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My thoughts are going many different directions this morning, and I need a way to put them together into a cohesive whole. I’m famous for that. I bring in disparate elements and tie them all together — I do it in my books; I do it in my reading and assessing of the world. I have a peculiar talent for creating patterns that don’t actually exist. One early betareader/reviewer of The Minäverse complained about this aspect of my writing and then said he could offer me no help in fixing it because somehow it all worked and he couldn’t see how to change it. An even earlier critique partner complained that he couldn’t suggest changes in a sentence or paragraph of my book because it would snowball, and then the entire books would fall apart. What this no doubt means is that my brain is a mess to an order of magnitude that isn’t ordinary, and you shouldn’t take anything I say to heart.

With that caveat, let me proceed. While I took my breakfast break this morning, I watched a YouTube video on what Cuba is really like — not the beautiful Cuba you might find in travel images and foodie videos, but the actual lived reality of the Cuban people. And I thought it looked sort of familiar. Why is this familiar? I asked myself. Oh, yes, it’s familiar because I’ve seen it at Walmart and its brother corporations such as Sam’s Club and the Sam’s Club gas station. Could it be possible, I asked myself, that Walmart has been preparing us to think of communism as normal for years now? The last time we were at the Sam’s Club gas station, the line was exceedingly long, extending into the Sam’s parking lot. Being the person he is, my husband averted the line, went the wrong way down the arrows and swung around to discover that the line was long because most of the gas pumps were out of order. That’s the way it is in communist Cuba, except worse, of course, because the heights of greatness are never achieved overnight.

But the gas situation isn’t nearly as bad as the shopping experience in Walmart itself. Empty shelves. If not empty, stocked only with one or two products to make it look like the shelves aren’t empty. Few employees. Hour-long waits in checkout lines. While some people experienced this for the first time during the pandemic, this has been going on for years in my area of the country. It got so bad several years ago that I quit Walmart for a long time due to 70-100% of my shopping list being unavailable — that is not even remotely an exaggeration. If I were an actual Karen (my children think I’m a Karen because I’m grumpy), I would have called the management and complained on repeat about my terrible experience as a shopper. Not that Walmart cares. Walmart has never cared. They are too large an entity to care about meeting customer needs.

If you go back farther in Walmart’s history, they were one of the early corporate adopters of working with the NSA to put out propaganda messages that encouraged Americans to spy on each other and report suspicious activity to the government. What, you don’t remember that? It was disgusting. When we finally achieved high status and brought a Walmart to Socorro, I would do anything to avoid shopping there. I was not going to support a corporation that worked hand-in-hand with the NSA. Now, of course, that’s old news. We’re quite happy to allow the social media networks to bring us propaganda and to censor what US citizens can or can’t say. Libertarians, for some reason, decided this was all good because Muh private business. Did you know that if you post a comment on pederasty or pedophilia, especially when it’s adjacent to the word homosexuality or a relevant synonym, YouTube will pull your comment in less than five minutes? I dare you. Go try it. I guess I’m about to find out how this platform responds….

After watching that video on Cuba, I turned to the daily local news, which I still read sometimes. New Mexico is in a sad state after the last year and a half. I often see articles about the state’s willingness to pay people to go back to work. Today, I read about our farming industry, and their inability to find workers during the pandemic. That means two growing seasons have now been affected by large unemployment checks and a government that pushes fear and lockdowns. Do you know what happens when there are no field workers? Food rots in the field. This creates scarcity, which drives up prices. That, again, is beginning to look like Cuba. A cold chill rose up my spine. Why, I asked myself, is the government giving so much to businesses like restaurants and not supporting farms, which are the most important businesses we have? And then I asked myself what exactly they could do about it besides subsidizing them. That might work, if farm laborers could be bribed back into the fields. But those types of subsidies won’t last forever, so I began imagining the state taking over the farms and forcing people to work them, as in communist Russia — which, unsurprisingly, created famine and starvation, as government officials generally know nothing about running a farm. Meanwhile, though, the government has already caused scarcity without taking over the farms at all. That’s how evil the government is.

