Jill Domschot

It had already been a long day up in the mountains, where my son had a cross-country meet. I was ready to collapse, but my husband had another idea: “Let’s go see a movie!” To be honest, I hadn’t been in a theater since they were recently reopened. My children and husband had gone, but I hadn’t, and it had nothing to do with Covid or being in crowds. The truth is, most movies are a hard sell for me.

I got burned out on superhero movies a long time ago, after the one-upmanship on godawful CG just made watching such films a miserable experience. That applies to all action movies. Look, honestly, endless car chases with no evident plot were bad enough in Jason Bourne style films, but now that those cars defy physics because some dude creating CG never mentally matured past age twelve, I have no patience any longer. Add to that mix the general Hollywood repugnance of naked people and sex and wokeness, and I’m done. The film industry can just burn, in my opinion, as there is little art and storytelling left to rescue it from its filth and tawdriness.

But…but my husband was being spontaneous, and he wanted to go watch a movie with me. The children were gone; it was just us. It was a date! Those don’t happen as often as they used to, sadly. We ditched the dinner we were eating and gathered ourselves together in five minutes and raced to the theater, barely able to adjust our seats before Cry Macho began. For the record, my husband had searched the movie titles on his phone and chosen this one because it was filmed in Socorro County, the place we consider our true home. So that was a draw for me, even if the film turned out to be terrible. You know how it goes: Oh my gosh, I recognize that shrub. Isn’t that the one where you turn up [redacted], right before you get to the old [redacted]?

I actually really enjoyed Cry Macho. It might not have restored my faith in the industry, but it’s one film where just about everything was done right. It stars Clint Eastwood and was, in fact, directed by him. Clint Eastwood is old Hollywood, hearkening from a time when the industry still knew how to tell a good story. Don’t mistake me — the industry was always morally repugnant. But it had that one key element, storytelling, in its favor. That’s what Clint Eastwood brings to this film. It also happens to be heart-warming and morally sound.

The basic plot is of an old, washed-up cowboy named Mike Milo (played by Eastwood) who’s hired by his morally suspect boss to travel down to Mexico to find his teenage son and bring him back to Texas, away from his abusive and alcoholic mother. While I was watching the story unfold, I laughed quite a bit and thought to myself, “No actual Mexicans were used in the filming of this story” and “neither was any part of Mexico used in the filming of this story.” Seriously, though, as I said earlier, it was filmed in Socorro County, New Mexico. Even the border to Mexico made me laugh because it was quite literally filmed in my old backyard, which is several hours from the border. I really did recognize those shrubs because I used to see them daily. There were, however, actual Mexicans who acted in the film — such as the teenage son, played by Eduardo Minett. But they didn’t feel Mexican. Is that an odd way to word it? More on that in the next paragraph.

The film is composed of old-fashioned set designs that are supposed to evoke the ideal of Mexico from old cowboy westerns. Old buildings, stacked crates, burros, and people wearing ponchos work together to create this atmosphere. In order for this to be plausible at all, the movie had to be set in the late seventies, when there still might have been people wearing ponchos in Mexico as they pulled their burros into town. To go along with this old-timey-ness, the actors effected over-the-top Spanish accents, like Antonio Banderas in Spy Kids (also a real Spanish speaker, but with an overdone accent used for effect). That was why nobody seemed like Mexicans; it was a hyperreal Mexico that could only exist in a romanticized past.

These simple sets worked for the story because they allowed it to go forward unimpeded by special effects or distractions…. Well, most people wouldn’t have the same distractions I had, which was recognizing New Mexican places, like the old buildings on the highway in Polvadera. So, what shines through in the final story is an old man who finds new meaning in life by helping out a wayward teenager. That’s why it’s heart-warming. It’s simple, with a focus on character transformation and hope. Is it cutting-edge and mind-blowingly great? No, absolutely not. But the story is solidly good, which is something that Hollywood never seems able to create these days.

I’m glad I didn’t resist my husband’s spontaneity this time; this movie made for a satisfying Saturday night. I hope Clint Eastwood makes more films like Cry Macho.

