He popped the black beauties as he drove to work. He had not gotten any sleep at all, but this was not the first time he’d pulled an all-nighter. Being young had its advantages and being able to stay awake all night was one of them. Of course the drugs helped, and he had enough drugs to last for as long as he needed them to.
Mary, Bea and Tommy were waiting in the parking lot when he got there. He was not late at all, was right on time, and as per the usual, he saw them getting out of their cars when they saw him pulling into the parking lot. If it had been him there already, as soon as the last person arrived he would have been getting out of his car.
So there they were lined up at the front door while Tommy opened it with his keys. Bill was standing behind Mary who was standing next to Bea. As they waited, he reached up and pinched Mary on her behind under her coat.
“Ain’t you got nothing better to do?” she asked.
“Not really.”
“You could pinch me,” Bea said.
“I don’t need to hear this,” Tommy said. “I don’t need to hear it, I don’t want to hear it and you’d all be better off if none of it was happening.” Just before he opened the door he turned back toward them and said, “Mark my words.”
They walked through the hall and did what they always did. Bill shut down the burglar alarm. Bea and Mary went into the kitchen, turned on the lights and put down their things. Bea started to make coffee right away in the small Bunn machine. Mary went around back to her station and read the notice board, a standard cork board with pushpins. The menus were posted there as were any notes she had left for herself. When she came back around to the line she asked Bill if prime rib had been left over. Bill told her yes but they still had to cook one. He said he’d check downstairs when they got down there to see if a round needed to be cut.
Before they went down the stairs, the coffee dripping in the coffee machine, Bill flipped on the exhaust fans. The kitchen woke up immediately. There was a groan, a hum, a squeal almost like a loose fan belt on a car when it was being started, and then the exhaust fans kicked in, droned and polluted the air with its heavy noise.
With the exhaust fans running, Bill turned on the Garland. He opened the grease drawer to make sure it was empty, which it was because he had emptied it himself. Then he looked up into the mesh squares which were the filters for the exhaust fans. They seemed pretty clean. They were professionally washed once a week.
Downstairs, Bill went straight to the meat room. He checked inside the walk-in to see that Henry Lee had left a round already cut. All he had to do was cart that big chunk of meat up the stairs.
When he returned to the linen room, before he actually got to it, Bea tossed him a uniform. He saw Mary reaching in to get herself a kitchen dress. Then he watched as she began stripping, Bea too. In a few quick moments, both Bea and Mary had hung up their coats and stripped down to bare feet and underclothes. Mary wore a white slip and a white bra. Big as she was, Bea wore full old-lady drawers and a bra fuller than Mary’s.
Carrying his uniform as he’d caught it, a smile on his face, Bill stepped up to them. He kissed Bea on the bare skin of her breasts, first one then the other. He kissed Mary on her lips then he reached down, lifted up her slip and kissed her on her white panties.
Mary slapped him upside the head.
By Peter Weiss
Bill reached his hand down and patted Arlene on the butt. “Somehow I get the idea we’ll have plenty of time to talk about it,” he said. “For right now, bottom line is I survived. Most important, I learned, and not for the first time either, that God is there with us and He has His own plans for us.”
“And you know this how?” Arlene asked. She reached behind her and lifted her robe, moved Bill’s hand so that it was on her bare behind.
Bill kneaded her flesh gently. He allowed himself to enjoy touching her but he did not do anything overtly sexual. He found the juncture of her thighs and her buttocks and played there a bit then moved his hand up to the small of her back. He held her firmly against him, leaned in and kissed her, a gentle kiss at first, then an exploratory one. He felt Arlene eagerly kiss back so that their tongues met and played together.
Bill thought as they kissed. He recalled the second night in the workhouse when the tough came for him, when the tough asked him what he was in for, when without thinking he responded truthfully, saying it was for assault and battery. The tough asked him if it was his wife he beat up. Bill told him, no, it was a cop.
That wasn’t exactly true. The statement was true but the implication was quite incorrect. He didn’t beat up anybody. He grabbed the guy closest to him but others grabbed him from behind, knocked him out and carted him to the paddy wagon. They weren’t cops either. They were FBI.
Bill remembered. Bill would remember for his whole life. Bill would never forget. Bill could never forget. He could never forget any of it.
He’d put the tough in a quandary and the tough, maybe a real tough guy, was probably not too bright. He stood looking puzzled, as if in a dilemma. Bill remembered seeing him thinking, trying to decide what course of action to take next. Bill’s answer had caught him off guard, completely surprised him.
Luckily and most fortunately, the tough nodded, turned and walked away, his crew following behind him.
