Author: Diane Griffin

Diane is a writer of Fantasy, an intermittent blogger, and a generator of nonsense.

Posting On My Blog About Posting On My Blog About Me

I perceive that my writing energy, what of it there is, is being spent on correspondence. I wish this was not so, or that I was devoting more time to writing than I am. This is most apparent on Facebook, and to a lesser degree, on Twitter.

I think my twitter is super boring. I hate that I’ve let it become about leftist politics and the Democratic Primary horse race, which is already such a sh*t show that I can’t believe it. I really don’t like centrist Democrats. They’re so full of it.

The thing that’s annoying me the most is the seemingly successful smear job they’re doing on Tulsi Gabbard. Let’s get this straight: The candidate who is basing her campaign on the need to stop doing foreign regime change wars is, somehow, an imperialist. Also, someone with a 100% score from the HRC is a secret homophobe.

Got it.

And so it gets harder and harder to look at social media, because most of my friends are het up about politics, because politics is such a sh*t show right now, and because I’m also het up about politics, and sometimes I just don’t have the heart for it. I don’t even have the will to finish an argument when I start one. This stuff is BORING.

I’m sick of idiots, and I’m sick of the led-around-by-the-nose centrists who are bound to go fight for Biden Man (as I call him) when Biden Man is the latest example of the sort of Democratic pol who is, at heart, more responsible for Trompe (as I call him) than any other faction in the country, including his own base.

But I digress, egregiously.

I’m depressed, and therefore more distractible than usual, and the human race is draining me of hope right now. There are a couple of factors here. One is that I am feeling a bit rudderless about my writing, and less than productive. It’s hard to remember that I’ve done a couple of things since graduating, and that I can, if I choose to, keep the momentum going. I’m making that choice.

The other is that I am lonely and feeling spiritually dark. I’ve been embracing my inner goth. Winter is really hard for me, and it takes until around this time of year to get over it. So I think I have a one or two month window in which to be as productive as possible, then I have to start splitting time with the film fest I program for.

I have to start being very strategic with my time. I am picking projects I really want to do, and putting as much love into them as I can. That’s the way I know of to keep myself going. I need to be excited about what I’m working on. That’s why the write-every-day experiment that I tried earlier this spring failed so badly — I had to force myself to the computer every day, and that sort of thing just will not work with me. It’s a problem, but it’s the truth.

Memorial Day Memory

My Grandpa and Grandma Matthews raised peonies for Memorial Day as a cash crop.

They had two one-acre plots that they would plant with peonies in March. They’d harvest at the end of May, cutting the blooms for bouquets, uprooting the plants and wrapping the roots to replant the next year.

Then he would plant his vegetable garden in the same soil — corn, tomatoes, beans, eggplant, beets, summer squash, peppers, etc, which would get et when fresh, but which Grandma would also put up for the winter, in the same cellar where they stored the peony plants.

Such bounty from the earth! Those two plots will always be the configuration of my fondest Memorial Day memories.

Personal Blog #203 Part 11: Sunny Southern Colorado

Why the Mountains Are Always to the West.

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This is me riding shotgun through what was once called The Great American Desert, though it’s really a steppe, the eastern slope of southern Colorado. Much of my childhood was spent in this country, though I have not lived there since my freshman year of high school.

Sage, cactus, and grasses are a threadbare cover to the land I grew up on. The mountains are a grand presence in the west, impressed upon me to the point that any time I encounter mountains, no matter how they are actually oriented, the lizard part of my brain automatically labels the direction of those mountains “West.”

I still have family there, so I still go back. I’m glad that I do, because I love Colorado. I love its clear night skies and summer thunderstorms. I love being in the mountains south of Florence, where my Mother spent part of her childhood, in a dirt floor cabin, going to school in a one-room schoolhouse. My very favorite wildflower in the world grows in meadows around where my mother grew up. It’s called Indian blanket, and its ragged beauty is extravagant.

Indian Blanket

My roots in the Arkansas Valley run deep. My grandparents are buried there in the Fowler Cemetery.

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My brother and mother live there now. Though I haven’t lived there in decades, no place on Earth better deserves the appelation, “home.”

Byzantium, the Lost Empire (National Geographic Special)

Low-res version; Two episodes; 1 hr, 44 min.

This is the two-part National Geographic special about the Byzantine Empire. The first part is a laying of the groundwork, an answer to the challenge of condensing a millenium plus into a forty-five minute television show. Not bad.

The second part is for the Byzantium buff, and is full of little tidbits I’d never heard before. Worth your time, if you like history.

Documentary: Conservation of the Mosaic of the Transfiguration in the Monastery of St. Catherine at Mt. Sinai

This religious icon/mosaic, commissioned by the Emperor Justinian in the 6th Century, is one of the few remaining examples of pre-Iconoclast Byzantine art still in existence. I find it breathtaking, even before the restoration. The restoration work documented here makes me happy and proud to be a human.