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William Lobb

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It’s been the same dream since my first dream.

It’s been the same dream since my first dream. A prairie somewhere, level as glass for miles in any direction. In an ocean of switchgrass sits a junkyard and a teepee and a ‘51 Shoebox flathead Ford.

It’s not a shiny black Ford, with chrome glistening in some summer’s sun. The body is rust-pitted and the windows are broken and the guts of the interior have been ripped out. The flatty V8 robbed of easily assessable parts. A testament to the violence of age and the passage of years.

My father was certifiable about certian things, many things. He bought a lawn mower from Sears one time. His first gasoline powered mower. One of those pre-historic rotary mowers. The thing would start but not run. The better part of the summer of 1964 he was at war with Sears. They wanted to send him a new mower, my dad wanted his mower fixed.

One day, I guess I was seven, I decided to fix it myself. I wasn’t far into it when he came home. I doubt I had more than a few screws removed from the engine cover. My mom expected he’d be mad I was messing with his tools. His reaction was, looking at her and pointing at me and the mower, “He’s right, it’s time we fix this damn thing.”

We found it was a bad head gasket, well he did. I just watched and lost parts for him. That day I learned the beauty of the art of figuring stuff out and fixing things.

I think about that day and some imagined obligation I now feel to find and fix a lost and forsaken ‘51 flatty and make it whole and take it with me to some imaginary prairie somewhere and let some wind cool us and the teepee keep us dry and warm.

I’ve never been much on heaven and hell, but I hope where my damaged soul ends up it involves old junkers and greaser’s ghosts and hammers and wrenches, and the sound of swearing over bloody knuckles lilting over some grassland savanna.

Fridays Adventure in IT

My reputation for grumpiness is something I want written into my elegy. I’m sure I can count on my daughter for that.

Friday was a perfect example of (literally) 100 emails that could have been one text message. The woman from the vendor, who was very nice and I’m sure very good at her job, kept ‘reaching out’ to me. Reaching out makes me nuts, but that’s another rant. She was even ‘reaching out’ with those annoying emails that say: DO NOT REPLY ABOVE THIS LINE! (I always reply about the line, never was good at coloring inside the lines, either…) At one point I had to send an email asking what email was everyone referencing, I was lost in the emails and a hopeless sea of replies and replies to replies.

Finally the big day came, yesterday. I get a text from the client there is a Zoom meeting invite sent to my email and calendar. So, I lose my shit. My client, rightly, admonished me to “be nice!” I promise I will. For the fifth time in so many days I reiterate this can all be fixed in five minutes if I can talk to someone who understands my question…

We get on the call and manage to get all parties involved connect via zoom. Typical zoom, “I have no video!” “Can you hear me!” “There you are!” Where’d you go?” There they are!” The poor woman from the vendor is telling me and the tech, “We don’t see your video!” I reply, “You don’t need my video, I need to talk to this guy! I finally realize this is a zoom call because this guy I need to speak to is in India and zoom was the only way to get us together. Dude is fucking brillient. We are sharing DNS war stories and the vendor people are asking if we can share our screens. We both at the same time say we are on our phones and we don’t have screens to share. I think the vendor people are stunned! How can this be? No screens to share?!?

Finally I ask my big question, my buddy in India answers it. He check the DNS update on his end (from 10,000 miles away). We both marvel at how today records update in seconds, even faster the the TTL record mandates, we share some more eight, ten, twelve hour DNS record update war stories from ‘back in the day…’ He passes a comment about wave theory and I tell him I’m just starting to understand that.
I ask, “We good?” He says, “Yes!” I report back to the vendor—and I swear to Allah at this moment yet another member of her ‘team’ was joining zoom… as I say, “We’re all set!”

She says, “Ok, now we have to test it!”

Me, and my friend halfway around the world both say, “No need to test, it works…”

She doesn’t sound too sure.

They test, it worked.

