Still feeling good, remarkably so. Not waking up with neck stiffness and lingering pre-headache pain like I had last time. Banishing it with potassium was good, not even having it to start the day is better. Fingers crossed this isn't a fluke.

Other Cat is on the couch next to me, snoring little cat snores. I think her birth defect messed up her sinuses, because she sounds like a piglet. She must be having a dream because her toes and whiskers are twitching. She hasn't been out on the balcony since she got locked out, unsure if because of the weather or she got traumatized. Maybe she has decided the balcony is too scary.

Spouse is on board with getting a nice gravity style water filter as an anniversary/christmas gift. I think instead of the Berkey we're going to get a Pro One. Supposedly Pro One has better filters? Same countertop tank style, slightly less expensive, comes with a stand, comes with a metal tap standard instead of plastic, available in brushed stainless steel. That's exactly what I want. That last bit is important because brushed steel is easier to engrave than polished. (Nice to have the option, even if I never get around to it.) They're out of stock right now but should be back second week of september, which is perfect because our anniversary is the third week.

Is nice, ya?

The tap water here is mostly okay, but once in a while we get an amber tinge in the water and it would just be nice not to have to worry about it. I know the preppers like to get super into their water filters for apocalypse level disasters. Realistically, I'm a lot more concerned about a problem with the water treatment plant that messes things up for a week or two. A bad freak storm, like Ida, or the cold snap in Texas. If the water's out for more than two weeks, we have much bigger problems than I am capable of anticipating, and most likely we will abandon our home anyway. If things are so bad I absolutely need the Ultra Mega Super Duper Portable Filter for drinkable water, chances are I'm dying from eating contaminated food or getting sepsis from a scratch or dying of heatstroke or hypothermia or radiation or drowning. You know? At some point, I'm cool with not making the survival cutoff. Fallout is a depressing game. Two headed cows and giant cockroaches and nasty dead vegetation everywhere. And I'd rather die of bad water than end up sport for rapey cannibals, because as far as I can tell from Mad Max and The Road and The Book of Eli, etc., rapey cannibals rule the tippy top of the apocalyptic survival pyramid. So I'm only interested in surviving milder scenarios where the blip is temporary and stability is likely to return in a matter of months or a couple years. Maybe that means I'm not much of a prepper.

Right now, the thing that makes me twitchy is the likelihood the US will slide into a christian fascist state after the 2024 election. I fear a V for Vendetta world, not a Mad Max world. If I lived in a red state like Florida or Texas, I would absolutely be making plans to move elsewhere by the end of 2024. And I know that's part of the problem - the dissenters leave and the loonies get the run of the roost. But I see nowhere for that situation to go but down. Fascism doesn't value dissent, only unquestioning conformity to whatever they define as righteous, and the definitions must evolve to keep the populace angry and suspicious of one other. I am truly worried for those of us who can't or won't fit into the judeo-christian mold. Everyone thinks they'd be one of the good guys in nazi germany, hiding their jewish friends in the attic. But how many would actually face the modern wrath of the alt right for publicly stepping up for their trans neighbor? As a woman I am not so sure that the rights I enjoy will continue in the future, at least in certain states. Not just talking about reproductive issues. I worry about wild west vigilante style justice becoming more common and excusable, praised even, esp in rural areas. I worry about witch hunt McCarthyism for people of differing political and religious beliefs.

I've been getting a bit tinfoil hat over electronic privacy lately. Part of it is I hate feeling psychologically manipulated, and I don't like being put in a category, studied, and sold as a product. But the other part is even if the current online world is benign, the online world of a few years from now could use that profile to deduce how loyal I am to the state/church/state church and what kind of reeducation I need. Hey, we know you once bought a book about tarot cards because we accessed your amazon records spanning the last decade. We know you read astrology articles from your google search history. Let's get you into an informative class about how the occult opens you up to demon possession, and sign you up for 6 months of sunday services with obligatory tithing. I don't think most christians would see a problem with requiring people to attend church as community service or therapy. I 100% believe an average christian could be convinced to advocate for a bunch of awful things if they believed it would "save a soul" and was pushed by their pastor. I mean, shit, look at the missions in California or the brutal reeducation of native people in Alaska, Canada, the US, etc. You think they wouldn't do that to all us modern heathens if they could? They absolutely would, and call it a kindness. They want everyone converted and many of them are blind to the unspoken threat they wield with their religion (and if you're christian and thinking, that's not true, I'm progressive and tolerant, I just think everyone should have a chance to know god's wonderful love and worship him or else they get THROWN IN A LAKE OF FIRE FOREVER FOR BEING SINNERS - there you go - you are only as tolerant as your god & leadership allows you to be). And that's a potential future use of current online info that really gets my hackles up. I don't have much faith that what details I innocently volunteer today won't be used against me without due process in the future. And if we're talking about drifting into a theological state, there's a lot of stuff I consider important to me that christianity would want to strip away.

