Low Tide
Only when the tide goes out do you learn who has been swimming naked. ~Warren Buffet
The year 2024 was the best one I’ve had in recent memory because I was able to live my lifelong dream of visiting Africa. It was an epic trip that satisfied my itch for travel — at least for now.
After writing and rewriting for 12 years, I completed my novel, In Time Out, and made it available on Amazon. In October, there was a luau book launch in Tucson — a perfect pool party and cosmic celebration with family, friends, former colleagues, and neighbors. The enthusiastic love and support bestowed on me will live in my heart for a very long time.
Other good things happened in 2024. I traveled to visit family members and
entertained numerous guests at a one-of-a-kind hot-air balloon fiesta, and while hiking, bike riding, fine dining, sipping at breweries, wineries, dipping into hot springs, taking photographs of pueblos, wandering around the Indian Cultural Center and several art museums, listening to music performances, and enjoying all the activities that a diverse,
midsized city has to offer I felt at home in my new location.
After several major travel and career accomplishments, I’ve made a choice to live at low tide in 2025. The windswept, tsunami of politically polluted shoreline is not a healthy place to reside. I’m a Retired Old White Woman (ROWW) and I do not have any energy to give to Grumpy-Ass Shitheads Birthing American Grief (GASBAGs) who are leading this country into some kind of a toxic hellscape.
I am a United States Navy Veteran who doesn’t scare easily. Low tide is
where the good stuff is revealed.
What exactly does it mean to live at low tide?
First, I’m not planning any worldwide travel. I’m sticking close to home — and piloting my own car — while hoping for the best for all the airline captains, mechanics, and air traffic controllers.
Next, my volunteer gig with the Sierra Club has taken on a renewed focus since the felon-in-charge has restated his philosophy of “Drill baby, drill”. That…as well as some corporate interest has had the brilliant idea of dumping more radioactive waste near my beloved back yard.
Finally, I’ve made a personal commitment to protect my own mental and physical wellbeing despite what is happening “out there”. The GASBAGs are working hard to out-weird each other. This gang of elected and
non-elected politicians care not that they are playing literal Russian roulette with ordinary lives and livelihoods. Their antics remind me of my days as a special education teacher in an intermediate school. My students used to escalate their inappropriate classroom behaviors to see how much they could get away with before I’d step up (or call for assistance in stepping up) and take action.
Who in the hell will stand up to these revenge crazed bullies? They are unfazed by the Constitution or the Rule of Law. For them, there are no laws.
I know their master plan is to distract — and they’ve done it all — from Elon Musk’s Nazi salute to Melania’s hideous hat to appointing incompetent, unqualified, brown nosers to lead paramount governmental agencies. The
distraction is working to their favor. What is happening and what will happen to the country I’ve defended and enjoyed living in until now is completely out of control and beyond anything I could have imagined.
Citizens of all backgrounds are frightened, and frightened people are easily controlled and manipulated. It’s in the history books!
As a fiction writer, I believe in happy endings. There’s one in my novel. But I’ve stopped believing in magic and I won’t believe again until something is revealed in the lowest of the low tides.
I’m wading in the surf right now, eyes cast down searching for a hopeful sign. No salvation spotted so far.
A lot of the country’s population is out there swimming naked in the rip tide.
