I’m not real smart. Never claimed to be. I’m listening to this justification to the 18 year old war in Afghanistan.

So far I understand this: Some Saudis hijacked some planes and took down the World Trade Center. George Bush bombed the living shit out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama ended the Iraq war. That was good, or bad, or both.

The Afghanistan war rages on. Syria has been blown to little pieces of concrete for a reason I cannot connect.

Bin-Ladin was in Pakistan and died there.

The US never bombed the shit out of Pakistan… or Saudi Arabia.

Some nonsense about freedom and shock and awe and a bunch of flags and stuff.

We spend $1,000,000,000,000 to “keep us safe,” from some scary people 7,500 miles away, who don’t have planes…

We listen to cowards who have never served a day, glorify war and make millions…

‘Murica

Like I said, I’m not real smart. It’s almost like it doesn’t make any sense intentionally…

Down here in these trenches lives a girl. She told me to call her Layla. Her skin deep beauty left awhile back. All that remains is a gray leather shell and purple and yellow track marks on her legs and forearms.

She hopes to get a job at Burger King. Right now she’s living in a motel, two-hundred dollars a week.

Smoking a menthol outside the Sunoco and asking me for spare change, offering blowjobs for twenty dollars and talking to me about her little girl. The baby lives with Layla’s mom. The baby-daddy died last year from a heroin overdose.

She hopes the fast food job will help her bring her baby to the motel with her.

I pass a comment, unintentionally glib, sincere I thought, about aiming higher than Burger King.

She looks me cold in the eye and says, “Old man, you don’t know shit about low. Maybe you think you know low. Trust me, I’ll dream the best day of my life to see your lowest day.

“We live right the fuck out here among you, every day you walk by. We are here. We are living and breathing and dying right here. Don’t think you are better than me, life has just been kinder to you.”

I remembered the frozen faces of Dicken’s Ignorance and Want clinging to the robe of the ghost.

I gave her twenty bucks, passing on the blowjob.

She was right.

Beaten, bleach poured on his skin and a noose around his neck? Brain-dead red-hats yelling, “This is #MAGA country!”

Don’t feign shock and ask, “How did this happen?”

You know full, fucking well how it happened.

It’s clear as day, you either oppose this shit or you endorse it.

Saying and doing nothing is endorsing it. Excusing it because it doesn’t impact you, yet, is endorsing It.

There is this dog in my neighborhood, real pain in the ass. He’s constantly getting loose, starting fights with other dogs, digging holes in peoples yards, barking and making too much noise. One time he got loose and six of us had to chase him for an hour. We didn’t catch him, he came home when he got tired and bored.

The other day the owner comes over to me and starts apologizing. I looked at him and asked him, “Why?”

He said, “My dog is such a pain in the ass he drives everyone crazy.”

I said, “Your dog is so much like me sometimes I think we are one and the same. I like your dog.”

He just looked at me funny, said, “Ok…” and turned around went home.

The dog just got loose again. I swear he looks at me and smiles while he’s running away.