Author: djgourdoux

Sparks

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(I’m up at my cabin, working on my novel. I wrote this short scene tonight – the setting is an all night diner in a small mid-west town.)

Shortly after midnight on Angela’s first night waitressing at the Town Friar, a late twentyish man with dark bags under his blue eyes and dishwater blonde hair neatly parted on the left side walked in alone and took a seat in the last booth.  It was a Thursday night, officially having just rolled over to Friday, and as it was a week night and still almost two hours before the bars closed, the restaurant was nearly empty.

Angela approached the table with a coffee pot and a menu in hand.  She handed him the menu and asked, “Coffee?”

He didn’t look up as he turned his cup upright and took the menu. He muttered a “thanks” and buried his nose in the menu as she poured.  When she was finished with the coffee, she asked “Do you need a couple of minutes?”

“No, I’m set.”  Then he ordered bacon and eggs, sunny side up, not lifting his eyes until he was done, when he saw her for the first time.  “Say,” he said, “You’re new, aren’t you?”

“First night,” she smiled.

“Well, nice to meet you,” he replied as his eyes dropped down to her breast, where her uniform proudly displayed her name plate, “Angela.”

The following Monday, shortly after midnight, he stopped in again. This time, when she bought the menu and the coffee pot, he looked straight at her, and smiled.

“Hi, Angela.  Do you remember me?”

“Yeah, I remember you.  You were here Thursday night. Bacon and eggs, sunny side up.”

“That’s right. You must have a good memory, or else I really made an impression on you.”

“I never forget a face.  Or a tip,” she said.

“Well,” he said, “I never forget anything. I have what they call a pornographic memory.”

She laughed. As she poured his coffee, she said, “I suppose next you’re going to tell me you like your coffee like your women.”

“Not my coffee, my eggs.  I like my eggs like I like my women. Sunny side up.” She smiled and shook her head.

Once Angela settled into her schedule, the night shift Thursdays thru Mondays, he became a regular, always stopping in at about five past midnight every Monday and Thursday, always at the same booth, always with some new cheesy lines for Angela. She found something endearing about the way he delivered them. He was just self-effacing enough not to take himself too seriously, and at the same time, there was something sad about him, a sorrow that seemed to settle in his shoulders.

She learned a little bit about him, that his first name was Jim. When she asked him what his last name was, he answered, “Nasium.”

“Nasium,” she said. “You’re name is Jim Nasium.”

“That’s right,” he replied. “And trust me, I could put you through a real workout.”

She learned that he worked 2nd shift at the plastics factory. When she asked what he did there, he answered, “I’m the foreman, because I’ve got the sexual stamina of four men.”

“You’re wife is a very lucky woman,” Angela frequently replied, reminding him of the wedding band on his finger, and trying to preemptively douse any sparks that might have been igniting between them.

He’d say things like, “You must be exhausted.”

Ever the trusty straight man, she’d reply, “Why’s that?”

“Because you were running thru my dreams all night.”

The cornier the lines were, the harder she laughed. She appreciated that he came armed with the lines, touched that he’d thought about her outside of the Town Friar even if only for a moment or two. She found herself looking forward to his visits.

As reliable as his business was on Mondays and Thursdays, he was never part of the weekend bar closing scene that was the busiest time for the Friar.  Angela only saw him once on a weekend, on a Saturday night in September. He came in and sat at a table in the center of the room instead of his usual corner booth, and then she saw he wasn’t alone.  There was a woman with him, seated across the table from him, and it couldn’t be clearer that it was his wife.  The table was still Angela’s to serve.  As she approached them she saw him wince. Rather than the customary greeting she gave him the nights after work, she went the generic route, pretending she didn’t know him, and he did the same.

Angela recognized Jim’s wife as one of the many same small town girls she’d gone to high school with back in Indiana. She was still pretty, but early childbirth had expanded her hips and added a shapeless softness to her waist and face.  As she watched the two of them, an image became clear, an image of what their lives were like. This was a big night out, a birthday or anniversary, long awaited and eagerly anticipated. They’d gotten a sitter to leave the kids with, and now, at 10:30 on a Saturday night, their big evening was already winding down, and they sat there, wordless and tired, with nothing to say to one another. As Angela served them, Jim couldn’t even look her in the eye, and the source of the sadness she’d always observed in him became clear, and a part of her felt like crying.

