I’ll just drop this here: Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, August 6 and 9, 1945
200,000 dead by December 1945
Covid 2020, 200,000 American dead by December 2020?
Don’t be a idiot. Wear a mask.
Sounding off
We Should Be Antifa
Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, spoke of and warned us of the evils of the military-industrial complex in a 1962 speech.
The Republican Party in 2020 is precisely the system Ike was describing in his farewell address
Before you mindlessly speak of the “evils” of socialism, you need to study fascism and what exactly it means. To me, anti-fascism is exactly what the United States once stood for, what it once fought a bloody war to stop. It is exactly what Eisenhower spoke about.
I have and will always be anti-fascist. The fact that your sitting president casts anti-fascism as some sort of evil should terrify you, and cause you to act before you are in chains.
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.
My Best Day, As A Writer
Mo
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 Manly Art of Dying at 35
Twenty-six years ago, today, I saw that terrified visage in the mirror. Blood running down my face, my eyes a combination of jaundice yellow and red. Is that even a color? The blood running down my throat, mixed with whatever chemicals in my gut made me puke in the sink.
So many of my boys from back then are dead now.
A lot of heroin, a lot of violence. Guns and knives and rage and dope… a fascinating combination.
Sitting in Poppy’s ‘Cheby’ with Luisito, after an NA/AA meeting, splitting a 10 mg Valium and a 1/2 pint of Clan MacGregor. Just a taste, to take the edge off all that talk of God and relentless self-inventories, and chips for days and weeks and months and years sober.
Admitting to each other as we emptied the little bottle that we wanted none of that, we just wanted to spend a day just not so fucked up. Pouring the last down his throat, Luis passed the bottle back to me, “I saved you the corner…”
He was my brother.
I wonder to this day, especially on this day, why is Luis dead and I sit here drinking coffee. I still believe the universe took the wrong guy, the better man.
If I get through today without popping a handful of Seconal and a couple of quarts of vodka, it will be twenty-six years, not-fucked-up. Sobriety is elusive and speculative. I long ago decided to be ok with simply not fucked up.
