Giorgia – a graduate school girlfriend – elevated her quiet nature into an imminent road hazard whenever we strolled down the sidewalk. Male drivers – necks straining, eyeballs bulging—often smashed into telephone poles or clipped fire hydrants as we sauntered down the avenue, heads up for automotive danger.
Living on the same dormitory floor— we knew each other by sight — but never talked until the night I got blind drunk after breaking up with another undergraduate, an artist who drove race cars.
Can you drive me home? I asked Giorgia, dangling keys in front of a nearly-flawless face slightly smudged by a deviated septum, a casualty of early Cocaine Wars. She sat talking to girlfriends at the last bar I stumbled into and laughed a yes with smiling eyes before leading me to the car.
I thought you were never going to talk to me, she said, after I blurted a lame excuse to lay the back of my head down on her lap while she drove.
Too forward for a sober man, but acknowledging my condition, she laughed and acquiesced, giggling as I looked skyward, vision blotted out by anti-gravity projectiles. I’d grown up on a dairy farm and remained unimpressed with mammaries, perhaps making me attractive to such fine specimens.
Giorgia made extra money tutoring “special needs” college students, so I knew there was a beating heart under the quivering mamilla.
We enjoyed each other in countless ways, but then I drove off to Chicago to try out my new degree, and she stayed behind, three years younger and needing attention.
Then Christmas arrived.
Her parents, working-class Italian immigrants with World War Two in the rearview, lived in the suburbs, so we met there, six months of my neglect shading the day. I drove out from the city and she drove up four hours from the school. She didn’t need to announce the new attitude sparked by my six-month absence. The slumped shoulders, the sad turn at the corner of her mouth, and the failure to meet my eye screamed infidelity.
I sorely missed my own family during this precious holiday – turkey, gravy, red wine, brother, parents – as I sat down to a Christmas dinner of spaghetti and meatballs. Pizza.
And when her mother bent over to retrieve a box of frozen shrimp sweating under the icebox – it says right on the cover, keep under refrigeration! – darkness turned to light.
Varicose veins, yellow smoker’s teeth, boobs running over knees, forty-five extra pounds. Unassisted grease farts lifting a faded house dress in a hot kitchen.
The future.
When we kissed goodbye and Giorgia swished back to whomever now shared her collegiate bed, I felt the weight lift, the spirit rise. A window opened.
Glowing skin, radiant eyes, gravity-defying bazookas. Under refrigeration, crammed into bras, or blowing in the wind, they could not defy gravity. Forever.
May they attract a better man while they can, while they stand — a man who can go the distance — I prayed.
Someone who neither contemplates expiration dates, nor the continuous emotional support of a sad-and-saggy princess.
People would laugh and throw disgusting objects at you for inserting blatant — although natural — irony into fiction.
The Republican Plan
Trash talkersblocked every good thing President Obama tried to do for eight years, and beyond, regardless of how their obstruction negatively impacted the poor, the sick, the disenfranchised.
***
Obama picked Janet Yellen to lead the nation out of the an economic depression caused primarily by greed, which the present Orange Tweeter drinks with a ladle.
Regulations continue to die by the handfuls as we drive the economy right back into the 2008 hole hedge fund managers drove us into, a hole now ready for a second suck since we’ve already forgotten the purpose those regulations had in the first place.
Janet Yellen, first female federal reserve director and the leader of the rebound, lost her title to a Trump appointee despite the fact that previous presidents — who exhibited realpatriotism — retained successful federal reserve chairman regardless of party. She’s declining her seat on the reserve now that a sacred white male wears the crown. If it ain’t broke, Trump’s bound to fix it.
Trash talkers assailed Michele Obama because she’s healthy and eats well, yanking veggies from school cafeterias in a fit of misplaced revenge — who needs health care? — while their corpulent spawn returned to the trough, happily sucking pizza and inhaling grease to their diseased hearts’ content. At least they can’t talk trash with their mouths full.
The Plan
Trash talkers so lazy and greedy they couldn’t drive to their fabulous oaisis, paying Amtrak to haul their sorry butts over to the Greenbrier, lying just a day’s drive from Washington, all transportation and lavish opulence foisted onto the backs of Everyman tax payers.
