"I love this!"

"That was so well stated."

"I knew it wasn't how they said."

Except it was not true. Yep, Lady Francis was not being truthful when stating, "It was not the Last Supper. It was a depiction of an ancient Greek Bacchanal… because, you know, the Olympics are ancient and Greek. Surprise!"

One eminent art professor stated that the internal structure and the color choice of the depiction "is so typical of The Last Supper’ iconography that to read it in any other way might be a little foolhardy." Even the people who designed it and were responsible for explaining and promoting the display did not come up with this alternative interpretation and instead said it wasn’t meant as mockery, but as a message of inclusion (NY Times). A few minutes before I started writing this they admitted it was, in fact, inspired by Da Vinci's masterpiece and apologized to those who they had offended. 

Yet, Lady Francis continued the onslaught against truth by smugly equating Marie Antoinette's tragic demise with modern political theater,
"The headless woman was Marie Antoinette. She ruled over France and was found guilty of treason, conspiracy, and stealing from the country.
Sound familiar?"

To just blow off Marie Antoinette as someone who simply deserved to die downplays the massively insane, psychopathic blood lust released on France by the Reign of Terror. My question is why would someone choose to align themself with truly evil and psychotic people like Robespierre and Marat against a woman who was probably the most iconic female victim of a patriarchal world view ever? She never knew anything different than court life, was forced to marry the soon to be Louis XVI in her teens, her main job being to produce male children, and the scandalous stories about her licentious ways were produced, bought, and paid for by her power hungry brother-in-law in order to usurp the throne. Then she was decapitated for the amusement of the most jaded MMA crowd in human history.
 
Maybe you can quibble about the systematic murder of tens of thousands of blue bloods who were deemed guilty of being born with wealth whether they were evil or not, but how do you explain the rape and murder of the nuns and the killing of hundreds of lay priests (and not those ermine wearing corrupt, fat fucks) who died because they would not swear allegiance to the state and abjure their faith in God.

Now getting back to the Olympic presentation organizers. They say their purpose was not to mock. Well, that statement rings hollow too. If they were being completely honest, they would just admit they knew what they were doing was going to be divisive. They knew there would be controversy. They knew it was a political statement, and their aim was more than likely to poke their thumbs into the eyes of those who don't believe the way they do. The question becomes, then why try to obscure the message with such a blatantly obvious lie?

And why did so many of your followers glom on to it as a way to explain away their own inner confusion knowing that something was out of the ordinary, but still unable to bring themself to admit that this was an uncalled for provocation.  Don't you believe in your own message? If so, why the lie? To fool yourself into believing you can follow a lie and still consider yourself a good person? To avoid the consequences?
 
Ideology of any nature does not grant one the right to believe in or to purposely spread lies, and I know that both sides do it. Or is it really one group tricking both sides against the middle? The true character of a human being is what he or she allows themself to justify in order to get by. I understand the tremendous demand that that last statement places upon a person and I admit that I fail at this justifying things a whole lot more than I wish. At least, some of us are still trying. This was an act of revenge and hatred, justify it at your own peril. 

I was recently reading about Alexander Solzhenitsyn's sojourn through the gulags after he was unjustly imprisoned for criticizing Stalin in a letter to a friend. And I read about his transformation from an atheistic Marxist-Leninist into a committed believer. I found out that he attributed the problems of our Modern world to the Enlightenment and its relentless attack against anything deemed spiritual. For all their so-called wisdom and scientific expertise those great men committed one truly unforgivable sin. They locked away the concept of infinity, buried it in the basement, and whispered we'll get back to it one of these days.

The dominant reality of our existence on this planet is that we live in an infinite universe and need to grapple daily with what that means.Without the concept, we can only pretend that secularism is the smartest choice and that all life on earth is about is eating, defecating, and fornicating.

I'm betting Lady Francis was AI and was commanded to write the response with an utmost degree of smugness in order to create the maximum amount of anger on both sides.  The people who operate the internet know us all so well, and instead of using its powers to unite or uplift us, mostly use it to provoke and divide. Remember that one of Christ's main admonitions was the need to be as wise as serpents, but doing no harm with that wisdom. I'm not saying that those who wrote the Bible knew about the coming of the internet, but I'm betting they knew a lot about the nature of evil.

The truth of our situation places us into an uncomfortable position and makes tough demands upon us all. The irony of ironies, is that's what DiVinci's painting is really about.

       Karl Marx, the O.G. commie, was a lot more evil than most people give him credit for being. For example, a lot people don't know that he was suspected by many of being an outright Satanist. His favorite quote was from Goethe's Mephistopheles, “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” His friends said that he would go around chanting this phrase. His father wrote letters to his son accusing him of being possessed by a demon. It is a conservative estimate that over 100,000,000 people have been murdered trying to force people to believe in his theories. One of his biographers stated that, "Anybody that thinks that this [communism] is a philosophy that is just about helping one another or sharing the wealth or redistributing wealth, they do not understand Marx and Marxism.” Another, participating in a discussion on the issue, referred to Marx as a 'militantly, aggressive, atheist', basically meaning that it wasn't enough for him to not believe, he didn't want anyone else to believe.

     You are probably thinking now, "Wait a freaking minute here! I thought you were going to talk about sportscasters. What's going on here?"  Well, I'l get around to that, but first I think its fair to show how I got on to this tact in the first place, and it all started while I was listening to two guys discuss Marx's religious beliefs, or lack thereof. Both seem to agree that it would be safe to say that Marx was of a Satanic state of mind. One stated that the records reveal that when he was young, Marx had written several poems in homage Satan. 

        After listening to that, I listened to another podcast explaining why US Soccer should fire coach Gregg Berhalter after the US men's team's recent failure in the Copa de America. Leave it to me to be able to connect the two stories.

         Our men's team had every advantage that you could possibly think of; most of our country's teams have it a hell of a lot easier than most of the other teams in the world. Yet it didn't do them a damn bit of good and they were sent home before the knock-out round.

       That made me think of a book named The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle. The book pointed out that many of the greatest success  stories in  sport's history began in places that provided less than optimum circumstances, Dominican baseball, Brazilian soccer, Ethiopian runners, etc. It also made the point that in most of these cases it was the overcoming of obstacles, figuring out how to self-correct mistakes and the hunger for success that provided the 'initial spark' or drove the transformations involved. It also states that there is a substance called myelin that coats our nerve fibers whenever we figure things out on our own, so we actually perform more efficiently by learning from our mistakes. Another book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by imminent psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihali said that his study revealed that the real secret of great athletes gaining the state of optimum performance was twofold: doing the right thing for the right reason.

         We usually don't do those two things in America now days. First of all, we always seem to try to make things easier on the people involved. I seriously doubt that any of the members of the US soccer team have ever played soccer with a ball made out of duct tape or on an uneven dirt playing field full of gopher holes. Our athletes have some of the best training facilities available with the best trainers and highly paid coaches doing their thinking for them.

          And as far as doing the right thing for the right reasons, well, we are getting away from that too. Most of our younger athletes think about their NIL contracts and their branding more than doing the right thing. We have systematically taught our kids to worship celebrities more than true heroes. And we have allowed the greedy pimps and the whoremongers to basically eradicate the concept of amateurism. Usually it's the suits with slicked back hair and cash stuffed in their pockets and greedy old college administrators who are both making the decisions and doing most of the 'splaining to the rest of us. 

          How do Karl Marx, the Devil, and sportscasters figure into this scenario? Well, the people who are behind the scenes pushing the militant atheistic form of Satanism on us gullible types are a whole lot smarter than we give them credit for being. They have long understood that any form of social interaction can be corrupted to serve the cause, music, film, politics, sports, you name it. And they are especially gleeful with the advantages that electronic media confers.
     
       Loving and watching sports is not the problem. Paying college athletes millions of dollars for the use of their image is. Paying someone nearly a billion dollars to hit a baseball is. Spending more of our time arguing about who the Cowboys should draft in the first around than we do trying to figure out how to live a life worth living is. And you might not understand it and not want to hear about it, but to blindly follow the seasons watching more sports than legitimate news or seeking answers to the nagging spiritual questions makes your life more aligned with the militantly aggressive atheism of Marx than with anything truly meaningful.

        We have a quarterback in the NFL who is on track to make $60 million a year for throwing a football and a general population who seems to be okay with that. We have pop singers who make hundreds of millions of dollars being worshipped by massive fan bases who clearly don't have any idea of who or what they should be worshipping in place of their idols. In almost every field of human endeavor we have people who are trying to squeeze out every last nickel that they can get out of the public no matter what the cost is to the collective human experience. We no longer have real heroes. 

         I just watched a sportscaster go on a ten minute rant gesturing and spitting as if he was discussing the existential meaning of the universe, except that he wasn't. He was talking about why Caitlin Clark should be placed on the WNBA All-Star Team. Before that I saw another one get worked up as he explained to his apostate partner why LeBron James was well inside his rights as a father for tipping the scales in favor of his son in the NBA draft.

