Life as a writer in the Age of Gold, as the later half of twenty-first century was being touted, wasn't very taxing. In fact, I could barely remember a time when it was. Most mornings I got up to an already made cup of pre-stirred coffee with two hazelnut creamers, walked outside and sat in the world's most comfortable deck chair, watched as the sun rose over the Sierra Nevada mountains behind me, and gazed out upon it's dazzling, golden reflection upon Lake Tulare, the largest freshwater lake in the world. Life was so easy that I often wondered why it was that way, and why I possessed the myriad of privileges that I did. It was Ouzel, the artist, who kept reminding me of the truth as he knew it.

       "THEY too get bored my friend."

       A few creative friends and I were gathered around a bar named The Argo which was owned by another friend of ours named Miguel De Santiago, a tall, bearded, very handsome pianist from Barcelona, Spain. When Ouzel mentioned the word THEY, everyone at the table, Vesuvia The Sexy, a red-headed lounge singer, Gordon the All Knowing, an English historian, Ouzel, Myra Rosas, a poet of uncommon beauty, Leo, the bartender, and myself, we all looked over our shoulders. It had been over ten years since the events known as the End of The Bickering, and in many ways things were so much better. Still, that anxious feeling that someone was always listening was pervasive, and I wondered if any of us would ever have a day without its ghostly presence. 

        We all knew that the ominous pronoun was as close as anybody in human history had ever gotten toward identifying whoever or whatever was in ultimate control. The proper noun Antediluvian had appeared suddenly out of nowhere to describe a group that once been known, in the first part of the century as the Corporate Elites. Gordon, who enjoyed the privilege of access to the deepest historical archives ever assembled informed us that the term was first used as a joke in one those ubiquitous late night talk shows that were once employed as means of social control. The term went 'viral', a well-used colloquialism, and a word that we now know simply meant a concept that was used like an aerosol to fertilize the collective consciousness. Gordon's first book The Unturned Stone, the one that led to his invitation to sit on the Council, was a brilliant analysis of the events occurring in the last half of the Twentieth Century and which ended in the year 2030 with the Good Vibration (The event was actually named using the title of the Beach Boys song a group which had begin by singing music associated with the surfing culture of California). The more formal term for the period was the End of the Bickerings.

      Everyone sitting at the table, and many millions of others all around the world had gotten up one morning and witnessed what looked and felt like a glitch in the flow of time. The sky suddenly shimmered, and our vision of the the world got blurry, and everything in it shook for exactly one second. Yeah, one second. Most of the population of the Earth and the majority of its man-made objects simply disappeared from sight. Things like houses, buildings, highways, cars, public schools, igloos, telephone poles, and planes were gone. Some things, a lot actually, remained it was true, and the main difference seem to be that the things that were left behind were the beautiful things, simple, of undeniable use and inspirational. For example, the Golden Gate Bridge still spanned the San Francisco Bay, the Statue of Liberty maintained its post in New York Harbor; the Space Needle in Seattle, the Eiffel Tower in Paris were still there The Cathedral of Chartres went one step further and actually elevated to a position five feet higher than the ground it once rest upon. 

     At the same time, all of the crime and drug infested housing developments, concrete banks, ugly billboards, the mansions of the greedy, fast-food restaurants, public schools, traffic lights, trash piles, the homeless encampments, and all of the graffiti covered, boarded up buildings in the inner cities were gone in the flash of an eye.  One of the strangest things that had happened was although most of the homeless were gone, it was not all of them, some were still there. It was later assumed that it was the drug users amongst them who had disappeared, but not even all of them. The strangest thing of all was that Washington D.C., the U.S. Capitol and most of the people who worked there were gone along with the White House, the President, and his political staff. Wall Street at noon was strangely silent and it was later determined that ninety percent of the denizens of Manhattan were  missing.

         "Elaborate on the idea that THEY get bored too, Amigo," said Gordon as held up his empty gin glass so that Leo could see it. " I think there might be some truth to the idea, but also think it could just as easily be that they need someone to record the truth, lest they forget it.

           Before Ouzel could respond to that, Myra took up the gauntlet as she usually did. "You are both partially right. They do get bored and in their idleness, they have chosen other people like us to find the truth for them. No more heavy lifting, for them. They are too powerful, too entrenched to ever be afraid of the truth again."

           I loved looking at Myra when she spoke, her jade eyes lit up and her voice was like the smoke from burning incense. I opened my palms and raised one eyebrow to ask, "Well, what then?"  She told me once that she loved the way I talked without using words (It's why I did it).

         So she flashed a grin my way before she answered, "Haven't any of you ever wondered why they are on this side of the divide and still in position to call the shots? Maybe they need the truth  we provide to sustain their position."

        While the others oohed and sighed in realization, I quickly glanced at Gordon, and it was obvious that it was a subject he really didn't want to get into in this setting. We had discussed the issue somewhat the last we had went fishing. He had some very strong opinions on the matter. In fact, there was a passage in his book where he had discussed the Pilates (He pronounced it pill lah tez)  a term he had he coined himself to refer to the political class of the first quarter of the twenty-first century). The name was a reference, of course, to Pontius Pilate the Roman governor of Judaea(36 to 26CE) who pronounced sentence on Jesus Christ. It was plainly obvious that Pilate didn't really want to condemn Christ, but willingly did so on behalf of the Roman Empire in order to maintain his privileged position as an interface. Gordon stated that the position was no longer needed as humanity on this side of the divide had "leveled up" after the Good Vibration.  He shared that he had found evidence that the rest of humanity hadn't disappeared at all. They were still there with all their toys and tribalism where they always had been. It was the rest of us who had translated into a supra-sensible higher level of consciousness.

        Myra had almost hit the nail on the head. Gordon had explained  to me, that they, whoever they were, needed the truth that we mined for them from our own subconscious which was now pretty much exposed to the elements. He mentioned that many, many years ago the elite class had discovered the truths contained in the ancient wisdom and decided to restrict excess to those truths, distract the general population with banalities and half-truth and outright lies,  keeping the information secret in order to gain advantage and power. Along the way, they realized they were missing out on advantages to be gained by the valuable knowledge they possessed. Some bright people amongst them realized they needed a lot more illumination to be able to forge portals through the dimensional interface large enough for them sneak through by hiding amongst the truly enlightened. The problem was that their oppression of the truth was working too well. So, in the middle of last century, they initiated a series of psychological operations designed to push the human evolutionary path forward at a rapid pace. They designed and propagated culture in a way that expanded the consciousness of some while continuing to oppress others. In their writings, they referred to those who didn't get it by the pejorative BREATHERS. The term was defined as being humans  who were seemingly incapable of showing a positive growth in consciousness, people who could easily controlled, easily manipulated, and willing to believe almost anything, no matter how absurd, to maintain their position in society while never taxing their mental/emotional states. 

