"Broken hearts and dirty windows Make life difficult to see That's why last night and this morning Always look the same to me" John Prine It was a quarter till two, and Ernie the bartender was already showing signs that he was ready to close. Ernie, the owner and barkeep of a seedy little establishment in the San Fernando Valley, was a stocky little Armenian dude with a weird beard that was braided on both sides of his chin. His dark hair was curly and awkwardly lay on his head like a misplaced rug. Whenever he was ready to go home, he'd always turn off the radio and shut down some of the neon behind the bar then stand there and dry a glass that never seemed to get dry. "What's the matter, Ern, you in a hurry to get home?" "Naw, that ain't it, Errol. Ma's not feeling too good. She called about an hour ago and said her stomach was bothering her." "Hell, you shoulda said something. I'll swallow this one down then. Hey, you couldn't mix me one up for the walk home could ya?" "Well asides the fact that I legally can't do that, it goes against my better sense to pour scotch in a paper cup. What's the matter, you dry at home?" I nodded, "Payday's tomorrow." "Tell ya what I'll do then. I pour ya shot of Lamberts." "No scotch?" "Scotch is not for shots or paper cups. Scotch is a thinking man's drink. What you need for walking is whisky." I didn't argue and finished my drink and put the glass down on the bar, "I guess beggars can't be choosers." We both laughed and Ernie turned and went and got the Lamberts. I guess it would be wrong to call Ernie's Place an Armenian bar because even though there a boat load of Armenians living in the LA area, Ernie and his brother Leo were the only ones who seemed to ever come into the place. He explained it by saying it was because of a feud he had with some of his cousins. The regular clientele were middle class white dudes from the offices and car lots in the vicinity, a mess of blue collar Okies and Mexicans, a few Black guys from the airport, and some bored housewives. Some of the neighboring bars didn't let the ethnics in, but Ernie's wasn't like that. The whole theme of the place centered around the poker tables in the back room where how they judged character was solely based on how well you played cards. It was Sunday evening though, and Ernie shut the tables down on Sunday. It was a place where people either went to play poker or to drink away problems. Some, like myself, went there to talk to somebody other than the pictures on the walls. I'd come out to LA two years before from Tulsa, Oklahoma after my wife Elsie died from being hit by a hit and run driver. She was on her way to tell me that she was pregnant with our first child. She didn't die right away but lingered in a coma for over a week. My brother Pete, callously, picked that trying time to come tell me that he had decided to go out to California to seek his fame and fortune and wanted me to go with him. Mind you, my wife was lying comatose in the bed not six feet away from where we were talking. "Elsie's not going to want to go to California." He didn't say nothing, at least not out loud, the look he gave me though was pregnant with meaning and hung there in the air between us for several minutes. I broke the silence first, "What about Sissie? We the only family she's got out here now that Aunt Susie died and Walter and his family went west." Pete rubbed the stubble on his chin, "She's a big girl now, Errol. She don't want to keep living with her older brothers. Besides I think she's going to marry Oliver Jones if he ever works up the nerve to ask her." "Don't you think we at least ought to ask her?" "Well sure, but......., " he never finished his sentence because a nurse came in to check on Elsie. It turns out that we didn't have to ask our sister what she wanted because she died two days later. She had attended a barn dance in Pryor and on the way home, a drunken farmer had pushed the car she was in onto the path of an oncoming train mistakenly thinking his wife was in the car with another man. They brought her body into the morgue in the basement of the hospital while Peter and I were upstairs sitting with Elsie. Then my beautiful wife passed away not 10 minutes before Johnny Bowron, our neighbor's son, burst into the room to tell us about Sissy. I never did tell Peter one way or the other about going west. It was just assumed. I think that I was numb right up till the moment our truck, loaded with everything we owned, pulled out of the muddy, rutted, lane that ran up to our farmhouse. Pete had handled the whole shebang. Elsie was buried by the side of her Daddy up in Tulsa, but Pete and me buried Sissy on the hillside overlooking our farm, right by our mom and dad. I remember thinking that for the thirty-two years my family owned the place, there wasn't a single grave up on that hill. When we left, there were three. Ernie brought me a paper cup containing a double shot of Lamberts. I was reaching in my pockets to pay him when just waved me off and said