— from the Greenbrier website
Enter trash truck.
Note: it was nice to see Republican office holders attempting to revive (unionized?) trash truck employees forking over payroll taxes for fully-subsidized Congressional health care and luxury trips.
This writer salutes all manual laborers across America run over by the government train in uncountable ways each and every day, just as I mourn those lost in the tragedy.
Which is one more reason this monstrous irony requires a spotlight.
***
You have to hand it to the Grand Old Popinjays.
They’re organized.
Democrats remain rudderless because they lack a true leader.
Democratic Congressmen make “suggestions.”
Here's how weak Democrats are at the root level: one of the first things President Obama did after his inauguration was speak to all the school children of America. At the time I taught black and Hispanic high schoolers, so I projected the speech on the big screen and said when it was over:
"I know it's not a level playing field yet, but this has to be encouraging."
After a short pause, one of the black males in the back yelled in reply:
"He ain't black!"
Say what?
***
The reason Republicans dominate? They have a simple plan and they are entirely unified around it.
Destroy anything Obama ever did.
(Regardless of the needs of fellow citizens).
It’s something small, and completely contrary to their own perception of patriotism, but at least it’s a semblance of organization, a mighty weapon in the face of none.
Haven’t written much the last seven weeks due to a trip to the northern climes, but I did enter Jellybeanersin several indie book contests.
Here is the first result and a link to more reviews.We live in an interesting time, when excellent writers [seem to] outnumber addicted readers.
Bizarre.
But great in the sense that a deep record of humanity and its travails will be an open book for future generations, with talent to equal the giants of the past.
Readers’ Favorite Bronze Medal. Click to read the review.
The motivation behind Jellybeaners — to shine light upon the opioid epidemic taking Americans at the rate of fifty per day —remains front and center in the news, and burns painfully in our collective hearts.
Logically, one should abstain from indulging in news the first thing in the morning.
Soaking up death, stabbings, arson, child neglect, fracking, meth-lab explosions, sex slavery, environmental disasters, racist cops, neglected infrastructure, enduring slave wages, endless CEO profit raking, idiotic politicians blubbering pie-in-the-sky promises with no intention of following through … mixing all those nauseous facts with prodigious amounts of caffeine … well.
That can’t be good for the psyche.
But the routine never varies.
Out of bed, slurp coffee, devour news, cautiously turn to the obituaries, brace for the blow.
This week?
A recent law-school grad with a long history of academic success, a loving family, and a promising future. Twenty-seven-years-old. Here’s a brief paraphrase from the obit:
God protected him many times when his parents were unable. His earthly life ended unexpectedly but his everlasting life has begun.
We’ve watched the font-size of our local print paper decrescendo for thirty years to the point where it’s barely readable.
After all, they have our subscription money, and we’ve read the news on our iPhones and internet feeds, old print news takes up valuable paper and ink, so we’ll minimalize it, shrink it with a pissant font, and look for other revenue streams.
To balance the loss of readership and revenue to online outlets, our local newspaper doubled the size of its obituary text, colorized large head shots of the recently-deceased, and unknowing created a daily parade of local folk now leaving eternal digitized images.
If you plan ahead, love to scribble, and can afford to throw even more cash at a local newspaper publisher, up goes your twin column half page manifesto, a.k.a. bird-cage lining.
Obituaries sell local papers. Furthermore, the family of the deceased wanting to run an obituary is billed up to $600— approximately five times an annual subscription price — to purchase the publication of their loved one’s death notice.
And newsprint corporations will continue to milk grieving readers until obituaries naturally migrate whole herd onto the “everlasting” cloud — which is subject to evaporation any second of any day.
***
So we slurp coffee, wipe crust from our eyes, and suffer the dark parade of endless young-people obituaries — two or three “mysterious passings” per week — digitized head shots projecting health, vitality, and promise … while the shocking dissconnect of truth and image confounds the thoughtful reader.
Cancer victims either declare outright the nature of their earthly battle, or direct donations toward eradicating the scourge, which indicates the cause of their passing.
But prescription or illegal opioid drug deaths — cloaked in self-painted societal shame — lie hidden between the lines of the family-or-funeral-home-produced death notice.