Later, locked in the workhouse, Bill had plenty of time to reason it through. If the tough went on and attacked him, he would be attacking someone who had fought a cop. That was bad etiquette. Then, in a different light, if Bill had attacked and beaten up a cop, maybe, Bill imagined the tough was figuring, maybe Bill could take him or maybe this guy he had approached would give him such a good fight that he might lose his status as the dorm tough.
That’s how it worked down.
Arlene’s tongue tasted good. His hand on her back kept her pressed tightly to him. He could feel her relaxing against him, felt her letting her body mesh with his.
“You going to tell me?” Arlene asked. “I’m interested in why you believe God is there with us.”
“Of course I’m going to tell you,” Bill said.
“Well?”
Bill moved his hand from where it was back down to where her thighs joined and met her buttocks. He pressed his fingers between her thighs indicating that she should spread them.
At first Arlene did not move her legs, but when Bill increased the pressure of his fingers, she took his hint.
“What?” she said.
“I don’t know,” said Bill.
“You want me?” Arlene asked.
“I don’t know,” said Bill. “I’m certainly thinking about it. You certainly are appealing. But no matter what, now isn’t the right time.”
He touched Arlene but only for a few seconds, just long enough for her to kiss him even harder and moan slightly.
By Peter Weiss
So the monkeys are busy at work. We saw them at their best last week, on Friday, when they had that hearing, which, like most of what they do, was far removed from what they’re supposed to be doing.
Monkeys indeed!
Actual monkeys, however, are much better animals. They’re honest. They don’t lie, deceive, play with words or deny what they’ve done. WYSIWYG. With actual monkeys what you see is what you’ve got.
Over the weekend, the monkeys in the House added a little condition to the negotiations that were supposed to be taking place. This was breaking news late last night. Negotiations for keeping the government open et al. seem to have broken down. A new condition was added that has something to do with limiting ICE in doing its job. And, of course, there is still no real consideration for giving the president the wall by any name you want to call it.
So the monkeys have been acting like monkeys again.
They were elected to serve the people. They were elected to govern the country. First and foremost, the responsibility of the government is to protect its citizens. That, ladies and gentlemen, historically is why people join together in governments.
People don’t elect people to go on and spend their money indiscriminately. Or, they don’t elect people to limit their freedom or to stop them from living their lives.
Our representatives have stopped protecting us. They stopped doing it a long time ago when instead of serving the American people they started serving the almighty dollar. Of course, that’s not surprising. It’s not surprising since most of them are millionaires and many of them are lawyers, and millionaires and lawyers are known to spend other people’s money so as to save as much of their own as they can and to write laws to protect themselves, the people be damned!
Of course it is much more complicated than this but a few simple examples will serve the purpose. First, in a private household, when money runs out and money has to be borrowed, the borrowed money has to be paid back, with interest of course. The household can borrow more money up to the point where the bank realizes it’s no longer a safe risk to loan them money, at which point the bank calls in the debt.
Most sensible households live according to a budget. Money is allocated monthly and when it runs out the household stops spending. At the very worst, it borrows into the next month’s budget but decides how it’s going to cut the next month’s budget to cover the deficit.
Our monkeys, on the other hand, don’t live by any budget. They spend our money indiscriminately, blatantly lying to us all the while, and when they need more money they raise taxes. We have to pay them or we go to jail. (Some people don’t, like Al Sharpton.) The left-side group of those monkeys has already said it’s going to raise taxes and will do away with the tax cuts we recently got.
A second example regards healthcare. If you remember, at the last minute and again in the dark of night, they voted themselves, way back when, an exemption to Obamacare. If Obama care was so great, the greatest thing they could have possibly done for any of us, why didn’t they keep it for themselves?
We could go on and on, example after example.
Friday’s hearing was supposed to be about oversight on the Justice Department. What it was, and not surprisingly, was another attempt for the left-side monkeys to justify attempting to crucify a duly-elected president simply because they don’t like him.
Yes the monkeys are at it again. Yes the monkeys who represent us really are worse than real monkeys.
Yes, maybe we’re the monkeys since we keep electing them.
Published works by Peter Weiss
“I’m only working lunch. Tommy hasn’t given me extra shifts yet.” Arlene shifted in the chair. “My ass is getting numb,” she said. Then, “You want some coffee?”
“You willing to work out west?” Bill asked. He nodded yes to the coffee and then they were both standing up.
“Sure,” said Arlene. She led the way into the kitchen.
Bill leaned against the kitchen counter as Arlene went about setting up the coffee. When she had the percolator on the stove, she stepped over to Bill and invited him to take her in his arms.
“How would that work?” she asked.
“I’d ask Robert to have you worked into their schedule so you could have as many shifts as you needed. You might have to work one shift in one place one shift in the other sometimes on the same day.”
