I was tired from the lack of sleep the night before, but I had to go to work. I had worked at three different jobs since coming from Oklahoma. I pumped gas at a service station, worked in the produce department at a grocery store, and I even twisted a few wrenches working on cars. All my bosses were wonderful people, I couldn't have been luckier in that regard, and I learned something important from every one of them, but something inside of me never felt right while I was working there. I felt restless like I knew I wasn't at home.

        I quit the mechanics job because I didn't feel like was giving Doc Arnold equal value for what he was paying me. He tried to talk me out of leaving because he liked me and didn't  want to see me jobless. One of the guys I met playing cards at Ernie's was a cracker-jack mechanic named Leo Jones who had just gotten laid off because the shop where he was working couldn't afford to keep him on. Leo also had two kids and a wife. So, I took him to meet Doc, and it was love at first sight. They took off to jabbering about engines and gear-ratios and I managed to slip out of the garage without them noticing. Even though I was now jobless myself, I felt pretty good because I had hooked up Leo and hadn't left Doc in the lurch.

        I didn't have a car then and still don't, but I had picked up a used Schwinn bicycle to get to work and back and when was riding it home, Doc's shop was only about four miles from where I lived, and started getting close to where I lived, I saw this old guy wearing a battered straw hat who had pulled this battered looking old truck over to side of the road to pick up an shabby looking sofa somebody had tossed out. He was, grunting, sweating and wrestling with the thing trying to get it up into the back of his truck, so I stopped and asked him if he needed a hand. He held out his hand for me to shake, told me his name was Garret Fitzgerald and that he did, in fact, need a hand.

         "Are ya blind or daft, Son? Do you not see me here wrassling with this forlorn piece of crap? Why would ask such a useless question?"

       When I started to explain that I was just looking to help, he stopped me before I could even get a  word out.

        "No need to explain or apologize, Laddie. It's you that is a helping. I was just making a very poor attempt at humor. If you would help get this sofa unto the back of my truck, I would, for a fact, be very appreciative."

         That's how I met Old Man Fitz, soon to be my next boss. I was barely five minutes away from leaving Doc's employ and the universe seemed to have reached out and spoke to me by saying,"Errol, I just can't have you out there just bouncing around out there at random."

          Outside my own Pa, Fitz quickly became the most influential man in my life. He had actually been born in Ireland and him and his dad had migrated first to Boston then came out to the West Coast because of the condition of his father's lungs. When I asked him about a mother and siblings, he told that his mam and his sister Kelley had died right before he and his dad had sailed across the ocean. He was a stout but rather portly gentleman with a great white shock of hair and long white beard to match with piercing blue eyes and big red cheeks. Fitz could  be taciturn at times and come off as grumpy, especially when you first met him, but once he warmed to your presence, it would often be like talking to your dad, a priest,  a college professor, a newspaper reporter, and a door-to-door salesman rolled into one. The reason that he was out picking up trashed furniture from the side of the road was that it was how he made his living. I helped him wrestle that old sofa onto to his truck, and he made me an offer.

       "Sonny, I'll pay you if you would come with me to my warehouse and help me to take her inside my workshop. Normally, I have a helper but I just fired the lad for being lazy, and my wife, who's at home, has a bum ankle." He pointed in the direction of a hill to the west of where we were, "It's just over that hill right there, and I'll bring you right back. I'l even throw in a sandwich and a pop."

        So, I threw my bike on to the back of the truck being careful not to scratch it and went with him. True to his word, in a couple of minutes, he turned his truck into the driveway of this large brick warehouse situated in a fairly substantial grove of Eucalyptus trees. Over an open double-wide garage door was a large sign saying Fitz's Resurrection Warehouse in large green letters outlined in gold.

        While we were lugging the sofa into the open doors, I questioned him, "Is this some kind of ministry or something?"

        He was huffing and grunting some but answered, "Don't be daft, Son. Gather your facts before you question things, else they won't be obligated to give you a correct answer. Also, your question mark should have been placed after the word ministry. Or something is a redundancy."

         After we placed the sofa down where he wanted it, I felt the need to explain that I felt my question was relevant considering there was a large red cross painted on the sign, but once again he checked me before I started talking. He simply held up the back of his hand as he began walking toward work bench where he picked up a lunch pail and started walking back toward me. He gestured toward a table and chairs and motioned for me to sit.

         "In that cooler there, they're a couple of pops on ice. My wife has this wonderful machine that makes ice. Amazing, huh? Could you be so kind as fetch me one? You can have the other." I did as I was told, and he opened up the lunch box and took out two rather large Roast Beef sandwiches and handed me one. He sat down in one of the chairs and let out a big sigh, and after we got situated, he began again. "Hortensia's sandwiches aren''t as good as my last wife's, but they're not bad. Go ahead and dig in."

         He ate a couple bites out of his sandwich and took a big swig off his pop. The sandwich was not just great, it was one of the best sandwiches I'd ever eaten. I wanted to tell him so, but I was afraid he'd cut me off again. Instead, I just said, "This is pretty good." 

         He nodded and gestured at all the stuff that was around us. "There's your resurrection, Son. I fix old things, bringing them back to life you might say. I haven't sat between the walls of a church since we buried me mam and my sis. That's not to say I don't respect and believe in the message of Jesus. I just don't like the fat priests who tell it. As you can see, I've spent a great deal of my own life bringing things back to life, not to believe in a resurrection, and you might one of those fools, who'll say,'They're just things Fitz, they are not living beings. But, the way I see it is, a thing is a thing, it occupies both time and material space as well as a space in our mind, and I consider what I do, much like what Christ did in his own time."

        I looked around and was totally amazed. The entire space, and it was a big warehouse,  was full of things like repaired vacuum cleaners and old radios he had rescued from the trash. There were chairs, tables, floor lamps, sofas, and bedposts. Oddly, the whole western wall was covered in flattened tin cans and looked like a piece of art. The East wall was almost entirely made up of glass windows that he had colored so that the sun coming in the morning filled the space with multi-colored light like a rainbow, or one of them great cathedrals in France. The thing that most caught my attention was the front of what had once must have been a rusted out truck that had been painted and converted into a beautiful sofa. The whole thing, all of the objects, the colored lighting, the tin-can wall, along with the portly, red-cheeked Irishman with his flashing blue eyes seemed so magical, and so full of life, I didn't to leave. Something inside of me shifted, and there was suddenly nothing more in life that I wanted to than to get a job and work for this crazy old Irish man. I so desperately wanted to ask him for a job, but was afraid of the possibility of a rejection.

