Archive for June, 2015

Comfortably Numb

There is still plenty of injustice in the world, but today was a happy day.

I am pleased.

There exists a lingering conservative legacy on the highest court in our land.  Like many, I considered the supreme court deigning to hear the issue of gay marriage to be ominous.

Turns out I was wrong.

I am a rare kind of satisfied.

I am excited.

This is big.

The whiplash paced acknowledgement of LGBT dignity and the eschewing of the confederate flag as a symbol of anything but hate and oppression is soul caressing.  It fortifies my sensibilities. The religious right in this country has been bitch slapped hard and the message is unambiguous.  You people can longer enjoy being unapologetic dicks with impunity. The rest of us are on to you.  You’re on notice.  Your bullshit has an expiration date now.  The provenance of passing judgement and bullying from an altar of righteous indignation has been revoked.

Just like that, you are on your way to the margins.

My pleasure is guilty.  For hundreds of years you have been insulated from the verdict of equitable objectivity.  I can’t help but rejoice in your confusion and new found sting of shame.  The Lucifer of your peculiar fantasy is you.

It’s about goddamned time.

Today we were visited by justice and its always attendant compassion.

We deserve to celebrate that and to revel in it.

Take the weekend.  Get drunk and make toasts.

The union is indeed a little more perfect.

Careful not be lulled, however.

Beware the sentimental euphoria of complacency.

It is far from over.

Gird your sensitivity and generosity and brace yourself for what Monday will surely bring.

Until then, own that love and kindness prevailed in a big way today.  Keep it close to your heart.  Remember it when the shit storm once again darkens your day. Reach for it the next time some asshole opens fire on the TV.  Be ready to beat it back all over again.

Drinks for my friends.

American Malaise

I had to step back and think about it for a minute.

Because this time it was perfect.

A hate crime.

Terrorism.

Some product of deplorable southern genetic fuckery succumbs to calculated indoctrination, walks into an iconic black church and sits through a service for like an hour with the unsuspecting he intends to murder.  He quietly allows his rage to detonate and blows holes in people he doesn’t know at all but hates with the incandescence of racial animus.  He believes the full throttle afterburner of lies forced down his neck at the optimum time for his aptitude to gulp them.

He was about fourteen years old when Barack Obama was first elected president of the United States of America.  Since then he’s been given specific purpose to fear and hate black people and allowed to blame all his own failures and shortcomings on people whose only difference is the color of their skin.

Not just one shit stain lost his mind,  half the goddamn country has.

The second it begins, the right wing religious assholes don’t even break stride in their relentless campaign of obfuscation to render culpable the first black president.  It’s all his fault.  How dare he get elected twice. They stop at nothing.  Shame and hypocrisy are mere divots in a smooth green field to them.  Such routine violence is ascribed to trends of acceptance and equality for everyone from gay and transgendered to immigrants and black Americans.

It’s an attack on Christians and of course it is racism to point out the impetus was exclusively racist.

It’s everyone’s fault but theirs.

They relentlessly spin it away from anything to do with bigotry and the sick fetish for guns in our culture.  They just can’t abide a lingering look at this latest horror.  Any prolonged bearing of witness to the very worst of our kind slithering from under rocks and out of caves to visit misery. Any scrutiny of the those among us emboldened by the craven fantasy of a  president on the verge of sending troops to confiscate anything resembling a firearm from every American household.

It’s all about that fetish.  They don’t give a mad fuck about protecting their families.  They aren’t actually worried about the grid failing and battling their neighbors for sustenance.  That’s all bullshit.  The second amendment is nothing but a goddamn slogan to them.  They only fear the potential emasculation writ large for them by the NRA of losing their guns to the nigger in chief.

I loath the NRA. Because without it we would have at least some amount less of these tragedies. Because Wayne LaPierre could not give less of a shit that without him there would be less of them.  Because the NRA is organized crime.  Because they masquerade as a group of innocuous defenders of the second amendment when they are actually a cabal of greasy lobbyists who agitate the hardest case dumbasses in this country into thinking they need some sort of arsenal to prepare for the coming race war.  Because they paint it as holy and even some kind of civic duty.

