Blogging

April 16, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
How do you use social media?
View all responses

The only way I use social media is by blogging. I do check out a couple of people who scavenge the internet for pertinent news articles. Since it’s difficult to do the work myself, it’s nice to have someone else find the kernels of truth (or maybe the grains of wisdom) in that teeming chaos. But for what I myself post online? It’s this blog.

For the past nineteen years, this blog has been there for me when I needed an outlet, whether it was to talk about the writing process, promote authors, discuss books I’ve read, help me find a way forward during my years of grief (and coincidentally helping others as I helped myself), tell about my experiences as a first time home owner, showcase my garden, or express gratitude for my life even while my body is slowly declining into old age.

I’ve seldom considered why people read this blog (or why they don’t when they don’t). Sometimes I know, though, especially when people come to read my grief articles to find out that they’re not alone or to find out why they are going through what they are going through. Others use this blog as a way to keep track of me, not in a creepy stalker sort of way, but as a concerned friend. All too often, we let life separate us from our friends, and so this blog shows them that I’m still around and doing okay. But for the rest? Their reasons for reading belong to them, and really have no part in why I write.

Today I found a comment on an article I wrote back in February about my current run of daily blogging, where the commenter asked if blogging every day makes us confuse quality with quantity, and if it’s narcissistic to think that people want to read every day what one writes.

For the most part, I don’t write for others. I write for myself, and anyone who wants to can come along for the ride, so I responded: I suppose one has to ask if the blogger cares what people think of their blog. Sometimes it’s for the bloggers — keeping to a discipline, clarifying their ideas, telling their truth to a (perhaps) uncaring world.

And their rebuttal: Well, when you publish something it’s for a public. If you need an exercise for your discipline keep it to yourself and don’t publish it.

I don’t understand the point of this exchange. People always write for themselves. Even if the writing is published, it’s still for themselves. If bloggers didn’t get anything from writing, published or not, they wouldn’t do it. And just because bloggers publish their articles, no one has to read them. In my case, it’s not as if I’m chaining readers to my computer.

Do I want to be heard? Of course I do. Although I say I write for myself, I consider blogging to be a form of communication, a longer way than simply posting a comment on some other social site or sharing someone else’s commentary. And communication, even in such a sideways fashion as this, is important to one who spends most of her waking hours alone. Do I consider this blog to be narcissistic? Since it’s centered on me and my life (who else do I know well enough to write about?), I suppose it could be considered narcissistic, but then everyone who writes would by definition be narcissistic. And even if it is narcissistic, who cares? If what I write doesn’t resonate with anyone, they simply stay away. At least I’m not heaping more outrage on an already outraged world, not spewing hatred or trying to make anyone believe what I want them to believe. More than anything, it seems as if I show appreciation for whatever the day brings.

As for quality vs quantity, again, what difference does it make? I sometimes have interesting ideas. Sometimes I’m just letting a piece of my day slip out into the open. And always, I write to the best of my ability, proofreading until the piece is as well written as possible. (This is also part of the discipline factor, something I would not do if I were simply jotting entries into a for-me-only journal).

I might be getting away from the blog prompt of how I use social media and getting into the why of it, but it still comes down to the same thing: the only way I use social media is by blogging.

***

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. Tags: , , , , , , . 14 Comments »

What Is Now the Reality

April 8, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I don’t understand the whole “naming generations” thing. It seems to me it would make more sense to go by decades — for one thing, no one would have to remember the names; for another, people at the beginning of a decade often have more in common with those at the end than they do with their own named generation.

For example, the boomer generation is considered to be 1946 to 1964. There is a vast difference in the lives between those born at the beginning of that so-called generation than those born at the end. At its most obvious — the oldest boomers are just turning 80. Most are in their 60s and 70s. The youngest still have two to three years to go before they retire. Do people who trash the “boomers” even realize that?