             We woke up in this new world like newborn babies, I mean, except for the fact that most of us were older, and even maybe, a little more curious about life than most of our missing neighbors had been. It was a context thing. For example, I had traveled to the bar on my new bike. When I had gone to sleep that first night I just lay down on picnic table that had been in my back yard. When I woke up, I was in a bed in my new house, the one above the lake, the one that floated three feet off the ground. The funniest thing about it was, it was the house I often dreamed about, a simple, rustic affair kind of like a cross between a mountain cabin and a beach house, but a little more luxurious than either. Everything I needed was there, yet it very uncluttered and clean. I had two simple bedrooms upstairs, a living room attached to the kitchen divided by a long marble counter with four chairs, and a library/office space which doubled as a reading room and place to write. Then there was the porch that surrounded the house with one side facing out over the lake and another facing the mountains.

         That comfortable deck chair I mentioned earlier had no visible means of support. It looked like a little floating cloud and was as soft and fluffy as you would imagine a cloud would be. My bike had no wheels. It was silver and shaped like a fish; it had handlebars and a seat and pedals. It also moved very fast. The real  crazy thing was that I didn't really need it. I soon learned that I could just  close my eyes for a second and travel around as fast as I needed. It was decided by all thought to keep things kind of similar for while as the newness was a bit overwhelming. It was kind of like watching that old 200l Space Odyssey by director Stanley Kubrick where no one understood the ending because of the lack of context.  A decision made to keep things the same for a while to orientate ourselves to this new and strange environment, thus the bike with no wheels. It was also decided that we would be required to use the pedals. Indolence was frowned upon above most things and many believed that we would get very lazy unless we participated in some mandated some physical activity. The bike actually had a device mounted that recorded every pedal we took. I didn't mind, and neither did the others; it felt good to stretch our legs, and we often went on group cycles.

        Probably the weirdest thing I could mention was the only rule that THEY actually wrote down and distributed. It seemed THEY feared that we would close our eyes for longer periods, and they wouldn't know what we were thinking. Sleep as we once knew it was no longer required, yet we kept the night time with its procedures the same, with one big exception. We could not close our eyes for prolonged periods of time. When the lights went out, a camera mounted over our beds would activate and if we closed our eyes too long, or actually went to sleep (which was still possible, even if unneeded) an alarm would sound to remind us to keep out eyes open. We never knew if they could even enforce the directive, but we were not argumentative types by nature. I'm not sure if they ever knew that most of us had learned to day-dream long ago, and had we wanted, we could just easily sleep with our eyes wide open.

         When I arrived home that evening, I was more than a bit troubled, more so than I had been since I had arrived on this side of things. My son Jason was still on the other side. Gordon had mentioned that there was a group left behind there who were referred to as the 49 %. They were the people who were so close to transitioning, but were holding on to something that kept them from achieving the 51% shift in consciousness that would have placed them on the other side of the divide. My son was very strong willed, brave and intelligent. So intelligent that he thought he was strong enough to doubt the existence of God. I suspect that was what held him back. Gordon also informed me that there had long been small portals which made it possible to travel between the dimensions. He explained that all of those ancient myths which talked about facing dragons and other such monsters in subterranean worlds had been about such traveling. He also explained that THEY were doing their best to get all of their own  relatives out of lower depths before they shut down the portals. They assumed that shutting down the portals would guarantee their entrenched existence on the higher level.

     All I knew, was I needed to reach my son and convince him of the foolishness of his war with God. And I had to do it soon.

      I showered and went outside, sat crosslegged and meditated (with eyes open) on the porch facing a large new moon. I envisioned my daughter Julie rocking her nephew Billy, my grandson, to sleep on a hillside north of Fresno (babies were exempted from the closed eyes restrictions). I tried my best to manifest an image of my son being there in the morning when Billy awoke, but something kept obstructing the vision. Afterwards, I read a chapter from a book about Hunter S. Thompson, the man who created Gonzo journalism. I was researching to write a book on how the world of 1960's had opened the door to such a flood of lunacy, ignorance, and lies to where it had gotten to the point where you could not even acknowledge the difference between day and night without making someone angry.

     When I arose from the cross-legged position, I got up to the thought of how my knees no longer creaked and my back did not need stretching.  I went inside to my bedroom and thought about darkness and the lights turned off. I crawled into the most comfortable bed I've ever known, and keeping my eyes wide open, dreamed about a lady named Susie.

      "Shut the hell up, you stupid B#@&! I wasn't even looking at you. You're freaking crazy!"

    The woman, already visibly angry, lost all control at being called a b$%#, "At least, I'm not some pervy, muscle bound dumb ass jock who uses his gym membership to scope out hot, young, women while they're exercising!"

      "Hot! Girl? You a five at best! You know what that means, don't you? You average! You a mediocrity on your best day and probably one them crazy, narcissistic hoes who thinks that everybody else is staring at them. And you call yourself a girl. I bet you in your mid- thirties with a couple kids. If I was trying to pick up a hot girl in a gym, I damn sure wouldn't be wasting my time looking your way."

     The woman sneered sarcastically, "I didn't say everyone. I only said that you were, and I said it because you were checking me out. You waited until I started doing squats then peeked over here. Don't believe me? I'll show you the evidence! I sat my camera up to catch you guys in the act. I'll show you."

    "You sat the camera up? Hell, I walked in after you did." He stopped for a second to think and then quickly arrived at the conclusion, "Aha! You were already in here when I came in. Aha! You sat your camera up in order to get trap some dumbass so you could capture it own your phone. You're one them crazy ladies who likes to post up videos pretending to be offended!"

    The woman, realizing she'd been caught red-handed, started to stutter out a defense but only managed a very weak, "You don't know what you're talking a........" Then she looked down toward the ground and noticed that he had placed his own cell phone behind his back pack pointing directly where she was currently standing." Look! Your camera is pointing right at me. You wanted me to accuse you! You're one of those sick dudes who trigger women into reacting so you can video and try to make them look foolish!"