Look, I don’t know how to pound this in hard enough: communism isn’t a golden ideal that could be enacted properly to create a better society. Rather, it demonstrates the nature of mankind devoid of God. It’s just one of the ironies of the way humans function. They think they can create a society based on the equality of all humans and the value of their labor, but as soon as they reject God, they instead create a self-serving system of exploitation, starvation, and murder that begets a compounding cycle of scarcity that leads to, yes, more exploitation, starvation, and murder. Change the ideology and remain “secular”, and your results are going to look the same.

How is this possibly connected to Walmart? I don’t know; you tell me. Why does a self-serving, godless corporation go out of its way to encourage people to snitch on each other while actively creating a monopoly where they drive competitors out of business, and then refuse to hire enough labor or order enough supply for their stores? I don’t think Walmart is the beast system. I don’t think they’re the ultimate communist-corporatist-fascist state. No, they are just a glimmer of what our government has been attempting to bring us for years now. And it will only get worse, even if Walmart shuts down half its stores and files for bankruptcy tomorrow…because, ultimately, the communist, Luciferian dream stays alive wherever God is thrown out like so much garbage. Even where there is free trade. Especially where there is free trade because that is simply when exploitation and murder go global.

That’s the name of a hymn we often sing at Mass; it turns out it was written by a Lutheran, which is ironic because I wasn’t familiar with it until attending a Catholic church. The Lutheran church we were members of sang very old, heavy German hymns to organ accompaniment. This particular song draws me in every time with its simple folk tune combined with moving lyrics: Shepherd me, O God, beyond my wants, beyond my fears, from death into life.

Mass today was profound for me, if not a little weird. By weird, I mean that as I stared at the stained glass of the Holy Spirit dove behind the statue of Jesus, I saw the silhouette of a giant spider. It had to have been a tarantula, but it was bigger than any tarantula I have ever seen. It was extremely bizarre — I wondered if anyone else had seen it, but the people appeared to be focused on the priest and his sermon. Obviously, I have ADD and can’t ever entirely focus…. I imagined for a moment that I was in a horror film and away my mind flew!

Sometimes, though, God knows when I need to listen and catches my attention. The spider disappeared, by the way. I saw its long legs slide across the glass one last time, and then it went…who knows? We’ve been deluged with rain lately, including last night. That’s the rational response to why a tarantula would have climbed that high up on a church building. It was apparently trying to dry out.

But let me back up a little. The liturgical readings today included Jeremiah 23, in which the prophet is delivering woe to the false shepherds leading God’s people away from him and into destruction; Psalm 23, in which David reassures us that God himself is a good shepherd who will not lead his people astray; Ephesians 2, wherein Paul is explaining to the Ephesian church that Jesus has reconciled the lost sheep to God through his sacrifice; Mark 6, in which Jesus disembarks from a ship and sees a vast crowd of people as sheep without a shepherd and begins to teach them. And lastly, here is the responsorial verse (from John 10): My sheep hear my voice, says the Lord; I know them, and they follow me.

In the liturgy, the Bible selections are read directly before the sermon. Honestly, I’m not blaming a giant spider for trying to distract me from the message; I can do that just as easily on my own. The spider did distract me for a minute, though, before God called my attention back. He’s my shepherd; that’s why he calls me back when he needs to teach me something. The message this morning was on giving our time to God. I’ve been feeling guilty about my time-hording ways lately. In fact, I wrote a comment on this post about my need for an abundance mindset with time because I’m stingy with it (I’m linking to it because the whole post is good and you should read it). It’s difficult for me to view time as abundant. At the same time (there’s that word again), It’s what I value more than anything. What humans view as scarce becomes precious to them. But God is not like that; he created billions of humans he considers precious and worth saving. And he will without fail give them his time if they call on him. I suppose you’ll remind me now that God operates outside of time. True…but when Jesus was here, he existed in time, and he gave it to either people or his heavenly Father no matter how worn he was. The gospel passage today makes that clear.

