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Shopping…

In the grocery store, wearing the mask Janet Baskerville made me, and being genuinely happy I have such a nice mask.

Worrying about what I’m touching, and then touching my face because it itched. Thinking about going in the men’s room and washing my hands and face, but what the fuck lurks in there waiting to kill me, but I really need to piss, but I’ll find a tree on the way home, outside, and away from people where it’s safe, right?

That Fauchi is a good guy, right? I saw him on a magazine in the check-out line. He can be trusted, right? Except I read some dirty shit he pulled during the early days of the AIDS virus, so maybe he’s no better than the rest…

Embracing the word “contactless” now, because that’s a good thing, right? Go home and sit in my cocoon and be safe, right? I’ll be contactless.

Seeing the last four-pack of toilet paper and getting excited.

Looking really hard for Lysol.

Trying to understand that there is a difference between baking soda and baking powder and realizing I’m sixty-three years old and don’t know what either is used for, but I know one takes odors out of stuff.

Finding eggs and feeling like I should tell someone, or do I keep it a secret?

I want to get an anti-body test, but I heard there are 20-30 different companies making these tests and I could whip something up in my shed, using motor oil and gasoline that would probably be as accurate.

False-positive is a thing I worry about now.

Wondering if I’ll ever see my daughter again, as her part of Florida burns.

And that Foghorn Leghorn acting motherfucker in the White House directing this shit show, as he gets his Justice Department to let self-confessed criminals go free, gets away with what he want to because we are all to busy washing our hands, and looking for alcohol swabs.

I realize what a dystopian brain-fuck this shit-show really has become, and wondering if that is by design.

There is good news… you have to look for it…

I took some FB flak for posting about the number of survivors from this virus. This is my response to any who disagree:

We could all go jump off bridges and stuff now, I suppose… the news is dark, and horrible, and worse, seemingly, every moment. Please forgive me for trying to share some light.

This is not false hope. People are recovering. People are dying, the deaths, some are horrific, it’s only going to get worse long before it gets better, but still, it’s important, at least to me, to know a large number of people are surviving.

I was talking to a guy the other day. He and his wife have it. They are running low grade fevers and have the cough. He was out in his back yard digging a hole. Before anyone wants to send sanitation squads to eradicate my friend, he’s a farmer, on his own land, an easy two miles from anyone. Oh, and he’s 60 years old.

Not everyone is dying a horrible death. It’s not an instant death sentence. People need to know this side of the story too.

I’m still, thankfully, working every day, the work is different now, but it’s work and I’m grateful for it. I’m exercising every day, the bag, the bike, hiking; eating clean, working on my Mustang, getting outside in the fresh air and sun.

I know, we all know, we could get this tomorrow and it could be bad—very bad—but I’ll not let this define me. I’m trying to live my life as normally as I can, and I’ll take any positivity I can find and hold onto that shit like it was gold.

Old Drunks, and Bad Timing

A conversation with an old friend, another drug addict, and a drunk. He said he’s been thinking about getting some wine a lot these past weeks. Wine, or some beers, maybe a joint or two to take the edge off, get a little fucked up.

I replied I had similar thoughts during Ma’s last month. The horror of that shit-show. The day I walked into the nursing home, and she sat there covered in cake, her fingers sticky with icing, and the realization that she’d lost the ability to feed herself with a fork or spoon, and had resorted to trying to eat with her fingers. The walls were gray, Pat Robertson was spewing some ridiculous bullshit on the TV.

“Yeah, walking out of there that day, getting fantastically fucked up seemed a good idea. I got passed it, same as I will today. The endless conflicting reports that life as we know it is, far all intents over, or this is just a bug, like a cold, and it will all magically disappear. It’s enough man, to make you think, right?”

“I’ve briefly contemplated getting fucked up. You have to, It’s part of the process to being less fucked up. I’ll never consider myself sober, simply less fucked up. I’m good with not so fucked up.”

So I asked my old friend, “How fucked up will work for you? I know my fucked up. You think we should try my fucked up?”

“My fucked up would probably start with four or fives hits of blotter acid. Sitting around a kitchen table while Hector Luis ‘updates his-self,’ meticulously working a spike into a vein. Luis was a terrifying son-of-a bitch on heroin. After we both had settled into our drug of choice we’d sit there spinning a loaded .38 in circles on the smooth Formica top, like spin-the-bottle for psychopaths, talking about how we would go about killing each other. Luis had a go to plan: hydrochloric acid for my fingerprints, and burial with lye and lime to decompose my body and cover the smell. Hector Luis was a meticulous motherfucker, always thinking.”

