Trolls...
Are Boring
They think a variation on “No man wants you and you will die alone!” is an insult you haven’t heard before. I have seen American manhood and I am sorry to say, American manhood has destroyed my opinion of it with its behavior these past… 10 years. America will not recover from the damage American manhood has done it in my lifetime. Obviously, I speak of a collective, but if you’re bleating “Not all men” or “You hate men” or “You hate white men,” you are definitely part of that collective. I’m not the greatest fan of American womanhood, but they are a collective improvement.
Men are not lonelier than women, but as an aggregate, they make their unhappiness dangerous to other people. Men are lonely because they have chosen to be reprehensible human beings, and rather than become better humans with whom other men and women alike wish to spend time, they come into spaces where women are seriously thinking and writing because they want us to feed their humiliation kink. They are energy vampires.
It shouldn’t be this way and it didn’t have to be this way, but they chose this for themselves and everyone around them, and then they wonder why they are lonely.
All that said, for the past three weeks, I have had whatever respiratory virus is going around but yesterday I went out for an easy 25 mile ride, and held the pace well. Except for the mid-way point when I ran out of gas, coughed up a lung, and then found my second wind. Cross-training on a rowing machine absolutely paid off for me, and given the crap in my lungs and sinuses, I am in pretty decent condition.
What also paid off was my relentless focus on cadence, or how many times a minute you turn your cranks: the range I heard when I was younger was 60-90 rpm; the thinking is now, 80 to 110. Easier on the knees, for sure. Traditionally, I have tended to drop down a gear, generating more torque, when I wanted to go faster. Now, I hold my gear and bump up cadence to about 85 rpm, then maybe drop a gear and hold at about 80.
For a bonus, the last 5 miles or so were in the rain. It was a lot less unpleasant than it could have been but still good training, because in two months, I will be riding every day, no matter what. I have also decided I hate the saddle on my gravel bike, which I will be riding across country, which is the same saddle I love on my road bike. Fortunately, I have another saddle that should work. We will see tomorrow.
Tonight? I am making an early evening of it. I am going to pour a glass of Bollinger, left over from my late husband’s funeral a year-and-a-half ago, who saw me through the early writing of Now You Know: Conversations with Erwin Rommel. You know, that guy in the tank. German theater commander, North Africa. One of the most famous, and enigmatic, figures of World War II, his involvement with the military opposition—which seems to have been driven most of all by humanitarian concerns—willfully, deliberately misunderstood.
I knew I was gonna write about the guy when I was 15: there were too many gaps in the standard biographies, so I went digging into those gaps. And what I found were the not-famous murder orders he disobeyed, adding to several hundred thousand people not murdered. Along with independent but supporting operations coordinated with the Berlin conspirators.
Back in January 2022, Margaret Atwood challenged me to take another look at the foundation of Now You Know. I wrote the first draft in 360 days, and then it took me another three years to figure out how to integrate the past into the present we are all enduring, how to not flog the dead horse but to lament all who have already been lost, and all who will be.
I have done that, and am waiting my editor (in publishing as it is now, you have to hire your editor before you can have an agent who will find you a publisher) to tell me she is ready for it because deadlines aren’t hard and fast.
Until then, I will nibble at it, but mostly read it for pleasure. Which I begin tonight.
It hasn’t been easy.
Halfway through the first draft, I figured out how Erwin Rommel got Paul Hausser, the "father” of the Waffen-SS, a man well-practiced in atrocity, to treat partisans as prisoners of war, meaning with rights under the Conventions. We (I am remarried) had a very distinguished retired soldier to dinner. He and I were drinking beer and talking about how much my research methods mirrored Hilary Mantel’s. He said, you should have fun with this. Because my eyes were kinda rolling around in my head from the brain work.
I said, “I share headspace and timing with Erwin Rommel’s ghost. Does that sound like fun to you?”
His eyes got wide and he shook his head. “Nooo…”
No, it hasn’t been fun at all. But it has been satisfying and I think it has been worthwhile. This is, after all, a case study of a senior officer fulfilling his responsibility to his country and the world.