         Instead, I told him the story of how I come to be on that road where he had found that sofa. When I came to the telling of why I left Doc's employ, I noticed some moisture welling up in his eyes. I finished and felt embarrassed about being so open with someone I had barely met, so I swallowed the last of my pop, placed the bottle on the table and looked down at my hands.

       "Well Errol, it seems like we've been placed on a path of convergence. I just fired my helper, a Mexican boy named Arturo, last evening. He was too lazy and didn't want to work. It was a hard thing for me to do because I truly liked the lad, and I really liked his mam, and I know his family needed the money. I thought that he needed the lesson of getting fired more than he needed the job. Then Mathilda, his blessed mother, came this morning before I opened, and told me it was he best thing I could have done. She said they had long talk and he had decided to get a part time job and return to school. At this point, Fitz  broke out his pipe, stuffed some tobacco in it, and lit it, took a huge puffs and blew out two huge smoke rings. "When you said that you walked away from the job because you didn't feel that you were giving that man Doc a good return, I knew right away that I wanted you to work for me. I meet so many hungry men in these desperate times looking for work who'll tell you they can drive a nail straight into piece of granite and then you find they don't even know how to hold a hammer, or read an alarm clock."

      I found myself a real home at the Resurrection Warehouse. It didn't pay as much as the mechanic job, but Fitz told me that after hours, I was free to work on projects of my own if I wanted to make some money on the side. He was also teaching me the skills I need to repair and refurbish things. On top of that, it came with lunch and a pop.

         "There'll be a doughnut or two from time to time and some coffee in the morning. Of course, Hortensia would be expecting you to have dinner with us from time. She don't get out as much because her knees gives her problems and she likes to know what's going on at the shop. Now, if gets a little nosey about something I don't want to know about yet, I'll clear my throat or cough. She knows the game, and won't be getting mad at you if it happens."

         The last thing he told me that morning has stuck with me ever since he said the words, and it will be there when I die, and maybe, if I'm lucky enough someday, be able to pass down. It came after I asked him why he was so brusque with me at first.

       "It was for your own edification, Lad. You saw me wrestling with that sofa and asked me if I needed help, and I know you were just being polite, but a good man wouldn't ask. There's such a thing as being too polite."

       When I got to work that morning, Fitz was just finishing a piece that we had found put out on a sidewalk outside of apartment complex. It was an old roll-up desk in such horrible condition I questioned  even if he could work his magic on it. He just chuckled and said, "How would you like it, if people just gave on you?" It was drying from the last coat of varnish, and it was stunning! I had no doubt that someone would buy that desk for hundreds of dollars. He was feeling good about the results and wanted to have some coffee before we went out on our junk run. I decided to tell him about my dream and my problems with Giancarlo.

        "I've been married three times before this one, and every one of them ladies paid me a visit after they passed on. My first, Mary came back just to say hello. Marta, the second, was angry because we had never gotten around to having kids, and she felt cheated. Hilda, the last one, a fine German lady, was just trying to scare me a little."

          I asked him which of the wive's was his favorite; he just chuckled and said the one that's in the kitchen cooking us lunch. Hortensia, his current bride, was a widow of a truck driver, and she was a little on the portly side herself. His first wife had been thin, so when I asked him which body type he preferred, he said, "You like 'em boney when you're a younger man because you're boney too and there's a lot more room in the bed. When you get older though, you like 'em with a bit more heft because they're softer when you're trying to sleep. There's nothing worse than getting an elbow to the liver when you're counting the sheep."

       Our conversation became much darker when we discussed about what I should do about Giancarlo. Fitz rose from the table and slowly wandered over to a large, gun-metal gray metal closet standing in a corner. He rummaged around in it a bit, and unlocked a footlocker and withdrew something wrapped in a red cloth and brought it back to the table where he placed it and unwrapped it. It was a shiny chrome, pearl handled .38 pistol.

          He grimaced as he spoke, "I'm going to lend you this pistol till your problem is solved to your satisfaction, Errol." I started to protest but he just held up his hand, "My Uncle gave me this in Boston and Boston back then, was a dangerous jungle for a young Irish man fresh off the boat. Now, I'm agin killin a man as much as anybody, but a far worse thing is ending up on the other side of that equation. This man wants to do you harm and travels around with two gorillas. It's one thing if you knew for certain the full extent of his intentions toward you, but you don't, and they involve a woman who might need protection too. And as my uncle said when he gave me this gun, 'It would better to have a gun and not need it, then need one and not have one because you were so enamored with the false illusion that human beings are all naturally good.'"

         I had to admit that argument made a lot of sense, so I reluctantly accepted the gift. He told me that the six chambers were fully loaded and then reached into his pocket and handed me six more bullets along with a bit of advice that he had apparently culled from a dime-store novel about Wyatt Earp which was to make sure you took your time and aimed carefully before you pulled the trigger.

         As, it turned out, I almost had to heed his advice that very day. At quitting time, I had to figure out a way to get that pistol home. So, I unloaded it and put six bullets in either pocket on both sides of my jacket. Then I carefully wrapped the gun back up in the red cloth and tied it down inside the basket behind the seat using an old shoe string.

    I got about a mile from my house and turned the corner on a road leading up a hill, when a car full of evil intentions, two ape-like creatures, and oily, wannabe gangster was barreling down that same road.  They saw me as they whizzed past me and then slammed on their brakes at the bottom of the hill where there was the only place wide enough to turn around after putting the car into reverse a few times. There was copse of trees at the top of the hill, and I tore out toward it as fast as I could peddle. I almost made it too, but right before I reached it, Giancarlo's car came brushing by, knocking me off the road and into the rocky field that adjoined it. I fell, ripped the knee out of the right leg of  my jeans and tore the right elbow out of my blue flannel work shirt. I also hit my head on a rock and was bleeding from a wound on over my right eye.

     I was somewhat dazed, but I could see Giancarlo and the twins dismount the car and start sauntering my way. The two thug-like brothers flanked Giancarlo. They each had a large wooden baton and were slapping them into their palms to make a loud noise. Giancarlo was dressed from head-to-toe in white linen and was stepping gingerly so he wouldn't step on something that would foul his clothing and his shiny, two-tone brown and white shoes.

       Boot, the bigger of the twins was yelling, "Hey Mister Look at the Naked Woman,' your little tricks ain't going to work no more. We ain't as dumb as you think we are, are we Butch?" Then he looked over at his brother who was having a time figuring out what his brother had said, then you could see the understanding finally unveil in his head, and he yelled, "Oh yeah, time for you to suffer 'Mr. Look at the Naked Woman!'" Then he tried to slap his baton a little extra hard, but he stumbled, and almost tripped and fell which caused Boot to roll his eyes and slap his hand against his head and clearly forgot he had baton in it and almost knocked himself out.

