Author Notes

Happy Christmas, Ma

I sit three feet from the box of wax candles in shapes of snowmen and Santa Claus and pine trees, and I remember the challenges you had with pudding and names and words last Christmas.

I left up the gaudy, fake, three-foot plastic tree in your room, the lights still on, until you died in February. There wasn’t a lot left for you to enjoy, but you loved your all blue lights and silver balls. It’s my sincere hope the last thing you saw before you last closed your eyes were those lights reflected in plastic and chrome shine of those ornaments.

I realize a fake tree was a horrible violation, but it was the best I could do; nursing home rules, not mine, Ma.

Every Christmas of my young life was a tribute to JJ Newberry’s and Woolworth’s and plastic and tinsel and various and other tchotchke. I’m left, this year, to make some kind of sense of, and peace with, these boxes of plastic ivy, red and white stockings and assorted reindeer and fat men with rosy cheeks.

I lost a lot of the Jimmy Stewart, It’s a Wonderful Life, Bing Crosby, White Christmas, the year my father died, but as broke as you were, physically, emotionally and financially, you soldiered through.

The last month of the year was your time and your tree needed to be real and covered with all that stuff that belonged in a dumpster somewhere, but has found it’s way in my attic. I never told you when you were alive, Ma, but I admired your courage and resolve above all.

It’s poignant and fitting and perfect the best memory I have with you was drinking Canadian Whiskey by one of your trees. The ice in your glass clinking as you sipped your drink, the blue and silver reflection shining in your eyes. Maybe the only time I really saw you smile.

Happy Christmas, Ma.

But I have questions…

I realize that some, many, view the founders as damn nearly man-gods, who suffered otherworldly brilliance and vision.

We were taught in elementary school to overlook things like genocide of the native population and the fact that many of these man-gods owned, and on the regular threw a fuck or two into the human beings that they owned. But that was ok, what with all that talk of more perfect unions and such… but I have a question.

They crafted a nearly flawless document called The Constitution modeled after the English Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta, and they provisioned within this document the ability to amend it and add to it as the world changed and evolved… but I have a question…

These man-gods modeled a system of checks and balances with the judicial, executive and legislative branches of government keeping any one from seizing too much power or control… but I have a question…

With this perfect system of laws and amendments and checks and balances how the fuck does one account for this gutless, soulless, cowardly, boot-licking motherfucker—re-elected in Kentucky with a net 16% approval rating. How does every non GOP backed piece of federal legislation proposed land on and die on this assholes desk?

Spare me your fife and drums and flags, this is all working as designed 245 years ago.

November 1963

It feels a lot, tonight, like November 1963, and I have liver and onions and mashed potatoes sitting on my plate. I wasn’t eating any of that, and my father wasn’t letting me up from the table until I did, and the liver was stone cold. I learned the meaning of the word ‘stand-off’ in that little kitchen, in the little stone house by the muddy, weed-filled pond. It wasn’t a lake, dad; it was a goddamn mud-hole. We should settle that once and for all.

I’d sit there all night; I wasn’t touching that dinner, and my father wasn’t budging; he had the radio and his newspaper. He was in it for the duration. He called me ‘bullheaded,’ and I reminded him I was his son. We’d sit there, on these occasions, until maybe 8 pm, and we’d declare a draw, and I’d go to bed, better hungry than poisoned by cold mashed potatoes and liver.

My dad didn’t like Kennedy, but he didn’t want him dead either. He understood there was a line that couldn’t be crossed, and there were rules that had to be adhered to, like eating the food put before you, no matter how disgusting.

That day the slug blew off the back of Kennedy’s brain, I saw fear in my father for the first time. I was six, and the world turned dark and suddenly cold and frighteningly small that November Friday. I’m quite sure it was the first moment I felt his fear.

Cronkite cried, and Huntley and Brinkley reported on the tiny black and white TV.

I was born just before Sputnik went into space, but the spectacle of spacemen and heroic deeds of Gagarin and Glenn were lost on this day; I asked my dad if the Russians were coming again to kill us. I was six, dad, fucking six-years-old, and I remembered the missiles in Cuba, in 1962, we saw them on that same little TV, and I was scared then too, but this was a different scared. Besides, we’d been saved from the Soviets by Lieutenant Kennedy, and now half his skull was blown off and laying on the trunk lid of some big Lincoln Continental in Dallas. The teachers cried, and the principal cried, and on the way home, I saw a cop crying, and I was scared.

It was Saturday the next day, and I remember the fear in my sister’s eyes when she realized American Bandstand wasn’t going to be the little black and white TV that day, just talk of Soviets and Cubans and dead presidents.