    It was at this point, the manager of the gym, a tall, Matthew McConaughey lookalike in an Adidas warm-up suit, came over the the scene and immediately set about trying to sort things out between the man and the girl. The man and the woman had calmed down considerably but still talked over each other in their efforts to tell him a version of even that, however fabricated, presented them in the best light. He wasn't having any of it though and made them speak, slowly one at a time. Afterwards, he thought about what they had said and then looked at their strategically planted cameras and understood what was happening right away.

     "This is fucking disgusting. Both of you should be totally ashamed of yourselves! What complete asses you are. You're just hypocrites. Just think about how your selfish actions reflect on others. In trying to get a few likes on your web page, you greatly diminish the problems that people are being going through on a daily basis. People see your shit and greatly diminish the real problems in our society that make life a hell of lot harder for the rest of us. Here, I want you to get your stuff get your stuff and get the hell out of my gym!"

     The manager bent over and grabbed the guy's packpack and tossed it toward him. Next, he went and got the girl's phone and handed it to her. He then pointed them toward the exit. Shamefaced, they both stumbled across the cluttered gym floor. The bright light of the sun outside entered the slightly dimmer light of  room as the door opened and then shut snapped shut behind them. As the manager began walking toward the desk, his slightly paunchy, balding, and bespectacled assistant came around the counter to question him on what had just happened.
 
     "Damn, Donny, you toasted them fools. That little speech you gave almost caused me to start tearing up. Hell, that lady was  damned near crying and that musclebound idiot's face was as red as a cherry."

      "Shit, I'll bet you that shame they felt probably lasted till the moment they got outside of the door. In fact, they'll probably be setting up their little scam inside of another gym in less than an hour."

        "You really think they're serial offenders?"

        "No, more like serial offendees!"

       "Offendees! Ha ha! That's a great one! You think that one up yourself?"

       Donny nodded, "Yep. Just now when you asked me that question." He pushed through the small, swinging gate to get behind the counter, but stopped suddenly and turned back to the trailing assistant."Did you get it all?"

       "Yep, every bit of it. I had it posted before the door shut behind them. It's really gonna make the gym come off looking great too. Like we really got ethics or something."

        They chuckled at the observation.     

      "Damnum! That lil skinny one sure can fight. She kicking that big girl's ass."

       "Sho is. It was that running start gave her the advantage. Caught that other un by surprise; if she had time to get ready, I spect we'd be watching a different fight."

       "Maybe, that lil gal hits a lot harder though; you can hear her hitting her all the way over hear.'

         My older brother Glen and I were standing outside the Reina Del Mar restaurant, our breakfast go-to, located right in the center of town. The two girls fighting were doing so right smack dab in the middle of the intersection of Rosewater and Main, the x-marks-the- spot middle of the dusty, little farm town of Concord, California. City leaders liked to claim that the town was the Tomato Sauce Capital of the world. They even said so on the sign they erected on  the exit off highway 53. The sign had a big, old, smiling red tomato wearing a golden crown and and  a purple robe. The city even had an annual  Miss Tomato Sauce Queen contest which coincided with the Pizza Sauce Parade marking the end of the harvest season.

   The two combatants were denizens of the homeless encampment currently located in the city park. The park, located about 100 yards south of where they were fighting, used to be called Rosewater Park in honor of one Millicent Rosewater the first mayor of the town when it incorporated back in 1923.  Legend was that it was the Rosewater family that had donated the land  for the park and had pushed through the beautification efforts  that led to its creation. It had been a nice little oasis at one time with several tall trees and a large grassy expanse dotted with some picnic tables, a swing-set, merry-go-round, a couple of slides and a remodeled restroom. On the northeast corner sat the hacienda styled Veteran's building with its brick lined arches, whitewashed walls, and red-tiled roof. In the center of the tiled courtyard, there was fountain dedicated to the men who had gone overseas to fight in World War I. Nowadays, the people of the town just called the park Dreamworld because it was the hub of most drug activity in the community and far from being an oasis, the place now looked like what it was, a homeless encampment littered with shopping carts, tents, plastic shacks, copious amounts of trash and a small community of dispossessed souls, largely said to be have been pushed out of the larger cities to the south. There were many rumors floating around that the officials of those cities paid for the train tickets to Concord and the tents in San effort to thin down their own herds of meth addicted outcasts and fringe dwellers.

       My brother and I ate breakfast at Reina's most every morning, and sitting inside the restaurant and watching the carrying-ons of the park people was better than most of the reality shows on TV, no, make that better than all them damn shows, if by better, you meant more interesting, or even, more simply just being real. Damn near all of the foot traffic across the street were the meanderings of the drug addicted and the dispossessed although I don't how we could refer to  them any longer as being dispossessed as their possessions stacked up into ever larger piles of  trash and it was obvious that most of them, along with their drug use, were being subsidized by the very people they looked upon with suspicion and disdain.  There is even one lady who we referred to as the Walking Lady who slept on a little strip of grass between the restaurant's parking lot and the sidewalk. She walked back and forth relentlessly. Glen and I thought that surely that someone in authority would eventually realize that you couldn't have that lady sleeping out by a parking lot and relentlessly pacing back forth. She clearly had some severe emotional/mental issues and needed help. The City officials kept saying it was out of their hands because the State said so. She hovered over the area like a figure from a bad dream. 

        I walked over to where Glen was parked and only then noticed that his passenger side was caved in, and he had bubble wrapped and duct taped the space where his window used to be.

         "What the hell happened here?"

       He walked around to where I was. The women were still fighting in the background and the walking woman would pass in and out of the picture as she paced back and forth in front of the restaurant. A crowd of park dwellers had gathered and yelled out their support for one or the other of the combatants. Some even mimicked the fighter's efforts which, had they not been so real, loud, and in color, could have leaped right out of Keystone cop movie.

      "Oh that. Someone backed into Vicky at the grocery store last week. I sent her up to get me a six-pack of Guinness and she come back with that."

         "What the hell's with the bubble wrap. I seen plastic windows before. I don't recall ever seeing one bubble wrapped before, and damn, man, how many rolls of duct tape you use on that sumbitch?"

         Glen's shoulders slumped a little as he explained, "When we moved the last time to where we live now, Vicky found a deal on bubble wrap. Let's just say she ordered a lot more than we needed. and as for the duct tape; you gotta use a lot of that shit to keep that plastic in there, road wind being what it is and all."

            "Why don't you just buy a new door at a wrecking yard?"

