"Look over there. That's Danny Dozier. That man ain't been right in the head since Jeannie died four years ago."

     "Damn, Judy. He still look fine though."

     "It's them jeans, Karla. Every man looks good in Wranglers and boots. Who's he think he is with that long hair?"

        "Member back in the day when he always wore his hair long?"

        "Hmph. Just trying to look younger than he is."

        "Well, you might not like it, but it's working for me. You just mad because of that one night you were trying to flirt with him, and he left with Jeanne."

        "Damn it, Karla! Why you gotta go bringing that up? It happened almost fifty damn years ago. Besides, I just have never cared much for him. Too damn, opinionated for one thing."

          "Hell, I remember when all you did was talk about him!"

           "Well, Penny Kayser, I don't remember inviting you into this discussion. This here's between me and Karla. She's been telling everyone for years that the only reason I don't like him now is that he jilted me at the homecoming dance and took off with that mousy little Jeanne."

              "Saw it with my own eyes!"

            "If you don't mind, I like to add my two bits to this story."

             "You know your contributions are always welcome, Deena. Hell, God knows that you are the only one of these girls who actually makes some sense."

             "F**k you, Judy!"

             "Yeah, f**k you. There ain't never  nothing ever come out your mouth but gossip and innuendo."

           "All I want to say is that I warned you not to make friends with him. Once a boy regards you as a friend that's all he'll ever see you as."

             "I lived next door to him for eighteen years. It's kind of hard not to become friends with your neighbor. Besides, what you said ain't necessarily true. Bernard has been my best friend ever since we married."

              "Ugh! Like making love to your brother."

           "Ain't that the truth. I bet ol Bernie is as reliable in that regard as one of them oil rigs on the road to Bakersfield, up down, up down, up down." 

            "Shush now! You shut your mouth. How we been friends all these years is beyond me. You only say that because it's your own failure of imagination how doesn't allow you to supply the twist and turns that'd turn your own husbands into world class bull riders."

          "That's cause we're still ladies, Judy, unlike some women I could name."

               "You're lucky I don't slap your face Karla. If it wasn't for the fact that you've been my best friend since we were in kindergarten, and that I know you're lying about being a lady, I'd still might."

           "Or maybe the fact that I'm at the other end of the table and you'd have to get your fat ass up to do it."

            "You guys quit your bickering! Danny's coming this way!"

           "Well, hello ladies, Judy. I was sitting over there talking with Slim and I couldn't help noticing that you were looking over at us and smiling. So, I thought, well, hell, I could use something to smile about, so I came over to see if you would share a smile with me."

           "Well, me and Penny were just remarking about nice your butt looks in them Wranglers. Just like the old days."

            "That's right, we were saying that maybe we needed to do  your workout for ourselves."

            "Well, I do believe you ladies done made me blush. How bout you, Judy, you don't think my butt still looks good?"

              "Well, it ain't your derriere that matters now is it? You always did have a too high opinion of yourself Danny, and you know it. I was telling that it was wonder to me, how your head could still fit into that hat. It's only holds ten gallons, don't it?"

         "There's my smile; now that's the Judy Villa that I remember. I was talking about you with my dad about you just the other day." 

                "Me? Now, that presents a conundrum; what could you and JT possibly have to say about me?"

                 "We were tearing down his back fence and replacing it. We got back to the part that was in the back corner, remember the place that was just behind your window. My dad told me, 'I don't know why, but I never could keep them three boards right there in place. I was always nailing them sumbitches back up, but I'd come out the next morning, and they'd still be hanging there loose. Made me think of you for some damned reason."

                 "I don't know why that'd cause you to think about lil ol me."

                 "There's a mystery involved. One night I remember coming home late one night and them three boards were glued in place. I remember being puzzled by it, cause they was always hangin loose. I noticed that Blaine's Robert's truck was parked in front of your house that night. I've always wondered if he had something to do with it."

                "Well, maybe my daddy didn't like the ascetic of them loose boards no more than your daddy did."

                 "Shit, you know better, that whole damn fence coulda fell down without Gus ever noticing. Well, look at that. It's already one o'clock. I have to run. You ladies have a good day. I'd tip my hat, but I'm afraid I couldn't get back on this big old head of mine."

                 "Well, I hate to see him leave, but he sure looks good walking away."

                  "I was just about to say..."

                 "SSH! If you two, old biddies say another f**king word, I'll stab you with this here fork!"


                 

               

                  

   A shiny, new Lexus pulled into the parking lot of the Breakfast Kingdom, Concord's best and only breakfast place. Geezer Jennings with his long gray hair pulled back into a pony-tale was sitting next to the large window that faced the parking lot, pointed the car out to his buddies, "Somebody got money. That there Lexus right there cost at least $80,000."

    Big Larry, sitting across from Geezer, twisted to get a look and whistled, "Damn, that's a lot of money for a car."

    From behind him, Geezer heard Rodney Bennett say in almost a whisper, "Ah man, they're here already."

       Geezer turned ready to ask Rodney who he was talking about when he saw the expression on his friend's face. It was beyond sad.

        Geezer was going to ask Rodney what was wrong when his next door neighbor and life-long best friend Pancho Romero said, "Dang, man, ain't that your boy Donnell, Rodney?"

        Geezer whipped his head around and sure enough, a tall, well built young black man in an expensive looking tailored suit got out of the car followed by an elegantly attired and very pretty woman.  "Damn, that is Donnell and Daisha. Hell, Rod, I ain't seen them since Marlys's funeral. What they doing here?"

         Rodney didn't answer. Instead, he waited until his son and daugther-in-law entered  the dining room. Pancho was the first one up to greet them, jumping out of his seat and embracing them both, "Damn, Donnell, you get bigger and better looking every time I see you. And who is this, your daughter? Hell, I thought you were married to that old hideous looking ragged looking Roberts woman?" 

          Daisha flashed him a huge smile, "You know perfectly well who I am, Coach and don't try to butter me up with all that daughter crap." She hugged him and kissed him on the cheek. Pancho had coached them both in the intricacies of baseball and softball once upon a time.

      There were lots of hugs, handshakes, smiles all around. Geezer noticed though that even though Rodney was smiling, he didn't look very happy. There was a immense sadness behind his eyes. Donell waited for the small talk to die down before asking his father, "It was great seeing guys, but we got to travel. I have a big meeting tomorrow. You ready, Pop?"

         Rod looked like he wanted say something to the guys but couldn't. He turned back to his son, "Ready as I'm likely to be. Gotta swing by the house to pick up my bags.

       "Bags? Ready for what? You guys going on a trip. can I go to too?" Pancho blurted out. Tall and lanky, Pancho was always the impulsive one, the joker, the one who would always say what was on his mind. Although he had meant his words as a joke; it didn't take a genius to notice that they were much too heavy to float.

         Donell looked surprised, "You didn't tell them, Pop?"

    All the eyes swiveled and fell on Rodney who was looking at his shoes. There was a long tense pause.

        Geezer broke the silence, "Something wrong, Rod?"

      Rod slowly straightened his shoulders raised his head, "This is it, boys. I'm out of here. Donnell and Daisha have graciously invited me to come live with them."

       Pancho blurted, "In Oakland?" Donnell looked at him and shook his head yes.

       "I know you guys been looking after Pop and driving him to the doctor and all, and we're grateful and everything," at that point he started choking up, " The optometrist's office called us and let us know that some of the issues with his vision are going to get worse, and......I.., uh,.. we just need to have him closer."

        Daisha added, "Donell got a big promotion, and we've moved into a bigger house that has a small apartment in the back. This way he can watch his grandkids grow-up, play sports, and all that stuff. Besides, with Donnell's new job we aren't going to be able to get down here as much." Although, all of the men present loved Daisha and Donell, her words didn't move them much. They were too stunned.
 