       It just made me think of the billions upon billions of dollars and the massive amounts of time and consciousness we spend everyday distracting ourself from reality. It's perfectly obvious that we spend way more time and money talking about these events than we should, but hardly ever seem to grapple with the problem what it really means to live for a short while midst of an infinite universe. Is it any wonder that there are so people without hope on nearly every corner of America holding up cardboard signs or that an veritble ocean of fentanyl floods across our boarder daily?



​

   The first thing this morning I saw a video of an older man dancing to A Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress. It was the funniest thing I've seen in quite a while. It made me laugh out loud, after a while I got up and started dancing too.  It was the first time I just let myself go in a long, long time. I've been looking for an exercise routine for a while. I've been putting on some weight, and even worse, since I'm not coaching at this time, I'm becoming quite sedentary too.'

     My mom died two years ago and I can't seem to get past it. I was the one who found her; I lowered her arm because it was out there like she was reaching for something. I wiped the spittle off the corner of her mouth, and I closed her eyes. A few years before that I had to reach down and take my father's pulse. He had died coming out of the shower not ten feet away from where my mom left this world. Six months after he passed, I stood in the backyard of my ex-wife's house with my daughters and watched as the people wheeled their mother out of her house in black body bag.

     It's not like you ever get over the grieving. You just keep trying to push it out of your focus, so that you can go about your day without breaking down. When you really start to get older though those feelings just start piling up and collecting on the sadness side of the scale and it gets harder and harder to balance things out, so that you can move yourself out from under the dark clouds and feel somewhat normal, if by normal you mean, not so sad. I love seeing things that make me laugh. I love to watch videos of my granddaughter as she learns about life and as she makes my daughters laugh.

     I was thinking this morning that maybe a little dancing would  make for a great exercise regimen.  I should've mentioned that I  was only wearing a pair of Nike basketball shorts. It was sight I know that would make a lot of people cringe, and I know it would make some people feel a lot worse than that. But I also know, that it would make most of the people who know me, and those who love me, fall down on the ground and laugh until they couldn't breathe, that would be my target audience.

      I'm thinking I might start dancing instead of doing push-ups. So, if you drive by my house and see me or my silhouette gyrating or hear the  music of The Rolling Stones coming out of my front window, You have my permission to cringe, roll your eyes, or tell yourself I've gone crazy. Be careful though if you start laughing, I don't want anyone to suffocate or get into a wreck on my account.

       The way I figure, if you can't let yourself go when that music starts playing, you're pretty near dead already. If you can't get up and move and shake when Mick Jagger starts singing, "If you start me up, if you start me up, I'll never stop," you probably need yourself a new battery, one of them Tesla ones that can make a whole car climb a mountain.

 

       One of our neighbors back then had been a snake-handling preacher in Alabama before moving out west. Obie Dunworth was still kind of a preacher I guess, but he had toned it down quite a bit. He told my dad that that the snake fondling racket didn't play out too well in California. Obie had the same type of build as the guy who played Daniel Boone's side kick in the old TV show starring Fess Parker, skinny legs but kind of bulging in the belly area. The way he belted his pants way up high right across his belly button made the belt look like the equator, dividing the bulge into two equal parts like it did. One day, I was outside bouncing a tennis  ball off the back wall of the house, and he called me over to the back fence where he had two small wooden sheds both about 10 feet by 10 feet, one red and one blue, in the southeast corner of his yard about twelve feet apart forming an area where he couldn't be seen from the road. My dad parked his big, white Chevy 3/4-ton truck back in the north east corner of our yard, so standing next to the fence made me kind of hard to see too.

         "Mornin there, Danny, come on over here, son; I got something I want to show you. I sent my grand-son Donnie to go fetch it out my truck."

       "Morning, Mr. Dunworth. Ya know I been meaning to ask you a question about them snakes you used to handle back there in Alabama. How come they didn't bite you when you picked them up?"

        He looked at me like the last thing he wanted to do was talk about them snakes; I could tell he was a little nervous about something, but he decided to humor me.

        "That was the whole point of it, sonny boy. You reach down in that there box and pick one or two of them snakes up, and if they didn't sink them fangs in ya, it meant you were being protected by the Holy Spirit."

           "That's what was puzzling me. Let's say, you didn't reach down in that box, well, the snake couldn't have bit you either, doesn't that mean you was being protected before you reached down in there."

         His face squeezed up together and his eyes got real narrow like he was mad at me for something. Fortunately for me, his grandson Donnie, who all the kids called Donnie Dumbass because he was more than just ordinary dumb, came around the corner of the garage struggling to carry a big card box full of something.

      I kept looking at him waiting for my answer, so Mr. Dunworth finally said, 'Yes, I guess it does, but it's the temptin of the devil that's impotent in the sitchiation; you givin Ol Luke a chance to hurt ya, and God said no, you can't hurt none of my chiren." I guess the answer satisfied him cause he quit talking and went and fetched that box off a Donnie, brought it over to the fence and held it up high enough for me to look inside and see the contents. He then told Donnie to go tell his grandma to cook breakfast for him. Donnie didn't seem happy about it but scurried away anyway because he knew his grandpa would backhand his ass if he didn't.

            "That there's what they call a whole case of Ripple wine, boy. It's good stuff. twenty-four unopened bottles of it. I heard tell that you kids love this stuff, and I'm willing to part with for only a dolla on the bottle."

            I looked over the fence and sure enough there 24 green bottles staring back at me. He was right too, us young really did like that stuff because it was cheap, and you could pass it around and drink it right out the bottle. I fished around in my pockets to see what I had on me, "I only got $12, Mr. Dunworth, cash money. That way I won't have to go see if I could get a loan from my daddy."
         
         There's was no way my dad was going to give me $12 to buy wine over the back fence, and Mr. Dunworth knew it, but he also knew that he didn't want my dad, who was a deacon in the Holier Than Thou Children of the Savior Baptist Church, to know anything about the transaction that was going on. I guess that was because it was like they was in some kind of competition or something. (My dad's church really didn't have that name either. My friend Richard put that adjective on the front because every-time we asked a grown-up a theological question, the answer came back at us with lecture about how morally superior we Southern Baptists were compared to other Christian sects.)  

       Like I said, Mr. Dunworth had given up his snake handling ways by then and joined the plainly named but still stylistically outrageous 6th Street Baptist Church. They not only talked in tongues there but put it out on the loudspeaker so the whole neighborhood could hear the chatter which was being backed up by two guitars, a drum set, a trumpet and a saxophone. It sounded kind of like if John Coltrane and Miles Davis were improvising a call to prayer using a passel of starving cats for the chorus.

         Obie wasn't real happy bout my counter offer, but he thought about it for a minute before blurting, "Give me that $12, boy. I reckon it didn't cost me nuthin in the first place, and $12 is $12." I handed him a wad of crumpled bills, and he handed me the box over the top of fence. It was pretty unwieldy at first, and I almost dropped the box before I got a handle on how to deal with the load. As I toted it to where my car was and popped the trunk open, I was softly singing the song Ripple by the Grateful Dead,
 "Reach out your hand if your cup be empty
  If your cup is full may it be again
  Let it be known there is a fountain
  That was not made by the hands of men."
I made sure my mom wasn't looking out the window, put the box in my trunk and slammed it shut.

         I went back behind the house to toss the tennis ball some more. I know that some the neighborhood adult's used to look at me like I was crazy because I was still tossing that tennis ball and pretending I was playing baseball, but it was my stress relief. From the time I was small, I'd be out there pretending to be a San Francisco Giant. Sometimes I would be Juan Marechal with that high leg kick, sometimes I'd be Gaylord Perry throwing knuckleballs, and sometimes I'd be my hero Willie Mays making a throw from center field. It was pure escapism, and it always helped me to forget my troubles for a while.

        I was in the middle of my wind-up when I heard someone singing over the fence in a wobbly voice that kind of sounded like whoever it was had been crying.

       "Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves, we shall come rejoicing bringing in the sheaves."

         I went to investigate, looked over the fence and there was Donnie Dumbass, Obie's grandson, pants to his ankles, squatting and taking a crap behind his grandpa's garage. I tried to avert my eyes real quickly and get out of there, but it was too late."

        "Hey, Danny! I want to ask you somethin."

        I only looked enough to see the top of his head, "What you want to ask me, Donnie?"

       "How bout selling me them bottles back?"

       I laughed, "What are you, dude, ten? Twelve?"

       "I'm twelve, but that don't mean nothing. I can handle myself."

       "It's a big no, Donnie. I ain't selling no wine to no kid!"

       "Come on, Danny. I thought you was a cool cat."

       "I am. But I'm too cool to get caught selling alcohol to a minor."

       Suddenly, his head appeared above the fence. He walked toward the fence buttoning up his pants. His eyes were red liked he had been crying about something. I figured his grandpa had hit him for something.  Donnie always looked like a shabbier, hillbilly version of that dude on the Mad magazine covers. He had big grin which revealed a mouth full of yellow teeth that had clearly never been introduced to a toothbrush.

       "We got ourselves a deal, Danny?" He stuck his hand over the fence.

