What a Summer It Was

I ruptured my left quadriceps tendon in July and spent most of this summer in a knee immobilizer. The injury made walking and even prolonged standing impossible for the next two months. It stopped me from biking and fishing, but it did give me plenty of time to watch the circus at Mar-a-Lago.

As I write a tale about reincarnated knights from the twelfth century, I’m finding it hard to make up anything more outrageously magical than Trump and his supporters.

Emails sent from a non-secure server should be grounds for prosecution, but apparently, keeping top-secret documents in an unsecured area is no big deal. Nothing to see here. Launch codes? Names of undercover agents? Nope. Move along.

Trump says he could declassify documents just by thinking about it. Magical thinking at work. The magic at play in the “real” world is so much more powerful than what I imagine in my books.

Some of my books’ critics complain that my presentation of the political right isn’t evenhanded, that I’ve made them one-dimensional, and therefore unbelievable. Honestly, those characters haven’t required any artifice at all. I just used stories from the news.

People really gathered in Dallas awaiting the resurrection of JFK, Jr.

People assaulted nurses and doctors because they didn’t believe the pandemic was real, even as they watched their friends and neighbors die.

The newest installment of the K-Nurse series, Between the Dragon and His Wrath, has folks dying all over the place from the pandemic and the MAGA equivalents in utter denial. Don’t Look Up, anyone?

We are living in a cartoon. Is it any wonder some of the characters in my books are cartoonish? Storm the capitol and call for the death of members of Congress and the vice president, but when you get caught, expect everyone to understand you were just exercising your first amendment rights. That’s not even a very good cartoon.

I have tried to apply Trump’s magic to my knee, to make the injury go away by thinking it will go away. It’s my knee, after all. I’ve owned it all my life. If I don’t have dominion over my knee, then who does? Turns out, I’m not the sorcerer Trump is, so I have to live in a world where tissue heals according to physiology, and I have to do what the physical therapist tells me.

On being called “drunk” by a partygoer, Winston Churchill once replied, “Yes, madam, and you are ugly, but in the morning I shall be sober.” Treason is an ugly thing, and Mr. Trump is a traitor, but in the spring, I will walk again.