Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
Design for an Athenian Villa
(unknown)

This week’s EndDays dispatches arrived while I was partly in alien territory, writing from the lobby of Skamania Lodge as The Muse attended a Washington State Port Commissioners gathering. The Columbia River predawn fog held steady outside while the week’s writing ranged from the physics of Backwards progress to the theology of Religionism, from the terror of public acknowledgment to the discomfiting blindness of PipeDreaming. I stood up in a room full of local leaders and said the thing that needed saying out loud. I felt, for the first time in a long while, unmistakably like a writer. It was just Thursday.

Thank you for following along!

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Weekly Writing Summary

Gravlity
“…the physics of making this country great again seem to reliably result in rendering it worse.”

This EndDays Story employs Aristotelian physics to explain the peculiar sensation that gravity and levity have both stopped working correctly under this administration.

In this EndDays Story, I borrowed Aristotle’s two governing forces — gravity and levity — to describe what EndDays feel like from the inside. Gravity seems to be working overtime, with every initiative sinking beneath the waterline, while levity has gone strangely absent, as demonstrated when the traditional White House Correspondents’ Dinner devolved into armed camps rather than light-hearted banter. This administration navigates solely by whim, which Aristotle never listed among his fundamental elements, though it most closely resembles his fifth element, Aether — a gaseous substance that, in this case, reportedly stinks to high heaven. Those of us accustomed to the old, reliable four elements feel rightfully disoriented when balls roll up inclined planes seemingly unassisted and fire sinks beneath water. The physics of making this country great again seem to reliably render it worse.

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: La Belle au bois dormant-[Sleeping Beauty] (1890)

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ChangingWorlds
“I once feared and felt cowed by their delusions. No more!”

This EndDays Story finds me reclaiming my own authority after too long ceding it to the rampaging cynicism surrounding me!

In this EndDays Story, I realized that our incumbent has already passed the threshold beyond which no former president ever accomplished anything new — that narrow window of roughly 175 days within which any administration can actually permanently change anything. We are well past that horizon for this one, yet I had somehow ceded my own authority to the spectacle. Viktor Orbán’s recent electoral defeat reminded me of what always ultimately happens to authoritarians who pit themselves against democratic-minded citizens. They get run out on a rail. Our incumbent seems to be unwittingly performing no less of a public service, shedding former supporters and losing whatever mandate his tiny electoral victory once secured. I forgot that I always get to choose. I get to decide. I am not a compliant citizen but a rather fierce one. I once feared and felt cowed by their delusions. No more.

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: The Earthly Paradise (Sir Lancelot at the Chapel of the Holy Grail) (1890)

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Religionism
“Why, in all that’s actually holy, would we ever decide to downgrade ourselves into being merely a Christian nation?”

This EndDays Story examines the weaponization of religious zealotry as a reliable sign of EndDays arriving, and asks what on Earth we think we’re doing.

In this EndDays Story, I traced the way EndDays always seem to unleash religious zealotry — charlatans proliferating, scripture pressed into the strangest purposes, a prince of peace reintroduced as a god of war. Our Founding Fathers were not born-again Christians but Big ‘R’ Republicans and bigger ‘D’ Democrats who well understood the catastrophic nature of church-state divorces throughout history. E Pluribus Unum was always more about beating our religious swords into communal plowshares than converting everyone into a single cohering conviction. Religionism amounts to so much idolatry, replete with the statue of The Golden Incumbent in ill-fitting golfing attire. We were originally organized to be the thorn in the side of authoritarian power. Why, in all that’s actually holy, would we ever decide to downgrade ourselves into being merely a Christian nation?

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: The Baleful Head (1890)

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Terrorized
“Such small incremental improvements, even if only in acknowledgments, often produce great differences.”

This EndDays Story finds me finally naming the context my fellow citizens and I have been inhabiting — publicly, in a room full of local leaders — and discovering that naming it rendered it strangely more copeable with.

In this EndDays Story, I finally raised my hand at a meeting of local leaders organized to protect immigrant neighbors and said what needed saying out loud: we are presently occupied by a hostile and capricious power, and if you do not feel paranoid, you are not paying close enough attention. I feel scared. I feel terrorized. I remembered when the Nazis overran Denmark, and every citizen showed up wearing stars when the Nazis demanded that Jewish citizens wear them. I wanted to stand up and get counted, too. Count me as an immigrant. Count me as a Jew, too, you fucking Nazis! Those at my table mouthed “Thank you for saying that.” Making the implicit explicit rarely evaporates any implicit — it just renders it more perceivable and therefore strangely more copeable with. Such small incremental improvements, even if only in acknowledgments, often produce great differences.
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: The Feast of Peleus (between 1872 and 1881)

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Backwards
“…going Backwards inevitably proves impossible and ultimately self-defeating.”