…especially when it’s a literal pit. No, I suppose you shouldn’t fall into a pit of despair or the kind the enemy lays for you when he wants to cause you to sin, either. But there are real ones covering this topographic earth. And sometimes, the pits that harm the physical body might cause the figurative ones to surface, as well.

My life is composed of blocks that can be shifted as I go about my week. This is the life of a contract and freelance laborer. I go where the work is when it’s presented to me. At the same time, I have a list of important life goals I’ve given myself: I must exercise, study languages (mostly Spanish), play the accordion, write and edit books. I have short blocks in the day dedicated to these activities that I move around my other work. This forces me to be flexible and to never stop moving — stagnation is the dirtiest of all dirty words.

However, you can imagine that doing activities by rote in a prescribed time frame can cause stagnation. You see, I’m happy merely to get my activities done and mark it off the checklist. That is its own kind of stagnation, which doesn’t inspire me. I want — nay, need — creativity and purpose in my existence. Don’t we all? I have to admit that I’ve lost a certain amount of joy in my accordion playing due to forcing it into its prescribed box each day. There is definitely a balance that has to be achieved regarding creative work. Without the daily effort, creativity has no defined parameters. With the daily effort, it often ceases to be creative.

Yesterday, after finishing my last tutoring session at six, I came home and strapped on the accordion and duly tried to play one of my favorite songs, Mi Cómplice by Cardenales de Nuevo León. I hit wrong notes. I stopped and backed up. I played it from the beginning chords over and over. It was getting frustrating. And then, just when it began to flow better, my timer went off. My accordion time was over, and I still had to walk the dog and serve dinner — I had put in a crockpot pork tenderloin earlier, but I knew my family would wait for me to call them to dinner before they started eating.

With much frustration in my heart, I put the leash on my elderly dog, while apologizing profusely to the puppies. I’m simply not capable of taking all three for a walk at one time. The puppies only get walks when I have at least one other person to help me. But even when I have an extra person around to take hold of the elderly dog’s leash, walking both of them at one time is like being pulled by a hundred pounds of pure puppy muscle; it’s not easy. It’s a great workout for the core stability muscles, though. Alas, a great workout was not going to happen that day, as there was no one available to help.

And that last bit went way off the subject… Point being, I have to give at least my elderly darling her walk, or she will sulk. To regain the magic of accordion, I played Mi Cómplice on my phone. It’s always good to remind myself of what inspired me to want to play the accordion in the first place. I set off, marching to the beat* and thinking only of the finish line. I didn’t want to go for my relaxing walk; I just wanted to check it off my list and please my dog.

That’s when I fell in the pit…the literal pit in the park I like to walk in. I already know the poorly maintained parks of Roswell have holes, but with the darkening air and my preoccupation, I fell right in one, my ankle twisted, my glasses, phone, and dog suddenly scattered across the park. After the shock wore off, I said a few choice words and gathered myself together again. My phone had jumped to a Ramón Ayala song after landing with a thud — ah, my original inspiration for the accordion. I might have felt more pain if I hadn’t instead felt completely ridiculous.

I think the message in this post is — Jill scratches her head — to pay attention to the current moment? Or perhaps it’s to not treat life as a checklist because true enjoyment, like falling into holes, is around every sunset corner you round. Oh, yeah, it had something to do with the snares of sin and mumbling choice words when I fall, not to mention despairing over the long walk home. Whatever way you look at it, my ankle is throbbing today, though it didn’t prevent me from trying to fill my exercise block. And I already filled the Mi Cómplice spot and perhaps played it a little better than yesterday.

*If you want to see what marching to the beat means, you’ll have to watch the video and mira al hombre que está bailando con un palito. Seriously, though, the first time I watched this video I laughed so hard with pure delight that ese hombre does nothing but dance on beat with a stick. Apparently, that was his role in the band. I love his smile. Infectious.

Yesterday was Parade Day, the best day of the year, when school is cancelled and the town is shut down for miles. Make way for the parade! the sirens scream.

