Fool’s Game

March 15, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I spent a lot of time researching the final books of the Wheel of Time saga, trying to figure out what parts Robert Jordan wrote and what parts the substitute wrote. Since there was no one place for the information, I had to comb through hundreds of sites and interviews until I came as close as possible to knowing who wrote what.

It was all suspect, of course, because even the parts that Jordan himself wrote were added to by the substitute. Occasionally, the substitute added just a few words, but those few words sometimes changed the thrust of the scene or at least diluted it. And even when the substitute hadn’t changed parts that were written by Jordan, they would have been subject to change if Jordan been able to write the entire ending himself.

Jordan was both 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). He knew the major points he wanted to hit as well as the end to aim for, but the journey to get there wasn’t plotted out. Which means that even if he had written a significant scene ahead of time to give himself something to aim for, by the time he got to that scene in the writing, things might have changed. In the books he finished, that was often the case, so it would probably have been the same with the finale.

He had supposedly written the final scene while writing the first book, which is why the end seems somewhat sketchy (both in the meaning of not being fully drawn and of not being totally true). The woman who helped the hero at the end was never named, had never appeared previously in the story, and was someone the hero didn’t know because I think at the time he wrote that, Jordan himself didn’t know. And yet, through several of the last books Jordan did write, he was developing a character who was foretold as someone who would help, so I have a hunch by the time he reached the end, this woman would have replaced the unnamed one. And if not, it would have been a grievously misplaced use of Chekhov’s gun. (Chekhov’s gun is a principle where every element in a story should be necessary. As Chekhov pointed out, “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”)

Jordan did seem to delight in turning assumptions on end, and even though he said that not every prophecy needed to have a major resolution, still, to have a character who was fated to help the hero and who was central to other characters’ actions (they thought she would kill him), to end up simply having her place a pile of clothes and money aside for him to use if he happened to survive the last battle is not a big enough payoff for all the drama instigated by that prophecy, especially since the hero could have done that himself.

The point I’m trying to make, at least to myself, is that even the parts Jordan wrote are not canonical.

So, basically, for me, the entirety of the final three books are not worth the paper they’re written on.

I am beginning to see, however, why people revere the substitute so much. Not only do they prefer his style of writing (though why people would slog through millions of words of a saga if they didn’t like Jordan’s style, I don’t know), but otherwise they’d be left with the utter sadness of Jordan never being able to finish his epic. Sad for him, of course, and sad for us. I have a hunch his ending would have been visionary if not spectacular — all the issues readers had with his getting sidetracked had pretty much been resolved, and he was again focused on getting the characters to the last battle. Most readers, I’m sure, are just as glad not to have to contemplate what could have been and are willing to settle for what they were given.

Most. Not all. Not me. I keep thinking I should be able to figure out what the ending would have been because of all the clues Jordan had laced into the saga with foreshadowing and prophecies. The “hero’s journey” concept could be a clue, too, since that was a big part of the origin of the books, but in the end, it’s a fool’s game since there’s no way of knowing what would have come out of Jordan’s subconscious and what he would have discovered as he wrote.

Still, as a person who gets caught up in literary mysteries, I’m sure I’ll continue to do what I can to puzzle out the end, fool’s game or not.

 

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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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Using My Time

March 14, 2026 — Pat Bertram

The more I reread The Wheel of Time books, and the more I can retain those millions of words, the more the irony and the subtle humor become apparent.

In one scene, one of the heroes, who is being kept as something of a sex slave for a queen, entered a room where a bunch of women newly come to the palace were milling around. He had a bad feeling about the situation, and he stood there waiting for “one of the Forsaken [what the disciples of the Dark One were called] to leap out of the flames in the marble fireplace, or the earth to swallow the Palace beneath him.” That isn’t amusing, of course, but what is amusing is that although he didn’t know it (nor could anyone who hadn’t previously read the books in their entirety), one of the women in the room really was one of the Forsaken.

In another case, a woman who was sort of a slave caretaker (Robert Jordan created some appalling civilizations), thought that one slave’s new-found acceptance of her situation meant she was going to try to escape, and so doubled up on her conditioning. What I found amusing is that the slave keeper herself ended up being blackmailed into helping the slave escape.