Word Has It

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One of the best songs ever written by the great Neil Young is the amazing Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young track, “Helpless,” which includes the line “big birds flying across the sky.”  It conjures up images of herons or cranes or eagles or owls, “throwing shadows on our eyes.” It’s one of Neil’s most poetic and poignant images, and perfectly captures the feeling of being helpless.

Now, let’s look at what one misplaced apostrophe can do, and change birds to bird’s. Neil’s powerful paean to heartbreak and loneliness becomes a silly sentiment about a yellow-feathered Sesame Street character clumsily taking flight.

Such is the power of punctuation and typing.  An inadvertent space can change the kindly and distinguished therapist into the menacing and sinister the rapist.  An unintended “i” inserted at the right place can change a realty agent into something more mysterious and powerful, a reality agent.  Leave out the letter “l” and a minor vocal inflection can turn into a deadly and life threatening vocal infection.

Maddening as these can be, they are but one of many reasons why I love the English language. That it has room for Ogden Nash silliness, Ernest Hemmingway efficiency, William Faulkner bombast, and so much more, is truly remarkable.

But it wasn’t these brilliant masters who first made me fall in love with language. Rather, it was one of its great butchers.  Nobody could carve up the English language like my dad.

There were several categories of the mayhem he’d inflict.  Among my favorites:

  • Adding an extra random syllable wherever he deemed fit. Vibrate and arthritis may seem like perfectly fine words, but not for my dad – they became, instead, vi-a-brate and Arthur-ritis.
  • Strangely inexplicable word choices. More than once, while deer hunting together, we’d come to a nice hill or ridge and he’d whisper to me, “This looks like a good spot. I’m going to stand here – why don’t you go out about one hundred yards or so and make a half circle around me, maybe you’ll kick something up.  Don’t go too fast or too slow.  Just sashay thru the brush in a big half circle.” The first time I heard this, I went home and looked up the meaning of sashay in the dictionary:

          Sashay: to walk in an ostentatious yet casual manner, typically with exaggerated                      movements of the hips and shoulders.

Not the kind of lingo you’d expect while deer hunting with a burly truck driver.  If anybody reading this happened to be in the Chippewa County forest about forty years ago and thought you saw a guy dressed in blaze orange walking though the brush in an ostentatious yet casual manner, with exaggerated movements of the hips and shoulders, you weren’t hallucinating – that’d have been yours truly.

Another favorite strange word he’d use from time to time was monkeyshines. This was used whenever I was goofing off and getting on his nerves, forcing him to say “knock  off the monkeyshines.”  I’d heard the word so often that at one point in my childhood I became convinced that when I grew up, I’d make my living in the tropic, illuminating primates.

  • Mispronounced words: There were a number of these, but my all-time favorite was the time he was explaining a minor surgery he was scheduled for. When he got to the part about how they’d anesthetize him, he said “They’re gonna use Anastasia to knock me out.”  I immediately formed images of the missing daughter of the Russian Tsar Nicholas and his wife Alexandria bonking my dad on his head with a hammer.

It’s little wonder that I grew up loving puns and playing with words.

Here are some bonus sentences I’ve written without having a story to use them in:

He’d heard of the great herds of cattle, but had no concept of them until he rode the road and saw the herdsmen who drove droves of the great beasts into town.

His shirt was wet with sweet sweat.

While he napped, she grabbed the broom and cleaned up.  In other words, she swept while he slept.

It was so warm out that Fido, being a hot dog, had no appetite for a hot dog.

Horst, the singing cowboy, lost his voice.  It seems that Horst grew hoarse on his horse.

She sang a hymn to him. That Jim wasn’t here when he sang his hymn to her is neither here nor there – even if he was here, she couldn’t hear what he sang to her.

Black Lives Matter

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The past few days have been nothing short of insane, with two more questionable shootings of black men by white police officers, and the subsequent murder of five police officers in Dallas.

To be clear, nothing can justify any of these murders.  The five officers killed in Dallas is unforgivable, especially when considering the fact that their lives were taken while they were working to protect people who were protesting against them.

I have nothing but respect for the brave officers who put themselves in harm’s way to protect the rest of us from the sick and twisted few who view violence as a justifiable mean to an end. It’s an incredibly difficult job that is only getting harder, and requires men and women of exceptional courage and character.

