Kage Baker would have shaken her head at me sadly. “Screwed that up, didn’t you? Where’d your mind go?”

Last night, Dear Readers, I completely forgot to write a blog post. The thought never entered my mind, until Kimberly asked me this morning if I had been too tired to blog. Whereupon I realized in horror that – while I had stayed up until 3 AM – it had never even occurred to me to write. My apologies, Dear Readers!

What was I doing until half past midnight? I was reading. I was reading my own past blogs, starting way back in 2010, when I first began this. I was re-reading all my initial grief over Kage’s death, my resolution to continue her writing and the first, fairly successful attempts to do that. And the beginning of my gradual decline into the wild and active life of a coral polyp …

My gosh, some weird things were happening 9 years ago!

Of course, when you examine any past time in detail, it’s pretty weird. Especially when you get down to what the media is now terming “granularity”. I take that to mean examining something in such detail that you are getting right down into the basic texture of it – cells, maybe. Pixels. Quantum foam. What we used to call, in the naive and golden days of the ’60s, the nitty gritty.

It was certainly strange to read over those days back in 2010, 2011 and so on. It was peculiarly fascinating, so engrossing that it was gone 3 AM before I could even try to sleep. I think … I think I kept at it for the glimpses of Kage, that I had drawn so clearly in the first year she was gone. I didn’t remember that I had remembered so much.

However, it’s an obsession that kept me merely chasing my own tail. There was no sudden revelation, no new truth to simultaneously blind me and laser the scales off my eyes. It was a comfortable path but it was circular; good scenery, but it didn’t lead me anywhere. When Kimberly inquired as to my not blogging, it was like cold water thrown in my face to wake me up.

Today, I would have preferred to be in another world, though, Dear Readers. I don’t often touch on politics here, but it’s impossible to avoid encountering them in these days. Unless one is in a coma, or a gilded Lotus Eater’s delirium, the coarse texture of reality is inescapable. I am as concerned as any other rational adult over the closure of our government, and the grim antics of our execrable Chief Executive. I am just as repulsed by the prostitution of our immigration system. I am just as frightened by the growing possibility that Trump will try to hand a castrated government over to Putin.

So, I watched Trump’s address. I think he must have been heavily drugged – although nephew Michael postulated that Secret Service guys with machine guns were standing just out of sight to keep him on track. I don’t think so, though – he was, I think, willing to rein in his usual fulmination in order to pontificate on his current obsession, the Wall. I’m not ruling out drugs, mind … he didn’t make a single threat.

But it was a cruel reminder. Times are hard, hatred is trying once again to ascend to control of the world. You gotta pay attention, because the villains nowadays are sneaky, quiet and blatant liars. It’s no time to slide into the warm bath of the past. Not for long, anyway.

I enjoyed it. But I won’t sit down and disappear up my own memories again any time soon, Dear Readers. It’s much too easy to never, ever come back out again.