I thanked the guy in India for his help and restoring my faith. I told him part of me believes this whole thing that so many of us have worked on and worked at for thirty or forty years, will one day soon crumble into a sea of dumbassery. He laughed.

I texted my client and said I lied. It took twelve minutes, not five.

August

Screaming August summer night bugs, take me back to the swamp as a boy. All I need is muddy knees and a dozen mosquito bites and I’d be home again.

There was a world where a boy could be entertained and satisfied listening to the racquet of bush crickets and looking for constellations. Before air-conditioning, and cable TV.

How often, now, in my busyness I forget to step outside and listen to the night and wait for the stars.

A time when the world was so real you could reach out and touch it.

American Pride

Increasing violence against Jews, and Asians, and People of Color.

Forty-three percent of American kids don’t really know if they’ll eat this week. Sixty percent—SIXTY—of Americans say they can’t afford health insurance.

When I look at Flint Michigan all I can think is genocide. A lot of this looks like something I thought was long past.

One of the two major political parties that run this nation actively, daily, tell us that we didn’t see what we did see. Gun sales seem more important than human life. Our right to bear arms trumps our right to go to a movie without getting our brains blown out. We stopped talking about the opiate plague as Covid killed a half million people.

They told me we beat the Nazi’s and the Soviets. We are Americans. We always beat the bad guys. We are on the side of God and mom and apple pie, right?

On the Fourth of July, when the anthem plays and the Stars and Stripes are billowing in the wind, remind me again, why am I so proud?

We’ve got some work to do before my chest swells with American pride again.

Ronny Gray

I met Ronny Gray in 1972. The young boy spoke of things I’d never heard of, and could not imagine. The cotton gin, and the great migration north of his family coming out of Mississippi. He spoke of his grandma who lived and worked the cotton plantation all her life, a daughter born into a time when slavery was a recent memory and an all too near horror. She was of the Jim Crow south. Memories of her father and mother, Ronny’s great-grandparents, defined her life and darkened her waking and sleeping moments. Her family were sharecroppers, a step up from being the property of the slavers, and a step into a life of extreme poverty, simply another form of servitude.

Ronny spoke of how his grandma never adapted to the poverty of Newburgh, New York’s, Ann Street, after the moving north, preferring and missing the poverty of Abbeville, Mississippi.

Ronnie was a boy, fourteen year old, but old beyond those years. We were friends, but we never talked much about race until that morning in May 1972, when we were discussing the shooting of George Wallace in history class.

The teacher was Mr. Agocha, a very proper and mild mannered, but stern, man from Nigeria. He liked to bring up subjects outside the curriculum and openly discuss them. It was interesting and fascinating to discuss American History with a man from his background. He stayed with the class plan, but he always encouraged us to look a little deeper into what we were being sold, on any subject. I owe a lot of my scepticism to Mr. Agocha.

Middletown, New York, was a diverse working class town. Italian kids, and Celtic kids and African kids and Hispanic kids, and Middle-Eastern kids and Asian kids, and some Eastern European and Russian kids, and kids of different religions were thrown into one big pot. We we given a choice by the politics and placement of the universe at that time, we could kill each other, or figure out how to get along. There were a lot of fights, I was involved in my share. Fighting seemed to be as much as part of boyhood as mud and dogs and hating school. Fighting wasn’t something to be liked or disliked, it was just a part of the process. In the end we, for the most part, figured out how to get along with each other.

As Mr. Agocha discussed the assassination attempt of Governor Wallace of Alabama, the previous day. I said, out loud, “Too bad he didn’t kill the motherfucker!”

Immediately, without even looking up, I was directed by Mr. Agocha, simply by looking down at the floor, pinching the bridge of his nose with his free hand, and pointing toward the door with his arm, extended through the gray sleeve of his fine suit jacket and his long, black index finger; off to the vice-principal’s office for me, once again.

