normalcy | The Direction of Intention

And We All Know It [David’s blog on Two Artists Tuesday]

Posted on May 26, 2026 by davidrobinsoncreative

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” ~ Mark Twain

The boats are slowly returning to the marina. The beach at Eichelman Park has been combed. Signs of summer’s onset. The Saturday Farmer’s Market moved from its winter quarters and has returned to the mall in front of the museums, running all the way to the Tap House. Signs of normalcy. The people are leaving their houses to purchase flowers and vegetables and mingle in the public square.

Yet, amidst the signs of normalcy, everything is different.

There is so much that the republicans claim to know for sure that just ain’t so. Despite what they espouse, despite what they “know for sure,” the 2020 election was not stolen. Our elections to this point in time are not and never have been rigged or corrupt. The January 6th insurrectionists are not innocent and they are not victims of the justice department. The president is not of sound mind. He is not innocent of his enumerable crimes. His cabinet is not competent.

They want us to believe what they know for sure, that this is normal – but it just ain’t so.

And now they wonder why they are in trouble. They’ve ridden a herd of lies for a decade. They ask us to not believe what we see. And now their only route to holding power is to gerrymander. While currently holding all the cards-of-power they claim to be the victims in this hot mess that they’ve enabled. Midwives to autocracy.

It’s their insistence upon the lie, even though stripped bare-to-the-bone and completely exposed, that is the most troubling. For years we’ve asked what might be a bridge too far for these lemmings in cowboy clothes, these guys and gals that swear they are cleaning the swamp and representing the common folk, all the while engorging their morbid wealth by sucking the lifeblood from the people they pretend to defend. Vampires all.

It’s what we know for sure. It is so. We can see it. And no amount of gaslight can obscure what we see. Afraid of their constituents, they cancel their town halls, they flee the capitol rather than vote to intervene in the criminal-in-chief’s latest war-of-choice.

The boats slowly return to the marina. The beach at Eichelman has been combed. Signs of normalcy in a time when nothing is really normal. This would-be-despot and his party-of-pretenders are naked and corrupt – and falling apart. And we all know it.

read Kerri’s blogpost about THE BEACH

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The Feeling Of Normalcy [David’s blog on KS Friday]

Posted on October 31, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” ~ Lao Tzu

After a long week of travel and a few days delay due to nasty weather, we took advantage of the first bit of sun and returned to our trail. It was as if an entire season had passed in our brief absence. So much life happened in such a small amount of time.

In truth, on the road home we discussed how it felt as if we’d been away for years. We felt as if we’d stepped into an alternative universe. Like a science fiction movie, it seemed that our rocket ship returned to earth and although we’d only aged a few days, the earth had aged a few hundred years. The world we knew no longer existed. It was a strange feeling to walk a trail we knew so well and yet it felt unknown.

It was, perhaps, more unsettling because that is how I feel about these un-United States these days. I walk through my days in places that I recognize and yet it is made strange by a congress that is effectively dissolved, the rapid destruction of the symbol we call The White House, a president blatantly and gleefully bilking the nation while building a Marie Antoinette ballroom while democracy crumbles, people starving, people being plucked off the street and disappeared for no other reason than their skin is brown, and the highest court in the land, rather than protecting the Constitution, betraying it, shoveling more power to the autocrat. We are no longer headed for a fascist state, we have arrived.

And I go to the grocery store as I always have. I rake the leaves that fell while we were gone. We make dinner each night. When the sun peeks from behind the clouds, we return to our trail and walk so we might feel a bit of normalcy.

But the feeling of normalcy is now our enemy. Human beings are excellent at adapting and even more skilled at denying; making the atrocious acceptable. Normalizing the outrageous is now the force we must resist. We have already gone too far in normalizing the monstrous, in accepting the incessant lies and petulant abuse of power – and willing abdication of responsibility in The House, the cowing of the once-free-press. We cannot allow the loathsome to become our new normal. We cannot become accustomed to oppression.

We can, however, recover the impulse that gave our nation its birth: we know how to rebel against a bully king doing the bidding of the morbidly wealthy. We know how to join with our neighbors and speak truth to power-run-amok. We know how to say to corrupt tyrants, “This will not stand.” We know how to set course toward a more perfect union, a nation where all people are created equal, respected, and protected equally under the law.

[Happy Halloween! I just had a conversation about costumes and what I would wear to be the most scary. My answer: a republican. What kind of monster takes away food assistance from the most needy to give more money to the already morbidly wealthy? And then lies about it. Scary.]