I’ve been seeing a lot of envy from younger generations because they’re told that boomers hold more than 50% of the wealth, and they want a piece of it. Some will get it when the boomers die off. Although a lot of the boomer wealth came from real estate investment, a portion was inherited, and unless the state takes a greater portion of that inheritance than they did in previous years, the next generations will end up with it.

Something people don’t understand is that for many of the boomers, their real estate investment wealth is their home. One couple I know bought their house decades ago, it’s now paid off, and is worth considerably more than when they bought it. But they are still working since they haven’t hit retirement age yet, and like everyone else, they are struggling to figure out how to support their old age since that house is their main investment. So, they can live there after retirement and work part time to pay the bills, or they can sell the house, realize the profit, and hope they can somehow find something cheaper to buy that leaves them enough to fund their living expenses. That doesn’t sound like boomer wealth to me.

As for that wealth — according to Pew research, 10% of boomers hold 71% of the generational wealth. Although on average, boomers hold more wealth than the previous generation at the same age, a good percent of those folks are no better off than their parents.

So what brought this on? I saw an article — the article wasn’t even a rant, just a supposed explanation of why boomers had it so much better than subsequent generations — that said that in the mid-1960s, boomers could still buy a house with a single income. And yes, in the mid-1960s, people could buy a house with a single income, but those house buyers weren’t boomers. They were the previous generation. In 1965, the oldest boomer was still a teenager, the youngest, a toddler. Unless there were a lot of really precocious babies back then, they weren’t buying houses.

What people don’t seem to realize is that by the time boomers were old enough and had enough money to buy a house, the housing market had changed and suddenly it took two incomes to afford what the previous generation could do on a single income. (I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that feminism grew considerably around that time. Did the need for two incomes fuel the movement, or did the movement somehow fuel the need for two incomes?)

Another thing that people don’t realize is how few basic things were necessary back then. Cable was just coming into prominence in the mid1970s; before that, television was free. There were no cell phones for each family member but a single phone, with perhaps an extension, plugged into the wall. Designer clothes were the privilege of the rich. Middle class women might yearn, but never assumed those clothes were for them. As for the whole “cute” shoe fetish and brand-name bags? Again, saved for the rich. It wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that logos and brands became global status symbols. People today seem to think that fast food and take out were always available, and yes, there were a few fast-food outlets, but they were a special treat rather than a staple. Takeout was pretty much restricted to Chinese food, and most supermarkets didn’t even have delis.

As the pace of life speeded up, with the need for two incomes to support a family, the idea of cooking at home every night was overtaken by the prepared food market, which added considerably to the family food budget.

People complain that boomers are too ignorant about technology, and admittedly, now and again, you do come across a person in their late 70s who fumble with phones and computers, but most of the boomers, though not born with a phone in their chubby little hands, had to learn about computers to keep their jobs. Most boomers have been into technology for the past thirty years. It’s the previous generation that has a hard time with phones and computers, mostly because they didn’t need to learn until their grown children talked them into it.

As for those who complain about too many boomers in the House and Senate? Nope, again, those ancient folks aren’t boomers. They’re part of the never-silent “silent generation.”

And lest you think these ideas are limited to a single demographic, back then, before the government decided to get in on the act, people were doing just fine by themselves, naturally integrating into better neighborhoods.

Did the boomers have it better? I don’t know. I do know that the air was cleaner, the streets quieter (fewer two-car families and people worked closer to home so commutes were shorter), kids could play outside and had a lot more independence than kids do nowadays. Although health insurance was affordable, one could get by without insurance since doctors’ fees didn’t include exorbitant malpractice insurance rates. Because of the 1976 gas shortage, cars were smaller, more efficient — the boom in SUVs came in the 1990s.

Although boomers were able to buy their houses earlier than later generations, I have to wonder how much of that had to do with the money saved by having fewer necessities to buy, but whatever the reason, I do know that most homeowners were able to buy a house at a much younger age than I was.