     Giancarlo shook his head, but wasted no time getting to the point."Well, what do we have here, Boys? Looks like a little rabbit don't it? Look at the little rabbit, how vulnerable it looks. Tiny little rabbit so pitiful and afraid. Is it a girl rabbit or a boy rabbit?" Giancarlo stopped abruptly, and the two dummies ran into his back and almost caused him to fall forward. He turned and glared at both of them before he resumed the abuse. "Damn, look at all that blood on its head; that must hurt a lot, huh?"

        Boot was impatient, "Come on, Boss, let us work him over. We'll mess him up good and proper. He'll look like a mud puddle when we're done! What d'ya say?"

      I don't know why Giancarlo didn't, but he didn't. He was apparently satisfied for the moment with drawing my blood; he gave me a very strict warning to stay away from Rosie DeLeon, and emphatically stated that she was his girl, and if I knew what was good for me, I would stay away from her. Rosie was a pretty girl and mother of one who lived across the courtyard from me at Cohen's Court and often moonlighted waiting on the poker tables. He had mentioned something about an unnamed female in his initial threats, but I wasn't seeing anyone at the time, so I didn't know who or what he meant.

   So, when he named Rosie, the motive for his anger suddenly came clear. She was standing behind me when I had caught him bluffing with a pair of fours and raked in a huge pot at his expense. He got up and left the table in a huff, but didn't say anything at time, so I didn't put two and two and together. A couple of weeks later though, he walked in the bar where I was sitting, sat down beside me and acted like he spilled his beer on me by accident.

   I stood up to protest, but then the two mountains rose up behind him, and I hesitated for a second. Thankfully, it was Ernie who broke it up by ordering them outside. Giancarlo was still mouthing off as he went by me and was going on about how he was going to get back at me. He said something about a girl, but I didn't hear him clearly. Then when he mentioned her by name, I remembered that I had taken a shiny silver dollar from the pot and flipped to Rosie for bringing me luck.

       I was so relieved to watch them fools walk away and crawl back into Giancarlo's car and drive away. Not because of the beating that never happened, but because it meant that I could finally release my grip on the pistol I had reloaded as I watched them approaching.


                



     

        

         

           

     You know what's weird. Gravity? Just think about how little the average person knows about that kind of stuff. Most people don't even notice when they drop a glass or something that hits the ground. Them scientists say that Isaac Newton was born in the middle of the 17th century or there abouts, and if that apple tree story really took place, it had to have happened pretty close to the beginning of the 18th century. So, that means that us humans have been sitting under apple trees getting hit in the head by falling apples for tens of thousands of years at least with out ever noticing that anything funny was going on before Newton came along and laid claim to the notion. There were probably a few Greeks and Egyptians who had a clue, but they didn't have radio back then, so I guess it didn't matter, at least up until that German feller invented the printing press, I guess most people simply assumed that stuff just falls down whenever you let it go.

      One day, my family and my Uncle Wilbur's family went up into the snow to find a Christmas tree. My dad just couldn't accept paying a dollar for a tree when we could get one for free. I guess that some kind of sense. While we were there, we saw these people paying this guy money to let them climb up his hill and slide down on an inner tube or on a sled.

       My Uncle Wilbur blurted out, "Damn, look at all them folks paying for that guy to let them climb up that hill."

     My dad answered with sarcastic grin, "Nobody pays to climb a hill, Brother. They paying for that down hill slide." I remember that day because that saying became one of his favorites, that term 'the down hill slide'. He used it to explain just about ever thing and in a lot of different ways. For example, he used it to describe laziness and cutting corners and often would say, "Beware of that downhill slide, son. Anything worth doing involves a climb." When my cousin Wilcox, Wilbur's boy, lost everything he owned because of his hardheaded nature, Pa said, "Stubbornness often precedes that downhill slide."

      When I went through all his things years after he died, I found an old, battered looking brown leather-bound notebook. Pa had been keeping track of all those things he had ever said like that. He had gotten the notebook on his tenth birthday and written hundreds of sayings over the years. The very first one was "Don't count your chickens before you eat them, makes more sense to count them after they're gone."

      They did get better over the years.  When I opened the book and looked to see what it said on the last page, I was surprised to discover that Pete had written something it in. It was something my dad had said right before he died. It simply stated, "My whole life's been a downhill slide, how could it have been otherwise, my mom was standing when she had me."  I remembered that there was the story that Pa's mama was standing up with her back against the wall when he came out the chute.. I don't know the particulars, or even if someone or the other had just made that up to explain my father's strange character traits. I guess it made some sense in an oddball sort of way, and Grandma Maggie was sure stubborn enough to do something like that just to prove she could.

    I kept the notebook on a table in my bedroom, and whenever I started missing Pa, I'd open it up and read a couple of his sayings. My favorite was. "Why did the chicken cross the road? It ran out of other options." When I told Pete I kept it there to remind me of Pa, he asked me how come I didn't have any pictures or things of Ma's. I thought it about for a couple of seconds before answering. "Don't need nothing to remind me of Ma, she's with me every day." He started to raise his finger and say something smart back, but then it hit him what it meant, and he stopped mid-word and nodded.

    This the kind of stuff you think about when you wake up in the middle of the night because your dead wife came to you in a dream and wouldn't talk to you. It's also the same thinking that you would use to distract yourself from thinking about your real problem which was what were you going to do about a cheap little hoodlum named Giancarlo Robbia who, for some reason or another, hated the very fact that I was even alive.

        I couldn't sleep, so I put on a jacket and went and poured myself a small glass of orange juice and went and sat outside on the small porch in the front of my two bed-room bungalow. I don't why I rented a two bedroom apartment, I guess maybe because I knew that Pete was so wild and unsettled he'd would probably need a place to stay at some point. I set the other bedroom up as an office with an old desk I'd found in a thrift store along with a reading chair and a couple of book cases. My little library was small, but it was loaded up with some powerful thinking. I had read a lot of Mark Twain's stuff and a lot of Dickens. It had some Thoreau and Emerson too, Dad's volume of Leaves of Grass that Grandma had given him for his 16th birthday, Nay favorite was this book by a Canadian name Maurice Bucke, and I even kept Mama's two volumes of Browning's poems that she kept on the fireplace mantle.

       Even though my mind was restless, I couldn't help but notice what a lovely night it was. A large full moon seemed to float on a pillow of clouds surrounded by a halo. For a moment, I started up in thinking how foolish we humans are, as we could witness this natural beauty nightly and speculate on how the moon follows the earth and reflects the light from the hidden sun, and how the angles change and shadows encroach only to be driven back. There's a whole lot of stuff to sort through in thinking about what it all means. The greatest thing about it though, is that we have the eyes to witness this display and thoughts to process it, the heart to appreciate it all the way down to our bones and words to describe it to generations yet unborn. But most of us, one way or the other, have to turn our focus on to the stupidity of people like Giancarlo Robbia. I would much rather sit there and lull myself into sleep looking at the moon, but I knew it wasn't going to happen on this night.

