Timeless.

My grandmother had a troubled life. To say that she raised two children during wartime perhaps gives her too much credit for the work that her eldest kid actually had to do in her place. Good thing my mom’s school taught Home Ec.

Within the more functional parts of her life, Grandma was a seamstress and artist. She’d done costume work for a ballet company. And she painted. Mostly still-life stuff with fruit and flowers. One larger work was likely a response to the 1956 film of “Moby Dick,” a vigorous, folk-art depiction of the whale and several unfortunate whalers in small boats around it. Not bad, but also not something I needed to own when it came time to divvy up her stuff.

The only work of hers I was ever interested in was something I was told she’d drawn in a response to a newspaper photo, from an article about the Holocaust. Unlike her genuine oil-on-canvases, this one’s a scribbled sketch of what looks like charcoal, pastel, and ballpoint pen on crumbling, glued-together cardboard. Compared to what little I know about the rest of her work, this piece is unique.

And it’s good. Especially in light of all the other holocausts being visited upon families these past four decades, all over the world. Some of that perpetrated by former victims.

The old frame was ratty and fell apart. The art itself deserves to be reframed, but first I need to figure out how to preserve it.

Please pardon the ugly watermark.

Kenopsia for Dummies.

The last hour of each last day of most of the fan conventions I’ve ever attended felt like being turned into a deflated car tire. 

You leave the last panel, which is likely just filler or thank-yous by a presenter anyway (). You and your best friend look at each other, run to the dealer’s room, hoping to maybe find something you’d missed. Only to find that the shantytown you’ve been reveling in for three days is packing up, sounding more like the end of a great party. The sounds of people with hand trucks and folding tables is telling you to “go home,” and you don’t want to. It can’t be over yet! 

You finally make your way to that table… the one that had that pricey thing you’ve been vacillating over for two and a half days… and that guy is still there. But even from 100 feet away, you can see that he and his exhausted employees (who are more or less your age) have already taken down his displays and packed up most of his merch.

And be honest with yourself. You were never going to read that book/hang that art/wear that costume/get that 8×10 signed anyway, were you? If you were ever going to to any of those things, you’d have done them on Saturday.

Sad-walking through the corridors full of very few attendees prepping for a long trip back home, you realize you can now take your badge off, but you don’t want to. You don’t want to look like just another one of those bland hotel guests who’ve been giving you and your costumed cohort the stink-eye all weekend.

You take the badge off anyway, and exit the hotel. Late afternoon, maybe the sun is already setting. The city’s streets are full of evening commuters, even if it’s a holiday. Crowds of people who don’t give a rat’s ass about the delirious weekend you just had.

It’s getting on in the day, your buddy isn’t in the mood for yet another fast food meal, and you can’t say you feel differently. So you find the subway station, take the stairs down to the turnstiles, and silently head back to your lives. I mean, what more is there to talk about?

Ghods, it’s been decades, but I remember that late-afternoon, end-of-the-wonderful-day melancholy, because at 15 or 16, there was little difference between that feeling and the one I’d get at the end of a day trip to the beach with my parents, ten years earlier.

It’s over. Time to go back to your life. Yeah, that one. No, I don’t want to hear about it.

I need another drink.

He’s not an astronaut. He’s a tourist.

Apart from JPL’s robot probes, my beloved NASA space program—the source of my childhood’s real-world inspiration to think about our future—has been largely dormant for decades. What replaced it? Several cults of personality, flogged by publicists. 

Billionaires took advantage of our Republican-crippled public infrastructure to build private launch platforms as startup luxury tourist businesses. But that was just Phase One. Eventually, one or more of them will shake out the bugs, lure more high-profile passengers into highly publicized joyrides, iterate on the process, and reduce costs until it becomes demonstrably sustainable.

Now let’s fast forward a century, to when Bezos IV’s workers—who’ll mostly be homeless refugees of escalating climate disasters, recruited to mine asteroids for water and rare earth metals—won’t even have the right to breathe unless they pay for oxygen out of their own slave wages. Feudalism has already returned, and we’re going to bring it out into the solar system with us.

But…but… O Captain, my Captain!

Today, an affluent 90-year-old dipshit tourist took a ride on a luxury liner, and 85% of the middle-class Trek nerds on the planet got moist, believing this was about them. And the true irony is, Bezos’ media network now owns the one fictional franchise that describes this future in the most accurate way.

Your “Shithole Country.”

Dear Cousin:

You voted for a racist, predatory con-man, the majority of whose followers are the same sort of people who exterminated our family. 

They are now terrorizing the Capitol building because they lost an election. After being encouraged to violence by any number of Republican office-holders. And for some reason, they’re *not* being gunned down by militarized police, as BLM protesters were only a few months ago. 

Insurrection and open calls for sedition. To undermine a certified election.

As a reminder: this is not ANTIFA, and it’s not Mexicans, and it’s not Palestinians, and it’s not who our parents called “the schvartzes.” This is domestic terrorism being waged by insane white supremacists. 

