The Last Warm Place by Barry Napier

 

Philosophers and scientists have for thousands of years made a job speculating about humanity’s place in the universe. Sometimes I wonder about poor old Aristotle, if he could visit any decent observatory now and talk with cosmologists and astrophysicists how would he handle learning that his view of the universe was so completely wrong. Of course we have the high ground of over two-thousand, three hundred years since his death to figure things out.

And yes, I’ll hazard an assumption that humanity has pretty much got the basics figured out now. And no, I will not speak of all the new conflicting data we’re receiving from the James Webb Telescope. We’ve stirred up a shitstorm of issues with our models of the universe and what that brilliant piece of engineering floating out at the second Lagrange point about a million miles away.

But thing with science is that all the astrophysicist boys and girls are as happy as pigs in mud trying to rework their theories to fit the new data. That’s how science works.

The problem that occupies a small collection of poorly working brain cells my head is whether or not our science boys and girls might be missing something we can’t see. Or even worse something that our puny human minds can’t conceive. Some aspect of the universe or even the structure of reality that puts us back in the same category as my boy Aristotle.

That’s where the subgenre of “Cosmic Horror” makes its presence known.

Cosmic horror, for those with much better taste in reading, deals with the terror of realizing the universe does not give a flying damn about humanity. That we live in a vast, uncaring universe that has existed for almost fourteen billions years and our species just can’t comprehend how insignificant we are.

This is where the book I just finished reading comes into play. It’s entitled The Last Warm Place by Barry Napier.

Here’s the SITREP (situation report).

Time and Place: Pretty much our modern day world.

Giant slug-like monsters have begun appearing all over the Earth. Yeah, think Gozilla-sized creatures that flatten cities just like my atomic powered Japanese lizard buddy. And as you might expect the national governments of Earth are unable to stop the creatures with conventional weapons.

Since the novel is set in our current time societies all over the planet begin to fall apart. Not just because of the monsters. The only things that kills them are nuclear weapons. Here in the United States it’s mentioned that the government tried to evacuate the cities about to be attacked, but it was nightmarish chaos.

People are scrambling to survive and there is almost everyone is out to save themselves. That’s where the main character of Eric enters the story. He was in New York just before it got nuked and got away after saving a young woman named Kendra. Kendra had been raped twice in the chaos and as they make their way out of the city and move south Eric does his best to protect her.

Because of the sexual assaults Kendra is pregnant and gives birth months later as the two continue to head down the eastern seaboard. Eric helps Kendra deliver the baby and it is born healthy.

They are now a de facto family with Eric hopelessly in love with Kendra and the baby. Eventually they grow tired of moving and they take up residence in an abandoned house in rural Georgia and spend their times scavenging for food.

Because of the nukes and the monsters the world is a gray dead place. Think Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

Eric and Kendra and the baby are surviving, but only barely. Things begin to change when two other survivors happen up the house Eric and Kendra are living. There is a short fight with the two stranger attempting to assault Kendra. Eric kills one and Kendra the other, but one of the dead strangers was carrying a piece of paper that says there’s a government run “Safe Zone” back up in Virginia. That paper is actually a ticket for admission and Kendra immediately wants to leave their house and head north.

Eric has reservations about leaving but with supplies getting harder to find he knows they will eventually starve if they stay. The trip north is dangerous but it’s fellow humans that pose the biggest risk. That is until Eric and Kendra start encountering these large burnt circular areas that other survivors call “nests.” These nests have strange effects on human minds and they are filled with creatures that don’t belong in our reality.

The Last Warm Place is not literature. But it is a damn good story of survival and fighting to retain just a small spark of hope and humanity. One of the things I liked the most was that Eric is not some highly trained soldier. He was just a decent and caring guy attempting to take care of his mother before the monsters appeared. As for Kendra, she was just a normal young woman working a standard 9 to 5 job.

Most post-apocalyptic books have the main characters as harden survival experts who already knew what to do in these situations. I got the feeling that Eric and Kendra only survived as long as they did out of sheer luck. More to the point I was rooting for that small family and hoping they would find a place where the baby could grow up. And yes, Eric and Kendra fall in love while heading north. They were both in love while living in house down in Georgia but their individual traumas kept them from admitting it to each other and themselves.

The main point of the book that hit me hard was the idea that there is a real possibility that we do not have existence completely figured out. That while highly improbable, the universe and the nature of reality could send something our way that defies our ability to comprehend.

