Broken World

Its falling apart faster than I could have ever imagined. Watching the gears and wheels fly off the mechanism is no longer fascinating or terrifying, it is merely kind of sad.

Summer is almost over.

How many summers do I have left? (Tom Waits asks that in the Francis For Coppola movie"The Outsiders") As I become increasingly obsessed with the passage of time, why is it that I can't see anything positive?  What the fuck is happening in this country? The burden of Summer is that it is the time when you are supposed to have fun and enjoy yourself, but there is an obvious time limit, so you better make the most of it, because the looming dread of Winter quickly approaches.  Hurry up and  fucking make something of the beautiful damn weather you fucking putz!  Run outside and FUCKING BE HAPPY! What do you do if you can't see anything ahead that is even remotely enjoyable? What do you do then?

Friends are dying. I can't go see them or I will self destruct. My mother is old and seeing her makes me sad. I fear my bad mood has infected my loved ones.

Doug Henning says it's all an illusion.

Vampire Capitalism Unleashed and Unbent.

The vampire is an over used metaphor, but when the bloodsucking shoe fits, it must be worn. The evil is so large and proud of itself it doesn't need to hide anymore. The people of the United States are a heard of cattle, kept in a veal pen for the rich to drink our blood and slowly shrivel us into poverty. The people I am concerned about are the vampire gangster capitalists who are recreating the European aristocracy, to whom the goal is not just to amass an unbelievable fortune but it is imperative that some one lose in the process: the misery of others is just as important as the wealth you have. How else can you explain the Trump junta's policy of creating demonic mischief that succeeds only when people are made more uncomfortable and threatened? Betsy DeVos is ruining education in favor of for profit loan and schooling institutions, her BROTHER Erik Prince runs Blackwater who wants to privatize the war in Afghanistan for profit, together they make money on the caged children of legal asylum seekers. Stephen Miller, when not killing and eating co-eds in the basement of his Georgetown bachelor pad, invents new misery for legal immigrants. Worst of all is the wanton disregard for the destruction of the very planet we all share. As I write this, our air is worse than Bejing's, California is suffering from fucking FIRE TORNADOES. The administration told us today we  no longer have to conserve gasoline". It is not enough that they have the money- they need you to be destroyed  in the process. This can be applied again and again; to healthcare, to big pharma, to the drug crisis and the homelessness epidemic. The Flint water crisis? Really we couldn't fix that one? And that was Obama...I can see a future in which a company will buy your suffrage rights and vote for you in return for relief from the horror that they can inflict on you or your family. Of course there are good rich people- who care and want to do good. Bill Gates for one, but they are out numbered by those that have become something else.  Bill Gates sees it as his job to give it away. It remains to be seen if he can make a dent in the growing evil that infects the land. We might not need a blue wave in 2018, we may need an exorcist.

Yet another apocalyptic thought upon falling asleep...

Strangely it occurred to me as I was falling asleep last night, what if the rapture already happened and God only saw fit to take Mr. Rogers, because none of the rest of us could measure up? I guess I am okay with that.

Maybe we were expecting there would be fireworks?

This is not a real belief. This is not something that I subscribe to. This is a theory. I call this the Nacime Theorem, after the cameraman who first brought it up to me. He doesn't actually believe it either, at least I don't think he does. Nacime is a very normal, college educated, talented camera man, well known and liked in our community. It was probably a random thought fired off from a creative mind engaged a very usual day's work. He  and I were working on set, on a elaborate corporate talking head set up. It is remarkably manual labor, done mostly by people with too much education, and the discussions are frequently quite interesting. Sometimes they verge on the type that were popular in freshman dorm rooms, whilst clustered around a bong shaped like a hobbit or something. On this particular day, discussing the destructive and surreal turn of American politics, Nacime postulated the following, which he claimed to have previously heard someplace and it was this:

The Mayans had been right- the world really had ended in 2012, and what we are now experiencing was the residual consciousness of a dead world unable to fully grasp it's fate. 

It honestly seems to be almost as good an explanation as I have for the world at this time. This would mean that somehow we now find ourselves in a sort of world wide episode of "Lost", with guest star Donald J Trump as the Joker. It is tempting to believe, in order to relieve one of the burden of collaboration in the grand scheme of things to say that it's all a fever dream and we will wake up, or in this case accept our demise. We can chuckle at the dark humor of it, trying to forget the way the earth is heating up, and nationalism is running rampant and that we have begun to see how we could exterminate ourselves with out ever even intending to do it. I remember December 21, 2012, the day the Mayan long count calendar was set to end, very well- I totalled my wife's Honda Fit on a corner three blocks from home. Maybe, the jarring impact and inflating airbags were my sign that the end had come. Could Brexit, Russian meddling, the second term of Obama and most importantly the rise of the twitter demon Trump be just a sad misfiring consciousness leftover? Could all my personal depression and anxiety be the gasping last thoughts of a drowning soul? Are we all on this sinking ship?

I don't really believe this, but it feels shockingly right to me some days.

Redux, And Beyond.

We are still in here someplace. Under the gray hair, the glasses and the aches and pains these two people are still here, just in case anyone was wondering.

It's an incredible gift to have some one to love for over thirty years that you still are excited about. I am the luckiest man in the universe.

We went to Montreal for our 30th anniversary on July 23rd, a city we had never been to before. It was beautiful.

More Endings, Beginnings and Hope.

Behold: our beloved son and heir, Thomas, named for the apostle that questioned, like any normal human might, but was loved anyway. His has finished eighth grade and now can put the social cannibalism of Middle School behind him. As our youngest it is hard not to want to hold on and wish that they could be ours forever, but we now start to let go. He is sometimes a challenge to be around and difficult for his increasingly elderly parents to understand, but he is the beginning of a fine person, who I am very proud of. We have tough years ahead, but God willing it will be okay.

Thanks for being a good kid Tom.