it was on the house. "You looked like you needed that drink, Errol, and far be it for me to turn away a man who needs a drink." "Appreciate it, Ern, and you're right, I sure needed a drink tonight." "You ain't worried about that Giancarlo guy are you? If you want, I'll give you a ride home." "Naw, shit no. I ain't worried about that fool, him and his little gang of thugs. No, you go home check on your mom. I like walking at night. It clears my head." He finished locking up the door and walked over to where his car sat underneath the streetlight. He had to fight off a cloud of bugs to unlock it. He waved as he pulled out of the parking lot onto the blacktop road. I waved back and then turned and started walking the three quarters of a mile up hill climb to the one bedroom bungalow I shared with a parakeet named Edgar. That night Elsie came to visit me. I know it's probably wrong to phrase it that way, her being dead and all. But, the fact was, she still visited fairly regular. This time, she woke me out of a dead sleep. I was dreaming about a night at the county fair when we were on our first real date. We got in fight because she thought she caught me looking at another girl, got mad and took off through the crowd. It wasn't true. There was no way any fool could look at another girl when Elsie was around. I mean she was small town, church-going girl, and back then that meant she was clothed from her neck to her knees. My brother Pete used to use the word swaddled to describe the look when he was complaining about how the girls in our home town always dressed. He had picked up the word in Sunday school class, when our teacher, the aptly name Ms. Hogg said the infant Jesus was wrapped in swaddling clothes. Pete had spent a year traveling with some carnies and had no end of stories about how the girls dressed in the towns and cities more sophisticated than our own, which in his view, was pretty much every other town. He also used a lot of terms like hot to trot and out looking for it when he launched into one of his rants. I didn't care if Elsie wore a flour sack, which I'm sure most of our mothers had done at one point. Any guy in our neck of the woods would have snapped their damned head off trying to catch a glimpse of her walking by. Looking at her made me think about what life must have been like being a peasant boy in the Middle Ages, living in a hut with your animals, and then seeing the Lord's beautiful daughter come riding by. You couldn't help but think that the mere vision of. her wasn't heaven sent. I swear I was just looking away so I wouldn't give away what was going on inside my head by just staring at her all the time. Maybe, some other girl happened to randomly intersect the path of my vision when Elsie turned to tell me something, or maybe she just made the whole thing up to play games with my heart, I don't know. I was her first beau, and that was her first real time away from her mom and dad's protective vision. My dad had warned me about such things one night as he sat outside on the porch sipping on his nightly glass of squeezins as he called it. "You keep a young girl locked town tight as she begins her turning, she's going rebel one way or the other. The tighter the chain, the crazier the dog." I looked at him stupidly, not comprehending the analogy. Hell, I didn't even know what an analogy was then, "Elsie not a dog, Pa. She's the prettiest girl I ever seen. Maybe the prettiest girl in whole damn world." He just looked at me for a bit, took a sip and said, "Don't be stupid, Errol. I don't want to talk to stupid. I use up all my stupid talk when I'm trying to tell them pigs what to do. Most women have a great deal of crazy locked up inside them. Not judging, mind you. It comes with that monthly cycle thing they been given. They have to learn to live with things, we men, don't even know about. It's the child bearing and raising of youngins that uses most of the craziness up, and keeps'em from going full blowed crazy." "Mama?" "Your mama is one of the rare'uns, boy. Jeanne always so calm. There's two reasons she was so sane. Number one, she really believed in that Bible. Most of the people in that church say they do, but she really does. Secondly, her daddy was a lot crazier in her mama. Your mama had to learn how to be sane a lot earlier than most girls just to survive her raising and take care of her siblings." I guess, he just was trying me to tell to keep my guard up when it came to dealing with females. He tried to explain that Elsie was bound to play games with me regardless whether she wanted to or not. He said that she wouldn't even understand why she was doing things, and that I needed to stay smart and not get caught up in the craziness, and that my main job was to keep guiding her back to her true self." I was just talking to talk, and smugly answered that that sounded easy enough, and Pa suddenly spit out his drink, doubled over, and damned near choked himself to death laughing. When he finished, he had to take a big drink