Not that any of this matters. People will think what they want, though it’s never a good thing to compare yourself with other generations. It’s all about making the best of the world you live in, whatever generation it might be — and whatever name it might have — because the past (and lamenting the past) can never change what is now the reality.

***

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

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When Books Were Just Books

March 23, 2026 — Pat Bertram

Once upon a time, books were just books. At least, once upon my time they were. I always knew books were written by people, of course, but the authors were separate from their works. Like literary midwives or hedge doctors, they brought stories out of the everywhere into the here. It didn’t matter who they were. Only the books mattered.

I miss those years of innocence, the years when the back covers had tantalizing blurbs, not a close-up of an author’s face, when the snippets of reviews were from reviewers, not other authors peddling their own books. I miss the mysteriousness of authors, when all that was known was the brief biography hidden in the end matter.

Now, of course, with the onset of the internet, there is no such thing as simply a book. Too much about authors is known. Too much is discussed. Too much is . . . too much.

I’ve stopped reading works by a couple of authors because of their politics. In some cases, I simply cannot abide those they choose to align themselves with, and it completely changed the tone of their books for me. I’ve stopped reading other authors because of remarks they’ve made online. I’ve stopped reading still others when I found out that opinions in the books are their own, not just their characters’ thoughts. In yesterday’s blog, I mentioned that we read ourselves into books, but it’s hard to read yourself into a book when you find the person who wrote it is too much in the book. And even harder when you find them less than admirable.

Perhaps it’s naïve of me to think it was ever possible to separate an author from the books they’ve written, but for most of my life I did. An author was simply a brand. (And often a dead one at that.) If I liked a Frank Slaughter book or a Graham Greene, I’d look for more. Back then, there were no dust jackets on library books, just some sort of generic fabric-covered binder’s board, with only a name and title on the spine, so that’s all I had to go by.

It no longer matters, really, that authors have destroyed their mystique for me because most books published nowadays are not worth my time, but I do wish I still thought that books — and authors — were something special. Something . . . magical, even mystical.

I’m sure it sounds hypocritical of me to think this way since my books came to be published because of the internet, at least in a roundabout way, and those I’ve sold I’ve sold because of the internet. But in a way, it proves my point. I’m too visible (and yet, oddly invisible because so few people find me). There’s nothing magical about how I wrote my books, no sitting in an ivory tower birthing stories, just one word dredged out of my mind at a time. There’s certainly no mystique to my being an author. There’s just . . . me.

I suppose I should be glad there are still human writers, even unadmirable ones, because all too soon, there will be mostly non-human writers wringing stories out of the nowhere.

Makes me wonder: will there still be human readers? Or will there be hundreds of little artificial readers sitting around reading those artificial books?

It’s funny though. Here I am being nostalgic about a time in my life when authors didn’t matter, only their work did, and yet the future when perhaps there will be no authors doesn’t seem all that much more palatable.

***

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

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

Story Endings

March 21, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I’m sitting here chuckling to myself. I’ve just gone through several novels in a row where I read the first couple of chapters, got bored, then read the ending with no desire to go back and read the bulk of the book I missed. What amuses me is that this is the way I read most books now, reading just the ending, and yet with The Wheel of Time, I skip the ending completely.

Well, maybe it isn’t that funny, but for a minute there, I saw the humor.

I just had the terrible thought that for the rest of my life, I’m going to be rereading those same eleven books because I simply can’t find anything else to keep my attention. In too many novels, the minutia of the character’s lives and their inane conversations seem to serve no purpose except to fill up the page. Oh, things do happen, but those doings aren’t worth suffering through those banal pages. Even the endings seem ho-hum, as if the authors themselves had lost interest.

I used to be able to read anything. Cereal boxes, ingredient lists, one-dimensional books, just . . . anything. I don’t know if the change was a result of all the time I spent reading and studying the multi-layered Wheel of Time, or if the change would have come anyway. Because of age maybe? Loss of patience for inanity?