Yes, the fair parade is a big deal in Roswell. Shutting it down in 2020 was just another way to demoralize an already demoralized community. When the furor settles, Roswell is a rural and agricultural community that has been hit hard by the shutdowns. Farming was supposed to have been “essential” but, sadly, when our distant bureaucrats determine that some businesses are essential and others aren’t, they unwittingly (or wittingly — I don’t put anything past politicians) disrupt supply chains that eventually cause farms to go out of business.

This year’s fair parade was a moment of hope, though, when the town rallied together, and the only person wearing a mask in the crowds or in the parade was the alien overlord of diabetes — oops, I meant to say Dunkin Donuts.

Even though I’m not a community-oriented person, I still find it heartening that a small town in the middle of nowhere gets together to celebrate what is important to them: schools, sports, local businesses, and the agricultural world the fair represents. I even find it heartening to see misbehaving boys riding their skateboards against the flow of the parade. And then there were the children who decided they would lead the parade on their bicycles; there they were, right in front of the blaring police and fire vehicles, as though they’d self-determined themselves to be the real marshalls of the event.

As much as the world changes, it stays the same. That’s why I kept this parade as the precursor to a major turning point in my latest book, Order of the PenTriagon. To the heroine, the normalcy of sparkly cheerleaders tumbling down the road is something to envy. But, despite the world coming apart for her, there the parade is — in a distant future when aliens have left the human population in disrepair.

When I started writing this book, I couldn’t have imagined how the world would shortly change; I get a strange shiver when I consider the so-called “pure bloods” of people in my book world who haven’t been vaccinated. No, I don’t consider vaccinated people to be impure; that would be the current meme world calling them that. To be honest, though, I wanted to throw in everything I’d read or heard over the years from men like Alex Jones or David Icke … and these men, I’m afraid, turned out to be actual truth bearers in many ways. David Icke might be slightly insane (I would call Jones “obsessed” and not necessarily mentally ill), but he still had a sense of reality the rest of us normal people have lacked.

I’ll finish this post by encouraging you to read my book, and also to post a picture of the Shriners in the parade, as they have a role to play in my story. Obviously, the men in the photo below are real people, not book characters. I impute no evil or good intentions to them; it’s really just an illustrative image, as it shows what Shriners look like with their hats and bikes.

Before I answer that question, I need to issue an apology for commenting problems here. Ever since I did an update a while back, I’ve been forced to moderate comments. All of them, including my own. I try to approve them immediately when they pop up on my phone. Occasionally, I miss one. Sometimes, I forget to approve my own, and days later, it feels awkward to do so. According to my settings, I don’t have to approve commenters who’ve left at least one prior comment. I have no idea why moderation isn’t working according to the settings, and I don’t have time to go to my host and search around for the problem, and I updated all the widgets here already. This apology is for any comments I unwittingly left in moderation (including my own, as they were meant to be in response to yours). Normally I have no desire to moderate at all; that’s what the spam filter is for.

On to the topic of the day: that nebulous concept known as joy. What is it, exactly? I don’t know. I don’t have a strong sense for feelings, but I know it’s generally defined as a constant in the soul that isn’t defined by temporary circumstances. Some Christians define it as an enduring trust in God. In Galatians 5, it’s housed between love and peace in the fruits of the spirit. I know what love is. I know what peace is. I know when I experience love and peace in others and in myself. But I find joy to be too intangible to recognize.

To be fair, all the fruits of the spirit are intangible concepts that spill over into real life actions. Someone filled with peace will be a peacemaker, a mediator, an unbiased judge. Someone filled with love will sacrifice what they want — or even need, at times — for others. Patience is demonstrated with a steady determination through trials and setbacks, even when they are caused by others. Faithfulness, gentleness, self-control — these all have real world applications.

What are the real world applications for joy? How do we spot this trait in others? I’m asking honest questions, as I honestly don’t know the answers. However, the Christians who’ve defined “joy” as “trust” are on to something, I think. When we trust that God will always be there for us despite temporal struggles when we don’t feel his presence, we are content anyway. I know this is true; I’ve felt this kind of contentment. In fact, it usually expresses itself most fully at times when I have little or no control over a situation.

