My name is Anne, and I'm addicted to reading about United States presidential election politics.

There is being a citizen and keeping up. There is having a hobby and entertaining oneself. The amount of time I spend or waste reading about Presidential elections in run-up to same is beyond that.

Long before any actual voter votes, many assumptions are made. The assumptions are used to build many houses of cards which iftencollapse when the voters enter the scene. I read about those houses of cards too much. Even when voting happens, I read about it much more than fits any need or any sane allocation of focus.

Can I cut back? Do I need to go cold turkey, as in twelve stepping?

With the vast time saved by either cutting back or cutting out, I could read "The Story of the Stone," a multi-volume novel I love the beginning of.

The sky needs repair, so a goddess is repairing the sky.

A goddess is repairing the sky and already I'm happy.

She has a big pile of thousands of shimmering, silvery, huge stones cut in rectangles solids to do the repairs with.

When she is done repairing the sky, there is one stone left.

Sad, left out feeling stone.

The stone becomes a human and the novel thousands of pages long is the story of that human.

The novel is also known in English as "The Dream of the Red Chamber." It includes sex, one of the compesations for not being part of the sky.

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Since I started aiming to read much less about presidential politics, three crises in the campaigns have happened. People said things that others thought were bad--one candidate, one big donor and one commentator.

I did not read any complete articles about these crises. Huge progress. I got what was said, had my own reaction to it, and didn't read the reactions of pros, and the reactions to the reactions on into the gloom.

I read one long biographical article about a candidate I kind of like but who I didn't know much a bout. That's good. If he is still a candidate when the primary I vote in rolls around, I know some background to think about.

I read one complete article about how one candidate is not at this point having annoucned public evnets, but is only meetings with invitation only crowds of very friendly people.

I should not have read that article. The headline told the story, and it will work out how it works out. Probably can't run a whole campaing like that.


But wouldn't it be fun to try? Only very friendly crowds. People who know I used to be huge and shining, I used to be much harder to hurt than I mere human. People who can just sense I was supposed to be part of the sky.

The Story of the Stone is, I think, on the whole, a novel about usual novel stuff--human relations and their ramifications. Which is why I love that it starts in this whole other way.

"There is so much more to me than this. I really much bigger than these oh-so-human situations I'm moving through.


**
Now I've got more reading time, and the library still has the novel. I was going to say that the library still has the book, but the novel physically runs to several book. I recently saw an abridged addition, fat and thick and called the other name, "The Dream of the Red Chamber."

It did not start with the goddess repairing the sky, and that is so wrong. It went straight to the human muddle, but we know we were really intended for something above the human muddle. Down here in it, we can only do our best.