Turn off the sound that Fox News is spinning this with. Look at the images everywhere else. Look at the meaningless destruction in what has become a banana republic. 

This is now your legacy. This is the degree to which you have helped destroy what our parents came here for.

And just a small part of it, while we huddle in another lockdown during another increase in COVID infections under a president who tried to ignore it all for an entire year. 

You are part of a death cult. You excuse its excesses with disgraceful selfishness.

We have nothing in common. 

Sure, it gets better. So much better.

I’ve posted about this subject before.

My closest living blood relations include one survivor of the Hitler era. They support Trump because “Israel” and because Fox News tells them to, every hour of every day. Between the two sides of our family, we probably lost about half to the concentration camps.

The survivor is likely living on Social Security and Medicaid while voting every two years for people who want to eliminate both.

One of the survivor’s kids married a Madison-Avenue douchebag to escape a narcissist parent. They now aspire to be Manhattanite gentry. Their bratty private-schooled kid is pursuing an MBA.

The survivor’s other kid fell down a Qanon rabbit hole and lost what was left of his mind. I now look back fondly upon a time when UFOs and crop circles were all he preached about.

My family’s great experiment—coming to America for a better life—has failed in spectacular fashion. It took us only one generation to forget everything we were supposed to have learned from the horror of 80 years ago.

One generation for most of us to embrace the rhetoric of our former oppressors by supporting their modern counterparts.

One generation to support an escalation of the new “final solution”: eliminating all those Palestinians who stubbornly refused to disappear overnight in 1967.

Cheers.

Good intentions did not absolve.

I was thinking awhile back of a guy I used to consider a good friend, who turned out to be bugfuck certifiable, in the way that publicly-functional people can hold down meaningful jobs that require high skills, pay their bills, attract a mate, and yet still harbor extraordinarily dissociative and conflicting beliefs. All with the superior certainty of self-siloed group affiliation.

Last I knew, this guy probably had about a dozen religions, two of which are Linus Torvalds. Mythologized George Lucas is probably still one. A version of Star Trek as well. At least two became Google/Alphabet’s Android division. One or more might still involve a notional Jesus in some form. Windows likely still figures in that list somewhere, considering his profession.

His devil? Apple, of course. A source of incomparable corporate evil and paragon of theft. I think he conditionally absolved me of my transgressions in this regard because of my own profession.

I miss hanging with him and talking about anything that might not invoke his volatile darkness. It became too unpleasant to navigate past the hidden hazards, and I got tired of demurring to avoid pointless arguments. When not angered by trivial disagreement, he could be a genteel and considerate person.

For her sake, I hope his wife has learned how to manage that volatility. Or counter it with her own. Sagan help any kids they might have decided to have.

And none the wiser.

 

 

“…You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”

“…look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.”

Excerpt From: Arthur Conan Doyle. “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.” iBooks.

Your papers, please.

It’s likely been decades since this country first violated the Geneva Accords that it once helped create. Today our troops fired tear gas at unarmed women and children. They were not a threat to anyone other than white oligarchs who rely upon scapegoats.

The white poor who support those very rich are themselves inches away from falling into even worse straits, but they still believe in blaming their problems on people even more powerless than they.

I’m still having arguments with evangelical airheads who somehow believe they retain the moral high ground by supporting all this. I’m the fool.

But this is just part of a continuum. We haven’t even gotten near what we should be expecting next; food riots and demonstrations by the newly-poor and dispossessed, put down by armored troops. Some of those who’ll be shot and imprisoned in internment camps might even look like someone you know.

We’ll all be told they’re dangerous subversives.

Midterm Election Day + 1.

One of my Democratic senators (Bob Menendez) was reelected last night despite the fact that he’d been investigated for corruption. His federal trial ended in a hung jury (he’d covered his tracks well), and his courthouse announcement afterwards included a Soprano-esque “To those who were digging my political grave so they could jump into my seat: I know who you are, and I won’t forget you.” Not a guy anyone should want in Congress.

But it gets better.

Reliably, Menendez’ Republican opponent (a pharmaceuticals guy named Hugin who’d raised the price of a cancer drug by something north of 800%) eagerly supported (and received support from) Trump. No amount of calling the Democrat “corrupt,”—in Youtube ads or roadside billboards in two languages—could apparently overcome the taint.

Yeah, my guy sucked and will likely continue to do so. Despite the fact that he votes sensibly on a lot of big-issue bills, his party could still do a lot better for me and my state.

But as much as my guy sucked, the other party found someone who was even worse. It’s part of how they recruit now.

I held my nose and voted. ‘Twas ever thus.

On Neil Simon.

Neil Simon wrote the first play I ever appeared in (almost 30 years ago), not to mention one other play that gave me an enormous workout nine years later.

It’s easy to dismiss his writing as comedic fluff, but there’s personal truth in the characters he created. Some broke down before our eyes, others went at each other, hammer and tongs. I played both kinds, and couldn’t help but recognize each as parts of myself. Telling their stories was akin to telling my own.

Hell of a run, Mr. Simon. Well done, sir.