Maybe I’m looking at the situation wrong. Maybe I should be grateful something keeps my attention, even if it’s a series I’ve read a half-dozen times before.

Or maybe I should settle down and try reading the Kingkiller Chronicle again. I’ve had the first two books in the Kingkiller Chronicle trilogy for some time now, but have never been able to get into it. From what I can tell, it’s another one of those series that people love because of the beautiful writing or hate because it’s poorly executed. Either way, they spend hours discussing the books online. Apparently, one of the major problems with the “trilogy” is that the author never wrote the final book, though some people think the writing is so great that it’s worth reading anyway. It’s a “framework” series, where the “frame” is the present day third-person story of an innkeeper, who tells stories of his past in the first person. I never did like that kind of book, and I really don’t like fantasy, but I have the books, so I might as well try again.

Unfortunately, since there is no ending, I can’t do my usual thing of reading the first part and skipping to the ending.

And if I can’t get into it, well, there’s always The Wheel of Time.

Or hey! I could write my own series about a tired old woman chosen to save the world from evil. Assuming that tired old woman cared — to write the books or to save the world, either one.

***

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

Posted in books, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , . 2 Comments »

Not a Private Forum

March 18, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I got an email from a woman who had left an emotionally raw comment on one of my grief posts. She had been hurting and wanted understanding as so many grievers do. But then as the rawness passed, she got on with her life. She googled herself to see what prospective employers would see, and she was shocked that the comment she left here on this blog showed up in search results. She said she thought this was a private forum otherwise she would never have responded to my post. She asked me to remove her comment, which I did.

I didn’t know comments on blogs could show up on search results. This blog is a rather small cubbyhole — pinhole, actually — in the vastness of the internet, so it never occurred to me that comments were searchable. (Especially since, come to think of it, few people leave their names, and those who do usually want to be recognized.) That this blog itself is searchable is all to the good — searching for help with grief is the major reason that people find me.

I only mention this to warn you not to put anything in a comment you don’t want strangers to find. Of course, by now, most of us know that there is no privacy online anymore, if, in fact, there ever was. Knowing this, there are a few things I never post here — my birthday, my house address, my email address, and probably a hundred other things I am so used to keeping private that I don’t remember. Other than those personal privacy issues (I’ve had a few blog stalkers over the years, and I certainly didn’t want any of them showing up at my doorstep!), my life is an open book. Actually, my life being an open book is why I’ve been careful about those privacy issues. I don’t want all the dots to be connected by people I don’t want connecting the dots.

Quite frankly, sometimes it makes me nervous about how much of myself is on here, especially all the things I wrote about during my grief years. As someone once told me shortly after I started telling a truth few wanted to admit, “It’s time to take off the mantle of grief,” but I never did.

So far, when I’ve found myself feeling nervous about any previous posts, I’ve managed not to delete them. And I won’t. But that means, your comments are there, too.

Anyway, I hope this doesn’t deter you from leaving comments. I cherish every response I get.

***

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

 

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

So Turns the Wheel

March 10, 2026 — Pat Bertram

So here’s something I don’t understand about the publishing decisions for the end of the Wheel of Time.

They chose an author based on a memorial he wrote for Robert Jordan, but that piece was more about how Jordan had been a big influence on him in his own writing career rather than about Jordan’s books. Admittedly, the memorial was a paean to Jordan’s writing and to the saga as a whole, but though he called himself a big fan, he barely knew the books. And he certainly didn’t seem to comprehend the characters or where they were going.

I do understand they wanted a proven author yet one who wasn’t so big that he couldn’t take the time to work on the ending of Jordan’s books, but even so, the writer they chose didn’t have the time to spend rereading the books or going through the notes that had been gathered for him because he had his other deadlines to meet.

