Up Against the Wall

There are some days when I think about the roots of the situation of the world today.  Maybe it was the 1970s children who having avoiding being drafted dropped into about a decade of total self focus.  Maybe we the children of the late 1950s, who came of age as the Vietnam war was winding down,  needed to continue the activism of the 1960s.  Maybe as opposed to drinking, fucking ad smoking dope we should have been watching out for what the tired, wrinkled old white man were doing next..  Maybe we should have been focused on the three card monte game these tired old white men with power were playing.  Navel gazing was fun but it sure has left us in dire straits today.

As we sat there self satisfied at the end of the Vietnam era, with Nixon booted from office, as we were  lifting our celebratory beers at age 18, the invisible merchants of power were already planning to steal our  job security, steal our good paying work, and steal the quality of life from each and everyone from us.  They did not give a flaming fuck about America or American lives or the American middle class.  They were the greediest of bastards wanting more, more money for them, more power for them, more of a legacy for their families and the public welfare be damned.

Without us, we who are now early 60 somethings, being out in the street calling for a focus on improving the life of our people when we were in our 20s and 30s and 40s, it all vanished.  The jobs vanished going off to Bangladesh and Pakistan and Mexico.  Those high paying jobs that didn’t require a college education, well they evaporated.  And as we moved on from pot to coke and from rabbit ears to 157 channels (all QVC) we lost a place that was a good place to live, a good place for families..  We moved on from community and free love to a libertine’s path of decadence.  We had our heads up our collective  selfish asses.

And what can we do now?  The Supreme Court has cloaked corporations with personhood and allowed these “people’s”  unfettered funds to be funneled silently and anonymously into ever political race and ballot question that is out there.  The consolidation of media that Regan okayed has denied us an outlet to speak our views.  The rich own the newspapers, the television stations and are rapidly consolidating their control over the web.  I note there is a move afoot to deal with the troll farms and fake story mongers out there.  But my fear is that in trying to clean up this Wild West quagmire the rich will impose rules that will stifle authentic voices form being heard.  We are fucked.

I am almost back to to point where in the late 1960s where people were talking about revolution.  I am not one to believe in violence, and blowing up government buildings and the like, but I do believe in civil disobedience to the maximum.

Last night I had an extended conversation with my son about the three biggest issues facing us and how we have to focus on them in sequence.  My list was basically, 1. Global warming, 2. Nuclear weapons, 3. And the status of women and the myriad attempts in the name of religious concepts to claw back and strip them of their independence.  If we don’t deal with our warming overpopulated and increasing poisoned world, we are shit out of luck.

Why are we not addressing this?  Our politicians are bought and sold by the money of the polluters, those who want to hold onto to their cash streams.  Even if you don’t believe in global warming you have got to consider how befouled the environment is becoming and how little margin we have before the food wars come.  Shouldn’t we rethink what we are doing and change how our world works? Or die trying?.  Things like reducing the negative effects of beef production and consumption need our attention.  Things like the gyre of floating plastic that is choking our seas and our sea life has to be dealt with.

Wells nukes, uh, if any  of those dicks Trump or, Modi, Putin or some Ayatollah decide to throw down we are totally screwed.  “Nuff said.

The women thing got a bit of argument out of my son.  He was arguing we should be fighting for all those that have been subjected to the retrograde policies that Trump and his ilk have been pushing and enacting.  Blacks, Jews, the LGBTQ community are all taking their hits.  Good people on all side of Charlottesville my flaming asshole.  But I disagreed saying that women stand to lose the most with any rollback of Roe v Wade.  When women lose control of their bodies, they lose their ability to be considered full equals.  IF YOU DON’T WANT AN ABORTION BECAUSE GOD TELLS YOU IT IS WRONG DON’T GET ONE BUT LEAVE EVERYONE ELSE THE FUCK ALONE.  We need women in the majority in the state houses and in the halls of the United States Congress.  They make up more than half our population, fuck this paternalistic shit, let us place them deep into the mix of deciding our priorities.

