March 2026 in Review
Hello Funny People,
Well, I've suffered and survived my first cold of the year, and I have to tell you: I hated it just as much as I did last time. The weather here in STL just cannot decide what it wants to be. Does it want to be Spring, Winter, muggy Summer--what? Answer: all the above, all at once. That said, I'm doing alright otherwise.
A Brief Recapitulation
The new job has been interesting so far. Don't misunderstand; I'm glad to be gainfully employed in nonprofit education with good benefits, a salary, a pension, and off that damn job market, which sounds like an ungodly nightmare right now. However, it's been interesting because of how radically different a change of pace it's been.
This time of year at my old accounting job would normally be a time of high stress. Lots of "herding of cats," to use one of my favorite images. And around this time, we'd be super high strung because we're less than two weeks out from the first filing deadline. Here at the Community College, however, things are chill in a way to which it's still taking my mind and spirit time to acclimate.
There have been some highlights though. Thus far, I've gotten to know many of my counterparts, both within my campus's building and across the district. Always good to know people who know more than you do so you can turn to them when you need enlightenment on a subject. I've taken minutes at various meetings, particularly academic advisory committee meetings. I've attended one staff development conference on another campus (and doing so, seen a campus I've not spent much time on). And, of course, I've gradually begun ingratiating myself with the faculty I support, my colleagues with whom I work, and the students with whom I do on occasion interact.
I've also, in my brief tenure thus far and to my surprise, managed to get on the Dean's good side. Not through any Machiavellian machinations on my part, but simply by...being myself, apparently.
At one point, she stopped into my primary department and asked me how I was getting along so far three weeks into my job.
My answer: "Well, it must be going well because they haven't fired me yet."
Not only did she laugh, but she gave me a high-five.
I reserve my brash humor for my nearest and dearest, but it's also how I interface with the world with the greatest ease. I've also learned, through sometimes embarrassing experience, that my sense of humor isn't for everyone. But, on this occasion, it helped.
One of the students, a gentleman a few years older than me, in fact, also gave me insight as to why it was likely I got this job in the first place. The campus I work at is in the north region of St. Louis County, not too far away from my old University, the University of Missouri - St. Louis. North County, especially in recent years, has garnished a reputation for being...let's say, rough. In my daily commute, I see it. Lots of neglected neighborhoods, rundown buildings, and people who look as if they're hard up for cash and worried they won't be able to make rent this month or fill their fridge, let alone pay their phone bill. As such, there's a lot of desperation, and where there's desperation, there are folks who turn to things that aren't good for them, namely drugs.
A month before I started on my job, one such person apparently wandered into the clinic asking, "To see what was in there." To the ears of the wary, it was sign they may have been looking for something more than just to satisfying their curiosity. In a department largely comprised of women, having a scary-looking dude like me (bearded, woolly haired, brown, 6'1", with resting douche-canoe face), manning the front office is ideal. It's like having a pit-bull guard your front yard.
Besides that, of course, we've had typical bizarre weather here in STL, which is part of the reason I had my cold. The weeks have gone something like this:
Monday: 23°F, Cloudy, Windy AF
Tuesday, 33°F, Still Cloudy, Still Windy AF
Wednesday: 54°F, Clear Sky, Slightly Windy AF
Thursday: 70°F, Clear, Sunny AF
Friday: 89°F, Sunny, Hot AF (And not in a fun way)
Saturday & Sunday: HOT AF, Windy AF
Repeat
Sadly, this weather by snow globe shake has also had one major deleterious effect: it's killed off most of the local beauty for the season.
When the heat started coming, both the Daffodils and the magnolia blossoms have taken a major hit. The week of the 16th, we had a sudden March snowfall, and with it, came a frigid cold in the teens. While some Daffodils managed to withstand it, a lot of them have browned and died for the season. The magnolias, however, hate the cold. While many of them stayed on the trees (usually, they get pelted down from the branches by icy rain at some point), every tree that once glittered with coral and violet blooms and buds is now a sad shade of wilted brown.