Still, a major factor with the Wheel of Time, is that the books and the internet were more or less born at the same time and attracted the same age group. So there were many thousands of people who’d lived with the books their whole lives. While waiting for a new book to be published, they spent millions of words on hundreds of sites discussing the books and their theories of what they thought would happen. Some of these people gave brilliant analyses of the characters and the culture. One fellow in particular, a college student who was majoring in comparative religions, wrote reams of essays and had insights that gave him a major following.

So getting to what I don’t understand — with that amazing resource at their fingertips (literally at their fingertips since they’d be typing on a keyboard), why didn’t they use it?

They could have started discussions asking what loose ends there were in the myriad plots, asking about where they thought the characters should go and what they should do, asking what they’d most like to see at the end, asking about what needed clarification, asking what things that were foreshadowed still needed to happen, asking . . . well, asking just about anything. With all those thousands of people ready to discuss everything to do with the Wheel of Time, there’d be no need for the substitute to reread the books or go through notes that made sense only to Jordan himself. If nothing else, it would have been a good starting place. And the books would actually have been a continuation of Jordan’s story instead of filled with new characters and revamped long-standing characters because the substitute wanted to . . . actually, I don’t know what he wanted to do. Make the books his own, perhaps.

It’s funny that almost no one will criticize any of those last three books. I have no idea why they are so sacrosanct except that maybe people were glad to have any ending. Oddly, the bits of criticism that are let through the barrier of protection are blamed on Jordan, even though the points in question were completely the creation of the substitute author. Also, in one book of Jordan’s, the timeline wasn’t kept straight (the story for each POV character started at the same place, giving the book a feeling of repetition), which he later said he regretted. And so did his fans. They sure dumped on him for that! Yet when the substitute skewed his own timeline in one book so badly that he had a character in two places at once and another who was in a different timeline than the characters he met up with, no one said a single word.

I suppose, in the end it doesn’t matter. No one else cares, obviously. Nor will I once I forget those books completely. As it is now, I feel an itch every time I see something in Jordan’s work that was mangled by the substitute. For example, Jordan explained how one magical machine worked on its own to project a character into scenarios based on the character’s fears, and yet the substitute had people working the machine to create horrific scenarios for the one being tested in the machine. Nothing major. Just itchable.

It’s possible no one could have finished the series properly. The more I see all the foreshadowing that appears in Jordan’s work several books before the foreshadowed event, or find hints of wry humor and ironies that won’t be understood until later, or see minor characters that are threaded throughout the saga, or marvel at the subtleties as well as all that goes on beneath the surface, or understand that something that seemed to be a win for the side of Light was actually a win for the Dark, the more I am astounded by what Jordan was able to keep in his head. I had a hard enough time keeping the 100,000 words in each of my own books straight. (In one case, I had to use a bulletin board and hundreds of tiny pieces of paper each containing a bit of information to figure out the timeline.) I can’t imagine keeping millions of words and thousands of characters and hundreds of plotlines in my head. Nor can I imagine doing all this in a world of my own creation. (Long before I’d ever heard of the Wheel of Time, I considered creating my own fantasy world for a book or series of books, but I gave it up since I have a hard enough time imagining the real world, let alone a fake one.)

His writing technique probably precluded any other author, too, since he was both what is known as a pantster (one who writes by the seat of his pants, who creates and discovers the story as he is writing) and a plotter (one who outlines, who knows the story before he writes).

It amuses me to think we had that in common — that we both had major points we wanted to hit as well as an end to aim for, but the journey to get there wasn’t plotted out. But the rest of it? Keeping all those words and characters and worlds in one’s head? That’s not me, for sure!

Just one more thing for me to puzzle out when it comes to these books — not just what he wrote, but how he wrote.

None of this, of course, helps me with my own writing because I’m pretty sure I don’t have another book in me, nor does it help me to understand . . . much of anything, actually.

Which brings me full circle to the beginning of this article where I mention that there’s something I don’t understand.

And so turns the wheel . . .