to stop the choking, and the strength of liquor caused him to choke even more. I damned near choked my pa to death out of mere stupidity that night. I think I learned more about human frailty that evening than anything that's happen to me since. After regaining some composure, he finally said in a voice made gravelly by all the choking, "Easy nuff? Son, when that little pecker of yours starts to gettin hard enough to scratch your name in that oak tree over yonder, you're going to learn a thing or two about crazy all right, and you're going to learn it, and still have to learn to act normal, build a house, dress a hog, and keep your own fool seff from being cheated by all the damn, two legged varmints round here. Easy has nuthin to do with it. Listen, you avoid easy like the plague, easy's got nuthin to do with real life." I never did learn if Elsie was playing with me or not. By the time I caught up with her and grabbed her by the shoulder, she turned around with the biggest smile, and I forgot the question. The night in the dream though, I was one shot away from winning her one of them big dolls, but I quickly put the rifle down and started chasing her through the crowd. Yet, every time I'd get close enough to start to reach out, someone or something would interfere, and she'd get even further away while I dealt with the problem. She made her way all the way out by the parking lot, where there was a beer stand where Pete and some of his friends were standing around talking. She finally stopped and let me catch up to her, and, this time, when she started to turn, she disappeared, completely vanished into the night and I realized I was with dreaming and woke with a cry that hurt me to the bone. After that, I couldn't go back to sleep. So, I got up and made myself a cup of coffee, went outside, and sat down on the single wooden chair I kept by the front door. And while I was pondering over what I need to do about a sleazy, little two-bit hood name Giancarlo Robbia, the morning sun peeked over a mountain top far away. My older brother and I love to watch movies on a big screen. The experience kind of takes us back to those childhood Saturdays where we could watch two and a cartoon. Back in the day, we kind of had the feeling that all of the movies we watched deserved the big screen treatment, and it was easy to see that the people who made them were proud of what they turned out whether it was one of those crazy B movie Sci-Fi things where the monster was wearing a latex suit, or something more elaborate like Gone With the Wind or Justice at Nuremberg. Nowadays though, anyone can stream a movie on their cell phone and watch it in the back of an Uber or in church. Hell, any piss ant with a cell phone can make a movie.
We're both retired and sometimes we have to wait a month before there is something we actually want to see, and we do get disappointed an awful lot, a whole lot more than we are used to. We saw a movie recently where one of the opening scenes featured an elephant's ass blowing wet feces all across the screen. It was a big budget movie too. I don't care how you cut it, it'd be hard to be proud of a movie where you coat the audience's vision with wet elephant shit before you even get started. And you're not really a movie maker when you do shit like that, but more of a performance artist. You know, like that Gaga woman who obscures her real singing talent by doing stupid shit like wearing prime sirloin cuts of meat as a dress for a Gala event. I'm kind of old school that way and was raised thinking that you don't wear cuts of meat to big events, you eat them, I don't care how important the event was either. I suppose it might have been a way to get discovered without the obligatory attendance at a P. Diddy party, but it comes off looking more like you're still trying to snag an invite. Besides, I'm guessing that there are still a lot of us willing to forgo such a shot at fame, wealth, and celebrity if it meant exchanging our boxer briefs for a skirt steak. Three of our most anticipated choices this past year were huge disappointments. For example, Martin Scorsese's The Killer's of the Flower Moon had such a great premise, but Scorsese forgot to film the middle third of the story, and then there was that cringey opening where he explained how he felt compelled to make the movie. I read the book, and it was a shameless glorification of J Edgar Hoover creating the fledgling FBI. I think maybe old Marty was just trying to get ahead of the story, so that his Hollywood buddies wouldn't really think that he working at the behest of law enforcement or something. Hell, in Hollywood nowadays, that would get you banished to making infomercials for air-friers or non-stick skillets. Next, there was Kevin Costner's Horizon: An American Saga Chapter I, another movie with an interesting premise that was totally screwed up by the lack of an ending. It was one thing to have so many side stories that you needed a remote control on rewind in order to keep up with what