quote:

I generally ate a big breakfast. The amount of walking I did required it. In the old days, as a corporate executive, I kept going on little more than continuous cups of black coffee until dinnertime. I had one of those steel thermal mugs you carried everywhere with you as a kind of signifier of how busy, and therefore how important, you were. The people in my office joked that my thermal mug was surgically attached to my arm. In those days, in a life that now seemed as if it had taken place on another planet, we lived in Brookline, Massachusetts, and I worked for a software company called Ellipses on Route 128. Our division made network security programs: antivirus, antispam, antihacker, firewalls. I was head of marketing and spent the bulk of my time organizing promotional events at national trade shows in places like Atlanta and Las Vegas. We’d pay big-time rock and roll bands to get the customers in for the CEO’s sales pitch. We’d buy out whole vintages of California wineries to impress our clients. We’d hire celebrity chefs to feed them. My job paid well and we enjoyed the status of a nice house, German cars, and private schools for the children. I multitasked so hard I had panic attacks. I suppose all the coffee I drank didn’t help. Then, within a short span of time, our world changed completely.

We came here, to Union Grove, Sandy’s hometown, after the bomb went off in Los Angeles. That act of jihad was extraordinarily successful. It tanked the whole U.S. economy. The authorities finally had to start inspecting every shipping container that entered every harbor in the nation. Freighters anchored for weeks off Seattle, Norfolk, Baltimore, the Jersey terminals, Boston, and every other port of entry. Many of them eventually turned around and went home with their cargoes undelivered. The earth stopped being flat and became very round again. Even nations that were still talking to us after the war in the Holy Land, stopped being able to trade with us. Ellipses went down by stages, one division at a time. Ours was the last to go.

I was thirty-six then. We sold the house in Brookline at a substantial loss just to get out. We dumped the big BMW and kept the sedan. You could still get gasoline, though it was expensive and scarcities were worsening. We wanted to be as far away from the action as we could get without leaving the northeastern region of the country. Sandy’s father, Bill Trammel, was alive then, a retired vice president of the nearby Glens Falls National Bank. He was glad to have us all in the house in Union Grove because Sandy’s mother had died of cancer the year before, and it was a bad time to be old and lonely. Pneumonia took Bill two years after we arrived. Common antibiotics were in short supply. In a way, I was glad he went before Sandy and Genna and everything else that happened, because it would have broken his heart. He was absolutely a man of the twentieth century. His last coherent words, in the delirium of illness, were “Don’t worry, I’ll bring the car around . . .”

By the time he passed away, it was obvious there would be no return to “normality.” The economy wouldn’t be coming back. Globalism was over. The politicians and generals were failing to pull things together at the center. We would not be returning to Boston. The computer industry, in which so many hopes had been vested, was fading into history. I was fortunate to have carpentry skills to fall back on and to have a decent collection of hand tools.

The evangelist on the radio cut out, and I realized that the electricity had gone off. I felt relieved, even though I had only myself to blame for leaving the radio on. Listening to these maniacs had gotten to be a compulsion for me. I was desperate to learn anything about the world outside Washington County, because I worried constantly about my Daniel and where he might be, and whether it was dangerous there.

We didn’t have coffee anymore, or any caffeinated substitutes for it. I made a pot of rose-hip tea, which was our chief source of vitamin C, and fried up three slices of Jane Ann’s brown bread with plenty of butter in a cast-iron skillet that I had owned my entire adult life—I actually remembered buying it in a Target store in Hadley, Massachusetts, the year after I graduated from Amherst College. When the bread slices were crispy and fragrant, I took them out and dropped in three small pullet eggs. I missed black pepper terribly. We hadn’t seen any for years. Cinnamon too. Anything from the Far East was no longer available. But over the years I had developed some skill in brewing my own hot pepper sauce. It was worth something in trade. I put plenty on my eggs.