        He looked at me like I was dumb, "Intend to, asshole. Still looking for one. In the meantime, I gotta figure out what to do with all that bubble wrap. That shit's driving me crazy. Kids always popping them bubbles; then Vicky gets mad and starts screaming, at me and telling me to tell them to stop popping them bubbles." 

             "You do it?"

             "Yeah, but you know, kids gonna be kids."

             "Why don't you just throw that shit away?

            He didn't answer right away. He tried, but the sound of the cop's siren and the ambulance arriving was so loud, I couldn't hear. So, he stopped and waited.

             "You know Vicky. She's so tight that we're pumping shampoo and body wash out of a fifty gallon drum in my garage because she thought she could save five dollars by buying in bulk."

           "Hell, dumbass, just leave it in the back of your pick-up over night, and them people over there in Dreamworld'll take care of the problem."
   
            He thought about it for a while before answering, "You know that's the smartest thing you said in quite a long time. Look, one of them leaving in hand-cuffs, and the one that started it is leaving in  an ambulance. Right there's proof that life ain't fair."

          My car screeched a little as I opened it, and I turned back to answer, "I don't know how leaving in an ambulance is much better getting hauled off to jail. That one there will be out in an hour. The other one will have a headache and two black eyes for a week or better. Sides, who needs to see a couple crackheads fighting to figure out that life ain't fair."

         Walking Lady eyed  me suspiciously as I pulled out of the driveway.

            The next morning as I drove by the park, I noticed one of the tents had a bubble wrapped door and there was more bubblewrap curled around a palm tree next to the tent and the trashcan chained to the palm tree was completely incased in bubble wrap. Glen bought breakfast that morning because how well my suggestion had worked. It was the next morning though that shook us out of our routine as when we both arrived at the restaurant at the same time and when we got out of our vehicles, it looked like the whole damn park was covered in bubble wrap.

           "Don't look at me," Glen said as he exited his car. "We didn't have near that much. I don't know what the hell happened there."

            Before I even answered, I pointed over to where the walking woman was still asleep in her sleeping bag on the grass strip by the side walk. Her head rested upon pillow made of bubble wrap.

             "Apparently, that shit either breeds like one them deadly viruses, or else, what we have here is just a simple case of keeping up with the Joneses."

            

                 

       Norman Westbay passed away a few days ago.  Truth be told, I never talked to him all that much, just a few times in passing really, but the news of his death made me very sad. Later on in life, we became Facebook friends and found out that we kind of thought alike on a lot of things. This was probably because we grew up within two blocks of each other on the Southside of Corcoran. We didn't live out there because our ancestors were manor borne and bred or had staked out a claim centuries before. We came from migrants, people who moved into the area in search of better times; people who didn't mind getting blistered, sunburned, and dirty to find them. Yet, at the same time, my dad was probably the first  person who ever broke the ground of our yard in order to plant something in the entire history of the world.

        Norman and his friends were a few years older than me. He was older than my brother too. We were of that generation when the young men  were being shipped off to the jungles of Asia with the admonition that it was, "Kill to be killed" out there and our leaders didn't seem to be overly concerned over which one happened first. On the home front, a lot of the drugs that were floating all over the place at the time happened to be provided by our own government. They didn't us tell that at the time. I only found out about it much later, read about it in a book.

        I came out of the Southside with a chip on my shoulder. Most Southside kids did. It's still there, by the way. It's the how the good  Lord's going to identify us Southside kids when we get to heaven.

     My dad once sent me to a parts store to get a piece of packing because he was working on fixing our water pump. He was all greasy and didn't want to put his hands in his pockets, so he told me to just charge it. I went and got it, and it cost thirty something cents. There were four men there when I told the man behind the counter to put it on Dad's bill, two on one side of the counter and two men sitting on stools. I will remember until the day I die how those men looked at me when I told the man to charge it. I feel no hatred for any of the men; I never hated my dad for it either. It was just a moment of great clarity where the universe let a young boy know his exact position in both the world at large and the smaller hierarchies of a small farm town. There were probably times in my father's life when that thirty something cents could have been the difference between success or failure.

      Lawns were manicured on the North side of Barnum Avenue. The only curbs on the Southside ran around Mark Twain School. Men over there wore white shirts and ties in the middle of the week. The only time men wore a shirt and tie on the Southside was at a funeral or at church on Sunday. 

     The differences were often very subtle, and even almost non-existent at times. Yet, there was no getting away from the fact that some of my immediate family had eaten possums and squirrels when they were young, and anybody who would eat one of them nasty ass critters would have had to have to have passed down something special in their DNA, something that distinguishes us from those whose ancestors were several generations removed from that particular source of protein.  I'm seventy years old and I can still sense the condescension in someone's voice when they are talking about completely unrelated, and I can see it their eyes from across the room.

      Norman and his buddies were our heroes growing up. They rode around in cool looking vehicles with good looking females at their side, but mainly because they they didn't appear to take shit from anyone, especially those people wearing white-shirts and ties in the middle of the week. They taught us in their cheerful defiance, that  it wasn't wise to trust an over-zealous preacher any more than a car salesman with a drinking problem. My brother told me that when he was a freshman, he had to sneak around the high school to keep from ending up being stuffed in a trashcan. Once in his PE class, the seniors were surrounding him, and it was Norman who stepped in and told them to leave my brother alone. That's pretty much what it took to become a hero on the Southside, to identify as one of us when the cool thing would have been to step away.

    Most people are mistaken in their understanding that consciousness works like a river, constantly flowing. It's more like a collection of individual photos moving so rapidly that their projection seems seamless. As one scene appears, the next is already hovering above it, and they transition at such a fast rate that they actually dissolve into each other with only the minutest change taking place. Eventually though, those changes add up and you find yourself in a completely different scene.
   
        As baby boomers, we shared a world with the likes of such diverse characters as Theodore Cleaver, Charles Manson, Lee Harvey Oswald, Davy Crockett, Mick Jagger, John Kennedy and his brothers, Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendricks, Buzz Aldrin, Robert Young, Minnie Pearl, Red Fox, Elvis, Richie Valens, Martin Luther King Jr., Jane Fonda, Malcom X, Willy Mays, Cesar Chavez, and a whole host of others, fictional and real, who helped shaped our perception of reality.

      On the Southside of Corcoran, we shared a seemingly smaller world but one actually much bigger because of its proximity, wherein people like Pops Ramirez, Polly Payne, Mr. Coffman, Howard Loo, August Baker, Sixto Miranda, Ruth Dougherty, James Reed, and Mr. and Mrs. Reed loomed large. Their family stories were our stories, and their struggles to survive became our mythologies. 