      Big Larry spoke first, "Damn it Rodney. You should have said something. We coulda had a party or something."

       Rodney just stood there looking chagrined. These men were his life long friends. When his beloved Marlys had died of a heart attack while Donell and Daisha were out of country on a business trip. It was Pancho and Geezer who had handled everything till they got there. When he couldn't pass the driver's test and lost his license, it was Geezer who made sure Rodney didn't miss a doctor's appointment.

      Pancho walked over to him and gave him a big embrace, "Damn, Amigo. I ain't gonna lie, this shit don't even feel real. Hell, we been eating breakfast here every Wednesday for what twenty- five years, hell, every weekday morning for the last five. Don't seem real."

         Rodney struggled, "I know, Panch. It don't. It sure doesn't seem real."

        Geezer was up next. He threw both his arms around his old friend and spoke lowly, "Hell, Rod, you should have said something, gave me some time to process this and all. Who am I going to fish with now? You know, I really looked forward to driving you to Hartford so I could flirt with that little fat nurse."

          "I know, Geez. I just couldn't though. I couldn't even say it to myself without wanting to cry, and I know how you start bawling like a little girl bout nothin."

        Geezer held his friend at arm's length and looked into his eyes. "This here ain't about nuthin, Rod. This here's some deep shit. Sides, you know I ain't never cried."

       Rod laughed sadly, "You a lie. You cried last week when the Dodgers beat the Giants. Didn't he Pancho?"

           "Hell with you both. I was crying about that twenty-dollar bill I lost. I don't cry when it matters. Do I, Larry?"

           Larry was too busy stuffing the last of his fries into this mouth and didn't answer. Daisha smiled grimly, "Sorry guys." She walked over and took her father-in-law by the arm and started to walk him out. Donell, overcome with emotion, had already gone out to the car. Rodney paused at the door and said, "You guys got my number. Call me and I'll give you my address, and we can write or something."

         Geezer couldn't resist one last joke, "Rodney, what in our history makes you think that Pancho and Larry could write a damn letter?" Rodney smiled.

       When the door swung close behind them, Big Larry offered, "Might be for the best, guys. Rodney's lost lots of weight lately, and I bet he ain't shaved in at least three days. Remember when Marlys was alive; he was always the sharpest dressed man in this town."

        Geezer was too busy watching Rod walking toward the car and didn't answer, so it was up to Pancho to tell Larry to shut up," Be quiet, Dumb Ass. Rosie'd woulda kill me if I didn't see that he was eating regular, and who gives a damn if Rodney missed a shave or two? I do that shit myself." 

         Geezer couldn't take it and got up and quickly walked out the door and stood on the curb. Pancho was right behind him. Larry stayed behind and polished off his food. Benny the Bugle, another friend of theirs who had been listening in, ran and slid over to seat by the window and watched.

       The shiny, new Lexus backed out of the parking slot and straightened its wheels so that Rodney, sitting in the back seat, was level with where Geezer and Pancho were standing. His head and shoulders were slumped over, and his head was barely above window level; he looked up sadly and barely raised his hand and waved as the car pulled forward.

             Pancho and Geezer stood right where they were and waved long after the car turned left on Derry and drove out of sight toward the outskirts of town.

           After a long while, Geezer turned to his friend and started to say, "Maybe Big Larry's right. It might be good for. . . ," he then noticed that Pancho was crying, "Are you crying? You damn crybaby. Two tours of duty as a helicopter gunner in Nam just to come home and start bawling outside a shit hole restaurant.. Knock it off, Pancho. We ain't freaking snowflakes! We real men remember. The last of a dying breed and don't you ever forget it!"

           Pancho turned toward Geezer and smiled through his tears,
"Said the same dumb ass fool who cried all night when Jerry Garcia died. I'm gonna miss that fool, Geezer. He didn't talk dumb shit all the time like you."

      Geezer took the insult in stride and gave Pancho a grim smile,"Hell, I know. I'm going miss him too. Hell, we all been sidekicks since we were in first grade. When Arlene left me for that preacher dude, and I wouldn't come out of house, it was Rod that coaxed me into going fishing. Probably saved my life by doing it."

        As they turned back to the comforting embrace of the Breakfast Kingdom, Pancho put his arm behind his friend's back and said, "If I remember right, I tried everything I knew to get your ass out of that house."

          "Yeah, you did, but you're a damn Dodger fan, so that shit don't count."
             
       Later toward evening, Geezer stepped out on his front porch to smoke a cigar and saw Pancho sitting outside on his own porch. He lit the cigar and headed that way.

          Pancho saw him coming and called out to him, "I thought you were going to come over and listen to the game last night."

            "I planned on it. Then my son-in-law came over and wouldn't leave."

              "The dumb one?"

           "They're both dumb Panch; you know that. You gonna have to be more specific."

               "Jenny's guy. What's his name, Roger?"

         Geezer shook his head, "Yeah. That's him. Wanted to talk politics all night. I hate that shit. He thinks like just Jenny do. Hell, I wouldn't doubt she tells him who he gotta vote for."

        They looked at each other and didn't say nothing for a bit before Pancho said, 'I was thinking about this one night with Rodney. We were at bar uptown when Ferdie Jenkins came over where we were and sat down. You knowed that dude ain't never liked you."

            "Well, I never liked him a lot more than he never liked me."

          "He started telling me and Rod why we hung around with you. Said you was stupid, two faced and a bunch of other shit."
 
            "That fool never got over the fact that Ceecee Moore liked me more than him.'

              "Rod got mad and held his hand up and said, 'Don't ever come over here and be starting shit when they're ain't none."

            Geezer took a long drag off the cigar, blew it out, and said.  "Screw you, Panch. You told me that before, and you're just telling me that shit now trying to get me to cry. You gonna listen to the game tonight or what?"

              "You'd think I'd miss the Giants getting their ass beat? It's your turn to the bring the beer, remember."

           "Shit, glad of it. That way I don't got a drink that horse piss  you drink. My cousin gave me a couple of Cubans. We'll smoke them up." He started to walk away but then turned back. "One night my mom started to worry about me, and she sent her preacher out to talk to me. Me and Rodney had been out fishing all day. He got here as Rodney was leaving. We sat down out on the porch, and the preacher started to saying a bunch of shit about me being with Rod. I was shocked. I mean this was supposedly a man of God and stuff, but I told him in no uncertain terms to go fuck himself, and I got up helped him off the porch." Geezer waited a while to see what Pancho was going to say, then added, "Damn it! I Almost got ya! Your eyes are kind of wet."

         Pancho shook his head and laughed, "You didn't get nothing. I ain't ashamed to say I cried all that shit out already. Tell me something though did that really happen?"

           "Yeah. It happened, and if he'd said another word, I'd choked the living shit right out of him."

           "Damn. I'd liked to been there when Mama Alice found out you told her preacher to go fuck hisself?"

         "Shit, she went to church that night, walked right up the aisle to where he was standing and kicked that fool in his nuts. Caused a big mess, man. Damn near got herself arrested. I had to go down to the church and help straighten that shit out." 

         Pancho was bending over, slapping his knees and laughing hard, so Geezer kept going, "When the cops finally showed up, they asked me what mama's side of the story was, so I told him what had happened. He looked at his partner and told him, 'I don't know George, but kicking a slime ball preacher in the testicles hardly sounds like much of crime to me.' His partner looked at him and said, 'I know. It seems like she should a got a medal.'"

       Later that evening when the game ended, and after Geezer had gloated for a full ten minutes over the Giant's victory, Geezer and Pancho, drunk on Modelo Reserva, sat silently in the dark, smoked a couple of Cuban cigars, and tried to not be too obvious as they cried a little for their missing friend.

         About twenty minutes later, Pancho snubbed his cigar out in the the green neon, glow in the dark, ash tray that sat on the  small wooden table at the side of his chair. "You know, Geeze, they're right. He needs to be close to Donell and Daisha."