Yeah I am talking about a revolution.  I refuse to acknowledge that Donald Trump and all that he and his corrupt minions have done is legitimate.  I am not sure have to get the flames of this revolution started but it is time.  Up against the wall you reactionary motherfuckers. Yeah we silver haired children who made love to the blue lights of pioneer amplifiers and the music of Glen Frey and Don Henley need to stand up and say, stop the madness.  We may not have done what we should have done in the 1970s but we need to do it now.  Organize, vote, march, …..you know the drill

Filler

I am writing this from the public library. This eddifice is at best 15 houses, and one four lane boulevard, away from my home.  Nerds engaging in role playing games have driven me from my home.  These are games where crafting the characters can take longer than gameplay.  When I walked in and saw what was happening I considered my options.  With twenty-something year old bodies strewn about my house, neither could I watch television, nor could I play music on the big Harmon Kardon speaker in my kitchen. Thus, I took flight.

I had three choices.  First, I could walk back to my office and work on my backlog of cases.  Bag that.  Second, I could walk to the community center and sit in an area what had been designed as a coffee shop but now serves as sort of an snack bar with a couple of junk food dispensing machines.  Bag that.  The last option was the public library. Hey, I had a movie I had to return by tonight anyway, so here I am.

One of the things I like most about libraries is perusing the titles of the new volumes set out to catch readers’ eyes.  I will not read one percent of one percent of one percent of all the things printed in any given year.  But ah how the titles intrigue me.  Today I was struck by one title, “The Land of Lost Borders”.  I don’t know what it is about.  Really, I don’t care what it is about.  If I wanted I could use the electronic search engines on my phone or on this iPad and I could get a rating and a synopsis.  I don’t want that.

When I see a title like, “The Land of Lost Borders”, it sets my imagination off in a hundred directions.  Assuming it is fiction, and it well may not be, I imagine it to be a book about a place that lies between two countries that has been fought over so many times and remapped so many times that the warring neighbors have simple left the place as a permeable free zone, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller.  While there are towns with elected councils, the place is really a government by principles rather than laws.  “We don’t do that here”, would be a phrase that has as much power as any codified statute in any “civilized” nation.

Or perhaps the tale could be one of dementia. The title might reference the mind of person that one day seems sharp and focused and on another totally lost.  Or it could be a tale of two people wandering through the mountains of a friendly nation only to find out their map was out of date and they have trespassed into a land where they are by the very insignia on their passports spies.

Walking past book titles is such a starting point for these flights of my mental fancy.  Some nights I will tease out the story I tied to the title into something that would almost qualify as a movie treatment if not an elevator pitch for a limited 6 episode Amazon Prime series starring Charles Dance and Kiera Knightly.  If you don’t know Charles Dance watch The Widow on Amazon Prime.

My plan for my flight from the nerds was to bring my earbuds with me and listen to what is referred to on my iPhone as my Shazam playlist.  There are a couple of hundred songs on this that I have identified from television soundtracks or coffee house speakers.  The basic style of a song on this playlist is a solo vocal with an acoustic guitar, an electric bass and a song structure/lyric that is most likely a cryptic ballad.  Damned if I didn’t forget my earbuds. Oyster crackers I brought.  Pills that make me La-La so I can fly in aero planes I brought.  And a crushed hard boiled egg in a ziplock back (of unknown vintage) I brought.

A break is taken here to dispose of said egg.   If the bag were to open, the egg would become not just my problem.

....a short time passes....

The egg is gone into a recepticle hopefully not to open and thus not to offend any one. Where was I, oh yeah I was going to listen to music.  Not happening, instead I am listening to squeals of kids in the kids’ books area, a place with soft furniture and fantastic imaginary creatures painted on the walls.  I can also hear the coed near me shuffling books as she makes a vain attempt to do her work.  One books slides out to the middle of the table as she pushes it away.  She flips her phone up and swipes through a couple of screens.  The phone then goes face down on the table. With her forefinger she flips through a few pages of a book, her other hand tapping on the table.  The book closes and she flips through a few more screens on her smart phone.  It is clear, maybe not to her, but to anyone around her, she is not in the right mental place to do intellectual work tonight.  Perhaps my tapping away at this keyboard is distracting her.  I doubt it.