         "Get yo damn hand out my face, boy! Did you even wipe your ass?"

           "I sure did! Look, I used that old sock over there."

           I swear to God, I tried my best not to look, but before I could stop myself, I stole a glance over the fence, and sure enough, there was one of those white athletic tube socks with the two red rings on top sitting in the middle of a huge pile of Donny Dumbass shit.

         Later that night, my friend Golly-Gee had a party at his parent's house. The parents were gone to Pismo for the week-end and he had invited a few people over. I took the case of wine bottles and, sure enough it made me into the bonafide hero of the evening. Golly and I went outside by the fire-pit to smoke a joint, and it was there I told him about the incident with Donnie.

         "Damn it all-to-hell, Danny Wilson, I could've went my whole life without that damn image in my head! Now, I'll never be able to get it out of there. Why in God's holy name did you tell me that?"

           "Sorry, man. It was just much too big a thing for me to keep it to myself."

           "Uhhgh! Sumbitch!"

          "Don't forget, you told me you caught your cousin Rascal masturbating in your daddy's tool shed.

            I knew Golly pretty well, and I knew he was going to make the point that it wasn't a fair trade, but right before he started, he stopped cold, threw up his hands, and blurted, "All right. we're even. But understand, this wipes the slate clean, and don't ever tell me nuthin like this ever again."

           I was going to say okay, but there was something else I had to get off my chest. "Golly, I don't know how to say this, but there's more to the story." I paused to get my thoughts in order before I told him, "I told ya, I didn't look for more than a second, but in that briefest of moments when I peeked over that fence, it sure looked like Donnie had a golden halo around his head."

           Golly, a tall, thin with long, brown hair, looked at me with his face all screwed up like he had just bit into a lemon. The look told me that he suspected that I was smoking some of that stronger stuff like our buddy Rambo had broke out when he got back from his trip to Arkansas the previous summer.

         "Golly, I swear on your Granny's mustache I ain't lying. It was there. A circular golden glow, and there's more to the story. When I saw that one, dingy white sox sitting on that top of that ugly little pile of excrement, I had myself a moment."

              "A moment?"

              "Yeah, an epiphany, a sudden flash of intuition."

           "I know what an epiphany is, Danny. Remember I had one myself when I finally got Donna Knowles to show me her breasts. It was a feeling so strong I sank down to my knees and started singing Hallelujah." 

            "That ain't nothing near what I'm talking bout. That's a whole different thing, remember when Donna walked into church that day and Preacher Preacher started stuttering?" 

          "Oh my God, do I! My Grandma thought he was talking in tongues and jumped out in the aisle and started dancing. I thought I was gonna pee my pants. It was the best time I ever had in church."

             We laughed until our ribs started hurting. I regained my composure and went on telling the rest of the story. "I swear, Golly, I suddenly understood the relationship of the event of Donny sitting there squatting to the totality of our relationship to the infinite universe. Not only that, I suddenly knew that no matter whatever had happened in all of previous history of the entire human race, me looking over that fence and seeing Donnie squatting there was destined to have happened."

              "Let me get this straight. You saying that if somehow, one of Donnie's direct paternal ancestors had got eaten by a bear during his family's passage over the Cumberland Gap, you would've still looked over that fence and saw him squatting there."

          I nodded without saying a word and handed him the joint. He took a big hit, coughed a few times, and handed it back."

         He kept on, "You saying that if Donnie's great, great, great grandma had fell off a cliff into the freezing water of a lake in Alaska where none of Donnie's family has ever been, and you had somehow managed to get yourself unto a airplane with engine problems and had to parachute out over the Andes Mountains, that you would have somehow ended up being in your back yard into time to see Donnie squatting out behind that garage."

             "Yep. Exactly. Our history would have rewritten itself"

            Golly looked me strangely for minute, then he uttered the phrase that had given him his nickname, "Well golly gee, Danny. You mean like a book where the words on the page would change.” I nodded, he thought some more than went on, “I guess I could see it, but let's keep it just between you and me. I don't think most of the people round here would understand in the least, ya know what I mean?

         "Well, I was thinking bout telling Preacher Preacher."

        "That's what I mean, especially don't say nuthin to Preacher Preacher. He'll bring it up in church. That fool been lookin for somethin to latch onto to restore his general reputation ever since that stutterin incident."

         "Maybe it needs to be brought up though, I mean seeing that is all wrapped up in the bigger picture of things and all."

          Golly just shook his head, "No. You just going to have to trust me on this one, Danny."

          And so I did.  I wrapped that memory up in a large plastic trash  bag, and poked a few holes in so that it could breathe, placed it in a Styrofoam cooler, put an abridged copy of Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough on top of it and hid it in the furthest corner of the deepest basement level of my subconscious. (It had a lot company down there. There was coffee can with the memory of when I peed my pants in my first grade classroom, a shoe box containing the memory of me joining in with a bunch of boys and teasing Barbara Lee till she cried, and a blue, locked, tin-metal box with the memory of when I broke down and cried as Julie Prime was breaking up with me.)

       I didn't ever think about the incident until one dark, stormy Halloween night when I was attending Columbia University working on my Masters in Literature. I was home alone in my apartment reading a book about the French Revolution and was perusing this passage about the revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat. Marat was a vicious rascal, and as radical as they come, someone who kept pushing the violence of the revolution. The author described him as having green tinged, scabrous skin (Marat suffered from a skin condition) and having a croaking, frog-like voice. It was said Marat would squat down on the banks of the Paris sewers while hiding from the authorities. He would later be assassinated by a beautiful young lady name Charlotte Corday and his death immortalized in the famous painting by the artist Jacques-Louis David.

            The image of a toad-like Marat squatting down by the sewer opened the door to the basement room where my deepest memories were stored and the squatting Donnie Dunworth suddenly made an unbidden appearance in my room. I tried to nip things in the bud by closing the book and picking up another one and reading something else, but by some strange synchronous power, I opened up the page to an illustration of the Aztec earth goddess Tlaltcuhtli who was often depicted as having a squatting, toad-like body, crocodile skin, and a mouth full of razor sharp teeth.

              It just so happened, at that time, I was also working on a graphic arts project where I was supposed to create a graphic image that could be commercialized. I suddenly had another epiphany. An image of a golden frog wearing a gold crown encrusted with rubies and emeralds surrounded by a halo appeared in my head. The motto of Alfred E. Neuman, "What me worry?" was written on a banner below the image. I immediately went over to where my computer was sitting on the kitchen table and created a mock-up of the image after changing the words from the Mad Magazine motto to "No Worries".

           To make a long story short, the next morning, I printed up 100 blue t-shirts with the image and took them to a local flea mart. I sold out that first batch in under three hours. Thus, the idea for Gold Frog Industries was born. I copyrighted the image and printed it on everything you could print an image on, often changing the slogan to different sayings. I was smart and sold out right before the idea reached a point of over-saturation and walked away with a cool five million dollars. I also hired a bunch of college students to go out to all the flea marts in the area and buy up all the shirts that people sold knowing that sometime in the not-to-distance future there would be a market for the retro t-shirts.

              Ten years later, I went back to Concord for my mother's funeral. Me and Golly got together and went to buy some beer at the local Seven-Eleven. By some strange circumstance in the universal ordering of events, as we pulled into the parking lot, we saw Donnie Dunworth squatting by the rear of a old, rusty blue Honda changing a tire. The passenger windows were down and a couple dirty looking little boys were hanging out watching their daddy work on changing the tire.

             It took Donny a while to recognize me, but when he did, he quickly stood up and held out his hand while I approached. When he looked at his hand and saw how dirty it was, he pulled out a red rag from his back pocket and wiped it and held it out again. "Danny Wilson! Damn, man! I ain't seen you since you moved out of your mama's house to go to school."

             I grasped his hand and shook it vigorously. "Donny Dunworth, as I live and breathe. How you been dude?"

            "Well, as you can see, I'm still here. I'm working at the mill over Hartford. They pay more than these cheap bastards in Concord. Hey, these two little heathens here are my boys, Obie and Obert. Hey boys. This here the neighbor I told you about, Mr. Danny Wilson."

              "Hi boys. How come you ain't out here helping your daddy."

             The boys both grinned and biggest one said shyly, "Daddy said we ain't big enough, Mr. Wilson."

             The boy’s cheeks were covered in grime, but they were cute little fellers. "You keep growing and you'll be big enough before you know it."

              We went in a got the beer, and when we came back outside, I handed it Golly who went and put it in the car. I called Donnie over to where I was and shook his hand and quietly passed him a fifty-dollar bill.

              He looked at the money and looked around, "What's that for, Danny."

              "I figured I owe you for that case of wine. It was yours, wasn't it?" 

              Donnie's eyes widened, "How the hell did you know that. I never told no one. My neighbor, you remember Mrs. Jones? Well, she got saved one Sunday and swore off drinking. She gave me that case of wine and told me to get rid of it. I hid it in my daddy's tool shed. I was going to give it to mama for her birthday, but Grandpa found it and stole it."