         "Don't make it any easier though. What's next for us. It'll be you or me next. What'll either one of us do without a true friend. I mean you got Rosie, and she's great. I ain't got nobody else. There's the girls, but I'd just get in their way. Least with you guys around, I can make some kind of stab at having some kind of life. Without you guys, it'd just be Bingo and wheelchair polka at the home." He drained the bottom of his last beer and took a last hit off the cigar. He started stoking his beard. Pancho knew his friend was elsewhere when that happened. An old memory of Geezer doing it back in 1972 just after his Dad died flashed into his mind. They had talked all night when that happened, Geezer, Rod, and him. It was great night that cemented their bond forever. They had talked about all the deep issues that no-one ever seems to talk about anymore. They shared their intimate thoughts and feelings and discussed their fears and the things that caused them anxiety. They were still awake and talking, sitting on the rear gate of Geezer's dad's 1957 Chevy pick-up, when the sun rose up over the horizon.

         "We got go see him. Give him a month to get adjusted and then go up there to see how he's doing."

          "Oakland, Pancho? You forgetting that neither of us is that great a driver. It's been a while since either one of us has driven on real freeway. You think maybe we oughta fly, or take a bus?"

          "No screw that. Me and you on the road to help a friend out. Like the old days. Think of all the shit we could see and do. Think how good it will make Rodney feel."

            Geezer stopped stroking his beard, "You know I ain't got no-one to talk me out of doing something this stupid, so you better be serious. What about Rosie? She's gonna kill you."

          Pancho laughed, "No, she'll be so glad to see me when we get back she'll forget all about killing me. We'll have to take your car, so she don't catch on though."

            "No problem, but we'll have to stop when I need a bathroom break. None of that handing me bottle over the back seat and telling me to fill it up like you guys used to do."

        For one brief moment, the fires of youth and friendship reanimated the men's ever shrinking imaginations.  A little jolt of energy created by anticipation flowed through their aging systems. Geezer, sitting on the porch step, turned and looked at his buddy.

       "Hey Pancho. Do you remember the night my Dad died?"

       Pancho laughed, "Funny you should mention it; I was just thinking about that night."

​        "That old thing drove like a tank." 

      While Destry Lewis was sitting in the administrative office hallway of Robert Bellarmine High School, he stumbled upon his reflection in the door window of the counselor's office at the end of the hall. He looked small and lonely, even a bit broken which for him was highly unusual. Normally, he was generally known for his confident manner and defiant attitude. Most of the kids who knew him would probably say that he was overly confident and too defiant. He looked at the reflection and at once knew that it perfectly captured the small, old man who lived inside his head, the one he was always at pain to hide from everybody else.

        He was also thinking about the imminent discussion with this father that would most likely occur about five minutes after his expulsion from the school, his third in two years. 

         He didn't have long to contemplate on the subtleties of the reflection as he heard the sound of footsteps approaching and turned to see their source. As he feared, it was Vice Principal Lorinda Stephens, a large formidable looking African-American lady who possessed all the stature and the gravitas of one of those old large majestic  ocean-liners of the past. For a second, Destry looked beaten. Ms. Stephens rarely smiled in public, and it was perfectly plain that this was not going to be on the rare moments when she did. He looked back down the hall and saw his defeated reflection and quickly straightened his back and arched his shoulders, and when he did, some of the fiery personality that he was known for returned.

         She didn't say anything as she walked past him, just extracted her keys from her coat pocket, unlocked her door, opened it, and gestured for him to enter. He didn't exactly sneer as he walked past her, but it was close enough. She beckoned him to take the seat in from the large dark oak desk sitting in the rear of the office.

        He walked slowly toward the chair, back and shoulders straight, and sat down and crossed his legs. He admitted to himself watching her walk to the throne-like chair behind the desk that the lady radiated sobriety and rectitude. It was a rare thing for him to acknowledge, as, in all his other experiences with administrators, he was much more accustomed to sensing the unctuous quality of people only pretending to actually possess any real solemnity of manner. He dialed his defiance back a notch accordingly. It was the very first time.

         He watched apprehensively as she picked up his file, placed her glasses on the end of her nose, and looked over its contents.

         "Mr. Lewis, it says here that you stood up in class and loudly announced your desire to "shag a movie star"? Is that the case?

            "To be honest, Ms. Stephens, I didn't use the word 'shag'. Mr. Peoples probably put that it that way in the interest of being slightly more decorous than I was. But, yeah, basically it was what I said."

             She sat back into the chair, "So, you admit to the intent?" He nodded, and she continued, "Why on earth would you do something like that?"

         Destry took a deep breath and fought off the the involuntary inclination of shrugging before speaking, "Well, it was part of the assignment."

             "Mr. Lewis, I'm fairly certain that Mr. Peoples, who I have known for over fifteen years, did not have an assignment which instructed his students to openly share their hidden sexual desires."

               "I didn't say he intentionally intended it be so, but he did ask us to relate, to stand up and relate that is, something that we really wanted to do but that most people didn't know about."

                "And you thought it was appropriate to say what you said?"

               "Like I said, maybe by his standards it wasn't appropriate, but then he shouldn't have ask such an open question. If he didn't want complete honesty on my part, he should have said so at the start."

                "So, you were just being honest?"

               "Absolutely. You see we are studying Cyrano de Bergerac in class. And I like that dude a lot, Cyrano, not Mr. Peoples, he sucks as teacher. Cyrano, on the other hand, values personal honesty and courage more than anything else."

                "Yet, he lies to Roxanne."

          "Yeah, but that's what the play is about; that's where the dramatic tension comes from. Here he is the bravest of the brave, yet he can't master the self doubt he has because of his appearance and because of love."

           "And Mr. Peoples was what, asking the class about hidden desires?"

              "In a very clumsy, offhanded way he was trying to get us to think about how our inner self is different from the image we present to the public."

                "What compelled you to say what you said?"

             "I think he signaled me out because of this reputation I have  of  being brash and self-confident. He was trying to say I was a phony. So, I decided to answer him honestly using the first thing I popped into my head."

           "Do you honestly mean to tell me that you think that your answer was appropriate for a high school literature class?"

                "That's a different question. I answered the question he asked me, and I answered it honestly. It's not my fault that Mr. People's is a hypocrite."

               "So, your deepest desire is to sleep with a Hollywood movie star?"

                  "There you go to changing the question again. I didn't say it was my deepest desire. My deepest desire would be to be able to function in a society where I didn't have to lie or modify my truth in order deal with the inability of others to accept it as such. In response to your question, I would just say, how could it be otherwise? That's why those stars exist, to create desires where none existed before. They use our desires against us, to sell us stuff, including false realities and untruth."

           Ms. Stephens started coughing at that point, and Destry got up and darted to the water dispenser and brought her back a paper cup of water. She drank and nodded her head in thanks. When she recovered from the coughing spell she asked one final question, "I'm going to give you one last chance to convince me not to expel you. I'm looking at your record here, and I have to say, it is troubling. Why should I trust you to not be continually causing these kinds of disruptions in the future?"

             "I've been expelled from two other schools. But no one has ever taken the time to really examine my so-called crimes. In one school, my history teacher asked my opinion about the Cold War, and I gave it to him, but it wasn't the 'my opinion' he wanted, so he picked a fight with me. I don't back down in such situations. It would probably save me a ton of grief if I did, but I can't. There is this father issue I have. You'll meet my father, and you'll see what I'm talking about. He's a politician in every sense of the word. I don't think he's never said a honest word in his entire life. If he told me the sky was blue, I'd have reason to doubt it. At the last school, I was reprimanded several times for giving honest answers to dishonest questions. Let me ask you, what would you do if someone asked a question and you knew that they wanted the answer that they always get and not the answer that you want to give? It happens everyday in my world. We sit there like prisoners all day and listen to them blather. Then they ask us questions that have no meaning and expect us to spit out only the words they want to hear, but not the words we want to say. Then they get mad. Frankly, I'm sick of all the lies and pretense. I couldn't care less if I'm expelled. At least, I won't have to listen to Peoples butcher Cyrano."