The “Land of Lost Borders”, has sent me down another path, I am thinking of the short nature of my time upon this sphere.  Once, not so long ago really, time seemed infinite and it seemed manageable.  Time could be pushed back.  Time could be tamed.  There would be the occasional loss to time of someone to an accident or a rare and dread disease.  But as long as one stayed relatively fit and did not hang glade or sleep with the spouses of very jealous and very well armed people, time could be ignored. Such is not the case now.

If things go as is planned I will walk away from work in 7 1/2 months.  If things go as planned I will walk away from the place I have lived and loved for most of the last 40 years.  (Right now I loathe this place, the leaders seem lost in a vision that is just not what made to this place attractive to large portions of the people who have opted to be permanent residents).  But I won’t dwell on that.  My country too is leaving me behind. It is time for me to go somewhere for a bit.  Maybe I will go for all the time I have left.  I just don’t know.

But the contemplation of these changes tells me that I may have as little as a day and maybe no more than eight years left here on this mortal coil. I am not thinking of this with dread but with an acceptance.  Kind of in the old Buddhist frame of mind here.  I have grown old but I have never grown up. Maybe that has been for the best. I don’t think I was really designed to be a mature adult, a person of gravitas and substance.  Me, I am just filler.  You know what I am okay with that.

I Have No Home In This World Anymore

Over the past couple of days I have been enjoying being engaged with the Facebook group from my old hometown. It’s fun to remember the buildings, the people and the places of the years that I spent growing up. It wasn’t heaven, but it was a place where I was part of a whole cloth.  I belonged whether I wanted to belong or not.

However, in September of my 18th year I headed out to Michigan to follow my desire for college education.  I think when I left my little farm town I fully anticipated that I would return home at the end of my studies. For all my braggadocio about wanting to go out into the world I was still nervous and cautious. I figured the fallback for me would be to go home and find some work there. I think most of the people I knew thought I would end up back in Jersey.

Things and events dictated otherwise. Most of the work where I grew up was tied to factory or farm. I was scrawny and weak and myopic. None of these traits are really suitable for the kind of work available in my hometown and it’s in environs.  There really wan’t much for a college educated liberal arts type. Plus, I had too much history defining who I could and couldn’t be in that place. Once I left it was pretty much for good whether I knew it or not.

I have lived in the Midwest for 43 of the last 45 years.  I did try and go home for about 2 years.  It really wasn’t an apt fit for me.  Bit by bit, month by month and year by year my home had shifted.  Over time I had become rooted in the snow and the four seasons of the north country.

I think we Americans are basically a restless bunch. For the most part pretty much everyone I’ve ever known has wanted move, has wanted to travel, has wanted to go somewhere. Some of us have abject wanderlust. Some just have a small itch for change of scenery now and then. At the most the Jersey shore is no more that 65 miles from where you are in the Garden State.  Sometimes that drive is enough. 

It was good to have a very defined home when I was young but I still have that desire to go traveling further. I think I used up all the home Michigan has to offer me.  In eight months I am going to be on the go again.

Still no matter where I go the dust of Pedricktown, NJ will be part of the aromas of my memory.  Memories of the smell of the reeds and plants along the causeway leaving town going north will come back to me with the coming of summer. The sounds of a small town will probably be some of the last things I remember.  Remembering  one man whistling and singing as he pumped gas and cleaned car windshields will forever echo in my mind.

Home is a fragile construct.  I was lucky.

On The Day Trump Nixed His Staff from the Correspondents Dinner

Tuesday, April 23, 2019

Sitting here I am at the dinning room table. Good beautiful light outside now  but it is the tail end of what has been a cloudy chilly day.  Have been running through my list of all time favorites songs to play.  Funny that, almost all of the tunes are songs of loss and hoped for, but most likely failed redemption.  This was the stuff I was listening to in my early teens and through college.  

Mission in the Rain by Jerry Garcia is a prime example.  A loser adrift Garcia's worn voice sells it. Well then there's Bert Jansch’s Needle of Death, not much there in the way of redemption there, eh?  Mostly I listened to ballads.  It is amazing I made it to adulthood listening to Ralph McTell’s Streets of London.