Because of small things like this, which cannot be seen until a reread or two, I’m finding this read through to be more amusing and more touching than I expected. It helps, I think, that I skip the torture scenes. (Those Forsaken do love their torture. Oddly, most of them undergo just as much pain as they give. I suppose that’s what happens when you dedicate yourself to the Dark One. Since he’s also called “The Father of Lies,” you’d think that would be a clue to his nature, right?)

It also helps that I know so much mythology and history, long ago customs and costumes, and all the other bits that make up Jordan’s world, because the knowledge makes the books richer, though I miss a lot. In a passage I just finished reading, someone mentioned the seals on the Dark One’s prison, saying three were hidden away, three were broken, and no one knew where to find the seventh seal. Seeing “the seventh seal” written out like that was a hitting-palm-on-forehead moment for me. I don’t know why I never associated these seals with Revelations and Armageddon, though I should have. I knew the last battle was Armageddon, though in the books it’s called Tarmon Gai’don. I just never got the connection with the seals. Now I’ll have to go through the books and see if I can identify what seals were broken and how they affected the Wheel of Time world. Like the fisher in The Fisher King legend, the Wheel of Time hero is “one with the land,” which is becoming obvious as the hero’s tempestuous moments are reflected by stormy weather. So too must the broken seals have some sort of correlation with what’s happening in that world. As if there’s not already a headful of correlations to find!

I know there’s a lot of correlations between historical battles and those of Jordan’s, such as the off-screen skirmish called “Altaran Noon,” which was based on the “Sicilian Vespers.” Since I don’t know much about battles, I’m sure I miss a lot of what he intended. Or maybe I’m not missing what he intended — it’s possible he didn’t really intend for anyone to see what he was doing; it’s possible he recreated those battles for his own amusement since he was a self-avowed military historian. (Before becoming a full-time writer, he was a nuclear engineer, and before that, he’d served two tours in Vietnam as a helicopter gunner, which contributed to his interest in military history. It’s also what inspired him to give his male characters their unique perspective about not killing women.)

I seem to be writing a lot about these books lately, but there’s a great deal to process, though sometimes I wonder why I want to. Still, I need to be doing something, and studying these books and this world is a good a use of my time as any. And who knows — if I can come to understand his world, maybe I can understand ours.

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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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Jordan’s Women

March 12, 2026 — Pat Bertram

One common complaint about Robert Jordan and his Wheel of Time saga is that he didn’t know how to write women and that all his women characters are interchangeable. They aren’t interchangeable, and each has their place in the story, but because of the way Jordan inverted traditional gender roles, I can see why people think it’s true. Fans also say the characters don’t act like any woman they know, but the characters aren’t supposed to act like women we know.

In the Wheel of Time world, women have the assumption of power (in our world, boys and men used to have the assumption of power and the rest of us, no matter our age, were “just girls”). It was one of Jordan’s themes — turning gender assumptions on end. Those of us who grew up in his era understand why all his women characters treat men as if they are naive boys and why they never bothered to see things from their point of view — because that’s how boys and men treated us “girls.” As if we had no sense. As if we had no point of view worth seeing. As if we were so empty-headed we needed to leave all thinking to them.

But the world today is different from the one that existed when Jordan began developing his saga 50 years ago. (The first book was published almost forty years ago, but before the first word was written, he spent ten years researching and developing his ideas.) To younger generations, gender assumptions are . . . fluid, to say the least, so they can’t relate to that particular theme of Jordan’s. Still, the saga is a fantasy, a creation of a different world, so it should be read only from the point of view of Jordan’s world and not judged by current beliefs in our world.

Admittedly, I don’t like one of his major women characters, and don’t read her point-of-view chapters on rereads. Fans of this teenage character complain that other readers don’t like her because she’s a woman, that if she was a man, there would be no problem with her. (Which sort of illustrates Jordan’s theme, that she was acting like a man from an earlier generation.) But the thing is, people — men or women — who will walk all over anyone, lie, do anything to garner power, might be compelling characters, but will never be someone I like in real life and definitely not in fiction. This woman did not have a character arc — it’s a straight shot upward.

