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Archive for the ‘Biography’ Category

Links #831

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Obituary, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 7, 2026| Leave a Comment »

I had about six Coors Light at the VFW.  –  Tammy Robinkoff

This improvisation by saxophone great Sonny Rollins was provided, along with his obituary, by Jesse Walker; the other links above the video were provided by Radley Balko; Mike Masnick; Nun Ya; Popehat; Mike Siegel; Asawin Suebsaeng and Sean, in that order.

From the Archives

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

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This Too Shall Pass

Posted in Biography, Diary, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , on June 5, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Trauma, like everything else, is typically effaced by time.  The anniversary of the events of Memorial Day, 1995 still affected me deeply at the 24-year mark, but once I moved to Sunset full-time the following year, those old serpents began to grow quieter; last year they were overshadowed by the death of my best friend, and this year the anniversary was marked by little more than unpleasant memories despite spending it alone, which in the past was a bad idea.  The weathering away of the aftereffects of trauma appears to have been mostly the result of a combination of time, therapy, and daily cannabis usage, but I can’t discount the contributions made by age, wisdom, and perspective.  Those who fear mortality are fixated on the fact that all good things die, ignoring the fact that bad things do as well.  Spiritual immaturity obsesses about the former to the exclusion of the latter, but the insight which comes in the fullness of time, assuming we allow it to, brings the realization that this is not only as it should be, but as it must be.  And, if we’re fortunate, the recognition that this is not only good, but beautiful.

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Diary #831

Posted in Diary, tagged , , , on June 1, 2026| Leave a Comment »

What you’re looking at here is the ring which joins the plumbing of my hot tub to the heater; the flashlight is necessary because even in broad daylight it’s pretty dark in the basement.  As I learned three years ago, when there’s a leak it’s typically because a two-dollar rubber o-ring needs replacement.  But my body has aged considerably in the past three years, so it was much more tiring and unpleasant than it was last time, and I experienced nearly as much anxiety around the process as I did last time despite knowing exactly what needed to be done.  That’s how it has been with nearly every technical problem since Grace died; even when it was something she could no longer do (like crawling under the floor or climbing up on the roof), I could rely on her technical expertise to guide me, and because I had faith in her ability I wasn’t as reluctant to attempt things I’d never done before (like welding a steel structure together).  In contrast, I now experience considerable anxiety every time something technical needs doing; I even put off changing the main water-system filter for the entire last year because I was worried something might go wrong (I finally did it recently and of course it was fine).  About 30 years ago my friend Frank said that tragedies are multiplied by the inconveniences they spawn, and I’ve had the truth of that ground into my heart every time I have a technical problem, because every time it does and she’s not there to fix it herself or tell me how to fix it, I am reminded of the huge Grace-shaped hole in my life.

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Uncle Throwback Thursday

Posted in Biography, Favorites, Miscellaneous, Music, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , on May 28, 2026| Leave a Comment »

In the early ’80s…I was much too young…to really feel in my gut what it meant to remember [being in love] across a gulf of decades.  –
“So Long Ago, So Clear”

Trying to use [social media] without muting is like trying to have a garden without weeding.  –  “Maytweets”

Journalism that doesn’t at least occasionally offend the government isn’t real journalism.  –  “Yes, They’re Still Tweets”

My emotions are often insidious, slippery things, which is why I often used to refer to the “snakes in my head”.
–  “Thirty Years Gone“

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Diary #830

Posted in Diary, Miscellaneous, tagged , , on May 26, 2026| 1 Comment »

It’s that time of year when y’all are starting to get tired of pictures of chickens, so I instead present something completely different: pictures of eggs.  A few years ago I was given four ornamental chickens by friends who decided to stop keeping poultry, and I’ve been surprised that elderly (they’re all at least 6) chickens not really bred for laying are nonetheless still laying more than the much-younger blacks, who have been extremely disappointing layers.  One of the Ameraucanas is starting to peter out; she now lays only sporadic, tiny, vestigial eggs.  But one of the blacks laid this enormous goose-egg-sized monster last week; I’ve included a normal large-grade egg and one of the vestigial eggs for comparison.  On Friday night I decided to make eggs in a frame for dinner, and I used the giant (which turned out to be double-yolked) and three of the tinies (which had no yolk at all); that’s how I typically use eggs whose size grossly departs from the norm, because they’d throw off the amount of liquid in a recipe, but that doesn’t matter when one is merely cooking them straight.  Plus it’s kinda fun.

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Out of the Past

Posted in Biography, Fiction, History, tagged , , , , , on May 25, 2026| Leave a Comment »

As a lifelong bibliophile with a special interest in reference books, I’m always delighted to find a useful one that I didn’t even know existed.  Regular readers know that I’ve been working on a novel, The Big Boom, set in New Orleans of 1925 and featuring the characters from “Until the End of Days“ and “Hellhound”.  It will surprise no one who has read more than a few examples of my work that I’m an absolute fiend for accuracy; anachronisms and other such errors really annoy me when I encounter them, so there’s absolutely no way I’m going to let them creep into my work if I can possibly avoid it.  But once in a while, the fact one needs is far too obscure for the enshittified latter-day Google to turn up, and since there is no academic library nearby that can turn into a complicated search unless I want to rewrite that section of the story so as to avoid referencing unknown facts.