               "It took me a while, but I figured it out. You never told nobody?"

             Donny laughed so hard his shoulders shook, " Hell, Danny you knew my grandpa." 

             "I sure did. I reckon if I had to replace that case of Ripple in today's dollars it would cost me at least fifty dollars. So, you take that money, and we'll call it square, all right?"

              Donny didn't say nothing, just smiled and raised his chin and nodded and turned to go back to his tire changing. Danny started walking back toward his car. When he opened his door and slid in behind the wheel, Golly nodded towards the doorway they had just exited and Danny turned and saw Donny leading the two boys into the store. 

             "You gave that fool some money, didn't you?"

            I just smiled wryly

            "How much?"

            "All I had in my pocket was a fifty-dollar bill."

           Golly mulled things over for a moment, "How come you didn't give him more money. Hell, I know you got at least a $1,000 in your wallet right now. I mean, him copping that squat gave you that damn idea."

           "Just watch." After they sat in silence for a moment, they saw Donnie and the boys come out the door and both of them kids were struggling to sip out of a 32 ounce soda using one arm and holding a couple packs of little chocolate donuts in the other. "I'll do something for them boys later. There are some people you just can't hand a thousand dollars. It'll hurt'em more than do'em good."

                "And Donny's one of them."

                I smiled again, "Top of the list."  
 
 
Part Two   
 
     “Let's begin by asking why,” she peered at me with her glasses perched on the end of her nose and her yellow notepad perched perilously on her knee.”
 
      “Why what?”
 
    Instead of answering, she gestured with her pen as if to indicate the totality, the entire conversation, or everything that had happened since I had entered the room and sat down on the couch.  
 
        “Well, I was kind of hoping, you’d tell me. You know, I came in,  you told me to sit here and you read me that story I wrote.”
 
         She sat up a little straighter in her chair and slid up closer to the table that separated us. “Precisely, it’s the story. Why this particular story?”
 
          I pretended to be a bit more puzzled than I really was. I don’t know why, I guess it was just a way to get her to reveal things that she didn’t seem too inclined to share. “Well, a day after I got here, I was shown into a room with a bunch of other people, all shapes and sizes too; most of them seemed a little confused or anxious. They sat us down in front computer an told us to start writing.”
 
           “They give you a prompt?”
 
           “They said to write a fictional narrative that was based on some biographical details of our life. Gave us three hours to complete it. I knew from the three hours that they wanted more than a paragraph or two. When people tried to hand in something superficial, they were removed from the room.
 
          “How did you know what they wrote was superficial?”
 
          I shrugged, “Easy, they were done in five, ten minutes. The people in charge grabbed what they handed-in, went and shut down their computers, and escorted them from the room.   You know, it was like those people who make up ridiculous reasons to get excused from jury duty. There was a sense of like they were considered light weights.”
 
“You ever do that?”
 
     I shrugged again. “Everybody does. I considered it as a challenge though. You know I wanted to try and convince them that I was really telling them the truth.”
 
“Did you ever succeed?”
 
     “Every time I wanted to get sent home, I got sent home.”
 
     “An example.”
 
      “On March 6, 1974, the Weathermen bombed a federal building in San Francisco. I was called in for jury duty one day, so told the lawyers that I was with my mom on that day back in 1974 attending a women’s reproductive freedom protest, and my hearing was partially damaged by the blast. Told them that with the sign language interpreter, I could easily handle being on the jury. They excused me with an apology. The trick was acting that I wanted to take part.”
 
      “You dressed the part?”
 
 I just held my hands apart in response to the question.
 
       “That’s kind of evil. Do you feel proud of that?
 
        I shook my head and thought about how to answer. “No, I don’t. I didn’t do it because I felt superior in any way. You see, I just wanted to test a theory.”
 
       “And?”
 
      “Let’s say I didn’t tell you what I did. The historical record of the event and memories of the court room would be based on a false interpretation and no-one would have known the difference. You see, I have this problem with understanding existence. I don’t think that our physics and our philosophies deal with reality as it really is. Because of infinity. I can’t explain it much better than that.”
 
         “Let’s get back to your story, how much truth was contained in it?”
 
 
        I pretended surprise, “All of it.”
 
         “All of it?” 
 
          She took her glasses off and leaned forward. The first thing that came to mind was how pretty she was. Her glasses had restrained a luxurious brunette mane that once loosened, cascaded down around a face straight out of movie magazine. The second thing that came to mind was the visual display of skepticism and the slightly abrasive hint of judgement that entered into her voice really turned me on. I had to be careful not to let the need to impress her make me sound foolish.
 
      She quickly realized that she given me a tell, had shown me something about her that she didn’t want to reveal, and so, she leaned back into her chair and put her glasses back on. There was a golden model of a set of scales sitting on the table. She stared at the scales while composing her thoughts. Finally, she spoke, “So, the story of the boy defecating was true? His grandfather selling you the wine? You getting rich by selling merchandise with an image of a  squatting toad?”
 
      “The incident with Donnie is, as far as I can tell, something that really happened. I did buy a case of Ripple from his grandpa. I never gave Donnie any money. In fact, I never saw him again after that day. As far as his dirty little boys, well, I projected some personal assumptions as to what would happen to him given what I knew about him then. Believe me, I wrestled with the ending a while. I could have had him ending up in a lake with his hands and feet tied. I know three people who died that way. I could have had him and them boys decapitated after he had tried drive his Volkswagen beetle underneath a tractor trailer. I treated the memory of him with some empathy. Some might say the ending was fictional, I would say it mirrored something in my subconscious urge for me to make amends.”
 
       “Why would you need to make amends. You never actually got rich off the event, like the person in the story?”
 
        “Why did I write about it in the first place? For years, I let that memory tell me that I wasn’t as good as the people on the other side of our small town. I mean, who looks over their fence and sees someone squatting down defecating. Who buys a case of Ripple off a crazy snake handling preacher?  Because they made me feel inferior, I let those memories control me and never learned whatever lesson I was supposed to have learned from them. I never valued the experiences for whatever truth they offered up.”
 
       I paused for a moment to collect my thoughts. I got up and went and got a drink of water from the pitcher on the other side of the table and held up the glass to ask if she needed one but she shook her head no. I sat back down and went on, “The truest thing about the story was the epiphany I had.”
 
     “Epiphany?”
 
     ‘Yeah. I told Golly about it. From that moment on, I’ve understood the fact that life is like a stage play, but a peculiar, interactive type of play that rewrites itself so that certain ends are achieved. I can’t understand why I got this sudden, powerful understanding of things from such a raw, crude experience as seeing my neighbor’s grandson taking a squat behind a garage but it happened. You see, it's why I’m really here. You think, you’re asking me these questions because somebody upstairs ordered you to, it’s part of your job. I see it as you are reading a script that someone else has written.”
 
       “And you?”
 
       I shrugged, “Playing a role, but I get to ad lib a lot.”
 
       “To what purpose, may I ask.”
 
       I shrugged again, “Still figuring that one out myself. I do have to assume though that there’s an audience out there somewhere that has a taste for irony and the absurd.”
 
          “Like Waiting for Godot?”
 
           Her response caught me by surprise and I chuckled, ‘Exactly.”
 
         She had evidently heard what she needed to hear. She scribbled down something on her notepad and before leaning back into her chair, she absent-mindedly pushed down on the top of scale which set it the arms rocking back and forth. She was clearly thinking about something, and looked up and caught me staring. She reached out again and stopped the scale.
 
          “Fifty-one percent,” I told her. She looked surprised but didn’t say anything, so I told her, “It’s the secret message hidden in Jesus’s Parable of the Talents.”
 
          “I don’t understand.”
 
       “Don’t feel bad. I don’t think anyone else does. The ones who think they do, are the ones who have no clue. The ones who truly know something are usually the ones who understand and admit that they don’t know much.”

        'Well, you have a nice day?"

         "Did I pass?"

         "Excuse me?"

         "You know the test?"

         "There's no test. No failing, no passing, if that's what you mean?"

          
         She genuinely looked confused, but I wasn't buying it. Come on, you trying to tell me that there wasn't kind of an analysis involved?"

           "I didn't say that there was any kind of analysis involved. You're putting words in my mouth. It wasn't a test, think of it more like a poll we were taking, a measuring of results."

           I thought about things for a few seconds, "It was the movie, wasn't it! It was that stupid movie! I know it!" I could tell the statement caught her by surprise, Her mouth hung open for a moment  and she blinked twice before she quickly regained her composure.
       
           “Well, anyway, you’re free to go. We’re done here.” She placed her notebook into her briefcase along with the copy of my story and snapped it shut. The she turned and walked toward the door.  She looked good walking away. Right before she got there, she suddenly snapped around and said, “What if I told you that Donnie Dumbass was my father?”
 
            I laughed out loud and blurted, “No way. Let’s say even if I was a benevolent creator God who wanted to bestow the best future I could possibly come up with on Donnie because of the genetic and environmental handicaps he had been saddled with, I would still take one look at you and say, no fucking way. Math don’t add up. In fiction, the one rule that remains constant is there has something believable in the narrative, as slight as that fact is, otherwise it crosses over into something like……like...”
 