Is trust a trait that radiates from the face? Yes, and it can be seen in the eyes of small children whose parents have never dropped them, let them go, or failed to care for them. The elderly often have it too, but it looks different on them because they have lived long enough that they should have stopped trusting in humans at the very least and probably even questioned God’s hand in their lives at times, and yet a resiliency shines from their eyes. They smile at people anyway, and the smile goes all the way to the eyes.

I was inspired to explore the concept of joy after reading an inspirational book called You Gotta Keep Dancin’ by Tim Hansel. I read it some time ago but accidentally flipped it open the other day to where the author quotes Nehemiah 8:10: “…the joy of of the LORD is my strength.” I’ve read that Bible verse numerous times, and yet, its meaning never registered with me. Because I rarely sleep and have no future hope of getting adequate sleep, I tend to think of things operating the opposite way: once I have slept enough and regained my strength, I will be joyful. But that’s not what the verse says. It says strength comes from joy. Not sleep. Not good health or a perfect diet. Joy. God’s joy.

Maybe this concept isn’t as earth-shattering to you as it is to me. And obviously, you can see why I would want to define joy, pin it down, and concentrate on feeling it. After all, an intangible reality that acts on a physical reality must be able to be measured somehow. It’s measured in my days, though. It’s numbered in the fact that I get through each task of every day off 0-4 hours of sleep a night and still laugh at jokes and maintain hobbies around my erratic work schedule. If joy is a deep trust in God, then I can sense its existence without having to define it further.

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. I had to dangle clickbait. This is not something I normally do, but I’m feeling wicked today. Do we really have a pandemic of the unvaccinated? Of course. That’s what happens when only unvaccinated people are required by employers and schools to be tested weekly and when the CDC only requires schools and employers to report hospitalizations and positive tests amongst the unvaccinated. It would be funny if it weren’t so manipulative and evil.

I want to make clear that I don’t doubt in the existence of Covid, or of its dangers. But take a look around you. The manipulation can’t last forever, not when it’s becoming painfully obvious to nearly everyone but the diehard believers in “science” that Covid vaccines won’t stop the spread of a very real illness. Everywhere I turn, the facts no longer support getting Covid vaccines — at least not as a way to stop the spread of Covid — which is ironic, as the diehard believers are still telling us nonbelievers that we’re irrational, fact-denying idiots engaging in temper tantrums (that’s an almost exact quote I read in a comment section the other day). And it’s not just Israel’s or Gibraltar’s data any longer; Harvard Business School, where they have a 95% Covid vax rate, has just had to take some of their classes online again due to outbreaks. Remember, though, that this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated….

What is the purpose of this post, but to alleviate frustration? I don’t know. I’m inundated with new articles to read, new facts every day. I’m on overload, as most people are. And sifting through it is a nightmare. I think that’s why so many skeptics accepted the vaccines in the first place. They wanted it all to stop: they wanted their elderly relatives to leave them alone, their bosses to leave them alone, and the shaming-blaming media and politicians to just shut up. In short, they wanted life to return to normal, and that is exactly what hasn’t happened.

Either our media and government entities are full of idealistic true believers in the vaccines, or they are monsters. There’s really not another option. And I don’t mean they are monsters because they’re pushing a vaccine that will never bring us herd immunity. I suppose they are slow-moving beasts at the best of time (except when approving Pfizer’s vaccine….) No, they are monsters because they are trying to hide or suppress data on cheap, workable medication like antihistamines. That is just the latest drug on my radar that they’ve suppressed.

If you haven’t heard that there were a couple of Spanish nursing homes that used antihistamines successfully at the outset of their patients’ Covid outbreaks, I’m not surprised. Who is going to make hand-over-fist money or control a population through Claritin passes? There is definite science behind why antihistamines work, which is why it’s even more heinous that this information is being suppressed. Can you imagine elderly people not dying of Covid because their doctors gave them allergy tabs? Not killing our elderly sounds like a great and noble thing, but instead, we stick tubes down people’s throats as a last resort before they die. I doubt most doctors and nurses enjoy seeing people die. It’s a shame, really. I talked to a nurse just the other day who told me about what a nightmare year 2020 was for her. What if she had been given better treatment options for her patients?