Now, some of you may know that early 20th-century New Orleans had one of the most extensive networks of streetcars in the United States, but as automobiles proliferated in the 1930s some of the lines began to close down, and after World War II an unholy alliance of Detroit manufacturers and corrupt New Orleans politicians conspired to replace the clean, quiet, efficient, and long-lasting (there are streetcars still in operation today which were built in the 1920s) electric streetcars with filthy, noisy, inefficient, “modern” buses which must be replaced every few years.  By 1953 only the St. Charles Avenue and Canal Street lines were left, and in 1964 the Canal Street line was pulled out as well; the only line which survived into my adulthood was the St. Charles line, and even it was reduced to about half of its former range.  So when streetcar routes came into the plot twice in the first four chapters of my book, I started trying to find maps of the network in its 1920s heyday, only to be repeatedly thwarted.  Finally, a few weeks ago, a serendipitous search turned up a photo of the map someone had posted to Reddit; it was much too low-resolution to be of any use, but the poster had the good sense many internet denizens lack: she named the source.  I immediately went to Amazon, located a copy, bought it for the very reasonable price of $20, and it arrived a week ago Saturday.  It was published in 1955, was written by a New Orleanian who was an age-peer of my main characters, and was even better than I’d hoped for; it had three different maps (1880, 1906, and a combined 1915-1930 map), detailed descriptions of each route, schematics of the cars, period photos galore, and a wealth of facts I couldn’t have hoped for (such as the fact that the normal fare from 1922 to at least 1955 was 7¢).  The whole thing was so exciting that I spent most of the following afternoon immersed in it, editing my text to insert small details, and generally feeling like a kid in a candy store.  I know some of y’all probably find this amusing, but as I’ve said many times, “You can take the girl out of the library, but you can’t take the librarian out of the girl.”  Or the old woman, for that matter.  And I always treasure books which connect me to a world I was born too late to explore for myself.

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Links #829

Posted in Biography, Current Events, History, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Obituary, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 24, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Approving a project that will consume water and energy at this scale is irresponsible and dangerous.  –  Franque Bains

This week’s video is a recently-discovered shellac master pressing of “Cross Road Blues” by Robert John­son, who died mysteriously in 1938 before his career even got properly started, yet still influenced the young blues-inspired guitarists of the Sixties.  The video was provided by Brooke Magnanti, and the links above it by Mike Siegel, Shiv Ramdas, Kevin Wilson, Reason, IncarcerNation, and Nun Ya (x2), in that order.

From the Archives

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

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Diary #829

Posted in Diary, tagged , on May 19, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Sunday was graduation day for the pullets.  On Saturday night I left the nursery open, and when I went into the henhouse on Sunday morning only one of them was still in there; after shooing her out I removed the chick feeder, water bottle, heat lamp and timer, so from now on they’ll come and go with the other chickens, on a natural daylight schedule.  It’ll probably be a few weeks before they start to follow the flock, and they’ll generally keep to their own clique until they start laying sometime in July.  I can’t yet tell whether the turkey is a tom or a hen, but she’s bolder than the others because despite being two weeks younger, she’s already noticeably larger.  But in any case, by September the hens will all be one flock (plus the turkey), and on the first day of autumn the timer-controlled heat lamp will go back on, and the cycle will begin again.

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A Novel Process

Posted in Biography, Fiction, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , on May 15, 2026| Leave a Comment »

For most of my life, my writing process was more like gestation than construction; an essay or story would grow in my head until I put it on paper fully-formed.  When a high-school English teacher wanted us to include a “jot outline” of rough ideas along with the essay, I would do the outline after I finished (sometimes as late as the beginning of class) because writing down half-formed notions was simply not part of my writing process, and even in university I typically wrote my term papers at the (manual) typewriter, and the only necessary revisions could be accomplished with Liquid Paper.  When I got my first computer in the spring of 1989 this process became even quicker and more seamless, because with a word processor I could revise without even leaving a detectable trace.  And while this may sound wonderful to those of you who struggle to write, it meant I never developed the cognitive tools to write anything more than a few thousand words long, just as I never developed the cognitive tools to gain understanding of any topic I couldn’t master by simply paying attention to the book or teacher.

It has certainly not escaped the notice of my long-term readers that most of my fiction is in the short-short category (< 2000 words), with only occasional forays into the full-length short story category (< 10,000 words).  So last summer, when I wanted to tell a story that needed more time and space for character and setting development, I needed to learn a new skill: actually plotting a story rather than simply shouting “Eureka!”, reaching up to grasp the light bulb over my head, and quickly inserting it into a document.  Most of the work was still done in my head, and my first two novellas were written all out of sequence, with each scene or section written as it developed in my mind, then put together in proper sequence and polished.  And what I learned from that process made me confident enough to embark on a still-larger project, a short novel (in the 45,000 word range) set in the spring of 1925 and tentatively entitled The Big Boom.  So far, I’ve finished the first draft of the prologue and first three chapters, and yesterday I started chapter four (which will trigger some additions to chapter one).  This story seems to be developing more in sequence than the other two, though it may not continue in that wise; still, given that “Hellhound” was written in sequence to a greater degree than “Until the End of Days“, who knows?  I’m taking my time and enjoying the process, and I hope y’all will enjoy the result.

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Throwback Thursday’s Coffin

Posted in Biography, History, Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, Words, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on May 14, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Calling the name on government records “real”, rather than the name by which people are widely known, the name they chose for themselves and built a career on, is a sickening obeisance to the State.  –  “What is Real?”

True principles and valid ethics don’t depend on the gut-level preferences of any one person.  –  “Under the Sun”

My lifelong practice of burning my candle at both ends has resulted in my brain aging far more than those of people who haven’t been running theirs on “high” since the Nixon era.
–  “More Often Nowadays”

Catholic education has traditionally put such a strong emphasis on critical thinking skills that some wit once pointed out that the Church was its own worst enemy because it provided children with the tools that undermine faith.
–  “Just As Good“

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