Never Underestimate the Power of an Author

June 26, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I wasn’t going to do any more political posts — as I keep saying, it’s getting too dangerous. Not that I’m bringing myself to anyone’s attention, it’s just that the internet is forever, and who knows what will be the end of this push toward, not just socialism, but communism.

So what got my goat this time? The socialists/communists are saying they want a Scandinavian-type socialism rather than a Venezuelan-type, which, of course, shows their ignorance, or perhaps shows that they are relying on the ignorance of their constituents.

To be honest, I’m just as ignorant about how things work over there as anyone else, though I do know a few basics. The Nordic Model combines capitalism with an extensive government-funded social welfare system. In particular, what Sweden has is a parliamentary representative democratic constitutional monarchy, which seems to mean that the power comes from the people, with the prime minister as head of the government, the king head of parliament, and officials elected by the people to represent them. They are a capitalist state with a large taxpayer funded welfare system. Meaning that, unlike true socialism, people own their businesses, not the state.

Because of Sweden’s early free market system, by 1970, they were one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Then, in 1970, they began playing around with socialism. The government was horrifically expanded, taxes were massive, wealthy businesses left the country, zero jobs were created. By 1990, they realized their experiment was a disaster. They discovered they could have big business or big government, not both. As Kjell-Olof Feldt, Social Democratic Minister of Finance (1983–1990) said: “What we believed in as young socialists simply turned out to be impossible in practice.”

Now, their socialism is funded heavily by low and middle-income families, not just the rich. It’s still not a utopia by any means. As with all western countries, their open borders have created a high incidence of gang-related shootings, problems with local integration, and a huge drain on their welfare system.

So why do I know all this? Pippi Longstocking. Do you remember her? The storybook hero we all (especially us quiet bookish types), admired so much?

In 1970, at the beginning of the Swedish socialist experiment, Astrid Lindgren, the author of the Pippi Longstocking books, was sent a tax bill for 102% of her earnings. Yep. Socialism on steroids. (Socialists seem to like to steal from authors. One bestselling author is trying to leave a neighboring country, but he can’t leave until he forks over about 65% of his investments via an “exit tax.” Not his income, not his realized capital gains. His investments and savings. So, he can stay and spend an ever-increasing share of the tax burden, or he can leave and lose more than half of what he’d spent his life earning.)

Anyway, Astrid Lundgren fought back like an author — she wrote allegories that were very obviously a critique of the government’s tax system, but that people loved and understood. The press called her selfish. The prime minister blamed her for betraying the country. But she kept writing. And talking. She explained about the unfairness of a tax that punished the people who created wealth by stealing even more from them than they earned. People listened. In 1976, they voted out the Social Democratic Party that had ruled for over forty years.

The tax system was overhauled. Still, they didn’t dump socialism for another fifteen years.

So the moral of this story is . . . well, I’m not sure what the ultimate message is, but one is never to underestimate the power of an author beloved the world over. Another is not to listen to what the communists in the United States are saying about the “good” socialism they want, because the truth is that socialism doesn’t work, and you can’t tax the rich ad infinitum.

And of course, in my case, the main moral is not to get me riled up.

Though it did give me a blog topic, so there’s that.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, books, culture, history/myth, life. Tags: , , , , . Leave a Comment »

Shenanigans of the Political Class

June 25, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I find it ironic that politicians who scream about citizens making (ie: creating) too much money and profess the need to confiscate that wealth through punitive taxes, never once promise to give back the millions that have stuck to their fingers during their tenures as “servants” of the people. The mega-millionaires in Congress seem to be the loudest of the “eat the rich” contingent yet don’t see themselves as one of the problems. Apparently, their money is theirs. And so is everyone else’s money.

Too many people agree because they don’t understand that created wealth — wealth that is invested in business and creating thousands of jobs — is not the same as money in the bank. They complain that the wealthy don’t pay their fair share of taxes, and yet if everyone were taxed at the same rate, those same people would be complaining about their tax bill. The richest pay around 35% of their income in federal taxes. The middle group pays about 15%. The workers at the lowest end either pay minimal taxes, or they don’t pay into the system at all but are instead given money via Earned Income Tax Credits. (There is a wide range in each of these categories, but these are the averages I found.)

An even bigger irony comes from those communist mayors (calling them democratic socialists doesn’t change the nature of their rhetoric) who have never held a job in their life, led affluent lives because of family wealth, and yet now pretend to be bringing about a better life for working people while a) making things worse, and b) somehow getting richer.

