This month is the 20th anniversary of Polistra’s Mill. In the earlier years I marked each anniversary.
The first entry was dated March 1, 2005. I started writing at Blogspot on March 14, and imported the previous two weeks from a brief attempt at blogging on LiveJournal.
The tenth year seems to be the last point I marked.
Polistra and Happystar haven’t changed. Their location moved from the Homette bungalow court to the Kansas railroad depot seen in the top icon. I stopped using Danbo and Garbanzo, and sometimes use a Martian now. I still have a deep respect for Russia but not for Putin after he joined the “virus” monstrosity.
Redoing the scene with the current location, characters and allegiances:
I moved from Blogspot to WordPress at the start of 2022 after Blogspot deleted a few posts. I still don’t know exactly why those items were “wrong”, but in any case WordPress has never deleted or warned about “misinformation”. So far.
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Footnote: I chose the name in honor of the original townsite of Manhattan. Three towns were started by the settlers from New England. Juniata was to the northeast where Rocky Ford is now. New Boston, later named Manhattan, was near Bluemont Hill, expanding into the old downtown. Polistra was to the southwest, at the junction of the Wildcat and Kansas. I had explored that area often in the 60s and saw what seemed to be the ruins of a mill. The site is officially remembered by Poliska Lane at that location. The difference between the two spellings is lost, but I suspect Polistra was a version of the Greek Palestra meaning marketplace. Many towns were given names promising commercial success.
Also from 2015, here’s more background on what happened to the real Polistra. The item includes three wildly wrong year-end predictions. 1. I had just finished the LAST edition of courseware. Oops. Still doing it, still enjoying and learning. 2. I hoped Trump would be a real populist. Oops. I saw the truth two weeks after he took office. 3. The Ukraine war was about to end with a Russian victory. Oops.
The tone of the item sounds mighty familiar. I needed to hibernate after a long hard year. 2015 and 2024 were especially hard for similar reasons. Some years aren’t especially hard. Of course I didn’t know in 2015 what “real populist” Trump was going to do in 2020. Even so, I survived all of those shitty years and kept working and creating and enjoying. Trouble drives creativity.
Polistra's Mill 