The priest repeated his message about our need to trust God and give him our time — he wanted to drive it home. No doubt, this simple message needs to be pounded into obtuse people who set their own plans in their own way and fail to spend any time listening to their Good Shepherd. It’s no wonder I struggle and spin my wheels even when I add a daily prayer and Bible readings to my checklist. God is not a box to be checked off on our lists of daily accomplishments. He wants us to enter into his rest from the busyness of our lives, to dwell in his presence. To change animal metaphors a little, God wants us to curl up at his feet like my puppies curl up at mine. My dogs have trust and devotion to me for no rational reason that I can make out. I’m a far cry from a good shepherd, and yet they trust me implicitly. It’s humbling, to be honest. I suppose my kids did at one time, too, when they were little instead of grown or nearly so, as they are now. And yet, I can hardly put a modicum of my faith in a perfect shepherd. A mustard seed. Just a mustard seed worth of faith is enough, but I rarely manage that.

On the way to the altar this morning, the congregation sang the song I opened this post with. Oh, how prescient that song is for me. Shepherd me, O God beyond my wants… But my wants are everything to me, aren’t they? I want to use my time stacking up my accomplishments: writing books and speaking Spanish and playing the accordion and getting at least a couple more degrees. And to what purpose? So I can be proud that I did all these amazing things, which, as it turns out, are quite commonplace? Accomplishments without purpose are useless to the world. And I have a feeling that my accomplishments will continue to be useless unless I allow God to shepherd me past them as my ultimate goal.

My love for the accordion has been with me for about twenty years now. It’s funny because in my last post about learning extremely relevant vocabulary through Mexican music I stated that I’d been listening to these beats for over twenty years, but I tend to forget how old or young I am. My focused attention toward norteño, banda*, tejano, etc. adds up to twenty years on the nose.

I can’t really put a date on the day I first tuned in to Ramon Ayala’s accordion playing. What I remember is that it took my breath away while I was driving, which is as dangerous as you might imagine, and I pulled my car over to the side of the road to finish listening to the song. It was Rinconcito en el Cielo. It was an earth-shattering moment in my life. The next accordion player to really grab my attention was Ricardo Muñoz of Intocable in songs such as No Te Vayas. However, earth-shattering moments are rare, and I never had to pull my car over again to catch my breath.

Over the following years, I studied the music by listening to it (obviously) and reading about its history. I collected albums and attended a conjunto festival in San Antonio, TX, where I saw Flaco Jimenez play. Later, I saw Ramon Ayala live, though every time Intocable has come to New Mexico, something has prevented me from going to see them. I’m sad about that. I’ve seen a number of other bands live, though, including Conjunto Primavera. It’s been great fun learning about some of the older musicians, too, who aren’t featured prominently on the local Mexican radio stations any longer. By older, I mean bands such as Conjunto Bernal. Not that long ago, I ran across a video in which Ramon Ayala and Paulino Bernal were playing together, and then Ricardo Muñoz made an appearance near the end. I think it was a birthday celebration, but I can’t find the video — if I do, I’ll post it. This is incredible because these men represent three generations of accordion players. Muñoz is a gen-Xer, Ayala a boomer, and Bernal a silent gen. There are, of course, millenials now playing the accordion, but there is so much wealth to be found in the parents and grandparents and greats that originally impacted my life so much. And by the way, as it turns out, Señor Bernal now mostly plays praise songs on the accordion because he’s a Christian; so is Señor Ayala. They both have testimonies circling the internet.

One date night when my husband and I had been drinking at the local Socorro pub, he ordered me an accordion on his phone. Just like that. Just ordered it. That was…I don’t know, 2013? There was a live band at the pub complete with an accordion player, though I believe they were going for the Celtic sound. The accordion was still of the Norteño variety, that is, a three-row diatonic. Soon, my accordion was shipped and I’ve been struggling to learn to play it ever since, though I never really went all-in until recently.