If only because it's ruining the little beauty we get here during this time of year, we need to take climate change seriously and do something about it.
The Writing Life
March 13th, I finally finished the last chapter of the steampunk dark fantasy. I immediately went to bed and napped afterwards. Having finally finished a fourth novel, after having the shame of my first attempt at a fourth novel flame out in 2024 is such a burden off my shoulders.
Now, I have two things I'm in the middle of doing.
First, I'm finally returning to my long-neglected second novel and beginning the revision process. I'd made some strides towards that a few years back (most of the biggest changes, particularly regarding the ending are done), but now, I want to slow down and go through it, line by line, and polish it up. And perhaps find those other stubborn spots and fix those up too.
The second thing: figuring out which big project to do next. In the summer of last year, I started two new novels, set in a different setting to either my forthcoming novel, my second novel, or my steampunk dark fantasy. In fact, it's set in the same world as my story "The Culebre of San Moreno," and both, to different degrees, feature Tata Duende. The problem: I don't know if I want to spend another year, plus, writing another fantasy book. Especially now that I have some ideas about one of my other sci-fi titles ready to go. Decisions, decisions...
For now, I'll focus on the second novel, but once I've completed a full pass through it, I'll need to mull over which novel I'm to turn to next.
Miscellaneous
The undisputed highlight of this month was spending time with my friends, Val and Will. The weekend of my birthday, we went to the early show of Daniel Tosh's First Farewell Tour at the Stifle Theater downtown and then had a small dinner at one of our favorite bars, The Golden Hoosier.
Not only was it an evening of laughs, it was an evening of good conversation and catching up after not being together for so long. A lot had changed in our lives since we last hung out, but we were the same as ever. Three friends, enjoying each other's company.
Watching the orange oaf and his circus of upwardly mobile failures has been anything but enjoyable. That said, his base has started, gradually, like an iceberg, to drift away from him. All it took was further proof of what matters to this fuckers. Not human rights violations. Not the clawing away of food and healthcare from hurting citizens. Not the sundering of our institutions. Not the further rigging of the tax code in favor of billionaires, which they will never be but continue to believe they might be (because they're idiots). Not even the alienation of every last one of our former allies or the potential mass-exposure of their personal data to who knows because of one of muskboi's former red-pilled code monkeys. Nope.
But the moment gas prices began to encroach towards $4 dollars a gallons at the pump? You better believe these selfish, uncaring assholes started getting pissed.
I'm not naive. I know people vote in their own interest. I know Americans fundamentally have no sense of collective good and likely never will. I also know that conservatives, broadly speaking, don't care about other people and the only way to get them to take an interest is for them to experience painful hardship directly. But it still pisses me off that, despite the Iran Conflict being an illegal, immoral war they didn't question it or turn against it until the cascading effects of it began taking more money out of their wallets
The end of the American empire can't come soon enough.
Between moments of observing interesting times, I've been trying my best to keep up with some recent reads and watches.
After neglecting it since the new season began, I binged the first 10 episodes of The Pitt's second season.
Turns out, the first season was not a fluke. Noah Wyle and his cast mates, new and returning, have delivered a marvelous second season thus far.
In keeping both with the show's mission—to be as true-to-life as possible while still delivering a dramatic story—the contemporary hardships of life in the US aren't far from the narrative.
This season, we get mentions of how changes in funding from the Federal Government regarding race-based research have overthrown Samira's plans for a study on racial disparities in medicine. We also get more criticism directed at administration regarding the nursing shortages from everyone's favorite charge nurse, Dana. The troubles of communication, particularly with an ASL patient in Santos's charge, which were such a godsend last season regarding the Nepali hate-crime victim, come into play. One of the great sources of stress comes when the entire hospital's computer system has to shut down due to the pending threat of cyberattacks, which forces 21st century adults, overly reliant upon technology and its conveniences, to adjust, mid-shift. Most importantly, however, we get a glimpse into how the current regime's harsh crackdown on immigration through ICE has begun to affect families. Two Haitian-American children, an older daughter formerly bound for the Ivy League, forced to look after her minor brother in Pittsburgh after her parents were deported. And where did ICE snatch them? At their immigration status hearing.