***

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

Posted in blogging, fiction, history/myth, internet, life. Tags: , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

Skimming

March 7, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I have the terrible habit of ingesting books whole without actually reading the words. I’ve never been able to explain how I read — it’s not skimming exactly, but if I read every single word individually as if reading aloud, the meaning of what I’m reading gets lost in the words themselves. Maybe the way I read is a form of meditation. Or daydreaming without visuals. (I have aphantasia — the inability to form images in my mind.) Despite having said that, I do occasionally skim, especially scenes of violence or sections that don’t keep my interest, and considering that I have read more than 25,000 books of all genres, unless the writing is better than merely competent, most books have huge sections that don’t keep my attention. Also, when it comes to fiction, there are few plots or characters that don’t echo in my head — some because I’ve read those very books before; some because they are similar to those books.

Which is why it surprises me that the Wheel of Time saga has caught my imagination enough to allow for rereads. Though there are chunks of the middle books that I can’t bring myself to read again, or even just to skim, I find myself trying to slow down and savor the rest of Jordan’s words. (Even subtracting out the last three unreadable books written by the substitute author as well as the chunky parts of Jordan’s books, there are still approximately three million words that I do read. And if half of those are used for prosaic storytelling, there are still one and a half million of Jordan’s words to savor.) A lot of his writing is truly beautiful. The subtleties are beguiling. And there is much to puzzle out as I deconstruct Robert Jordan’s world and his writing.

Sometimes I miss little things if I get to skimming a section I remember well, until something draws me back. For example, in a passage I read today, a character noticed the hero’s guards/ guardians/ personal army outside the hero’s room quietly playing a finger game: knife, paper, stone. A little later, three of those people entered the hero’s room to deal with his latest infraction of their “honor.” As they left him, one said they’d won the right to punish him and warned him not to dishonor them again. Written out like this, it’s obvious that their game (their version of rock, scissors, paper) was to choose those three, but when these elements are separated by several pages, the association becomes so obscured I missed it in previous rereads.

Admittedly, the situation wasn’t important to the overall story, but it tickles me to find such correlations. Because of this, I’m training myself not to skim, but that will work against me in the long run — without skimming, most books are not worth my time to read.

When I was young, I often read as a way of expanding my mental horizons — a way to work out in advance how I would deal with the circumstances the characters are faced with — but that’s no longer an issue with me since most fictional situations are now either somewhere in my past or will never be in my future. A choice between love and a career? No longer applicable. What to do with an unexpected pregnancy? Definitely not applicable! Taking revenge on someone? Not something I would ever do. Save the world from the forces of evil? Only applicable if that evil appears in my own backyard and even then it’s not something I want to contemplate. (I’m wary enough of thoughts to think that thinking itself can bring down upon my head whatever it is I am thinking of.)

Without any necessity for reading myself into the story, most novels become ho-hum, especially if the writer can’t make me care for the characters. Without skimming at least a part of the book and skipping other sections completely, I’d probably never have read most of the books that I did. Not finding other books of interest to me could be why I’m caught in the spokes of the Wheel of Time.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, and since you’re probably skimming this essay anyway, I doubt it matters.

***

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

Posted in books, fiction, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , . 2 Comments »

Nothing to Do With Me

March 5, 2026 — Pat Bertram

Every once in a great while, I will see a spike in my blog statistics where suddenly, for no apparent reason, the views on a particular day jump by 1000% or even more. During the first years of blogging, I could see where views came from, what was googled, or what link was clicked to get here, but apparently, privacy laws have now eliminated much of the practice. Sometimes I can see what posts were read, but when there is a big jump, all I see is that the views were for the homepage of my blog, not any specific article.

So I’m left wondering what it was I said that struck such a chord. I know it’s not something I wrote on that day, because this even happened a few times when this blog was all but dormant. Since no one left a comment on any post (which few people do any more), I’m left in the dark.

