You let it happen once, it’s going to keep happening. In New York’s mayoral election, a candidate who displeased leftist snowflakes was winning. Then suddenly a bunch of ballots appeared or disappeared, long story short, the displeasing candidate who dared to oppose defunding police is not winning any more.

Hmm, where did we see these magically appearing ballots before? And why do they always favor the candidates who please leftist snowflakes?

Must be a coincidence.

At this point, I have lived in North America longer than in Ukraine. The trauma is wearing off to the point I’m considering visiting Ukraine in the next few years and the idea doesn’t give me nightmares.

On the negative side, I’ve been working for almost 3 hours so far today. The net result is a paragraph that I wrote, then deleted. Plus, two sentences that I keep rewriting and they still sound daft.

I’m a really slow writer. Even on a best day I can’t produce more than 250-300 words.

Yes, I changed the way the blog looks. Just to shake things around a bit.

As I was doing it, I noticed that we are closing up on 6,000,000 visits. That’s insane! It would have been a lot more, of course, if I hadn’t taken down most of the archive out of fear of persecution.

On the subject of being happy in academia, I have an article due on September 1. Another one due on October 1. And another one due on January 1. Of course, I’m also writing a book. So yes, I’m happy in academia.

By the way, the article that is due on September 1 is all about mocking Almudena Grandes’s doorstop of a novel titled Frankenstein’s Mother. I’m enjoying the process of writing it immensely. God, I hate that novel.

And the article due on October 1 is about Ana Iris Simon’s novel Feria that created all that scandal in Spain because it ridiculed leftist pieties.

I kept wondering why I ended up in this random small town. But now I know. I was meant to spend this pandemic here because if I’d stayed in Montreal or had a job in Chicago, like I always wanted, I would have died of apoplexy last year. No disrespect to people living there but I’m not made for that kind of thing.

Parts of Australia are in lockdown again?? Even crazy Canada is starting to reopen. What’s wrong with English-speaking countries that aren’t the US? Why have they been so insane? I’ve still not seen an explanation for the shared COVID lunacy of such geographically and climatically distant societies as the UK, Canada, and Australia.

I’m still upset over a ten-week lockdown I experienced in April-May of 2020. We’ve been back to normal since then but I’m still not over that ridiculousness. For people to stay in it for over a year – I have no words. I mean, I do but I don’t want to make anybody feel bad.