Well, here we are again, dear reader, spinning around the sun on this cosmic Tilt-A-Whirl, and what a day for the history books…September 21st.  A date that frankly feels pregnant with a kind of manic, paradoxical energy, a temporal crossroads where the universe decided to drop a couple of absolute atom bombs on the literary landscape before liver-kicking us with the present.

First, let’s hoist one to the granddaddy of tripping the light fantastic, Herbert George Wells.  Born today in 1866, this was the dude who looked at the stiff, corseted Victorian era he was stuck in and said, “You know what this needs?  A goddamn time machine.”  And then, not content to merely invent the future, he gave us invisible maniacs, Martian invaders with heat-rays that could turn a London bobby into a puff of steam, and surgically-mangled beast-men lamenting their lost humanity on some forgotten island.  The sheer, balls-out audacity of it.  Wells was running a high-voltage current through the placid pond of English letters, electrocuting the frogs and making the rest of us see stars.  He built the sandbox that nearly every sci-fi writer since has played in, whether they know it or not.  So raise a glass of whatever high-proof solvent you have on hand to H.G. – the man who saw tomorrow and had the balls to write it down.

And then, on this very same day in 1937, 71 years later, a quiet Oxford professor unleashed a creature of arguably equal cultural gravity, albeit a smaller one.  J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit hit the shelves.  Suddenly, we’re not peering into the future but into a hold in the ground, and in that hole lives a short, comfort-loving fellow with hairy feet.  From this impossibly cozy starting point, we get launched into a world so vast, so detailed, and real that it’s still the benchmark for an entire genre.  Bilbo Baggins.  A small guy who’d rather be worrying about his next meal gets tangled up with dragons and elves and ancient evils.  It’s the ultimate tribute to the idea that the most profound courage isn’t found in the chiseled hero, but in the reluctant little guy who does the right thing anyway, grumbling all the way.  It’s a fairy tale, technically, but it has the weight of myth…a reminder that even the smallest person can change the course of the future.

Which brings us, I guess, to the future we’re actually in.

Because today is also a day of memorials.  Today is the day the public gathers to remember Charlie Kirk.  And the transition from celebrating fictional words to confronting the brutal and cruel realities of our own is a kind of whiplash that I usually try to avoid here, but here we are.  Charlie Kirk was an American author who was assassinated eleven days ago.  Murdered in public, while discussing ideas.  Taken out of this world by a pathetic tranny activist because of the words he wrote, the ideas that he dared string together.  We can celebrate the power of the pen all we want, but we also have to face the fact that some people who aren’t capable of coherent thought can only answer ink with bullets.

There’s a dreadful silence where Charlie’s voice should be.  A future he should have been writing has been violently erased.

This  shameful assassination has changed things in this country.   I’m working on a response to this, but I’ve been holding off finishing…I’m still watching, still be let down and disappointed.  As disgusting as Charlie’s murder was, the reaction to it by the left has been even more disgusting.  More on that soon.  Today is for mourning a colleague who used words as weapons so effectively, his opposition saw they could never beat him with words, so they shot him.  And we are left holding our books, the beautiful, harmless-looking objects, and wondering about the terrible cost of filling them.

N.P.: “Leifr Eiriksson” – Domsgard