At the same time, because their job is so important, I believe that police officers should be held accountable to a higher standard.  The stakes are too high to suffer the incompetent and corrupt few who besmirch the integrity of the badge and weaken the trust that citizens must have in the institution to maintain a semblance of order and sanity.

One of the outputs of the week has been debate about the legitimacy of the “Black Lives Matter” movement. There’s been a  lot of push back against the movement, from preposterous and inflammatory rhetoric from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, who classified the movement as a “terrorist organization,” to the many dim-witted racists who dismiss it with the broad sweeping statement that “all lives matter.”

Well, no shit. That is so obviously true.  If only the people saying that really believed it, if they paid attention to some simple facts, they’d begin to grasp that white America and black America are two radically different places.  Once one begins to understand these differences, the need for a “Black Lives Matter” movement becomes as obvious as the fact that for many Americans, black lives don’t matter.

The discrepancies between these two different Americas are so vast and complex that there are no easy sound bite solutions. For more than one hundred years, blacks have been segregated and abandoned, relegated to lives of poverty and violence, with inadequate access to education, health care and employment. As a result, a culture of cynicism, drug use, and violence has developed.  The inner city neighborhoods have become war zones, with no way out, and no way in for the abundant riches enjoyed by those outside.

How big are the gaps?  Here are some numbers I pulled down from the Center of Disease Control’s (CDC) website this morning:

Average life expectancy, U.S., birth 2010

Total population               78.7

White males                       76.5

Black males                         71.8

White females                  81.3

Black females                    78.0

 

U.S. Infant mortality rate – Deaths before first year, per 1,000 births

Total population               6.17

Whites                                  5.20

Blacks                                    11.5

 

Unplanned pregnancies from 2006 to 2010

U.S. Whites                        30%

U.S. Blacks                          70%

 

U.S. Obesity Rate

Age                        White    Black

2-5 years              3.5%      11.3%

6-11                       13.1        23.8

12-19                     19.6        22.1

20-39                     26.2        46.0

40-59                     38.7        49.3

60 or more          34.0        48.5

 

Deaths from Firearms per 100,000 people

Age                        White    Black

15-24                     14           75

25-34                     17           79

35-44                     15           33

45-64                     20           15

65 and over        27           7

 

It’s taken a long time for things to get to this point, and the reasons for the disparity in all of these numbers are many and complex, and the solutions too difficult for a simple mind like my own to comprehend.  But maybe the first step is for white America to recognize that we’re all Americans and decide that it is unacceptable for so many of our fellow citizens to be discarded and abandoned and forced to live under such deplorable conditions.  Maybe the first step is the simple acknowledgement that black lives really do matter.

Independence Day

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Today, July 4th, is one of the most important holidays in these United States:  Independence Day, or the country’s birthday, the day we declared ourselves to be a free and independent state.

To be independent, to be free, is one of the most powerful and universal dreams. It’s so powerful because almost everyone has a personal independence day that they long for.  Whether it’s freedom from a job and the independence to retire and do what one wants, independence from an oppressive spouse or parent, or independence from financial burdens, we all recognize and share the vision of unshackling the chains that bind us, that prevent us from achieving our dreams. It’s at the core of being human.

It’s easy for me to name what I dream of independence from:  Parkinson‘s Disease.

I’m at the point now where every day is literally a street fight between myself and this stupid fucking disease.  And if you want to know who’s winning, all you need do is count the bruises on my body from the frequent falls and the walls and furniture I ‘m constantly crashing into as a result of the balance issues I struggle with. Right now, at this moment, I have bruises on both arms and shoulders, one on my back, and a particularly big and purple shiner on my left hip that is finally beginning to fade.  I’ve had enough falls and crashes by now to know that it takes 48 to 72 hours after the worst ones for the pain to appear. Last Thursday night was one of the worst so far, when I fell out of bed flat on my back.  Like clockwork, the pain has started to set in this morning.

Then there’s my speech and voice.  I stutter and slur my words and mumble softly, and when at my worst, people either simply don’t hear me at all or mis-hear me, nodding yes or shaking their heads no when in fact I never asked a question.  Usually I try to speak up and make myself heard, other times I figure it’s not worth the effort and let it go.

For a guy who fancies himself a writer, nothing is more frustrating than coming across as inarticulate.

And speaking of writing, I usually try to fit my writing time into that brief window when my meds have kicked in, because otherwise, it’s getting too difficult to operate a keyboard.  If you look closely at the dates I post articles to this site, you’ll notice almost a steady decline in my output.  What used to be once a week has turned into once every other week or less.