“Maybe I’d need to get two quarts of vodka and a handful of reds fucked up, then go start fights fucked up. That was a good, fun fucked up. I could barely stand, but I’d fight you.

“Maybe we could get ‘shoot a guy while stealing his cocaine fucked up?’ Like the night we ended up in the ER at Horton Hospital? The detective asking, “Why would anyone believe that you two Cheech and Chong motherfuckers weren’t involved with that shooting in Goshen, and how did the slugs end up in Luis leg?”

“We were lucky the only thing the detective cared less about than the slugs in Luis leg was the bleeding doper in Arden Hill Hospital, 5 miles up the road. None of us were worth the hours of paperwork.”

“So, my long not-so-fucked-up friend, do you need to get that kind of fucked up, my kind of fucked up, or do you want to get some kind of pussy-ass fucked up? I can’t get fucked up the way Luis and me used to get fucked up, because Luis was my crime partner and Luis is fucking dead, and I no longer have the energy.”

“How fucked up are we taking about here? You are suggesting to me that getting a little fucked up might be an answer to all this, but I don’t really recall how a little fucked up works.”

“So, are we going to go get fucked up or not?”

Finally my friend said, “I guess not.”

“Good, that’s a good answer, a good thing, it’s a good thing to be not so fucked up.”

My Best Day, As A Writer

A random Facebook friend request, a name from deep in the past. From the old days, another place, another time, like a signal from a star fifty light-years away. From a world unrecognizable, and foreign, possibly imagined, but familiar and real. The whisper of long forgotten ghosts.

“Are you Billy Lobb, from Truman Moon Elementary School? Now you are a world famous writer?”

The pretty girl from fifth grade, and fourth and sixth and tenth grade. The pretty girl Archie Reed and I were always trying to get to notice us. I should be mad at her for being so pretty and always getting me and Archie sent to the principals office…

She remembered me as funny, and she recalled holding Archie’s hand in gym class. I was pretty mad that Archie got to hold her hand.

That was Middletown 1960s, little black kids and white kids and brown and Asian kids, and Catholic kids—getting out of school early for “religious instruction,” and my raging jealousy. I wanted to be Catholic and get out of school every Wednesday afternoon—Jewish kids with funny caps and some Indian kids with spots on their foreheads, all holding hands, before we were told to hate each other.

I assured her I was not even locally famous, but I am truly a legend in my own mind.

She read my first book, incredibly fast. Proof to me that at least someone learned something valuable from the Middletown School System. Then I felt bad for Archie and me. We didn’t learn much.

She used words like “dark and gritty,” and “poignant, turbulent, intense.”

She asked me pointed questions about characters I’d forgotten, and I felt I was being tested, and I had to think hard to make sure I answered correctly.

I’ve had great reviews, and horrible reviews. I been gifted with kind and undeserved words of praise, I’ve never had a reader’s comments and questions and kindness take me back to such a special place, and time.

I realized as the conversation came to a close, how much I didn’t want her to go back to her life as an ER nurse in Kansas City, and close this door, and let the envelope of darkness from all those years swallow us up again. I was enjoying so much my visit with the ghosts…

My best day, ever as a writer.

The End of the World.

A young girl, Asian, I think she’s Chinese, not sure. She works as a nurses aide. Both of us walking, side by side down a narrow brick and glass and concrete corridor to the parking lot, facing west, the setting sun in our eyes.

Nearly seventy degrees, sixty-eight last time I looked, in the heart of an update New York winter. A gust of wind, must be fifty miles per hour is blowing dead straight at us, compressed and condensed in the narrow, long passage.

She is wispy thin, maybe one hundred pounds, and the force of the gale makes it hard for her to walk, I’m having a hard time too with forward motion at double her size.

Through the roar and occasional projectile, flying cigarette butts and styrofoam coffee cups and someone’s abandoned sandwich bag, she asks me, “Is this the end of the world?”

Too young to be a child of mine, closer to the age of a grand-baby. She is looking at me, looking to me, as if I posses an answer.

Do I share my broken world view, nurtured through six decades watching the decay, and collapse, and a steady march to authoritarianism, nationalism, autocrocy, fascism.

Do I say it is my deeply held belief that when we stop killing each other over oil, we will begin killing each other for water? Do I tell her if I’ve not lost my faith, truth be told I never had much, of any at all, in man and his gods?

“Nah, kid, it’s just a warm January day. Just take a warm day, just take it and enjoy it.”