      There's a young girl who was recently offered, if I remember correctly, four million dollars to sell a T-shirt brand that basically dismissively called for my generation to hurry up and die. We are doing exactly that, but not because of the efforts of one stupid little girl. It's just the way that this world works. My dad was a part of what was known as the Greatest Generation. He lived just long enough to witness a world that not only didn't have a clue as to what that meant, but one that actually somewhat ridiculed his generation's efforts to save the world from tyranny.    

       I hate to see any of the people of my generation die, especially the ones I knew personally. Dylan warned us early on about the harsh nature of this living, he was talking about our parents, but his words were an ominous prophecy of the current state of affairs,  "Don't criticize what you can't understand," and "Get out of the new one [road] if you can't lend a hand." I guess we were never meant to understand any of this current insanity anyway. 

        I hate it even more to see someone pass on who shared in what it was like to grow up back then on the Southside of Corcoran. Especially someone I looked up to and admired. It makes me feel pretty fucking lonely.     




       
        

        

         

          

     This morning I walked out of El Capitan after having breakfast with my brother and the homeless woman who sleeps on a little strip of grass by the parking lot dropped her pants down to her ankles. She not only mooned the cafe's regulars, but the people at the drive-in across the street got to view the Full Monty. The speakers on the lamp posts were playing, "A little ditty about Jack and Diane," which gave the whole situation something of a surreal feeling as it were taking place in darkened, smokey New Orleans' strip club. Not one of the fancy ones right off Bourbon Street, but further back in one of those dives where the strippers' stomachs are all ripply as a washboard and their sagging breasts lie flat against their chests as they awkwardly undulate to a two-piece jazz ensemble while chewing gum.

      A young guy was walking down mainstreet with a German shepard   on a leash and even the dog seemed to be disgusted by the sight of the woman. The young guy was triggered, and he yelled at the woman, "Pull yo damn pants up, Bitch. That's nasty!" She paid him no never mind and just pulled a crumpled joint out of somewhere and lit it up. Me and Steve just stood there transfixed and more than a little bit nauseous. It's hard to acknowledge that we were too jaded to be properly outraged by such a sight, but, in truth, we have become more than a little bit inured to such strange occurrences. Once you've had to change your mother's diapers while watching her slowly wither away, nothing much that life offers up seems to penetrate down to the level where it might register as being too painful to endure.

     Besides, it wasn't the craziest thing we've seen since we've been sharing breakfast at El Capitan. That could be the time the crazy girl with the half shaved head and one red shoe who dropped her pants and stuck her ass in some bushes and did her business right there in full view of anyone who had the misfortune to see it. Or, it could have been watching the one legged meth-head pushing himself down main street in the broken wheel-chair that he had stolen from my mom's house the night before. Fact is ever since our crazy governor and his goofball minions have designated our downtown park as New Amsterdam, there's way too much crazy stuff going on around there to take much notice.

        I've been having an internal war since those tents starting popping up in the park like mushrooms after a rain. I'm outraged, but at the same time, I'm torn by a desire to feel something akin to empathy. When it all started out, I was bouncing back and forth between the two polarities of feeling empathetic and feeling anger, with the two little angels on my shoulders bickering and calling each other names. Now, it's a full-on wrestling match with brass knuckles and steel toed boots. I don't feel the need or the urge to punish the woman, but damn if I don't believe that if something about the situation is not done pretty soon, shit is going to get real freaking real as the meth continues to do a number on all their brains. Someone is bound to get hurt; people have already been hurt. People don't seem to be taking notice of all of the weird shit; maybe because of the even weirder stuff going on in the world at large.

      I love this crazy little town, but damn if she don't break my heart every time I turn around. She don't look anything like she did when we were younger. Back then, she got  all dolled up every now and then and, "Every time I looked at her, I couldn't speak because, I couldn't get my mouth to move, that's how beautiful she was." Now, her one faux silk dress is grease stained and has a threadbare patch on her ass, her bleached blonde hair never gets brushed,  her teeth are nicotine stained and her breath smells like a glass of two day old Modelo with a bunch of cigarette butts swimming around in it.

       The eminent psychologist James Hillman once said that when we get old its not so much that we lose our strength and energy as much as we lose our illusions. I don't have any illusions anymore, ran completely fucking out, so now I'm starting to look at life as if I'm stuck right smack dab in the middle an episode of The Twilight Zone written by Rod Serling after he suffered a bad case of hemorrhoids caused by month long cocaine binge. Carl Jung wrote in one of his books about how the things we hate the most about other people are often the reflections of our repressed selves that we see in their actions and words. I used to write about this little weed I saw one time at stop-sign on the outskirts of Shafter. The wind kept blowing it over, but it kept popping back up every time. That little weed's zest for life inspired me at a time that I most needed some inspiration. My wife had left me after thirty-one years of marriage and my father had lost his mind and died on his bathroom floor after stepping out of the shower. I had to feel around to check for his pulse. It wasn't where it usually was. The sight of that naked homeless lady wasn't anything compared to the sight of my father lying lifeless on that cold bathroom floor.  

        My beloved mother died last April all alone in a hospital bed in her TV room while I worked on a crossword puzzle in the living room. I had to close her eyes and wipe the drool from the side of her mouth. An hour later, I watched as my daughter helped carry her body out wrapped in a sheet because the gurney couldn't handle the front steps. I have arthritis in my right shoulder, so I couldn't help much, besides I have would have probably dropped her because of the state that I was in. Illusions are luxurious things when you think about it, they help soften the hard corners and jagged edges of life. You can't sustain a smile without them. I wish I'd had the sense to have kept a few of them around, or that there was some way of manufacturing them out of stuff you have on hand like old memories, photographs, a good Scotch, or a favorite song or book. Sadly, life don't work that way. I know that one of the reasons that woman this morning upset me so much, was that she reminded me that eventually, if the wind kept blowing long and hard enough that the tiny weed would have to succumb to the gravity of the situation.  I see some of myself in her desire to just pull a blanket over her head and sleep. It's the kind of thing that most of us will have to to fight against at some point in our life. Her giving up the fight for verticallity is troubling, as is the willingness of those other denizens of the park doing the same.

         I hope and pray that someday soon my brother  Steve and I will be able to come out of El Capitan in the morning and see some kiddos laughing and playing in the park and hear the speakers on the lampposts playing some Miles Davis from the Kind of Blue album, you the know the one with Bill Evans on the piano. And then, a white dove will fly down with an olive leaf in his beak and lay it on the hood of my car. I'll pick it up, examine it, and know that solid land is out there somewhere not too far away. We'll both look at the dove and whisper in unison, "Thank you."