There’s a new thing that’s been kicking my ass lately, and that’s “freezing.”  I could always tell when my meds start to wear off because I become very rigid and stiff, and movement of almost any type becomes very restrictive.  What’s new is my brain’s apparent difficulty to multi-task when I’m in this state.  Any physical activity I attempt to do, whether putting on my socks or getting out of a chair, requires my full concentration.  For example, every morning, when putting on my socks, my mind begins to drift as I think about the things I want to do in the upcoming day, and before I know it, a minute or two has passed by and I’m still sitting on the edge of my bed, sock in hand, staring at my foot.

This all sounds very depressing, and trust me, more often than I’d care to admit, it is.  But despite all of this, I haven’t given up.  I’m currently a week away from completing my second go at Parkinson’s physical therapy training, and I religiously do my stretches every day.  I still work out daily at the Kenosha Memorial Hospital cardiac center and still lift weights, trying to ignore the pain in my arms from my bruises.  And there are times, especially after I exercise, where I feel good.  I’ve learned to treasure and bask in these moments, even when they last for only ten minutes or so.

Every morning, when I wake up, I tell myself that while it‘s inevitable that Parkinson’s will eventually win, that doesn’t mean I can’t give it a good fight. Maybe, for that day, at least, I can kick its ass, and declare my own independence, however short-lived it may be.

Over the Road

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My father was born on June 28th, 1926, in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, only a week after the summer solstice, in the longest days of the year, when the sun doesn’t set until close to ten o’clock P.M.  Maybe that had something to do with his deliberate nature.  I choose the word deliberate rather than methodical, because methodical implies a certain precision, an attention to detail, that was never a part of my dad. Dad just never seemed to be in a hurry, that’s all.

For the last thirty to thirty five years of his working life, my dad was an “over the road” truck driver, which has to be the worst job description ever. What other kind of truck drivers are there? “Under the road?” An “over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house” truck driver? Calling somebody an “over the road truck driver” is like calling someone an “in an office accountant” or a “through the sky” jet pilot.  So to clarify, my dad drove the big rigs, eighteen wheelers, semi-trucks, over the long haul.

For most of those thirty-odd years, he drove by night, the last sixteen years from the Central Wisconsin terminal in Milwaukee to various Midwest destinations, from Saint Paul to various locations in Indiana and Ohio.  He’d leave on a Monday night, return home on Wednesday morning, and sleep the day away behind closed shades and a shut bedroom door.  At 5:30, one of us would gently wake him for supper, which was eaten in the presence of Walter Cronkite on a little portable black and white television. At some point while the meal was still being consumed, the phone would ring and my dad would turn the volume of the television down before he’d pick up the receiver and say, “French Embassy, DeGaulle speaking.”  The CW dispatcher was on the other end, calling to tell him where he was driving to that night, and what time he had to leave.  Then, after we finished supper, he’d go back to bed for a couple of hours before getting up and going to work. For a while, when I was in junior high or so, I’d always walk him to the door, and see him off, saying in an overly slow and melodramatically sad voice, “Bye, dear old dad. Hate to see you go.”

“Hate to go,” he’d reply in his own fake voice, always forcing a sniffle to heighten the melodrama.  It was just a stupid little thing the two of us did, and we both got a kick out of it, although even then I recognized that there was an element of truth to it. On some level, I really did hate to see him go.

Looking back on it now, I’m aware of what I had no clue of while I was growing up:  that it had to be an incredibly difficult life, and how strange it had to be for all of those years for my dad to be more familiar with the lonely landscape of the night, of the glow of headlights that would illuminate the dashed lines that his big rig would consume and swallow, than the brightly lit daylight that the drawn shades on his bedroom and motel windows strained to keep out.  So much for being born a week after the summer solstice.

It’s a testament to the strength of my mom and dad and their marriage that they raised four children (that they somehow found the time to conceive four children is impressive enough) and provided a stable and healthy and happy environment.  And to be clear, that was mostly thanks to my mom.  She always put her children first, and always made sure that my dad stayed involved in our lives. These were no minor accomplishments, especially when compared to the train wrecks that most other families of “over the road” drivers became.  My mom and dad were married for more than forty years, until mom’s death in 1994.  There were no periods of my dad being kicked out of the house, or moving in with a younger woman, or my mom taking him back, or step or half brothers and sisters. These things were the messy norm in most of the families of my dad’s co-workers.