I really hate them.  Because they have somehow managed to be on the lips of every callow redneck confederate flag waving asshole from Florida to Arizona. Because they are able to get otherwise reasonably sane people to buy into this crap.  They have so successfully plumbed the paranoia of the contemporary American male, they are able to exploit millions of them with hubris but without reservation.

Because they effortlessly paint every new atrocity as one side or another didn’t have enough fucking firepower.  If there were just more guns, everything would be just fine.  What we need is more guns.  Every injustice can be resolved with some obtuse Dirty Harry doctrine.  If only everyone had a goddamn gun, the good guys would win every time.

Because the more they foment fear and prejudice, the NRA and every other pig at the trough rakes in a shitload more money.

I hate the NRA because they will not allow us to even try things.  We need to try things for fuck’s sake.  We need actual universal, comprehensive background checks and a data base for people who would purchase a gun, a dozen guns or more than a thousand rounds.  Whatever.  People who have felonies, mental disorders, or even a propensity for railing against other “groups”.  A list of people with a history of violence or meaningful conversations with the disembodied.

We have such a list for anyone who aspires to ride on a commercial airplane. No one in this country has ever been killed by a shoe bomb but we all have take our shoes off before we can get on one.

What about liability insurance?  Maybe everyone who buys a lethal weapon should have an insurance policy that will pay out the nose if the bastard accidentally or intentionally ends a life with it for any reason other than self preservation.  The notorious avarice of insurance companies could be the antidote for the infamous greed of gun merchants.

But we can’t even have that conversation.

The president is an asshole for confronting the ubiquity of guns in our country instead of just letting folks grieve.  Somehow, he is the one politicizing it because he points out an ostentatiously aberrant problem with no equal anywhere else in the civilized world.  He is chastised and pilloried by the media, our elected representatives and half the electorate for daring to point out the obvious carcinogen.

Somehow, by being nothing but forthright and germane, he’s too soon and too much for pointing out this crazy fucker would have only been marginallysuccessful at the sporadic hematoma if he was limited to plastic spoons.

I am done with you idiots that would suggest we talk about anything other than how we can realistically mitigate this problem.  Regulation.  Common sense.  There is no substitute.  There is no longer any excuse for eschewing responsibility.  Fuck you if you want to whine about the looming potential of a home invasion because violent crime is at a historic low.  Yeah yeah, criminals will always have guns.  If you don’t live among criminals then piss up a rope.  If you’re that worried about it, lock your doors and windows, get a home security system and keep a Louisville slugger by your bed.  If you’re not crazy you can even have a gun.  Seriously, despite the odds that you’ll die by it or kill your spouse being exponentially higher.

No shit, if any of this happens to you it’s unlikely you’ll be wearing your holster.

Open carry is absurd.  I don’t automatically assume you’re hung like a gnat if you own a gun but I’m confident you resemble a Ken Doll sans underwear if you think it’s normal to strap your AR15 on before you go grocery shopping or out for ice cream.   If you find yourself in the middle of some stick up, run or get on the floor like the bastard says because if you’re packing you’ll probably be the first to taste your own blood.  Stop fantasizing about being a hero.  Life isn’t a comic book and you’re not in an action movie.

So relax, and shut the fuck up, you can have your goddamn guns as long as you’re not a goofecock nutter planning to shoot up the local Starbuck’s and willing to prove it by submitting to an objective process.  Nobody wants to take your precious guns away as long as you are sane and willing to prove it.

There’s no way that’s too much to ask.

And South Carolina, take down that stupid fucking flag.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

Picking fights

There should be some sort of meter.

A scientific instrument.

To measure it.

As soon as they say anything like “Obama’s Kenyan socialist/communist policies are sinking this once proud Christian nation”, I just have to walk away.

Because, well.

I used to argue.

I used to get angry.

I’m not necessarily some huge fan of our president but I don’t hate him and my problems with him are really only because I’m paying attention.

I’ve finally figured out that no matter how much I humiliate them in my eyes they are never humiliated in theirs.  This gives me pause because what if I’m that stupid and don’t know it too?  There’s a conundrum I’ve grappled with.  I’m grateful to have worked it out and you’ll be pleased to know that I’m not that stupid.

I’m pretty sure.