        Then the dove will cock his head to one side and answer by cooing, "Da nada." I least that's what I think it will mean. I don't speak dove talk very well.

       The other day I came out of El Cap after eating breakfast with my brother and the speakers on the lampposts were playing "Frosty the Snowman". I've always liked the fact that they play music downtown. It makes me think like there's a movie soundtrack to life in Corcoran.

       That song always reminds me of watching the animated movie with my family around Christmas time when I was a lot younger, back before my parents grew old and died and my life took a significant turn for the worse, exiting the one lane mountain road leading upward to heaven and  somehow ending up a passenger on a nitro powered Greyhound bus speeding down the six hundred and sixty-six lane highway to hell. I know that  sounds more than a tad bit melodramatic, but all I'm saying is that I feel like everything was going fine and then, suddenly, a huge flying elbow came out of nowhere and knocked the rose colored glasses I was wearing off of my head and clean out of the ring up into the twelfth row of the arena where they landed at the feet of a toothless bald man wearing a Rowdy Roddy Piper T-shirt that exposed his hairy belly. He not only stepped on the glasses, shattering the lenses, but held them aloft so I could see them. Yeah, it's like that. People always tell me how crazy life is now, but truth is, life has always been freaking crazy. It's built into the blueprints of the situation, like being born into a world where no ever really seems to understand why we even exist in the first place. 

     I went to Visalia and watched a movie that had just come out that very afternoon. It began with an elephant shitting all over two guys who were trying to push a truck with the elephant on the back up a hill. Within a couple minutes the movie got markedly worse when a scantily clad young lady urinated on a naked fat guy lying on a floor. I wish with all my might, I could say that I left the theater after such an auspicious  beginning, but I didn't. You see, I've become somewhat jaded and wanted to see what could top that shit. However, I felt the same way leaving that theater as I did after watching the movie The Joker. I knew The Joker was an omen, a harbinger of things to come, a feeling that was vindicated not long after with the nightmare that was the summer of 2020.

     I saw a video the next morning that listed the Top Ten Christmas Movies of All Time. At the top of the list were the Home Alone movies and Bruce Willis's Die Hard. Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, which actually is one of the best Christmas movies ever, had fallen all the way down to tenth place right behind The Miracle on 34th Street. My daughter called me later and said her family was going to watch Home Alone that evening. I asked her if it bothered her any that the laughter in the movie was based on the suffering of the two bumbling thieves; she just laughed, insinuated that the question was crazy, and said no. Later on, I read a comment under another post where a guy said that he would defend to the death the fact that Die Hard was a Christmas movie, and he didn't care what anybody else had to say on the subject. That comment was on a post that was more of a bio about some young athlete and didn't have much of anything to do with Christmas, but apparently he felt compelled to let his feelings be known on the subject. There was another list ordering the best Christmas movies which listed Tangerine as the fourth best Christmas movie of the year. Tangerine is about a transvestite prostitute who gets out of jail and staggers across the underbelly of LA in search of the pimp who done her wrong. The author of the list references the film's humor. It is about as funny as having a toothache during a prostrate exam taking place on a bed of nails, and had very little, if anything, to connect the story to the birth of Christ.

     I know that these internet lists are created by people who are willing to play fast and loose with truth in order to get clicks.  I also have to admit that I used to watch Keven torture them two dumb fucks in Home Alone with as much relish as anybody else. I have binge watched The Sopranos, Deadwood, Rome, and that bleakest bitch of all, The Wire. I watched most of The Game of Thrones even after they killed the Sean Bean character off in one of the earliest episodes, and I knew that no good would come of it. I've watched Pulp Fiction so many times I can quote whole scenes from memory. I've wished the characters (Casino, Good Fellas) played by Joe Pesci so much ill will that when something bad actually happens to him, I'm going to feel kind of guilty.

     In spite of all that, I feel kind of good about the fact that I can still understand the vast difference in calling Home Alone a Christmas movie and calling It's a Wonderful Life a Christmas movie, and I marvel at the fact that so many people around me no longer can. I don't think it makes me any better than other people, but it does cause me concern. The human ability to justify bad behavior is the very thing that Jesus speaks about the most. It's why we don't object to the $125 million contracts for quarterbacks playing a game, or the fact that every damn so-called reality show is scripted. I'm as guilty of it as anybody.

      I think the real message in the story of Christ concerns the role that our relationship to infinity plays in the story. I do not believe that humanity will ever be able to break off a piece of the universe, place it under a microscope and suddenly be able to explain the meaning of existence. That means that we can only learn about it by trying to understand what the human condition has to do with our position between infinity and the finite, and that will only come from the revelations we encounter as our perceptions expand to embrace a more transcendent and larger view of reality, the kind you get when you actually think of such things in lieu of watching scenes of people killing or torturing each other on a movie set with a Christmas tree in the background.

      Sometime in the not to distant future, when It's a Wonderful Life has fallen off the list of The 100 Greatest Christmas Movies completely, Hollywood will suddenly awaken to the fact that it can quit beating around the bush and just remake the Christmas story to it's own liking. It will use product placement and viewers will be treated to the sight of    a Dentine chewing, wise cracking, Jesus popping open a Coca Cola and his family being turned away from an overbooked Hilton by a bellhop played by Rob Schneider. Tom Hanks, of course, will  play Joseph with Jennifer Lopez portraying the pregnant Mary. There will be diapers, aspirins, energy drinks, chicken dinners, and the McDonald arches situated beneath the neon star of Bethlehem lit up by General Electric. Bruce Willis might even make an appearance as a disgruntled ex-cop seeking to thwart the evil intentions of King Herod played by Joe Pesci. Eddy Murphy will narrate as the voice of the donkey complaining about the journey to Bethlehem. I am hoping however that the Sean Bean character will keep his head this time, that there's no elephant covering people with shit and there's no naked girl holding a sprig of mistletoe while peeing on a fat man. But, most of all, if anything like this ever does come to pass, I hope I have the good sense to get up and leave.