         “Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey?”
 
           I smiled, “Exactly! Here, let me get that door for you.”
 
           
        
 
 

   Cameron Lowry was remembering a day where he was sitting on a rock staring at his reflection in a tiny pool of water in a small, sandy depression along side a small stream in the middle of a jungle in Vietnam. He had taken his helmet off for the first time in two days and had removed his boots to wash his feet with a small bar of antibacterial soap he carried with him everywhere. He had a clean pair of socks, which at the time he considered his most precious belongings, in his knapsack. The thing that he first thought of when he saw the dirty, gaunt-eyed face staring back at him was pretty deep. He remembered that he thought that the reflection, as slight a thing as it was, had materialized in this hellhole of world, and thus would leave an indelible mark of his presence in the universe at large for all time.

   He wasn't too surprised that he was thinking so deeply on that day. Lieutenant Ira Callahan, his platoon leader had led their squad into a VC ambush out of sheer stupidity and it had taken two days of bloody fighting to claw their way out of the blunder. Sgt. Albert Costello, a wizened old vet from the Bronx, had tried to warn Callahan, but the college grad, the scion of a long line of New England bankers, was bound and determined to wrest his political future out of the jungles of Vietnam. Both their bodies, Costello's and Callahan's lay about fifty feet from where Lowry was soaping his feet. There were seven other stretchers there, each bearing the lifeless remains of someone Lowry considered a friend. John Palmer, who he had gone through basic training with, was there with half his head blown off. It had only been a week before that he had physically restrained Palmer from a tossing a grenade into the latrine while Callahan was in there. 

       "He's a piece of shit, we both know it, but he ain't worth having carrying that around with you the rest of your life." He heard the words he told his friend as he pinned Palmer's arms hard to his side.

        "He's going to kill us all, Cam. He's going to get every last damned one of us killed if we don't stop him."

       As Lowry pulled his clean socks on, he knew he was going to have to bury that conversation in the deepest recesses of his memory, along with the one of Sgt. Costello getting killed while he was trying to drag the gravely wounded Callahan to safety. 

       It was Corporal Raymond Ruiz, who had been auto mechanic in Pomona before the war, who had saved the day. Ruiz had been a Sargent when Callahan had showed first showed up. He had been busted down to private for not obeying a command quickly enough in a fire fight that Callahan's had initiated his first week at the base.

         "That damn fool ordered me and Collins to walk right down that path in broad daylight. I tried to tell him the only reason we were still alive was we didn't do that kind of shit, but he didn't listen. Collins was a newbie though, didn't know any better. I told his dumb ass to keep his head down. He thought he had better listen to Callahan rather than me. He hadn't even wore the new off his boots."

        Ruiz had crawled over to where the  squad was pinned and started to giving out orders. It was a miserable muddy affair, and all the choppers were grounded because of the weather. They shouldn't even had been out there but for Callahan volunteering them to go. 

          He remembered the words Callahan used while over-ruling Sgt. Costello's warnings, "The won't be expecting us because of the rains. We have the element of surprise on our side."

          "But sir, they won't be expecting us because nobody in their right mind'll be out in that crap. Them sneaky little bastids won't even come out in this mess."

         "Give the men their orders, Sargent!" Costello stewed. you could tell he was at the point of insubordination, in his head he was balancing his duty to keep his men alive against a life long love of the Corps. Costello was old school, a devout believer in his sense of duty. Now he was dead and had died trying to save the life of the man who had killed him.

        Lowry remembered Ruiz telling him to take three men and to crawl west around the enemy's position. "Take your time, Cam. Don't get in no hurry. I'm gonna leave Jones, Lopez, Tiger, and Andrews here to hold this place while the rest of us will try to sneak around them to the east over there. Tell your guys not to shoot directly east, don't wanna get killed by my own guys. Stay alive."

      The plan worked. It took full hours, crawling slowly, so as not to make any noise, to get into position. They were the longest hours of his life, thinking all the while, that they were going to run into some VC trying to do the same flanking maneuver. Ruiz and his men opened fire first, surprising the enemy who turned and tried to flee west and ran right into where Lowry and his companions lay in wait.

     After the all the shooting was over, the men still had to gather up the dead and triage the wounded for evacuation then wait all night for the weather to break. What Lowry remembered most about that night, it was his chosen memory of the time, was when during the sleepless night, while he was overcome with fear and fatigue, Corporal Ruiz had sat down beside him without saying a single word and just nodded. They had sat there in the dark silence for several minutes when Ruiz reached inside his knapsack and pulled a chocolate bar from out of nowhere, unwrapped it slowly, broke it in two and handed half of it to him.

      Lowry savored that moment, and he often used the memory of the simple act of kindness in his efforts to blot out the other memories that came unbidden. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

    He sighed deeply at the memory on this night and knew that if he opened his eyes right then, his tall, slender and beautiful grand-daughter Minh, the second child of his son John and his Vietnamese wife, would be patiently sitting there by his bedside studying for her exams at UCLA, and he knew if he truly wanted, Minh would jump up and rush out and buy him  a chocolate bar from the vending machine in the hallway. But, he didn't want to bother her.

​     Besides, he knew it wouldn't be the same. It would be nice, but not the same.

        

    Well, last Saturday night, my women's basketball team got beaten pretty badly in the state play-offs. Strangely enough, I learned something pretty important  that made the trip to Stockton very worthwhile. My recent bedtime reading has been C.S. Lewis's classic Mere Christianity. For most of my life, I've pretty much avoided anything that even remotely smacked of Christian apologetics, but I finally worked up enough curiosity about Lewis's viewpoints to take a crack at it.

    My religious upbringing would make a great Coen Brothers film as it was filled with ne'er-do-wells, crackpots, and outright crooks. I was told at ten years of age that I was probably going to burn in hell forever, and later convinced myself that it was probably going to happen because of the guilt I had over lusting after the Rubenesque attributes of the preacher's daughter, my girlfriend during my high school years. The time I spent attending the Baptist church of my youth gave me a very strong aversion to what some people cynically label church people.

   C. S. Lewis though has a pretty good reputation for someone imbued with a Christian outlook. He lacks the typical "used car salesman" pushiness that I have come to expect from a Baptist variety of a man of the cloth. I spent most of my life tuning out both their insane blather and incessant efforts to notch another soul saved on their shepherd's staff. I never turned my back on Jesus though, just some of the craziest of the  lunatics who claim to be on a first name basis with him as they draped one arm across my shoulder and tried to pilfer my wallet with their other hand.

     I was reading a chapter about Faith when Lewis started talking about the necessity for a fledgling Christian to leave some of the more confusing ideas alone till he or she has walked along the path for awhile. He notes that most of us are not going to be prone to sudden insights like St. Paul and that the best we can do is to trust the process of "growing up". This is especially true, he points out about the argument whether it is 'good actions' or 'faith' that matters most. "The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two into one amazing sentence. The first half is, 'work out your own salvation with fear and trembling'- which looks as if everything depended on us and our good actions: but the second half goes on, "'For it is God who worketh within you'- which looks as if God did everything and we nothing."

     Upon reading this, my mind made an instant connection to Iain McGilchrist and his amazing study of the hemispheres of the brain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. In his book, McGilchrist makes the argument that the compared to the right hemisphere, the left brain is more materialistic and hyper-analytical, prone to collecting data and information often even without a purpose. It is also lying and manipulative and  dead set on wresting the ultimate position of power from its  more spiritual and creative right brain counterpart. McGilchrist asserts that the historical periods of humankind's greatest inventiveness and effectiveness have been when society's needs were being managed by the greatest collaboration between the two, in other words, when the Corpus Callosum, a thick bundle of fibers that is vital for enabling both hemispheres to work together, helps the two hemispheres collaborate to create, well, you know, the magic.

     Lewis's words opened the door to a key point of understanding not only of the full import of McGilchrist's argument, but also for understanding one of the Bible's most fundamental messages as well.
The ultimate war between the hemispheres of the brain is in fact the perfect explanation of Lucifer's fall from grace. In attempting to explain the issue of whether it is faith or good works that guarantees salvation, and leaving it as a conundrum that Christians must work out on their on, Lewis's argument enabled me to recognize that Lucifer was driven by the same hubris that materialist science has been driven in its attempts to wrestle the scepter away from a more spiritual consciousness, and much like this Luciferian point of view, science will never be able to sensibly rule or even give meaning to this world on its own.

     The key to understanding this mystery involved is in how the Enlightenment thinkers handled the greatest mystery of them all, which is the concept of infinity. They put infinity in an imaginary box, dug a hole in the bottom of the Vatican basement and poured concrete over it and pushed a large section from the walls of Babylon over the spot. What we need to understand that there is no piece of infinity that, placed upon a slide and then placed under a microscope, would ever would yield up all the mystery of the infinite. I would argue that even a spectacle as large as the Super Bowl is just a diversionary effort to keep the secret, you know, well, secret.