Mr. Agocha had an authority about him I didn’t understand, I rarely respected any authority, but I somehow respected his. A big man, the top of his head didn’t clear the top of the doorway by much. We both worked hard to understand each other. I’d stay after school somedays—intentionally—and talk to him about Nigeria and America and the world. He called me Beeelee in a voice that sounded like the echo from a barrel.

Ronny Gray was waiting for me as I was leaving the vice-principals office. The Middletown Junior High School had a catch and release system, fairly pointless from my perspective. Once I learned the vice-principal could not, in fact, beat me to death for my crimes he lost a good amount of his authority and power.

Ronny came up to me and grabbed my arm. He said, “Billy, you’ve got a big mouth. It gets you in trouble all the time, but you slide. That’s the piece you’ll never understand, you slide, so it’s fun for you.”

He looked me in the eye, “You are more dangerous than the other white boys because you don’t know what you don’t know. You act like you know, because you can, because you know you won’t get beat up. If I run my mouth like you run your mouth, I’ll get my ass beat. It may not be here, at the school, but I’ll get my ass beat. Someday, someplace the beating will find me.”

“My grandma’s daddy was called a slave—do you have any idea what that means, how demeaning that word is—slave—fuck that, ain’t no slaves, only the enslaved! Nobody ever thinks about that word, they just say it. I don’t say it. I feel the word.”

“I’ve been to your grandma’s house. She is poor as dirt, your grandma got to flush her toilet with a pan of dirty dishwater because her well is no good. Your grandma and my grandma are both poor as dirt, but yet somehow people see your grandma’s dirt as better than my grandma’s dirt. Like your grandma came from better dirt. Dirt is dirt and poor is poor. Ain’t no white dirt and black dirt, there’s just poor dirt.”

We walked together to get our lunch bags, and sat that day away from the other boys, that day we sat alone.

We opened our bags, Jif peanut butter and bologna and mustard sandwiches. The poor kids ate from paper bags, those bags always had the same smell. Jif or bologna it always smelled the same.

The rich kids had the hot meals. Nine cents, was the cost of lunch and milk. that was the division between rich kids and the poor kids. We learned the cost of that divide. The middle class kids, they had Superman and Batman lunchboxes, and if they dropped one the thermos would break and milk would spill out all around and the kid with the Batman lunch box would cry and he’d get himself a nine cent hot lunch. Me and Ronny we just had our smelly bags.

Somedays we swap sandwiches, it felt like variety. To this day I eat exactly the same thing every day for lunch, I don’t have Ronnie or the boys to swap with anymore.

Eating our sandwiches a couple of pretty girls walked by. Ronnie says, “You can look at all the pretty girls, white, black and brown, no body going

to jump you on your way home. Some brothers and uncles and father not going to beat your ass for talking to the pretty girl. Me, I go talk to that pretty white girl, or go to her house, if she likes me or not, I get my ass beat. You show up at Sandra Feliciano’s house and her grandma gives you goddamn cookies and milk. I show up and her brothers come and beat my ass.”

The old fourteen year old boy looked at me, holding his sandwich with both hands and said “It’s about less, it’s always about less. I was learning as a young boy that I was less. My grandma was less than your grandma and my sandwich was less than your white-boy sandwich. I ain’t less, I refuse to be less. These are the lessons I learn in school. Somebody will beat me for it, but I will not be less than anybody. You and me we are the same, but you still don’t know, what you don’t see. Your problem is you don’t know what you don’t know.”

We finished our lunch, a bell rang…

I talk to a lot of white people who are ‘woke,’ I wonder if they had friends like Ronny Gray and Mr. Agoscha. I learned a long time ago I’ll never understand what it’s like to be black or Hispanic in America. At best we are looking in a window at another world, we can understand, we can have empathy, we can defend, but we can never fully understand, any more than my black and brown friends understand what it is to be a Celt. Maybe If we stopped trying to be ‘woke,’ and just listened to each other and learned from each other, we could fix this stupid mess. I’m not woke, fuck that, but I’m on your side.

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