Being an obtuse intellectual, it’s difficult for me to grasp music, which seems to be something you get naturally or you don’t. However, anyone can learn music, and you can’t fault me trying. Little by little, I’m learning my favorite songs, which has given me an entirely different perspective on musicianship. I love Ramon Ayala and still would call him the king of accordion, as he was the one who drew me into the magic of the norteño sound. But after trying to learn songs, I find Muñoz’s playing to be impossible to replicate. There is something almost unearthly about his playing, something intangible that I can’t attain to at all. On a recent Twitter post, he says in answer to the question If you could speak to your accordion, what would you say?: “I always speak to her and it is something too intimate….” That…definitely comes across. I can imagine myself talking to my accordion and either being verbally abusive to it or turning the scene into a Johnny English moment because…I can’t help myself. I’m always more comedian than artist. In case you want to see the Tweet for yourself, here it is:

Siempre hablo con ella y es algo demasiado íntimo… https://t.co/iesozsMIjK

— Ricardo Muñoz (@IntocableRJM) July 16, 2021

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

*Banda is brass band music; I love it, but it doesn’t always or even usually have an accordion.

Under the bright sunshine of the innocuous town of Roswell, New Mexico, the aliens landed their ships for the first time, leaving behind a virus that eventually swept the globe. The spread was curbed through a series of vaccines that also cured the Earth of violence. This curious global stability has come to be known as the Alien Peace.

Peace has come to Earth for all but a lonely few, that is, whose minds have gone haywire from the vaccines, and now taunt them with unrelenting noise.

Talat is one of Roswell’s vaccine damaged. After her caretaker publishes an illegal book about the aliens and then dies under suspicious circumstances, Talat flees before the authorities can force her into foster care. This lonely flight ends when an equally damaged young man, Robert, shoots a government official to protect her. Now fugitives, they escape their hometown together…and land right into the arms of the aliens.

It was never noise. It was them, guiding the chosen ones to fulfill their prophecies for domination of Earth and humankind. Unbeknownst to their transcendental overlords, a few unacceptable humans hide their own prophecies of a warrior couple who will defeat the din of abysmal peace. But with so many voices, how will Talat and Robert know which ones to follow?

Or…if that’s perhaps too long, here’s a shorter version:

Under the bright sunshine of the innocuous town of Roswell, New Mexico, the aliens landed their ships for the first time, leaving behind a virus that eventually swept the globe. The spread was curbed through a series of vaccines that also cured the Earth of violence. This curious global stability has come to be known as the Alien Peace. Peace, that is, for all but a lonely few whose minds, damaged from the vaccines, now taunt them with unrelenting noise.

Talat is one of Roswell’s vaccine damaged. After her caretaker publishes censored information about the aliens and ends up dead, Talat flees before the authorities can force her into foster care. This lonely flight ends when an equally damaged young man, Robert, shoots a government official to protect her. Now fugitives, they escape their hometown together…and run right into the aliens’ trap. What was once noise is now clear: the aliens’ prophecies must be fulfilled.

I will be publishing my book Order of the PenTriagon September 20, 2021. Why that date, you ask? It’s a minor point in the book that the protagonist, Talat, reads the marginalia in an old pawnshop Bible on the Psalm 127 page, in which the anonymous inscriber states that God has built her house and answered her prayers as of September 20. So I thought I would go with that date. There is no magic to it. I imagine I used it because that was the day I was writing that section of book; in fact, I added the year date as 2020…I no doubt wrote the section in 2019, looking forward to 2020. How strange that in September of 2020 I was sitting on my completed book, writing another one, and editing others’ books. I was also tutoring and homeschooling. I was doing everything but looking at a completed house of answered prayers (regarding my writing career — there was no doubt that God pulled me out of the Covid poverty when my bank account had finally hit empty).

On the other hand, life is never a completed house until we die. God doesn’t stop answering our prayers, either. Life is a process of building, and God is not a genie in the sky; he’s our heavenly Father whom we should have an active relationship with. If we don’t and call ourselves Christians, there is something broken in our relationship. We could be the prodigal son wandering in far-off lands, but if we are God’s children, we will always wander back to his house. In fact, he will leave his house and come fetch us back if we’re too lost to come on our own. That was the message Christ gave us — that he as the Good Shepherd would rescue us. I believe that. There are people who reject their rescuer, but that doesn’t mean that the shepherd won’t offer us a lifeline or a trip out of the canyon in his arms.