          She leaned forward and started to answer but stopped and sat back in her chair. She thought about what he had said for a long while. She then thought about all of the polite answers she had given in order to get where she was, and she also thought of all the people with the big fake smiles who had asked them. Destry stared at his hands while he waited. After a long while, she picked up a pen from its stand and wrote him a pass back to class.

              "Here, take this pass and get back to class. Tell Mr. Peoples I'll talk to him later."

               He stood up and took the pass from her hand, "He's going to have a sh.., I mean, he's going to be very angry, Ms. Stephens."

                "You let me worry about him. You need to worry about how you are going to start answering people honestly without making them angry. It's a little thing called tact. I suggest you learn how to use it. Now, you can get out of my office, Mr. Lewis."

            He started to leave, but turned back at the door, "Thank you, Ms. Stephens. That the first time I ever had the chance said those words to anyone in a school setting. Usually, it's just 'So long'."

            When the door closed behind him, she allowed herself a small smile and wondered what it would've been like to tell one of her teachers what she really desired. She reflected on what it meant that none of them had ever asked. Then she wondered what it would have been like to have told her father the same.
         

      "You know what, Dad? I don't want to talk about that shit. So, either you don't talk about it, or I'm leaving!"

       The people all around us in the Mexican restaurant where we were dining turned to see what the fuss was all about. I stared back angrily at each intruding pair of eyes until they turned back and pretended to fiddle with the rice and beans on their plates. They were still listening though, their ears on the side of their head that faced us were clearly sending out little radar signals as their spouses nudged at their feet beneath the tables.

      We had been having good time reminiscing about things. Then Deja told me about a conversation that her sister Casey had had with their mother before her mother passed away. Deja told me that as her mother was dying she had made Casey a promise to contact her somewhere from the great beyond. Casey had her doubts of course and expressed them to her mother. Jennie was very close to the end, but had managed to squeeze her hand and hoarsely whisper, "I love you and your sister so much, I know that I can do it."

       Casey was weeping when she told Deja about the incident, "I asked her, 'How, Mom? How you gonna do it? You can't write or phone me; they don't have phones there, or even paper?"

     She said that Jenny had thought about it a while before she answered in another hoarse whisper, "The lights, honey, I'll do something with the lights."

       I was sitting there thinking about the possibility of communicating across the great divide when a well-known political figure appeared on the television on the wall behind Deja's head. I absentmindedly said something derogatory about the politician. I had forgotten the one rule we had about conversing which was never talk about politics. We were both tired after coming from the hospital and visiting my mom who had fallen and broken her hip. In a matter of seconds, we went from talking and laughing amicably into full-scale political savagery.

    I looked at the fire burning in Deja's eyes and instinctively tried to calm her down. I got six words in, really just two, 'calm down' repeated three times, before my own fire roared to life. I stood up, pulled a hundred-dollar bill out of my wallet, and slammed it down on the table.

        "I'm your father. I brought your ass into this world, and it wasn't so that you can tell me in a crowded restaurant at the top of your damn voice, what I can and I cannot say. . . . Be safe going home." And just like that I was out of there but not before unleashing my ire on the fat, bald headed man staring through the colorful flowers and the green ferns that sat upon the divider wall, "Eat your Goddamn beans, asshole."

         I slowed down while walking toward my car in the dark parking lot hoping that she would hurry out and stop me. She didn't, so I unlocked the door and threw myself into the driver's seat. I sat there in stunned silence, leaned backwards into the seat, relaxed my shoulders, and took two long centering breaths exhaling each slowly. I started the car and looked into the mirror, still hoping to catch the image of her running toward me, or at least coming around the corner looking somewhat remorseful.

        The tires crunched on the pebbles as I and pulled out onto the road heading for a home once so full of life, but now that Jennie had left and died and the kids moved off, seemed as dark and forbidding as a dimly lit parking garage in a cheap horror movie. I turned the stereo on; Boz Scaggs's Loan Me Dime was playing; so I turned the volume up and stared at the white lines in the road and AT the inroads that my headlights made into the darkness, trying hard not to think about anything. 

        There's this part in the guitar solo where Duane Allman pleads with the all-mighty to take notice of his plight. Every time I hear that guitar plead it sends a shiver up my spine. I knew it was coming and that it would be the perfect soundtrack for where my head was, a muddled state silently yet urgently begging for God or anybody else to loan me a fucking dime: the dime being a metaphor for peace of mind. I ain’t had much of that since Jennie left. Then one night she up and died and well before I had had time to adjust to being without her. Maybe that dime that Boz Skaggs was crying about represented some kind of personal salvation too. Lord knows, I could needed some of that too.

     The tingle happened while I was passing under the overpass on 10th Street, emerging on the other side with a single fucking tear in the corner of my right eye. I caught it just before it spilled and nudged it gently back into place. I don't know why I always prided myself on such stupid shit, but keeping my facial features free from moisture while the storms raging inside my head were erasing coastlines is a trait that I've always foolishly valued.

     I didn't really know when or where the cultural divide between my daughters and I began, probably when they were born. Each successive generation thinks that it’s their responsibility to point out all the flaws in its predecessor's point of view. I remember several loud arguments when I believed that I was right about the Vietnam conflict and was equally certain that my father was wrong. We never got it right we got it right, but just tired of the argument. I thought I knew everything at the time, and listened to a lot of people who shamelessly lied rather than listen to my parents who I knew always had my best interests at heart. The way of the world I reasoned. I wanted out and my father barred the way.

       I read a quote somewhere that said that what we lose as we age is not so much our physical strength or dexterity as our illusions. I had witnessed this. My parents took to going to McDonald's everyday where they sat and laughed and conversed with people from every different persuasion, people they had never socialized with before. They all had differences too but decided to put aside the things that made them different and concentrate on the things that made them similar. They valued each other's presence and laughter more than anything else.

       I worry a lot about this current generation. They seem to be a lot less forgiving than us. People are flawed, and we overcome our flaws as we age.  

        People like to talk, and a great many of them lie as much as they talk. Many lives have been tainted by the actions of their forebearers, and somehow that stain got written into code. Most people spent lifetimes working to erase the stain and rewrite the code, but others could care less, and just go with what was written. Then there are those whose empathy has been destroyed by the time, setting, and obstacles of their life, preventing them from achieving a wholeness only accessed by a knowledge of the self, people without hope, driven to hurt others by pain they can never seem to soothe.

         I was sitting at the intersection of Arboles and Laguna waiting for the light to change, six blocks from home when I thought that all I really wanted is for my daughters to beware of those who will use their goodness for evil ends. The snakes are out in multitudes. The main flaw of life is that it takes so long to see if new ideas truly function any better than older ones do. 

      There’s a mantra I repeat over and over when I'm mind won't settle. It starts with the beginning of the Lord's Prayer up till the part where it says that God's will be done on Earth. Then I add my own part where I ask for forgiveness of all the sins that clog my heart and brain; it ends it with, "Lord, please grant peace, love happiness, and freedom from pain and suffering to all who I have sinned against." I say it three times perfectly and then as many times as needed until most of the winds are spent. Sometimes it works, sometimes it don't. I had repeated the mantra some fifty-two times before I got home and walked into my front door.

       I fixed myself a Scotch and water, took it into the den, sat down in my brown leather recliner, kicked off my shoes, and turned on the TV. An old Pentecostal neighbor I had as a kid once told me that TV antennas were the sign of the devil, 'The Devil's Cross' he used to say. I laughed at the notion a lot. Nowadays, though, I sometimes worry that the process of gaining entrance into Heaven could involve taking the amount of time I've spent in front of a TV screen and dividing it by the times I actually did something useful. 