     I drove home from San Diego the other day with my oldest daughter. When I mentioned my desire to to write something about that aforementioned Christmas list of movies, She advised me not to. I value her opinion, and it almost persuaded me to give up on the effort. I bought a new mattress, and it is the kind that has a remote that allows me to sit up in bed and read. This morning when I woke up, I picked up a book from my lamp table entitled The Consolation of Philosophy. The first chapter was about defending unpopular ideas and focused on the story of the death of Socrates. The author mentioned that he bought several post cards of the 1786 painting by David of the death of the philosopher who had been sentenced to death for telling his version of the truth. The author mentioned that when looking at one of the postcards, he saw, "The behavior depicted contrasted so sharply with my own. In conversations, my priority was to be liked rather than speak the truth. A desire to please, led me to laugh at modest jokes like a parent on the opening night of a school play." 

       I recognized myself. I don't even wish I was as honest and steadfast as Socrates. It's way too much damn work, and people didn't really like him because he was always in their face getting on them about shit. I know on the inside, I'm still going to laugh whenever Joe Pesci gets hit in the head with a brick, or the anvil lands on Wiley Coyote's head. I just don't need to see it any more, and more often than not look for something more edifying to watch (which is a task unto itself). I'm hoping someday though, I'll quit doing that altogether and completely cut Hollywood out of my life and get serious about reading all these damn books with which I've surrounded myself. 

     For right now though, I'll just settle for knowing It's a Wonderful Life needs to be at the top of any list of top Christmas movies followed in no particular order by A Christmas Carol, and The Grinch that Stole Christmas (animated version). And Home Alone and Die Hard, ​well, you know,




         

    

       

       

         

      It has become way too easy for us to ignore the reality of the infinite cosmos in favor of the near and the finite. I taught thirty-one years in a public school, and the subject of how to live in an infinite universe almost never came up. The fact that I taught 7th grade Language Arts only serves to underscore the fact that our young are not being taught to basically ignore the most fundamental question of the human condition - how are we supposed to relate to the oft neglected the truth  of infinity

    I learned about concept of Metaxy after reading a thesis by a guy named Glenn Hughes on the philosophy of German political philosopher Eric Voegelin who believed that the principal duty of our thinking is to, "Keep in mind the encompassing context of the Whole of reality within which thinking and living incur," with Metaxy referring to the idea that human beings dwell in  a space in-between the infinite and the finite that gives rise to the human race inhabiting a perpetual state of tension because of the polarizing thinking involved. How are we supposed to think and act when we are living in an infinite universe, yet must constantly deal with finite material concerns.

      Voegelin believed that for any artistic creation to stand the test of time, it had to reference both the existence of the cosmos and mankind's relation to it. In his view, all of the garbage we currently have on our TV sets, movie screens, bookstore shelves, and radio airwaves is just so much distraction from the real thinking that we need to do in order to align ourselves to some kind of a transcendent reality.  For a while, I believed it was all just about culture and the creation of art but finally wised up to the fact that this thinking would apply to every human endeavor, even something as seemingly mundane as playing basketball.

      We used to understand that playing sports were all about achieving  some form of transcendence, that is, before it all got corrupted by the influx of money and politics. On every basketball court there are ten individuals each with their own history, motives, skills, egos, and self-doubt running around in a state of flux. They do their best to score points for their own team and deny the other team members a chance to score. Whether they know it or not, the players are out trying to prove something, to others like their coaches, friends, or family members, but mainly to themselves. 
      

       Last night, while standing in front of a urinal at a Chick-Fil-A in San Francisco, I had a face-to-face meeting with God. I had entered into the restroom and found that someone had plugged the toilet with toilet paper and flushed the toilet several times making a huge mess. The manager was in there with an employee cleaning it up and commiserating upon the stupidity of human beings. The urinal by the sink was relatively clean, so I stepped into the stall. I was staring at the blank white wall when suddenly God spoke, "You're not getting any younger, Doug."

         I hesitated for a moment, thinking, 'Why here? Why now?' When I finally spoke, I answered, "I'm seventy. What's your point?" I noticed that the two men had quit their bitching and eyed me suspiciously. I decided that it was probably a good idea to move the conversation to internal dialogue mode figuring that God would catch on and do the same.

        "No real point, just suggesting that in few years, you and everyone you know will disappear off of this planet as if you had no more substance than a summer mist. You might want a pay a little more attention to things happening around you."

            I hesitated again, thinking that he might be trying to tell me something important without saying it directly. You know, the way he normally communicates with people. For example, instead of saying don't build a temple to Baal, he'll wait until you build it and put on a barbecue where you sacrifice the first born males of the entire city, make a bunch of speeches saying how great your shit is, then he suddenly sends an earthquake that not only destroys the entire city but a toilet seat flies up out of the smoke and dust and miraculously lands around your neck, so you just end standing there gaping with flies buzzing around your mouth looking monumentally stupid. 

          "Are you saying that there's going to be a test at the end?"

        He didn't answer. I guess he figured he had more important things to do. While I washing my hands though, the employee looked up from his mopping and wished me a happy holiday. I came out of the restroom and decided that from there on out, I was going to pay more attention to what was happening around me. I had always had a sneaky feeling that the universe was trying to tell me shit, but I treated the pronouncements like they were coming from a boozy uncle with garlic breath, an annoying habit of calling me Sonny Boy, and enormous amounts of gray hair growing out  of his ears. I figured that my lack of curiosity probably accounted for why God chose to approach me in a nasty restroom in San Francisco in the first place, catch me with my guard down, so to speak. I mean I used to go to church all of the time when I young, but I was never there mentally. I mean a few times, I even brought in a transistor radio and ear phones to listen to a Giants' game. That little ploy was ended when I got caught up mumbling the lyrics to Inna-Gadda-Da-Vita when the preacher was delivering a sermon on forgiveness. My mom snuck up me and slapped a pair of those round, pink colored glasses that John Lennon used to wear right off of my head. I looked around and everyone was laughing at me except the preacher who had turned cherry red with anger. I didn't say nothing, but inside my head I fairly screamed, "What about forgiveness, Asshole?"

