, it’s the proximal cause of the election loss.) Even if he is not a jerk and a clown in your (mistaken) opinion, he lost the election.

Trump did not win the election just because you don’t like progressive identity politics and the Deep State, and will refuse to get vaccinated when the vaccine becomes commonly available.

So shut the fuck up.

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I’m also sick of reading about the red state/blue state schism, about which today’s Wall Street Journal has supplied this attractive graphic:



Yup! Red areas are bigger than the blue areas!

You know what?

That’s completely irrelevant, WSJ, because more than 80% of the country’s population lives in the blue areas.

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What else?

I met the woman with the gorgeous Irish wolfhound in the photo above when I went tromping yesterday. Both she and he were starved for human interaction, so I spent 10 minutes—masked and at an appropriate social distance from the human although not from the dog—background clamoring with them.

Also, I pulled out the Work in Progress and realized that one of the reasons I’d left off writing it was because I’d come to a potentially controversial passage that I was self-censoring.

To wit:

June works at a dancehall in the late 1920s.

The dancehall is going through a time of financial uncertainty.

The proprietor hires a bunch of Chinese girls to up the dancehall’s novelty factor.

June and the other white dancers view the Chinese dancers in the most racist of stereotypes. And of course, the novel is written in a close, first-person POV. So, you know. I must write them.

I had been seized with this thought, My God, if you write this, you can kiss any chance of publication g-g-goodbye!

It was strong enough so that I stopped writing.

(Yeah, sure, there were other reasons why I didn’t start writing again.)

Of course, the racist stereotypes are absolutely faithful to the time, the place, and the character. Plus, the novel in its entirety is a redemption tale: June encounters the lead Chinese character again later in the novel, and the lead Chinese character essentially saves her life. So, you know: positive change.

But I just keep hearing imaginary Twitter activists every time I try to write it.

So interesting how pressures to bowdlerize keep changing. Every epoch has those things that dare not speak their name.