Back in those years I was an optimistic secular humanist.  Yeah, let us break that down.  What is an optimist? Well one perspective is that you are a person who is hopeful and confident about the future.  If you get a little more rarefied, it is a philosophy wherein you believe that this world is the best of all possible worlds or that good must ultimately prevail over evil. Yeah, this kind of dovetails with the secular humanist definition.  Secular humanism  is a belief that humanity is capable of morality and self-fulfillment without belief in God.

Ah optimism, ah youth, to recapture one or the other, wouldn’t that be something? As the years have passed I have lost faith in so very much of humanity.  I have become convinced that with the accumulation of possessions and wealth that we lose our capacity to be generous. With each step up the rung of winning we lose sight of those they have not reached the same level. Humans become possessive, protective, aggressive and instransigent.

It does not mean that I am going to quit trying to do justice.  It does not mean that I am going to abandon my hope that without God we can be moral.  I mean my hope in listening to those songs was that somehow, somewhere, some way there was going to be redemption.  What I feel now is that it is harder each day to fight the growing ugliness and hatred I see, a palpable dark knife wound that is forming a chasm between people.

I didn’t mean to end up here tonight.  What was really on mind was loss and loneliness. But our world has become so polluted with hatred and anger we cannot easily find our way to reflect on individual pain, on love, on loss. My heart is sick and broken.  The hearts of people I love are sick and broken. The road here has been so fast, not so wide, but oh so very fast.  

Why is it that the good all just seems to come undone?  Why is it that we cannot find a commanilty to lift out of this foul mess that is sucking us in? Was I wrong to believe that humanity could move forward without the threat of hellish punishment or the promise of crowns of gold and jewels and robes of purest white? 

I keep coming back to the definition of optimism. No matter how worn my heart feels I believe we can make it better.  

The Graveyard Thing

So as I was lying there in bed last night I was thinking of Pedricktown stories. Why I need to go back and revisit the years of my youth escapes me.  However every single time I read a post on the Pedricktown Facebook page memories come flooding back.

Most of my stories that were coming to mind that night were tied to Ruby’s packing house and/or the Baptist church.  I will leave the packing house stories for later.  Those tales are earthier and deal with teens trying to sort out their place in the world. They are beer, sex and pot stories involving a bunch of teenage boys, southern crackers and very  big black men mostly all overseen by grizzled old men with names like Whitey. 

Because I spent so much time at the Baptist church there are a number of tales tied to that place that have a humorous bent.  Hell I have a number of stories involving the mental gymnastics I went through each time a visiting pastor would make an altar call.  By the way I am a Lutheran with Buddhist leanings now.  We don’t do altar calls.

The following tale does not tie to VBS or BYF or any of the other Baptist acronyms I remember all so well.  It is more a me versus the monolith that the Baptist Church was in Pedricktown kind of tale.  It is a tale of the church building as part of the places of my youth as opposed to the church community as part of my social world story.

When I was about six or seven I had learned to ride a two wheeler bike.  For me this was a major accomplishment.  As any of you who knew me as a kid will remember coordination was not my strong suit.  I think I was the last kid my age in P-City to not need training wheels. On a sunny day my shadow was a trip and fall hazard.  I digress. 

Well any how I had learned to ride a bike and my father had consented to the purchase for me of a sting ray bike from W.T. Grants in Pennsville. It was purple metal flake, had high handle bars and a banana seat.  I rode it everywhere.

Well as fate would have it on one particularly sunny afternoon in summer there in Oldmans Township one of my ne’er do well cousins was in town.  My Aunt had dropped both he and a bike off at my grandmother’s house.  During those years my grandmother did a great deal of child care for all of us cousins when our parents had obligations to attend to. This was old America, the one where extended families reached into every aspect of your life.

With two bikes and time to kill we went riding together about town. In P-City there are only so many places to go. You could ride down to the bridge and was for fish or corpses.  I think I remember two jumpers from the Delaware Memorial Bridge being snagged by fisherman off that old bridge over the 18 years of my youth.  You could ride up Railroad Avenue north to the train tracks, boring.  You could ride south down Railroad Avenue past the school and to the edge of the fields, even more boring. Eventually the ultimate magnet of our childhood called us.  Off we went to the Baptist cemetery down at the far end of West Mill Road.  

For some reason that place held an inexorable pull on us.  The attraction was so strong you could almost see the waves of magnetism in the air.