     I was five minutes into watching a repeat episode of Two and Half Men when my memory grew hazy and stumbled upon a memory of a dog, the only animal I had ever loved, a poodle my aunt had given us  named Peter after an old flame.

       Me and my brothers quickly dubbed him Petey; he was a small black, shaggy little thing but a purebred poodle, a type of dog that was about as out of place in neighborhood we lived in on the south side of Concord as I would be standing on the Champ de Elysees.

      My aunt had to move from one apartment to another where pets were not a part of the plan. When she dropped him off, he looked like a little sissy with his sides all perfectly trimmed and little puffs of hair on his hips and shoulders, the top of his head, and even on his tail. My dad, a dust bowl Okie, wasn't much on spending money on hair styling for pets. My brothers and I eyed the dog anxiously and thought to ourselves, "Damn, Petey, you going to have to get used to things around here."

      It was like that damn dog had read Darwin. It was kind of like he knew that if he waltzed around the Southside of Concord like he did at my aunt's fancy apartment in Bakersfield, he was going to get his ass chewed clear off. Hell, none of them other dogs out there even knew what a poodle was. 

     It wasn't long though before Petey took over the neighborhood.  He was kind of like that dog Tramp in the Disney movie. Before long all the girl dogs were clamoring for Petey's body like he did something like won a game of chicken or something. Before a month was out, he came home with a bunch of buddies, and all the girl dogs on the block started sashaying by our yard swishing their tails like they were chasing flies. 

         Petey the Poodle was the only pet I've ever loved like a human being. I know this says a lot about me. A lot of people go through many dogs in a lifetime. Not me. It was way too much of an emotional investment. It was like the idea of me remarrying. I don't think I could ever love like that again.

       At the rear of our house a single step led out of the back door unto a large five by eight plain concrete slab. Petey and I used to sit there on Saturday mornings and watch the sun rise over the line of tall trees that dominated our neighbor's lot. The sunrises were glorious mixtures of pinks, oranges, blues, and yellows that reminded me of the vibrant colors in the cinematography of The Wizard of Oz. Petey and I would just sit there basking in the warmth of the morning sun as contented as any living creature could ever be.

      And when I left, he would go about his business. That always impressed me about Peter. He always had his own shit to do and didn't have to depend on me. He would come rolling back home about the same time that I did every evening when I returned from the playing fields of the nearby elementary school. Then we would eat and watch TV. Petey usually sat on the couch next to my mom, and sometimes between her and dad.

      My parents were never very demonstrative when it came to showing their affections. At least, that's the way it seemed to me at the time. It never occurred to me that there was any history involved in the matter. I never once thought about all the roots of all things, of the painful lessons or the joys, or the wounds and the scars. It seemed to me that life was shaped mainly by the problems of the here and now and the demands that the future placed upon it. I never did learn how to be demonstrative in love.

      Mom ran over Petey one night, killing him instantly while he was sleeping in a rut behind the left rear tire of the family car. My brother Cody and I got the news when we walked in the front door of the house and found my dad sitting on the sofa crying. My dad never cried. Dad buried Petey in the northeast corner of our yard and placed a small concrete slab over his grave to mark the spot. The slab is still there.
 
       I learned that the things you love the most always pass away. It was such a brutal knowledge to thrust upon the shoulders of a skinny, twelve-year-old.  I do know that it's really a pretty fucking sad thing to realize that you haven't silently sat and watched the sun come up since you were twelve years old. It's kind of like not having a memory of playing catch with your dad, or having developed a fear of deep water because your best friend drowned the summer before you crossed town to attend middle school with a bunch of kids you didn't even know. 

      That period of my life explains a lot about all of my relationships afterwards. I always held the people I loved the most at a short distance afraid that life would catch them sleeping in a rut behind the left rear tire. When Deja and her sister Casey were changing from toddlers into awkward young girls, I was conflicted because even though I knew it was only a natural, I was bothered by the realization that there were such sweet parts of them being left behind, but life moves on, and I have to squint my eyes at times in order to remember for the briefest of moments the perfect innocent beauty of the bud before it blooms, briefly because it hurts too much to linger.

      And we usually forget there is always the matter of the roots, the knowing of the sweetness and the memories of the suffering where great lessons are vaguely explained, painfully learned, and locked away only to be summoned in times of utmost despair.

       The memory of Petey made me think of my dad kneeling down and scratching the words, "Petey Our Beloved Puppy," into the wet cement slab he had placed over the grave and just as quickly, that old memory morphed in the newer one of my brothers and I standing at the side of my father's grave. I had thought of Petey's funeral on that day too,       wondering who would etch the words into my father's headstone.  My brother Cody had selected Elvis's Peace in the Valley as the music marking the end of the ceremony.

       My childhood friend Hobo, real name Larry, came up afterwards and hugged me tightly. He whispered, "Did you pick out that damn music?"

       "Naw. That was Cody's idea. He loves Elvis, man. He'd sang it hisself if we'd let em."

       Hobo pulled back and said earnestly, "Good fucking choice though. I always said that if'n the King can't break you down, you can't be fucking broken down."

          I laughed, "Shit, fool. Don't be making me laugh. It's my dad's funeral for Christ's sake. Hell, the song was a lot better than that preacher though."

         "Ain't that the damn truth! Where did you guys get that mealy mouth motherfucker, out the Yellow Pages? Sound like he was trying to sell us a car."

           I laughed again, "Knock it off, I said. Damn, dude. Jennie said that if we used Old Penrose she wouldn't even come. Glen came up with this dude."

           Hobo pulled a package of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket, lit a one, and exhaled slowly, "Well you know what they always say. Same shit, different suit."

         Hobo invited me over to his house to burn a doobie. I remembered looking over my shoulder toward where Jennie and kids were talking with her mother and sister and weighing the consequences awhile before answering, "Hell, if a man can't get a bit twisted the day he buries his dad, what the hell he good for?" To this day, I don't know if it was a valid response.  All I knew was that I didn't want to face a whole bunch of sad looking well-wishers telling me the same damned thing over and over.

     When I pulled up in front of my mom's house about an hour later, twelve-year-old Deja flew out of the front door followed by a tiny Casey and came running down the sidewalk yelling, "Daddy, come quick! Uncle Cody's out back fighting with the preacher!" 
                     
      I fell asleep after midnight and went somewhere altogether different in my head, a strange, colorful, enchanted place full of mystery and weird people. I never knew exactly where I was at any time. It looked a lot like the south side of Concord, but had rows of urban sidewalk trees and skyscrapers and even the damned Thames River flowing right through the middle of it all. I remember stopping to get my bearings and to purchase an expresso at a small sidewalk cafe in front of the Eiffel Tower. The actor Robert Mitchum was with me for some reason but not saying a whole bunch of anything when suddenly Pee Wee Herman came up on us and started acting a fool and jabbering at us in French. I was urgently looking around for something and didn't have the faintest clue as to what it might be when the phone rang.

         "Hello?"

      "Hi, Dad. It's me Deja. I was worried about you and wanted to check on you to see if you made it home okay."

         "I'm fine, Kiddo. How about you?"

        "I'm good, Dad. It's funny though, ever since I've been home, my dang ceiling light's been flickering non-stop."

         "Well, turn it off."

​          "I did."
   
              

  Joseph Campbell warned us older humans that, "We have the comparatively complex problem in educating our young in training them not to simply assume uncritically the patterns of the past, but to recognize and cultivate their own creative possibilities, not to remain on some proven level. . . . . .but to represent a movement of the species forward."