who was doing what to who, but then he didn't wrap up a single one of the many storylines before launching into a thirty minute preview of upcoming events from Chapter II, II, IV, etc., and never give us in the audience any kind of an ending to the movie we were watching. That is not how shit is done in the real world, or at least the real world prior to Covid. You show previews after the movie has ended, everyone knows that, or used to anyway. Most recently, it was Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis, another fascinating premise that F2 Coppola managed to screw-up by, in my opinion, trying to impersonate Quentin Tarantino. It was hard to tell what was going on half of the time, we were literally in the dark and all. It was like he was making a pastiche of subliminal messages in order to insert them into a movie and ran out of time and forgot to make the movie. This is the guy who made Godfather II, arguably the greatest movie of all time, a master manipulator of the narrative arc, so I know that he knows, or used at some point what a well developed and concise narrative does for a movie. I know there are going to be plenty of people who are going to say these movies are works of art and that these guys making them are geniuses. And I won't argue that point, in regards, to the three I mentioned. But there are people who think Jack Black is a genius, and he wrote lyrics to a Grammy nominated CD about spilling his seed onto a woman's butt cleavage. I could have wrote shit like that when I was twelve, and I damn sure weren't no genius. He also endorsed Joe Biden for president and pretended Biden was doing wonderful when they had to stick a tracking device in his underwear to keep him from wondering off. Things is you have to be careful slinging that term around or you risk wearing it out describing something that is the textbook definition of mundane. There is definitely something wrong with Hollywood these days. Which brings me to my original premise that Covid has killed Hollywood. I think it died in a hospital bed on a breathing machine. It started to have respiratory problems about the same time all of its stars retreated up into their barricaded castles in the hills and started filming themselves singing "Imagine there's no heaven,"and urging the rest of us to sing along with them at a time that the rest of us were wondering how we were going to wipe our ass without toilet paper. I think some shady young dude snuck in the hospital room and pulled the plug on Hollywood. And that dude was probably the first one on the scene to offer his condolences to the grieving family as the doctors wrote Covid 19 in the blank as the cause of death. Everyone at the funeral was murmuring amongst themselves it nothing was ever the same after the pandemic. The death did clear the way forward for people who believed that covering a screen with elephant shit was an act of genius, the critics who tripped over themselves to give a 98% approval rating to the movie Road Trip which was the second worse movie I've ever seen, the people who green-lighted the movie Strays I which was the worst movie ever made, and for the suits so afraid of Quentin Tarantino that they couldn't bring themselves to tell him to leave that fucking flame thrower in the shed so as not ruin his best opportunity to create a masterpiece. In truth, Hollywood died in a lot more ways than that, it died in as damn near many ways to die as there are death scenes in the movies. It was hit by a car on the way to meet a lover on the top of the Empire State Building so that they could attend a P. Diddy party together. It was poisoned by a power mad bank president when he was caught trying to launder money from Epstein's offshore bank account. It was shot and hung upside down after a bloody coup after telling the villagers that everything was hunky dory and those same villagers got tired of dining on the peanut shells the celebrities were tossing down from the parapets. It hung itself in a closet after looking in a mirror and seeing what it had become (which ironically was, a performance artist totally lacking in new tricks as all of its former fans moved on to the wunderkind who introduced the movie going public to the wonders of whale shit and Octopi engaging in oral sex in a sci-fi romantic comedy, a wunderkind who showed up to receive his Oscar wearing a tux made out of the recycled clothing found at a homeless encampment in Malibu. It died of a broken heart after realizing what it was in comparison to what it could have been. Old Hollywood has died in a variety of Hollywood endings, but its ghost still lingers on like a wet fart in a nursing home on Chile Bean Wednesday. And its malevolent influence will continues to be felt indefinitely until either the audience somehow wakes up from this bad dream that we are currently in, or somebody remembers, ironically from the movies, what it takes to bring a vampire down. Don "Johnny" Wilson sat impatiently in a wooden chair that looked like one of those old, dark oak chairs that we used to see in the old movies involving courtroom scenes. The weird thing was that there was a whole line of these chairs stretching as far as his eyes could see, lined up along a very tall stone fence that also seemed to stretch to the horizon, every one of the seats was filled with human beings of every race and age. On the other side of a two lane road, there was cracked sidewalk and a vacant field. There was a corner where another road intersected and a building on the corner. Across that street was an extension of a wall very similar to the one he sat before. There was also a lonely streetlight on that corner.
