I’m feeling pretty chill right now. A kind of day off. We ran the show in the morning. Still some tightening to go but we are close to it. Then Benjy had to get to the station. We only have one whip this week, a big old saloon people carrier type thing. It hasn’t got winter tyres. I’m pretty used to driving in snow and ice though. And dad taught me how to spot the black ice if there’s been snow recently. Which there has. I lost traction on a couple of turns but was expecting it and driving to cater for it.
When he was dropped off I went on a little explore. It is all grids here. By rights this whole hostile area should be uninhabited. But with building after wooden building these settlers have carved out their existence on the plains and my God it is a triumph of man over nature but no wonder the people here think nature is irrelevant. Human will has carved out predictable journeys through emptiness.
We all bought cheese and had it together in the hotel foyer with wine. I don’t think the wine is up to scratch here generally. I brought the best bottle I could find by my standards and it was getting roundly dissed by Sam. It was a Californian Rioja, 2020. I know that was a good year in Europe, might not have been so good over here. But allegedly the grapes are good in California. Just … wine doesn’t travel. It is much further from the wine zone to here in Indiana. Chilean wine or American wine has still travelled a long way to get here to the cold cold Indiana flats.
But this is why the world is dying. There’s local stuff. I don’t even know what it is. Because all the outlets are trying to sell things the same the same the same. We are such a boring species.
Coming to the end though I guess. So be it. The temperature has been incredibly low here, refreshingly low, yesterday minus 25 and my beard froze with moisture from my breath. It isn’t just the kids whose mother is their sister, it is the nominal leaders saying “Global warming eh?” When the morons are driving there’s nothing can be done.
It is pretty weird being here. There’s a lawless militia who are rewriting how things are done over here. Today they decided that the right to bear arms is irrelevant. They took a gun from a peaceful protestor and then executed him for his opinions. It must be hard to be a citizen of this country knowing that the law is changing and the cost of getting left behind is a bullet. That poor lady who was shot in the side of the face because her wife talked to the gunchild like the idiot he was… I don’t really understand it but from what I can make sense of, the “proud boys” are now called “ICE” and have been set forth without training to bring as much fear and dissension as possible, with absolute immunity if they want to shoot people in the face. It’s weird to think that this is an American thing. For most of my life it is what America has been protecting people from. It’s scary. I’m not a citizen. The militia shoots citizens with impunity. Am I taking a risk writing this? Surely not… The land of the free? I think I’ll be okay as I’m not a woman and the proud boys are mostly afraid of women. The guy ICE/Proud Boys shot was interrupting their chief pleasure of beating up a woman.
I’m trying to be light about this but it is sickening. These slow useless humans hiding their faces even though they were the ones deliberately coughing on your soup in COVID because masks are against human rights. Slinging their self importance around, clueless and mean, their atrocities condoned by power even before the evidence is considered. And all the little nasty Stans supporting authoritarianism like it’s never gonna come for them…
So to bed. With extra duvets. All is well.
AlBarclay 