I’d think this was an algorithmic anomaly or maybe bots trolling the site since sometimes the jump signifies a single view, but sometimes the statistics show that people stayed to check out another post or two. Why? I have no idea. In the past when this happened, I’d congratulate myself on having said something that resonated with people, but now I wonder if such a jump in views has anything to do with me at all.

For a non-blog example: it used to be that when people were kind to me, I’d be pleased with myself, thinking that their kindness was because of something I did, my own kindness, perhaps, then it dawned on me that they were kind to me simply because they themselves were kind. It had nothing to do with me.

Is it possible the jump in views has nothing to do with me or anything I wrote? It certainly has nothing to do with any promotion I’m doing because I gave up promoting this blog years ago when Facebook banned it for being spam. Sometimes I like to think this blog could be considered S.P.A.M. — Special, Perspicacious, Astute, Meaningful — at least to some people, but that’s just me being self-indulgent. But, come to think of it, writing this blog itself is a form of self-indulgence. And so perhaps is wondering what brings people here.

I don’t suppose it matters why people come, at least it shouldn’t matter to me, though I can hope it matters to those who stop by. In any case, I can only write what I feel, throw my words out to the winds of the internet, and what happens after that has nothing to do with me.

It’s like that saying: “What others think of you is none of your business.” Perhaps nothing that happens here after I post is any of my business. Though that doesn’t mean I can’t be curious about what brings people here.

***

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, internet, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 3 Comments »

The Algorithms Made Me Do It

March 4, 2026 — Pat Bertram

Algorithms are an interesting concept. Because I followed the monks’ walk, my news feed is full of Buddhist teachings as well as a daily meditation on peace from the walkers. Also, for some reason, I see a lot of biblical references especially referring to Armageddon.

Because I posted a blog about conspiracy theories, my feed is full of conspiracy theories, (Note to R.U. — including information about lizard people). Also, there’s much talk of what people have found in the Epstein files now that they are searchable for the public, confirming events that once were only surmised by the theorists.

Because I like to see all sides of what is called “truth,” I get a lot of leftist ideology. And because I sometimes check out news from black conservative commentators, I get a lot of information about what this administration is doing to counteract what the left is doing.

This makes for a wild ride, for sure. And it makes for wild thoughts, especially when seen through the lens of The Wheel of Time, which is, at its most basic, a tale of a cosmic battle between the forces of good (and not so good) and the forces of evil (and not totally evil).

What if the conspiracists and the biblical scholars are right and we are currently going through a cosmic battle that is being played on various stages?

The political stage, of course, which seems pretty obvious since the two sides are diametrically opposed.

The religious stage and the battle between cosmic forces for good and evil as described in The Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time, and countless other novels. An ongoing battle between Christians and those who are trying to decimate Christians, such as what is going on in Nigeria.

A technological stage with perhaps a battle between humans and artificial intelligence (as has been predicted in hundreds of science fiction stories for the past century). And what is called a paradigm shift from our present awareness to a greater one (or at least a different one) if we are to sustain our species.

If the algorithms are telling me anything, it’s that there is a present good to counter the “evil,” though I wouldn’t call it evil — it seems more like unrest, an acceptance of criminal behavior as the norm, and a growing feeling that laws don’t have to be followed if you feel morally superior to those laws. As the left continues to push their socialistic-communist agenda, others are fighting back, stressing individualism over collectivism. As the unrest grows, so does the personal need to find peace within and hence the vast influence of the Walk for Peace. And the paradigm shift continues to shift, at least on a political level, such as the abandonment of punitive climate controls to one that accepts the necessity of power-hungry AI data centers.

Even if there is some sort of cosmic battle going on, and even if I sometimes worry that the world is changing to a reality I might not be able to recognize, would we even notice, or for the most part, will our lives go on, with us noticing only small changes in how we interact with the world and each other?