Whenever she saw someone with power, she did all she could to be like them, to become one of their group, use them, and then move on to the next group who could further her objectives. This is the most divisive character among fans — some women think this character is the real hero of the story (which isn’t surprising, since that’s what the character herself believes), while some (like me) see her as evil. The only reason as far as I can see that she doesn’t go over to the Dark One is that she’d have to swear fealty and be second-in-command at best. If she isn’t evil, she certainly portrays the dark triad of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. She never changed, never had a moment of self-discovery or reckoning. Anything heroic she did was a side effect of her power grab. And she never stopped grabbing.

A second major character isn’t unreadable so much as she is the young heir to a throne, raised to believe in her right to rule and that she was superior to everyone else, always “sticking her nose in the air,” as one character described her. Despite that, of the three main women characters, she tended to be the most considerate (which isn’t saying a whole lot) and also sometimes acted as peacemaker between the other two. But even that isn’t as much of a problem as that a large portion of a couple of books are devoted to her claiming her throne, a story line that is way out of balance to the rest of the books and one, moreover, that does nothing to move any of the many plots forward. I have a hunch that Jordan planned to go somewhere with that whole subplot to make it less of an add on and more intrinsic to the story, but since the substitute author killed off her realm first thing when he took over, it became even more of a waste of words. As it is, her character arc is meandering, sometimes up, sometimes down, but never going anywhere since she doesn’t really change, just goes from being heir to the throne to being queen, simply becoming more of who she always was.

I started out liking the third one of his major women characters. She was a bit older than the other two, a healer and moral caretaker in the small town most of the heroes came from. Because of her youth, she had to bully people to make them see her authority, but still, she did her best to take care of everyone. She joined with the other heroes so she could look out for them but ended up dealing with a quest of her own. She became more and more of a bully as she tried to keep her place in the world, which irritated me until I saw her character arc. One by one, those she once had authority over turned the tables and she ended up subservient to each until there was only one left for her to bully. When she finally realized she had to give in to his authority too, she cried. That was the end of who she’d been. From there, though, she gradually built up her power base, starting with herself, until she became a true hero, the only one of the three women who did. An actual character arc.

(I wonder if Jordan planned that — one was too much, one too little, and one just right.)

There is another female triumvirate in the saga based on the legend of the three wives of King Arthur, who in Jordan’s books also represent the three aspects of the goddess — maid, mother, crone. (The maid is not a child but rather a warrior, a Maiden of the Spear. The mother is the queen mentioned above, who will have the hero’s children. The crone, though almost as young as the other two, represents the “truth teller” aspect of the crone archetype.) This “three wives” subplot is an unsettling part of the story for many readers (me, included), though it does make sense since Jordan is playing with our myths and legends, imagining what the sources might have been. The maid and crone have similar character trajectories to the queen/mother — ups and downs, with minor changes and an acceptance of their place, but mostly just becoming more of what they’d always been with no major arc that I can see.

Readers often point to the women’s annoying characteristics, such as straightening their clothes, messing with their hair, crossing arms, sniffing loudly, as proof that these characters are written badly, but these are tics, something every writer has. I can’t imagine writing four million words and having to constantly come up with different ways to show vexation or nervousness or disdain. The characters also spend a lot of time describing clothes, but the clothes give hints as to where they are and what they are thinking. It does make me wonder about his wife, though. Jordan says he gave every one of his women characters one of his wife’s characteristics, though he’d never tell her which ones.

In writing this, I developed a better sense of who these characters are, so I might decide someday to read every word of the whole series, including the parts that annoy me.

But maybe not. Since I know their arcs, such as they are, I don’t need to know anything beyond that. At least, I don’t think I do.

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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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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 . . .

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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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Family, Friends, and a Reason to Celebrate

March 9, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I had the weird experience yesterday of living in two different time zones depending on what room I was in. In one room, it was afternoon, and in the other, before noon. It didn’t really matter, apparently, since it took me a while to realize that there were two different times in my house. I mean, I knew it was 12:30 in one room but immediately forgot what the time was. Fifteen minutes later, I went into the kitchen and there the time was 11:45. Figuring I’d misread the time in the other room, I went back and checked my phone again. Confused the heck out of me why I’d lost an hour in one room but not the other.

Then, of course, light dawned. Sheesh. Daylight saving time. Unlike my phone and computer, the stove and microwave don’t change the time automatically.

Neither does my body.