            Returning to the restaurant, the first thing I noticed was a group of young kids who were just there hanging out. One of them, a fashionably dressed boy about twelve, wore a red hat that said "No fucks to give" written across the front. He was wearing sun glasses and was clearly doing his best to act out the message on his hat. Every now and then, him and his friends would scream loudly or do something stupid to let everyone in the place know that they had no fucks to give. Stuff like that always makes me sad. I have no reason to complain though, the stuff that I did at that age was pretty dumb too, but I learned my lessons and got scarred up pretty badly in the process. I look ok in public, but I still bleed from some open wounds, and at night, when I'm alone watching TV sitting on my sofa in my underwear, I grieve sometimes and sit there dumbfounded, wondering how I got from point A to point B. I even wrote a song about it. Some of the lyrics go:

         The thing that I remember most
         As the rain kept coming down
         We never really tried that hard
          Try and find some common ground

          But the thing that's so amazing
          Is that I've been all around
          Now, I'm stuck here all by myself
          In this lonely little town

          The song's about my ex-wife leaving me after thirty-one years of marriage. The fact that she left me doesn't surprise me nearly as much as the fact that she waited so long to do it. It don't do no good to grieve though. Ain't got time to waste like I did when I was young. I've resolved to pay more attention to life as it unfolds all around me. It's a pretty amazing thing when you think about it. I have this beautiful little granddaughter named River. I watch the videos of her learning how to use a slide by herself every night before I go to bed in hope that they'll help me have good dreams. Everything she does fills me wonder, but I also feel sad too, knowing how life can so casually break your heart like a disloyal girlfriend looking for a guy with a nicer car.

        So, if you see me out driving somewhere, and you see my head turning circles like one of those owls hidden in the rafters of a rundown barn, or one of them pictures of Jesus where his eyes follow you everywhere, don't let it creep you out none. God told me to pay more attention, and I'm just getting in some practice.

     I was sitting in the Arena Bar and Grill in Simi Valley the other night listening to the most amazing cover band I have ever heard. There were four dudes in this band; three of them were kind of on the young side, I mean if you consider being just on the under side of forty being young. I do. The bassist though looked liked he'd died and been brought back to life on more than one occasion. I don't say he was old and wrinkled looking, but that dude made Keith Richards look like he'd been using skin care products all his life and not the cheap shit either. Old or not, that sumofagun could sure play his bass guitar. He handled that thing as smoothly as John Travolta handled Karen Lynn Gorney on the dance floor in Saturday Night Fever.

      As good as the band was, and it was very good, it still took several songs before I relaxed enough to let go and start enjoying the music. That led me to thinking about how tightly wound I've become since the devil-may-care days of my youth. And that made me start thinking of all the hard, painful realities I've been dealing with the last few years, and that, in turn, led to the realization that life in general sure can be a cold-hearted bitch. The large room was full of people of all ages, sizes, and ethnicities. The occasion was meant to raise money to help the family of  a young mother who passed away from liver disease a couple of weeks before. Everybody appeared to be enjoying the music, but it was still easy to see the tale-tell signs and erosion of hope in their eyes, and the sadness etched on their scarred bodies. There was a beautiful black-haired woman in a short, skintight black dress who was working very hard to cover-up the extra pounds she carried around her middle, a hard-looking biker dude with tattoos all over his neck and cold, ball-bearing eyes, and a bleached blonde matronly looking woman with one side of her head shaved and tatted, wearing a dress much too short for a lady of her age and girth. The only ones there who appeared unscathed by life's vicissitudes were the children out dancing on the dance floor, happy, yet slightly apprehensive from trying to comprehend all of the antics of their elders.

      Earlier that morning, I was forcefully reminded about my mother's passing. Someone had broken out a Capri-Sun drink in a little plastic pouch, and it reminded me of the apple-sauce packets that we kept in her refrigerator to feed her as she lay dying. She passed away last April, and I'd been hiding from the memory of those bleak days like a kid playing hide-and-go-seek for money. But suddenly, the image of her laying in bed struggling to hang on to what little bit of life she had left hit me right between the eyes like a sucker punch. It took some serious and frantic gymnastics with the TV remote before I found a college football game interesting enough to distract me.

      For over two years, the small park in the center of Corcoran has been taken over by the homeless. I go back and forth between anger and empathy over the sad state of affairs. It seems like every street corner in the certain sections of Hanford, Visalia, Tulare and Fresno have been taken over by people with cardboard signs expressing their hunger and/or desire for alcohol and drugs. We, the supposedly average citizens, become immersed in a culture of death and dying. In California, we got ourselves a Governor who wants to make our once beautiful state into the abortion capital of the United States. I don't think he believes in any of the reasons that people  put forth to argue for abortion as much as he wants to use the issue for his own political purposes. The politics of the issue have taken over to the point that neither side can see there is a lot of things that can be done to mitigate the myriad tragedies of unwanted pregnancies that people could agree upon without compromising any their own beliefs.

        I believe the whole thing, the divisiveness over the abortion issue, the homelessness, the transgender issues, in fact, everything that polarizes society, is both political and purposeful. I think that they want it to be that way. They do not wish us to ever come together and view our willingness to resolve issues by talking them out as a danger to their hold on power. Who are they? The people who benefit most from the current state of affairs. The rest of us are left to our own devices to make do as best we can.  I'm still slightly unconvinced about the whole Covid narrative, but firmly believe that there was absolutely no reason to rip the hems off of the social garment. Since when has it ever been a good idea to tear society apart in the face of major existential threat? Yet, that is exactly what happened. Instead of tightening things up or battening down the hatches, we emptied out the jails at the same time we defunded the police, we created sanctuaries for the homeless in every public space  to serve as a constant reminder about the hopelessness of life. We legalized drugs and ended cash bail, releasing criminals back on the street almost as quickly as they committed their crimes. Our Governors wrested control of the states from out of the hands of our duly elected officials and put us all in jail for our own good, or so they said. It has become a major social faux-pas to mourn the loss of free speech which now apparently exists only for the benefit of the people who advance one side of the narrative, or who have little or no common sense.

        It's a scary place this modern world, full of scary people and stupid ideas, bloated like a parking lot full of dead cows in the summer sun, floating around with all the grandiose pomposity of the Hindenburg. The stench  of decomposition fills the air and the babblers, singing like a choir composed of cartoon squirrels, tell us that the aroma is just that expensive perfume that one Kardashian girl wears to cover up the perspiration she is profusely sweating because one day, she knows with all the certainty of death and taxes, there will be a time when a little boy points at her as she exits a limo, who will say, "But Mama, she's not wearing any clothes," and the whole world will suddenly awaken from its narcoleptic slumber and see her and her siblings for who and what they really are.

      Solutions? I have none, just to try to get as close as I can to some sort of truth and live life where I cause no pain. That's hard to do nowadays because everyone is so sensitive and entitled, a hell of a lot more entitled than we used to be. They taken away our right to laugh at shit, and that's the biggest loss of all because if you can't laugh at life, all it leaves you is the tragedy.

      Nope, I don't know what the answer is. I just know that whatever this shit is, ain't it.