Imagine if our government weren’t so invested in the pharmacological tyranny that made them ignore or invent false stories about cheap drugs that effectively treat people (obviously, not everyone; there will never be a panacea. But why can’t we even look into these drugs? Why)? I’m now making up my own John Lennon lyrics. Sing along with me….

Antihistamines and azithromycin as a treatment for COVID-19 on primary health care – A retrospective observational study in elderly patients – PubMed (nih.gov)

Mast cells activated by SARS-CoV-2 release histamine which increases IL-1 levels causing cytokine storm and inflammatory reaction in COVID-19 – PubMed (nih.gov)

Writer and blog friend Jay DiNitto said something funny in the comments of my last post. He asked me if I took drugs — in jest, of course — because my blog is relaxing and exciting at the same time. For a start, I find it funny that anyone thinks my unfocused blog topics are exciting! But, yes, I try to be relaxed.

Let me tell you something about the world. Earlier, when I was taking the dog for our daily constitutional, I witnessed a man with a whip in one of Roswell’s many parks that have been let go to stickers and burs, and he was pulverizing garbage with it … and probably grass, too. Crack! Crack! Crack! That was to the right of me. To the left of me, a car whizzed by, emitting the sounds of angry rap, of which I could only hear angry obscenities before it screeched to turn a corner without reducing speed. Behind me, a speeding truck went through a stop sign, to which the car to his right responding by laying on his horn multiple times.

Maybe I’m overly sensitive, but I feel a sense of anger in the world around me that threatens to overwhelm my senses. I’ve become part of it, as I have to fight to suppress my own anger, and sometimes I’m not good at suppressing it. In short, the world is an angry place, but it’s still chockfull of fascinations. I discover the fascinations to block out the rest. No drugs are needed to throw myself into finding a new tidbit of information.

That has been a long intro and, possibly, an apology for the tidbit of information I had planned to share on my blog today. It’s not very exciting! But it’s actually very interesting to me. Due to my seeking out Spanish news articles and listening to Mexican music on my phone’s YouTube app, Google now recommends Spanish news articles to me. I would say about 50% of its recommendations to me are in Spanish. And they’re oddball news articles, too. When I seek out news to read in Spanish, I look for current events from Mexican media sources (yes, I’m slightly obsessed with Mexico, so I’m naturally going to seek those out). Google rather recommends articles about archaeology, history, and obscure language issues.

The tidbit of information I’m going to share — are you breathless in anticipation yet? On tenterhooks? — is from that last category. While that article has disappeared from my Google news stream, I found a comparable article about the subject here. What piqued my interest was the title (similar to this one): Existe una palabra en español que no se puede escribir. Wait, what? How could there be a word that you can speak but not write? As far as I know, English has no such thing because it has all the phonetic sounds from the alphabet and the normal blending of letters, and then it has exceptions to them. I know this because I’ve been teaching English phonetics for years. I have a few handy, torn-up manuals that teach all sounds in the English language. In the 19th C, if Webster had come across a peculiar word that didn’t fit the normal phonetic rules, he would have found a “best spelling” for it and put it in his dictionary. That, however, wasn’t peculiar to Webster. English had been doing that for a very long time. Webster simply wanted to streamline and regulate the spellings for a new English-speaking nation.

Apparently, there’s no such wiggle room in Spanish for such bold dealings. In this case, the word in question is the command form of salirle, which basically means get out! In order to write this, you would end up with salle, the “ll” making a “y” sound instead of an “l”. This article is actually not as comparable as I though it was; it’s much shorter. The one I read goes on for a space, talking about how this topic was discussed by the Real Academia Español, who determined that an exception couldn’t be made for this command form, or even that it could be written differently, e.g., sal le. Its recommendation was for writers to reconstruct their sentences to avoid this form. My thoughts ran to court transcriptions and the like. What then, Royal Academy? What happens then??!! What if a witness is telling the court the last conversation she had with her murderous employer, in which he is breaching her quarters and she shouts, “¡Sal-le!”? What then, I ask you? How is the court scribe supposed to type that out? I wish I could find the original article, though I don’t think it went into quite that much depth.