I’ve never understood why working-class people listen to such hypocrites, except perhaps that they think that when the billionaires are taxed to death, then some of the money will be parceled out to them. I certainly don’t understand this push toward turning the United States into a communist country; it’s the surest way for everyone to go broke. Except for those at the top, of course.

A current scheme is a wealth tax, which never worked in the countries that tried it, but apparently, people still think it’s a good idea. But the trouble is, if they tax unrealized capital gains, then the owners of the company will have to sell off part of the company, which means people losing their jobs, which means fewer taxes overall. Also, all sorts of retirement funds that are invested in those companies lose money, because the sell-off will lower the value of the stock, which means the vulnerable also lose out. And of course, the politicians won’t bother giving a rebate for the loss of the rich person’s wealth when the stocks go down. And yet, when the stocks go back up again, they will again tax those unrealized gains, which means double tax on the same money. So bizarre!

I guess the moral of the story is that one doesn’t need to know economics to be in congress — or a mayor — though it should be a requirement. But then, it’s never about the truth, just the perceived truth. At least as long as it gets them reelected.

Which brings me to the biggest irony of all — that I, who have always had a head-down approach to the shenanigans of the political class, am not only aware of such doings but am blogging about it.

I might have to do something about that — not the shenanigans, which I have no control over, but the writing.

 

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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Talking to My Twenty-year-old Self

June 17, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What is something you wish you could tell your 20-year-old self?
View all responses

Hypothetical questions like this make me think — not about the question I’m supposed to blog about, but the mechanics of it.

Truly, assuming there was something I wished I could tell my twenty-year old self, how would that work?

At first, I thought of leaving a message somewhere for me to find when I reached this age, but then I realized that’s the reverse of the question. Besides, there’s nothing my twenty-year old self could say to me today that would make any difference. If there was something that was important enough for that younger version of me to want forwarded into the future, it’s already been done. First, there is a little thing called a memory. Second, even if I don’t recall the important thing itself, it would be written in my very life — everything that ever happened to me stemmed from the thoughts of that year (and every year) so any message would be redundant.

As for the logistics of getting a message back to that younger self — reverse email? But email hadn’t been invented back then. That twenty-year old self would have to wait several more decades to receive the message, and by then, she’d be almost as old as I am now. If not that, then what? Time travel? Okay, so assume I went back in time, how would I ever convince that person I was her? I’m sure she’d think I was a relation, perhaps a great-aunt or some such because I did at one time bear a distinct resemblance to my mother.

I remember when I was young not ever actually thinking that old people were forever old, but I somehow presumed it. I knew people grew older, but it just seemed to me, in that accepting way of youth, that they were old, and had always been, just as I was young, and would always be. It makes sense, I suppose — when you’re young, you can see the changes in yourself as you graduate to a new grade every year, but the older folks always looked the same. I don’t know when it struck me that old folks had once been young, that they’d lived a whole life before getting old, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t happen until later in my twenties or even in my thirties. (I knew people aged, of course, but old age seemed so alien to my young self that I never made the connection.)

So there my young self would be, seeing this old woman, and no way would my twenty-year old self ever believe that I was this old. Oddly, I doubt that my current self would even recognize that young self. Odder still, now that I’m old, I feel as if I’ve always been old, as if I’d never been young. I mean, I know I was, but . . . who can remember that far back? Or care? It is easier just to accept what I am today and go with that feeling rather than give credence to a past.

Which means, I suppose, that even if I could go back and tell my twenty-year old self something, there’s nothing I would wish to tell her.

As for the photo accompanying this article, I realize it’s not my twenty-year old self, but nowadays, one young age is as remote as the other.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, culture, history/myth, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , . 6 Comments »

Dotting Eyes

June 12, 2026 — Pat Bertram

So, artificial intelligence is supposed to run the world in the future? Good luck with that!

This comment wasn’t planned, but it just hit me as I am writing — if AI, or at least Generative AI (or as I once accidentally called it: degenerative AI) learns from people, and half the population is, by definition of average intelligence or below, then how will it ever get smarter than humans? And oh, yes, while I’m on this topic, people say that you can tell what AI has written by the M-dashes. Those are the long dashes I use in my articles all the time — eight in this piece alone, by last count — and I guarantee nothing I write is touched by anything artificial. Well, the computer — my fingers do touch that — but as for help with writing? No. Absolutely not. The point of writing is . . . well, to write. Having a voice in a machine do my writing for me would completely defeat the purpose of connecting with my own inner voice and ultimately with other human voices — not vocal voices since obviously I can’t hear people who read my work, but voice as in a person’s unique way of phrasing, unique tone, unique point of view.

