We Repeat The Nonsense We Hear. Find Decent Nonsense. 

Sick Dogs and Our Bad Conscience

I spent a bunch of time with a sick dog this weekend. I’ve known this dog since she was 8 months old and rowdy as hell. I really thought that she might die. I cried buckets. It looks like it isn’t this dog’s time though. As a result, my emotions are still pretty raw. I ain’t got tears to cry but I’ve still got plenty of feeling. 

Compassion that moves me to anger. Furious anger. Righteous anger. I don’t know what it is about the drive home from work that makes me think about all the big picture stuff. Big picture stuff? Shit. That’s so inadequate but I don’t know what else to call it. It’s burning anger about all the injustice that’s bigger than me. The injustice that happens while I watch a clock. It’s monstrous shit. It’s shit for The Hague. It’s shit that gets Meryl Streep Academy Awards for starring in fucking movies about it. It’s shit that grieves my fuckin’ spirit but at the end of the day doesn’t even really inconvenience me because of the accident of my birth. 

My country puts little brown children in concentration camps. They cry for their mommies and daddies. These facilities are often run for a profit and the guards go home, drink beer, watch the game on occasion and probably beat their wives and then promise to never ever do it again. They can do what they do and then they can go to Home Depot or Cabela’s and never give a second thought to what they are doing to earn a pay check. Banality of evil. They’re just doin’ their jobs. Maybe they’re all grim about it. Maybe they’re tormented. Maybe they lose sleep over it. I know some of ‘em enjoy it. They are having the time of their lives.

Yeah, immigration cops are bastards. It’s a popular thing in certain circles to say that all cops are bastards. I didn’t use to believe that but I’m starting to. I got a relative who is a deputy sheriff. I’ve watched him joke about running over protesters. I’ve seen his buddies mock African American Vernacular English. I’ve seen them drink a beer while rockin’ a Punisher skull on their chests. They’re bloodthirsty, suburban warrior fascists. They are the soldiers of this sad apocalypse. 

The enforcers of this shameful order are one thing but then there are the people on the sidelines. There are people who see the pictures of weeping children behind chain link fences and are thankful. They smile. They could not be happier. They are seein’ America become great again. They are seein’ people who are not like them suffer. They are watching a man who says the vile shit they say in their taverns and their country clubs in front of the whole nation proudly and without any shame at all. They got a man leading the country who has given permission for the demons that lurk inside them to run wild. 

I sit here at my desk and pound my keyboard and I got no idea what to do. I wish that I could tell you what to do. Tomorrow I’ll go back into work, the machine will grind on and I kinda hate myself because anything I might do or say is ineffectual in the face of this grave evil. 

Here’s what I’m going to do. It’s not much. All I can think to do right now at this moment is to tell you the truth as I see it. It is that bad. My country is engaged in a great evil. If there be a God and that God is just, he must punish us. I do not know if there is a god. I do know evil though. We’re seeing it. I don’t give a flying fuck about flags or anthems. I care about what’s true. 

God. Damn. It. 

I will never forgive the people who perpetrated these atrocities. As far as I am concerned, names like Trump, Miller, Sessions, Kelly and the whole Satanic cabal of them deserve to live in infamy. They should be hauled before a court and sentenced for crimes against humanity. 

I get lost in the night's machinery

with nothing to see but what there is to see

synthetic angel glow and Internet Protocol that never sleeps

keeps me company

and that troubles me

Additional Notes on How I Learned to Love the Lord

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about what I wrote earlier today. Mostly I’m not too satisfied with it. I feel like things could have been more lucid and more interesting. There was so much that I could have said that I did not end up saying. 

Faith or lack thereof is a challenging thing to express. There was a lot that just got lost or at least that’s my feeling. 

The story that I told myself as a Christian was that I was a reformed criminal that found redemption. Reformed criminal? I was a kid that did something dumb but in my mind, I might as well have been knocking over liquor stores or have been some kind of budding serial killer. I had a desire to convey to people what a wretched sinner I was if I ever got the chance. I look back on this and I’m both amused and disturbed. 