       Secularism has done some great things for humanity, but its zealots have also committed themselves to the keeping of the human race in the dark about the need for left brain materialist thinking to admit that the concept of an all powerful deity can most likely be explained by the humanity's need to grapple with the ideas that are engendered by our efforts to understand what it MEANS to exist in an infinite universe. The powers that be have to understand that such efforts will ultimately expose them as the nonsensical, narcissistic Pharisees that they are. How else can you explain their stupid, self-serving ideas and unceasing efforts to destroy humanity's ability to hope.

       The real message that C. S. Lewis's writing enabled me to understand was that we human beings have many amazing accomplishments to be proud of, but if they are not attached to and/or explained by our existence in the metaxy, or in-between-state, they are really kind of meaningless, and only by viewing them through the prism of an infinite reality can we finally achieve some kind of understanding of our true self.

     I never knew that Mr. Borba had taught at Corcoran High School, I only knew him as an English teacher at the College of Sequoias, you know one of them once in a life-time teachers who changes your life forever. He taught me the three-part divided thesis and showed us the movie It's a Wonderful Life, both things entered into my consciousness and fundamentally transformed me from the inside out. Both things showing me how to tame my wild thoughts and convert them into something beneficial to my well-being.

     I was one of the many victims of the Sixties. I never knew that my family was working-class poor. I never knew that I was supposed to hate authority, distrust adults, and hate America until those journalists and creative types from the east coast at the behest for their corporate masters and maybe with some help from our own government started propagating the idea that everyone needed to be pessimistic about the post-war future. Now there's still a lot of people who will argue that it was the events themselves that caused the problems and divisions that plagued that troubled era. Walter Lippman had already published his ground-shaking Public Opinion in 1922 explaining how our rulers  and their highly paid minions employ techniques to manufacture consent, "especially of the irrational and often self-serving social perceptions that influence individual behavior and prevent optimal societal cohesion." In other words he blew the whistle on how those who own this country create the illusion that the public arrives at these divisive opinions own their own when in fact the entire culture is often used to prevent us regular stiffs from not only arriving at our own opinions but to prevent us from working things out things on our own often added by conversations with our neighbors. It was a hallmark trait of the Sixties, it has since been systemically institutionalized into our social structure.

      There was also, of course, the ironic fact that my own cultural heroes of that time had been engaged in a great deal of self-enrichment while they led me and many of my friends Pied Piper-like away from the only path that would have led to the truth of things. Led Zeppelin, the greatest rock band of the early Seventies had the phrase "Do What Thy Wilt", the motto of Alister Crowley, engraved in the grooves of their albums, the Beatles had a picture of the satanist on the cover of the Sgt. Pepper's album, arguably the most influential music album of all time. The Rolling Stones in the meanwhile sang about having Sympathy for the Devil as the narrator of the song (played by Mr. Jagger) gleefully states,

And I was 'round when Jesus Christ 
Had his moment of doubt and pain 
Made damn sure that Pilate 
Washed his hands and sealed his fate

 Were we stupid then or just naive? I would say both and then add a lot of other adjectives like overwhelmed, confused, misguided, puzzled, curious and searching. The thing we didn't understand then though was that there were many people getting paid to tell me  lies,  so someone else could profit off of my gullibility and the gullibility of my well meaning parents who, coming out of the Dust Bowl, could easily spot a shyster car salesman at a hundred yards but never understood that the difference between that car salesmen and a lot of Baptist preachers was a matter of degree and the angle of the scam.

 My experiences with the hedonism of the Sixties led me out to the Tulare Lake Basin where I dug ditches for a living working out my sins in a purgatory of my own making. God suddenly said, "Enough's enough," and reached out for me one day after I had read, on my lunch break, in a Bible Concordat about Moses taking that first step into the Red Sea on faith. A flow of energy rushed through my body and in a matter of seconds I had found a path back to the surface of things.

  And that road led me to Mr. Borba's class where he gave me the anecdote to all the poison I had swallowed in my mispent youth in the form of hope represented by a smiling Jimmy Stewart. There are many in Hollywood who still hate Frank Capra because he gave names and verified the communist presence in the industry during that era. The fact  is that many of the screenwriters caught up in the Black Listing were in fact being told what they could and couldn't write by none other than Stalin himself. I don't believe that's why they constantly smear Capra though; I believe it is actually because of the hope engendered by that image of of a smiling George Baily, smiling because he has just fully understood the natural goodness inherent in mankind.

    Mr. Borba died last year and I've heard lots of stories about how he impacted  the lives of many people. I thought about starting this with the words, "Grown men cried on the day he died and he changed my life forever." I thought, damn man, that's more like a song lyric, and I was stunned by profoundness of the thought, "grown men cried on the day he died." 

     Thank you, Mr. Borba. I don't know if you knew it on that day you showed that movie in class on last day of the fall semester that you were creating the wizened old man sitting in front of his lap-top writing about how the universe always provides the truth and wisdom to those with the eyes to see it. When I see that movie henceforth, and that bell rings, I'll think that James Stewart smiles because he knew you finally got your wings.

     Hell, they didn't even have lap-tops in those days.

  

    There is a very subtle, yet palpable innocence that hangs over the dying of a day. John Henry Lewis looked out over the horizon at the pink, orange, yellow and red pastel sky as the sun slowly disappeared beneath the dark outline of his neighbor Francisco's house. John Henry loved the dying of the light and the natural, living art it created for his approval on a nightly basis. He picked up a half empty can of Pabst sitting on the white plastic table next to his heavily padded lawn chair and swallowed it down with one gulp. He then crushed the can in the middle, folded it in half, and tossed it into a tattered cardboard box sitting next to the table. He made note to himself that the box was almost full and would soon need emptying into the large, green plastic trash can he kept in the back. The lawn chair, one of those old aluminum ones from the sixties wasn't very comfortable, but John Henry had attached an old, memory-foam pillow to the backrest and placed a thick, brown cushion on the seat.

     He sat out on his small porch damned near every night until the sun went down, and usually, as soon as the last golden shimmer turned to silver, he'd fold up shop, swallow the last of his beer, toss the last empty can into the box, pick up whatever was left of his pack of Pall Malls and go back inside the house. This night the pack was empty, so he crumpled it up and placed it into the pocket of his robe. Lastly, he'd pick up his treasured ash tray, one of them old small, bean bag looking things with a red plaid fabric and rounded red metal dish to hold the ashes. He worried about his things, about losing them to someone who would steal such a thing of the hell of it. He had won the ashtray on his first date with Jenny, a trip to the county fair in Fresno over fifty years before.

  "Gonna quit these fuckers one of these days, " he mumbled to himself, smiling as he pulled the screen door open because he knew that there was half a carton of unopened packs laughing at his lie.

    The television was already on. He slumped down into his well-worn easy chair and picked up the remote to turn up the sound. Every night he watched the end of the nightly news before turning in. He hated the news, all of it. He hated the anchor-men and women most of all. He often complained to Jenny that he couldn't stand people who would repeat anything they were told for a paycheck. She would  roll her eyes and tell him, "If you hate it so much, Johnny, then why the hell do you watch it every night and then complain?"

    It didn't matter how many times she asked the question, her comment would always sting, and he would hesitate and think before answering, try to mumble something out a few times, before finally replying in one broken sentence, "Why Jen......we wouldn't....have nothing......to talk.......about." She'd just smile a catty little grin and go back to doing whatever she was doing. The fact that she'd ask the question always made him feel a bit like crying, and he never  understood why.

          He knew that Jenny never really understood him either, right up till the night she died. She just made do and pretended and went along for the ride most of the time. He did the same for the sake of their relationship. Theirs wasn't a great marriage by any means, But compared to the perpetual silence he endured now, it was Bogey and Bacall.

       Her last days were spent in a coma, lying silent in their bedroom under Hospice care. The brain cancer that she'd battled against so long and hard finally ran her to ground. She was blind in her right eye and paralyzed on her left side. Jenny would have been mortified, had she known, that her husband of over fifty years was changing her diapers and giving her sponge baths. Their relationship, although not the great passion seen in the movies, had reached a state best described as being comfortable, all the hard edges worn away by the wind, the rain, and time. Out on the porch sometimes, he would remember with some guilt, the many times when their marriage was brand new, and she would talk about how much she hated their parent's boring life style. More than once, she reminded him that she had almost rejected his proposal because of the way his parents interacted in their old age.

    The final night, he had left her bedside while she slept and gone outside for smoke. He heard someone whistle in the darkness, looked across the street toward Pancho's and saw the tiny dot of fire on the tip of the joint his friend was smoking. He stepped off the porch and tottered down the side walk to his front fence. Ponch saw him coming and got up from where he was sitting and ambled across the street.

              "Big Bad John, what's up, man? How's Jenny doing?"