The soundtrack to almost all of my memories of my mom and dad together is the music of their laughter. Both had finely tuned and complimentary senses of humor and a deep appreciation of the absurd. They both had the ability to get on each other’s last nerve, and both could be compelled to exercise this talent from time to time, but these times were rare. Most of the time, they set an extraordinary example of the way a couple should treat one another – with simple and sincere respect.

Dad died in August of 2011, nearly five years ago now. We were, at the time of his death, very close, just like we’d always been.  I’d started writing a couple of years previously, and I had the opportunity to share with him an essay I  wrote describing what he meant to me (read it here:  https://djgourdoux.com/2011/06/18/dad/) .  He liked it, telling me it was “excellent.”  It was an opportunity I didn’t have with my Mom and especially my oldest brother, Mike, who died without my being able to tell how much I looked up to and loved him. I miss all three of them.

I’m not big on religion, and I don’t put too much stock in an afterlife, in either a Heaven or a Hell.  I think we live on in the traces we leave on the landscape through the work we busy our hands and minds with and the love we feel with our hearts and souls.  These things change the world in minute but profound and permanent ways, and connections between our existence and the waking and working world are maintained long after we’re forgotten, like the impressions of eighteen wheels left in the asphalt of an interstate highway on a warm and black summer night.

The United States of Armed-erica

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This past weekend, forty nine innocent American lives were lost in yet another mass shooting.

I don’t know what the answer is. All of the tired old arguments have been trotted out, and as usual, minds are not being changed.  That won’t happen until the time when somebody we know personally is struck down. Until that happens, until we recognize the victims as someone we know, these shootings will remain an abstraction, something we can’t relate to.

Which exactly sums up how deeply and seriously fucked up we are as a society.  Our inability to recognize the faces of our own children in the victims of Sandy Hook, of ourselves out to enjoy a movie in Aurora, Colorado, or the friends and family members out for a good time in a nightclub in Orlando, is a chilling indictment of how desensitized we have become and how little we value human life.

I understand that people don’t want to give up their guns. I understand that many of the proposed solutions are knee–jerk reactions that will have little or no effect. What I can’t understand is the reflexive close minded defense of the status quo. So increased gun control isn’t going to change anything – if you’re so fucking smart, give us some ideas that will.

And don’t just say that the solution is more guns.  The idea that more guns will make us safer is just stupid. When the shooting is in a darkened movie theatre or a dimly lit and chaotic nightclub where alcohol flows freely, more gunfire will result in more deaths. Real life isn’t the movies, where you know who and where the gunman is, and where events unfold in slow motion. Real life happens quickly and randomly. And besides, do we really want to live in a country where we need to arm ourselves just to go see a movie or to practice our religion?

What we all need to focus on is the lives lost.  Imagine the unimaginable, getting a phone call that your son or daughter is dead, shot down and taken forever by some random, deranged dickhead. I’m guessing that the same old “bad people do bad things” and “guns don’t kill people, people do” arguments won’t stand up, and that the rage and pain would be unbearable.

We can focus on the numbers, the thousands of lives lost to gun violence, but those are just statistics. Statistics don’t live and breathe, and they sure as hell don’t bleed. Real blood is being spilled, and as long as we do nothing to prevent it, it’s on all of our hands.

Nick

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Nick1

Twenty seven years ago today, on a warm and sunny day, my wife called me at work and told me to get my ass home.  She was about to have a baby, our second.  A few hours later, around six o’clock PM if I remember correctly, Nicholas was born. From that point on, the world would be a better place.

Nick was born with a twinkle that has never left his dark eyes, like two stars that glow and shine in defiance of the otherwise black and empty void.  When he smiles, those stars ignite and light up the entire universe. From the beginning, he inherited the warmth and likeability that made my father, Nick’s grandfather, so unique.

From the beginning, he also had to endure the burden of being the most like his old man. It was bad enough that he had to look like me, even worse was that he seemed to think like me, sharing the same interest in sports and music, and the same sense of humor. I always felt proud when people would point to him and say, “He’s just like you.”  So proud that I bought into it, that I believed it.

It turns out that I was wrong.

nick3

Nick is better than me.