Once the radio went off you could hear roosters battling for supremacy of the village. Some people were annoyed by them, but I found them pleasantly reassuring. Their crowing and the vapors of the hot sauce helped clear enough room in my head to think about what I had to do. Planning my day was a way of not giving in to despair. It really is not possible to pay attention fully to two things at once—for instance, carpentry and suicide.

quote:

Halfway out to the general supply I ran into Shawn Watling, a big, shambling young man who so typified our times. He’d been born in a hospital and raised on computers, and then all of a sudden the world fell out from under him. I met him coming onto North Road where Black Creek Road joins up with it. There is a bridge there over the creek, which is a tributary of the Battenkill. Shawn worked as one of several hands on the Schmidt farm up the hill, which was in fruit, oats, buckwheat, and hay, with some beef cattle, and goats for milk and meat. Agriculture had changed completely without oil. We’d gone from a few people using machines to grow monoculture crops and process them for everybody else, to a society in which at least half the people used tools skillfully with human and animal muscle to feed the other half. With the population down so much, labor was at a premium. Shawn was probably paid decently, but his opportunities were limited.

His father, Denny Watling, had run a real estate office in town. His mother, Margie, was the leading sales agent. Shawn’s parents played in a country music band all tricked out in matching cowboy outfits at local bars and the county fair every August. They were regular small-town folk who read spy novels, got new cars every three years, and once took a vacation to see Paris. They were gone now, along with Shawn’s little brother, Cody, who had been my boy’s age, taken by the flu. Shawn inherited his father’s instruments (violin, mandolin, guitar) and was part of our music circle in church. He was a hell of a musician. He was in the last graduating class that Union Grove high school ever produced and he spent one semester at Colgate University before it, and most colleges everywhere as far as I knew, had to close on a temporary basis that now seemed permanent. Shawn went to work for Bill Schmidt because that was what there was to do for a young person like him. He was strong in a way that you hardly ever saw in the old days, strong from real work, not from lifting barbells or aerobics classes. At age twenty-three, he married another young survivor, Britney Blieveldt, and they had a girl named Sarah. Shawn was not a kid anymore. He and his family lived in town in his parents’ old house, which was one of the nicest ones on Salem Street, our nicest street. Having a nice house didn’t make him wealthy or boost his status, though. There were plenty of empty houses in town and no one to sell them to. The real estate industry no longer existed.

When I met up with him on the way to the general supply, Shawn was leading a big furry black dog pulling a two-wheeled cart. The dog was part Newfoundland with some mastiff in him, Shawn said. It belonged to Mr. Schmidt. Few dogs were around anymore. Some had been eaten during the hunger that followed the flu in the spring of that year. People didn’t talk about it, it was so demoralizing. And now, with no manufactured pet food, you had to have a productive household to be able to feed one, which Mr. Schmidt certainly did.

“We need you on Tuesday night for Christmas practice,” I told him because he’d skip it if you didn’t pester him about it. Rehearsal for the Christmas carol service went on year-round and was more like an excuse for the circle to play regularly. At this time of year we usually played everything but Christmas music just because we liked to play. Sometimes we played string band dance music, sometimes old rock and roll, sometimes Handel. With the electricity off, you didn’t hear recorded music anymore. You had to make it yourself.

“You come by the house and collect me, I’ll go, Robert,” he said.

“I wish I didn’t have to drag you there.”

“I get awful tired, especially this time of year.”

“We’re supposed to play a levee at the Shushan grange July Fourth, you know.”

“We’ll just play the same old crap. “Possum Up a Gum Stump,” and all. We don’t need to practice that.”

“We do if we want to sound crisp.”

“I don’t care how it sounds.”

“That’s not a very positive attitude.”

He laughed bitterly. “We’ll be haying up at Schmidt’s all next week. He’ll probably have us out there until pitch dark, anyway.”

I know deep down Shawn loved to play. We just continued on for a while, enjoying the quiet road and the creak of the little cart’s axle. But the big black dog was panting from the heat, and a big gobbet of foamy spit hung from his jaw. Shawn limped slightly.

“Did you hurt yourself?” I said.

“I fell off Mr. Schmidt’s barn roof.”

“What were you doing up there?”

“Fixing it. What do you think?”

We walked a ways again in silence. I hadn’t known him to be so irritable before.

“It’s been mighty hot lately,” I said.

“It’s not just the heat. Jesus, Robert, look how we live? I’m practically a serf. You know what a serf is?”

“Of course I do. I went to college,” I said, and regretted it right away.

“Lucky you,” he said.