The social criticism is never far from the surface, and it's clear the creators, showrunners, and central star are not fans of what's going on (at least, as far as we can tell).
On the lighter side of things, seeing where our characters are, about a year after the previous season, is refreshing. Mel, Santos, and Whittaker have all clearly grown into their roles as fixtures in the ER.
Whittaker especially has grown from the accident-prone, but good-natured boob he was last season to being a seasoned medical professional with practical experience. Such is his growth that Robbie has adopted something of a hands-off approach with him, trusting him to handle the teaching of medical students doing their rotations.
Mel, of course, is Mel, though, she's far more tightly wound this season than previously due to a big source of stress hanging over her. Yet, so far, she seems to be managing it alright--at least as alright as a ND person with lower support needs can in such a high stress environment can.
Santos, however, is a little on edge. While her shell of sarcasm and abrasive humor has grown on me, especially given we understand her more than previously, she's clearly under a great deal of stress. Not only have a lot of the technical difficulties of this season fallen on her shoulders—namely, the generative AI charting issues, the problems with the ASL interpreter through Zoom, and her constant tardiness on her charting—but she also has to deal with a twofold problem apparent from last season. One, she's still unable to be completely vulnerable with other people, largely due to her chafing personality, and two, she clearly needs someone to talk to, especially now that Langdon has returned. But knowing Santos, she's not likely to reach that point of spilling her guts until a crisis hits.
The show still has five more episodes left in the season. Exactly where things will land by the end is still up in the air, but with another major disaster, and the added complication of the loss of their computer systems, there's plenty of scope for drama still.
My other live-action show obsession as of late is a small gem I've neglected since it debuted on Netflix three years ago: The Diplomat.
When I first saw the poster for this show, it didn't catch my eye. Why would I care about this series of its characters. However, I am a total shill for any story involving political intrigue. Anything with a little thriller pacing, engaging characters, and high stakes that come down to negotiations and conversations, where cultural sensitivities, differences, and varying sizes of egos have be navigated between people is absolutely for me.
This show scratches the itch for that part of me that still rewatches The West Wing periodically or yearns for the early seasons of Game of Thrones. And speaking of West Wing, while I haven't gotten to the episodes featuring them yet, I understand that Allison Janney and Bradley Whitford are in this show. So, I'm looking forward to seeing them do their thing when I get to it.
My reading this month, strangely enough had an interesting thread running through it, even though the books themselves were all by different authors and all telling their own stories. Perhaps the fit of pique I found myself experiencing after watching The Librarians last month left me in a mood to fight fascism, because that's essentially what every single book i wrote had in common. In one way or another, every book was antifa literature, and honestly, I'm glad of it because all of them have given me a kind of hope.
When Books Went To War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II by Molly Guptill Manning
This wonderful social history book explores the story we all know but through a different lens: the history of the ASE, or Armed Services Edition.
ASEs were the result of every publishing company crowd-sourcing to produce a specially made, easily portable edition of selected titles from their catalogues for the servicemen (World War II still only had men servicing in combat, with Women serving as non-combat WACs, or Women's Army Corps). These books became enormously popular among servicemen, who traded them around among themselves, like they were playing cards, they led to a mass rise in literacy among the American people. So popular were they, in fact, that, as Manning writes, "Any men caught without one was considered to be out of uniform."