It’s taken some time, too long, really, for me to see this.  It should have been obvious.  But that’s me – I can be slow and dimwitted. For too long, because Nick was “just like me,” I projected my own insecurities and weaknesses onto him, bluntly pointing out “mistakes” he was making.  I thought I was questioning decisions he’d made, but it’s really not a question when you insist that you already know the answer. I regret my judgmental nature, and recognize that however much he is or isn’t like me, the journey he is on is his own, and only he alone can chart his course into the great unknown.

Now Nick is a full grown man, and on this, his twenty seventh birthday, I want to celebrate how much he isn’t like me, and how proud he makes me, and how much I love him.

nick2

 

Saturday

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Saturdays at the hospital are filled with empty spaces. It begins outside, in the almost empty parking lots, the same parking lots that on weekday mornings are filled to capacity, now populated by only a handful of cars parked close to the entrances to buildings like scattered leaves blown against a doorstop.

Inside, the emptiness fills hallways and corridors that during the week are consumed by wheeled activity, nurses or attendants pushing gurneys or wheelchairs, doctors and surgeons in lab coats with heads buried in clipboards. Rooms are filled with patients, both out and in. On Saturdays, beyond the walls of the emergency ward, there are no out patients.

In late morning the visitors start trickling in, friends and family, mothers and wives, fathers and husbands, siblings and in-laws. A little bit nervous at first, not knowing what to expect, they cling a little bit closer to each other than they normally would as they walk down the halls, bearing gifts, flowers and balloons or books, peeking into each room at the living story lying in each bed, hoping for a spark of recognition, until they reach the room they came for.  As they enter the doorway they suck in their breath and force a smile on their faces, and finally they are standing face to face with their loved one, broken and hurting and healing.  They make nervous small talk and stand in uncomfortable poses next to the bed.  Time ticks on as they talk about shared interests, while husbands or wives grow impatient and glance at their wristwatches or cell phones, thinking about the game they are missing or the lawn that needs mowing, any of the things that they worked so hard all week for. They feel it all slipping away as their spouse drones on and on, telling the patient how good he looks and how much he is missed at home and how easy he’s going to have to take it after he gets out.

Then, in late afternoon and early evening, the visitors are gone, and the patients are left alone.  The flowers and the cards and the books are all put away, and nurses make their rounds, dispensing meds or serving dinner. This is the time for rest, and as the sun descends, weariness and fatigue set in, and sleep comes.

But just before sleep, in the lengthening shadows cast through the windows by the setting sun, their presence is felt, like a cold shiver down the spine.  This is their time, and for the half hour between daylight and night, they move freely and unapologetically.  You can see them, standing behind opened doors in darkening corners, floating on the air pushed through floor vents by furnaces or air conditioners.  You can hear their murmurs between the rhythmic beeping and humming of monitors and machines, the voices of the others, the ones who came here and never left.

Cruz Control

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Ted “government shutdown” Cruz has had his comeuppance, enduring possibly the worst two weeks in the history of presidential politics.  Consider the following:

  • Desperate to stop Donald Trump, he paired with John Kasich and made a much publicized deal to unite and pool resources against Trump. In another revealing look into the Republican mind, they decided that only Cruz would campaign in Indiana and Kasich in Pennsylvania.  Apparently, they did the math, and concluded that their odds were better with only one weak candidate running against Trump instead of two.  The whole deal fell apart wen Cruz, in true Cruz fashion, changed his tune and said that there was no deal and that the reason Kasich wasn’t campaigning in Indiana was that he’d dropped out of the race (he hadn’t).
  • Cruz, despite the fact that the convention and a nomination was still two months away, decided it was time to name a running mate, selecting maybe the only person in the country less popular than him, Carly Fiorina. In an abnormally uncomfortable press conference, Fiorina sang a song to Cruz’s young daughters, which would have reminded presidential historians of the time that John Tyler sang to William Henry Harrison’s goldfish had that ever happened. While the move did nothing to generate more votes for Cruz, it was successful in adding yet another genuinely weird and head-scratching moment to an epically weird campaign.
  • At least Cruz was able to take comfort from his friends in congress, except that he has no friends in congress. That became clear when former House Speaker John Boehner ripped Cruz apart, calling him “Lucifer in the Flesh,” instantly angering devil worshipers around the world.  It was a telling indictment of Cruz’s likability that he was able to make not only Lucifer but also John Boehner sympathetic figures.
  • Trump, the presumptive Republican nut job, targeted Cruz’s father in his latest wacko conspiracy theory, implying that Raphael Cruz was involved in the JFK assassination.