Because Even Sasquatch Needs To Be Heard Sometimes

 

Some poor, foolish people out there might still wonder why I have become the blogger version of a Sasquatch. Like my mythical hairy counterpart I still lurk Blogger reading posts and maybe commenting from time to time. Its just hard to find the energy to give a damn.

Way back in the long ago 2000s and 2010s I was filled with rage over the disastrous Bush/Cheney Administration and their wars. Looking just at the surface of the situation the war in Afghanistan was justified in the sense that a legitimate terrorist organization was using the country as a sanctuary and training ground.

But George W. and Dick Cheney weren’t satisfied just to eliminate the Al-Qaeda threat. No, ever since Daddy Bush refused to overthrow Hussein for his oil buddies, those big boys were looking for any reason to force the US Government to drive up to Baghdad and take over all that black liquid gold.

I might be out of practice with my clever allegory, so let me say it plainly. The Iraq War was pure corporate imperialism. The best figures I can dig up say at least SIX TRILLION dollars disappeared into the Iraqi desert. And at least One-hundred thousand Iraqis died in Bush and Cheney’s attempt to control that country’s oil.

One of the many reasons Obama would win the 2008 election was to remove US forces from that country. One of the others being to clean up the banking mess. But strangely enough I admit Bush/Cheney didn’t directly cause that clusterfuck. That mess can be traced back for at least a couple of decades.

But I’m once again getting off point.

For years George W. Bush held the title of worst president of the United States. But history and the stupidity of the American people are never to be out done.

In 2016 a whole host of stupid decisions resulted in Donald Trump winning the electoral vote and becoming president. He was a criminal incompetent deviant back then but he had mistakenly picked several members of his cabinet who did their best to try and keep him in check. Of course, he lost the 2020 election and as his first term ended Trump attempted to overthrow the newly seated House of Representatives preventing them from confirming Biden won the electoral vote.

The result was four years of him buzzing around like an enraged horse fly while the Biden’s Attorney General twiddled his thumbs. Now throw in Biden’s failing mental acuity and the natural ability of Democrats to fuck up and we get Trump back into the White House.

We’re not even halfway through Trump’s second term and the national and global situation now makes the Bush/Cheney years look like a triumph of enlighten statesmanship. Oh dear God in Heaven, I’d love to jump back in time to the last couple of years of the Bush Administration and go inform my self-righteous younger self that no matter how badly Bush fucked up Iraq, the handling of the banking crisis, and the Hurricane Katrina response it was going to get so much worse.

I can objectively state that the Republican Party had been losing its mooring to reality as far back as 1996. It during that election that the late General Colin Powell was considering a run for the White House. At that moment in time he was held in high honor by the majority of Americans for his handling of the First Gulf War. Given the prevailing zeitgeist dominating the country with every semi-sane individual it was believed Powell could have beat Clinton for the presidency.

But no, I clearly remember all manner or conservatives nutjobs foaming at the mouth protesting the idea that Powell should run for president. Conservative monster Rush Limbaugh entertained callers on his radio show who said Powell was a traitor.

Powell’s supposed crimes ran all over the legal spectrum. Long story short, the bullshit reached a point that Powell’s wife told him no. And to be completely honest the lives of the Powell family was threatened by America’s usual collection of racists to the point the Secret Service knew what to prepare for when Obama became POTUS.

Looking back during the Republican primary for the 2008 presidential run I clearly remember thinking that the assorted space aliens in the Mos Eisley cantina scene in A New Hope looked more intelligent than the hopelessly distorted individuals running for the nomination. Every election cycle since then the Republicans have drifted further towards authoritarianism while pointing a bony finger at Democrats exclaiming we were all nasty commies.

But Trump’s one success can be compared to a body fighting a viral infection. He, his family, and the various little parasites that follow him have corrupted the country like a virus in such a way I don’t believe there is a real way back to “normal.”

Yeah, I get a chuckle reading my old posts from the Bush years. I’m a fairly well read guy when it comes to history and while I probably would have accepted the possibility that the US could do something as suicidal as electing someone worse than Bush, I wouldn’t have believed it for a minute.

I had an ugly, naive belief back then that while we Americans could make evil choices, we weren’t an inherently evil people. I’m not just faulting Trump voters. They’re an ignorant, hateful, fear-filled people ready to jump and kill the most current Fox News scapegoat.

But a full accounting for this mess has to include those folks who couldn’t vote for Hillary back in 2016. It doesn’t matter whether they voted third-party or stayed home. The result was Trump getting elected. Dying for your principles is fine, except when your sacrifice results in Trump picking three Supreme Court justices.