             "She's dying, Ponch," he tried to say it all matter-of-factly but his resolve gave out before the end, so the name of his friend was barely audible. After a slight hesitation he gathered the wind to say,  "She ain't got much longer. The nurse said she probably won't last out the week." There was a moment of complete silence before he broke into sobs, his shoulders shaking. You couldn't see it in the darkness, but his legs almost gave out. Only the desire not to just completely collapse in front of his old friend, the desire to be an old-school man like his dad, kept him from giving the whole thing up and lying on the sidewalk and letting it all go. Ponch reached across the fence and steadied his shoulders; taking a handkerchief out of his shirt pocket, he handed it to John Henry who used it to dry his eyes and wipe his nose..

            "I'm so sorry to hear that, Johnny. She's fought so long and hard. Helen been praying for her....we were hoping.....well, you know." Then Ponch reached a complete lack of words. He wanted so badly to say something that would comfort his friend, but there were no words to be found. He thought for a second that in the billions of times throughout human history, human speech had never evolved words that measured up to the gravity of the situation. The sight of his friend crying shook him to his core, made him understand that someday, probably not far off, he or his beloved wife would be in John's shoes. He gripped his friend's hand firmly and shook it. After a minute, he finally got some words out. "Helen told me to make sure you know that if you need us, we're here. She made you some stew and some rolls, I'll bring it over tomorrow. She's real worried about you, man."

             "Tell Helen thanks, and thank you too, Frank. Jenny loved you guys. You guys have been the greatest help. Give me hit off that joint, Ponch. I need something to help me sleep."

            "Hell, you quit smoking this shit forty years ago. I remember the day; Jenny was going to leave you." He suddenly caught the irony of his statement right before John Henry held his hands apart and shrugged. Ponch handed the joint over.

           John Henry took a deep drag and held the smoke in for  a  while then handed it back to Ponch. After a bit, he exhaled slowly. "You're right. We made a deal, I quit partying altogether, and she stayed. She's leaving me now though. I can't sleep at night, Ponch. I'll have to rethink things, I guess."

           They stood there at the fence talking when Helen, Ponch's wife, came outside in her bath robe and slippers and walked across the dark street and gave John Henry a big hug. When they went back home, John Henry didn't go in right away instead he stood outside by the fence alone  looking up at a big yellow moon.

       When he finally reentered the house, he noticed right away that it was oddly quiet and that he couldn't hear Jenny's raspy breathing coming from the monitor on the coffee table. He hurried into the bedroom and there, by the dim light coming from the hallway, saw her body frozen with her right hand raised above her head as if to ward off a blow, eyes wide open, with spittle leaking from the bottom corner of her mouth.

             "Oh. Jenny," he slowly exhaled, the words coming out as gentle as a spring breeze.  He took the blue wash cloth from the nightstand and washed off the spittle from her mouth, gently closed her eyes, folded her arms across her chest, kissed her on the forehead, and sat down in the chair by the bed and softly cried.

           After  several minutes, he composed himself enough to call his girls and his boy Junior.  They were all expecting the news and took it fairly well considering their beloved mother was no longer alive. Cyndi, the youngest, was the only one who seemed more concerned about his well-being than the loss of her mother. She felt that she had lost her mother years before when she had informed Jenny that she was gay. John Henry had taken that news well enough, preferring to lose a religious absolute than his own daughter, but Jenny had never accepted it. Despite John Henry's formidable efforts, her relation with Cyndi had only existed on the pretext that she refused to acknowledge that her baby was married to another woman. He called the number on the Hospice letter and the people on the other end they said they would be there within thirty minutes time. He went back into the living room and sat back down in his easy chair. There was a story on CNN about some terrorist attack in Europe. They could wiped Paris, France off the face of the earth at that moment, and he wouldn't have cared.

          The undertaker and his crew couldn't get their gurney up the front steps because it had something wrong like a broken wheel. They ended up carrying Jenny out of the house wrapped in a bed sheet. His last view of his wife of fifty years was of her bare feet sticking out of a gray bedsheet as they loaded her into the back of a large black van. Going back into his house, he left the front door open because he couldn't bear the thought of being inside the house alone. He remembered that he had went and got down a half empty bottle of Scotch from the liquor cabinet over the kitchen sink and an ice tray from the fridge and poured himself a stiff drink. He sat down in his chair, closed his eyes and breathed in and out several times while trying to relax his shoulders and calm his racing mind.

       He had fallen asleep in his easy chair before a commercial for light beer woke him up and he decided to sleep in the chair and had not gone back into the room.  He had slept in the chair for a week before he finally bought a new bed and gave the one that Jenny had died in to a local thrift shop. He had tried his very best to keep things as normal as possible and succeeded to a large degree, in the daylight hours that was, but as soon as the night returned though, all the dark things would come out of storage to haunt him in his loneliness. It was the reason why he started his little ritual of sitting out and watching the sun until went disappeared.

          On this night of remembering, he was also thinking about the night long ago when Jenny and him had stayed up and watched The Wizard of OZ on TV. It was Jennie's favorite movie, and it was one of his favorite memories of their life together. She was lying on the sofa with her feet across his lap. When the characters in the movie sang the Yellow Brick Road song, she had moved her legs to the music and giggled at the absurdity, and when Dorothy clicked her ruby slippers together, Jenny clicked her heels together three times too. That was too much, so he asked her with a sheepish grin, "You really think that's gonna work?"

          She just laughed and said, "You don't know, Johnny. It might just work, couldn't hurt."

          "What did you wish for then?"

         "That you would love me forever and ever."

        He remembered that it wasn't his favorite memory though; it was close, but his favorite was of one  night when they'd driven home from the casino on the little side road about a mile long that led from the casino out to Kansas Avenue, Jenny unbuckled her seat belt and slide over to sit next him. It  made him feel so happy and he reached over and put his hand on her knee. Now, he teared up every time he left the casino at night, remembering how simple and fleeting true happiness could be.           

        After the movie had ended that night so long ago, he told his wife about a theory of history that L. Frank Baum had written the stories that the Wizard of Oz movie was based on as an allegory for the social-economic events occurring in America when they were written. It made Jenny angry for some reason.

        "Johnnie, why can't you ever just watch a movie without the history lecture? I loved the fantasy of it.  Why do you always got to spoil the mystery by analyzing things to pieces?"

             "I don't know, Jenn. I just like knowing the truth behind things, and not just accepting this crazy world on its face value." He wanted to say so much more, to explain to her the hunger for knowing things that burned inside him like a flame. He wanted to impress her with his knowledge of things because he felt that he had gotten way pass being able to impress her any other way. By the time he sorted it all out in his head, he looked over at his wife, and she was already fast asleep. So, he closed his eyes and silently explained what he meant and pretended she was still listening.

            Since she had died, he often held such silent conversations with Jennie and sometimes even with the picture of Jesus that Jenny had gotten from her great-grandmother's house a long time ago. He couldn't convince himself to take it down even though it always made him feel sinful. Sometimes he even converse with the poster of Bob Dylan that he had hung up on the wall after she'd died, and he didn't have to worry about her getting mad. He would explain his feelings to them, and they both would listen attentively without complaint.

       He sat in the darkness about thirty more minutes, saddened and worn out by all the remembering and thinking that went with it, thoughts about Jenny and that night they'd watched the movie, and about how they'd sang the songs together and told jokes at the Wicked Witch's expense. He finally got up enough energy to rise up and go to his bedroom. He turned the light off, slid beneath the comforter and then clicked his heels together three times.

          He smiled at the thought. "Couldn't hurt," he mumbled and winked at Jesus in the dark.

               

          

              There is a lady in our town who lives on Main Street. I mean literally lives on a bench located on the main thoroughfare of Corcoran. It's plain for everyone to see that she's clearly hurting. She sits and stares to the west or stands and stares toward the road. Sometimes she walks back and forth like she's one of the characters in small town version of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, waiting for some kind of salvation that never seems to come. She's moved a couple of times because she used to sleep on the sidewalk in front of the cafe where I eat breakfast everyday, and she was sleeping in the park with the other homeless after the local police told her she couldn't sleep on the cafe's sidewalk.

         Like I said, she is clearly in some distress. But she's not the only one. Every day there's  a whole group of people who traverse the stage outside the window where I'm eating. Dressed in scabs, filth, and ragged, unwashed clothing, they are all broken in one way or another. And clearly, the powers that be, depending where you want to place their abode either in Heaven, Nirvana, Valhalla, Washington D.C., or Sacramento don't seem to give a damn about them. I feel like I can say that that because it's been going on for such a long time and nothing seriously has been done to identify the problem much less fix it. Our political divide where both sides of the table are blinded by the ever expanding, ever darkening mists of their own flatulence can not seem to bring themselves to see past the end of their own noses, each side wanting and/or needing to keep the sores of the body politic gaping and bleeding and oozing in their misguided efforts to throw both blame and stones across the aisle as if their only job in life is to accuse the other side of sin. 

      I know that I myself should be a lot more empathetic. I really understand that I should do more myself, and I'm not trying to place the blame on others. I've just never been a person who could walk up to someone in such a wretched condition and say, "Here, let me take you somewhere where they can help you." It's not in me, and me makes me even sadder because I've so often searched those darkened reaches of my own inner world looking for the wells of healing water and only found an half-filled gallon jar or two, barely enough to satisfy my own needs in such arid times. I'm a typical American in that way, someone who write checks to charity, so I don't have to listen to the news. But everyday, this dystopian panorama is still outside the window where I sit and eat my eggs and bacon.