It did just occur to me that, in addition to forming a creative story in which a person might be forced to write an unwritable word, I could come up with a reasonable explanation for why a man was whipping garbage and grass in the park with an actual bonafide whip. Did you know a circus got stranded in Roswell during the original pandemic shutdown? For months, their tents and trucks were parked at the fairgrounds looking forlorn, not like a circus at all, but like wasted dreams. What if that man in the park wasn’t angry at all. What if he was the lion tamer, and he lost his job and became permanently trapped here? What if he was just practicing so he could find another job?

Or maybe he was a really awful lion tamer, and his bosses, clearly Spanish speakers, finally told him to “—–!” Sorry, but I don’t want the Academy after me. But the funniest part of this to me is I’ve never heard anyone use the term salirle as a command. Maybe it happens all the time in actual Spanish-speaking countries. Here, though, the circus manager would probably just shout the very transcribable ¡Váyase, señor!

And with that, I think it’s time to leave now.

Hans G. Schanz has been putting these books sales together for a while. Most of the books are $.99; some are free. I tend to grab a couple of books if I can find something that piques my interest that I haven’t already read. Unfortunately, I’ve read most of the authors I like in this group. I will highlight a few of those in a minute because you might not have. First, I’ll put up some links: Book Sale; About BasedCon.

Most of the authors in the sale are modern and currently publishing; there are a handful of classics on the list. I like most sci fi classics, such as H.G. Wells, but I’m writing this post to promote the authors trying to make a living at this gig today.

My favorite current author to read off the list, then, is Robert Kroese. I appreciate Kroese because he manages to be cerebral, absurdist and/or funny, and adventurous all at the same time. It’s my favorite tone for books, albeit I’ll go for weird in that middle slot instead of funny. And I’ll be honest, if the first two descriptors are present, adventuresome isn’t mandatory. But an author that can manage all three gets two thumbs up from me! I don’t have three thumbs….

Fenton Wood is not bad, either. He manages to be cerebral and weird and adventurous in his first book, Pirates of the Electromagnetic Waves. That book also has the heady thrill of childlike wonder, as the characters start off as children. By the next book, they are no longer children, and the plot isn’t as solid. I actually like the second book in the series simply because it’s so technical; there is wonder in that, too. But not everyone enjoys the feel of nonfiction in their fiction. Nonfiction just happens to be what I read most of the time — well, not exactly. I read it constantly, though, in between my fiction. A chapter here, a chapter there — and then I see an enticing work of fiction and will buy it and read it all at once. This entire series is worth giving a try. Fenton Wood has a unique voice, and I’m grateful for the ease of indie publishing because traditional publishing rarely chooses good weird these days.

One of my favorite author personalities on the list is Jon Del Arroz. His books are good, too, especially the series that starts with Justified (the book he has for sale at BasedCon). I’ve at the very least started most of his series of books. His latest release is The Stars Rejoined from the Aryshan War series. I purchased this book but haven’t yet read it. I admire Jon because he doesn’t just produce good books; he’s also hardworking and constantly producing content: new series, comics, and videos. He’s one of those people who would be kind and magnanimous to all people [or most, probably] … if they would allow him to. The world is full of haters, though, and can’t cope with people who are both open and conservative. Openness is a trait in the Big 5 cluster of personality traits. When I examine the world around me, I realize that the only people I really get along with well possess this trait. But it’s both sad and strange that openness, which used to cluster around oddball conservatives and people who call themselves “liberals”, is difficult to find in a world hunkering down in their black and white spaces. Have they become checker or chess pieces? I don’t know. I hate hunkering, though.

I didn’t mean to get philosophical. I apologize. Go check out the list of books for sale. There are many more authors I appreciate there, and others I won’t read due to their 17+ rating. I’m sorry. I don’t read books with explicit sexual content. I don’t find it healthy, as reading goes directly into the cerebral brain, where lust might worm its way in under the demons of intellectualism. For the record, when scrolling through, I saw only a couple that fit into 17+.