How many women and girls are going to die because Roe v. Wade was overturned? I honestly didn’t like Hillary but even my dumbass knew she would be better than Trump.

So, if your were wondering why I just can’t find the energy to cruise the blogosphere like I once did there it is. It’s late and my hairy Sasquatch butt is going to bed.

Prime Minister Mark Carney- The Leader of the Free World

 

News outlets are reporting that just today the Neon Orange God of American Proles has threatened to impose a 100% tariff on goods imported from Canada if went ahead with a trade deal with China. The Neon God is worried that PM Mark Carney himself is angling to make Canada a “Drop Off Port” of Chinese good that will flood into the United States.

On the surface, what essentially is happening is that the Neon God is transferring his fears of little brown people coming up from the southern border to cheap Chinese electric vehicles crossing into the US from the north. 

I imagine Neon God is partially concerned about this situation because heaven forbid that Elon fucking Musk might actually have to play by the rules of the great game of capitalism. But the main reason Neon God is losing his ever decreasing supply cranial voltage is because the honorable Prime Minister of Canada is running rings around the supposed leader of the free world.

Truth be told, while Neon God, “the festering carcass of American rot shoved into an ill-fitting suit” was at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos he clearly proved to the world that the United States is in full collapse.

Neon God’s obsession with acquiring Greenland- by force if necessary- will in more enlighten times in the future be studied by political scientists, historians, and anyone in the profession of treating mental illness. And while our erstwhile allies were able to placate America’s mentally challenged, narcissistic ruler and divert his attention to a different shiny object, just today he once again called the Canadian Prime Minister “Governor Carney.” Reminding everyone that Neon God was still fixated on making our patient and kind neighbor to the north, the “51st state.”

Where PM Carney proved himself to be a true leader was when he turned down Neon God’s invitation to his “Board of Peace.” This pissed off Neon God to the point he released a statement revoking the invite. Which I’m sure in Neon God’s decaying neural pathways he believes happened retroactively before Carney politely told him to fuck off.

What I really like about PM Carney is that he is emerging as the leader of a movement of countries to counter US, Russia, and Chinese global influence. If I had the PM’s ear I would be screaming into it for him to push hard for the movement to forge a new economic and military alliance because, like I and many others have mentioned, the United States should never be trusted again.

Even if Neon God and his low-IQ cohorts are expelled from power in 2028 the United States could very easily fall victim to the likes of such a fascist demagogue. In fact I’m sure it will happen because the average American hasn’t got the IQ of a rock. As a nation Americans are looking for easy and painless answers to problems that require years of patience and rational thought.

In fairness, I’m including the short-sighted and spoiled idiots on the left of the American political spectrum. The people who couldn’t vote for the black lady back in November of 2024 own a huge chunk of the blame for the deaths and damage Neon God has caused.

So to any of our Canadian kinfolk that might find this shout out to the blogging abyss, please support your Prime Minister! Work together with any country looking to preserve liberal democratic values because the alternative is US Army M-1A2 tanks rolling into Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

Sandbar Exile

 

Had ChatGPT recreate what I saw. It's pretty close but the sandbar was longer.

Back in September my wife and I were returning from Florida after having spent a week visiting the Mouse and his friends. My motivation for being on this trip is, of course, my wife who is one of those “Disney Adults” some complain about. She’s always had a thing for Disney but her enthusiasm now is mainly a leftover from us taking our kids there back when they were small. 

I’m lukewarm at best about Walt’s creation now. Whatever “magic” existed for me has been smothered by decades of corporate greed. The goose that used to lay all those golden eggs was cooked long ago with the carcass cut into pieces and sold off at outrageous prices. At some point there’ll be a reckoning for the grossly charming and overpaid corporate personalities along with the swine-like shareholders but that’s in the future.   

But all things considered, it wasn’t a bad trip, the crowds were manageable and while we naturally paid an arm and a leg for the experience, I was able to unwind and relax. No, it wasn’t my idea of a perfect vacation but take what you can get these days. 

But it was on the drive home when I saw something that would have made Jimmy Buffett smile. 

Somewhere around northern Florida or southern Georgia we were on a bridge crossing an estuary when I glanced to my right. Someone had grounded a jon boat on a nice sized sandbar and set up one of those beach cabana shade tents. Naturally, since I was driving I was only able to look down at it for a second or two, but I noticed there was someone sitting in a chair under the shade. Beside that person was an open cooler. 

