Routine

I’ve got this posted under two categories, blog housekeeping and Harry’s Diary. Its simply meant to be a footnote for my eight loyal readers to know what has occurred to me just know…..to put more routine in my life regarding the blog at least. The blog routine I’ve just thought of might only last a day…..we will see.

It is prompted by several concerns. When I attempt some impossible mission like getting elected to Congress in the increasingly cancerous Republican party its hard to write in the blog routinely. Routine is important. And I’d like to keep a record of the stuff racing through my mind a what seems to me to be light speed only to become a ghost improperly recalled unless some vestige remains for me to revisit. Case in point the column I just submitted to the editor of the Duluth Reader late yesterday. I sent it with an apology for its tardy submission.

You can see my rewrites on the floor where I usually have my recycling can. I had an idea for the column on Thursday which was good since Saturday night is the theoretical deadline. But it had the title “We are the meteor” I only roughed it out so as not to forget what was on my mind By the time I got back to it Saturday its ideas got mixed in with more ideas from my recent trip through the Minnesota River valley. They were a bit of a riff on the previous column, Indian Givers that served as my post campaign return to the Reader. But by Sunday I was taking a rather different approach based on the children’s book Millions of Cats.

But after developing two very different rough drafts I decided on Saturday night to spend it with our grandsons binge watching the very cool Amazon series Paper Girls. Claudia and I had already binged watched it ourselves and on Wednesday with the boys over for another end of summer overnight with us we got them into the first two episodes. That this time travel series is about four 12 year old girls and that it kept their attention attests to its quality.

But that left me only a couple hours late Saturday night to try and figure out how to merge two very different columns into one. All I could do was hope I could get a couple hours sleep and clear my mind. I sent my first alert to the editor explaining how I was once again going to get it in before Sunday church services……only when I woke up after three not so good hours of sleep I still couldn’t wrap my mind around what I wanted to write although Millions of Cats was now my Title.

Cut to the chase. I don’t wad up bad drafts like the stereotypical writers of old movies. I simply print out excessive quantities of partial edits go through them make corrections on my computer screen and print out the improvements. I have taken out a couple of forests this way since I began writing. But paper wadding while possibly cathartic is wasteful of my recycling space. I simply chuck old copies until I finally get to a print out on reading I can no longer find things to correct or improve……Woe to me if I read a “perfect” copy the next morning.

I got my completed copy in late Sunday and sent a second apology to the editor.

So this morning contemplating my irritation with myself for threatening my return to weekly submissions I decided I need to fore a little more routing into my writing. If I do what has just occurred to me I’ll also correct a three year failure to comment on all the news headlines and stories that capture my attention for the day. I start my day, as I’ve explained before with a lot of cellphone news scrolling which took the place of reading the morning paper when the Duluth News Trib fired too much of its reporting staff to allow its newest owners to make more money and then turned the paper into a two times a week paper with daily online news stories that I consistently miss because there is so little local news being reported and glitches that have prevented me from reading them on my cell phone.

Only the local news has suffered. I have switched to reading the Republican detested New York Times and Washington Post to get some real in depth new on the wide variety of sources I’ve craved since my Readers’s Digest days in junior and senior high.

Since before Covid first struck I’ve made a habit of emailing particularly interesting stories to myself for mention here in the blog……BUT DAMMIT….I rarely take the time to mention most of them. I especially worry because the readers of FOX WORLD PARANOIA have already been spoon fed bullshit inclining its hard-of-hearing viewers to think science is all Frankenstein and that man’s massive accidental reengineering of Earth is liberal nonsense that must be fought off with the point of a gun rather than reading. HELL!, I know Trumpers don’t read my blog. No one reads my blog!!! but I have to keep writing and uploading my thought in it to stay sane.

So this morning….where its almost already lunch time I will attempt to do two things. 1. I will have a simple post about todays 2 to 6 headlines that I find interesting whether I’ve read the stories or not AND 2. I will write out a sketchy possible future Reader column.

Both will be unsatisfying but I hope they keep me sane and I hope the daily stab at a future column will leave me with the bones of at least one column that I can crank out before having to turn in in tardy on Sunday. So that’s a routine which as of now…..after an hour of cranking this post out……I’ll try to get done today. Then I’ll be able to find time to work on French (a couple hours) and maybe do something else like honor my Christmas gift of cooking two meals a month for my sweetie……Something I have skipped the last five months doing in my concentration on an impossible challenge to the Eighth Congressional District’s threat to America – Pete (I worship at Trump’s outhouse) Stauber.

So on the the headlines.

Don’t look for proof reading corrections……this is pretty much stream of conscience.

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