     I have also read somewhere that we have an obligation of determining the best records of what we've done and the best voices and ideas to pass forward, not only to guarantee that the mistakes of the past are not repeated but also to provide the groundwork where the seeds of the future will be cultivated. There's is absolutely no use in learning from scratch every time, especially when so many of the lessons we have learned have been purchased with a tremendous outlay of blood, bone, loneliness, death and suffering.

        John Lewis Gaddis once asked a group of incoming freshmen at Yale what connection that the main characters in War and Peace could possibly have with their very different lives. He was taken by the the answer that some of them shared, "They make us feel less lonely." How truthful is that statement, the knowledge that we are not the first or the last to face the future alone, uninformed, and untested?

       Gaddis also noted that Thucydides echoed much the same sentiment when the historian encouraged his readers to, "Seek knowledge of the past as an aid to understanding of the future, which in the course of human beings it must resemble if it does not reflect it." Gaddis then offered up the idea that future would only become a bad case of collective amnesia and of loneliness amplified to an insufferable degree if Thucydides's words were not heeded.

         Our current problem is not that our hopeful young reject some of our past, or that they offer up exciting new ways of looking at things which in turn engender new possibilities. Our problem is when some of their leaders, usually the least intelligent among them, become addicted to the murmuring noise of the crowd and try to lead us forward into realms they know nothing about, then have to maintain their position with oppression and force.

       They never care to acknowledge that crowds rarely read and usually get their knowledge from those who wish to use them only to maintain some sense of status quo, nor do they understand, that those behind the scenes of their so-called revolution are usually the relatives and offspring of the same people who pulled the strings in the past that they reject.

      This is how a Hitler becomes a Hitler, and a Stalin becomes a Stalin, and a Pied Piper becomes a Pied Piper. The universe has a proven record of putting forward the right people at the right time, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King Jr, or a Gandhi. And even at times, when the whole world needs changing, it offers up someone like Jesus, someone who sacrifices greatly to pay the price for our tremendous stupidity. 

        Left to our own devices though, we will continue to select the truly stupid, the gloriously self serving, or the proven evil in order to maintain conformity. 

     Henry Miller wrote, "Man's greatest dread is the expansion of consciousness. All of the fearsome, gruesome parts of Mythology stem from this fear. . . . . The law of the universe dictates that peace and harmony can only be won by inner struggle. The little man does not want to pay the price for that kind of peace and harmony. He wants it ready-made, like a suit of manufactured clothes." How much evil has humankind endured from those who try to buy a plastic wrapped, store-bought sense of meaning?

         History states that Xerxes the Persian god-king once punished the sea for its failings, and that the Roman Emperor Caligula once waged war with an ocean. Desecrating statues and canceling culture will not bring us down. But the sentiment behind placing sheep into our classrooms in the guise of teachers, of decrying there is no need for history, or even a need to read literature because it's not actual data and can't be used in an algorithm, surely will.       

    There was a joke I read in  Reader's Digest back when I was growing up. It was about Abraham Lincoln and involved a man lecturing his son.

    Father: When Abe Lincoln was your age he was working his way
                 toward becoming a lawyer.

    Son: Well, when he was your age, he was President.

     I waited years for my father to say something remotely related to Abraham Lincoln so I could tell him the punchline. A few years later he did, and I muffed it by saying, "Yeah, but so what? He walked barefoot in the snow to get to school. Big deal. I walk to school everyday myself. Maybe I don't have a cold biscuit in my pocket, but the lunches there are pretty damn yucky, if you ask me."

     It's bothered me for years that the universe conspired to get me the opportunity to look very witty, and instead, I looked both stupid and petty. Looking back on those years I've noticed that around that same time there was a decided shift in how people, no not people in general, in how the fools who were busy brainwashing us at the time, regarded the institution of fatherhood.

      Fathers like Ward Cleaver, Jim Anderson, and Andy Griffith who once populated our culture disappeared and were replaced with the likes of Al Bundy, Homer Simpson, Hal Wilkerson and Peter Griffith. And it was also noticeable, that the positive image of men in general had suffered with the growing cries of "Death to the Patriarchy!" It's very plain to see now, and actually has been for years, that the people who run this world are trying to pass the blame for every injustice and every wrong turn we've made as a species unto the shoulders of the male members. They strenuously object to painting whole peoples with the same brush, except when it comes to men, then they expose their agenda by putting forth the idea that  men like Charles Manson, Hitler, and Harvey Weinstein are representative of our entire sex.

     I've written a lot about how me and my buddies hung out at Pop's Candy Store during our formative years. It was where we tested out new ideas and theories and came to a lot of our conclusions about what life really means. There were no pictures of our fathers hanging on the bare unpainted walls, but if you knew where and how to look, you could see the always present ghostly images of our dad's hovering in thought bubbles above our heads. Our fathers were our first take on how the Old Testament Jehovah played out on a material level, men who told us which wires not to touch, which lies to never utter, and which things to never do. Hardened men of experience who defined the parameters of our existence.

     And far be it from me to say that they were perfect people. They never were. They had their flaws, sometimes a whole shitload of them. But it was always more than a little instructive to see how they took on the traumas of their  past and juggled them with the obstructions of the present and tried to guide both forces into a better future for their families.

     Sometimes they were absent too, and we were supposed to learn lessons about how to function on our own while making crossroad decisions using only the lessons they taught us and the often monosyllabic instructions they left behind.

      My friends and I have our own flaws too, some of them caused, no doubt, by our unwillingness to ask our fathers the questions we really needed answers for. But all of our efforts to repair the damages that life inflicts upon adolescent boys were usually based mainly on the knowledge that we could trust our dads, not only to give us straight answers when we needed them, but also to never to turn their back on us when we really fucked shit up. 

     In literature the absent father motif is often used as a symbol for the absence of God. It was used mainly as a thematic question asking how mankind is supposed to act when God is not around. The modern media though uses it instead to push the belief that there is no God and therefore humanity must learn to rely on the blathering nonsense spewed out the mouths of morons, self-serving narcissistic politicians, and the beneficence of the people who call the shots.

     And none of them are the least bit concerned with the lack of parameters in the world that they are pushing us toward, or the long-term effects of the lies they tell us everyday. And we know that we can't trust any of them to give us straight answers when we need them, and we especially understand that they'll be among the first to shame us if and when we make mistakes.

    What they don't realize though, is that our dads are always around somewhere advising us to be suspicious of preachers with pearly teeth and slick backed hair, not to get involved with women who think credit cards and bon-bons are the crown of creation, or placing our trust in people who constantly bad mouth our fathers.     

      It wasn't easy standing there on one leg trying to clean up the blood, the muscle, the bits of bones, the entrails, and even the dripping feces, and it was even harder to turn the handle on the paper towel dispensary using just one hand.

      His wife Delia had just told him, while they were eating dinner on their anniversary no less, that she was leaving him. She looked right at him with a steely, heartless gaze and broke the news. Then she stood up, tossed her napkin on table and strode out of the restaurant like she was walking toward a job interview with God.

     And, oh yeah, she took half of him with her. The left half. He suddenly felt a lot lighter, so he looked down and noticed that she had sliced him neatly in two, starting at the top of his head and exiting below his crotch area. He was just starting to wonder just how the f**k she could done the thing so neatly and so swiftly when he remembered that Delia wielded words like a highly trained samurai wielded a katana blade, and she also had a natural gift for turning his own words into weapons that drew blood.

        As far as the people eating at the surrounding tables knew, he was okay. Sure, they had witnessed the tossed napkin and the storming out, but to the outward vision, he was still in one piece. He played along with the charade, paid the bill, and slowly made his way into the restroom where he stood before the marble counter and carefully surveyed and listed the real damage.