I haven’t a clue if that person was just the first to arrive and was waiting for others. Or did they just feel the need to get away from everyone and decided to use that sandbar for a short, self-imposed exile from the world?

I can’t overstate the urge I felt to slam on the brakes and stop to take a picture of the scene below me. But we were on I-95 with oodles of traffic behind us, so it wasn’t possible. Now that I’m back in the real world, I think about that person on the sandbar sitting under a cabana drinking a cool beverage way too much to be healthy.

It's Time to Think About a "National Divorce."

 

Just because I’m a glutton for abuse I’ve decided to take a moment and shout out into the void once again. With 2026 just a few days old it seems to me a good time to ponder about the dystopian nightmare that was 2025. 

I mean during the COVID pandemic back in 2020 at least we had Netflix’s Tiger King to while the hours during that way too short lockdown. What did 2025 give us? Off the top of my head I remember warrant-less immigration raids, Trump destroying a third of the White House for his ballroom/bunker. And of course 2025’s most precious gift is the Epstein Files.

** Quick sidenote: I abhor conspiracy theories but I have to officially state I believe old Jeffery did not commit suicide. 

If I could give an award for 2025’s biggest comedy it would go to the Republican Party and their mindless frailing after making the release of Epstein’s client list and correspondence a major campaign issue back in 2024.  One of the very few bright spots I found for 2025 was the slow peeling away of MAGA Republicans as Trumpy and his band of incompetent minions backtracked on releasing the files.

Yes, I especially mean Majorie Taylor Greene and her defection from the MAGA cult by refusing to play the game Speaker Mike Johnson and other congressional Republicans tried to play until even they in their stunted minds realized the Epstein jig was up. 

The one beneficial thing I learned from 2025 again dovetails with something Majorie said during one of her pre-awaking rants. I’ve come to believe that ultimately Blue and Red state America are going to have to go their separate ways. Yes, I mean Majorie’s “Political Divorce.”

I live in deep Red State America and despite the clusterfrak that has been Trump’s second term all the MAGA cultists I know are still dedicated to their Neon Orange Lord and Savior. What’s worse is that you can’t help but notice the rage they felt concerning all those abused by Epstein and his Igor-like girlfriend have now faded away to excuses. 

Case in point is Megyn Kelly’s surreal excuse of Epstein's crimes and those that hung out on his island. How she wasn’t tossed onto the street after that diatribe defies explanation for me. But of course, she has the right-wing bubble and right-wing hypocrisy to protect her.

**Second sidenote: I have seen the pictures of Slick Willy hanging with Jeffery and he needs to face the repercussions just as much as Trump.

Enough of me going on my tangent attacking helpless windmills.

Republicans alone didn’t bring us to this point. Oh, they bear a lot of the blame but national Democrats have had their ass so far up their heads for decades. But with the GOP filled with fascists and other assorted nutjobs they are the only semi-responsible game in town.

The majority of Blue States pay out more in federal taxes than nearly all of the conservative Red States. What do the Blue States get in this deal? Blue States are dominated by basket case third world states like all of Red America. 

While the rest of the Western world and other developed countries have some form of universal healthcare the USA has a collection of insurance companies whose main concern is keeping the shareholders happy. What gets weird is when a European asks if it’s true that families go bankrupt in America trying to deal with medical costs.

It’s the same with less advantaged kids trying to have the American Dream but being weighed down for decades paying off student loans. Funny thing, I’d have to look into it again but it was Reagan who brought about this student loan bullshit. 

Oh, I could go on for far longer than I have the patience for these days. So I’ll close by saying it’s the Red States that want to take away any and all of the civil rights won by women, the LGBT community, and minorities. It’s the Red States that want to create government agencies to track pregnant women to prevent them from having control of their bodies. It’s the Red States that openly talk about persecuting anyone who even spreads information about abortion.

Little secret that not so secret, MAGA folks who are overwhelmingly white are terrified of all those black and brown folks having more babies than them. 

I’ve honestly and reluctantly come to the conclusion it would be best for Blue States to break away from the paralyzed, incompetent and corrupt US government and form their own union. As long as the Red States have an electoral stranglehold on federal elections America is going to fall further behind the rest of the world.

I liken my attitude to a spouse who for years has put up with an emotionally abusive partner. This spouse has tried to save the marriage but the partner refuses to even acknowledge there is a problem. 

**Final sidenote: My wife and I are currently planning to move to a bluer state in a couple of years. I’ve actually told my kids and their significant others they need to think about just leaving the country. If and when a divorce becomes unavoidable, it will not be amicable.