But “voice” brings me back to what I came here to say.

I was listening to a clip yesterday from one of the black conservatives I occasionally pay attention to. I started doing so in order to find out what they think about being used to shore up the left’s anti-voter ID stance, and they don’t like it. They know it’s not Jim Crow-2, since their parents went through the real thing and so they know the truth of it. And they don’t like being patronized as if they were too stupid to figure out how to get an ID or how to prove their citizenship. (To be honest, I think the people I listen to are more educated, more coherent, and richer than those treating them as if they needed their hands held.)

Anyway, somewhere along the line during this two-minute clip, I lost track of what the speaker was saying because I was stunned into immobility. I simply couldn’t believe how AI translated his speech to text. He used the phrase “dot your Is and cross your Ts,” and what appeared on the screen was “Dot your eyes and cross your teeth.”

Um. Yeah. It might be artificial but it sure isn’t intelligent!

“Dotting eyes” wouldn’t necessarily be an erroneous transcription if he were talking about art, since that tiny dot in the eye of a painted face is what makes the depicted creature — animal or human — seem alive. And some people are born with teeth that come in crooked, so I suppose in some cases, it’s possible for teeth to be crossed, though I can’t really picture it. (No surprise since I am not able to visualize anything — all I ever see when I close my eyes and mentally try to call up an image is . . . black.)

But still — dotting eyes and crossing teeth? I sure hope the AI systems that run weaponry are a lot smarter than that or we are all doomed.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »

My June 10 History

June 10, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I keep getting notices here on this blog about articles I posted on that same day during the previous ten years. I was going to opt out of the notifications, but somehow I never have. (Though I’m sure if those notices included my grief years, I would have opted out immediately.) It’s interesting to see where I was and what I was thinking previously on this date, and interesting, too, to see how much I’ve forgotten. Apparently, once I’ve posted something, it was out of my mind, which, come to think of it, was the point. I never purposely went back and read what I wrote, which considering how long I’ve been doing this blog, could take months, but now I peek at what shows up in my notifications.

Six years ago on June 10, I lamented my lack of a garden. What I mostly had back then was dirt, dead weeds, some newly planted lilac bushes, and a few flowering plants that were here before me. Like the trumpet vine. In previous places I lived, I tried to grow trumpet vines, hoping for a bit of color, but they never managed to thrive. But here, they do. In fact, I have a hard time keeping them in check — I find starter plants all over the place. I dig them up and plant them where they would better serve me, and though slow to grow, most are still alive.

The old vines are blooming cheerily right now, which adds even more color to the garden I never thought I’d have. I remember back then telling a neighbor that in ten years I should have a beautiful yard, and I was partly right. I do have a beautiful yard, but it only took six years to get to this point.

It’s funny, too, that in that six-year-old post I mentioned how bad the winds were, and oh, we’ve been having terrible winds! I wonder what it is about this day and winds? Well, it is southeastern Colorado, which means we almost always have winds.

In 2022, on this day, I wrote about waking up every morning amazed that I am living in such a house on a beautiful mini estate. How very strange it is that I stood outside my house just today, thinking that very same thing — how amazed I am (and so very grateful) to be living here. Perhaps, like the winds, that isn’t a coincidence since I often feel gratitude for this turn my life took, but today it truly did strike me anew how very blessed I am.

Last year, on this day, I wrote about feeling detached from the garden that five years previously I’d wished for. I just didn’t care. (I didn’t need that blog to remind me. I remember how I felt) Oh, I did the necessary work last year, but beyond that, I didn’t take many photos, seldom blogged, and just felt as if it weren’t worth the effort because the intense sun just burned everything.

Whatever struggles I had last year — both with my attitude and the garden itself — didn’t destroy anything permanently. The garden is going well this year, I’m actually enjoying doing the work, and yes, I am still appreciating my cheery trumpet vines.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in being me, blogging, gardening, home, life. Tags: , , , , , , , , , . 3 Comments »

Loyal Subscribers

June 8, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
How do you build loyal subscribers?
View all responses

I find it interesting that most of these blog prompts have nothing to do with me, such as today’s prompt about building loyal subscribers. I have no idea how to build loyalty, have no idea if anyone has even subscribed to my blog. I do know a few friends get my blog by email, which isn’t really fair — they get to keep up with me on a daily basis, and I don’t know what’s going on with them. You’d think they’d be kind enough to reciprocate with their own blog, wouldn’t you? (I’m being facetious. If I want to know what’s going on with them, I could simply call, and I don’t, so who’s the one who isn’t being fair?)

