New Post. New Year....

Since November's flurry of posts, I've become lax indeedy with postings. ;-) As with many of us, the holidays did steer me away from the daily grind, and although I did have flickering thoughts, flashes of what to post, I was too pre-occupied with the holiday grind to commit myself. I might actually return to some of those thoughts, but after the fact Christmas or New Year postings already have a post date on them. The Christmas holiday is so far away from everyday life, with all of the decoration, conjuring of special holiday emotion, that it seems a violation to "go back" to it after the fact. We'll see. I won't make any promises to publish what I started the past two weeks, because who knows when I'll ever get around to it.

I stumbled on this Orson Scott Card website, and just couldn't resist this passage, since it's Rotterdam fictionalized in the future. It's bizarre to stumble across it, since, if you've followed my blog, you'll know how I feel about living here. What's even more ironic is that it's written by Card, an American, and a practicing member of the religion I left, Mormonism. I put too much stock in association, I'm sure. I just couldn't resist sharing this passage:

Rotterdam was once a bright city in a nation of light.

Then the Netherlands, in its last gracious gesture, gave itself to the International Alliance, believing that other nations would follow suit, that nationhood would fade away and the unity forced on humankind by the brutal invasion by aliens would become universal and permanent. Instead, as the only territory completely under the control of the International Congress, this small nation became the stepchild of politics. Perpetually underfunded and yet forced by law to allow any refugee from any nation in the world to enter and take up residence among the "citizens of the world," the Netherlands had become the most overcrowded, poverty-stricken nation in the world. Gone were the fields of tulips, gone the quiet graciousness of life. Not one person in a hundred spoke Dutch; not one person in ten had a decent job. The understaffed police did their best to keep order. But there was no order to be kept. And of all the cities of the Netherlands -- now the IZ, the International Zone -- Rotterdam was the largest, the most overcrowded, the least orderly. It was the city where hope became desperation.

It was a city of lost children.

They flooded the streets, swarming around people who looked like money, begging or picking pockets right in front of the police. They descended like locusts on the markets, until the merchants hired thugs to beat them away with sticks. The corpses of starved children, of stabbed or beaten children, of children dead of cold, were found daily -- only the body count was listed in the netrags. There were no names to write about. These children had no identity. They had burst into the world like pus from a boil, and if they once had parents who wanted to love or know them, it made no difference now. Somewhere in the world children went to school. Somewhere children played in gardens. But in Rotterdam children burrowed into the dumpsters to eat and then to sleep. In Rotterdam, the strong and cruel and heartless children made sure that the weaker ones never got near the soup kitchens and hostel.

Rotterdam was the darkest city in a nation of shadows.

If you want to check out the website, it's: http://www.hatrack.com/. It's an interesting site for writers, with pointers, etc., for the budding writer.