This EndDays Story finds me examining what happens when a corrupted individual is elected into public office and the whole enterprise starts reeling Backwards.

In this EndDays Story, written from the lobby of Skamania Lodge as fog held steady over the Columbia River, I considered what it means to live in a world running Backwards. Generations of actual progress toward a more perfect union were discarded in an initial blizzard of misrepresentations. Decency became an indictable offense. Bigotry was heralded as innovation. The criminal presently in charge of navigation apparently never learned the most fundamental life lesson: no viable future ever lived in any past, however corrupted and compromised any present might appear. I miss nickel candy bars, too, and understand the human longing for the familiar. But fleeing Backwards was never a viable option — it was always the coward’s path. Progress moves in one inexorable direction. Going Backwards inevitably proves impossible and ultimately self-defeating.

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: The Perseus Series: The Finding of Medusa (1882)

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PipeDreaming
“…it will not be because we knew what to do with it.”

This EndDays Story finds me among Port Commissioners at Skamania Lodge, discovering that those charged with planning our economic future appear remarkably sanguine about what seems to me like a perfectly foreseeable threat.

In this EndDays Story, I found myself among The Muse’s fellow Port Commissioners at a Washington State gathering, listening to boosterish presentations about the FIFA tournament and international trade while the news of boycotts, skyrocketing airfares, and quietly canceled hotel reservations seemed to be everywhere except in that room. The conservative commissioner seemed genuinely offended when I tried to pop his bubble about the tournament — he had apparently never imagined that anyone would consider boycotting something so strongly endorsed by Our President. I could almost see the wheels straining to comprehend, the rusty connections preparing their flight response. The awesome power of any Old Status Quo can blind even the most perceptive to what’s looming right before them. I didn’t see him again for the rest of that evening.

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: St Frideswide - Design for Stained Glass Window, Christchurch, Oxford (1859)


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They Have A Form For That

The publication of Cluelessness began a saga separate from the previously seemingly endless preparation and publication story. Preparation and publication took over eight years, and featured lengthy stretches of denial spiced with paralyzing bouts of my usual imposter syndrome. Once published, that history faded into well-deserved meaninglessness. Then, I could become forward-looking and start plotting about how I might get the word out. I suppose I could have started outlining something resembling a marketing campaign long before publishing the book. I easily imagine a marketing professional debunking my misconceptions about what effective marketing entails, discarding the usual options in favor of less obvious ones. But I couldn't seem to imagine that space before finding myself embedded in it with my freshly published book. I seemed to need to be actually in the context for marketing to even come up.

I am learning that there's probably already a form for that. I thought, naively, of course, that I might shop by book around, dropping in to bookstores and libraries. I found that my visit had been anticipated and that they'd already created a form to handle what I'd imagined human interaction might cover. The local library has a 'Local Author Form' that they ask every local author who stops by to contribute a copy of their book for the collection to fill out. This form keeps human interaction to an absolute minimum. Bookstores have similar forms. I understand these defensive measures. Every author carries their personal ardor for their work, regardless of its underlying quality. Some innocuous bureaucratic distraction probably improves these interactions for everyone.

I received a request from my publisher this week. Would I approve the withdrawal and dispersal of twenty-five copies of the e-Book version of Cluelessness, for the purposes of supplying book reviewers with copies? I quickly approved the request, but added a little request of my own. There are e-Book copies of Cluelessness? This query was the first I'd heard about that. I marveled at the discovery and replied that I'd appreciate any information they could provide on how I might get my mits on the link to order some. Three days later, no reply, so I asked my AI assistant, Claude, if it could find where to order these babies. Claude responded:

"The search didn't surface a direct eBook listing for Cluelessness yet. Let me try Amazon directly.

"Failed to fetch: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Cluelessness+Schmaltz&i=digital-text

"Failed to fetch: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Cluelessness+Schmaltz&i=digital-text

"Here's what I can tell you: Outskirts Press distributes eBooks to Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble Nook, Google Play, Kobo, and 450+ other platforms — but only if the author purchased an eBook edition as part of their publishing package. The fact that they asked for your permission to send 25 review copies suggests the eBook exists in their system, but it may not yet be live in retail channels.

My recommendation: press Outskirts directly and ask two specific questions — first, was an eBook edition included in your publishing package, and second, what is the ISBN or ASIN for the eBook edition so you can find it yourself. The eBook ISBN differs from your print ISBN, 978-1-9772-7965-1.

If they confirm it exists and give you the eBook ISBN, I can search for it directly."

You can order Cluelessness from Bookshop.org., Powell’s Books, or from Amazon. It's now more widely available, just as the publisher predicted. I'll let you know when I doscover the e-Book location.
Thank you for following along!——

I employed Claude.ai, a commercial AI-powered text editor, using it to perform repetitive copy/pasting work and to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.” I manually copy-edited each result.


©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz