Archive for the ‘My Mother’ Category

“This is a big fucking deal”  -Joe Biden.

“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”  -MLK

The Devil is thriving in the Catholic church.

The Ides of March have passed.

The health care bill passed with some drama.  As it should.

Outside, the wind blows hard.

My favorite part is that they lied without shame and cheated overtly and they still lost with ceremony all around them on worldwide television.  Republicans sucked the other day like they haven’t in decades and it was all on display.  They barked like dogs and continue to whine like toddlers.  Shameless.

I readily confess I don’t have my brain wrapped entirely around this bill and some specifics of the reconciliation language.  I have been paying attention.  I didn’t for a time and then I did again.  I got kinda sick of it all.  It does suck.  The bill.  As in sucking chest wound suck.  A mandate without fierce oversight, a mechanism to not only compete but provide accountability and barometric pressure is pure dumb.

A license to ill.

It was on it’s head already.  I sort of understand the economic imperative behind the mandate but throw us a bone bitches or don’t even bother touching me there.

 

I just can’t help but get caught up in the symbolism.  I know the bill sucks but it does accomplish some pretty important shit.  I’ll defer to the fantastic Ms. Maddow:

“On September 23rd…

• All kids get covered (no pre-existing conditions)
  
• Can’t get dropped if you get sick (no more insurance companies dropping you)
  
• No more lifetime limits (on benefits)
  
• Children can stay on until 26 (coverage up to that age)
  

On January 1, 2011…

• Premium payment reformed (80-85% for medical care) with rebate if you don’t use coverage
  
• Free Medicare preventative care (no co-pays)
  

By 2014…

• Total ban on all pre-existing condition denials
  
• Health exchanges open
  
• End to annual limits on benefits

Republicans want to repeal this…”  -democraticunderground.com

I’m not sure I want to “do” Rachel but I’m positive I want to get her drunk and cuddle.

So yeah, some good stuff.  It’s just that it barely flirts with incentive for fairness via non profit competition.

That’s the part I liked the most when we started this whole thing.  I see it as key.  Public option, extended Medicare, whatever.  Vital.  We have miles to go before we sleep.

Single payer, Universal, whatever label you choose and whomever you choose to accuse,  the richest spender nation on the planet ought to be covering it’s people.  We buy half of all the weapons.  Half of all of them.  Half of all the weapons made for war, we buy.  I don’t think we’re as big as Canada geographically, but our dick is way bigger.  Can you hear me now?  WAY bigger.  We could take Canada in 72 hours without the military.  They don’t have many guns but we do.

What exactly are health exchanges?  We now know they will be open.  How many?  Where?  I’ll assume that’s good news.  A place to trade bandages and syringes.  Do I have to volunteer?  I’m gonna have to choke a bitch.  I’m gonna have to read this bill and the 157 page reconciliation.  I’m working like twelve hours a week and taking a class.  You can see how I’m underwater.

My feet hurt and it’s humiliating.

It’s a simple problem and the answer is simple.  Shave five or fifteen cents off the defense budget and we can throw in some jobs for infrastructure.  Health care, jobs and mortgage relief.  We spend half the entire global budget on weapons and ten times as much as our nearest competitor.  China.  That there is my idea of Socialism, spending way too much of the people’s money on things they vehemently disagree with.  Wait, that’s Communism.  Isn’t it?  When they can’t afford roof and bread it is.  There is your Goddamn communism.

That there is your buttock.

Wars are your ass.

Your ass mam, has gone missing.

I’m trying to make a point here.  We still are a wealthy nation, despite our recent financial regress.  Much of it was concentrated without equity in the last decade but there is plenty of money right here in River City.  There is no reason, moral or fiscal, we should be denied this right.  It insults my intelligence when anyone complains about paying for it.  They talk about health care being 15 to 18 percent of our GDP.  The defense budget is well over half of every dollar you pay in taxes.  We spend so much fucking money on weapons, it makes the world go round.

Literally.  The world turns because of America’s efforts to be able to kill everyone of us.  Thank God for us.  Don’t piss us off.

Still, I’m impressed and finally proud again of the Democrats.  They pulled it off and scared the crap quite literally out of the obstructionist asstards by supplying them with an example of lockstep so long taken for granted as a fundament in the Republican playbook.  Smoked them at their own game.  Here’s hoping this bodes well and emboldens this heretofore assemblage of invertebrates.  See little Billy, we knew you could do it.  Now get your little ass back out there because the game isn’t even half over.  Be a Democrat for fucks sake.

Now the crazies come out like corpses of Laurel & Hardy with giant red eyed rats speeding off and away from their persons and pockets and folds.  Slack jawed zombies repeating obsolete talking points and swinging scythes.  The Baggers.  The Birthers.  The Hawks, Neocons, Bigots and Bible thumpers.  What an egregious ship of fools.  Obsructionist pricks for infamy.  Avoid their rodent familiars and do not dance with either of any of them.

It’s not safe to drink their liquor.

They really are beginning to parody themselves.

I’ve always thought that being a good loser is important.  I’ve been on the losing end enough to approach being gracious I think.  I’m hopeful that losing has humbled me, it sucks and it shames me but I try to learn and stuff and be polite about it.  The way one loses speaks volumes about one’s character.  If you listened to Boehner on the floor the other night or The Human Shitsmear and Butt Boy Hannity these last few mornings you might think the sky is about to kill you in your bed.

Not good losers, but excellent assholes.

These pricks are the epitome of sore losers along with the entire lock step, teeth full of Orios, lime green plastic tumbler full of cherry Kool Aid and rum mouth breathing members of the 1/4 Paradigm.  That was a pretty cool sentence.  If you don’t know about the 1/4 paradigm, categories are on the right on the main page.  Just scroll down.  I have a fairly general theory about relativity and how it applies without bias but with predictable pattern in a sociopolitical context.  I offer a bold constant.

I don’t really know about other countries but I understand very well that one of every four people in this country are ignorant dipshits.  My “1/4 Paradigm”.  In stores near you.

You’d think an invitation was extended to a banquet just ahead of the apocalypse.  You’d think because we passed a weak ass health care bill we were courting Satan himself.  The bill sucks.  Hello irony.  Fuck us in the neck.

The reaction has been of the meanest of spirit and bafflingly irrational.  Childish and callow.  Pointless.  Some fourteen state attorneys general have or intend to file suit.  Futile.  Not going to happen, if any single case enjoys a day in court it will be ashes, ashes and they will all fall down.  A waste of time money and the attention of even the dumbest citizens.  Give me a break.  Might as well piss up a rope.

Children of the corn.

What has my attention is the ugly and still gathering brutal reaction of the great unwashed.

Bricks through windows and awful terrorizing threats directed at our elected representatives that have finally and with courage, attempted the right thing on behalf of us all.  Stupak came around and they went after him like a common enemy.  Cheers Bart.  Those were your people.  An articulate bunch.  Very brave and very cool.

Kucinich is still the king of composure and principal.  What a class act.  I think Maddow and Kucinich should snuggle.  Just then, Dennis’ hot, six foot tall, copper haired, wife with a scorching accent enters the room in a black skirt, pumps and a line up the back of the stocking.  Nobody gets the Kucinich cool like I do.

Cantor’s claim of a bullet is looking dubious.  I bet that little prick is lying.

What frightens me is the virulence and vehemence, the irrational fury of those that would oppose a leap forward.

What makes me sick is the publicly elected officials who foment such dehumanizing disregard for common decency and difference of, or deference for, an opinion.  This is America.  We aren’t ever going to be herded onto boxcars for mass extermination.  If it ever happens here it will last an afternoon, maybe a day.  I’m not referencing irresponsible roundheads like Limbaugh, Hannity or Beck but rather the Boehners, Bachmanns, Cantors, Kings, Grassleys and Demints.  Allegedly responsible representatives who hobby, trade and wage in fear and dangerous incendiary nonsense.

Dirty, filthy immoral bastards who would blow anyone for $20k.  How do these people get taken seriously?  See above.

They deliberately cultivate and collect the same brand of bigoted, racist and ignorant subhuman that so violently opposed civil rights legislation.  Dumbass mouth breathing fucktards.  A handful of those folks have ended up being assassins.  Murderers.

American tradition and legacy is such that justice and liberty for all eventually prevails.  When there is will there is way.

It can take a while and never without a price.  The vulgar and profane consistently manage to extract more than a pound of flesh.  They are arrogant and bereft of humility.  At this pace, there will be blood.

They will go too far unfortunately and their cause will be consigned to history as ill advised and malattempted.  Political leprosy.  Social pariahs.  Just like McCarthy, Nixon and Dumbya’s entire posse.

These people are as ridiculous as they are dangerous.  There will be blood.

Just do the best you can to think peace.  It’s gonna get ugly.

It just might start rural.

All these earth quakes.  Bound to be a volcano.  See what I’m saying?

Health care is no mere privilege but a right that comes with being born human at least.  I believe that.  I always will.

Drinks for my friends.

Rain drips slow.  The faux brick pathways glisten because we shoveled and the rain drips slow.

Mother pounds on my door this morning at ten ’til nine and clearly under the influence of her best authority, she barks throaty my first name and that we’ll be shoveling snow.  Sheezus.  Same way she calls me to dinner.  She grew up with ten brothers and sisters.  She’s very funny and she doesn’t know it.

Still, I’m thinking there might be a punchline.  Like she’ll come back an hour later advertising cinnamon raisin toast and hot chocolate.  I am not yet awake.

I’m not a morning guy.  I’m not an outdoorsy guy.  I don’t ski or snowboard.  I am not about any of this in any way.  I don’t hike.  I loath the cold as much as I loath the heat.  I’m forty four years old and living at home.  Temporarily.  If it wasn’t for the brutal knock on the door, these would not have been my first thoughts upon waking.  This morning, they sting me.  It is, after all, my own mother beseeching me.

I roll over while I roll my eyes.  I pull on some boots and jeans.  A shirt and it’s time to piss.  Check my eyes and nose for boogers.  A coat, and hat and here I came.  Not gonna brush my teeth yet.

Billy Jean, The Tripod Lab, revels in our shoveling.  She is black, happy and has a short but powerful whip for a tail.  She misses the right front leg clean from the shoulder.  She doesn’t care.  There are no social stigma among pets.  She can run like hell.  All the power coming from the hindquarters.  She doesn’t always steer very well.  She wipes out a lot.  We have no problem laughing.

She is happy and dancing.  To her it is a game.

I adore animals for their almost incorruptible innocence.

I throw shovels full of snow on her and she bucks and huffs with glee.  She is the world’s happiest dog and an anchor for my parents that you would have to witness to understand.  They dote.

The sun is out and I’ve taken off my hat and coat.  The sky is The Big Nevada blue.  I begin to sweat.  Mother is snuffling and sniffing but tearing it up.  Our breathy fogs hang in the crisp bright air.  My heart swells and I’m  grateful she got me up to do this.  I revel in the sound of our shovels scraping the ground.  Heels clicking and sliding on a polished mall floor.  Rocks tumbling from a pile.  Clay roller skate wheels on a sidewalk.

The sweet old man next door appears at the end of our driveway with a clattering red midget in his grip.  He ends up doing more good than harm.  Imagine what happens when the blower only blows two feet in either direction on a twenty five foot wide, seventy foot long driveway.  He let me make a couple passes but kept asking me if I was tired.  Never got to run one of these before.  This is an excellent morning.

It pulls to the right.

We’re in the back now and I think about throwing snow on my mother.  That she is out shoveling with me and moving just as much snow as me informs my reluctance.  I want to but this is going well.  I’m sweating and feeling vigorous.  I wish I could.  I will if the opportunity arises again.  I see me dumping a load of powder on her head.  I don’t mess with my mother much but I’m really feeling it.  Everyone owns a little crazy and I like my mother’s.

I might fling some and act it’s an accident.  I might, but I’m chicken.

Instead we shovel and talk, and I think about how vulnerable but how simultaneously tough she is.  I know what she’s afraid of and she need not worry.

Gin & tonics and cigarettes  at 4:30 with mother on the patio.  Billy Jean attends.  She eats dinner and her treats while mom and I wrestle her toys from her to throw as we survey the day.  We take turns negotiating the toys away from the Tripod Lab.  Smart dog.  We have to do good cop bad cop and variations thereof.  Mom and I talk.  I’m pretty sure we tell each other just about everything.

I know I tell her everything.

She tells me “You’re all I have everyday.”

We both have big mouths.

I believe it to be inherent.

We come in, wash our hands and begin dinner, sometimes I cook.

Rain drips slow.  The faux brick pathways glisten because we shoveled them and the rain drips slow.

About a year and a half ago, my uncle Larry was diagnosed with stage four cancer.  I wept as my mother gave me the news on the phone.  Anyone who knows Larry at at all would describe their relationship with him as at the very least, unique.  He’s a unique little bastard.  Unique, yep.  Indefatigable, ornery, lovable, loyal.

He and my uncle Skip visited a few years back and helped with some insulation in my sister’s house.  After that they rubbed it in my nephews beds.  When their skin became inflamed and the mad itch had set in, Uncle Larry advised them to take hot showers.

Unique.

Here’s an excerpt from a blog I wrote at the the time:

“He was a bastard.

He deliberately shocked me with the horse equivalent of a cattle prod. He told me he’d caught a frog and wanted to show it to me. With glee, he electrocuted me.

He once moved our Christmas tree into the front yard and decorated it with my mothers bras and underwear.

I woke up one morning with his socks in my mouth.

I watched him wipe snot on my mother’s neck from the backseat of my father’s Mercury Cyclone.

He visited egregious acts on everyone he ever liked. It really was his way of showing you he loved you. Really.

Ten or twelve years ago, the Hardings had a reunion in a small town owned by my uncle Tyke in Washington just south of the Canadian border. I brought The Fish, my new girlfriend at the time.

The Matriarch of the clan had just passed. My Grandmother, eighty nine years old. She was awesome. We’d been lucky enough to have her for the holidays.

There were color themed t-shirts indicating which family you were from. We were purple.

We tore it up.

A very small town. If you didn’t mention you were a Harding and therefore related to uncle Tyke, you got no service, not even a smile. Play the Harding card and you were royalty.

We tore it up.

One night we cousins got to talking about Uncle Larry and how we’d suffered his obstreperousness. His orneriness. We decided to act. We dispatched one of his own children to secure his motel room key. A younger Begat had caught a six inch fish in the creek that day; it was confiscated under rules of executive privilege.

We salted his sheets and crumbled potato chips in them. We removed all towels and toilet paper. We covered every surface with shaving cream. We turned the thermostat all the way up. I placed the dead fish inside his pillowcase. We returned to the reunion and drank with him.

We tore it up.

Last time I saw him was two years ago at another family reunion. He and my Uncle Skip are a pair. It occurred to me they may as well stick thumbs up each others asses. There was chaos that only the Harding clan produce or tolerate. I’m sorry now we didn’t visit much but it sure was nice to see him. I can’t honestly remember if he knows I was the mastermind behind that revenge.

He is sixty six years old and cancer has invaded his body. There are plenty of loving Hardings, In-Laws and Begats to do everything they can. They will.

I will come too. I will make sure he knows I put that fish in his pillow.”

Well, he beat it.  Lost his teeth and ended up around ninety pounds, but he whipped it.  His body was some seventy plus percent infested with death but he smiled, did everything his doctors told him and beat it back.  Cancer free.  As of two weeks ago his back was beginning to bother him but he was up to his fighting weight and treatment was behind him save for checkups.  Clean bill of health.

He was a jockey so he knew well what it’s like to break bones.  When he heard of my father’s recent injury, I was the one to tell him, he was devastated and told my mother he’d be here if need be for anything including to drive the forty foot castle to Yuma so they could winter there.

My mother called today.  It has returned.  The big C is in his spine.  Not fair.  Not fucking fair.  The universe has chosen to shit on this miracle.  He starts radiation right away and twelve rounds of chemo immediately after Christmas.

For the first time in my forty four years, there will be no Christmas with my family.  This is not so much because of my uncle’s illness as it is the result of my sister’s deliberate blindness and irresponsibility with love and family.  Life sucks today.

Drinks for my friends.

I rocked at Jeopardy tonight.  Even nailed the final Jeopardy question.  Rock of Gibraltar.

Shall we do a little politics?

First up, the alleged war between FOX and the White House.  Here’s my take:  FOX lies egregiously and irresponsibly.  Consistently.  They are shameless propagandists.    Therefore, they lose.  This President or any other has every right to neglect them, ignore them or even cast the occasional aspersion their way.  FOX is full of shit and any thinking, attentive American knows it.  It’s Obama’s prerogative.  It’s just that simple.  I kinda like that he’s dismissing them while saying he’s not losing any sleep over it.

Um, looks like the public option is alive once again.  Harry Reid says as much.  He told us yesterday he has the votes.  Turns out he probably doesn’t.  Olympia Snowe is blanching, or posturing as though she will, as I can’t imagine her blanching any more.  That bitch is pale.  Translucent.  Then there’s Lieberman.  Benedict Fliptop.  The little droopy eyed cartoon jowled prick announced he’d get behind a Republican filibuster on the public option.  You know he’s a former Democrat, now an Independent, allowed to retain his chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs by virtue of tacit agreement between he and Mr. Reid that he would play ball on domestic policy.  Just so happens he’s the junior Senator from Connecticut, the finest and most luxurious mall in the country for health insurance corporations.  He’s taken over a million bucks in the last five years from the medical plutocracy.

Without even a conversation, not so much as a memo, Benedict Fliptop should be stripped of his chairmanship and barred from even caucusing with the Democrats.  This should happen yesterday.  He should be made to eat peanut butter and jelly on the steps or dine with his stinky Republican abominogs.  If possible, he should be ejected from his DC residence, have his single payer health care revoked and be issued a shopping cart, a hoodie and fingerless gloves, maybe a few cans of Sterno.  This fucker needs to understand that it’s politicians like him what cause unrest.  His own goddamn state favors a public option by some 68%.  What an asshole.

Let the asshat obstructionists filibuster if the Democrats can’t get their house in order enough to vote for cloture.  Force their hand and make them embarrass themselves and their party on C-Span.  Mr. Reid, you boxed.  You’re tough.  I know because you signed and inscribed your book for me at the respectful behest of my mother.  Bring in the cots, order pizza and throw Senate decorum out the goddamn window, at the same time throw tomatoes and rotten fruit.  Roll up your sleeves Harry, get a nurse for the elderly members.  Make the Republicans actually filibuster.  This is one one of the most important issues of our time.  Popcorn and porn for the junior members and Geritol, sponge baths and plasma for the senior ones.  Do I need to remind you that what happens here is not at your convenience but quite possibly at our abrupt financial inconvenience and physical well being?

I joke but I’m serious.  If it comes down to it and the Republicans aren’t forced onto the floor for days and weeks to read from their favorite children’s books, we will be justifiably far beyond angry.  Shame them.  Make them pay for attempting to prevent what every citizen of the richest country in history deserves.  For five fucking percent of our defense budget this would be a done deal.  Get this done.  How long did you want to be Senate majority leader anyway?  This is a cruel joke.  The debate is for and by the stupid.

If we can pay for these ridiculous wars we can pay for the health and welfare of our people and that’s right out of my mothers mouth.  The very first campaign I ever worked in was for you as Lt. Governor, I think I was seven and you were a “Goldust Twin” along with Dick Bryan.  You simply must do everything you can and give this everything you have, or I will campaign against you next year.

Let’s talk about the war.  You know, that one in Afghanistan where more of our men and women have been killed this year than any of the other seven?  The one Darth Cheney has the prunes to accuse Obama of “dithering” over.  The one he and Dumbya dithered over for seven years and ultimately bequeathed this mess of way too much technicolor that mother Cheney made for us?  Darth Cheney has my vote for most evil, most ineffective, most dishonest and most destructive President never elected in the 21st century.  The epoch is young but we should pray he prevails.

My money is on him and I can only hope it’s how history judges him and his little dog too.

I have to tell you I don’t envy our President.  He inherited a shitstorm of clusterfucks.  The electorate is flirting with disappointment.  The village folk grow restless.  The goddamn unscrupulous Republicans are pouncing on anything that moves even if it’s in the throes of death.  They’re stockpiling pitchforks and fagots (no, like torches).  I admit my own handful of discouragements.

We would do well to remember however, that a mess this size took eight long years to manufacture and the public was complicit for at least five or six.  Most of you have just woken up and are still rubbing the shit dust from your eyes.  We may not be all about a rose garden economically but the entire worldwide system is no longer staring into the mouth of the dragon and withering from it’s breath.  Jobs is what we need but jobs is always the last to appear.  It’s dicey yet, but we are closer to some modicum of meaningful healthcare reform than we have ever, ever been in an effort nearly a century old.  Troops are coming out of Iraq and he’s doing his damnedest to figure out Afghanistan.  There is legitimate effort in Gitmo and I’m not sure we’re done torturing or wiretapping but I know we’re up to far less of it these days.  He’s reaffirmed his promises to the the Gay, Lesbian and Transgender community and I believe he will follow through.

You can’t always govern with the President you’d want, you have to govern with the President you have.  I for one am still absolutely confident we picked the very best man.  There is not a doubt in my mind.

Drinks for my friends.

I’m a little weary of politics.  What say we do something a little different?

You have no choice you fucks.  Ha!

I saw a woman today I haven’t seen for more than twenty years.  I remember her as being somewhat meek and a little mild.  She worked for me back in the day.  In my food service management period.  I was a teenage fast food restaurant manager Werewolf.  Pre-law.  Pre-med.  Pre famous record producer.  Post cartoon character.  Her husband worked for me as well.  He was always a sneaky little shit.  Slow eyed and devious.  I never trusted him and suspected him of abusing her.  Saw him at Costco the other day.  I have the absolute luxury of not being recognized in my hometown.  Looked right at him while he pushed his cart with same sociopathic countenance he always wore when he assumed he was anonymous.   The gift of anonymity works both ways.  I haven’t lived here for nearly a quarter century.

Nobody knows who I am.

Thank Zeus.

The Sunday afternoon dining at Costco is pretty goddamn something.  I’m not sure exactly what, but there were samples at the end of each and every isle.  Soups, pastas, pizzas and sausages.  Weird dumb people everywhere but the vittles were all up in my periphery.  I left satiated and thoroughly entertained.  Mother bought giant portions of things she required like double A batteries and Marie Calendar chicken Pot Pies.  I purchased six months at least of hair conditioner, thirty pounds of cat litter and some decent wine.

I see people I know all the time but choose not to talk to them.

I’ve been here in Nevada for too long but not long enough.  My father fell from a ladder, broke six ribs and a shoulder and is recovering slow but steady.  I’m back to pursuing the business I came to pursue.  Had a very good day today. The finance manager of the Washoe Indian Tribe returned my call to say he’s very interested in giving me a crack at the credit card processing for all four of their retail smoke shops.

I feel as though I’m in a state of suspended animation.  Time seems to pass so quickly here without a lot happening.  Carson City Nevada just may be the strangest place in the universe for me.  Despite any amount of anything, it’s indescribably weird.  People tend to be friendly but ugly.  Nice but dentally challenged.  The ugliest woman I’ve ever seen in my life works at the closest convenience store that carries American Spirit Ultra Lights.  Festooned with moles, blemishes, boils and a rather manly crop of whiskers, she is the most physically repulsive woman I’ve ever seen.

Ever.  Poor woman.  Sheezus she’s ugly.

We’ve spoken.  She’s very nice.  But holy shit, she may as well be the Elephant Woman.

The youth in this town are nearly invisible.  I never see the 16 to 25 crowd.  I don’t get out much because I’m still somewhat fiscally challenged and in lockdown mode.  Keeping my head down and working the phones.

I’ve gone two months without a haircut and pot and I’m rapidly advancing towards an early eighties Jew fro.  I’m not particularly susceptible to vanity but a man does not want to look an unkempt fool.  Keeping my nose and ear hair in check.

I wanted to look her in the eye.  Brenda.   She had no idea who I was.

Same woman has been cutting my hair in LA for almost a quarter century.  From short to half way to my waist and back again.  We grew up together.  Her name is Suzanne and I adore her.  We are very good friends.  She understands my misshapen head and unruly kinky, copious and curly prodigiousness.

So now it’s Brenda.  She worked for me.  She has blossomed.  The truth is, I fooled around with just about all the girls who worked for me.  I think actually, every single one of them.  A few of them, I wrote their high school papers and they brought me breakfast.  That was the deal.  I ended up with more than breakfast.   I crashed a car with one of them.  End over end off the side of a cliff.  We shared way more than breakfast too.  I loved them all in one way or another.

I wanted to look her in the eye.  Brenda.

I drove by the 70 x 24 foot trailer on the corner of Viking and Nye that I grew up in.  In my early teens we built a 25 x 40 foot addition on to it with a garage.  Property lines and zoning codes dictated that I’d lose my bedroom window but I gained a built in bookcase and my own bathroom.  We put a solid mahogany custom pool table and a wet bar in the giant room that was built “hell for stout” according to my father.  He constructed a massive two level deck behind it and sunk a twelve seat, kidney shaped hot tub in the middle of the lower level.

I could play my drums all night without disturbing my parents or sister.

No cable television but life was good.

The lot itself was a quarter acre and we all worked hard maintaining it.  My parents hated the weed choked portion that belonged to the city so we tore down the fences and cultivated lawn up to the road.  My mother had beautiful roses and desert shrubs.  Multiple trees including a crab apple front and center with a rock garden at it’s base.  Elaborate sidewalks all poured by my father with our infant foot prints and a front deck carpeted in astroturf, with an awning and siding to match the trailer that ran almost the entire seventy foot front built by my father.  Two driveways, one off either street, one leading to the garage.

It was a beautiful blooming yard in the summer.  Flowers, roses and trees all celebrating.  Often a race car being wrenched on in the driveway without a garage.  Men drinking Olympia or Hamm’s beer, thick and muscular tanned arms waving arc welder torches and spark spraying grinders while the sun made rainbows in pools of water and petroleum collecting on the sun baked asphalt.  The women sitting on the front deck smoking long feminine cigarettes wearing beehives and hornrims , flipping through Avon catalogs sipping mixed drinks and moving in and out while tending to the inevitably late Sunday supper.  Us kids playing and running in sprinklers, away from bees, perfecting a makeshift slip and slide fashioned from construction site visqueen.  Craigmont grape, black cherry and cream Soda, barbecued potato chips and the constant sound of a sliding screen door smacking closed and sliding open.

Watermelons and cantaloupe…………tater tots and ketchup……….

Flies in the hot kitchen despite collective effort.  Corn on the cob and potato salad.  Jello concoctions and vinegary bean dishes with awful flavor and texture.  I will never comprehend “three bean salad”.  It is vomit.  I’ll bet it’s worse going down than coming up.  Who eats that shit?  Old people with atrophied taste buds and dumb hicks who can’t know better.

Seriously, fuck me.  I’d rather sip from a bedpan.  Nastiness.

Moving right along.

Steaks, hamburgers and hot dogs.  Fruit salads with throat blocking coconut shreds, Cool Whip and mandarin orange slices tasting of tin.  Delicious homemade cobblers, pies and ice cream.  Yes, homemade ice cream.  Huckleberry and lemon-vanilla  you bitches.

Alive and thriving.  A real neighborhood with real neighbors.  A community.  A village.  Safety and security.

Winter holidays were just as festive, somewhat more decorous and far more elaborately decorated.  At one time my mother had an entire outside structure devoted exclusively and extensively to storage of holiday decorations.  She was raised with ten brothers and sisters.  Birthdays were never a big deal but holidays, Christmas in particular, were huge, in her childhood and mine.  She made sure.

I think what I’m doing here, is writing a love letter to my mother.  Everyday for the past week, she’s been in the 38 foot home away from home, cleaning.  I’ve watched her clean every wheel, every window, apply wood wax to every wooden surface and take clean rags to every blind.  She’s dusted, mopped, vacuumed and wiped every surface accessible.  Her plan is to rent an industrial shampooer tomorrow for the carpets.  She is a house on fire.

She then comes in every single night and prepares a balanced meal for my father and I.

I help as much as I can.

She is a fart in a whirlwind.

She sets things for the meal in motion and then we sit outside and play with the the black canine tripod, throw her toys across the lawn, giver her treats, have a smoke and a drink or two and eagerly talk about nothing or things very important.  I find myself getting impatient for her to join me on the patio.  I’ve learned to make our drinks and just wait until she’s ready.

My mother always has something else to do.

I help with cleanup in the kitchen every night.  I wipe up and dry and put away and collect and wrap and stash.

Then I stun her with my prowess at Jeopardy.  We seriously discuss my appearing as a contestant.  “Goddamn you” she tells me because I’m good at it.  I’m really thinking I should look into it.

I wonder, wonder, wonder.  My mother is so bright and perceptive.  Such an active and adroit mind.  What does she think about while keeping herself so busy?  It can’t be the singular curse of an overactive mind because mine never stops and I’m a relatively lazy bastard.  She’s a thinker.  I know she is.  I know she’s churning.  I’m going to ask her about it.

So anyway, I found myself over on that side of town the other day, my spirits were buoyed a little by the beauty of the day.  A high desert Indian summer.  I’d been warned but wasn’t prepared for what I saw.  No lawn.  No growth.  No greenery.  Grey and black.  Decay and rot.  The slow and insidious violence of absolute neglect.  Like beauty and spirit and air had been sucked out.  Trees angry and twisted and dying.  Rotting crab apples littering where lushness used to be.  A sagging roof, curtains askew and windows like blank crazy eyes.  Like a horror movie.  I still dream there.  I hope what I saw does not go that far into my twilight.

It hurt my soul.  It took my breath.  I thought about me and my sister’s impressions in the sidewalk my father made.  I intend to save those.  I will get them.  I will knock on that door and pay the man whatever he wants to lose that part of his sidewalk.  I will do this before I leave this town.  All the magic is gone.  All that we did and built has been erased by apathy.  Everything is still intact in our hearts and minds and spirits.  What we did and who we are is still complete and golden and thriving.

Lonely is the night.

Drinks for my friends.

I have nothing to say.

I’ll come up with something.

I always do.

Mom says the old man had a very good day.  My services weren’t required and that’s a good thing as it allowed me to muck out the secondary master bath and bed suite I’ve been inhabiting for the last six weeks or so.  Cats are messy and so am I.  The fact that they don’t avail themselves of modern plumbing complicates any and all sanitary imperatives I might aspire to.

Did I mention I’m lazy?

I really liked Paul Newman.  Too bad he took the dirt nap.  Helluva an actor.

My mother tells me again she’s glad I’m here and tells me the time we spend together is a treat.  This makes me very happy.  I took the time to prepare her a very special hot dog today.  Mayonnaise, mustard and coarsely chopped white onions.  Ketchup, a sharp slice of cheddar, a quartered kosher dill and chunks of vine ripened tomato with an all white meat smoked turkey frank, a little lemon pepper and a secret ingredient.  Better cold than hot, trust me.  It’s all about texture with dogs.

Protein and produce on a bun.

She brought avocados so next up is my cold stew.

In as much as the path is obvious between now and then.  As clear as is the cartography, I’m still bewildered by how we’ve progressed and simultaneously regressed so consummately.  The vulgarity and naked ugliness of racism has reared it’s ugly head upon the election of a half black President.  Dichotomy and irony hold hands all while skipping to a mysterious and confusing Lou.

One step forward, two steps back.

What in hell are we up to?

I have no personal or particular reservation in declaring the seemingly idiopathic bowel obstruction to our otherwise facile and enviously intelligent new President’s legislative agenda, to be about not much else beside the color of his skin.  After all, I have never witnessed such virulent and obstinate complaint towards a pursuit of such humanitarian and compassionate endeavors ever.  I don’t believe any generation has in this country, witnessed such fuckery, since the Civil War.

The dissent is a cheap firecracker with a loud report.  It is bullshit.

We are a nation of reckless, feckless racist slobs.  To allow this sort of ignorant, irresponsible, irrational bullshit to poison what should be an informed and historically important conversation is a stain, a remarkable and embarrassing canker of our own device THAT WE HAVE CHOSEN TO COUNTENANCE in the face of logic and goddamn common sense, well, it compels me to hate Americans.  To loathe my fellow man.  To wonder just how fucking stupid we can be.  Where is the bottom?

Just how stupid are we?

We as a country and a society are on the verge of really fucking this up.  There are those of us too weak to stand and deliver and those so recalcitrant and so too ready to shit where they eat.  Between the two, we’re looking at gorgeous pizza upside down on the sidewalk.  What follows is anarchy from hell to breakfast.  Nine ways to Sunday.  A shitstorm of biblical proportions.  Whiskey dick chaos.  Cats and dogs fornicating and reproducing.  Such unions yielding dangerous and vicious progeny not unlike a Rick Baker rendering.

Forgive my skipping too much to my own Lou, but you feel me don’t ya?  This shit is getting refuckingdiculous.

I’m beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t just concentrate on selfish fun for a few years because it’s all going to end in some mad dash for food and sundries and weapons pretty quick.  The very same thinking would lead me to seek membership in a militia.

Future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.

Upon monitoring our mainstream media, an independent alien of other than earthly origin would be justified in concluding that the most powerful of nations has lost it’s fucking mind.  One look at the Becktard or the Human Shitsmear and they plot a course for the next nearest solar system with the potential for algae or sponges and above ground agriculture.  Any reasonably intelligent expedition is probably only carousing the universe for a place to grow leafy greens and to bang loose humanoid bitches.  We are way to high maintenance for any discriminating extraterrestrials anyway.

The very idea of corn confuses them.  It’s tasty but nutritionless.  They just can’t wrap their advanced brains around it.  That we seek to make it a source of energy confounds them.  It does me too.  They liken it to contemporary politics in America.  It makes no sense to them on any level other than their understanding that with the right amount of butter and salt, we Americans find it palatable.

Think about that.  It really is analogous to the way we deal with politics.

This is why why they keep cruising the atmosphere in green or gray hotel room service enclosures instead of stopping in for a cocktail and engaging any of us on a Taco Bell level or making land at Burning Man.  Sometimes they probe us rather invasively, but they’re just trying to understand us and our seemingly corn based existence.  They understand for example that when we ingest corn, we eliminate it in an almost completely unaltered form.  Proof that no benefit is had from its consumption.

As good a reason as any to probe us.

Earth is a great place to visit but they don’t want to live here.

I don’t blame them.

I’m so sorry for the sandwich I’ve caused you.

Drinks for my friends.

I hear Tam stirred a little shit.  She called night before last to tell me I would be spending the night with Dad and I’d be wearing a mask because of my mosquito sized cold.  She announces it matter of fact.  This is what’s happening now.  Mom is spent she says.  Who am I to piss against the wind?

I’d had a minor but obstreperous summer cold so it was decided I shouldn’t sit with the old bastard at least until I ceased to leak the mucus.  The other morning I fell out of, yes fell out of, the shower.  I was standing on one foot scrubbing the other.  Pretty fucking slippery.  It’s a tiny shower.  For people under 200 lbs.

What new devilry is this?  Same kind my dreams are visiting on me I think.

I show up to the old place on Viking and Nye.  Dad’s got a German helmet on and no one else is paying attention.  Outside the weather is gorgeous. It darkens and everything that’s bloomed seems to flee before the wind hits.  Whites and pinks go first.  Children are screaming.  I smell maple syrup.  My fingers are sticky.

We’re at peace because the bright red shag really does work with the paneling in the master bedroom and the wallpaper in the bathroom.  All hells breaks lose.  Often it’s a hurricane, sometimes it’s an earthquake and about half the time the trailer ends up on it’s side.  Rogue waves.  The giant motor home plunges of a cliff into a violent ocean.

I try to call her back to see if she’s got a laptop I can use and eventually end up with my old man on the phone while he’s doing his best to push one out.  He sounds strong to me and I smile.  There’s no phone in the shitter, they handed it to him.  How cool is that?

I’m a private first class

Third behind my Mother, my Sister and the doctors.  I know, my math sucks already.  I see myself as third because I refuse to be last.  4th, 5th and 6th are available to my niece and nephews.  I don’t need to be the xo unless it’s cognac..  My youngest nephew Keaton,  might just be a Carson City analog of Sean Connery and Richard Gere.  This dates me, huh?  I suspect he’s smooth.  Across the board they’ve benefitted from their respective gene pools.  Big cool brains on them.  Their style is.  Priorities is.  No respect for the Mason Dixon Line whatever that means.  The Westergards are a credit to their race and I adore them.

I wonder if they think I’m cool.

Anyway, Dad still live and pushing.

Neither one of us knows what’s up between the women folk but he thinks Mom is on her way to me.  I’ve pretty much decided I’ll finish my drink, brush my teeth and head out once Mom shows because she is my CEO and I gotta be consistent.  My briefcase ready and my teeth washed, I sit sipping my Bombay.

She arrives home and parks where the driveway meets the road like she’s going to get the mail without even coming inside.

It’s still a small town, no more than sixty thousand or so but it is the Capitol and my sister has been well and beneficially involved in it’s downtown.  An old city, even for the West, so there is architecture and landmarks aplenty.  It’s both bucolic and sleazy.  The Sierra Nevada Mountain Range hosts the sun every evening this Fall and for every season ever. I can see just about all of town from my folk’s backyard.

This makes me think of Wednesday morning trash pick up so I haul it out to meet her.  No recycling today, it’s every other week.

She’s flustered and alludes to my sister being a pain in the ass.  I think I know about that.  I don’t ask but set to making her a gin and tonic.  My brother in law did the coolest thing the other night by showing up to the hospital with pre-mixed gin and tonics in a big jar.  Mom jokes she considered crawling into the closet with the jar.

Mom is rarely funny herself but has a good sense of humor.  She is my mother.  I adore her.  She rocks.

I help pack some food and include a small Tupperware with ice because she’s still got some of that pre-mix at the hospital.

I hung out with my dad yesterday, he was good.  He flipped me off a lot and told me I was a shitass.  My dad is very often very funny.

Mike Bacon called and wanted to hang and we did but first I went to see dad for the first time in three days.

They brought salmon, green beans and rice for dinner. We shared it.  So surreal.  I applied the supplied packets of lemon juice, salt, pepper, Mrs. Dash and tarter sauce according to the best of my culinary instincts.  He asked me which utensil I wanted.  I chose the soup spoon as I had eyes on his soup and he’d already confessed to giving up all soup to my mother for the last few days.

It was cool in that was what he expected.  He assumed he was sharing his meal with me.  We ate it together.  It’s not so unusual on any level but it touched me in a way I can’t really describe.  We also talked about how things freeze in your memory perfectly preserved.  And of course, we discussed the dipshit Republicans.

He told me it was best case scenario under the circumstances.  He really likes it there and he’s comfortable.  He told me it doesn’t fuckin’ beat home though.  He flirts with the nurses and has nicknames for all of them.  No matter who enters his room he flips them shit and simultaneously charms them.  They all stay and sometimes talk too long for my taste.  He tells me one is a lug or another talks too much or that his affection for another is sincere.  My father has his flaws but he one of the best judges of character I’ve ever seen.  To this day I would trust his instincts over my own.

Note to self, the head administrator is fucking creepy.

You know I like soup.  Even shitty hospital soup.  The concept of soup is both wholesome and genius.

The ice maker on the fridge just made a squeaky farting sound.  Kinda like souls squealing and kinda cartoon spooky.

I wonder if he was on his best behavior for me.

He always eats desert.  We had fun yesterday.  He was in good spirits.  Patty was there when I arrived and was reluctant to go.  This guy Patty is the coolest.  I think I’ve already told you.  My father and I don’t have much to talk about so I tell him the news of the world.

Two men were wiping at their eyes today.  One was Maury and the other was my father.  I just remembered this.  Morey Tresnit, brother of Joe, son of Bob, tells me he got my message and will fax Tuesday.  He tells me this as the sun is setting in front of his bar & grill, “Mo & Sluggo’s”.  I’m not really sure in either case why eyes were leaking.  I can only be sure there was pain.  A drunk told me I had great hair and hi-fived me.

Morey touches me on the shoulder when I tell him I’m there to meet Mike Bacon and asks me if I want a drink.

Mike tells me I’m in graduate school.  He means that’s where I am in life.  He thinks that’s how I should look at it.    He’s so painfully bright he dances around me and I hope I’m keeping up.  He points out things I did or said I don’t remember and it’s kinda hard to believe it came from me.  We’ve been friends since the fifth grade.  He shares all manner of things.  I think he tells me he’s gay because I didn’t ask and I’m almost sure he tells that truth one person at a time.

He dated Cecilia Martin right before pining for dudes.  This is huge to me.  You gotta understand Bacon and I just can’t help you there.  I can tell you things about him but they don’t define him.  Plus, Cecilia Martin was an absolute vixen by the sixth grade.

I believe she had braces.

He’s episcopalian and he says he goes to church.  We drank gin.  Bombay Sapphire only.  I think I bought two drinks.  Joe Tresnit, who lives with my friend Kelly’s dad, Reg bought a couple, Morey Tresnit who’s business I want, bought a couple and Bob Tresnit father with the one leg bought a couple.

We liked the gimlets the best.  Mike had to remind Joe how to prepare them.

A subtle but sublime pleasure to indulge in cocktails and conversation with this man I’d not seen in fifteen years at least.  Erudite, razor sharp and lightning fast wit.  He’s currently a candidate for Ph.D. in Victorian literature, his thesis to be centered around his own novel concept of “gentrifuge”.

I either spent twelve or eight dollars.  Maybe both.

Bacon took me to his athletic shoe of a rental car and gave me a small tin with Obama’s countenance on it’s sliding cover and a chunky little bit of green inside.  He also supplied me with a one hitter painted to look like a cigarette.  I’m no stranger to paraphernalia  but I never sold these.

I’ve just discovered an entire box of Twinkies.   What new devilry is this?

I can hear Beddy wailing a little in the bedroom and Billy The Tripod and I have enough of an understanding for her to sigh and act like she can’t hear it.  A very good dog.

I think a piece on the actual difference (s), between Democrats and Republicans might be in order.  Thanks for the reminder.  It will be challenging yet educational………maybe a little didactic.

Bacon said something pretty profound about re-branding the word ‘socialism’ into an “E. Pluribus Unum” kinda vibe, “Out of many one”.  They didn’t teach Latin here in the brush but I got it.  Pretty elegant and disarmingly simple.  I think it means nothing about leaders or demagogues but ideas.  I hope.  That’s what I got.  I think he was reminding me of consensus.  Maybe he was reminding me that we have one.  Could be genius and could be a fool.  Either one of us.

It’s this kind of confusion what makes pot great.

He spoke so calmly and sincerely.  He half asked if he was effeminate.  I shook my head.  What he is, is who he is.  He’s a sensitive and sincere man and a little hypervigilant.  In Carson City, Bacon is like a well dressed comedian from New York City.  Jewish maybe.  Carson folks have no idea but they like him.  He is as close to the ten to twelve year old that I knew, as a 44 year old could possibly be.  He looks you in the eye and with very little physical language, imparts crazy thoughtful observations and very perceptive conclusions.

He delivers wisdom and humor in the same voice because it is the same to him.  He’s advanced.

I am rich to have a man like Michael Bacon look forward to spending a minute with me.  He told me, me and his grandmother had made his day.  He is exceptional in many ways, but so foghorn, lighthouse bright it would be intimidating if not for the lack of ego and a completely unassuming honest look in his eyes and on his face.  I don’t doubt Master Bacon is what he his without exception.

Drinks for my friends.

I made a genius tuna salad.

I used albacore packed in water by Chicken of The Sea.  A little mayo, some honey dill mustard, bleu cheese (not Bob’s) dressing and some tartar sauce.  Lemon pepper, garlic powder, chopped white onion, dill, lemon juice, black pepper, but I resisted basil.  I felt the licoriceness of the herb would’ve upset the delicate whang and tang I’d so meticulously constructed.  I’m very pro basil.  Mother said it was a little runny but flavor solid.

A little fresh basil would’ve changed the calculus.  Fresh rosemary too.

I’m all about the herb.

I added more chopped white onions and another can of albacore and ran a handful of the mixture through my hair.  It informed mine own coiffure with bounce and volume. No chunkiness in my wig.  Nothing untoward.  Slick and glistening smoothness notwithstanding, I was pleased with it’s sandwich worthy texture and consistency.  Mother was ironing pants and otherwise puttering in a busy and random way.  My mother is blind shithouse loony when it comes household duties.  A fart in a whirlwind says my father. I was phoning clients while contemplating my culinary creation.  Relaxed and contemplative was I.

Wish I’d had a few green or black olives on hand, but they’ve just returned from the road and the larder is not stocked with the pre-holiday robustness to which I’ve grown accustomed.  Still, it’s an amazingly well appointed kitchen.  All flavors,  appliances gadgets and tools at hand.  I love fashioning anything edible in my mother’s kitchen.  I want for little if anything at all.

Olives and onions are flavor and texture, see. I used it for a sandwich on multi-grain bread and wished for some thinly sliced Swiss while she spooned it over fresh, vine ripened tomatoes from Pasco Washington for to take with her to the hospital.

Dad seems to being do much better.  Haven’t been able to pull a shift in a few days because of an obstreperous yet minor cold.  Feel shitty in the mornings, fine by dusk  but I’d like to look in his one good eye.  Really wanna see the bastard.  He’s doing much better by all accounts and there is far less reason to worry than the last hospital stay.  Tough old bastard.  More worried about mom.

Turns out because of my recent fall from financial grace, my concerned busybody and overly nosy aunt has decided, without evidence of any kind, that I must have a chronic and acute drug problem.  She’s convinced herself and a fingerful of her sisters that I could be bad news and they have nearly talked themselves into an uninvited and unwarranted visit to save my mother from me.  The aunt in question sent her son, my cousin, to check me out.  He’s the oldest of my fifty plus cousins and has seen plenty of trouble.  Thrown out of the Navy, convicted on what we all KNOW to be baseless child molestation charges involving his own daughter.  So yeah, prison. He was pissed about the mission but told me all about it and said once he looked in my eyes he knew I was good.  He called his mother, my aunt, and told her to back the hell off and leave us the fuck alone.

Michael is fine, he told her and so the rest of the retired overly concerned vultures, and offered to score me some pot.

I don’t mean to malign these women because they are each and everyone a love and really only concerned for their sister, my mother.  This is beyond the pale however.  Over the line and just plain irresponsible out of control cattiness fomented by one aunt in particular who would know who she is if she ever read this.  She won’t.  If she does, I love her, she loves me and I have nothing to hide.  She was wrong.

Way out of line and I am offended.  Deeply.

I could really use some green bud.  It’s been months.  Man, I could use but an eighth.  I don’t even have a goddamn pipe. He’s a handful and an asshole but he’s been fighting the good fight on my behalf for at least a week unbeknownst to me.  My parent’s raised him for most of his formative years.  He’s very loyal to them and therefore to me.  I believe him to be a flawed but good man.

It occurs to me I could say that about anyone including myself.

My sister doesn’t like him. She is often guilty of rushing to judgment, and she is a nuclear powered earth mover once she sets her sights.  It can be either or both, advantageous and/or deleterious depending on the situation.  I adore her.  She is a house afire.  Methinks she needs to settle down, take a breath and consider context more often. Who am I to piss against the wind?  I am the cautionary tale.

We fought on the phone last night and I hung up on her.  I hate that.  Hanging up on someone.  It’s a weak thing.   She tells me I’m a bad listener while refusing to hear me out.  A nuclear powered earth mover who wades into things convinced of her overview and the accuracy of her assessment.  It goes without saying that we both share a certain alpha dog proclivity.  It goes without saying that she chaps my ass in the most urgent and immediate of ways.

I find myself losing composure with her quicker than just about anyone else I know.

I love and respect her but she pisses me the fuck off despite always having the best of intentions, much like the aforementioned aunt.

Very much like the aforementioned aunt.

Tonight I sit here writing, her youngest son, my nephew, shows up with a plate for me.  It’s the other thing about mi hermana.  Her heart is the size of gigantic juicy melon that threatens to burst from her torso.  Wrapped elegantly in a soft cloth of sunflowers that secures a pale blue paper napkin, cookies, chips, applesauce and a sandwich on a gorgeous roll.  My sister cooks like an angel.  From a simple sandwich to an elaborate five course meal to a BBQ for a hundred and fifty guests along with ridiculous pies and pastries.  Anything of sustenance or comestibility benefits from the grace of my sister’s hand and her adept and instinctual culinary prowess.

I refer to her and think of her as “Pissy” and she really is the shit.  Any pun you imagine, I take responsibility for.

About five years ago, when my fiancee and I were busting, she called me at my office to ask about coming to LA for Thanksgiving.  I told her as much as I loved the idea, I couldn’t say yes because I’d just put my house on the market.  Two days prior to the holiday she called again and asked if she and her family “could come over”.  Hadn’t sold the house yet, so about five hundred miles later, her and husband and brood showed up with a fully prepared Thanksgiving feast except a brined turkey and pies that would require time inside of my oven.

It might just be my favorite Thanksgiving memory.  I got pretty hammered and slept late the next morning.  By the time I came downstairs, my house was spotless.  She’d even swabbed my entire refrigerator.  Coffee and breakfast of course.  I think of my sister’s face and my heart swells.  She is good smells, good vibes, happiness and unconditional love.        

A violent storm or a soft gentle rain with the smell of moistened flowers and grass.  An absolute force for good but perhaps too often willing to bulldoze subtlety and nuance. No one who knows my sister can possibly avoid loving her.  I know I do.  She is exceptional in so many ways. I know this to be true as I’ve been on it’s receiving ends.  Yes, both of them.  She has been my savior and a foil.  I want her to know, she is righteous, but not always completely right.  A stopped clock is on money twice a day.  Don’t wind your own clock, or it’s the best you and your clock can expect.

No thing or circumstance is even remotely as black or white as she sometimes perceives.  Grey is the day.  Most days are purple.  Neither blue or red. Gimme a break Sis, I know what I’m doing despite not being complete in your eyes .  Help me to do what I need to do as opposed to what you want me to be and do.  Stop fighting me and help me.  I’ll never be as antiseptic in your estimation as you would prefer.  I am me and you are you and we are all together.  I could just as easily battle what and who you are, but I think unlike you, I’ve long since learned that lesson.  Sometimes your righteousness is cloying.  I don’t doubt where your heart is but help a brother out.

I simply don’t want the same things for myself that you do.  We are very different.  Ketchup little tomato.

Come to think of it, if only I’d had some capers for that tuna salad……..

Drinks for my friends.

September 16:

Hard day.  He’s so strong but so fragile.  Never witnessed this kind of pain.  He can’t find a way to sit where it isn’t excruciating.  He struggles to suppress his cough because it tears at his insides.  He squirms and fights.  He writhes and stomps and cusses.  I finally end up demanding the nurse administer a morphine injection.  His eyes  wide and his mouth open without a sound. It spooks me.

He says he wishes he could pass out from the pain.

It’s just so surreal and crazy.  I don’t remember being this afraid for him.  I don’t remember being this afraid.  I’ve come to loathe hospitals.  It’s  horrible.  A beautiful hospital, expansive slate walled lobby, fountains and modern sculpture, abundant natural light and beautifully scaped desert grounds, yet I hate it.  I want to run away.

If only there were a bar or cocktail lounge.  A silent television, a bowl of snacks and some cleavage.

I don’t want to come back here tomorrow but I will.  On the way, I will pray for him to be better despite my agnosticism.

Mother is breaking down.  It’s too much.  I understand.  They have been married for fifty five years.  She was eighteen.  They are attached at the hip, the brain and the heart.  I do the best I can.  Hug her and hold her.  He will be ok, I tell her.  We both know he will come down another notch or two in terms of what he can and cannot do.  He has beaten his body hard against the rock of concrete as a profession for some four decades and now this.

He was never out of work and he never really missed work.  He piled into his beat up Datsun pick up every morning and was gone long before six a.m.  In four feet of snow or hundred degree heat.  Hangover being the lamest excuse not to show up so that never stopped him.  He came home and drank a cup of coffee, read the paper with one eye, hard hat still on while I pounded on my drums.  He stopped me only when mom pulled up.

His lifelong friend Pat Sanderson walks in and even through his pain, they trade insults the entire time.  Pat wouldn’t have known had my mother not run into his wife this afternoon in the parking lot.  Both named Jeanne, both of similar composure.

We had decided not to tell too many people yet.  Until he could, I don’t know, be more normal.

Mom was raised on a ranch/farm with ten siblings.  They ate what they raised or grew.  They were poor and are still remarkably close.  The love in my mother’s family is as rare as it is exceptional.  Her parents did something very, very right.  She began by typing marriage licenses in the county clerk’s office and ended up an administrative assistant to the Governor of Nevada and at one point, the Nevada State Legislature created a position for her in the economic development commission and appointed her to it.  Very powerful politicians are family friends.  Mayors, Governors, numerous state representatives and Senate majority leaders.

She’s a very smart and accomplished woman.

My sister and her husband carry on that tradition but far more focused on local.  Their hands in and on everything municipal.

He hasn’t pooped since it happened, so me and Patty joke about a suppository applied with a hammer.  A gay hairdresser named Larry to feed my dad and maybe help him with his reluctant bowels.

I love Pat, he once bit off a man’s index finger in a fight because the sonafabitch kept poking him with it.  This guy is the shit and he’s gonna show no matter what when he learns my Old Man is any kind of trouble.  Same as last time.  Understand my Dad was a hard working, hard fighting man and men like Pat were by his side the entire time.  Hard hats flying in bar fights, they’d drink beer from them afterward.

I’m often impressed by the men who hold my Father in the highest regard.  My cousin Derek came by too.  Rough hands and bandaged fingers.  I guess my sister told him.  Found out in the morning and stopped by after work, then headed to my parent’s house to empty the shit tanks and grey water from the RV my Old Man was working on when he fell.  He adores my Father and my Father adores him.  My cousin Derek is the shit.  Race car driver who wins just about every race.  Fiercely loyal.  We have little in common but we like each other a lot.  He shook my hand and hugged me hard.  He loves me because he loves my father and I have no problem with that.

I adore him and his wife, My cousin Marlo.  Her parents, uncle Tyke and aunt Bobby, rock.

I can’t stand it, I’m so frightened and weak.  I advocate for him.  I bully the nurses and doctors.  I rinse his piss jug and try to entertain him. We’re not at all that alike you know.  I’ve spent so much time with him in the last few years in hospitals when his condition is dire.

September 17:

Pat “Patty” Sanderson calls this morning offering to take a shift from one of us.  He understands that we do not leave the Old Man alone; one of us is there 24/7.  I certainly don’t need it, but my mother could use it.  I tell him I’ll have mom call.  When I ask her about it, she says no, too soon, family only.  You need to call him, I tell her.  My uncle Larry calls to say if we need him he’s there.  This phenomena of love and selflessness would be multiplied by a hundred but we’ve decided not to tell anybody yet.

I call before I leave for the hospital to see if I need to bring anything.  The answer is no and mom says it’s been a pretty rough morning.  Instantly I’m fearful.  In the shower I try to imagine what it would be like to not be able to clean myself and realize he’s probably used to it.  In the past few days I’ve fed him, held cups for him to drink out of and scratched him where he can’t reach, fought with nurses and doctors to get him what he needs or what I think he needs.

We’re very different my Father and I, but his vulnerability has allowed me to love him and appreciate him so much more than I otherwise would have.  That old testosterone impetus for conflict has disappeared.  The rivalry between Father and son, especially between two of such different minds, is gone.  I understand that I’m of a different mind because both he and my mother wanted almost desperately for my sister and I to be.  He’s always been so proud of me and my accomplishments.  His praise and pride, always  so unswerving and resolute.  Love runs very strong and deep in my family.  I am so very lucky.

Patty didn’t hear from my mom so he just showed up with his wife this afternoon.  Brings a card that sounds like a toilet flushing when opened.  If you don’t tell Patty no, he’ll do whatever the fuck he wants.

He and Dad share a hysterical story about locking some asshole supervisor in a porta-potty on a high rise job, hooking it to a crane and dropping it.  They tell me they dropped it five stories before slamming on the brakes, so the cable stretched and snapped back causing the shithouse to tumble in the air a few times.  The super emerged, speechless, shaken and covered in shit.  When he finally reappeared at the job site, looking to fire somebody, they were busy working on the cable brakes for the crane.  He never knew until some twenty years later that my Father and Patty had been behind it.  Patty invited the man and my Dad to breakfast one morning unbeknownst to either and spilled the beans.  Patty describes the breakfast taking place in a booth neither could escape from as he was on the end blocking the exit.

He tells me that whenever my Father had a problem with someone on his crew, he’d ask Patty if he’d heard the shit the guy was saying about him (Patty).  Patty would beat the hell out of him and the problem would be solved.

Often as a child, particularly before holidays, my Father had to “work late with Pat”, that’s what mom said.  She understood these two fuckers were likely out drinking, getting their asses beat or more probably beating some ass.

They talked about Freddie Crowley, Ozzy Ellis, Roy Deihl, Johnny Annas and Frank the crane operator.  All icons of my youth.  More than a handful of times, Dad would come home, his entire orange Datsun pickup, the ‘Pumpkin”, wrapped from stem to stern in knotted together rubber bands, courtesy of Frank.  I remember him as the rubber band man.  More than once he came home with a brand new hard hat crushed by the crane Frank operated.  No choice but to show up to the job the next morning with his beat to misshapen concrete encrusted hard hat from days gone by.  Frank seemed to be just fine with that one.  In retrospect, I’m confident Dad would show up with a shiny new one, like a ridiculous Hawaiian shirt, just to bait the bastard into destroying it.

I believe my Old Man was gratified and amused to bring home yet another brand new one flattened by Frank’s crane.

He ate a full pork chop today and his chocolate ice cream.  None of the squash or salad no matter how hard I tried.  He needs a good crap.  We watched Hardball with Chris Mathews and I read to him from the paper.  His humor is good and he flirts with the nurses.  He had a shower because he stank.  He is brave and big hearted.  We will get through this.  I love him.  He is still my fearless, pick a fight with the biggest guy in the bar, Father.

The Old Man is rising to this occasion.

Further reading: http://brainspank.org/wordpress/?p=637

Drinks for my friends.

For the past month or so I’ve been inhabiting my parent’s house in Carson City Nevada, by myself.  I’m here on business in the town I grew up in to hopefully take advantage of old contacts.  It’s not going too bad.  My folks are retired and travel as much as they can in a 38 foot motorhome more luxurious and better appointed than most apartments I’ve lived in.  It has a satellite dish for the all important NASCAR contests along with at least three televisions, it even has a washer and dryer.

Yesterday they arrived home after months away.  Mother has a kidney stone(s) to be dealt with via an ultrasound procedure.  I’m hoping it will be painless.  Otherwise they wouldn’t have returned until early December.

Not far from home they met heavy weather.  A sandstorm that compromised an awning on my father’s beloved rig.

My father is seventy seven years old.

We had a pleasant supper of tomato basil bisque and BLTs; we’ve been blessed simultaneously with an affluence of tomatoes of exceptional caliber.  My folks brought home bags of them and my sister dropped off gorgeous heirlooms along with peaches and handmade olive oil soap yesterday morning.  My family understands a good tomato.  A nice malbec followed by  a peppery shiraz.  Great conversation.  I adore my parents.  Bright, well informed, kind, compassionate, loving and remarkably open minded.  We caught up on all things family, my Mother’s nine siblings, politics and specifically the dumb fucking racist Republicans.

In case you wondered, I’m a product of progressive non-biased thinking.

My father mentioned casually how my mother would no longer allow him on a ladder.  My mother and I discussed how well he’s doing after a series of illnesses.  About two years ago he was hospitalized after a colonoscopy revealed a substantial tumor.  There were complications and by Christmas, things were more than dicey.  Before that he’d torn a rotator cuff after a night of getting shithoused with my cousin Derek at a NASCAR race in Phoenix.  Sometime after the surgery, he injured his back after falling from a ramp while helping to construct a porch for my cousin Dee Dee with my uncle Fred.

My old man is one tough sonafabitch.  No shit.  One eye lost in a barfight some 45 years ago.  A retired concrete foreman that coveted the idea of the bigger they are, the harder they fall.  He was fond of proving it to himself.  Left home at 12 years old after completing the sixth grade.  Honest, brave, fearless and a firm believer in hard work.  The kind of man that might not make cops obsolete, but certainly lawyers and courts wouldn’t be necessary if all men had his honesty, ethics and ideals.

I stayed up late writing a new A&M chapter, basking in the warmth of my parents return and writing another chapter for the book about my time in the music business.  Nostalgia fueled my muse and I went with it.  I was very happy to see my parents.

I was awakened this morning around eleven or so by mother.  She was asking me to move my car so she could get her car out.  There are two other vehicles so I rolled over to face her a little confused.  “Your father has fallen off a ladder and I need to get him to the hospital”.  I think I said “fuck me” out loud.  I rushed to pull on my pants and t-shirt and made my way to the driveway.  As I pulled my car out and away, I flashed on the blood I’d seen on my mother’s blouse.

I walked towards their hoopty Buick in the garage and there he sat in the backseat, head bowed, feet not in the car yet.  I touched him on the shoulder and said something like what the fuck happened?  He didn’t really raise his head as much as he raised his eyes.  He was in pain and a little confused.  His face was bleeding from where it had bounced off the cement.  “I fucked up”, he said.  I asked my mother if she had her phone and she didn’t.  I rushed to fetch it off the counter.

As they pull out of the garage I knuckle the window and give my old man a thumbs up.  He gives me one back and says take care of my puppy.  My mom echos it, take care of the puppy.  Billy Jean The Tripod Lab.  No worries I tell them.

I was left with my thoughts for hours.  His hips must be fine because he was ambulatory.  The head bleeds profusely, but their didn’t seem to be an inordinate amount of blood so hopefully that’s not a big deal.  His ribs I thought, he must have cracked some ribs.  That’s gonna hurt.  I understand that as well as I can without ever suffering it myself.  It goddamn hurts.

A few hours later mom returns.  X-Rays and a Cat Scan but no word yet.  We’re both hoping it’s just cracked ribs.  He’s in a lot of pain, they give him morphine.  She collects some pajamas and a robe and heads back.  I call my sister to tell her what’s happened.  No way I was gonna call her until I had some info.  She wants to head out immediately and I advise her to wait.  Let’s just see what the tests tell us.  Probably just cracked ribs I tell her hopefully.  He’s tough.  Hold tight.  He’ll be in a world of hurt but we know how tough he is.  She says she’ll shower, prepare a meal for us all and be ready for my call.

After five p.m. and no word from mom so I call.  She can’t get a signal at the hospital but calls me back minutes later.  Six broken, not cracked but broken ribs and a cracked shoulder.  No internal injuries and they’ve stitched up his head.  He has asthma and the doctors are worried about his blood oxygen as it’s excruciating for him to breathe deep. He’s on oxygen and they want to keep him for a few days.  She says she’ll be home once he’s comfortable, settled in a room and has a morphine drip.

I call my sister and in her inimitable style, she says a meal will be cooked and she’ll head to the hospital.  I tell her she doesn’t need to do either because mom is there and I’m an adult now.

Uncle Larry calls just to chat and I fill him in.  I love this man.  The orneriest bastard I’ve ever met.  Woke up with his socks in my mouth once.  Liked to blow his nose and put the tissue back in the box.  Decorated a Christmas tree with my mothers undergarments and left it in the front yard.   A former jockey, he liked to shock me as a three year old with his homemade version of a cattle prod.  Despite all that, he’s among the sweetest men to ever suck air.  I got him back but that’s a story for a different day.

He recently kicked the ass of unbeatable cancer through sheer force of will and an indomitable spirit.  We all thought he was a goner but the little bastard whipped it.  It was grim and he somehow handed the big C it’s ass.  He said to me, “goddamn I hate to hear that”.  As a onetime jockey, he understands very well the pain of broken ribs.  We told each other we loved and he said he’d be in touch.  I’m sure he will.  Probably everyday, even though my old man hates to talk on the phone.

Not long after that, the doorbell rings and it’s my brother in law Todd and my nephew Keaton with a basket of goods.  Two different kinds of ice cream, sliced peaches, cucumbers in vinegar & oil, bread and a hamburger helper casserole.  At the same time, sister Tammy has arrived at the hospital with a prepared meal for my father.

My mother is exhausted and tells my sister he’ll be fine, that she doesn’t need to stay.  My mom says to her, “You have to work in the morning”, my sister says, “Well, that’s why I’m here now”.  She then shouts down some nurses who want to remove some sheet from under my father they used to transfer him from the gurney to his bed.  They insist, she stands her ground.  He’s in pain and my sister is not having anymore.  Period.  There really is no use in fucking with my sister.

As I write this, she’s either snoring or watching my father intently in his hospital room.  She will spend the night in a chair and go straight to work as she did for weeks two years or so ago.  I arrived to give her a few much needed nights off.  My family does not fuck around.  My sister, well,  she is fierce and sincere with her love.  Intrude in the way of my sister’s love, loyalty or affection at your peril.  She will mow you down.

I am lucky.  I see a hospital room in my future with the man who made me goddamnit.

Drinks for my friends.

Here I am in Carson City Nevada.

Back on the grid.  Internet access achieved.  Kinda proud, as I’m a bit of a luddite.

The capital of the great state of Nevada, merely titular as the seat of power.  Since the seventies or early eighties,  the actual force and center of political influence has resided with indefatigable dominance in Clark county, some five hundred miles to the south, by virtue of the voracious development and a subsequent population explosion in Las Vegas.

Despite all that, Carson City remains a cracklingly political town.  My sister tells me it’s all about to change.  Power will return to it’s rightful place in the North.

Between nation trotting sojourns with my father in an RV better appointed and more luxurious than most apartments I’ve lived in, my retired mother still oversees vital components of the bi-annual legislature.  They are somewhere between small towns in Washington state as I write this.

My sister swings a heavy municipal bat.  She has big plans for this town.  A media center unrivaled on either coast.  Her husband, whom I’ve known since grade school, wields substantial influence with Nevada’s nearly omnipotent Gaming Control Board.  Friends of the family are the wealthy, elite and intelligentsia as well as the kind, humble, ordinary and delightfully quirky.

Hello, Don Carlson, Harry Reid and the rest of you.

Not at all out of the ordinary for me to crack my hometown paper to find an article or editorial written by my uber talented and modestly ambitious sister.  Just last week while having lunch in an ordinary burger palace, I enjoyed such occasion.

Their lives are impossibly full.  Easy to envy.  Very busy and purposeful people.  Even my sister’s three children, two in college and the youngest a senior in high school,  are elaborately involved.

The net effect of all this furious activity and humble accomplishment  allows for me to feel distinctly and unmistakably slovenly.  Sloth like.  As I sit writing this from my parent’s kitchen counter, my trophy, a gold record, prominently adorns a living room wall.  Not much in the scheme of things, but I’ll take what I can get, at least until I’m a famous and/or critically acclaimed writer.  Or maybe head of the cheese department at Whole Foods.  

Another thing that impresses the crap out of me is the depth and breadth of both my mother’s and sister’s larders.  The culinary treasures in each are enough to sustain one through the apocalypse.  Exotic condiments, mustards, pickles, oils and dressings of all kinds.  Cheeses and sausages.  Canned fruits and vegetables.  Spices, soups and seasonings.  Refrigerators and freezers stocked with meats and nuts, breads and more vegetables.  Everything from freshly frozen hand picked huckleberries to chicken nuggets, huge sides of mammals, frozen diet meals and seafood.  Sauces from barbecue, to soy ginger and sesame, vidalia onion and fig, chili, rice vinegar and raspberry pecan.  Tomato paste, tomatoes chopped, tomatoes whole.  Soups and pasta, raw beans and crackers.

Slim fast in a can and baby corn in a can.  Microwave popcorn and Cups O’ Noodles.

Alcohol from fine wine to to cheap champagne.  Malibu Rum to Creme De Menthe, blood orange liqueur, vodka, gin, whiskey and Amaretto.  Soda, beers and juices.

All manner of candies and chocolates.  Jams, jellies and preserves.

Farm fresh eggs from my brother in law’s chickens and home made pies from my sister’s oven.  She has an herb garden and shops the farmer’s market every Saturday morning.  She runs marathons.  Her husband is soft spoken, brilliant and absurdly funny.

Not much substance here I know.  Been away from the wheel for awhile so give me some room.

I will tell you this.

Without a public option at the center of any health care bill, all is lost.  Obama will have squandered too valuable political capital for next to nothing.  The only efficacious mechanism for curbing corporate insurance greed, for legitimate reform, will be missing.  Without it, it will be a band-aid on a sucking chest wound.  Consequences of a bill without it will be dire.  All momentum and any mandate from an overwhelming majority will expire.

The ideas of hope and change will atrophy.  No bill will be failure.  A bad bill, without a public option, will be a stage for blame deserved, optimism smashed and the very last chance Americans will ever have at fair and equitable health care will fade to black.  The best promise of this administration will be shit.  Obama’s presidency, and our last best hope, will surface out past the breakers, missing a limb.

Fuck the Republicans.  Take one lesson from them and get the goddamn Democrats to march in step.  Marginalize the flat earthers by excluding them.  I’m weary of the vagina monologue here.  Tell the assholes that would terrorize their constituents  with stories of “death panels” and grandma’s plug being pulled to shut the fuck up.  Go to those states and wage war.  Get proactive.  Get medieval on their asses, with the truth.

Chuck Grassley should be invited to suck his own dick.  He’ll never vote for health care reform unless he’s shamed into it.  Obama needs to go to Iowa.  I’m not sure what Ted Kennedy’s status is but wheel him in.  Get proactive.  Fight, you you pussies.  More than health care is at stake here.  Don’t you see it?  Hope and change hinge on this.

Absent a public option will be proof that Democrats are unable to even lead a horse to water.  A majority in the House and Senate will be meaningless and it will all be for nothing.  Not a goddamn thing.  All for naught.  God will whisper in Michele Bachmann’s ear and she’ll be your next President.

You think the last eight years sucked?  I’m just sayin’.  It’s all about this.  Right here.  Right now.

Drinks for my friends.

I talked about it last night but didn’t realize that Senate Democrats had walked away.  Seems they want a specific plan.  As in, where exactly will the money go?  That seems reasonable to me.  $80 million is a lot of cake.

You know, Gitmo.

What baffles me is this:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    “I can’t make it any more clear,” Reid said. “We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.”  Was he quoted out of context?  As far as I know there’s no debate here about what town or city street they’ll be dropped on, they are to be incarcerated.  Harry is a friend of my Mother’s.  I got an inscribed, autographed copy of his book for my birthday.  I’m wondering if he’s getting a little old.  His handwriting describes the drawing of sea monkeys.

What is the deal?  There’s two hundred and forty of them and we already have more people behind bars per capita than any nation on earth.  There’s two hundred and forty and if America has a specialty these days, it’s locking people up.  Specialty?  Industry.  Bring them here, try them like Americans because we still have a system of justice and courts in which they may prevail if they aren’t guilty and are allowed to prove it.

Regardless of the outcome, the truly guilty ones will burn in a Christian hell.  Right?

What scares politicians so much about our justice system functioning as an equitable litmus for these particular “detainees”?

Anyway, it get’s better.

“Republicans are poised with an amendment by James Inhofe of Oklahoma that would block any of the Guantanamo detainees from coming to U.S. soil to stand trial or serve their sentences” -yahoo

Republicans just keep on sweetening  the elixir that will be the lubricant of their demise.  Ha!  Can I make that stick?  I’m way ahead of you.

“Shuttering this facility now could only serve one end: and that is to make Americans less safe than Guantanamo has,” said GOP Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.”  -yahoo

Guantanamo made us safe?  I’d say with the torture and death and all, the hawks would be lucky to slide into obscurity as opposed to jail.  Zero sum for them but a nasty stain on the rest of us.

Mitch McConnell is a scurrilous,  multi-chinned rodent of a Senator.  A nasty, long of tooth and sharp of teeth, a warm blooded, razor incisored dumbshit.  Even his dog hates him.

He warned that if the United States withdrew from Iraq, “the terrorists would come after us where we live.” -1/10/07 CNN

I can actually smell that sentence.

He loathes the idea of campaign finance reform.  He get’s giddy over the NSA listening to whatever and whomever blows their skirt up.  Sans warrant.  He’s very pro Iraq war as a central front for the war on terror.  I love how they accuse us of dangerous political stripes like socialist, when they stand to applaud fascism and nearly shit themselves with glee.

The cherry atop my shit sundae is the reality of scripture superimposed over  dramatic military landscapes as cover pages for top secret war memos to Dumbya.  While we were beating and abusing, torturing to death, people confined and bound.  Dumbya got a report with an inspirational poster for a cover.  I hear he really likes pears and carrots from a jar.  We did this to extract corroborating evidence for what we were about to do and then continue to do in Iraq and everywhere else.  On the off chance there was to be a super secret memo on Sunday, it was wrapped in Easter themed paper.  A candy bar tied in the bow.

Spuriouser and spuriouser.

Dumbya knew there would be pretzels later.  With supervision of course.  Plenty to wash them down with.

Drinks for my friends.

I hate reality television but I love a trainwreck. Donald Trump is a douchebag. He doesn’t even drink. I’m a little intrigued by Dice Clay, Rodman and Tom Green. I couldn’t possibly care any less about Joan Rivers or the other women.

Joan does look like a particularly bad movie vampire/transexual. A caricature inspired by less than elegant impressionism. I look at her and wish my penis was detachable. The bitch is scary ugly.

I hate it already. It’s insipid. I made it to the first commercial break. Thus far the only redeeming aspect of the entire egregiously contrived clusterfuck is that it will benefit various charities.

An adversarial demarcation is drawn between chicks and dudes. I’m confident it would have been more compelling to mix gender. I’ve made it to the second commercial break. The teams have been charged with the task of making and selling cupcakes. How inspired.

The drama ensues. It’s riveting. I wonder what I may be missing on another channel. I think about my toenails and how they’re getting a little long.

The tension and suspense is so thick I begin to wonder if the sushi joint across the street is still open. If not, the little Mexican place probably is. Can’t get a beer at the Mexican place though. Then I understand I’m not hungry.

I decide to smoke a bowl. I learn Dice is a blowhard and Rodman is a moron. Enlightenment.

I think about calling my mom but I just talked to her yesterday.

Chicks win, dudes lose. Dice gets fired. I will admit the end sucked me in a little. Now I feel dirty.

My mom and I are pretty close. I admire her. Both my parents have a work ethic I’ve rarely ever even glimpsed in another adult. Both in their seventies, open minded, generous and compassionate. It’s not like I grew up Brady but I consider myself pretty lucky. Good people, excellent parents full of love.

So I turned 44 a few weeks ago. Over Christmas when the prodigal son was home, the subject of my birthday did surface. My mother comes from a family of eleven siblings. My father from four but he left home when he was twelve. Birthdays were never a big deal in my family. Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter were Mardi Gras by contrast.

Sometimes I wake up on my birthday and don’t realize what day it is until half way through. I usually get a card from my folks with a few passages underlined, a sincere handwritten note from my mother reaffirming my parent’s love and a check enough for a decent bottle of hooch. When I was a kid I got a good book or two, H. G. Wells or Jack London and a cake. My sister calls early and leaves a voice-mail singing an off key happy birthday.

Anyway, like I said, it came up over the holidays. I told my mother, in all seriousness, what I wanted for my birthday, was an autographed copy of Harry Reid’s book “The Good Fight”. My mother and Harry are old friends. She worked for him back in the day when he was an Assemblyman in the Nevada State Legislature. He went on to be Lieutenant Governor of Nevada under Governor Mike O’Callaghan. O’Callaghan’s daughter babysat my sister and I for a time. He, the Governor, actually had a wooden leg.

She smiled and said she’d see what she could do. I knew she had taken me seriously.

Harry’s was the very first political campaign I worked in when he ran for United States Senator of Nevada.

He lost to Paul Laxalt by barely six hundred votes.

Harry Reid is now the Senate Majority Leader. One of the most powerful men in Washington. Laxalt, a Reagan crony, took the dirt nap some time ago. Harry’s from a little town called Searchlight. He used to box. He’s a Mormon.

My mother has since retired from politics but she still dabbles. The Nevada State Legislature still has bi-annual sessions. Mom took a job this year at the front desk for the Assembly side. She loves it. She is seventy three years old, she knows these people and she is so happy to be involved. She works hard and is beyond dedicated.

She’s been the administrative assistant to the Governor and headed up the economic development commission. She took me to DC when I was a freshman in highschool while she worked on a Bureau of Land Management issue of particular concern to western states; the ‘Sagebrush Rebellion’.

I had access to Nevada’s legislature as a boy. I was allowed to sit in the gallery when the Senate and Assembly were in session. All manner of bills and legislation were available to me. I had run of the library.

I eventually worked as a bill clerk before I left home to study.

I can’t get over how tickled my mom was when she told me about it all.

Harry was scheduled to speak a week or two ago. My mother sent a brief note through proper channels saying that we’d always been supportive (not entirely true), that I’d worked for him when I was eight years old and that I’d asked for an autographed copy of his book for my birthday.

On the day he was to deliver his address, a Sargeant at Arms mentioned to my mom that someone had been by her office asking for her. My mother is a busy woman even if she’s not. It fascinates me that she never stops. When she does, she wraps a sheet around her forearm and pulls it over her head like a bat. Three to five hours later, she’s done.

A little while later an aide of Harry’s appeared to tell her that the Senator would like to see her. She was escorted into a private room and they talked about personal matters for fifteen or twenty minutes. Just the two of them. Uninterrupted. They caught up. No politics, somewhat to my dismay, but he already had a copy of his book with an inscription and an autograph for me.

He called for a photographer.

Later, as he entered the legislative chamber, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries much like the President did last week, he bent and kissed my mother on the cheek on live television. When she told me the story she was just a schoolgirl.

Such is the magic of my mother. A sample of the blessing I enjoy from wonderful parents. To have played a part, to have been any kind of impetus at all in that day makes my heart sing.

Life is good.

Drinks for my friends.

Oil and pot. One syllable, three letters each. What’s the only difference? One’s legal and one’s not. People die, get kidnapped and beheaded at the behest of both. A simple product. A commodity. The bad people get rich either way. The terrorists are just as sexy.

Among the most dangerous and foolish of games.

The prison industrial complex. Mexican warlords. Where the money goes has not changed since Nixon. The only significant change has been the amount of money. Can you say exponential? The gleaming city is underwater. The levees have failed. The cash overflows. America’s Drug War is the second or third stupidest thing we’ve ever done. After slavery, Viet Nam and Iraq.

It may be the second or third most expensive.

Then there was The Pet Rock, The Osmonds and Spam as meat.

Lives lost and innocent imprisoned in numbers staggering and shameful. Pigs at the trough, persecuting, prosecuting and killing their own while they horde the filthy lucre. You want terrorism? It’s on your southern border and it’s blowing the fuck up. Terror not mutually exclusive with the North American continent anymore.

It’s state sponsored, by your state, by the US of A. As we speak, it spills over. Civilians slaughtered. Juarez, Tijuana, El Paso and San Diego. Every American city bends and groans under the weight of our archaic policies and a draconian incarceration non-solution.

Enforce, enforce, enforce.

We learned in the thirties that prohibition is wrongheaded and the furthest thing from efficacious mankind could possibly muster. Stupid then, stupid now. It gave rise to a brand of crime we came to call ‘organized’. I wonder why we called it that. Seems kinda non-nefarious. A non sequitur. What it is today, is bad news. Organized crime like this, is American made. Homegrown like Jazz and The Blues. Just like a gorgeous and unique art form, we are worldwide with the violence and the ignorance.

I worry about my parents. They winter in Yuma. They have the world’s best insurance but they still cross the border to save money on a few things.

This is where we are. This is what we’ve allowed to happen. It’s sick. The War On Drugs and The War On Healthcare. The conversation with my mother will be about their safety on the border, because of The War On Drugs and The War On Healthcare. Because they could be killed on a lazy Sunday.

This is bullshit. We need to shut this nonsense down. We reap what we have sown. Did you know Reagan dealt drugs? He also dealt arms to folks we’d all decided as a country we couldn’t do business with because they were brown and kinda socialist. Or was it the other way around? I forget.

Even in my world the clouds part.

Then there’s Our Man’s choice for Drug Czar (head of the ONDCP), Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske. I don’t know much about this guy yet but he looks to be pretty progressive. Alternet calls him “a relatively enlightened cop.” Seattle is goddamn liberal. They’ve lowered marijuana as an enforcement priority and have needle exchange.

Maybe there’s potential.

United States Attorney General Eric Holder has confirmed he will not be pursuing DEA raids on medical marijuana clinics. A policy shift that’s precisely 180 degrees out from the previous administration. It’s a waste of time and money and it foments distrust and fear. Smart move. Makes me smile.

Pretty big deal the aggregate of these issues alone. The departure they represent, despite them not being secondary or even tertiary to the electorate these days, it’s awesome. Forgive me but it is. It reveals a compassion and pragmatism people won’t recognize because it’s been so long since they’ve seen it.

Trust me, this is big.

My sincere hope is that it’s harbinger of things to come.

It he tells us he’s closing Gitmo, ending torture and the war in Iraq. Gonna wind down the defense budget a little, spend lots on infrastructure, healthcare and education. He seems to understand this is a long term deal. This is not your father’s President. His short game looks good too. Aggressive and decisive. Perhaps we should do something to revive the patient as opposed to speculating ad nauseum over what will be it’s demise.

If we could just stop spending money to kill people or be able to kill them better in the future. Not forever. Maybe for a few years. You know, a three year moratorium would just about get us out of this mess. It could work pretty well in the short term.

End the drug war, stop killing folks. Stop putting them in jail. Let the masses self medicate and get off your asses and allow America to cultivate hemp. Oil, nutrition and textiles in a crop requiring no pesticides that can be turned around every twelve to sixteen weeks. It’s illegal because it scared the shit out of Hearst (paper) and Rockefeller (oil) back in the thirties.

Good green bud has Pfizer horrified and vomiting.

Life is not a game and we’re not necessarily here to compete all the time. But when people succumb, when they become overly cynical and bitter. They have lost. They are losers on the human stage. They may succeed in some ways, but when they lose in important ways, nobody gives a damn.

Drinks for my friends.

She was an ugly woman. Homely. A tremendous lantern jaw with a prominent cleft in a hemispherical swell at the tip of her chin. Any attempts to restrain the growth of the spindly but wiry black stalks and the requisite follicles of her upper lip and below her ears, was futile.

Discolored craters in her cheeks partially filled by a face paste not nearly up to the job. She was more than uncomely.

Her legs, given the task of supporting her all but shapeless largesse, appeared impossible. Unlikely to support her bulk for an entire day’s activities. Like the stems on a giant piano that would no doubt fail to afford any ambulatory activity. Her ankles gave me specific pause. They appeared to be seconds from snapping despite being stationary.

She wore copious perfume, acrid and never adequate in masking the natural funk of her secretions. No matter the garish garment she wore, her back and under arms seeped stains and were an obvious source of her elaborate pungence.

She spoke loud, with shrieking enthusiasm. She shouted “gotdamn” because she was God fearing. Normal to her in her head. A menthol fueled guttural cough and a viscous chuckle.

Her teeth were grey, gapped and stained by cheap lipstick, coffee and cigarrettes.

She sold Avon. She was from Oklahoma. Her husband’s name was Melvin. He looked like a Melvin. He possessed a grotesque tongue. It was always on display when licking his thumbs to count money or shuffle and deal cards. An organ that escaped his maw to reveal scarring and sickly violet color. He eventually elevated himself to City Supervisor. An elected post. They lived in a trailer about a mile away off a dirt road.

She was an awful cook. Her yams were stringy and her turkey was always dry. Lumpy mashed potatos and gravy without flavor.

She was the sweetest woman you could possibly imagine. Her name was Arlene. They were hicks. Oakies. But very good people. She loved me because she loved my parents. Always very good to me. She had love in her heart.

Two daughters and a son. Mike, Barbara and Mary Jo.

I remember Mike losing part of his heel to a motorcycle. He later spent a stretch in jail. Mary Jo took it upon herself to become popular. She was a cheerleader. Possible in my hick town despite one’s lineage.

Barbara often babysat me along with her mother. Barb was smart and saw something in me I think. She read to me in Spanish and from the bible for the beauty of the language.

I always recieved Christmas presents from them but for a few years there were presents from the family and an exclusive present from Barb. Arlene was generous with Avon products intended for young men. Barb bought me board games and things she imagined would stimulate or encourage me.

I learned on my last trip home for Christmas that Barb had passed. She had abundant red hair and wisdom and humor beyond anyone in her clan. Welcome to haunt me. To be a ghost in my slumber should she choose. I always felt like we never finished.

Sometimes life is a well maintained pinball machine. Other times it’s a ball peen hammer on the glass. There’s always blood.

Drinks for my friends.

I used to try to get out of the house before I got too fucked up. Now I get as hammered as possible before I leave. It’s crazy. The strategy of poverty.

I’m contemplating the 7-11.

Always employ the interior of the wrapper as a resting place for your processed food in between bites as opposed to it’s exterior, a fuming petri dish of virulent germs. Never use condiments from the condiment bar at the 7-11 for the same reason. Me, I can’t help it. Don’t do what I do, do what I say.

I’m not shy about grabbing a fistful of napkins.

You know what? That iced coffee from McDonalds isn’t too bad as long as you get it unsweetened. I got Starbuck’s gift cards for Christmas.

When I was a little boy, four or five, I ran away to the local Safeway. I figured they had everything I needed. My parents were more than willing to help. I didn’t feel as though my needs were being met at home. I wanted more freedom. They dropped me off after hours. I couldn’t get in. Already there was a flaw in my plan. Thankfully, they took me back.

I really don’t understand overly spicy food. I like for the wasabi to cause my nose to run or break me a little sweat but I can do that by peeling an orange or standing outside too long. I like a little Tapatio in my noodles. Any thing beyond that confuses me at best. Pain in the interim. Then there’s the aftershock of the assfire morning constitutional.

Forgive me. I just really like to pick at this guy. He’s perfect.

How’s that for a segue?

More Dewitt:
“I deleted your idiotic comment from my blog. If you would like to re-post something a bit more respectful and less retarded have at it, but stop blog-dicking. Put it in line like everybody else.”

Admin:
“I like that I may have gotten under your skin a little. My purpose is to shine a light on your bottomless ignorance and fear, so either block me or I’ll be coming at you on the first page when I have something to say. Coward.

Come to my blog, I won’t censor you.”

Dewitt:
“Grow up. Third grade was a long tima ago, and you’re still a school yard punk. I have no desire to read anything you have to say. If you post obscenities on my blog they will be deleted.”

Admin:
“I’m no punk. I’m well informed, educated, have the courage of my convictions and most importantly, an open mind. Your’s closed a long time ago.

I thank the powers that be my parents aren’t anything like you.

You consistently object to my “obscenities”, yet never exhibit any inclination to engage me on any issue I take exception to in the crap you spew.

That’s cowardice.

Of course you have no interest in reading anything I have to say. It all flies in the face of your fear driven beliefs.

The truth is, you are are archaic and obsolete. You no longer matter. The world is changing without you. You are being left behind.

Honestly, it makes me sad.”

Moving right along.

Sheezus this Burris thing is odd.

In my mind the Democrats look like pussies. They knew who they were dealing with. Blagojevich. This guy is an arm’s dealer fucking peacock who’s got ice in his veins and a hairstyle that leeches intelligent thought to sustain itself. Have you looked at his eyes? Like binoculars in reverse, you can see what’s behind him only way smaller.

Shave the little bastard’s head and he’ll drop. Kinda like Sampson.

Still, the fucking Democrats couldn’t man up enough to smite this boy down in time to prevent him from swinging his own sword with precision.

He appointed a Jr. Senator for his state as he was not only privileged but required to do. What did they think this guy was gonna do?

Today they turned Roland Burris away. Shameful. I’ll be the first to admit this guy Burris is a little more than a little loose, but this was embarrassing nonsense. The newly sworn in Senate fucked this up. They should never have allowed it to get this far. Yes, Burris is a joke, but he’s an accomplished joke. The new Democratic leadership cheesed this one. Stepped on their dicks. Good job Mr. and Mrs. Reid-Pelosi.

The other side should be ashamed as well. You dickheads tried to turn this into some sort of racial imperative. I count on these assholes to do the wrong thing and they just keep doing it. Race. Sometimes it’s like mammals against reptiles. The big lizards are gone and the rest are small and stupid. Fuck you guys. How stupid is that? How fucking irresponsible? It makes me furious.

The body politic still disappoints, misleads and makes a hot mess of things. Yet it’s not even close to a push. Let’s just see what we can do. Really. Stay in the game.

Drinks for my friends.

What’s the rumpus?

So yeah, the Xmas vacation.  Pretty cool actually.  I brought the best bottles from my dwindling stash. Leonetti and Pejut.  Pedestrian tongues drank Two Buck Chuck or beer and they were happy.  I’m only selfish with my grapes to the extent of anyone’s ability to appreciate them.  Know and understand what you’re drinking and you can have all you want. I will only share my wine with them gullets that can appreciate it. I’m a dick like that.

Some still call me The Cock.  

I was asked to say grace at Christmas. Heh. I took it upon myself to thank the powers of the universe for family, friends and health, as well as the wisdom of the American people in their overwhelming support for Barack Obama as President Elect of The United States of America.  The caveat intended for my beloved uncle Tyke, an unapologetic Republican. 

At least they laughed. I’m sure they saw it coming.    

Dinner was excellent.  Culinary rockstardom visited upon us by my sister bearing an extraordinary mixed green salad with pomegranate seeds and an absurd pumpkin soup.  Dear cousin Marlow played an excellent solo with her fresh green beans, almonds and ham melody.  Otherwise, an excellent medley of turkey, mashed a’ tatas, gravy and various appetizers. Oh, and cauliflower in cheese sauce.

It was all I could do to not rub it in my hair.

Then there was the bloody roast beast with horseradish. Had to look away.

Among the pies were chocolate, pumpkin and a perfect pear and cranberry with crust to die for from my mother. She tells me she nails grandma’s crust better than any of her sisters. I don’t doubt it. I wonder if they know that.

Extraordinary people looking a little Norman Rockwell, yet moving at the speed of real life. Sharp, funny, pointed, loving and respectful. No matter where the day took me, no matter the people I was with, there was not just a glue of shared experience, but the bond of loyalty and acceptance. Dialog, debate and discussion almost all optimistic. Hopeful.

The first white Christmas in Northern Nevada in twenty years.  

Christmas eve, a study in silliness and inebriation.  I always have a party, but my father’s illness and the weather over the Sierras have conspired against it for the last two years.  I ended it at the house of my cousin’s Marlow and Derrick on the eve.  No worries.  I found myself in bed with cousin Derrick as well as Uncle Tyke.    

Decidedly outta hand.  Gorgeous.  Good to love and be loved. To be tolerated even. 

Visited the Madame. She was classy gorgeous.  

My sister the city planner, has changed the entire face of downtown Carson City in a handful of months and she’s managed to put an ice rink right on top of the town anthole. The rink thrives.

I’m here to talk about Uncle Tyke. Roland Emil. Sometimes I worry his eyes may be too far apart but he’s a crafty bastard and I can’t help but adore him. An excellent man despite being a shameless Republican. Uncle Tyke’s wife is aunt Bobby and she’s the shit as well. A devout Catholic who still manages to be completely honest and very funny. I adore them.

She was my smoking buddy but she quit. Replaced by daughter Marlow.

So, they begat Marlow and she chose Derrick. They all four rock. Marlow has gorgeous completely, an enormous heart, sweetness and honesty. Her husband Derrick slays me. I think he gave me the benefit of the doubt because of my father. I’ll take that. The respect he has for my Old Man, they for my people, makes my heart swell. I try to do my best towards them all.

This is a subject. These folks are real.

Derrick says, Hey you fat bastard, first time he lays eyes on me. Inside is the beautiful house he built with my father, his father and father-in-law-uncle Tyke. Inside, my little shit cousin Marlow puts out a delicious Christmas Eve spread. The salt in my ocean. No shit.

I ate with my hands. That just occurred to me. Hope I wasn’t offensive. Everyone else was doing paper plates. I’m sure I was loud and drunk but I’m just as sure I wasn’t the only one.

My feet stink like broccoli. Like babyshit. Lysol.

He drives a race car and can build just about anything this side of a nuclear reactor. Derrick. They tell me he’s pretty good. I don’t doubt it. He’s both fearless and egoless. I couldn’t take him down without a bat or a shovel. If I didn’t like him so much, I’d crack him with either.

My brother in law Todd worked up some powerful anticipation over three dollar roast beef sandwiches and dollar beers at The Carson Station. He did do the most remarkble thing by arranging to have Don Carlson meet us for drinks and then he and my sister held him there while I enjoyed pork chops with my folks. The overwhelming priviledge. Awesome. Marvelous. Thank you both.

My sister, who can best be described as a house afire, has taken it upon herself to broker my birthday present in the form of the brainspank logo on cousin Derrick’s race car. I understand the near matter vs. anti matter dynamic here. But to have my logo on a my cousin’s fucking race car. My sister, I still call her Pissy, is a genius.

Trust me when I tell you that she’s changing downtown Carson City at a rate that is making the old guys look really bad. She’s really starting to floor me. I’ll have to get published or this sibling rivalry thing might be over. I’ve been coasting on a gold record for a decade. It went triple platinum but that horse is dead.

She’s wicked, my sister. It’s not that she’s exceptional. It really is that she’s almost always exceptional. Goddamn Tam. Enough is enough. I’m here to warn you that your brother is comfortable as second superhero in charge. I’m reminding you that you may never enjoy the respite of second most accomplished sibling ever again.

I may choose to rest on my laurels.

You, as most accomplished sibling, have the burden of higher expectations. More Superhero stuff. I intend to get by with a few flourishes and self sufficiency.

I cannot believe the amount of food in my parent’s refrigerator and pantry. One can choose between a handful of different kinds of cereal, soup, crackers, chips, nuts, vegetables, fruit, sauce, spices, grains, pastas, vinegars, oils, syrups, mixes, dressings………….

The pantry is a huge closet with a divided glass door. Somehow it’s light is the most comforting in the house.

Three appliances. My guess is the one in the garage is long term parking.

I checked out Tam’s larder. Very impressive as well.

I spent more than a few evening’s end with the Tripod named Billy Jean. A sweet black Lab who lost a front leg while training with my house afire sister for a marathon. She assured me she would stay happy and spread it as best she could to all involved. She included a special promise for my Mom and Dad.

I made her swear.

I get home to discover my handsome refrigerator ceases and desists. The upside of being broke is that there wasn’t a damn thing in the freezer or the fridge. The downside will be a repair bill. It’s rough all over.

I hear that despite all logic, the universe continues to expand.

Drinks for my friends.

of all I know.

Spent the afternoon drinking with my best friend. A fine Saturday. I don’t know where my girlfriend is. Toto’s Hydra is an amazing record but the bottom sucks. I hear the mastering engineer on the new Metallica asked not to be credited.

The guy he hired to replace me, a man we all thought was a ringer, ended up nearly burying the business. A liar and a thief. Watch for me in dark alleys you prick. Terry.

You really can’t trust anybody. Well, I trust my Mother and Father, Sister, My Friend and my Girlfriend. Certain other people I’ve known for decades. Cats.

“you can’t trust anyone, trust me I have” -Agnes Gooch

All women have what I think of as a pooch. Unless they’re bodybuilders or prepubescent gymnasts. It’s the lower abdomen. Below the button. I spent time with a gorgeous woman who named her pooch “Gracie”. I adored her for that, among other things.

He’s a whackjob, my old boss and best goddamn friend. Within the last week or so he’s had to deal with his ex-wife crashing into the front of his house and turning other women away as a result. Someday he’ll let me write his book.

Crazy as a shithouse rat and one of the finest people I know. Showed me his guns, been working out with El Muerte. Ha!

So anyway, it’s been cold here in LA. It’s always weird when the sun is that low and still fat in the sky. Making heat in winter.

Not long ago I sought to impugn the character of my ex fiance’s new man by labeling him a giant vagina. I apologize for that. I’ve never met him. I imagine he’s a man of character and integrity because my ex is whip smart and has remarkable amounts of honesty and integrity. She has high standards.

Sorry about that.

I’ve been thinking a lot about canned peas lately. Nothing better than butter, salt, a little pepper, peas and the taste of the can. They should set it up so you can nuke it just like that. The way soup is these days. Peas or beans in a nukable container. Hot Pineapple anyone?

What else did I want to say.

The cats are golden. They make me happy because they can. Otherwise they’re horrible beasts that crap and pee everywhere. I put up with them because they are soft, furry and hysterically funny.

Here’s the the thing. They wear hats. Sombreros, porkpies and stupid red cowboy hats. Everyday I leave the house, only to return to a fashion show. It confuses me so I can’t really talk about it. Put yourself in my shoes. Walk in the door. Spotlight on a disco ball. The dignity of your felines compromised by the cheap and tawdry costumes.

A nightmare of pageantry.

It really is a bit much.

Nobody knows the trouble………….

Drinks for my friends.

I suspect we’d all be a lot happier if they could.

Oh, I don’t know. Merry Xmas. Yeah, Xmas.

I hate it when people don’t understand me. It’s worse when they think they understand me. Christmas. Man, whatever. My ass is broke and even the idea of it is daunting and depressing.

I’m anxious for family and friends. I just talked to my Mom. I needed for her to remind me what Cristmas is about for us, for our family. I needed to hear her say it. It worked. It helped. I’ll book a flight tomorrow.

Why do I still dream of going over a cliff in a motorhome? Giant waves and sinking ships? We debate until the end. Conflict is thick and before you know it, all is lost. Family and friends and me over a thousand foot drop. The bottom rushes at me. I lay in bed an extra half hour for that shit movie. Perverse nightmare lunacy. Why?

I’m a mess. This is a mess. I’m flirting with the wind and the very edge. Closest I’ve ever been. The gusts dictate my balance. We all fall down. That’s why. That’s the rumpus.

Broke for Christmas. Fucking awful. I have a reputation for generosity. I will bring wine and my etchings. That will be enough. Mom said so.

I just want to see and touch them all. My family, my friends.

My definition of crazy: Not Boring.

My definition of insanity: Sometimes blue is purple…………look at that truck.

Celery and grapefruit. Red cherries on green slices of melon.

Dive in headfirst and get water all up in your face. Like snorting horseradish.

Then there’s the ghosts. They move everywhere and beneath everything. They are on your side and then not. No way to schmooze them. They don’t care at all.

Drinks for my friends.

I’ve seen a spring.
I have.

We used to hike through the simmering sand and sagebrush to the closest mountain. Not far really, inside of a few miles. Other side of the airstrip. Hot and bright. Snakes in mind. Not much for a northern Nevada mountain. Maybe a thousand feet. Maybe.

Enough to pucker my starfish at ten years old.

The west face was closest, that was the side we climbed. A rockslide almost all the way up. Mostly volcanic I think. Pretty treacherous. The top was high enough to be cold with wind enough to make your jeans flap. It furnished an amazing view. Enough to put a choke in your neck when thinking about the same way down.

Scared the crap out of me.

The base of the mountain ended in a shallow canyon between it and a much smaller hill. Just behind the mouth of the canyon was a spring.

I clocked it’s greenery on the way up and wondered.

Very happy to be there after the way down.

Water pushing desert sand along with itself from a dark, half dollar sized hole at the bottom of a small pristine pool. This pool feeding a larger one under trees with cattails, reeds and grass growing lush. There were rabbits and birds and snakes.

Yellows, greens and blues with much sun and sky.

I had an epiphany that day. Frogs. The climb was the scariest thing I’d ever done. There was a gust of relief. Synapses lit up and dancing as I grasped the little oasis in a single swipe.

What I suddenly understood floored me.

We spent a little time. Maybe forty five minutes. Grateful to be there. I soaked it up. Moss, bees and dragonflies. Sunflowers and bubbling.

Was I a little late? I don’t know. Life’s complexity and requisite for balance began to reveal itself. An improbable ecosystem in an unlikely enviroment. Yet it thrived and sang. It vibrated and I knew why. I could see how and why it worked. It made sense to me. Scared me a little.

Pow.

I emptied a quart of sand from each shoe that day. That night I stared at the sky. I never stopped dreaming about that place one way or another. It allows me to contemplate the universe.

It frightens me now. It informs my nightmares. I’m sure it’s a scarier place today. Polluted.

The first time I remember my gaze landing on the big picture. The powerful gift of cognizance despite the self.

See what I’m saying?

Drinks for my friends.

“We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee;
We don’t take our trips on LSD
We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street;
We like livin’ right, and bein’ free.” -Merle Motherfuckin Haggard

I don’t know.

I was looking for more.

No wild swings, no haymakers. Certainly no knockouts.

Our Man was more dignified and in control. The composure of restraint served him well once again. Obama prevailed, but not so clearly or decisively, as last time. A net loss for Doubtfire, the salient reason, he’s behind in the polls and sliding. The onus was clearly on McCain to impress us. Didn’t happen.

The Bootlicker did a lot of flatlining.

I expected and even predicted that Our Man would throw more power punches tonight. I didn’t know then what I know now. He didn’t need to. It’s changed since their last meeting. He is winning.

I don’t mean to impart that I found it less than interesting. It was compelling.

Just talked to my Mother and her sentiment is more or less congruent with mine. She yelled at me for interrupting the post game analysis.

Cindy Stepford McCain said today that Obama has “waged the dirtiest campaign in American history,”. Fascinating. An insane thing to say in light of what the entire McCain family was subjected to at the hands of the unholy trinity of Bush, Rove and Cheney in two thousand. Amusing, in light of Palin’s recent remarks insinuating Our Man is some kind of terrorist.

That statement, by the actual Mrs. Doubtfire, smacks of raw and unmitigated desperation.

Also telling is the fact that McCain walked away when it was over and Our Man and Michelle stayed to engage.

Fresh diaper?

We are in good shape.

I can tell because they’re stepping on their own vagina lips to embarrass themselves. Desperation always smells worse than ass. More like many asses. Like a sewer. It’s why desperation rarely attracts much more than pity.

I need to address something else here. Forgive me, it’s not the first time. The question of why, if Obama is so clearly on the right side of America’s concerns and issues, why isn’t he ahead by twenty points? Economy in the toilet, unpopular war and McCain and his party are entirely culpable. It’s been an underlying theme since the primaries.

Why was it such a barfight for this man to close the deal and knock Hillary the fuck out?

Let’s just forego the requisite polite and feigned naivete here. It’s because he’s black and racism is alive and well here in the greatest country on earth. Were he a white man, it would be over but for the shouting.

The good news is, he appears to have left that brand of blasphemy behind. Not entirely, but you see it.

Indeed, America sees not a black man, certainly not a terrorist or a muslim. America sees a man. A strong, principled, intelligent, capable American man with the courage of his convictions. Congratulations my fellow citizens. The majority of us have seen fit to judge a man based on the content of his character rather than the color of his skin. We have begun to realize a dream, the shape and size of which could propel all human beings further into this century with prosperity and equality unlike we’ve ever seen.

It doesn’t suck that the competition is the Keystone Fucking Cops.

Forgive my enthusiasm. It’s just that the unthinkable is damn near at hand. A shift of this archaic and obsolete paradigm. It looks like we may have had enough. Pretty goddamn exciting if you ask me.

Too bad they had to screw the pooch this violently to even risk losing power. Too bad about the mess Our Man is walking into. Don’t forget, getting elected President is like getting a record deal; not the end all but the very beginning. We hope.

Drinks for my friends.

Have you told anyone you’d marry them?
I have fond memories of the Easy Bake Oven.

Would you rather live in Alaska, or Texas?
Prison.

Did you mean it when you said “i love you” last?
What I meant was that I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.

Your most recent ex REALLY needed you at 3am and you had a way to his/her house would you go?
As long as there was a Taco Bell on the way and I could get like four orders of Pintos N’ Cheese and a grip o’ hot sauce.

When was the last time you wanted to punch someone in the face?
Even if I like you, I fantisize about busting you in the mouth, I can’t help it.

Do you have a friend you can tell stuff to and your sure they wont tell?
Children of the 70’s will remember Bugles. A corn chip shaped like a funnel, well now their available with caramel. Sweet AND salty. A real game changer.

What is wrong with you right now?
I can’t stand anybody or anything. I like coleslaw but I’m picky.

Do you plan on kissing the last person you kissed again?
That would be my cat Beddy. She tells excellent jokes about latin homosexuals, so yes.

Do you crack your knuckles?
What I do is boil bowtie pasta in salty water with olive oil, strain it, sprinkle fresh Parmigiano Reggiano and then add the sauce. Maybe some pinenuts sauteed in butter. I pour some decent cab franc.

Would you go in public looking like you do right now?
I’m always at my best. Right now I’m dead sexy. I don’t need much support, I’m barely a B-cup.

Would you kiss someone to make your bf/gf mad?
Or to make her happy.

Can you handle the truth?
Handle it? I spew it. I covet it. I seek it. Bitch.

Did you like anyone last summer?
I loathed everyone I came across.

Do you believe exes can really ever be “just friends”?
I am the poster child. Seriously.

Ever kissed a blonde haired,blue eyed person?
Yep, she was hotter than Georgia asphalt. There were others but she was so round and ripe. Her name was Charlotte. I called her Charlotte the Harlot.

Do you think you can last in a relationship for 6 months?
Bob Dole.

What did you have for breakfast this morning?
A chicken salad melt on sourdough with cheddar and tomato.

Are you too shy to tell people when you’re developing feelings for them?
I either tell people the truth or what they need to hear, depending on the nature of my relationship with them. Often the truth and what they need to know are the same thing. Hardly ever mutually exclusive. I am however, a salesman.

Do you read horocopes?
What I do is sit on the toilet and blow my nose. Depending on the volume, I then fold it and use it for my first swipe. I’m a conservationist you know. Somewhere in there I may read my horoscope from the latest Hooker Paper. The Hooker Paper is free and right there on the sidewalk in front of the 7-11. America rocks.

Do you tell your mom everything?
Pretty much. She needs to know the truth about me to understand and advise me. She’s in her early seventies and only says “fuck” when she’s talking about Republicans.

Are you enemies with a former friend?
Nope. Former friends do understand they make me sad. The ones that make the saddest I probably won’t speak to again.

Have you ever done something dumb?
Bitches can’t stop staring at me.

Have you ever had the cops called on you?
Yep, by other cops. The Reno cops couldn’t catch us, so they called the Carson cops and they waited for us at the bottom of the hill.

Who was the last person you yelle?d at?
The clerk at the 7-11 until he pointed out the Funyuns.

Who was the last person you cried in front of?
Sarah Palin.

Have you told anybody you loved them today?
Joe Walsh. The chicken melt.

Think of the last person you held hands with, do they mean something to you?
Now I’m annoyed.

What color shirt were you wearing when you last kissed someone?
Dishwater blond. It was made of hair.

Do you remember your kindergarten teachers name?
Mrs. Jenny. First grade Shaw, second grade Springmeyer, third Bobay…….

Would you rather go to a party or go out of town?
A bash in Egypt.

If you could get back in touch with anyone,who would it be?
Jimhead, Daisy, Charlotte?

When was the last time you talked to the last person you kissed?
What possible relevance can this question……….

Whats on your room floor?
My room floor? The floor of my room.

What did you wake up to this morning?
The need to eliminate waste.

Describe your current shirt
Nope. Wait.
It’s more like a blouse. Mariachi kinda. Red. The ruffles look like roses. You should see my pants. My shoes. My hat.

Who were the last people you ate with?
Who eats with people?

When was the last time you felt guilt about something?
Five, maybe ten minutes ago.

When you have kids would you want a boy or a girl first?
Kittens. A basket of them.

What are you doing right now?
Researching Kevin Bacon. Bowling with frozen turkeys. Designing tents.

Are you alone?
We are always alone.

Are you still besties with the same people you were besties with a year ago?
Besties? What am I, twelve?

Have you ever had your heart broken?
I’m going to rub my dick in mustard.

Have you ever broken someone’s heart?
I’m letting my hair grow.

Talk to any of your exes?
Ever count the number of peas pictured on a can of corn?

If you could go back in time and change things,would you?
I would sterilize mouth breathing Republicans in the fifties and sixties.

Do you believe everyone deserves a second chance?
Nope.

Do you want to get married?
Nope.

Drinks for my friends.

Much respect as I remain entertained by the Rajun Cajun, but he needs to take his whiskey home.

“You haven’t heard about Iraq or John McCain or George W. Bush — I haven’t heard any of this. We are a country that is in a borderline recession, we are an 80 percent wrong-track country. Health care, energy — I haven’t heard anything about gas prices,” Carville also says. “Maybe we are going to look better Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. But right now, we’re playing hide the message.” -James Carville CNN.com

See, Jimmy, you’re right.

But see Jimmy, there’s another agenda as well. Dare I sound like an overly sensitive nancy boy when I point this out, but we’re going for a little unity here too.

See Jimmy, that’s on the agenda because you Clinton people have just refused to be remembered as dignified. Your class and generosity is suspect. Y’all continue to pick and whine. We no longer want to listen to your shit. We’d like to move on. We’d still like you to come with us, but it’s time to go.

See Jimmy, there’s a significant number of you who say at least, that they’ll be voting for McCain because Hillary didn’t get was owed to her and Bill. What was owed to her and Bill.

Jimmy, this is a problem and these people are idiots.

See what I’m saying Jimmy?

You musta missed Michelle Obama’s speech. My cable is out but my mother called to tell me how wonderful it was.

I watched it in pieces on the internet. I imagine you pontificated before that so I’m giving you a partial pass.

I actually teared up a little. These two people are special. They reach out and touch with astounding grace and sincerity. Her speech tonight was beyond compelling.

She was.

An elegant and passionate orator, an honest and humble communicator, a profound force of humility and honesty. Beautiful and intelligent and courageous.

She was.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I was moved.

She is.

Resplendent.

Jimmy, my advice to you is to shut up, jump on the back and let your feet dangle over the edge while you watch the road pass backwards between them.

Drinks for my friends.

Adrenaline and panic get him off me.

She’s a pile in the corner.

Small and bent. Folded.

This is not happening.

I shake my head hard.

Everything comes up the same.

In dreams you can’t ever scream or run or fight back.

Not today. I’m fucking nuclear.

Thermo.

Some ridiculous laugh volcanos from my neck. I have no fear.

None.

I fly off my back. I wail, kick and rage. I beat, muscle, force the fight, with fists, knees and elbows, into the bathroom. Lights on because he’s been playing with the fucking toilet paper.

The wet sound of flesh beating flesh. Sickening. Smacks and gasps.

A cloying steam of violence. Like fresh paint.

I swing and swing and scream and swing.

Against the wall. His neck a bundle of cables in my left hand. My right fist an anvil. I beat his face with it again and again. I swing my sledge, his mouth sprays fresh blood across the wall and the medicine cabinet. Again and again.

A tooth dances and rattles across the faux marble vanity.

His blood is humid. It thickens the air. He stinks like wild mammal.

Jacked up incisors lacerate my knuckles but I can’t stop swinging at them. I fucking loathe this fucking thing. I’m going to kill him with my hands. I’m bashing them in.

I will kill him.

I pound and pound.

He turns his hamburger face back after every blow to mock me.

On his knees by my toilet. More blood than I’ve ever seen from a man not dead.

He takes the beating and keeps smiling. He keeps smiling. He laughs like some mildly amused retard. Picture a Down syndrome kid with a Rubik’s cube.

My shoulder burns. I start to kick him.

The eyes spill too, joining the river beneath his nose and mouth.

He smiles as he pushes blood through his remaining teeth with his tongue. Wringing a sponge. It runs from his chin to his shirt, down over his crotch to splatter on the tile.

He has yet to fight back at all. I go cold.

His eyes find mine. Blue pupils suspended in blood. He’s locked, frozen. Staring straight through me.

He laughs like emphysema. A death rattle with mucus and mirth. I’m caving his head into raw meat while he sings a soliloquy minus any fear at all.

His eyes stay empty.

A demon version of the Rope-a-dope. I could beat his head off his neck and he would infect me with viruses that madden and fibers will squirm from sores on my arms and torso like thin white worms. No doubt the pain will be excruciating.

Biding his time while I cave his head in. Not bothered in the least. A lazy chuckle.

I picture the knife and spin to find it.

He’s not long for this mortal coil either. We’re tied. My end is his. His will be mine. I’m about to end it. He doesn’t know this. Somehow I do.

Cold War Policy. Mutually assured destruction. Quid pro quo.

He’s on me in a heartbeat. Before I feel it, he’s bitten a chunk from the back of my neck. It burns. Sickening pain. My stomach rolls hard. I feel air on the crater he’s made in my back. Maybe the weirdest physical sensation I’ve ever had. My own blood starts to flow down my body front and back.

He sucks at the the wad in his mouth and spits it on the floor. It lands with a slowmotion smack a foot in front of me.

I can’t believe it’s my flesh when I see the size of it.

He pounds the back of my head so hard, I go blind after every blow. He’s going to kill me.

Outmatched. I wanted to beat him and die last.

No chance here. High noon bitches. The difference between high school and the NBA. I’m about to die.

I throw my last elbow and manage to knock him off my back. Blind panic. I’m thinking the green dagger. I swim on my belly to my suitcase. Knees and elbows bang tile behind me.

It’s open.

I can’t believe the amount of blood on my hands.

He chuckles low through mucus and viscera. My hand finds the box. Somehow I have it by the hilt.

My calf in the grip of a reptile. I roll with the twist but my ankle snaps like balsa. On my back with the knife in my left hand.

My leg shoots fire. I can’t get up.

He hovers, bleeding on me. To own what I’ve done to his face…… His jaw dangles, my flesh hangs from it. How he took that chunk……..

Left eye dark, impossibly dislocated cheekbone from a countenance shredded and bloody. I flash on any gore I’ve ever seen. Fish guts on a plank to a deer without skin hanging from a rafter outside my bedroom.

All face angles are wrong. What I see competes with everything I know. What I’ve done to his face supplies me confusion and madness.

This amount of violence I’ve committed gives me pause.

It ends up being just enough.

To distract me.

He’s on me swinging so hard and fast I can’t see. He takes the knife from my hand. He plunges into me over and over.

I can hear it.

The sensation and abrupt pinch, blooming into a chrysanthemum of dizzying pain while still being stabbed and I can no longer breath.

There is no God. Yet I pay for my sins.

A dozen or so wounds and the blade shatters. The green inside burning me so that grey smoke clouds agains the ceiling.

A stink of hot grease and flesh.

I was very young, the backseat of a Mercury Cyclone with my family, headed to Reno. A Camaro with a paint job of red and grey primer, rocked past us on the the four lane blacktop. Faster than I could process, the Camaro crossed the double yellow and cars began to fly as high as the power lines along the left side of the highway.

My mother inhaled in confusion and horror.

My father didn’t hesitate. Tires smoked to a stop in the gravel and he’s running across the blacktop to stuff his shirt in the back of some dead man’s head. Somehow we had blankets and he was back in a hurry for those. My mother began a relay of helping her husband to help the smashed bodies and checking on us, telling us not to look.

Eighteen or nineteen dead or at least that many vehicles involved. It was the most horrifying thing I’d ever seen. People in impossible positions all over the road. Bodies opened with that much violence and velocity, spill awful amounts of red. Every glimpse out the backseat window, the gore made me panic a little.

A man wearing a suit visited our house a few months later on a Sunday. He had a handful of money in an envelope for my father. He was there because he believed my father, a stranger, had saved his life. Dad didn’t hesitate, he thanked him and pointed out that he, the stranger, just might be in the same situation some day.

In his mind, he’d done the right thing and it was long since finished. He was not happy to see this man despite the man’s gratitude. He had done the best he could. He wasn’t interested in revisiting it.

I lose for failing to do the right thing. For choosing the wrong thing, one way or another, over and over and over again.

My sins. My recklessness. My fault. My mistakes. I pay.

I’m a bird hitting a window.

I flop and blood runs from my mouth. I’m helpless. I spasm and convulse.

My organs fail one by one.

Breathing stops. I’m bleeding out.

Panic surges like vomit.

My eyes are fixed. I can no longer blink. They begin to dry, my view clouds.

I am dying.

I often dream of catastrophe. Airliners plunging from the sky and exploding. Giant waves destroying civilization. Mushroom clouds and troops backlit by the sunrise of a detonation running along some ridge.

Seconds from death, I piss and shit myself.

I fucking hate that I’ve shit myself again.

My thoughts cease and I am dead.

Various sources.

America closes in on one million foreclosures.

Indymac is the third largest carp in our country’s history to reveal it’s pale belly in the polluted waters of American finance.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in trouble and needing a federal bailout they will get. Two companies responsible for over half the mortgage debt in this country. Five trillion dollars.

Lists of vulnerable banks contain as many a hundred and fifty. Google the Texas ratio. At what point does the FDIC become FEMA?

Two million refugees from Darfur and and four hundred thousand slaughtered. Twenty first century genocide. A half a billion in aid a year from the US as opposed to to ten billion a month we spend in Iraq. Bin Laden used to live there so we favor their government with a blind eye because they occasionally share what kind of underwear he wears, his favorite Starburst flavor and pictures of his enormous horse package.

Over four thousand dead and thirty thousand horrifically wounded Americans by Iraq. Some estimates put Iraqi dead at over a million with some four million refugees. Meanwhile, we’ve blown the entire place apart.

National debt approaches ten trillion dollars. We had an actual surplus eight years ago.

A trade deficit approaching four hundred billion a year.

Nearly fifty million uninsured.

The Earth’s filthy nectar, which literally fuels everything we do, is imported by more than seventy percent. The price of that dirty ambrosia has risen nearly four hundred percent in the last seven years.

In America, the rich continue to get richer and the poor continue to plunge.

There’s a seventy five percent chance the icecap at at the earth’s north pole will be gone within the next three years.

Twelve percent of the electorate still believes Our Man Obama is a Muslim. Over seventy percent who voted for Dumbya in ’04 still believed Saddam Hussein was responsible for the events of 9/11.

“Most people are dumber than dirt.” -My Father

“The best country in the history of the world, and we’re going to fuck it up.” – My Mother

The stock market has been on a well oiled slide for a while now. One of it’s nipples went turgid last week because oil dropped three days in a row. First time in seventeen years. It’s because speculators knew we were gonna talk to Iran. They hoped we’d make nice. It’s a wash so far. We’ll see.

I encourage the stupid people to hold their breath.

I’m thinking it’s time to stock up. Get myself a gun.

I just jacked the sound on the local news. A story on corn ethanol. I’m not kidding when I tell you that a cutaway shot showed cars travelling backwards. If we go nuclear and corn ethanol, I think we should store all the nuke waste at corn ethanol stations.

Stupid fucks.

Forgive my pessimism. If you look at the numbers………..

My point is this. The Evil Empire is not looking at the same numbers we are. If they were, they’d pay attention and do something, like come up with better explanations for not giving a mad fuck.

Drinks for my friends.