      Giancarlo was two-bit hood who liked to pretend he was real hot stuff. He reeked of cheapness and small minded thinking; he seemed proud of his ignorance and exuded stupidity and greed. He wore these shiny double-breasted suits which he thought made him look like Bugsy Siegle, but were actually cheap knock-offs produced in a run-down factory building in Chinatown by an old, Chinese tailor named Wong Lee. Old man Lee liked to play cards and told us that Giancarlo had once threatened that unless Lee gave him the suits at half price he would burn down the factory building. He didn't understand that Old Man Lee was already hand-making top quality suits for some real deal people. Lee pretended to go along with the deal, but one night Giancarlo got dragged out of a casino, thrown in back of Packard and woke up, naked, and trussed like a pig ready for slaughter in an orange grove out in Topanga valley.

     All those cheap suits he wore did was make everybody aware that he was not the tough guy he pretended to be. He was strictly small-time and was contented to be twisting the arms of old ladies who ran boarding houses, and working men who were just trying to make a living pumping gas, fixing motors cars, or selling groceries. A nickel and dimer's what my daddy would have called him. Rumor had it that he wasn't even Italian and that his real name was Juan Carlos Roberts, and mom was Mexican seamstress, and his daddy was an Arkansas sneak thief named Squeaky Roberts.

      That didn't mean that he wasn't dangerous. Wannabe gangsters were generally stupid and would do rash things that a real hood would never do. He always strutted around with these two big apes who seem to share a single eye-brow, mouth breathing Neanderthals who carried walnuts in their pockets so that they could crush two of them at a time with their barehands in an effort to look tough. I had avoided their wrath a few times by merely pointing and saying, "Hey, look at that woman over there. She ain't wearing any clothes!" They would turn and look and it was at least a minute before they turned back around, and by that time, I was long, gone. One time I did it, and there weren't even any people in the direction that they turned, just a big, concrete wall. Still, took them a minute or two before they realized there wasn't any naked lady there.

     I knew that made them doubly dangerous because they would do what Giancarlos paid them to do, but, when it came to hurting me, they would come at me, screaming, "There never were no naked lady, Errol! You lied to us." The way I figured it though, was I could always do it again, and Giancarlos would actually have to be there to tell them not to look, and in that case, dealing with him would cancel out any threat they posed.

    I went back to thinking about my Pop. My main goal in life was simple. I just wanted to do it better than my pa. It wasn't going to be all that simple either. My dad had a lot of faults. He'd these spells of depression and would do impulsive things like drink and gamble all of our money away. He'd come home drunk, and when my Mom would meet him at the door full of anger, he'd invariably break down sobbing, begging for forgiveness, and she would always forgive him. Ma's greatness weakness was her unending love for my  daddy.

     But judging Pa was a lot more complicated than that. At heart, he was a really good person and a highly intelligent one at that. He just wasn't cutout to be a farmer. He was crucified by the one truth he could never understand. Pa could build a house from scratch though, wire it up, pour the concrete, frame the windows, paint it inside and out, roof it, all of it. He could take a car apart and put it back together in better shape than it was before he started messing with it. I'll never understand why he just didn't do those things, and why he felt so strongly about making that farm work. When I asked Mama, she'd tell it was because the farm had been in our family for over a hundred years and his daddy, my grandpa Thomas, considered it his legacy and therefore it was Pa's duty to pass it down to his son's, and his son's duty to pass it down to theirs. It was tragic, how it all played out, but damn, I was glad Pa didn't put that weight on his boy's, and Ma never shared in that view at all' she tolerated because it Pa's burden, and she was wife.


     He came home one night and burst in the door looking all crazy. Mama had gone over to Grandpa's house to help to deliver her sister's baby. Petey jumped up from the table where we were playing cards, and cried, "What's the matter, Papa? What's wrong?"

     Daddy didn't answer, he just walked slowly over to where Peter was standing, put his hands on Pete's shoulders and looked at him all weird and then looked all around the room before uttering, "Where's Mama, Pete?"

        Pete told him, then Papa came over to where my little sister Sissie and I were sitting, put his hand softly on top of her blonde head, picked up one of her braids and lifted it up slowly before letting it go, he grimly smiled at me for a second then started walking back toward the door. Sissie was scared and started crying, and Pete ran to him tried to grab hold of him, but Papa just gently shoved him away. Pete was off balanced and fell. Papa went out and closed the door behind him. I helped Pete up, and we all ran outside, calling for Papa to wait. Me and Sissie stood on the porch, she clinging to my arm as she cried.

           Pa  went to the shed attached to the barn and went inside, he lit the lantern and I could see the small window light up. He was looking for something and noisily rummaging around, I could see Pete creep up and try look into the window, but the light abruptly vanished, in the darkness, and I could hear Pa come out and start walking towards the woods behind the field where we pastured our cows. Pete was running toward him and calling, "Daddy! Don't go, Daddy! Wait! Mama be home shortly!"

         I could barely hear Papa's reply, "Go home, Pete. Take care of Errol and Sissy. Tell Mama, I be home shortly. Tell her I'm sorry."

       Daddy disappeared and Pete came walking back out of the darkness. He was twelve years old, but  in the dim light, he looked like an old man.

      

        

            

       

     It was a quarter till two, and Ernie the bartender was already showing signs that he was ready to close. Ernie, the owner and barkeep of a seedy little establishment in the San Fernando Valley, was a stocky little Armenian dude with a weird beard that was braided on both sides of his chin. His dark hair was curly and awkwardly lay on his head like a misplaced rug. Whenever he was ready to go home, he'd always turn off the radio and shut down some of the neon behind the bar then stand there and dry a glass that never seemed to get dry.

      "What's the matter, Ern, you in a hurry to get home?"

      "Naw, that ain't it, Errol. Ma's not feeling too good. She called about an hour ago and said her stomach was bothering her."

        "Hell, you shoulda said something. I'll swallow this one down then. Hey, you couldn't mix me one up for the walk home could ya?"

         "Well asides the fact that I legally can't do that, it goes against my better sense to pour scotch in a paper cup. What's the matter, you dry at home?"

        I nodded, "Payday's tomorrow."

        "Tell ya what I'll do then. I pour ya shot of Lamberts."

        "No scotch?"

       "Scotch is not for shots or paper cups. Scotch is a thinking man's drink. What you need for walking is whisky."

        I didn't argue and finished my drink and put the glass down on the bar, "I guess beggars can't be choosers."

        We both laughed and Ernie turned and went and got the Lamberts.

      I guess it would be wrong to call Ernie's Place an Armenian bar because even though there a boat load of Armenians living in the LA area, Ernie and his brother Leo were the only ones who seemed to ever come into the place. He explained it by saying it was because of a feud he had with some of his cousins. The regular clientele were middle class white dudes from the offices and car lots in the vicinity, a mess of blue collar Okies and Mexicans, a few Black  guys from the airport, and some bored housewives. Some of the neighboring bars didn't let the ethnics in, but Ernie's wasn't like that.  The whole theme of the place centered around the poker tables in the back room where how they judged character was solely based on how well you played cards. It was Sunday evening though, and Ernie shut the tables down on Sunday.

         It was a place where people either went to play poker or to drink away problems. Some, like myself, went there to talk to somebody other than the pictures on the walls. I'd come out to LA two years before from Tulsa, Oklahoma after my wife Elsie died from being hit by a hit and run driver. She was on her way to tell me that she was pregnant. She didn't die right away but lingered in a coma for over a week. My brother Pete callously picked that trying time to come tell me that he had decided to go out to California to seek his fame and fortune and wanted me to go with him. Mind you, my wife was lying comatose in the bed not six feet away from where we were talking.

       "Elsie's not going to want to go to California."

      He didn't say nothing, at least not out loud, the look he gave me though was pregnant with meaning and hung there in the air between us for several minutes.

     I broke the silence first, "What about Sissie? We the only family she's got out here now that Aunt Susie died and Walter and his family went west."

      Pete rubbed the stubble on his chin, "She's a big girl now, Errol. She don't want to keep living with her older brothers. Besides I think she's going to marry Oliver Jones if  he ever works up the nerve to ask her."

         "Don't you think we at least ought to ask her?"

      "Well sure, but......., " he never finished his sentence because a nurse came in to check on Elsie.

           It turns out that we didn't have to ask our sister what she wanted because she died two days later. She had attended a barn dance in Pryor and on the way home, a drunken farmer had pushed the car she was in onto the path of an oncoming train mistakenly thinking his wife was in the car with another man. They brought her body into the morgue in the basement of the hospital while Peter and I were upstairs sitting with Elsie. Then my wife passed away not 10 minutes before Johnny Bowron, our neighbor's son, burst into the room to tell us about Sissy.

        I never did tell Peter one way or the other about going west. It was just assumed. I think that I was numb right up till the moment our truck, loaded with everything we owned, pulled out of the muddy, rutted, lane that ran up to our farmhouse. Pete had handled the whole shebang. Elsie was buried by the side of her Daddy up in Tulsa, but Pete and me buried Sissy on the hillside overlooking our farm, right by our mom and dad. I remember thinking that for the thirty-two years my family owned the place, there wasn't a single grave up on that hill. When we left, there were three.

       Ernie brought me a paper cup containing a double shot of Lamberts. I was reaching in my pockets to pay him when just waved me off and said it was on the house.

       "You looked like you needed that drink, Errol, and far be it for me to turn away a man who needs a drink."

       "Appreciate it, Ern, and you're right, I sure needed a drink tonight."

      "You ain't worried about that Giancarlo guy are you? If you want, I'll give you a ride home."

      "Naw, shit no. I ain't worried about that fool, him and his little gang of thugs. No, you go home check on your mom. I like walking at night. It clears my head."

     He finished locking up the door and walked over to where his car sat underneath the streetlight. He had to fight off a cloud of bugs to unlock it. He waved as he pulled out of the parking lot onto the blacktop road.

       I waved back and then turned and started walking the three quarters of a mile up hill climb to the one bedroom bungalow I shared with a parakeet named Edgar.

      That night Elsie came to visit me. I know it's probably wrong to phrase it that way, her being dead and all. But, the fact was, she still visited fairly regular. This time, she woke me out of a dead sleep. I was dreaming about a night at the county fair when we were on our first real date. We got in fight because she thought she caught me looking at another girl, got mad and took off through the crowd.

     It wasn't true. There was no way any fool could look at another girl when Elsie was around. I mean she was small town, church-going girl, and back then that meant she was clothed from her neck to her knees. My brother Pete used to use the word swaddled to describe the look when he was complaining about how the girls in our home town always dressed. He had picked up the word in Sunday school class, when our teacher, the aptly name Ms. Hogg said the infant Jesus was wrapped in swaddling clothes.

     Pete had spent a year traveling with some carnies and had no end of stories about how the girls dressed in the towns and cities more sophisticated than our own, which in his view, was pretty much every other town. He also used a lot of terms like hot to trot and out looking for it when he launched into one of his rants.

     I didn't care if Elsie wore a flour sack, which I'm sure most of our mothers had done at one point. Any guy in our neck of the woods would have snapped their damned head off trying to catch a glimpse of her walking by. Looking at her made me think about what life must have been like being a peasant boy in the Middle Ages, living in a hut with your animals, and then seeing the Lord's beautiful daughter come riding by. You couldn't help but think that the mere vision of. her wasn't heaven sent.

      I swear I was just looking away so I wouldn't give away what was going on inside my head by just staring at her all the time. Maybe, some other girl happened to randomly intersect the path of my vision when Elsie turned to tell me something, or maybe she just made the whole thing up to play games with my heart, I don't know. I was her first beau, and that was her first real time away from her mom and dad's protective vision. My dad had warned me about such things one night as he sat outside on the porch sipping on his nightly glass of squeezins as he called it.

      "You keep a young girl locked town tight as she begins her turning, she's going rebel one way or the other. The tighter the chain, the crazier the dog."

      I looked at him stupidly, not comprehending the analogy. Hell, I didn't even know what an analogy was then, "Elsie not a dog, Pa. She's the prettiest girl I ever seen. Maybe the prettiest girl in whole damn world."

     He just looked at me for a bit, took a sip and said, "Don't be stupid, Errol. I don't want to talk to stupid. I use up all my stupid talk when I'm trying to tell them pigs what to do. Most women have a great deal of crazy locked up inside them. Not judging, mind you. It comes with that monthly cycle thing they been given. They have to learn to live with things, we men, don't even know about. It's the child bearing and raising of youngins that uses most of the craziness up, and keeps'em from going full blowed crazy."

     "Mama?"

     "Your mama is one of the rare'uns, boy. Jeanne always so calm. There's two reasons she was so sane. Number one, she really believes in that Bible. Most of the people in that church say they do, but she really does. Secondly, her daddy was a lot crazier 'n her mama. Your mama had to learn how to be sane a lot earlier than most girls just to survive her raising and take care of her siblings."

      I guess, he just was trying me to tell to keep my guard up when it came to dealing with females. He tried to explain that Elsie was bound to play games with me regardless whether she wanted to or not. He said that she wouldn't even understand why she was doing things, and that I needed to stay smart and not get caught up in the craziness, and that my main job was to keep guiding her back  to her true self."

       I was just talking to talk, and smugly answered that that sounded easy enough, and Pa suddenly spit out his drink, doubled over, and damned near choked himself to death laughing. When he finished, he had to take a big drink to stop the choking, and the strength of liquor caused him to choke even more. I damned near choked my pa to death out of mere stupidity that night. I think I learned more about human frailty that evening than anything that's happen to me since.

       After regaining some composure, he finally said in a voice made gravelly by all the choking, "Easy nuff? Son, when that little pecker of yours starts to gettin hard enough to scratch your name in that oak tree over yonder, you're going to learn a thing or two about crazy all right, and you're going to learn it, and still have to learn to act normal, build a house, dress a hog, and keep your own fool seff from being cheated by all the damn, two legged varmints round here. Easy has nuthin to do with it. Listen, you avoid easy like the plague, easy's got nuthin to do with real life."

       I never did learn if Elsie was playing with me or not. By the time I caught up with her and grabbed her by the shoulder, she turned around with the biggest smile, and I forgot the question.

      The night in the dream though, I was one shot away from winning her one of them big dolls, but I quickly put the rifle down and started chasing her through the crowd. Yet, every time I'd get close enough to start to reach out, someone or something would interfere, and she'd get even further away while I dealt with the problem. She made her way all the way out by the parking lot, where there was a beer stand where Pete and some of his friends were standing around talking. She finally stopped and let me catch up to her, and, this time, when she started to turn, she disappeared, completely vanished into the night and I realized I was with dreaming and woke with a cry that hurt me to the bone.

       After that, I couldn't go back to sleep. So, I got up and made myself a cup of coffee, went outside, and sat down on the single wooden chair I kept by the front door. And while I was pondering over what I needed to do about a sleazy, little two-bit hood name Giancarlo Robbia, the morning sun peeked over a mountain top far away.

     My older brother and I love to watch movies on a big screen. The experience kind of takes us back to those childhood Saturdays where we could watch two and a cartoon. Back in the day, we kind of had the feeling that all of the movies we watched deserved the big screen treatment, and it was easy to see that the people who made them were proud of what they turned out whether it was one of those crazy B movie Sci-Fi things where the monster was wearing a latex suit, or something more elaborate like Gone With the Wind or Justice at Nuremberg. Nowadays though, anyone can stream a movie on their cell phone and watch it in the back of an Uber or in church. Hell, any piss ant with a cell phone can make a movie.

    We're both retired and sometimes we have to wait a month before there is something we actually want to see, and we do get disappointed an awful lot, a whole lot more than we are used to. We saw a movie recently where one of the opening scenes featured an elephant's ass blowing wet feces all across the screen. It was a big budget movie too. I don't care how you cut it, it'd be hard to be proud of a movie where you coat the audience's vision with wet elephant shit before you even get started. And you're not really a movie maker when you do shit like that, but more of a performance artist. You know, like that Gaga woman who obscures her real singing talent by doing stupid shit like wearing prime sirloin cuts of meat as a dress for a Gala event. I'm kind of old school that way and was raised thinking that you don't wear cuts of meat to big events, you eat them, I don't care how important the event was either. I suppose it might have been a way to get discovered without the obligatory attendance at a P. Diddy party, but it comes off looking more like you're still trying to snag an invite. Besides, I'm guessing that there are still a lot of us willing to forgo such a shot at fame, wealth, and celebrity if it meant exchanging our boxer briefs for a skirt steak.

       Three of our most anticipated choices this past year were huge disappointments. For example, Martin Scorsese's The Killer's of the Flower Moon had such a great premise, but Scorsese forgot to film the middle third of the story, and then there was that cringey opening where he explained how he felt compelled to make the movie. I read the book, and it was a shameless glorification of J Edgar Hoover creating the  fledgling FBI. I think maybe old Marty was just trying to get ahead of the story, so that his Hollywood buddies wouldn't really think that he working at the behest of law enforcement or something. Hell, in Hollywood nowadays, that would get you banished to making infomercials for air-friers or non-stick skillets.

       Next, there was Kevin Costner's Horizon: An American Saga Chapter I, another movie with an interesting premise that was totally screwed up by the lack of an ending. It was one thing to have so many side stories that you needed a remote control on rewind in order to keep up with what who was doing what to who, but then he didn't wrap up a single one of the many storylines before launching into a thirty minute preview of upcoming events from Chapter II, II, IV, etc., and never give us in the audience any kind of an ending to the movie we were watching. That is not how shit is done in the real world, or at least the real world prior to Covid. You show previews after the movie has ended, everyone knows that, or used to anyway.

         Most recently, it was Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis, another fascinating premise that F2 Coppola managed to screw-up by, in my opinion, trying to impersonate Quentin Tarantino. It was hard to tell what was going on half of the time, we were literally in the dark and all. It was like he was making a pastiche of subliminal messages in order to insert them into a movie and ran out of time and forgot to make the movie. This is the guy who made Godfather II, arguably the greatest movie of all time, a master manipulator of the narrative arc, so I know that he knows, or used at some point what a well developed and concise narrative does for a movie.

    I know there are going to be plenty of people who are going to say these movies are works of art and that these guys making them are geniuses. And I won't  argue that point, in regards, to the three I mentioned. But there are people who think Jack Black is a genius, and he wrote lyrics to a Grammy nominated CD about spilling his seed onto a woman's butt cleavage. I could have wrote shit like that when I was twelve, and I damn sure weren't no genius. He also endorsed Joe Biden for president and pretended Biden was doing wonderful when they had to stick a tracking device in his underwear to keep him from wondering off. Things is you have to be careful slinging that term around or you risk wearing it out describing something that is the textbook definition of mundane.

     There is definitely something wrong with Hollywood these days.

  Which brings me to my original premise that Covid has killed Hollywood. I think it died in a hospital bed on a breathing machine. It started to have respiratory problems about the same time all of its stars retreated up into their barricaded castles in the hills and started filming themselves singing "Imagine there's no heaven,"and urging the rest of us to sing along with them at a time that the rest of us were wondering how we were going to wipe our ass without toilet paper. I think some shady young dude snuck in the hospital room and pulled the plug on Hollywood. And that dude was probably the first one on the scene to offer his condolences to the grieving family as the doctors wrote Covid 19 in the blank as the cause of death. Everyone at the funeral was murmuring amongst themselves it nothing was ever the same after the pandemic.