I was only going to write about my publishing date and post a blurb, but this post went it’s own way. Instead, I’ll post my blurb in the next few days and add Psalm 127 to this one. It’s long been one of my favorite Psalms, which is unsurprising, as it was written by Solomon, the biblical author who most resonates with me.

This is from the RSV:

A Song of Ascents. Of Solomon.

127 Unless the Lord builds the house,
those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the Lord watches over the city,
the watchman stays awake in vain.
2 It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he gives to his beloved sleep.

3 Lo, sons are a heritage from the Lord,
the fruit of the womb a reward.
4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
are the sons of one’s youth.
5 Happy is the man who has
his quiver full of them!
He shall not be put to shame
when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.

If you are studying another language and want to learn vocabulary, I always recommend reading. Reading is the reason I have an extra-large box in my brain for English vocabulary — why wouldn’t it work for another language? Don’t stop too often to look up words but take them in the context they’re given; you could make a list and look them up later, if you want. Becoming a fluent reader is a great way to develop a feel for the structure of the language you’re studying. On the other hand, a more exciting way to learn a second language is to listen to the music (English music doesn’t do much for me in this way, but when my vocabulary is no doubt that of a fifth-grader, it works). For that reason, I’ve been listening to Mexican music for over twenty years now. Why Mexican? you ask. I’m sorry to be prejudiced, but Mexican music is better than all other types of Spanish music. My children have taken to calling me a Mexican Weeb due to my obsession with Mexico. I guess that depends on how one defines Weeb. Some aspects of Weeb culture are anything but wholesome, full of prurient voyeurs of…cartoons. I can guarantee I’m not that type of Weeb. I just love the accordion and brass instruments and dramatic vocals!

I have learned very useful vocabulary in Mexican songs, such as francotirador (sniper), naufrago (shipwrecked), tatuajes (tattoos), antojo (whim), limosnero (charitable)…. I was pondering the usefulness of this last night as I read in the Telemundo online news about some gente who had been naufraga due to a storm. I’m sure that I initially learned the word while reading 17th C Spanish literature like Cervantes (people in his day went to sea and were shipwrecked and attacked by pirates, at least in stories), but it didn’t quite stick in my head until I was singing a catchy chorus on repeat: Naufrago en mi cama de tanto llorar. That’s a song by Los Elegidos, in case you want to look it up. As far as I can tell, they are a one-album band; they had a few hits and then disappeared off Mexican radio. But these handful of hits are quite catchy and easy to listen to…by easy, I mean I can understand the Spanish.

Francotirador was a funny one to me as I did what I always do — I tried to figure it out in the context of the song, which is unsurprisingly about a very painful love affair. My mind went weird directions, such as, a French shooter? Franco is surely related to Frank, which is related to French; and I already knew what tirador meant. Thus… ja ja ja. Actually, the title of the song gives it away, mostly: Directo al corazon. This woman’s treacherous love went straight to the heart, just as a sniper might aim for a quiet hit right where it counts. It’s a useful word in everyday conversation, I can assure you. And there might be some relation to “French” in there somewhere; I suppose the adjective “frank” could be related to the Franks. That’s a head-scratcher. I might have to look it up.

It turns out there are a lot of parents who don’t think distance learning is adequate for their children. It isn’t. It really isn’t. Neither is our up close and personal public education. Most parents have known this for a long time, but most didn’t also realize they could do something about it until the pandemic happened.

It’s funny to me that the bluest states in the nation were the ones who shut their schools down the longest. This goes against the progressive fantasy of having both parents in the workplace paying their taxes, while the children are ensconced in the indoctrination enclaves of the schools. Call me a positive thinker if you’d like, but this is ironically a blessed situation.