Because if I look hard enough I can find the asshole in any libertarian.  It’s pretty easy to find the asshole in most republicans and it’s a regular walk in the park with just about every Christian I’ve met lately.  I know how tired it sounds but I’m completely serious when I say it really is the old fashioned magnifying glass of logic and truth.  I swear it works.  Christians will say the exact same thing and then challenge you to disprove the existence of their adult version of Santa out of a thousand other versions for the exact same reason the other religions do.  Most republicans are arrogant and hypocritical so there’s your Christianity connection right there.  And most libertarians, although there are quite a few atheists, are really just particularly narcissistic, selfish republicans.

One thing is for sure.   Sooner or later, any one of the above will utter some version of “Obama’s Kenyan socialist/communist policies are sinking this once proud Christian nation”.

So you see what I mean now.

It’s just so cheap and intellectually lazy.  Fifty year old cliches that still pack a punch for the elderly, fanatical and racists old and new.

That racist thing, with all the other brackish deception, just gets to be too much for me.  It’s too too toxic.  Too wrong.  Too bullshit.  No reason on top of no reason with all that conviction and absolute certainty.  Before I know it, I’m actually arguing about dinosaurs cavorting with children and Obama’s fucking birth certificate.

A couple of these people have fooled me lately while on my way to believing they were good people.  This is where I need an instrument.  A device.  A tricorder or some damn thing.  They actually fooled me with the Christian shit. They get all pious on you and assure you they don’t judge.  Before I knew it I was having conversations with them about music and food and sometimes even politics.

Next they say some thing or another and my neck hair starts looking for a breakfast broadcast.  As soon as they can’t defend the socialist/communism thing, they move to insisting the unbelievable amount of racist vitriol howitzered at Obama never happened.

They’re not convinced he’s a citizen.

Then they tell me all those young black men were thugs.

That’s the dirty bomb.

It’s true I’ve got a stake in it but that shouldn’t matter.  I tilt on my axis and my parasites are spilled into the ether because of the gravitational disruption around my equator.  All my markets crash.   Somewhere in there I want get drunk and beat somebody up and puke in the sink.

It’s like they’re terrorists.  If you go on the offensive at all they get ever more self righteous and obstreperous.  They actually tell you about what the look on your face will be when God comes.  They share made up anecdotes about stereotypical minorities.   They bond among themselves. They WILL lie to you.  They flaunt it with all the pompous audacity of a child convinced that the cookie is bigger by breaking it in to pieces.

I just can’t do that any more.

So I’ve decided that if I am that stupid, I don’t want to know.  I want to be like them and have the courage of my convictions no matter what.  If I am that tragically vain, I won’t be able to bear it.  If I have anything in common with them, there it is.

I’ve decided that I have a finite amount of time and I need to allot that time more wisely.

I need to be among my people.

Drinks for my friends.

 

Trumptard

So word on the street is the Donald isn’t kidding this time.

He’s about to throw his hat and maybe his ridiculous hair into the ring.

I can’t wait.

Donald Trump will perform the equivalent of racking a 12 gauge at thirty thousand feet and blowing a hole in the fuselage of the commercial airliner the rest of the GOP bench is flying on and so vacuum all the integrity and credibility out of the pressurized cabin.

They will all panic and clamor for oxygen masks but half of them will perish by asphyxiation anyway.

It gonna be awesome.

He won’t be the stupidest and probably not the most radical to ever run for president but he will be intrinsically the douchiest.

The deal with the Donald is that he is utterly contemptible.  He may not be the stupidest but he is an idiot.  I say this for many reasons but chief among them is the fact that he’s a wealthy white racist.  His whole barely concealed dog whistle birther campaign waged from the sidelines for the last six years obviates any seriousness he would assume as his what?  Birth right?

I actually watched a season of his television show about a decade ago.  I’d just bought a new house and didn’t have internet access.  It occurred to me to be the most insipid, self aggrandizing spectacle I’d ever witnessed.  It was the first and last time I ever devoted any of my attention to “reality television”.

It completely sucked because he was an asshole blowhard.

My father is very funny and a consummate judge of character.  When he sees the Donald on television he calls him “suckerface”.

Despite the fact that I don’t think a single candidate from the GOP bench is worth a shit, Donald Trump is going to drag it through a sewer.  It’s sad.  Maybe the comedy looms way larger than any potential tragedy here.