        Anybody knows that possessing half a heart is damned near as worthless as having no heart at all. But a lot of people do not understand that the heart is also a seat of memory and the hub of all emotional activities. So, all of his emotions now entered in a limbo after discovering the hub was missing. They wandered about the halls of his consciousness lost, lonely and confused, sometimes hooking up with the half baked ideas that were still being emitted by the still intact right side of his brain. This resulted in a lot of strange behavior on his part. Sometimes he fell in love with an episode of CSI, at other times he would rage at the sight of cute squirrel eating a peanut in the park.

        It was his daughter Lacy who had to have the talk with him. She had won the honor because she drew the short straw, actually a piece of spaghetti, in a contest with her sister.

         "Dad, people are starting to talk."

       "What the f**k do I care bout what they think? Your mother took the half that cared, remember?"

         "She's gone, Pop. She died. You, on the other hand are still here, and that means you need to get your shit together."

          "You been telling me that for years. And I know it don't look like it, but I'm trying. It's just hard hard to do things when you only have half a body."

           "You look fine."

           "On the outside, Hon. On the inside, I'm missing a lot of pieces. It takes a lot of time to grow things back to where they were. I was forty-eight years old. I had a forty-eight year old heart, and a forty-eight year old fully functioning brain full of forty-eight years of life experiences that helped me make solid decisions. Now, I can barely see a little nub starting to grow back where my left ventricle used to be, but it's going to take some time, Sweetheart."

           "Dad, it would help if you found something or someone to love."

           "I do. I love you and your sister."

           "You know what I mean, Pop."

         Later that night, at the Casino, he thought about what she had said. He wondered what the odds were that he could find someone who was missing the right side of her body. Someone who was left brain analytical and who just happened to need someone with a more spiritual outlook on life. Someone whose own heart had been torn exactly down the middle.

         For some reason, he had taken to playing the Romeo and Juliet machine hidden deep on the left side of the building, and he didn't really know why. He assumed that it had something to do with the idea of fateful, ignorant assed love, an aspect that been missing from his life ever since Delia had stormed out the restaurant that night.

        He was twenty-five dollars down when he felt the presence of someone standing behind him observing. A minute later, a woman sat down beside him at the Space Journey machine.

          "Hello there, having any luck?"

          He turned to his left and saw an attractive looking red-haired lady, maybe a little younger than himself, smiling at him. He smiled and replied, "Not a whole lot, but I just got  here. How about you?"

         "I just got here too. I always start off by playing that machine."

       "Oh, I'm sorry. It won't take me long to lose what I've got in there."

       She laughed, "Oh, don't worry about me. That's a terrible way to look at things though. You have to have some faith."

       He laughed too, "I do have faith though. What I don't have is the sense to realize that none of this would exist if I was supposed to be winning."

       "Well, you got me then. I don't really have much faith either. My husband did though. My deceased husband, I should say. He had more than enough faith for the both of us. I like playing that machine because it was his favorite, and it always reminds me that I need to have some kind of faith in something besides the numbers I crunch all day."

       "You know why I play it? I play it because when you get the Bonus, or the nine little hearts all lined up, they morph into one giant heart. I know that sounds pretty damned silly, but it's the only way I can explain it."

       She looked into his eyes with a sad expression, "You been widowed too. Huh?"

        "Well technically, she left me before she died."

       They both sat in silence for a moment before she blurted,"Hey, I got an idea. You've got a hundred bucks in there. What say, I put in a hundred and we'll go halfsies on the winning?"

     He thought about, "Sounds good to me. Double our odds, or something like that."

          "Good! We'll have to do one thing though?"

           "Which is?"

         "Bet the max. It's only four dollars. Jerry used to tell me. If you ain't all in, the machine senses it and takes all your money become you aren't fully committed."

           "Kind of like life, I guess."

           "Exactly."

          They won two thousand dollars on the third pull and both joyfully leaped up and embraced.

          They split the money right down the middle and decided to share a cup of coffee in the diner. On, the way to his car afterwards, he knew he was going to kick himself in the morning though for not asking for her number. He wouldn't even had known her name if wasn't for the forms they had to fill out.

       But, at that particular moment, he was only thinking about the thousand dollars in his wallet, and the fact if he got there before midnight, he could still catch the two-for-one lapdance deal at The Shady Lady on the outskirts of town.

            

          

           

      I didn't open up the shades the first thing this morning like I usually do. I sat there on the small sofa in front of the window contemplating the light as it seeped into the room through the gaps in the blinds. Light is funny. It can enter into a room via a series of small horizontal stripes, but it instantly diffuses and permeates the darkness much in the same way that a teaspoon of sugar dipped into a glass of water would do. You could use three grains of sugar or a cup and all the water contained in the glass would contain the same amount.

      I've been thinking more about Jesus lately, and I have to admit that is something I don't usually do. I have his picture tucked neatly into the corner of the frame of my dad's picture. They are both looking at me as now as I think. The picture of my dad was taken right before he died when everything outside of his immediate wishes was first considered as a threat. I use it to remind me to suck it up, and by it I mean life's more painful lessons.

       Here's the thing about Jesus. There's always a part to his story that seems to point an accusatory finger. Dying on the cross for the sins of others sets a pretty high bar, and one that most of us walk under every day. I've been intensely aware of my failures as a high jumper all of my life, and it's caused me a lot of problems.

       It didn't help things that I first came face to face with Jesus in a small Baptist church that didn't offer much in the way of training when it came to Sunday School teachers. I've written about the incident a lot in my blog. A lot of times, when writing, I create characters and stories whole cloth using tiny bits of memory and reality to fashion the design. The story I tell about being told when I was ten years old that I would burn in Hell if I didn't accept Jesus on the spot is something I never ran through any filter. I remember it that well.

        It seems to me, that my church used the Cliff Notes version of the Bible, and even then didn't place a lot of emphasis on chapter summaries, it was pretty much the timeline repeated over and over. That made me look at Jesus as if he were a fifth or sixth cousin who only visited one time with another relative that us kids didn't even know.

     Mom scolded us, of course, before he showed up and warned us about playing nice. But he was shy in our presence and never said a word; it was the fact that they had dressed him up in the clothes of Little Lord Fauntleroy that made us think of him as a sissy boy and a snitch. I guess, that, at the time, the part about the nails through the palm and the scourging hadn't sunk in, and it was only the part where people kept pointing out that he was so much better than us that caught my attention.

      With my dad, it was different story. One day, two guys came into the yard with the intention of beating me up. I ran into our back porch when I opened the back door thinking I had reached safety, my dad was standing there with a belt. He answered the question I was formulating before I even asked it, whipping me one time hard across my butt while saying the words, "Stand and fight," through clenched teeth.

        I've always carried the welt but not on my ass. Its somewhere deep inside of me where I've tried to hide it from the view of others. I knew at a tender age what Abel felt when he brought forth the fruit that was spurned. Our fathers are our God when we are only boys. I disappointed him by trying to use rhetoric and logic when a sacrifice of pain was required. He didn't punish me, so much as tell me, "Son, life will be full of pain and if you run at the first sight of snakes, you'll only make things a damn sight harder."

       My brother and I watched a movie the other night. It had some blue-eyed European dude in it playing Jesus. The movie for all its pretended glamor and Hollywood trappings looked pretty cheesy. But beneath all that, the power of the story couldn't be restrained. It's a powerful story, the most powerful myth of all, and I use the word myth with its truthful meaning, "Extraordinary events that shake humans to their very core."
      
      The word doesn't mean, as a lot of imaginary spiritual leaders think, something that is not historical or real. On the contrary, it is the underlying reality of the whole shebang, the source of the cause and effect and not the result, and it's a thing much too large to for us to ever understand completely, or, at least not, without the commensurate expansion of consciousness that comes with knowing the truth, the breaking of old jars.

       The picture I have is just as phony as the actor in the film, but there is something truthful about the sadness in the eyes. Jesus was never accusatory, or at least, not till he discovered the people selling their goods in the Temple. And he knew well that most of us were more like the turtle in the race with the fox than Dwight Stones.