      I often feel like someone who paid a lot of money to watch Beckett's Waiting for Godot in a luxurious theater after eating a fine meal and drinking several Scotch and waters (at least four, the last one a double). My conscience is pricked and made alive by the stern scenarios, but by the time I get back home, I leave my conscience outside and lock the door behind me where sometimes, I hear it scratching like a spoiled cat.

       Yesterday, I drove to Fresno to give my daughter some money to help a lady in need get off the streets. I was a little short while waiting for my SS check to come in, so I took my coins to a Save Mart in Hanford and traded them in for a little piece of paper worth $40. Yep, that's about as far as I go. I'm much better at complaining about things.

       Whenever, I'm in Fresno, I go to Barnes and Noble. Normally, I buy a book or two. I'm trying to break that habit because the inside of my house looks a lot like library after an earthquake. As I'm typing this, I can  look to my right and see a battered, used volume of Ayn Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness. The tag on the cover said I bought it for 25 cents. I remember I bought it because I needed to find something to tell my daughter that she needed to be a little less altruistic, so that she could take better care of herself. The philosophy in the book though reminded me a lot of Nietzsche, so I quit reading it after the first chapter. On the top of the stack of books behind my laptop is the book, Savage Journey, a biography of Hunter S. Thompson. I can walk into any room of my house and come face to face with some great thinker. While I'm ironing clothes, for example, I'll pause long enough to read a page or two of someone like Joan Didion or Carl Jung. Waiting for the shower to get warm in the morning, it's H.G. Wells's History of the World. 

        When I catch myself doing this, I'm reminded of one of my earliest images of my mother sitting in a chair in the living room smoking a cigarette with an inch long ash and holding a romance novel in the other hand while the vacuum cleaner stands before her anxiously waiting. My brain has always been restless, ever searching for the bit I missed the first time around. This state of affairs has its benefits, of course, but its not always a good thing, as it makes it hard for me to focus and get shit done, and its getting even harder for me as I age to sit still and just enjoy the beauty of the world around me. It seems that I would rather run the world through the filter of someone like a Larry McMurtry or a Carl Jung than actually see the same real thing right across the street.

     So, now, instead of buying a book, I grab two or three and sit down at a table with my coffee and a small notebook to write down the lines or expressions that I like and want to remember. I kind of like this arrangement better because it adds the sport of people watching to the reading endeavor. Sitting there, I read an essay on Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five by Salman Rushdie in which he explained the meaning behind the iconic catch phrase made famous by the novel, "and so it goes." Rushdie explains that it wasn't so much a shoulder shrug offered in the face of existence, as most people think, but, rather, a respectful nod offered to the specter of death. Rushdie claims that every time the author used the expression someone in the book had died. It made perfect sense to me, so I wrote it down, now here I am talking about it.

      I often wonder, when I am alone at night, why I don't possess a greater amount of empathy towards the people who sleep on our nation's sidewalks and haunt our crosswalks holding up cardboard signs to elicit our sympathy and aid. Sometimes, I think it might be because what empathy I have, I need for myself. I was cruising along minding my own business when the powers that be just started raining nuclear bombs down upon my head. It was like God let Harry Truman take the wheel for a moment, and he decided I was threat to the Domino Theory of Cold-War containment. My wife suddenly up and leaves, my mom has a stroke; the first night my dad spends alone at home because Mom is in the hospital, evidently thinking about the idea of living life without her; suffers a mental breakdown; dad gets dementia and dies; ex-wife gets cancer and dies, mom gets a pace maker and dies of a Covid related illness. And so it goes.

     Kurt Vonnegut was actually there when the Allies firebombed the fairy-tale city of Dresden in retaliation for the German bombing of London. He went down beneath the ground of one of the most charming and magical places in Europe and emerged into the smoking ruins of a rugged Martian landscape. That scene resonates with me. I sometimes feel like I fell asleep on the couch while watching Father Knows Best and woke up to the Kardashians blathering about whatever the hell it is they blather about while sitting on that couch from Friends smoking a joint and watching a drunken Bill Maher urinating on Howard Stern's head while he's passed out in the doorway of the Mayberry jail. Otis the lovable drunk's neglected corpse is covered with cobwebs in the jail cell behind them but they never seem to notice. That feeling emptied my storage capacity of empathy about a half. Then, I think I hit a rock while driving the back roads to Tulare and punctured a hole in the tank that left me on empty.

        Yet, it might have been that brainless twit of a judge that let those two drug smugglers who brought 250,000 hits of Fentanyl into the valley loose the very same day they were busted. That's more than enough Fentanyl to kill every person in this area. Stuff like that makes you realize that we're living in weird times and you can't just be handing over your empathy to every one with a cardboard sign all willy nilly like. Most of them, the drugged-out ones, would trade your empathy for some Fentanyl while you were standing there if they could. You might need it later to barter for something someday or need to dig a hole and hide it for an occasion where you know it's truly needed, and not just give it to someone of the ilk of the person who stole your mom's wheelchair and sold it for five dollars.

         And it's not that I don't realize that the someone who stole my mom's wheelchair is worthy of empathy. I just used to know it a whole lot better before some people made a cottage industry as well as a political philosophy out of the signaling of virtue. They teach it to our children in our schools, and, hell, you can't even go into a fast food restaurant in America without the person behind counter asking if you want to donate your change to an advertising effort that shows the world how much more virtuous their corporate ownership is opposed to another corporate ownership. There is reason that the Bible says to "give your alms in private." People ain't changed all that much, especially corporate ownership.

       I was telling my brother this morning that there's a lesson to be learned by the lady's presence on main street. I just don't know what it is yet. I told him that according to science, we shape our own reality by our thinking. I then told him to straighten up and quit thinking weird shit, and I would try to do the same. I thought about whether this world is one of those Escape Rooms that people pay good money to escape from (Don't ask me), and maybe what we needed to do was to come up with a phrase that would free us all. I remarked that the lady standing there dressed all in black against the stark background of downtown Corcoran looked like something out of an Ibsen play or that movie The Seven Seals by Ingmar Bergman. You know the scene where the knight plays chess with Death? So, as we ate, I googled Ibsen and started reading a list of famous quotes from his plays.

       The first one was cool, and I thought very appropriate for these times. “It is the very mark of the spirit of rebellion to crave for happiness in this life.” I looked over at my brother and asked, "She still there?" He just shook his head sadly. I read the rest of the list, and then I would ask, and he would shake his head. The last one was the best. I told him excitedly, "This is great. It has got to be the one."

         He had forgotten by that time what we were doing and sheepishly asked, " The one what?"

            I looked at him with disdain and said, "The code word, the secret phrase, fool. The one that's going to change everything and make it go back to the way it was before."

           "Before what?"

           I was almost frothing at mouth by then, "Before Covid! Before Newsome and his slick ass hair. Before The Joker. Before Schiff. Before Antifa.  Before Hunter knew what crack was. Before Miley Cyrus. Before Nickleback. What do you mean before what? Before what ever it was that broke that lady over there's heart."

          "Just shut up and say it." He's usually like Silent Bob but sometime he's heard enough.

            "Okay. Here it goes, 'I don't imagine that you will dispute the fact that at the present stupid people are in an absolute majority all the world over.'"

           Nothing.

     The thing I missed the most about coming home from college was the fact that I loved college. I missed the lectures, the seminars, concerts, plays, even the sports. Concord was something of cultural backwater. If you didn't like high school sports, you were shit out of luck on weekends. When I first got back, there was only one bar and one Pizza Parlor to hang out at with friends. 

      The Hashichins Club was my idea. It was based on a literary salon in 19th Century France where writers like Baudelaire, Hugo and Dumas met to smoke cannabis and discuss literature. I knew a few, smart guys, Troy for one, who had gone off to college to get educated and came back for whatever reason. When I was chasing after caches of used books in order to start my store, some of these guys would call me and tell me that wanted to go with me. We started sharing books and attending lectures out of town. Eventually, we decided to meet once a month in my office to smoke some weed and discuss whatever book we had assigned for the month.  The first book was Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. There were originally seven of us total. We decided we needed to keep the group small because if you got too many people you would end up arguing more than sharing views. Troy was the first one to join up, then Brooks Miller a local attorney followed. Dealie never read books, so when I told him about the club, he didn't even ask to join. I could tell he was a little miffed though after it started up.

        We were slated to have our monthly meeting that night. We were supposed to discuss Thomas Pynchon's Gravity Rainbow, a book that some of us were struggling to understand. I had it in mind to table the discussion in favor of the guys listening in on a conference call with Dealie who was going to call that night to fill me in on what he had discovered in San Diego. These guys were friends of his and they were among the smartest people in town. I figured more heads were better than one. The Sheriff hadn't charged Dealie with anything yet, so the guys didn't have to worry about getting in trouble for helping a fugitive.