Actually, according to WordPress, I do have some subscribers, and a few more have subscribed in the past few days, so thank you for subscribing!

As for building loyalty — apparently, somewhere along the line I have done so since I see many of the same names in comments and “likes,” but as I’ve mentioned before, I have no idea why anyone reads what I write, though I do appreciate everyone who does. It makes blogging seem so much less like throwing a tiny penlight out into the great darkness of the unknown and more like connecting with friends.

There are some people who have been with me almost from the beginning — starting from the time I wrote about writing, then tumbling into the whole morass of grief with me, and still showing up now that my posts range from stream of consciousness to gardening. Truly, hands across the nations! (Did I mention how grateful I am for you? Well, it bears repeating.)

I might not know how to purposely build a following, but I know how not to build subscribers by the millions — don’t be controversial. Almost all people who garner those sorts of numbers and that sort of loyalty do so by talking about things that gets people emotional, and I don’t want to do that. I know how a lot of my readers think, and I’d just as soon not get into discussions that either get my ire up or theirs. (And I don’t like to have to think of tactful ways of saying I disagree, so I don’t.)

Another way not to build loyal subscribers is to not show a bias because bias automatically gives people a connection to you. It’s almost impossible not to show a bias, and I’m sure mine shows occasionally, though my bias tends to be for irony and intelligence and truth-seeking rather than for any movement or ideology. And I have a definite bias against hypocrisy, emotion that passes as fact, and regimentation of thought. I spent most of my life around people who loved to force people to think their way, so I became adept at changing midstream partly to keep the peace and partly because I didn’t care enough either way to argue the point.

But then, can anyone tell if they are really bias-free? I’m not sure. It seems ingrained so that a biased person acts as if their bias is the truth rather than simply their way of seeing the truth. Case in point: one popular quasi news show has been bleeding viewers because a lot of people don’t like its far-left liberal slant, and all the journalists on the show profess to have no idea there is a slant — they thought they were being impartial.

Seems like a good idea for me to keep keeping away from controversial topics — that way I can keep my bias to myself. And I can keep the readers I have rather than trying to grow a larger subscriber’s list, which I don’t know how to do anyway.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, internet, photography, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 7 Comments »

Recommended Tags

June 5, 2026 — Pat Bertram

In yesterday’s blog post, I wrote about gardening being A Strange Avocation, and I explained the difference in the behavior of flowers between this year and previous years. The tags I used for the post are gardening, home, life, bees and flowers, bees in a garden, larkspur, lily trees, purple echinacea, purple echinacea turned pink, yarrow. All garden related and directly related to the article I posted.

WordPress, the platform that hosts this blog, has an AI tool that suggests various tags for posts. In case you don’t know, tags are words or phrases that bloggers use to help people find their articles. For example, broad tags such as “gardening,” don’t do much to drive people to a blog post since they are too general. If someone were to Google “gardening,” they’d get millions upon millions of hits, and the chance of their finding any particular article are close to nil. Specific tags are best, or so they say, because the chances of someone stumbling upon your immortal words are a lot better. (I was being facetious about the “immortal words,” making fun of the fact that so few of our blog posts say anything of importance, and yet, in the electronic age, everyone’s words, no matter how puerile, truly are immortal.)

You will never in a million years guess the words that the all-seeing, all-knowing AI suggested for that gardening post, so I’ll just list them for you: “Auto immune disease, breastfeeding, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s, IBD.” How is that even possible? I’ve gone over and over what I wrote yesterday, and I cannot see anything that could possibly have generated such a wildly inappropriate group of words.

I know artificial intelligence is supposed to be a great thing, and it might be for other people, but I’m not that impressed. From what I have seen, generative AI in particular is not any more intelligent than most humans seem to be. (I slipped and called it degenerative AI before I corrected myself, but I like that term!) It also has huge biases, especially political ones, which makes sense, I suppose, since the vast majority of news sources and sites like Wikipedia are liberal, and generative AI is only as smart as its input. It would be nice to be able to use Google’s AI generated summaries for a quick perusal of any given topic, but I can’t rely on its answers because it makes mistakes that I know are mistakes. It doesn’t always understand the question, either. I wanted to check out “immortal words” to make sure I wasn’t making up the phrase, and all the AI would tell me is what immortal meant. I also wanted a quick definition for “tags,” and what I got was a whole lot of information about where to buy paper tags with strings. (I’ve noticed more often that search engines seem to be geared to products first, so if I want to know the definition of something, and it happens to be the name of a musical group or a brand name or whatever, that is what shows up, not the more generic term that I was looking for.)