And why did every publishing company in the states go out of their way to produce these books? Simple: to keep up morale among the servicemen. Well before Pearl Harbor, librarians and other knowledgeable people realized the reason why Europe fell so rapidly when Hitler launched the Blitzkrieg was because of the demoralizing propaganda Goebbels launched at them, via radio for months beforehand, bigging up the Germany forces. So by the time armies met on the battlefield, the mental war had already been won by the Nazis. Therefore, when the war came to the US following Japan's attack, and Germany began bombarding the US with similar propaganda, the world of books realized they needed to safeguard the soldier's minds if they wanted any chance of winning.
And win they did, not only because of the strategies devised by the wartime leaders, but also because the soldiers always retained the will to fight even in the face of the horrors of warfare. The ASEs were one of the sources of occasional peace that enabled them to retain that will.
As a writer, cursed to live through interesting times, it can sometimes feel pointless doing what I do. It's because of books like these that make me realize that, actually, one of the most important things we offer those who read our work is comfort, the ability to escape present hardship, if only for a few minutes. That few minutes, though, may make all the difference between people losing hope and people surviving one day more.
It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
I'd never read a Sinclair Lewis novel, and after reading this, I can't help but wonder why he ever fell out of favor. My only guess is that the genius he clearly possessed as a writer ended up being overshadowed by the lyrical genius of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the innovative minimalism of Ernest Hemingway, and the rhapsodic power of Thomas Wolfe, three direct contemporaries of his. Then again, Americans have never been the biggest fans of satire, mostly because we culturally suffer from a severe irony deficiency.
But this book appears to be having quite a moment. In fact, it almost reads as the prequel for the future Octavia Butler depicts in her Parable of the Sower, where a populist, neglectful, kleptocratic government imposes a kind of new world order. It also reads like the playbook Stephen Miller and the rest of 47's coterie read before they resumed power. (Of course, we all they didn't because, if they could read fiction, they'd be more empathetic and wouldn't be doing what they do.) Instead of ICE Agents terrorizing and killing people, we have Minute Men (or MMs), and instead of a circle of brown-nosing sycophants kowtowing to strong man, we have a circle of brilliant bureaucrats jockeying to overthrow their charismatic leader.
The best thing about this book, however, is its protagonist, Doremus Jessup's slow transformation over the book's plot. While, at first, he only sees Buzz Windrip and his Corpo Government as a nuisance, he doesn't immediately come out as a fire-breathing critic of him. The turn against him is gradual, as more people around him suffer under the Corpo rule, until Jessup elects to becoming an agent of the New Underground, a resistance movement that seeks to propagandize against the Jessup government and urge people to resist. Even after he manages to get his family safely out of the country, Jessup continues to work as a covert agent within enemy territory, under an assumed name, the novel concluding with the wonderfully simple words, "For a Doremus Jessup can never die."
Why does this change move me? It reflects how most people, especially people who aren't immediately impacted by fascist regimes when they pass legislation curtailing their rights, take a long time to recognize the threat for what it is. Yet, perhaps against Lewis's better judgement, he firmly believes they eventually will recognize it and become its greatest enemies.
Everyone should read this book, if only to see a portrait of something we don't see depicted enough in fiction: how fascism infects a nation. Seldom do such regimes take over using force, as they did in Spain in the 1930s. Instead, they invade the system and corrupt it from within. Hopefully, like Doremus Jessup, we'll make our way through this and never die.
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
Speaking of fascistic regimes, if there's a perfect novel to read in tandem with It Can't Happen Here that speaks to the other problem with our current interesting times, it's this book by Kurt Vonnegut.
While It Can't... explores the slow creep of political fascism, Player Piano explores what happens when privately developed automating technology and massive corporate interests begin impacting society with their unregulated innovations.
The despair over the loss of work resulting from the automation technology we see developed in Ilium, New York by the company, run in part by Paul Proteus, a classic educated nepo-baby, who his a growing sense of ennui effecting him as he watches the disparity his machines create grow wider and wider until, at last, he decides to try and leave it behind.