Please believe me when I say I didn’t seek out these stats on my own. I’m no longer the homeschool champion I used to be who goes out and looks for the answers I want to find. Okay, I was probably never exactly that person, but I used to be more of a homeschool champion. After raising two children who were completely homeschooled, and two more who have been given a greater variety of options, I’ve been tempered in my bleeding-heart idealism. Even though I didn’t go looking for this info, obviously the propagandist media is putting out their whine-fests about these stats, claiming that if the trend continues, it will bankrupt the schools.

La-dee-dah. At least as far as New Mexico goes, I couldn’t care less. We have the worst schools in the nation. It doesn’t matter how much money we pour into them, they do not get better. And oh, the school systems will beg for money. They’ll beg for it, and they will get it because when a high proportion of the population is on one kind of welfare or another, they don’t really care whether bonds pass that will raise taxes. Of course, higher taxes will affect all citizens at some level, but the schools here are such garbage institutions that the vast majority of the population will not be able to calculate or predict how it will affect them personally. That was why, years ago, the people voted to rape New Mexico’s rainy day fund (the kind of fund created for state emergencies like, gosh, a…pandemic) and give it to the schools. Guess what? It didn’t help the schools get any better.

Pouring money at schools doesn’t help. It never helps. Wealthy areas have better schools because upper middle-class parents are generally well-educated and consequently care about their children’s education — they understand why it’s important, and they have the skills to push their children to achieve. It’s not precisely that poorer communities don’t care. Sometimes individuals do; sometimes they don’t. It’s that they either believe they don’t have the skills to help their children, or both parents are too busy working to do much more than nag their children to do their homework.

There is a certain hopelessness regarding life outcomes in poorer communities that was broken or shifted during the pandemic. I’m sure most parents didn’t want their lives disrupted, but it gave them the opportunity to explore homeschooling, and many found that it was actually doable. Not only is it doable, but it gives parents the opportunity to discover what their children do or do not understand and to spend more time on those lessons. In a school setting, if a child doesn’t understand a concept, they will get a paper or test marked with wrong answers, and then the class will move on. In a homeschool setting, when the answers are marked wrong, the children have the time to learn why and correct their answers during school hours. That last bit is important because once children leave the classroom they have little incentive to go back and correct their work, even if the teacher is offering a better grade for doing so.

It always thrills me when people learn they have the wherewithal to fix problems like poor education. Believing you can’t do something is a mental block that will stand in your way your entire life. It doesn’t even seem to matter how poorly educated the parents are in a homeschool setting — if parents realize they can help their children, they will figure out how. If they don’t understand something themselves, they now have the resources at their fingertips to study it and understand it. When I started homeschooling, the internet was new technology. I still did most of my research in books. If I didn’t understand something, I had to find a library resource. And oh, by golly, did I ever. I still do, to be honest. But now parents can look up the concepts they never learned in school in a matter of minutes, so that they can teach their children. How incredible is that?!

I’m sure you’re going to ask how poor parents who work all the time can homeschool. It’s one thing to discover you have the ability to impart information to your children. It’s quite another to believe you have the time to do so. Well, I don’t have an easy answer for that. I only know what I’ve seen throughout my years of homeschool. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. There were always those moms in the homeschool group, even a handful of single moms. I’ve personally known two moms who started daycares in their homes to make it possible. I know some who homeschooled their kids for a few hours in the morning before they had to go to work (generally a grandma or another babysitter would come over at that point). Currently, I follow a vlog of a Mexican woman who homeschools her son in the morning before she goes to her shift as a nurse. She and her husband swap shifts. See, it’s even possible in other countries!

Anyway, I hope my positive thoughts on this subject are merited. Some of these new homeschool families will drop out eventually, even though these articles are appearing now because they haven’t yet done so. All I know is small changes in our thinking paradigms can make big changes in the long run. Thus, hope is warranted. Wait…when is hope not warranted? The darkest hours humanity has suffered were much darker than these, and people still had reason for hope.

*When I wrote this post late last night, I titled it “homeschool doubles,” which, I realized, didn’t quite mean what I had meant. So I changed it to “homeschoolers double”….oh, dear, the pandemic weight gain has been a trial, hasn’t it?