I never think the time change will affect me since I get up with the sun, but it does, mostly because bedtime comes an hour earlier (which really means an hour or two later since I’m not tired enough to fall asleep, so I toss and turn longer than if I had simply gone to bed an hour later).

I hope this moment of confusion isn’t indicative of what my old age will be like — a lot of confusion with (hopefully) a quick dawning of understanding.

Of course, if I’d looked at the calendar or continued my perusal of online articles, I would have been reminded, but I’ve been narrowing my focus to what is in my immediate surroundings.

And apparently, yesterday, what was in my immediate surrounding was two different time zones — MST and MDT.

I have been enjoying my narrowed focus. (Even though it’s an online activity, blogging is still a narrowed focus because what I see is the words in my mind being written in black and white.) It helps that the weather is nice so I can go outside to expand my horizons, but I’ve also been bringing my horizons inside. At least, I did on Saturday, which was the seventh anniversary of my buying this house.

The house anniversary is one of the few dates in my life I like to celebrate, and so does my next-door neighbor. (Apparently, I was an answer to her prayer for a good neighbor. Makes me feel special since I’ve never — to my knowledge — been the answer to anyone’s prayers.) To honor the occasion, she gave me these gorgeous roses!

She and a few other friends came to help me celebrate. It was nice that they couldn’t all come at once, so I was able to visit one on one or one on two which is best for me. I find more company than that causes me too much confusion, though unlike the time difference mentioned above, this isn’t age-related confusion (or whatever the problem with the time was) but simply the way I’ve always been.

My sister had asked what I wanted for a gift. Since I don’t need anything, I told her I’d like gifts for my friends. So she made me the most wonderful party favor kit, which was great on so many levels.

I had the fun of receiving the box of goodies, the fun of assembling the kit, and the fun of handing them out.

So, who needs a broader focus in life when one has family, friends, a reason to celebrate, and lovely hostess gifts to hand out!

I was proud of myself for cleaning up immediately afterward, so yesterday morning I woke to a clean house rather than a mess. Not that we left much of a mess, but I had to clear the table and do the dishes as well as finish the leftovers since I don’t like having cake and ice cream on hand. Though to be honest, I never have them on hand because if I do, they are too soon gobbled up, and neither of those treats treat me well.

So that catches us up on my news. I’ve been spending my blog time on topics other than me (though in a way, everything I write is about me or at least what I think), but there’s truly been nothing much going on in my life to write about.

Still, it’s been nice having this narrow focus even if it doesn’t give me a lot of fodder for blogging.

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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, dealing with old age, home, house, life. Tags: , , , , , , . 7 Comments »

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.

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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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Deciding Not to Decide

March 6, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I seldom get past the first chapter of new books anymore. Too many authors eschew the traditional past tense, third-person limited point of view and write in the clunky present tense first person point of view. (Or a mixed bag, which is even worse) Too many try to write in a roundabout style rather than beginning at the beginning and continuing until the end. Then there is a weird undercurrent of . . . nastiness, perhaps, or maybe just uneasiness to most books nowadays. I don’t know if it has to do with the difference in young authors today (and “young” to me includes those who are in their middle years), with the difference in mores, with too much artificial intelligence help, with the difference in the new generation of acquisition editors. Or if it’s just me with my now outdated values. But whatever the reason, I haven’t enjoyed any book written after 2022. And not a lot before then, either.

Because of this, I no longer feel like looking for books at the library. I figure I’d perused those same shelves over 700 times since I’ve been here, and I just couldn’t search them anymore. Too many shelves are full of whole series of books I have no intention of reading —- the entire Patterson oeuvre, all of Stuart Woods’ books, all the popular romance authors, and dozens of others. Too many other shelves are full of books I’ve read or reread.

So I stopped going to the library. I never made the decision not to go, I simply didn’t go, which is weird.

Visiting the library had been a major part of my outside activities ever since I got here to this town. It was such a treat because there hadn’t been a library near where I lived in California, so I went years without reading much. (That doesn’t seem right. Maybe I bought books. I know I bought word puzzles magazines, wrote books, and went through the video tapes Jeff had collected, but it seems odd to think of not be as caught up in reading as I’d always been.)