People give reasons for doing things. I don’t know that I buy too many of the standard answers given about why someone takes the dive for J.C. especially if it is couched in theologically “correct” language. People can say that they became conscious of their sinful nature and of their need for a savior but I often suspect there is a more interesting, more honest, more genuine reason. If someone tells me they believe simply because they like Jesus or it just kinda seems correct or just wants it to be true then I respect that a lot more than some bullshit they half remembered from a text book or a tract or something. Wow, this paragraph sucks. Moving on. 

My faith was nonsensical. It was utter bullshit. It basically revolved around feeling guilty for having sexual desires. I got really tired of hating myself for natural desires so I kinda just said fuck it and quit. Hating myself for liking the idea of sex made no sense. I wasted a bunch of time hating myself for a stupid reason when I should have been hating myself for being a Republican. 

The marriage between evangelical Christianity and conservative politics is an awful thing. It’s destructive. It baptizes ideas like peace through strength, low capital gains taxes, gutting the social safety net and other abominations that make the world a terrible fucking place to live. I can’t be part of that no matter how bitchin’ those praise songs are. 

It’s ultimately just not a very adult way of looking at the world. Adult is the wrong word. I just don’t think it’s a very honest way of looking at the world. 

“it’s the soul that’s erotic.”

— Adélia Prado, from “Dysrhythmia,” The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems (Wesleyan, 1990)       (via metaphorformetaphor)

The Fail-Son

My parents had two kids. I’m the oldest by a year and some change. I also happen to be the one that failed. I’m the fuck-up. I’m the problem. I’m the one they worry about. I believe the prevailing term these days is fail-son.

I’m a fail-son. Being a fail-son is not such a bad gig if you happen to come from money. I do not come from money.

You might think I’m being too hard on myself. Maybe I am but what I’m doing here is telling the truth. I’m giving you the truth even if that makes me look like a feckless piece of shit.

The longest period of time that I’ve ever held a job is six years. I left that job on impulse. I left that job on account of boredom. They were going to fire me eventually. I was on and off FMLA for depression. It was only a matter of time so one day I went in, I fired off an email to my direct supervisor and told them I was resigning and that my resignation was effective immediately and that was that. Yeah, I was depressed and often was burdened with an anxiety that made me feel like the apocalypse was imminent. See, that’s such bullshit. It was always anxiety over shit that was minor. Maybe I’m gonna come in to some snippy email from the boss. Maybe I’m gonna have some awkward social interaction. When I look back, it’s clear to me that the primary motivator for walking was boredom. I gave up a steady paycheck and relative stability because I was bored.

I’ll admit that that wasn’t the brightest thing I ever did.

After that, it was about 5 or 6 years of bouncing around from bad entry-level gig to worse entry-level gig. What I ended up doing more often than not was working as a call center agent. If there be circles of Hell, I’ve very little doubt that one of them is a god damn call center. I did low-level technical support. 95% of problems got fixed by having the inept soul turn the uncooperative piece of technology off and then back on again. You might think that doesn’t sound so bad. Alright. Imagine being chained to a phone for 8 hours a day. Imagine call after call after call after call after call. Imagine doing this at odd, wacky hours. Start at 3 PM and get off at midnight. Imagine sitting at your desk near the end of your shift on your Friday (Your Friday. No one else’s Friday. You work weekends so your Friday is a Tuesday.) and you’re praying to whatever Gods may be that you are not gonna get a fucking call. See, you don’t want a call. You have no idea at all what that call is gonna be. Every time you hear that tone in your ear, it could be a simple 5 minute call that is relatively pleasant or it’s going to be that call that makes you question every single fucking decision you ever made in your life that possibly led to you sitting in that desk taking that call. So many times, the fickle finger of fate poked me in the eye and I ended up talking some guy through installing some piece of software a half hour past quitting time as he gets increasingly more irritable and pissed off. I lived in dread of that. On my days off, I still felt dread. All I could think of was going back to it and a lot of the time, I didn’t go back. I’d call in sick, stay home and live in dread of going back to the shit. I can remember driving to work and having mad envy for so many people. I envied the guy who was out running. I imagined that maybe he’d go back to his home and he’d just chill for the rest of the day knowing that he had already done the hardest thing he was going to do that day. I envied the guy who was out there landscaping. I had no idea what kinda headaches landscapers endured, but sign me the fuck up.