We’re talking perhaps 2-3 opioid-connected deaths per-week in a region supporting a newspaper circulation of 43,000.
National statistics suggest nearly fifty-two Americans perish every day from prescription opioid overdoses — eighty per day if you figure in heroin— so two-or-three deaths a week in such a tiny demographic seems outrageous.
Heroin deaths are linked to the pill trade because recently skyrocketing street-prices of prescription opioids allow cheap heroin to flourish across the land, hitting rural states and Appalachia especially hard due to decades of high unemployment and a culture slow to raise education standards, though the epidemic appears to cross all lines, racial, religious, geographic, and socio-economic.
Many of our locals succumb to fentanyl, fifty times more potent than typical street heroin. They go to a party, try a little, forget how much they’ve taken, dab a little more, and before the dawn appears …. the sun sets on their precious lives.
The alarming potency of fentanyl — and even more horrendous Chinese exports washing ashore — steals our best and brightest, the folks we’re staking our future upon.
Opioid availability first soared (in recent history) after 26 states and D.C. legalized weed in some form and jerked market out from under Mexico, who made up the loss by dumping cheap heroin and opioid-laden chemicals on an already addicted North America poised to dull the pain with ever increasing amounts of opioids, a class of drugs that has debilitated us since the Civil War.
***
One family, six months ago, actually came clean in the second paragraph of their boy’s obituary, saying that the deceased fell victim to prescription drugs after losing his father two years prior. The son couldn’t bear the loss.
That’s the only self-admission I’d seen in thirty years of obituary reading, though I must confess that for twenty-eight years I only skimmed obits for astounding stories of WWII vets who’d conquered the world and returned home to build new lives.
***
The truth remains: we all wear a mask.
The Coalition for Positive Energy
This concept came home to me thirty years ago when I taught Hawthorne’s The Minister’s Black Veilto a class of honors English students in a suburban Chicago high school.
A small village church must deal with their minister, Mr. Hooper, who takes a notion to don a black veil covering his upper face — much like a widow would wear at an old-fashioned funeral. Everything goes south when he chooses to leave it on.
Permanently.
He becomes a better minister after this decision, ironically, and though his fiancé breaks off their engagement, she watches his entire life and comes to be with him on his death bed, where he admits all of us wear a mask. Upon his death, Mr. Hooper is buried with the veil in place.
Let’s look into the mirror.
When we’re at Sunday school, we wear the Sunday school face. Job interviews conjure a competent strong obedient flexible yes-sir face. Thursday night dollar-draft-beer Raccoon Club meetings at the local sports bar requires a special façade.
And since random acts of unprovoked violence occur in this crazy world — say the unexpected death of a child through accident or SIDs — well, that means perhaps even God wears a mask.
No one is immune from the natural instinct to project a happy face while masking reality through omission.
Facebook is simply a party-line on steroids, a party line with enough bandwidth so a billion users may share photos, text, videos, music, and fake news.
For whatever psychological reason, the vast majority of us prefer to keep the laundry in the closet and to project the shiniest image of ourselves and our loved ones, clean photo-shopped textually-tweaked images of success and prosperity.
Let’s face it, we’re all the billboard producers of our archived lives, turned digital and pulsing across the electronic social universe — Google Plus, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, et al. — social media entwined through massive servers grown muscular through carrying an ever-increasing crescendo of porn to the sex-starved masses. Thirst begets thirst.
Irony. Cleanliness afforded by dirt.
As a result, we can now Photoshop and video-edit our pimples and purple lives while projecting sanitized, filtered, smiling, I’m so happy, self-assured-selfies, eternal masks frozen in digital clouds of memories, gigabytes juggled in “perpetuity” for dollars a month.
Even when people freak out, breech social barriers, and reveal their dark sides on social media, it’s often ignored until the post mortems roll in.
Dylan Roof
When an individual’s mask slips down, the tribe doesn’t WANT to look, or doesn’t want to acknowledge some of us actually DIDlook and failed to respond.
Which brings us back to the Double-O-Demons.
opioid deaths 2015
Jellybeaners is a topical novel about opiates and obituaries, and the fact that shame drives many of our decisions.
And until we supplant shame with grace and help people recover from addiction through counseling, financial incentives, and work opportunities, well.