“Music always cheers me up,” I said.

“I’m glad it works for you.”

“Music salves the soul.”

“Nothing can salve my soul.”

“You know, Shawn, even back in normal times people got down and depressed. In fact, you could argue that people are generally better off now mentally than we were back then. We follow the natural cycles. We eat real food instead of processed crap full of chemicals. We’re not jacked up on coffee and television and sexy advertising all the time. No more anxiety about credit card bills—”

“I don’t want to debate.”

“I bet it’s true, though.”

“Find somebody else if you want to have a debate.”

“It’s just conversation.”

“Whatever you call it, quit trying to persuade me that everything’s great, okay?” he said and stopped in his tracks. I stopped too. His face was red and tendons stood out on his neck. He was a large young man, and he looked a little scary.

“You frustrate the hell out of me, son,” I said.

“Do I? I work like a dog. Harder than this dog. From sunup to sundown, like a medieval peasant. I do it with hardly any sense of a future, and the last thing I need is a lecture from the generation that screwed up the world. Come on, Merlin,” he said to the dog.

He marched off stiffly. I watched him leading the dog for a few moments and then hurried to catch up with them.

im on the net me boys posted:

I'm really glad that so many people recommended The New Jim Crow in this thread because it's a good book so far and I'm only in the second chapter. I was like, worried that I wouldn't learn anything new because I figured I was already familiar with the war on drugs and had taken an extremely in depth class about the south in the 1800s and early 1900s. Turns out between Bush and Clinton I had a pretty big gap in my knoweldge.

Sheng-Ji Yang posted:

i pirate basically every book since im poor but there is absolutely no ebook of this one despite it supposedly being one of the best american political bios ever written and winning a pulitizer so i had to actually get it but ill post cool excerpts of it i guess

Phi230 posted:

Yeah one of the main characters gets their hands on the book that describes our timeline and calls it a white nationalist fanfiction and throws it in the trash

also wheres the lie

oh yeah by the way its written by the guy who did the galaxy quest novelization

Epic High Five posted:

new next read lol, library has the ebook for free, I'll report back

SKULL.GIF posted:

pushpins posted:

pushpins posted:

Epic High Five posted:

It's gonna have as Asimovian ending where they get a confession to a murder but then just never do anything to the murderer because they're good folk and really the victim was a jerk

hackbunny posted:

After The 2020 Commission Report I don't know if I can read another of these novelized essays. It's like porn, or sci-fi, in that they have a point or gimmick to them, pretty narrowly defined, wrapped in a kind-of-forced story that isn't written very well

im on the net me boys posted:

Just finished The New Jim Crow... Def sending my dad a copy

emdash posted:

what's a good book about Iran Contra

Epic High Five posted:

what's ur dad's view on policing and the justice system at the moment?

how often did the book make u hoppin mad

Poniard posted:

if i stop being angry or stop posting i will die

Gunshow Poophole posted:

im working through Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind and it's pretty good so far.

he does an interesting job of kinda toeing th eline of what I guess what I would call a "fundamental" theory of conservatism with insisting that his perspective is flexible and supplemental rather than really seeking to be a bedrock set of principles.

SKULL.GIF posted:

Finished a few more chapters of A Wizard of Earthsea and one thing here I want to specifically praise is Le Guin actually effectively using chapters to break up her story in segments. Many, many novelists treat chapters as an afterthought, or just assign a chapter to each and every single scene. For instance, the second chapter of AWoE, "Shadow", tells a story in itself about a part of Ged's life, I can pick it up, start reading it, finish reading it, and put down the book! It sounds really simple and basic but it really improves the experience of reading the novel and she does it better than most of the recent authors I've been reading.

Le Guin also doesn't end each and every single chapter dangling with a suspenseful plot hook designed to psychologically encourage you to keep turning the page -- she trusts in the story's own merits to keep the reader interested and engaged.

the bitcoin of weed posted:

Le Guin is good as hell and I've been reading a bunch of her stuff recently, just finished Lathe of Heaven which was great and now I'm on something called The Word For World is Forest which is about a pacifist indigenous tribe starting a revolt against human colonists after they show up and start enslaving/destroying everything. Haven't read any of the earthsea books yet but probably will eventually