Quiet and bright this early-evening Sunday here in California’s Central Valley. This whole weekend has been a turnaround as both days were sunshine and clear-blue skies with way-little wisps of that nasty, depressing tule fog we’d been inundated with the last couple of months.

First post in nearly six weeks — too heart sick and depressed with all the terrible shit. I have found it hard to write when I’m in terror of shitty premonitions formed by actual real-life horror tales and the direct/indirect impact of those foreboding events to come, based on shit happening here and now. Does that make sense? I don’t know, but I’ve been that way my whole literary life — must feel good to write about even things that are dark and shitty.

Did catch a smile while on my daily walk about a month ago:

A face in wood.

I read somewhere recently that ‘terror’ is the frightful emotion felt in anticipation of something shitty about to happen, while ‘horror‘ is living through/witnessing the actual atrocious event taking place — horror is terror fulfilled. And with this being already just the eleventh day of a new year, the end has got to be close.

And what caught me eye and caused me to seek relief virtue the written word on my poor-ass blog (even just a few words, and none fascinating or splendid) was an excellent look at our current terrible-terror times as reflected by the disheartening short-fused countdown to the midnight hour for the Doomsday Clock came this afternoon via Émile P.Torres, an American philosopher, intellectual historian, activist, and podcast host — his Wikipedia page states: ‘Much of Torres’s work focused on existential risk, the study of potential catastrophic events that could result in human extinction. More recently, they have focused on “existential ethics,” which they define as “questions about whether our extinction would be right or wrong to bring about if it happened.”‘

So it is with the T-Rump and terror of the approaching horror — Torres concluded:

My guess is that the Bulletin will only move the minute hand forward by one second. However, I also wouldn’t be surprised if they chose to push it several seconds closer to midnight. The global predicament of humanity is dire — even worse than during the height of the Cold War, according to the Bulletin. We now face a rapidly growing multiplicity of unprecedented global threats and a deteriorating international security situation, thanks in large part to Donald Trump.

I suspect that this is the least crazy the world will be for the rest of our lives, if only because of climate change and all the disastrous sequelae that comes with it. So, buckle up! Things are going to get even bumpier.

Go read the whole piece (h/t Raw Story) — it’s long-winded, but well worth it,  as there are details of the overall horror made for the quickly-coming by the T-Rump, from climate change (probably our greatest human-collective ‘terror‘  — the rest all terrible distractions) to nuclear proliferation sparking a multitude of wars and rumors of wars. A hasty-formed situation all on the burnt-orange shoulders of the T-Rump, a terror of a horror.

What a time we be full-tilt part of, wouldn’t you say?

Also, a more-open shot of the wood face, including some former body parts:

And to close us out, this surprise (h/t Digby):

Terror bubbles into horror, or not, yet here we are once again …