I suppose, in Pollyanna-style, I should be glad that I didn’t need the suggested tags. Glad I don’t know enough about those medical issues from a personal angle to write about them. But still . . . utterly bizarre.

Actually, I’m not one to talk about intelligence, artificial or otherwise. Earlier, I was doing a puzzle, and I needed an eight-letter word beginning with L for a flower. And all I could think of was lavender. Lavender? Really? When I’d spent hours in the morning clearing away larkspur? When I’ve written post after post mentioning larkspur?

Oh, well, such is life. My life, anyway.

PS: The recommended tags for this post are Project Life, Heidi Swapp, San Diego Comic Con, Becky Higgins, Studio Calico. I don’t even know what most of that is!

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, gardening, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , . 4 Comments »

Eye-Catching

June 1, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
Go on a walk today and share a photo of something that catches your eye.
View all responses

I thought I’d respond to this blog prompt by actually doing what it asked. I went on a walk! First time in I don’t know how long, though it must have been a very long time because the neighbors have been waiting outside for me to stop by, and well, as you can see, that didn’t have a good outcome for them.

I was only going to walk a couple of blocks just to say that I walked, but I ended up walking a couple of miles. It reminded me of what I liked about walking — the lovely morning, the clean smell, the soft air, the blue skies, the gentle breeze. But it also reminded me of why I have a hard time forcing myself to get back to daily walking — utter boredom. Nothing to see other than what I’ve already seen a thousand times. (Well, the family on the bench was a bit different configuration; they are often rearranged and dressed to memorialize the season with hearts, Easter baskets, or Santa hats.) In previous living situations, when I walked for miles each day, I was able to find isolated paths, hiking trails, and vistas within walking distance of where I lived, but now all I see are the same houses, the same parked cars, the same cracked pavements, the same brown fields.

I’d walked all over town during my first years here, and because of a definite dog problem in this area, I soon learned to stick to one guaranteed safe route. But oh, so utterly boring seeing the same thing over and over and over again. (It’s why I stopped going to the library — the thousandth time I saw those same books did me in.) When I do manage to get out to walk (hard in the summer because I use up my energy on yard work), I try to think of it as a walking meditation, paying attention to the simple act of walking, but then I become aware of my slightly unsteady knees, and that’s no fun.

But that wasn’t today. Today was a real treat. It was also nice to find out I can still walk at least that far without any trouble. Added to the benefit, I exchanged a few words with one neighbor and made a point of stopping to visit with a friend.

Tomorrow, I get back to yard word, so there won’t be time or energy or inclination for a spur of the moment walk. Today was a rare day off, taken because in a few days, I won’t have any days off. The larkspur are finished flowering (which is odd because usually at the end of May they are at the height of their beauty). Soon the seed pods will form, which means collecting the seeds and pulling up the dead larkspur — not an easy task since there are so many of them. And after that, it’s a matter of planting new flower seeds for the summer, buying new plants, or transplanting overcrowded plants to fill in empty spots.

Later in the summer, there will be more color, and perhaps a real explosion of color come fall when the chrysanthemum bloom. Actually, it’s the lack of things to see outside of my own yard that helped me overcame my reluctance for work-heavy landscaping in order to have something fun to see. Even in a time where so many flowers are finished for the season, there are new areas that are flowering.

In fact, the thing that most caught my eye during today’s excursion (besides my skeletal neighbors, that is) was my own wildflower garden leading up to my back door.

These yellow coreopsis (or coreopsises or even coreopses for you Latin afficionados) started with only a couple of seedlings, and now look! So prolific and so sunny.

Truly eye-catching.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, gardening, home, life. Tags: , , , , , , . 11 Comments »

Unlimited Budget

May 31, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
If you had an unlimited budget for 24 hours, what would you do?
View all responses

This blog prompt should have been a no brainer. Unfortunately, because I overthink everything, I have a hard time with hypothetical questions, this one most of all. For example, I started out wondering what it means by “budget.” To me (and to the dictionary), a budget is basically a financial plan that helps a person understand what money they have to spend every month, allocates a sufficient amount of income for fixed expenditures such as rent and utilities, and helps control spending to avoid going into debt. But that definition doesn’t fit the postulated scenario at all. I suppose I could make out a budget for an infinite amount of income for a day without actually spending anything, but it seems a waste to go through all that simply for one day’s worth of phony money.