It seemed like he'd just opened eyes about an hour before, and he was suddenly there. Every one else looked puzzled and worried too. The sense of time passing felt kind of strange and more like that time was standing still. It reminded him of once when he was kid swimming in his grandpa's pond when he'd had a similar feeling. He was sitting on one of his grandma's a patchwork quilt on the grassy bank of the pond drinking a strawberry soda when Nova Hillsong, his grandpa's neighbor's daughter, emerge from under the surface of the pond, shake the water from her long, blonde hair and laugh. Nora was a senior in high school and the head cheerleader. Her body sheathed in a steel grey one piece bathing suit looked like the picture of the winged Venus he'd seen in an encyclopedia. He remembered that suddenly, all the sounds disappeared. Nora was smiling and saying something, but he couldn't hear. His little brother Tommy was tossing rocks into the water. Nothing. The weirdest feeling was that time had stood still. It only lasted a few seconds, but the feelingstayed with him all these years, and he had that feeling now looking at the line of chairs all lined up with their backs to the high stone wall that seemed to go on forever. His reverie was broken by an announcement that came over a loud speaker that was mounted the on streetlight across the street from where he was sitting. Someone had attached a bright yellow sign with the word REPENT written on it in blood red. A cracked voice suddenly came over the speaker saying, "Donald John Wilson report to the main gate immediately!" He sat up straight as he recognized his name." He was more than a little confused as he didn't know anything about any gate much less a main one. Perplexed, he looked all around him and noticed an old man dressed in an old timey looking police uniform sitting in a chair in front of the building across the street. The old man looked a lot like a character named Gus who used in sit front of a firehouse in an old time television show named Leave it to Beaver. The old man sternly pointed a bony finger in his direction and gestured for him to get up and start walking around the corner where the lamp post was. So he got up and started walking. Standing up was surprising because normally when he got out of a chair, the arthritis pain in his back made it almost life changing experience. This time there was no pain. And his knees seem to function a lot better than they had that morning while he was vacuuming his carpet. It dawned on him that he couldn't remember how he had gotten here. He was cleaning his small apartment and then, suddenly, he opened his eyes and found himself sitting in a chair. He walked twenty yards to the north where the corner was. The building looked like an Art Deco metal and glass store front from back in the Sixties. He turned the corner and saw, about a hundred yards away he could see two huge stone columns standing about thirty feet in the air and about that far apart with two, large, black wrought iron gates between them. There also looked to be a small group of people to the right side of the columns, some sitting behind what looked like three, large wooden desks. He noticed that there was chair just like the one he just vacated in the middle and facing the desks. I grew up in the 60s and the 70s, and I made pretty much every mistake that someone who grew up during the period could make. And I honestly believe that the people who were responsible for creating the chaos then, are the parents of people who sit up on their hill tops laughing at us now. I still bear a lot of hidden scars from that upbringing, but I consider myself lucky that after I had reached bottom, God had mercy on me and showed me the way out. I met Steve Brown after that epiphany. He hired me right out of college to teach Reading and English at John Muir Middle School, and I stayed there for the next 31 years. He handed me a set of keys my first day of work, and that night I actually cried while looking at them and holding them in my hand. I didn't believe I was anywhere near that trustworthy, and it fully hit me just how ashamed of myself I had been made to feel because of who I had been as a kid. What followed though were the best years of my life. My kids were young, my marriage was strong, and I was given the freedom to begin anew. Mr. Brown was