Then the next day, Sunday, we went to church, and later that day, some guy named Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald, the guy who everyone said was a Russian and who killed Lieutenant Kennedy. I was more confused than ever because all the Russians I’d ever heard of were named Khrushchev and Gagarin and Boris and Vladimir, not Lee Harvey Oswald, and I was still pretty scared about missiles from Cuba. I was scared because my sister was scared that American Bandstand might never be on again.

A couple of days later, Grandma came to our house, and we ate some turkey, and I was pretty sure, within days, there’d be a big picture of JFK up on the wall, above her piano, next to FDR and Jesus.

Later I went outside with my dad, and we put up some of those huge fire-hazard Christmas light bulbs purchased at a Woolworth’s somewhere in the late 1950s. Even though each of the three strands of bulbs my dad proudly owned had a big “UL” label—Underwriters Laboratory—that was supposed to convince me those big, hot bulbs wouldn’t burn the house down. It didn’t.

Dougie Hulseapple came by later that day, and we formed a plan to avenge the death of Lieutenant Kennedy because we both were scared of Soviets and bombs and Cubans and men named Ruby. It was getting dark way too early because it was November, so if there was any avenging to be done, we’d better get it done before dark when our moms with call us home.

It was like that in 1963 and feels a lot like I’m having liver and onions and mashed potatoes for dinner tonight too, and dad, it’s scary like that, and it still feels like the Russians are coming, and I think it’s going to be a long night.

American Taliban

Business across the country are boarded up, people have actually asked me if I think it’s safe to “be out” this week.

A quarter million of us are dead from an invisible killer, we wear masks and we are afraid to shake hands.

Marauding bands of self described Patriots, many heavily armed, are blocking traffic on roads all over the nation and intimidating voters.

The same elements that allowed the Christian Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, Cromwell’s brutality toward Ireland, slavery, apartheid, the rise of the Nazi party in 1930s Germany, the Taliban; all are still present in us.

When I see busses forced off the hi-way, and bridges blocked by pickups waving flags, their owners heavily armed, I realize not much has changed in the human psyche in 10,000 years.

We’ve not evolved, we’ve not learned a goddamn thing.

I’m fucking sick, to the point of wanting to puke, of all this winning…

#AmericanTaliban

What’s My Name?

I use two moral compasses, my grandmother Cora and Muhammad Ali. When I say Mr. Ali influenced my life I don’t mean he was a boxer I admired. He was, and still is, a larger than life role model for me. Not quite a deity, but probably as close to a Jesus figure as will ever exist for me. When the good church folks ask, “What would Jesus do?” I ask myself, “What would Ali do?”

Cora would have me turn the other cheek, Cora would tell me to pray for this man I hate. I’d fight her on this, I’d walk away in anger, because that is not my true self, not my nature. But, her words would echo in my head and fill me with self-doubt and make me feel less than the good, less than the self-righteous. I heard a lot of Cora in my head yesterday as I wished the worst for this man i loathe in my heart.

A post, from a dear friend, a better man than me, half read, half-understood, re-enforced this, Cora’s words. I heard Michelle Obama saying “When they go low, we go high.”

But that was then 2016 and her words don’t echo for me today. Michelle’s words or Cora’s words, ring hollow as a bell to me today, early October 2020.

No, yesterday, my true self was seeing the great Ali and Ernie Terrell.

One of Ali’s best public moments was the David Frost interview where he laughed at the sad and cynical America that made him a hero in Rome—the pinnacle of American pride—but home Louisville, a week later, he couldn’t buy a hot dog at a luncheonette because it was white only. Ali laughed, Ali smiled, but his smile betrayed embers of rage.

Ernie Terrell chose to disrespect Mr. Ali, and call him Cassius Clay, what Ali referred to as the name given to him by those who enslaved his ancestors.

Ali whupped his ass—big time—and screamed as Terrell laid out on the canvass, “What’s my name!”

That’s my true nature and who I am. I can’t wish Trump well as he’s callously stood by, spreading lies and false and dangerous hope, doing little to nothing as he watched—as of today—210,000 die, as he actively works to take away access to health care from people in the middle of this pandemic.

I can’t pray for a man who wants to rape and pillage the social safety net that literally means survival for millions and millions of older Americans, money that is theirs, not trumps, not the government’s money.

I can’t send well wishes to the leader of the Proud Boys and a man who every time he was given a chance to denounce racial hate and terrorism chose to fuel the fire. I can’t pray for a man who cages babies in a political stunt and has ruined the lives of those babies families.

No, I hope he recovers enough to come back to the White House, and diminished, lives there until January 20th, to be ripped from that place by the National Gaurd and the FBI, and sent to rot in prison and end his miserable, pathetic life.

And the American people need to collectivity stand up and yell, “What’s my name!”