      The death did clear the way forward for people who believed that covering a screen with elephant shit was an act of genius, the critics who tripped over themselves to give a 98% approval rating to the movie Road Trip which was the second worse movie I've ever seen, the people who green-lighted the movie Strays I which was the worst movie ever made, and for the suits so afraid of Quentin Tarantino that they couldn't bring themselves to tell him to leave that fucking flame thrower in the shed so as not ruin his best opportunity to create a masterpiece.

        In truth, Hollywood died in a lot more ways than that, it died in as damn near many ways to die as there are death scenes in the movies.

It was hit by a car on the way to meet a lover on the top of the Empire State Building so that they could attend a P. Diddy party together.

It was poisoned by a power mad bank president when he was caught trying to launder money from Epstein's offshore bank account.

It was shot and hung upside down after a bloody coup after telling the villagers that everything was hunky dory and those same villagers got tired of dining on the peanut shells the celebrities were tossing down from the parapets.

It hung itself in a closet after looking in a mirror and seeing what it had become (which ironically was, a performance artist totally lacking in new tricks as all of its former fans moved on to the wunderkind who introduced the movie going public to the wonders of whale shit and Octopi engaging in oral sex in a sci-fi romantic comedy, a wunderkind who showed up to receive his Oscar wearing a tux made out of the recycled clothing found at a homeless encampment in Malibu.

It died of a broken heart after realizing what it was in comparison to what it could have been.

Old Hollywood has died in a variety of Hollywood endings, but its ghost still lingers on like a wet fart in a nursing home on Chile Bean Wednesday. And its malevolent influence will continue to be felt indefinitely until either the audience somehow wakes up from this bad dream that we are currently in, or somebody remembers, ironically from the movies, what it takes to bring a vampire down.

     Don "Johnny" Wilson sat impatiently in a wooden chair that looked like one of those old, dark oak chairs that we used to see in the old movies involving courtroom scenes. The weird thing was that there was a whole line of these chairs stretching as far as his eyes could see, lined up along a very tall stone fence that also seemed to stretch to the horizon, every one of the seats was filled with human beings of every race and age. On the other side of a two lane road, there was cracked sidewalk and a vacant field. There was a corner where another  road intersected and a building on the corner. Across that street was an extension of a wall very similar to the one he sat before. There was also a lonely streetlight on that corner.

     It seemed like he'd just opened eyes about an hour before, and he was suddenly there. Every one else looked puzzled and worried too. The sense of time passing felt kind of strange and more like that time was standing still. It reminded him of once when he was kid swimming in his grandpa's pond when he'd had a similar feeling. He was sitting on one of his grandma's  a patchwork quilt on the grassy bank of the pond drinking a strawberry soda when Nova Hillsong, his grandpa's neighbor's daughter, emerge from under the surface of the pond, shake the water from her long, blonde hair and laugh. Nora was a senior in high school and the head cheerleader. Her body sheathed in a steel grey  one piece bathing suit looked like the picture of the winged Venus he'd seen in an encyclopedia.

    He remembered that suddenly, all the sounds disappeared. Nora  was smiling and saying something, but he couldn't hear. His little brother Tommy was tossing rocks into the water. Nothing. The weirdest feeling was that time had stood still. It only lasted a few seconds, but the feelingstayed with him all these years, and he had that feeling now looking at the line of chairs all lined up with their backs to the high stone wall that seemed to go on forever.

       His reverie was broken by an announcement that came over a loud speaker that was mounted the on streetlight across the street from where he was sitting. Someone had attached a bright yellow sign with the word REPENT written on it in blood red. A cracked voice suddenly came over the speaker saying, "Donald John Wilson report to the main gate  immediately!" He sat up straight as he recognized his name." He was more than a little confused as he didn't know anything about any gate much less a main one. Perplexed, he looked all around him and noticed an old man dressed in an old timey looking police uniform sitting in a chair in front of the building across the street. The old man looked a lot like a character named Gus who used in sit front of a firehouse in an old time television show named Leave it to Beaver. The old man sternly pointed a bony finger in his direction and gestured for him to get up and start walking around the corner where the lamp post was.

        So he got up and started walking.  Standing up was surprising because normally when he got out of a chair, the arthritis pain in his back made it almost life changing experience. This time there was no pain. And his knees seem to function a lot better than they had that morning while he was vacuuming his carpet. It dawned on him that he couldn't remember how he had gotten here. He was cleaning his small apartment and then, suddenly, he opened his eyes and found himself sitting in a chair.

       He walked twenty yards to the north where the corner was. The building looked like an Art Deco metal and glass store front from back in the Sixties. He turned the corner and saw, about a hundred yards away he could see two huge stone columns standing about thirty feet in the air and about that far apart with two, large, black wrought iron gates between them. There also looked to be a small group of people to the right side of the columns, some sitting behind what looked like three, large wooden desks. He noticed that there was chair just like the one he just vacated in the middle and facing the desks.

       I grew up in the 60s and the 70s, and I made pretty much every mistake that someone who grew up during the period could make. And I honestly believe that the people who were responsible for creating the chaos then, are the parents of people who sit up on their hill tops laughing at us now. I still bear a lot of hidden scars from that upbringing, but I consider myself lucky that after I had reached bottom, God had mercy on me and showed me the way out.

       I met Steve Brown after that epiphany. He hired me right out of college to teach Reading and English at John Muir Middle School, and I stayed there for the next 31 years. He handed me a set of keys my first day of work, and that night I actually cried while looking at them and holding them in my hand. I didn't believe I was anywhere near that trustworthy, and it fully hit me just how ashamed of myself I had been made to feel because of who I had been as a kid.

       What followed though were the best years of my life. My kids were young, my marriage was strong, and I was given the freedom to begin anew. Mr. Brown was the best boss I had ever had because he trusted us to do the job we were hired to do and gave us the freedom to do it. It was exactly what I needed at the time, some trust and the freedom to grow. He truly liked people, and before, I never knew bosses were allowed to do that. Mr. Brown also gets the credit for putting me on my true career path as a coach.

      I have to admit that back then, sometimes Steve annoyed me because when I was angry and venting about something, he never seemed to understand how angry I thought those things should have made him too. It took me years to learn how right he was about that stuff. He preferred to maintain a more balanced perspective and to always give himself the option of trying to find something more positive in the situation. I think it was his greatest gift. He chose to maintain a calm sanguinity over anger. It made him almost impossible to dislike. I say almost impossible because there is always some people who are going to hate you when they force you to hold a mirror up to their own ignorance. You can't be an administrator of any stripe without running into those people. What is admirable though, is when you can listen to their unfounded complaints and emerge without the feeling the need for vengeance. Another gift.