the best boss I had ever had because he trusted us to do the job we were hired to do and gave us the freedom to do it. It was exactly what I needed at the time, some trust and the freedom to grow. He truly liked people, and before, I never knew bosses were allowed to do that. Mr. Brown also gets the credit for putting me on my true career path as a coach. I have to admit that back then, sometimes Steve annoyed me because when I was angry and venting about something, he never seemed to understand how angry I thought those things should have made him too. It took me years to learn how right he was about that stuff. He preferred to maintain a more balanced perspective and to always give himself the option of trying to find something more positive in the situation. I think it was his greatest gift. He chose to maintain a calm sanguinity over anger. It made him almost impossible to dislike. I say almost impossible because there is always some people who are going to hate you when they force you to hold a mirror up to their own ignorance. You can't be an administrator of any stripe without running into those people. What is admirable though, is when you can listen to their unfounded complaints and emerge without the feeling the need for vengeance. Another gift. When Roscoe Bessey died a few years ago, I remembered feeling infinitely sad and wondering where we were going to find someone to fill the hole he left in this community. I remembered thinking that there wasn't one single person who could do it, but a lot of people would just have take to take up a little more space. The thing that makes me the most sad about Steve's passing is that this old world got a whole lot more crazy the last few years. There's a lot of us who need good role models to show us how to go about our lives and not to get caught in all the anger, the hate, and the craziness. And while I feel a little more optimistic about how some of these youngins are proving themselves worthy, there still seems to be a whole lot more out there who would rather just pretend. That means we can ill afford to lose anyone who knew how to play that role, much less someone who played it so well. Throughout history water has often been used as a metaphor for human consciousness and in particular the subconscious. I think it is more than a little ironic that recently the water in the Seine River had to be tested and at least once deemed too polluted for human safety. The irony being, of course, being concerned with the furor surrounding the controversy the opening ceremonies of the 2024 Paris Olympics most of which took place on or near the river Seine.
The furor was created when the organizers decided to parody the Last Supper by using transgender actors and actresses in place of Jesus and the Apostles. They immediately denied doing it and then very strangely publicly gaslit the very people who leaped to their defense by admitting that they had done exactly what they were being accused of and then offering up a less than genuine apology. The ceremony was broadcast to 28.6 million people world wide. The ceremony was obviously meant to shock and provoke. It took months, if not years, of planning. The man hired to create it had a track record and every deed and idea had to approved by some very powerful people. There is also a pattern beginning to emerge of these large scale events of ties to anti-clerical imagery. That's also kind of ironic because the French Revolution, some of which was also parodied, was largely anti-clerical in nature. It was also an event that impacted human consciousness far beyond the 18th century and the boundaries of France. And, despite the French attempts to glamorize and glorify as a major step forward in human freedom was a hell of a lot messier and convoluted than the typical history book tells us. In most respects, it was downright savage, bloody and demonic in nature. Many of the leaders were some of the most hideously, evil people who have ever existed. The French remind me a lot of San Franciscans in this regard. Those who lived through the Summer of Love have a nostalgic longing for the time and have remained in an ostrich like awareness of the fact that the counter culture of the Sixties, to a large degree, was a creation of the very government that they were protesting against. The origin of the French Revolution was largely created and funded by the Phillip II, the Duc d'Orleans, the king's brother and the people around him. If I remember right, there was only one prisoner in the Bastille on the day it was supposedly liberated, an old man who lived there because he could not acclimate himself to the outside world. The true fruit of the revolution was the gruesome and bloody nightmare of the Reign of Terror which led to Napoleonic Wars, World War I and eventually the Holocaust. The events were of such a nightmarish quality, that some historians blamed it all on an outbreak of hallucinations caused by a moldy wheat crop. In comparison, the LSD in San Francisco was first