Not really.

Trump just may be the harbinger of a final nadir in American politics.  Polls show he lands solidly in the middle of the field and that is troubling enough.  Donald trump is a uniquely American cartoon.  A real live face on the side of a bus. What the rest of the world pictures when they imagine the ringleader of the ugliest American carnival.

No experience.  No bona fides.

An uninterrupted history of pious avarice and narcissism.

So the most obvious move for him is to finally run for president of America.

If you’re anywhere north of thirty five years old, the idea of a clown like Donald Trump running for president should give you pause.  Some of you might panic and indeed you should.  It’s a neon billboard announcing our total abandon of vanity and self respect as a nation.  It indicates to the rest of the world that we have resigned ourselves to the idea that this campaign will be the punchline for the end of our dignity as a country.

Donald Trump entering the race for the GOP nomination is the last straw.  I hope he actually follows through.  I think we need to own how spectacularly ridiculous we have become.

It will be cathartic.

It will be a relief.

Goddamn we suck.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

Idle Hands

She lived just a few blocks east. Just down the road. She had questionable teeth but she was always in a good mood.  She was attractive. Fun.  I wasn’t used to my affections being paid any attention.  The first independent woman I ever met.

I was twelve.

I ended up at her place one day. There was a boarded up window at the front of the trailer and some huge vented machine on the roof sounding like it was drilling everything apart. It was quiet inside though, and dark.  Red sheets instead of curtains. The school bus driver’s son was there on the couch with a buxom red freckled girl named Belinda.  Turquoise eye shadow.  His name was actually Johnny. Skinny and hollow eyed. He was greasy and stank like a man in his tank top and bell bottoms.  Trying to get Belinda to make out with him.

The dead of summer.

The rare humid day in the high desert with a dark sky and the smell of rain whenever the breeze stirred. I remember a mere dozen days like it because of their peculiar jaundice and because they barely ever happened.

Her name was Donna Stevens. She seemed okay with me being there. It was morning because children were eating toast and cereal. There was chaos and confusion. Just a few streets down from where I lived the world was entirely different. They didn’t have a yard at all. It was all dirt and the discarded.  Cardboard and crates and mechanical parts. Identical plastic step stools to the front and back doors. Little kids running around yelling at pretending. People having nothing to do with anything walking through to the next street.

Donna’s older brother was Daryl Stevens. Friendly enough. I’d met him before on the bus. They were from Detroit. He wore a tight thermal shirt and a silver chain with tooth swinging from it. On his left fist he wore a giant steel ring that made me think of a piston. Muscular and quiet. He brooded and smiled. He rubbed his hands together a lot like it was cold. Like it was Detroit. I had no reason to be afraid of him but I was. He was coiled and you could see the mean in the way his jaw rippled.

We decided on the high school that day. A picnic. We had a bag of chips and a big bottle of soda. I’d never been there before but I watched it go by everyday from the bus. I don’t remember getting there that day. Three or four miles on the way into town on our bikes.

We broke into the cafeteria first. They had piled gym mats between the lunch tables for the off season. We fell on the mats from atop everything available. Inside a huge modern structure. There were murals and bridges. We broke into the auto shop next. It smelled familiar. We had contempt for the people who would be there during any other season somehow.

We vandalized.

We celebrated with barbecue chips and orange soda.

Outside it was darker, hotter and heavier.

There was a huge field in front with a track around it.

There was this guy named Shawn Hudson. A pole vaulter. He and his dad were working out that day. We were bouncing around on his landing mat in the middle of the field. They showed up fast from wherever they’d been. I don’t remember if this guy was olympic material at the time but if you lived in Carson City you knew his name. All sinew and formidable.  An angry nervous horse.

We were punks and they were up to serious business. I figured they were pretty much right about that after what we’d been up to. They got mean pretty fast though. His dad threatened us and taunted his son to fight, to kick our asses. He was hysterical. Adamant. Indignant. Resolute. Justified.  We started to panic but Daryl Stevens watched it come. Like he’d been waiting all day for this exact thing and was now able to relax because the time for it had finally arrived.

He was still. Waiting for it to start. Nothing about his outside changed at all.

It was the first time I ever witnessed two males not afraid of each other.

It scared the fuck out of me.