          When Roscoe Bessey died a few years ago, I remembered feeling infinitely sad and wondering where we were going to find someone to fill the hole he left in this community. I remembered thinking that there wasn't one single person who could do it, but a lot of people would just have take to take up a little more space.

          The thing that makes me the most sad about Steve's passing is that this old world got a whole lot more crazy the last few years. There's a lot of us who need good role models to show us how to go about our lives and not to get caught in all the anger, the hate, and the craziness.

      And while I feel a little more optimistic about how some of these youngins are proving themselves worthy, there still seems to be a whole lot more out there who would rather just pretend.

      That means we can ill afford to lose anyone who knew how to play that role, much less someone who played it so well.

         

  

   Throughout history water has often been used as a metaphor for human consciousness and in particular the subconscious. I think it is more than a little ironic that recently the water in the Seine River had to be tested and at least once deemed too polluted for human safety. The irony being, of course, being concerned with the furor surrounding the controversy the opening ceremonies of the 2024 Paris Olympics most of which took place on or near the river Seine.

    The furor was created when the organizers decided to parody the Last Supper by using transgender actors and actresses in place of Jesus and the Apostles. They immediately denied doing it and then very strangely publicly gaslit the very people who leaped to their defense by admitting that they had done exactly what they were being accused of and then offering up a less than genuine apology.

      The ceremony was broadcast to 28.6 million people world wide. The ceremony was obviously meant to shock and provoke. It took months, if not years, of planning. The man hired to create it had a track record and every deed and idea had to approved by some very powerful people.

    There is also a pattern beginning to emerge of these large scale events of ties to anti-clerical imagery. That's also kind of ironic because the French Revolution, some of which was also parodied, was largely anti-clerical in nature. It was also an event that impacted human consciousness far beyond the 18th century and the boundaries of  France. And, despite the French attempts to glamorize and glorify as a major step forward in human freedom was a hell of a lot messier and convoluted than the typical history book tells us. In most respects, it was downright savage, bloody and demonic in nature. Many of the leaders were some of the most hideously, evil people who have ever existed. 

      The French remind me a lot of San Franciscans in this regard. Those who lived through the Summer of Love have a nostalgic longing for the time and have remained in an ostrich like awareness of the fact that the counter culture of the Sixties, to a large degree, was a creation of the very government that they were protesting against.  The origin of the French Revolution was largely created and funded by the Phillip II, the Duc d'Orleans, the king's brother and the people around him. If I remember right, there was only one prisoner in the Bastille on the day it was supposedly liberated, an old man who lived there because he could not acclimate himself to the outside world. The true fruit of the revolution was the gruesome and bloody nightmare of the Reign of Terror which led to Napoleonic Wars, World War I and eventually the Holocaust. The events were of such a nightmarish quality, that some historians blamed it all on an outbreak of hallucinations caused by a moldy wheat crop.

    In comparison, the LSD in San Francisco was first introduced via a CIA sponsored program at the behest of the so-called MK-ULTRA  program at Stanford University. There was also a CIA program called Operation Midnight Climax operating where prostitutes were hired  to drop LSD into the drinks of their clients while agents hid behind two-way mirrors and filmed what happened. Ken Kesey, the acclaimed author of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, claims he got a job at the university so that he could pilfer the drug. The Acid Tests, which introduced the Grateful Dead into the nation's consciousness, occurred when Kesey and his minions would spike huge vats of punch with the drug and hold all night concerts in old warehouses. In an article in Reason magazine, one author states unequivically that while Kesey often gets the credit for creating the counter culture, "It literally was the CIA.*

    The events were chronicled in a book by Thomas Wolfe. Jack Kerouac, the OG of the Beat movement which morphed into the Hippie Movement, was first published in the Parisian Review, a CIA sponsored literary magazine used to promote American ideas in Europe. some have said that his stream-of- conscious novel On the Road  was propagated to spread a sense of dissatisfaction among the youth that the agency could manipulate for its own purposes. There was an effort that also included modern art and jazz music. Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning were among those on the CIA payroll. The only major figure of the era to ever catch on what was happening was the Beat poet Alan Ginsburg who openly wondered whether he and his friends had been manipulated and played for fools.

       Not only the opening ceremony, but the actual events themselves  promoted the idea that those people behind the Olympic production, interested in raking in the hundreds of millions of dollars that we just happen to have have laying around with nothing else to spend it on, are really only concerned with good healthy living and athletic competition. And while the rich and famous sat in the stands like Oriental potentates, those of us at home endured a virtual D-Day onslaught of advertising of everything from credit cards, insurance, and pharmaceuticals in order catch glimpses of the finely sculpted derrières of the female competitors in the skimpiest of outfits ever, whether they were track suits or ping-pong uniforms. (Seriously, ask yourself how many times did the female competitors in those nightly broadcasts look more like runway models than athletes, and how many times were they clothed in the skimpiest and tightest of outfits, and then how many times were the cameras placed directly behind the athletes as they stretched the fabric of those uniforms.)

          The 2024 Olympics with its controversial opening ceremony and its highly produced television was misdirection of the highest order. I was drawn to this opinion after reading Kazuo Ishiguro's classic novel The Remains of the Day. In the novel, the protagonist, a highly regarded butler placed in one of England's finest houses, witnesses a meeting his employer has convened in order to influence a French diplomat to agree to easing the restrictions placed on Germany by the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty. While reading the brilliant scene, it made me realize that such meetings among notables still occur to plan the future of this planet and its inhabitants. Yet, we never see them, in fact, the great majority of us never realize that they even happen.

            Instead, we nightly slouch in easy chairs spread out across an an increasingly anxious nation and plug into our virtual pacifier with its endless demands for us to buy things in order to satisfy our need to gratify oral and other fixations and driven mad by the mad dog fights that passes for the news these days. And the Olympics and the controversial opening ceremony? They were just the distraction of the day, as is the weird circus masquerading as a political campaign we've witness nightly for two years, a circus where the clown show is featured front and center, yet the audience is prohibited from laughing until the  ring master with his green hair, his white painted face and vacant eyes holds up a sign giving them permission to applaud or scream obscenities.

           The water is not only polluted, it is becoming increasingly so, and at an ever quickening rate.

       But they tells us that there is no need to worry because, for only $99 a month, you can have gallons of pure, crystal water labeled as being bottled in Alpine streams delivered weekly right to your front door. 




*
​As far as I know, no-one has ever questioned the counter culture myth that Ken Kesey took a job as a janitor in order to steal the LSD from the program. I think it a lot more likely, given the purpose of the program, that he was  given the LSD.
 
          

​

"I love this!"

"That was so well stated."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



​

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

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

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

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

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

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