There was a ritual to the visits there.  First we would walk over to our Grandfather Asher’s headstone.  He had died before either of us had been born.  He had been a veteran of San Juan Hill in the Spanish American war so there was always a flag and a metal star that held it on his grave.  Our Grandmother’s name was also carved on that headstone and she wasn’t dead yet.  It just said 1893-      .  Behind that headstone was our uncle’s grave. From the best we could tell our uncle had died in what I believe was a motorcycleaccident. I never got the whole story.  People kind of mumbled when it came to talking about his passing.  

After that grave visit we would wander around looking for open graves.  An open grave was a double dog dare kind of thing.  Invariably we would threaten to push each other in.  The terrifying push actually happened once or twice but that was when we were there with a group of cousins. I can remember screaming and crying until one of those sick bastards actually gave me a hand and pulled me out. Of course we were looking for the ghoulish and the macabre.  We were always thinking we might see something like a casket next to the open hole that might be visible.  Yeah I know it sounds sick but we are talking about being a kid here and more specifically being a boy.  Really we are talking about pulling the wings of flies, frying ants with magnifying glasses and the whole Stephen King Stand by Me kind of behavior that boys do.

On one particular sunny afternoon the whole double dog dare thing came into effect and led to a bad result well at least for me.  Could this story be going anywhere else, I mean really did you think it was going to be warm and fuzzy? Nayh.  Boys, graveyards and time to kill, I mean what could go wrong? 

On that warm summer vacation day my cousin had the bright idea that it would be a good idea to challenge me to ride out bikes as fast as we could around the grave yard.  Cool beans, there could be blood involved.  Round and round we went dodging granite markers trying not to split our heads open.  Now as to the sacrilegious and disrespectful quality of this race among the monuments to finality, those hard cold markers of mortality I guess I have always believed the dead were dead and they really didn’t mind.  I mean given the number of people who have occupied this earth before us is there anywhere where you aren’t walking over a spot where one of predecessors is now in repose?

It is at this point I must note that to my cousin the thrill of maintaining bodily integrity was not enough.  He upped the ante. As boys clearly we had to do something to up the thrill. It is here where the clothes start to come off.

As the next phase of the grand prix among the dead we continued the ride shirtless.  We did this for a couple of laps but this was still not enough to satisfy the thrill factor.  The following phase of this championship double dog dare ride was just a number of laps in just jockey shorts and sneakers.  Given how scrawny we were I cannot image this being an aesthetically pleasurable sight to be observed.

Still a tighty whitey ride was not enough for my nefarious cousin and I being the sheep that I was agreed.  Did I mention that I believe the graveyard sat at was still a five point intersection?  It was a main intersection of the town. Traffic was going by but we didn’t notice and/or care.  When you are seven or eight you are the entire world. Nobody else exists.

Finally there we were riding around the graveyard buck naked.  Well almost I still had on my black horn rim glasses and my sneakers.  We had only done a couple of laps when the church secretary came running out screaming at us.  For the life of me I don’t remember her name.  I do remember her stone white hair and I think she and the hairy thunderer image of God I held at that time had been in second grade together; She seemed really old and I am sure my cousin and my behavior added a few years to her aging process.  Normally she was slow and steady.  She was a rock upon which the church functioned. However on that day she was really pissed off and came out running screaming at us with a fury I could not have imaged.

I believe there were words used like “you filthy dirty boys” and “I have already called your parents”.  “God will punish you heathen little demons” might have been said but hey I have heard that so many times when I was hanging around with my cousins growing up it is hard to distinguish one incident of damnable behavior from another.

Quickly we grabbed our clothes and beat feet way from the church.  We pedaled our little but now clothed bodies away from that church and east down West Mill Street as fast as we could.  We flew.  My cousin turned in at my Grandmother’s house which was about halfway down the street between the church any my house. He wasn’t sweating.  He knew his mother would a. either not care or b. would never find out about it.  Me, I was in full flop sweat, heart racing, and boy parts in my chest mode.