Because I understood that the pole vaulter was afraid. He didn’t want this but it was impossible for him. His dad. Right there. Punks on his equipment. His father beside himself.

I was afraid for him.

Once it started it kept speeding up.

Before I knew it they were swinging on each other.

The pole vaulter from Carson City had run into a saw he couldn’t have imagined when he woke up that day. Daryl hit him maybe three times before anything else was possible. The sound of those blows caused me a languid trauma that I just can’t describe any better. I could have pissed myself but I didn’t. My brain temporarily suspended sensation. My mouth tasted like a nine volt battery.

I heard the pole vaulter bounce off the mat and saw blood where his right eye should have been. It gushed down his face and he screamed he would kill us all. He was half blind and in shock. Stumbling and tilting.  His cheek caved in. The worst thing I’d ever seen. Before anything else, the father understood his son needed to be in a hospital.

The rain was hot and plump but only sparse enough to stir the desert dust like talc on the way home.

I could smell the brush and the animals.

It finally rained hard that night.

It flooded the next day.

I don’t remember what happened to any them.

Drinks for my friends.

Dear Texas

Really?

You people floor me.

There is no way all of you can be this goddamn dumb.

How do you deserve the benefit of my doubt?

Rick Perry.

Could not remember one of three government agencies he would absolutely abolish if he were elected during a live televised presidential debate.  Despite that, he’s running again.  This time he’s wearing glasses.  Under federal indictment.

Unfuckingbelievable.

George W. Bush.

“I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.”

Same deal.  You know the rest.

What happened?

I mean, how is it that you can possibly even entertain the notion that the US military under executive order will be invading you anytime soon?

What exactly the hell is wrong with you people?

You publish textbooks for the rest of the country that actually endorse completely ridiculous shit like Moses is the father of our democracy and our founding fathers gave more than a passing fuck about Christianity.  You actually fight to include creationism in your science.  You would have modern homo sapiens cavorting with goddamn dinosaurs.

You’re just as crazy for the death penalty as you are for saving fetuses.  You lead the nation in executions. It doesn’t matter whether those pregnancies are the result of violent rape by a jaundiced and crusty alcoholic uncle.  You actually lead the nation in laws that defy and ignore women’s rights over their own bodies.  While you’re simultaneously adamant those fetuses never benefit from a single social program or basic infrastructure.

That’s the kind of stupid that just can’t be fixed.

The only people, the only place Ted Cruz is taken seriously is your state.  He said proposed federal relief for victims of Hurricane Sandy was a pork project that would serve only to further expand our national debt.  As opposed to helping people that just got their asses handed to them by God I guess.  Then he completely lacks shame in begging for federal funds for the climate disaster visiting his state now.  A disaster that just about every scientific mind agrees is the result of the human impact on climate change that Ted Cruz vehemently denies.

Every thing is is bigger in Texas, even the mendacious hypocrisy of your elected representatives.

Ted Cruz is a lying, hypocritical prick, he’s your junior senator and he is absent self awareness so profoundly that he is running for president too.

Your senior Senator is John Cornyn.  Oh boy.  Apparently you people hate the poor bastard.  Because he endeavored to end the economic maelstrom his party created by holding his nose and voting for the bailout.  He said it was a “necessity” and he was right.  Because he voted to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 per hour to $7.25, which still wouldn’t allow for a homeless man to support himself even with all the dumpster diving a man, woman or child could avail themselves of.  And he voted to raise the debt ceiling, to pay the bills he and his colleagues had already written checks for.  Gosh, no wonder you hate him.

You gave us Louie Gohmert and Pete Sessions, thank you very much.

Your entire state seems to revere stupidity and celebrate ignorance.

Highest percentage of minimum wage jobs in the country.

Lowest rate of high school graduates.

Top three in teenage pregnancy.

Dead last in voter turnout.

Greater reliance on federal aid than any other state.

You want to secede but don’t understand you’d never make it on your own without the filthy federal government lucre you so despise.

I have a number of friends from Texas and they all say you are the stupidest motherfuckers they have ever met and that is why they left.

The dirty South indeed.

The epicenter of American stupidity and the cartoon that inspires the loathing of America by every other civilized country.

I cannot for the life of me figure out what you are all so proud of.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

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