At the end of all of this, after getting trounced yesterday in Indiana, Cruz finally did the only thing he could do:  he put his campaign out of its misery, all but ensuring that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee.  Let me repeat that, and let it sink in for a moment:

Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president.

Donald Trump the reality television star.  Donald Trump the conspiracy enthusiast, who believed President Obama’s birth certificate was fraudulent and who apparently believes that Raphael Cruz was involved in the JFK assassination. Donald Trump who believes that Japan and South Korea and other countries should be given nuclear weapons. Donald Trump who not only supports a ban on Muslims but also supports the state sponsored public murder of innocent family members of suspected terrorists.  Donald Trump who said that all illegal immigrants from Mexico are rapists and murderers.  Donald Trump who is not only going to build a great wall that runs the length of the Mexico border but will also get Mexico to pay for it.  Donald Trump who said that women who get abortions should be punished.  Donald Trump who enthusiastically supports state sponsored torture.

Never before in American history has such an ill informed and extreme and dangerous candidate been this close to winning the presidency.  And there is no reason to believe he can’t win.  If there’s one thing we should take away from the primaries, where the other sixteen candidates fell, it’s that Trump should never be under estimated.

We could spend a lot of energy trying to figure out how and why Trump’s gotten this far. That would be an interesting and necessary bit of analysis.  But the more immediate concern has to be making sure he doesn’t get any further.  The stakes – the future of the country, and possibly the world – couldn’t be greater.

Kitchen Light

/ djgourdoux / 1 Comment

I’ve been doing a lot of work on my novel, “I Don’t Know Why.”  Here’s a brief excerpt that I wrote tonight)

I turned right on 14th Street, under the glow of the corner streetlight. It was about five o’clock, and some of the houses were beginning to light up, early risers assigned to various morning shifts who’d go to work and unlock and open up the day, preparing the world for the sunlit landscape of the living and sending the ghosts that inhabit the night to hide in the dusty corners of darkened closets and shadowy hallways that the daylight couldn’t reach. And I thought of the ghosts that haunted me – Matt Pollard, Kelly, Gerald, even Sam Richter – and it occurred to me that their exorcism was finally within my reach.

It was still dark out when I turned off of Vicksburg Avenue onto our driveway and walked thru the yellow glow of the yard light and onto the lit-up front porch. I lifted the welcome mat and found the spare key to the front door that my dad always hid there, the subject of one of my mom and dad’s most frequent and ridiculous arguments.

“It’s such a cliché,” my mom would say. “Leaving a key under the front porch matt. It’s so obvious.”

“Exactly,” my dad would reply.

“Exactly what?”

“Tell me, would you hide the spare key under the matt?”

“No! That’s what I’m saying, it’s too obvious of a place.”

“And that’s exactly why it’s the perfect place. Any criminal looking to break in would think like you do, that it’s too obvious a place to hide a key, and they’d look anywhere else. I rest my case.”

“It’s about time,” she’d reply.  “Because your case is pretty tired.”

“You see,” he’d say, pointing at his head, “you’ve got to learn to think outside of the box.”

“So that’s where you’ve been doing your thinking,” she’d say. “I think your box must have been left out in the rain too long.”

I unlocked and opened the front door.  The light over the kitchen sink was left on for me, and it struck me that this is what parents do for their children when they’ve grown up: they leave lights on.  It seemed like a feeble and insubstantial effort to retain some semblance of authority or control over a life that time had stolen control away from.  At the same time, I was genuinely moved by the warmth generated by those lights, by the simple caring evident in the gesture that said, we may no longer be able to protect you from the darkness of the larger outside world, but here, inside our home, inside your home, we can make sure it’s bright and warm and welcoming. I entered and shut the front door behind me and looked across the living room and the dining room and in the dim light from the kitchen, I could see, in the half-light of memory, the three of us, mom and dad in their bathrobes and me, in my two piece pajamas, on a long ago Christmas morning, and at the same time I could see my unconscious twenty year old body stretched out on the floor with mom kneeling at my side, crying, and dad standing over us with the phone in his hand, calling an ambulance. I realized, for the first time, the real cost of my attempted suicide.  It was more, much more than almost ending my life.  It was an unforgivable transgression against the holy covenant of home as a safe harbor that the three of us had spent our lives together forging.