It got to the point where I just could not stand to do it anymore. I could not hold down a job. I could not cover my bills. I had no choice but to return home.

The home I grew up in.

The place that doesn’t quite feel like home anymore. The room I sleep in has a floral bedspread and a statue of Jesus hanging on the cross.

I come home from the office to the Fox News Channel blaring all loud, sinister and mean. The people who raised me to be decent, kind and honest believe in President Donald John Trump. My mother is a Mexican national. She speaks English but not perfectly and with a noticeable accent. This is a woman who waited tables. Fuck. I can remember being ashamed of the fact that my mother waited tables but she did that for me. I hate myself for having been ashamed of that. I denounce Trump and she tells me that I’m jealous of his success and that every woman who accused him of sexual assault was being paid to do it. My dad is a simple man. He never missed work but he bitched about work all the fucking time. When I gripe about the grind, I catch myself sounding just like him. He loves those cheesy, underdog sports movies. I think he sees me as the underdog that’s eventually gonna win. Trump is no spunky underdog but my dad is in his corner for reasons I just will never fucking comprehend.

I hate the fact that they support Trump. I cannot ever let that go. However, I’m undeniably grateful that they opened their home up to me, that they took me back in. I realize that not everyone has family that can take them in when times are tough. That keeps me awake at night.

I’m a fail-son that should be hurting a hell of a lot more but somehow I’m not.

I wanna lick everywhere you'll let me.

Laura Ingraham

I cannot stand to listen to that woman’s voice. 

I suspect that I’m getting better at this. What is this? That would be writing. Pause. Scratch chin. Take sip of water. Get up and close the door. I sit with my feet up on the desk. My keyboard sits in my lap and I type away. 

It was one of those angry drives home. It was one of those drives home where I just got murder in my heart. I just got weaponized hate up in me. Anything I might possibly say is gonna be barely coherent. I’m gonna shout. I’m gonna keep shouting til I can’t anymore. I’ll be out of breath and none of it will be cathartic. I won’t feel better. I hate that kinda anger. I’m glad I didn’t do that today. It’s anger at the world and the people who run it. People talk about evil. They talk about people who do monstrous things. They talk about ‘em like they got glowing red eyes and how you can smell sulfur when they walk by. I believe it was Hannah Arendt who talked about the banality of evil. It’s these utterly unremarkable dudes like Scott Pruitt and Jeff Sessions who fuck up the world. They don’t look like monsters but what they do is monstrous. They get to manufacture a hellish reality for millions of people and then they probably go home and watch Blue Bloods or Chicago PD or something and then maybe their wife gives them a half-hearted hand job and then they are back at it the next day. That’s how they do. 

It’s good that I’m diligent at putting words to the page almost every single day but maybe I need to strive for more than that. I don’t know what exactly. I think the paragraph above had its moments. I fantasize about poetry and literary journalism. 

Making a living distracts me. Takes too much time, ya dig? Shit. That fucking game has us all by the nuts. 

I think to myself, “Where the fuck you going with this? Do you just want to stop? Chill the rest of the night?” 

I really do. 

I will actually. 

Random embarrassing fact #2

I don't know that this really qualifies as embarrassing but it might be. I try to cry at least once a week. Basically, I sequester myself and either think about something that makes me sad or touches me and just let the flood gates open. Why the fuck do I do that? That's a good question. It's not something that I entirely understand but I think the reason I do it is to re-connect with my humanity. That's not to say I'm like a fucking Vulcan most of the time but the world we got can be de-humanizing as fuck. It re-connects me with something pure. Like, that which animates the forces that liberate. And fuck, sometimes I gotta cry, ya dig? Okay. I guess also it's solidarity with people who have a reason to cry. Shit. That is cheesy as fuck but that's what's in my heart, I think.

I think I’m slowly getting over myself. The operative word is slowly.