My mom bought into the "roleplaying games teach devil worship" hysteria. At first all I knew about D&D was bad things, like from the chick tract and that one silly movie, Monsters and Mazes (if you're a gamer, you must watch it at least once).

In retrospect it is hilarious.

When I started playing RPGs in high school starting with Rifts, I had to cast D&D as "that one bad game" and I had to carefully describe the one I was playing as group storytelling, completely different, because I was worried otherwise my mom would freak out. One guy in my gaming group had to keep his books in the trunk of his car because his christian mom wouldn't allow them in the house. Spouse's mom threw out Star Wars movies and Harry Potter books because of references to magic. All garden level christian censorship. For anyone who doesn't have a personal stake in women's reproductive rights, consider they'll come for your porn and video games for sure, if they can. Anything they consider to be occult (which means it looks weird or scary). Get used to seeing censored versions of movies on your streaming services. Tune into your local christian radio station and see how long you can tolerate praise music, 'cause you'll be hearing a lot more of it. They will eviscerate the culture we all enjoy if they can. Because they think they're "protecting the children", they have zero chill. And if you're thinking capitalism will protect you because secular things are too lucrative, consider that corps will just pivot to take advantage of fresh religious fervor. That's a very fertile, unexploited market. Dollar signs everywhere. Harry Potter is played out, let's push a christian-friendly intellectual property now. So much money to be made.

This is speculative nightmare level stuff. What I really fear is that first moment when I may be subtly pressured to betray myself. I worry that I may not recognize it for what it is, and I also worry that I won't have the guts to stand up. When someone with a badge comes to the door asking questions about your neighbor and you tell the truth that you know they're in a polyamorous relationship, or your manager mentions in your performance review that you don't wear a cross and you wonder if it's better if you start wearing one, just to make a good impression for that upcoming promotion. Those are the private sorts of betrayals I fear. It's being the domino that leads to someone else getting in trouble - it's letting yourself be perceived as the oppressive majority, just because it lets you reap the benefits.

I am staying the hell away from conservative christian states. Spouse told me yesterday, "I never thought I'd say this, but I'd rather move to California than Texas." I see nothing but bad times for those areas, even if one is living in a blue city. The rules will get more restrictive, the elections will become circuses, the smart, sensible people will GTFO and stay away, the rest will be caught in a spiral of conversion and persecution. Services will suffer, people will know things are getting worse, anger and violence will escalate against whatever boogeyman they set up to take blame. "Everything will be great once we ban abortions. Everything will be great once we roust out the illegals. Everything will be great once we ban homosexuality and anything we find deviant. Everything will be great once we ban porn. Everything will be great once we control exactly what our kids are taught and who teaches them. Everything will be great once we censor the internet." I thought the 2020 election would throw some cold water on the fervor, but frankly the democrats seem to be suffering from performance anxiety. They're either too compromised, stupid or disorganized to be effective - or they are letting the right purposefully get away with outrageous things to force urgency on their own voters. This is a bad tactic. If voting every couple years is all us average citizen can do, we are fucked.

Spouse was talking about why Afghanistan is so messed up, and he mentioned that part of it is because whenever a new regime takes power, what do they do? They get rid of the dissenters, the educated. They don't want discussion or compromise, they want obedience. Conform or get made an example of. I wonder, at what point did some people in Germany decide it was time to build secret rooms in their homes to hide their neighbors? Because that had to have been a purposeful decision at some point. We need a place to hide people. I wonder when they knew it had gone too far.

"What are you prepping for? Invading foreign nation? Climate change? Natural disaster?" Fascist christian nationalist government. Yup. Persecuting all the most interesting people, banning my RPGs, censoring my favorite movies and shows, burning my tarot cards, being uterus tyrants, ruining the Internet more than it already is. It wouldn't shock me at all if they pushed for-profit prisons and created a legal slave class for themselves. Oh, we have thousands of homeless people after covid, too "lazy" to find jobs? Put them in prison and blast them with praise songs 16 hours a day while they make merch. Once they convert to christianity we'll take time off their sentence.

So, yeah, I'm a lot more worried about part of the country going theological than filtering radioactive fallout out of my water. I find door-to-door evangelizers a scarier threat than door-to-door looters. In my experience, christianity is one of the most conformist, vindictive, hypocritical, abusive, reactive and fearmongering groups that exist. It's not that I hate them, I've just seen what they are from the inside. They're not just pissed off about uteruses. Abortion is at the top of a long hit list. If they scratch that off, they will only be emboldened by their victory.

When it comes to Texas and Florida, all I hear are alarm bells. 2024 is coming. Now is the time to secure more of the practical things. Get some first aid supplies so you can handle minor illnesses at home. Workarounds in case utilities get unreliable. Get tools so you can make something with your own hands. Cooking, gardening, sewing. What can you barter? Think about where you can make a hidden space to smuggle contraband and maybe your neighbor, if necessary.

Am I paranoid? I sure hope so.