Probably what will happen, no matter what the algorithms tell me, is the same thing that is happening in The Wheel of Time now that I have eliminated the ridiculous substitute-author ending from my studies — just the same scenarios played out over and over again.

Does any of this make sense? I have no idea if it even makes sense to me — it’s just a wild idea I am playing with. And who knows, maybe the algorithms made me do it.

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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, culture, history/myth, internet, life. Tags: , , , , , . 7 Comments »

We Have Met the Alien and He Is Us

March 2, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I had to laugh at the news that the government is going to release the UFO files, because the truth is, most have already been released, but people don’t want to believe the prosaic (though often horrific) explanations. I spent years researching UFOs and looking for the truth of aliens among us. And you know what I discovered? They are us. Not you and me, but humans, nevertheless. Top secret projects like Project Mogul. MKUltra and human experimentation on US citizens by the likes of the CIA and the DIA. Experimental aircraft that was decades beyond what was released to the public. Drone technology. Laser technology. Extra-Low Frequency beams. And fake stories to cover up illegal dumping. (This last was Fred Crisman, an agent of disruption for the CIA, who also turns up in JFK conspiracies.)

We always think we deserve to know the truth, but our leaders don’t think that way, so there’s a lot of so-called UFO activity that will never be released, especially if it involves crimes against citizens or when it involves national security. (Or even when it comes down to how to control us citizens.) Military technology is always a decade or two ahead of what is released to the public. In UFO lore, there is a tale of a mysterious fellow who went around to various businesses and shared information that supposedly came from the aliens, such as fiber optic technology, but the truth is, this fellow was very human. He was Philip Corso, who headed up the Foreign Technology Desk in Army Research and Development, and one of his jobs was doling out military technology that needed to go public.

[He’s also the intelligence officer who did research on POWs from the Korean War, found out that most of them had been sent to Russia, and so decided it was best — and cheaper — to tell the world they were dead rather than continuing to pay their salaries or even trying to rescue them. And that’s been the US policy ever since. He’s also the one who said he saw Oswald at the Russian Embassy. And oh, after the truth about Roswell came out, he wrote a book supposedly telling the truth about Roswell, which was, in fact, all a lie. Shady fellow, for sure.]

Of course, if you’d read my book Light Bringer, you’d know all this. It’s fiction, but I needed a place to dump a lot of my research. Weirdly, though it was supposed to debunk all the UFO theories, I ended up creating my own alien group based on Zecharia Sitchen’s books about Sumerian cosmology, so if you do read the novel, take what that part with a grain of salt.

I was going to set out all I discovered about Roswell here, but I did a bit of online research, and everything that took me decades to find is available, all included in the U.S. Department of War’s “The Roswell Report: Case Closed.” It tells all about Project Mogul, a top-secret military operation that once had a security rating and a budget as high as that of the Manhattan Project. Sheesh. I could have saved myself a lot of work if I’d just waited a few years and read that report! At least now, though, it will save me the trouble of writing it all out here.

One thing I haven’t been able to find more information about is that supposedly, when the CIA were in Tibet, they discovered a living group of tiny humans, three or four feet tall, with long fingers and long, skinny necks. Add a jumpsuit and a mask with strange eyes, and there you have the “aliens” we are so familiar with. I wish I could have found out more than just the snippet I did, but still it’s worth mentioning.

It does makes me wonder what sort of things will come out if the files and information and photos are released now. Will there be a redaction, saying that aliens are real? Will there be a bunch of stuff released to hoax us? (Because someone wants us to believe the myth, otherwise, why would a character with the clout of Corso be negating the truth?)

Either way, I doubt people will believe the official story. The UFO myth we believe is too powerful. Of course, knowing how we’ve been played for so many decades, it’s always possible the myth covers up a more disturbing idea that they live among us. But frankly, I don’t know and don’t want to guess.

***

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

Posted in history/myth, internet, life. Tags: , , , , , , , . 2 Comments »
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