I found a one-way street, that's me, still hanging on to set you free

So it turns out that the reason I felt horrible yesterday and fell over before two in the morning was not only that I hadn't slept at all the previous night, but that I was (and am) actually sick. Congestion, aches, coughing, sneezing, exhaustion, the whole barrel of amusements. I woke briefly when derspatchel left for work and somewhat later when Autolycus slithered out from under the covers and circled around to headbutt and purr at me and otherwise gently encourage me out of bed, which I think is going to last only so long as it takes me to pay some bills.

I dreamed of visiting a friend who lived in an apartment building like some dormitories I have known, all dark paneling and leaded-glass windows and built-in shelves. I can remember reading and writing poems in the dream, but I cannot remember how that led to exorcising the ghosts that lived in most of the rooms—Jewish ghosts, but not dybbuks, because they weren't in anyone so much as the books and the doors and the walls. I spoke to them in better Yiddish than I know when I'm awake. I sang to them, a lot, even though my voice is destroyed and will never again work the way I trained it since the time I was eight or twelve and I have lost that most essential part of myself for the rest of my time trapped in this body which I do not want to call a life. I didn't think the ghosts went anywhere, but I thought they liked to be spoken to. The tenants claimed to have fewer problems with them after that. It's a happier ending than Marcin Wrona's Demon (2015), anyway. I wish I could remember the poems I had written.

Apparently there are still major American Jewish leaders arguing that we should give Trump a chance. That his continued defense of Bannon is noise rather than signal, that it is immaterial that his election was celebrated by honest-to-God neo-Nazis who throw Hitler salutes and shout Nazi jargon like it's an in-joke (and whom it is a hugely wishful exaggeration to say that Trump disavowed), that it's no big deal that the explosion of hate crimes post-election includes plenty of swastikas and anti-Semitism, which personally I would have thought was exactly the sort of thing to pique people's self-interest where compassion or fear for other kinds of human being in distress and danger are patently failing. Personally I think it is beside the point whether Bannon himself is a swastika-drawing, slur-shouting anti-Semite or merely willing to encourage and promote the hatefulness of those who are in order to accrue political power, just as I wouldn't start feeling suddenly better about Trump if it could be proven that he wasn't actually a howling racist himself, he just employed and empowered them. The voices you choose to amplify are just as important as the one you speak with. There is a point where the-enemy-of-the-enemy-is-my-friend passes through necessity into delusion and I think we sailed past it when anyone Jewish voted for a man who stole his second most famous campaign slogan from Charles Lindbergh, but then again I don't send money to AIPAC and I'm pretty unimpressed with the Jewish American Congress right now. I am much more in favor of the people with signs like "JEWS AGAINST ANTISEMITISM <— Why is this a thing that we have to say??" Or, as ron_newman says, "BE THE GOLEM."

Oh, and where generations of CIA plots failed, apparently 2016 killed Fidel Castro. Good grief.

If you want something nice, here are some Etruscan girls playing knucklebones and eec poetry's "Revenge," both courtesy of handful_ofdust. In writing news that pertains to me and other people, An Alphabet of Embers is not only now available as an e-book, it is on sale through the end of tomorrow. And you may wish to listen to this Woody Guthrie mixtape. I am especially enjoying the version of "This Land Is Your Land" performed by Odetta with narration by Will Geer, because it is not at all irrelevant these days to hear a black woman and a queer man asserting their rights to the country they live in. Also, it's just a pretty great version.

I seem to have talked to the internet (and cleaned the catbox, because Hestia was giving me the sad eye) instead of paying bills. Excuse me while I do that and then pass back out.