introduced via a CIA sponsored program at the behest of the so-called MK-ULTRA program at Stanford University. There was also a CIA program called Operation Midnight Climax operating where prostitutes were hired to drop LSD into the drinks of their clients while agents hid behind two-way mirrors and filmed what happened. Ken Kesey, the acclaimed author of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, claims he got a job at the university so that he could pilfer the drug. The Acid Tests, which introduced the Grateful Dead into the nation's consciousness, occurred when Kesey and his minions would spike huge vats of punch with the drug and hold all night concerts in old warehouses. In an article in Reason magazine, one author states unequivically that while Kesey often gets the credit for creating the counter culture, "It literally was the CIA.* The events were chronicled in a book by Thomas Wolfe. Jack Kerouac, the OG of the Beat movement which morphed into the Hippie Movement, was first published in the Parisian Review, a CIA sponsored literary magazine used to promote American ideas in Europe. some have said that his stream-of- conscious novel On the Road was propagated to spread a sense of dissatisfaction among the youth that the agency could manipulate for its own purposes. There was an effort that also included modern art and jazz music. Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning were among those on the CIA payroll. The only major figure of the era to ever catch on what was happening was the Beat poet Alan Ginsburg who openly wondered whether he and his friends had been manipulated and played for fools. Not only the opening ceremony, but the actual events themselves promoted the idea that those people behind the Olympic production, interested in raking in the hundreds of millions of dollars that we just happen to have have laying around with nothing else to spend it on, are really only concerned with good healthy living and athletic competition. And while the rich and famous sat in the stands like Oriental potentates, those of us at home endured a virtual D-Day onslaught of advertising of everything from credit cards, insurance, and pharmaceuticals in order catch glimpses of the finely sculpted derrières of the female competitors in the skimpiest of outfits ever, whether they were track suits or ping-pong uniforms. (Seriously, ask yourself how many times did the female competitors in those nightly broadcasts look more like runway models than athletes, and how many times were they clothed in the skimpiest and tightest of outfits, and then how many times were the cameras placed directly behind the athletes as they stretched the fabric of those uniforms.) The 2024 Olympics with its controversial opening ceremony and its highly produced television was misdirection of the highest order. I was drawn to this opinion after reading Kazuo Ishiguro's classic novel The Remains of the Day. In the novel, the protagonist, a highly regarded butler placed in one of England's finest houses, witnesses a meeting his employer has convened in order to influence a French diplomat to agree to easing the restrictions placed on Germany by the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty. While reading the brilliant scene, it made me realize that such meetings among notables still occur to plan the future of this planet and its inhabitants. Yet, we never see them, in fact, the great majority of us never realize that they even happen. Instead, we nightly slouch in easy chairs spread out across an an increasingly anxious nation and plug into our virtual pacifier with its endless demands for us to buy things in order to satisfy our need to gratify oral and other fixations and driven mad by the mad dog fights that passes for the news these days. And the Olympics and the controversial opening ceremony? They were just the distraction of the day, as is the weird circus masquerading as a political campaign we've witness nightly for two years, a circus where the clown show is featured front and center, yet the audience is prohibited from laughing until the ring master with his green hair, his white painted face and vacant eyes holds up a sign giving them permission to applaud or scream obscenities. The water is not only polluted, it is becoming increasingly so, and at an ever quickening rate. But they tells us that there is no need to worry because, for only $99 a month, you can have gallons of pure, crystal water labeled as being bottled in Alpine streams delivered weekly right to your front door. * As far as I know, no-one has ever questioned the counter culture myth that Ken Kesey took a job as a janitor in order to steal the LSD from the program. I think it a lot more likely, given the purpose of the program, that he was given the LSD. "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 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 two 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. |
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