So if the question isn’t about a budget as such, does it mean simply having an infinite amount of money to spend for one day? If so, how does the money appear? A credit card with no limit? If so, who pays the bill? Or does the money appear in my banking account? If so, how does the depositer know how much I will be spending?

Do I know ahead of time what day that “unlimited budget” will show up so I can plan how to use the largess? Or will it just appear one day, leaving me to wing it, and hoping I don’t get so overwrought by the stress of it all that I blow the whole deal?

And how does one spend the money? Go online and book airline trips and cruises for a future day? Will the travel plans still be available when the time comes, or will they have disappeared along with that “unlimited budget” day?

How would a credit card work anyway? The charges don’t always show up the same day as an order is placed, so if I were to buy a whole lot of stuff at a mall or online or wherever, there’s a chance that once the “unlimited budget” deal expired, I’d get stuck with a bill for things I would never have bought in the first place.

It would make sense to buy property or some other tangible asset, but I know for a fact, one cannot buy any property in a single day. Or maybe one can if one has that “unlimited budget” at one’s disposal. But still, I tend to think not. Realtors, lawyers, sellers, escrow folk and everyone else involved in a major sale don’t work on a moment’s notice.

I would think a good use of the budget would be to write checks to local non-profits, but would the money still be there when they cashed the checks? It doesn’t seem like it would be, and I have a hunch if I went to the bank and got trunk loads of cash to hand out to those groups, I would get into a whole lot of trouble. First of all, you can’t take out too much cash from a bank without dealing with a lot of paperwork. Second of all, unless the organizers were greedy and grabbed the cash for themselves, they’d certainly have questions about its legitimacy.

It all seems like too much headache.

In the end, I suppose I’d just buy what I normally buy on any given day, which is . . . not a single thing.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 3 Comments »

Self-Censorship

May 30, 2026 — Pat Bertram

You’d think that someone who says she writes for herself would write whatever she wants, and that would be true if I saved the writing for myself alone as I did with the journal I kept after Jeff died. Once a piece is written, however, and I go to post it, things change. Suddenly, it’s not just for me but for anyone who wants to take a peek into my life and thoughts and emotions.

For example, I tend to stay away from anything controversial, and if by chance I happen to mention something that could be construed as political, I edit it out because it’s just not worth the backlash. So perhaps it’s not self-censorship so much as it is simply editing to make a more universally accepted piece. Or do I mean peace?

Either way, I do sometimes second guess what I write, not just when it involves world affairs, but also when it involves people in my life, especially if I know they read this blog. In fact, I’m sitting here right now debating about whether or not I should mention something that recently happened. (Apparently, I decided to go ahead with the article, because here I am.)

A few days ago, I accompanied a friend to an appointment. I’ve driven with her hundreds of miles over the years, so I’m familiar with her driving, and I’ve never been concerned about safety, but that day, she was driving erratically, swerving from lane to lane, cutting in front of cars she apparently couldn’t see, seemed to have no depth perception, had a hard time hearing, could barely handle the steering wheel. Bizarrely, she had no idea what she was doing. To her, all was fine, she was just tired after a sleepless night. In fact, when I later mentioned that it would have been better to have cancelled the appointment, she said she had no idea there was any need.

I wondered if she’d been having a mini stroke, so when she next went to the doctor, I urged her to tell him the story. She did. What she discovered is that all out-of-whackness was caused her insomnia the previous night.

That is why this story is important and why, even though I worry my friend might think my writing this might be a betrayal, I ignored my inclination for self-censorship and posted it anyway. If you have a sleepless night, especially if you are getting up in years, please stay home even if you feel fine. Truly, the symptoms she showed were traumatic and life-threatening (for me too) and are common side effects of a sleepless night. It makes me wonder how many people are going about their lives as if everything is fine, when in fact, it isn’t.

I’m lucky in that I don’t worry about not sleeping. If I have a rare sleepless night, I just stay home the next day. And if I ever can’t because of an appointment, I hope I am as smart as I am urging you to be and cancel the appointment.

It’s funny how small things can have such devastating effects. We never think of a sleepless night as being life threatening in the short run, but it is or it can be.

So be careful. Please. And don’t drive if you’ve had a sleepless night.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, dealing with old age, history/myth, life. Tags: , , , , . 13 Comments »
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