I had good reason to be.  By the time I got to about where the Titus’s then lived I could see my mother standing on the porch and did she look pissed.  For all of those who ran afoul of her in first grade, image that look x10.  My memory is of being dragged off my bike and being read the riot act.  One phrase I remember to this day is “What were you thinking, would you take a bath in public?”  Out of context it sounds insane doesn’t it?  But at 7 years old it shook me to my core.  

As I was dragged to my room by my collar I heard the words that no child in his right mind ever wanted to hear. “ You will stay in your room and when your father gets home he will deal will this.”  “You will be getting the belt”. Yeah you can pretty much suss out how this ended.  I couldn’t sit for a day or two.  No it wasn’t child abuse it was just mid-1960s parenting. 

Did I learn anything from this?  Yeah the church secretary watches the graveyard.  Also lots of cars go by the intersection of Straughn Mill road mid-afternoon.  I probably should have learned that being naked in a public place does not end well.  As you all know that lesson did not stick.

The Mint Julep Glasses.

On my first trip to the Kentucky Derby I went with my friends John and Bob.  This was Bob’s idea.  I had no idea what I was in for.   

When I told people I was going, about seven people asked for commerative glasses of the race. I said that I would surely get them. Note, I had only seen the Derby on television.  It all looked so gentile.  It all looked so elegantly southern.   

Arriving the night before the race and after parking the car for some exorbitant sum on somebody’s lawn, what I saw was something akin to Fellini’s Satyricon.  There was drunkenness, dope smoking and half naked people everywhere. They seemed to be contained in a cordoned off section of town near the Downs.  Vaguely I remember we were looking for a guy name Tom.  We found him standing on top of a US Mail box wearing nothing but tighty whities and holding a sparkler in each hand screaming some bizarre rant. 

Well, anyway fast forward, because it is all a blur, to the infield the next day.  At that time, we discovered that the infield gets hot.  We also discovered that the commerative glasses came with mint juleps in them.  Hey, I bought one and it was mostly ice, a splash of bourbon, some sugar and a sprig of mint. I figured with pacing I could down seven of these in the course of 12 hours.  Oh, I was so much younger then…. 

Whenever I could tear myself away from the infield’s show us your boobfest and the guy who was so drunk he was drowning in his Styrofoam beer cooler, I would buy another mint julep.  By the end of the day the mint julep vendor ran out of ice.  By the end of the day the vendor ran out of mint.  By the end of the day they ran out of water.  The last two commerative glasses I bought were just water glass sized containers of pure bourbon.  By the time the race was over I did not really comprehend where I was. 

After the last race it took a bit to rally and leave the racetrack.  Funny thing though, once you got out of the zoo of the infield, they were selling the glasses sans alcohol for about half the price of a mint julep.  Oh, the hangover I could have avoided.

Jason Isbell

As I listen to Jason Isbell, I realize what it is about his music that make what he signs so meaningful to me. In his songs there are consistent themes.  These include how to be a decent person in a world that seems insane and how to come to terms with a personal past that is not necessarily the nicest or cleanest.  Overlaid atop these repeating themes are the concepts he carries from his upbringing that are hard wired into his psyche, I.e., old time religion and the value of family.

Having been raised in a very large family, Mom was one of twelve and I had tons of cousins, I have the family component hardwired into my soul.  Having answered an altar call at 10 and having been immersed in the waters of baptism I get the old time religion business.  I come from a church that won’t delete my membership because I now attend a church that while Christian doesn’t believe in full immersion. And yeah I have a little history, not like Jason’s, but real none the less.  I have done wrong and I have hurt people. And finally I live in a country drifting toward a racist form of fascism.

And I am a white man living in a white man’s world. When he talks about wishing he wasn’t one of the people who ignored the racist jokes of his “friends” and I so totally get that.  I told those jokes once and now I cringe at them.

The bottom line here is that I hope Jason continues to struggle with these things.  I am struggling with these things and I need his voice to communicate what I am feeling. I hope his success does not dilute his feelings.  I hope that he continues to walk crossing between tortured and self aware all while pushing a honest progressive vision of self.

I hope that he never loses the romance in his words.  If We Were Vampires and Hudson Commodore are just two of his heart wrenching but wonderful batches of lyrics that define the meaning of a full heart. Yeah I like Jason Isbell and he seems for all the world to be the real deal.