Like with Jessup in Lewis' novel, Paul's turn towards rebellion happens slowly. As he realizes the system is is propping up and benefiting from isn't fulfilling him, he decides to try and remove himself from it (given his wealth, partly earned, partly inherited from his late father), allows him to do so. But it doesn't take. So, eventually, like several fellow former Ilium Works employees he decides to outright rebel and try and bring the system down affecting the despairing masses with no work--while keeping everything that does help. While it doesn't work out quite as Paul had hoped, as the government intervenes and arrests him and his co-conspirators, it at least left Paul satisfied that he tried.
The strangest thing about this novel though has to be the fact that, while it's clearly a Vonnegut work, it's so different from his later works. This is understandable. Player Piano wasn't a huge hit when it came out, but writing it clearly taught Vonnegut how to compose a conventional, straightforward long-form narrative. It laid the foundation for his later, more experimental work. It has no overt meta-fictional elements, the style is much more classical than Vonnegut's later deadpan terse writing, derived from his past as a journalist, and while there's human in it, it's much more subdued than in his later books. All those aspects aside though, it's a great read for the thematic territory it covers.
How To Stand Up To A Dictator: The Fight For Our Future by Maria Ressa
"A good journalist doesn't look for balance as when say, a world leader commits a war crime or outright lies to his citizenry because that would create a false equivalence. When a journalist confronts the powerful, it is easier and safer to write it in a balanced way, but that's a coward's way out. A good journalist wouldn't give equal time to climate deniers and climate change scientists. Good journalists lean on the side of evidence, on incontrovertible facts."
The Nobel Peace Laureate and hard-nosed journalist tells her story...
Ressa's memoir of her and her independent news organization's, Rappler, fight against the despotic government under Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines is nothing short of a harrowing one.
Combating the constant wave of misinformation that Mark Zuckerberg and META have allowed to proliferate like invasive milkweed on his platform int he name of profit was nothing short of a Sisyphean task, and yet, Ressa and her colleagues refuse to let it go unchecked. Like Librarians, journalists, the authors of the first page of history, have been on the front lines in the war against lie-and-anger fueled right-wing populism spreading across the world. It's something we here in the United States have forgotten with all our nonsense and infighting amongst ourselves, especially following the capture of our fourth estate by the forces of naked greed and profit that is the billionaire class.
Yet, despite everything Duterte did to try and muffle her and close down her organization, Ressa continues to hold the line and urges all of us to do likewise. More so, she sets out a plan in her memoir to do so, each of which she epitomizes in the titles of each chapter of her book. More so, she also urges her fellow journalists to remember what it was that their job is. It isn't to cower in the face of power; it's to hold power accountable by relying on the profession's greatest tool: evidence and incontrovertible facts.
As she said in her Nobel Prize Lecture, "Without facts, you can't have truth. Without truth, you can't have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy, and it becomes impossible to deal with the existential problems of our times."
Ack-Ack Macaque by Gareth L. Powell
I have been looking for this audiobook for months, if only so I could read Powell's earliest BFSA award-winning novel in my preferred format. Despite lacking some of the things I've come to think of as his trademarks, like the alternating first-person viewpoints and the talking space ships, this is still a pure Powell novel.
The writing, as usual, is clean and clear. The action is palpable, whisking the reader from one page to the next, from scene to scene and chapter to chapter. At the heart of the briskly paced adventure is a complex and damaged woman in the style of Ellen Ripley. And, most importantly, through trans-human and uplifted non-human intelligences, most notably the eponymous monkey action hero at the story's heart, Powell explores big philosophical and existential questions, running like operating system programs in the background of the narrative.
Is there such a thing as a soul? If so, what comprises it? The Ship of Theseus question of much of our body can we lose before we're no long us? How much of our destiny is predetermined by those who come before of us, and how much of it rests with us exercising our own agency?
By the end of the novel, I knew I was going to finish the series. Now, of course, I just need to get the other books, and I'll be alright.
Until next time, Funny People, as always, stay safe, stay healthy and take care.
— IMC 🙃
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