When I set out to learn about my mother's bridge club, the Jewish octogenarians behind the matching outfits and accessories, I never expected to fall in love with them. This is the story of the ladies, their game, their gen, and the ragged path that led me back to my mother.Let’s write the fuck out of this year. I mean balls to the wall. Lunch money! Pirate teeth! Bone marrow! The eastern chipmunk! The unfurled flag! I want to eat my pages. I want to go viral, I want to direct, I want to lose myself in a holy transference. When I go out to pick up my paper at 5:00a.m., the world is dark and quiet. The leaves scrape like my dad’s razor. Every day at exactly the same time, a man walks by swinging a blue flashlight to mark the way. Sometimes I wish he would take me away.
What the fuck is wrong with us?
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Betsy Lerner 
We’ve got this. Thanks for the encouragement. I am so tired of the naysayers. I almost gave up. We need that push to say one more day one more page. Balls to the walls, yes! Let’s go viral.
Very timely mission. Two chapters into a second novel then ground to a halt. A vow to start anew tomorrow. On y va into the wilderness.
Go Bobbi!
That says it all, Betsy. Very succinct.
Nothing at all!
Holy fuck balls, I love this post and all of your posts because not only can I read them, I can feel them in my old creaky bones. Let’s do it.
What the fuck is wrong with us? I don’t know. I wish I knew. Deconstruction finally disassembling all social structures? The rancid, rotting remnants of the revolution of May ’68 stinking up the whole house? Too much teevee? The trivial pursuits of a pampered, rattled people? Uncountable billions of chickens coming home to roost? Choirs of fat ladies screaming on the stages of closed theaters, no one there to listen? The immense, immeasurable inertia of the learned helpless, unresponding? Is the world itself the handbasket it goes to hell in? We have entertained ourselves unto the precipice — do we fall or shall we jump? Does it matter? How do we make anything matter in the maelstrom?
We’re good. Everybody else is fucked up. Time slips away.
What’s wrong?
Election fatigue? Covid fatigue? Upcoming holiday fatigue?
Everyone I know is just plain tired.
Maybe Pfizer can add a feel good stimulant to it’s magic vaccine? I’d vote for that.
its.
Damn autocorrect.
Writing longhand for the first time because it seems to be the only way I can keep going… roll on 2021.
Yes! I’m doing this, too. Can’t take any more screen time.
I humbly suggested nothing is wrong with this tribe. But there’s a whole population of Others, loudly proclaiming their craziness, who are such a distraction to the creative mind-set. Truly, an overload of potential characters, dialog and plot twists. Let’s take reassurance in the calendar: this year ends in 49 days. The party will be in my Big Back Yard.
Read this in the midst of writing a book about the eastern chipmunk!
For real?
For real! I’m a squirrel biologist writing a nonfiction book about wealth in animals (for an academic press), but I’m including fictional stories about wealth in squirrels and one of the five squirrel characters is an eastern chipmunk. Just discovered “The Forest for the Trees”, thank god, which is how I found my way here!