I’ll finish this current reread of The Wheel of Time, reread the other few books I’ve collected, read the alchemy books inherited from my older brother, maybe read the books I wrote, and then . . . I don’t know. I’ll figure out something to do. I’ll have to — I’ve stopped going online except to blog or play a game for a little while because I simply don’t want to know what is going on anymore. Which leaves me a lot of free time!

It’s funny how different this year is. I used to agonize over any decision, and yet suddenly, here I am — blogging without ever having decided to blog daily, not going to the library without ever having decided to stop, staying away from news without ever having decided to do so. (Staying away from news was my New Year’s resolution, which lasted all of two weeks, and yet now, two months later, I’ve started honoring the resolution again.) Come to think of it, I never decided to do this current reread of The Wheel of Time either. I just did it.

This is a good time to make changes — with spring coming, I’ll be spending more time outside, and with nothing calling me back inside, maybe I’ll enjoy the work this year. (I didn’t last year. It just seemed to be too much trouble.)

Makes me wonder what other things I will start (or stop) doing without ever making a conscious decision. Should be interesting to see what life deals out.

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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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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 »

Buying Colorado

March 3, 2026 — Pat Bertram

After Jeff died, I moved to California to help take care of my father. He didn’t actually need a lot of help, but he did need someone there to watch over him, so I was able to find a life for myself. During the first three years, I mostly walked. And walked. And walked. Then I discovered dancing, and that became a saving grace for me. (Well, maybe not “grace” since it didn’t make me all that graceful, but I still managed to hold my own, even during performances.)

After my father died, I became nomadic — housesitting, traveling, staying in motels. But always, I ended up back in that desert town because I didn’t know where else to go. Besides, I had friends there, and dancing.

Then came the opportunity to buy a house in a small town in Colorado. I was sad to leave my dance classes and my friends, but I was delighted to leave California. Although the high desert was livable, the politics of the state weren’t. Even if I could have afforded to live there, I would have left out of self-preservation.

I was glad to settle back into Colorado. That is, I was glad until I realized that the Colorado I left wasn’t the same one I returned to. The state had always been moderate, and yet somehow the state had become uber-liberal, as bad if not worse than California, with punitive policies and little representation of the rural areas. I live far from Denver, but that sanctuary city with its insane laws neutralizes the outlying areas even further. Not only do they try to take our water (which makes the building of the conduit from Pueblo out to the Kansas border a boondoggle because there won’t be any water for them to share with us) but they are also taking away the ability for counties to create their own zoning laws. Instead, small towns must adhere to the same unaffordable “affordability” zoning laws that are being put into place in the big cities. A state that once had a tax surplus is now in a sinking hole of debt because of liberal ideologies and the fraudulent misuse of tax dollars. Then there is the bought-and-paid-for governor who’s making his own deals with WHO and Zelensky and anyone else that can further his agenda of separating Colorado from the governance of federal agencies. (Though he still wants federal funds.) All this creates at times an uncomfortable dichotomy between the individualistic rural areas and the collectivistic urban areas.

So how did Colorado come to this when I wasn’t looking? Tons of money from east coast liberals, and maybe even west coast, came flooding in. Most of the money for democratic candidates comes from outside the state, while most of the money for conservative candidates comes from inside the state. Which says to me that the state would have preferred to remain conservative, or at least somewhere in the middle where it had always been. (Today, slightly less than a quarter of registered voters are democrat, another scant quarter is Republican, and slightly more than half are registered as independent or unaffiliated.)  Many districts no longer even put forth a republican candidate for any office. They simply can’t match the funds the democrats have at their disposal.

Why the push to buy Colorado? I have no idea, though I guess it was easy in part because so many people from California had moved here. I never understood that, frankly. You move from a cesspool of high taxes and an overreaching government, and you immediately start creating a similar cesspool, but that’s what they did.

Although the politics of Colorado has changed drastically, the feel of the state hasn’t. The air feels like home. The weather, though not always to my liking, is what I was used to growing up.

And I’ve made good friends here, making this small town even homier.

Even though I grew up in Denver, it turns out I’m a small-town girl at heart, though I do wish — silly me — that politically things were different. Still, the machinations of politicians and their backers, and those who espouse extremist policies have always horrified me so I don’t imagine things will be that different. I hope not. And anyway, I’ve managed to survive seven years here, so with any luck, I’ll continue to do okay.

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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, history/myth, home, life. Tags: , , , , . 28 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.

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