       For years, I thought that the scar on my right hand where my Mom accidentally dropped a hot iron while she was doing my shirts was my only similarity to Jesus. He always said though that he lives inside us all and is always standing there ringing the doorbell, dressed in his Sunday gotomeeting robes, and with a nice bottle of newly vinted wine tucked beneath his arm.

     And if anything good comes out of this craziness we're going through now, it might be that we get so sick of tired the fools arguing, the clowns singing and dancing, and hearing the braying efforts of all the unscrupulous sellers trying to breech our temple walls, that we turn our TVs off long enough to answer the damn door.       

      I looked in the mirror this morning and was appalled by the amount of weight I've put on during this lockdown. My eyes also betrayed the fact that I'm beginning to get a little frayed around the edges too. But, I don't need a bunch of nervous Nancy's telling people that they can't say or even think that I'm fat because that's exactly what I am.

   People usually have enough inherent goodness that, when left to their own devices, they can generally work things out for the better. It's only when those who believe they have some kind of advantage over others start putting rules down to protect their inflated opinions of themselves that we start turning small amounts of shit into mountains of the stuff.

     I know that there are those who are genetically disposed to being assholes and can hardly be blamed for following the blueprints provided. But if the neighbors band to together and, out of love, form structural walls even the worse shit written down on the bluest of paper can be corrected.

       There are also those who have been traumatized, actors in plays written by Tarantino inspired parents. There have probably been a lot of great actors who have failed only because the words they read were written well before the current crop of auteurs with their, "Hey! look at me, I'm saving the fucking world. No me. Over here," mentality started scripting everything that came out of Hollywood's hemorrhoid encrusted arse.  Seriously, we can't blame people for obeying the ghosts of their demented  ancestors. Blame no, correct yes, and it could be done relatively cheaply by teaching literature correctly and providing one or two more counselors in every school. Just make the kids aware that there is script of their own creation hidden inside of every one them. And, oh yeah, put the Ten Commandments back where they are supposed to be. You'd have to be the biggest, dumbest, Karen in the whole fucking world to say they have no place in our current society.

          The biggest problem though is the idea that just because you have 240 characters to use that you need to use them all. We need to say out loud; "Some people just need to stay the fuck off of social media", or at least restrain themselves from commenting on every freaking thing under the sun whether they a clue or not. And when those dumbasses report that shit like its written in stone by the very finger of God, we need to collectively moon their ass while shouting, "Shut the fuck up!" We had way too many damned liars, devious salesmen and crooked lawyers before the internet appeared. 

       People like Shakespeare, Lincoln, Jane Austen, and even Jesus himself would be appalled, not so much by the restrictions imposed on their own output, but more so by the idea of providing a  social standing and a platform for those who really are, in truth, only capable of saying things like, "You suck donkey dicks, asshole."

         One of the things I worry the most about during this pandemic is the vast display of ignorance that has occurred beneath its aegis. I look at things mythologically, with an understanding that I don't need a 'smoking gun" to tell me that something groundshaking is going on, an earthquake being readied strong enough to level buildings, bring down bridges, and burn down memory itself.

        I try hard not to ever get involved in political debates because it brings out the worst in people, turns friendships sour, and like a big, steaming pile of shit only seems to attract flies seeking sustenance in the nutrients found in feces. But sometimes I get angry and can't help myself. The people who run the media in this country are experts and know how to push buttons as well as they know how to make lying look easy. They are, in fact, only pimps with perfectly coiffed hair and bright, white smiles. They are chosen, you know, more for their ability to fake an incredulous look than any knowledge they may possess. I wouldn't trust in their ability to think their way out of a room with an opened door, much less their expertise in explaining the world to us lesser humans.

       But engaging in the political fray only creates more drama. One of the most profound things Jesus ever said, and one that probably gets the least attention, is "Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's." He meant that money and the power it represents is the only way that a politician/materialist can ever value life. It further means that Pilate, who feigned indifference on the matter of crucifying Christ, actually colluded with with the spiritual/political leaders of the day into passing the guilt for his crucifixion onto the shoulders of the ignorant masses who had already been told what they were supposed to think and do about the matter.

        The episode offers up no ringing endorsement for the intelligence of humankind, and only offers up the truth that if you depend upon the media to tell you what and how to think, you really have no God given right to criticize or hate those who only do the same.

         A response to a recent Facebook post of mine reminded me that I've always been a better teacher and coach than a political pundit. So, I've decided to resurrect the habit of talking more about what I've learned, where I learned it, and why it is important than explaining why people are such fools for believing whole cloth in anything that comes out a politician's, or a news person's mouth. It's always about the motives, people.          

This is my favorite book on the subject of the Kennedy assassination. I thought I knew everything about it but who killed him, but I was so wrong. For example, this is where I first learned that a picture of Allen Dulles with LBJ ran in the Dallas' papers shortly before the hideous deed, or that mayor of Dallas's was also brother of one of Dulles's right hand men, or that the guy that Dealey plaza was named after had a beef with JFK, or that it was Bill Moyer who notified the Kennedy people about the change in the motorcade's route. I often wonder why this simple fact has not been pursued to its real end. More importantly, this book is where I learned that that the CIA employed over three hundred news sources to push out information in the Sixties. 

I always find it surprising​ that the information contained in this book about the Venona Project was locked up for over fifty years after the war ended. It details (Chapter 13) about the communist infiltration of the American media. The information could have also been used to put to rest a lot of things that were being presented to the public as being 'up in the air'. For example, we could have been told that there was no question about Alger Hiss's guilt as a Soviet agent, or that one of that one of Stalin's agents, Harry Dexter White implemented on Stalin's orders Operation Snow which led not only to the events at Pearl Harbor but also America's involvement in the war. It also blows up the myth that the worries about Soviet penetration into our top levels of government at the time were all based on rumor and hearsay.
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Looking back upon the war and the post-war era with a new perspective provided by the information discovered by this rogue intelligence operation is very enlightening and also somewhat worrisome when you notice the parallels to what's happening today.

 This is the book that really opened my eyes to the idea that schools deal with trauma in the wrong way. Every year, we sat through training that only served to indoctrinate us to the idea that trauma was only about the big ticket issues, such as sexual, physical, or hardcore verbal abuse, and also served to mask the real damaging effects of the thousands and thousands of smaller traumas that influence our every reaction to life itself. Kids need to be taught about self-awareness and how important it is to their development, and yet most of our schools probably only have one person, if that, trained to talk about the issues involved. This should be a whole school activity and taught via Literature. People used to understand this, and it is alarming that we have gotten so far away from it. This means that the proper teaching of literature becomes of paramount importance, and that makes me wonder why the educational policies of the last several years has sought to play it down.

 I place these books side by side to acknowledge them as the source of the concept of how our culture now tamely accepts the the authority of incompetent knuckleheads to explain life to us. Nietzsche chalks it up to the lowering of standards in academia which he claimed led to the development of the 'journalistic mode of thinking' which has led us all to believe that the thirty second summaries of world events was more than enough to explain away every complex issue, a Cliff Notes version of life, so to speak.

Guy Debord expands upon the idea that saying it is the also way that Elites control us by pretending that we have an endless source and variety of views and explanations. each one delivered by someone hired more for their looks and their willingness to say what they have been told to say than any other expertise they may possess.

The evidence is all around us. Whoever hired a narcissistic asshole such as Chris Cuomo knew what they were doing, but it never had much to do with the telling of the truth. And has anybody ever wondered why the thick girls who studied meteorology in college never seem to make it far as weather persons on the networks? Or for that matter, how come only supermodels seem to know anything about professional sports?

           It is gotten to a frightening point because now they are demanding that we forget all about history and to even discount our own eyes, ears, and personal experiences in favor of listening to, and accepting as truth, all the perfumed excrement that they spew forth.