“That’s okay with me. I just need to make money.”
Arlene leaned against Bill as he leaned against the counter and fixed it so that his arms were settled about her back. She snuggled on him, kind of sniffed him up.
“Thanks for being a gentleman,” she said. “Thanks for being a friend.”
“I was wondering why me,” said Bill. “I mean we hardly know each other.”
“Yeah, but sometimes that’s the best way. Sometimes when someone isn’t going to be a part of your life forever it’s easiest to tell them what’s deep down in your soul. It’s not easy to admit you’re scared out of your wits. And believe me, I’m scared out of my wits.”
“So they took me right from my trial to the workhouse,” Bill said. “The judge asked me if I had anything to say and when I started to tell them that the police weren’t telling the truth, he cut me off mid-sentence, banged down the gavel, said ‘policeman don’t lie,’ and pronounced me guilty. They put me in handcuffs, ushered me to the holding cell, and I don’t know, maybe an hour, maybe two hours later I was on my way.
“I never got a chance to say goodbye to my fiancé or my friends. I never got a chance to get money for the commissary, not that I knew anything about it anyway. I never got a chance to do anything. It happened so fast I didn’t know what hit me.
“I was shackled hands and feet. That‘s the way they transported prisoners. And then I was on the bus with some other prisoners. The bus made stops to pick up other prisoners and off we went to the workhouse.
“I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry so bad I didn’t know what to do with myself. I’ve never been so scared in my life and I had no idea what was gonna happen to me. All I knew was that I was scheduled to be in there for the next three weeks and there was no way out of it.”
Bill stroked Arlene’s back and kept her pressed close to him. Because he had not slept he knew he was going to have to pop some black beauties. Meanwhile, Arlene had left the coffee pot on a high flame and he could hear the water starting to boil. He looked over to the stove and could see the water popping up into the little bubble glass on top of the percolator. The coffee’s aroma permeated the air in the kitchen.
Arlene kissed Bill on his cheek. “Go on and finish the story,” she said.
“It’s a long story,” said Bill.
Published works by Peter Weiss
originally posted in October 2017
Remember the gorilla in Trading Places? Well that was Al Franken, the Senator from Minnesota who licked Obama’s shoes. Literally, that was him. He was the actual actor. In real life, he’s really no better than a gorilla. Feed him bananas and he’ll vote the way you want. As silly as he was in the movie, that’s how silly he is in Congress.
Do you know Master Politician Pelosi, of the self-praise stinks clan? Or teary-eyed Chucky? He’s from the weep-for-effect clan.
Yes, these are our leaders.
But this is not about them. Truly, they are despicable. They are unconscionable liars and they are hypocrites who are mostly immoral, self-serving beasts. Why they keep being elected is beyond any sensibility whatsoever.
But really this is not about them. This is about the elephants in the room.
I know. Maybe it’s a mixed metaphor. Maybe not. Turns out, though, as far as our leaders go, there’s not much difference. They’re all a barrel of monkeys.
This really is about the elephants. McConnell should be ashamed of his inability to rally his majority and pass repeal and replace. You know, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me thrice, shame on us all and a pox on your house. Now it’s on to tax reform and smart money says Ryan and McConnell don’t perform here either.
Then there’s John McCain. It’s clear that his personal dislike of President Trump is more important than his responsibility to his job. Ditto with Lindsay Graham. Ditto for Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and on and on.
So the Senate’s approval rating, which was under ten percent, sits now at about fifteen percent. The Republican voters, according to a recent poll, aren’t angry at President Trump, but they are angry at Congress and they blame Congress for nothing having gotten done.
Here’s the overriding metaphor for our wonderful Republican representatives: sixty times they overwhelmingly voted to repeal and replace Obamacare when their vote was symbolic and meaningless because Obama was president and they didn’t have the votes to override his veto of any bill they would send. Then they punked out of doing what they were elected to do when they had the power to do it simply because of their own individual personal self-interests.
What a bunch of goons. What a bunch of loons.
So we come to the bottom line. Our government no longer serves the interests of the American people. The Republicans, like the Democrats, are all monkeys dancing for the bananas thrown at them by the big money interests. They adhere only to the tenets of Social Darwinism. Their only goal is reelection. They will say and do anything for that and spin their actions in the finest, prettiest jargon they can pay their publicists to write for them. Overall, they are filled with hubris and driven by greed and selfishness.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. In Shakespeare (although the monkeys in education have deemed he no longer be read, minimizing and marginalizing one of the most astute recorders of human nature ever), wisdom and truth come from the clowns, the jesters and the blind. Not that President Trump is any of those, and whether you like him or not or agree with his policies or not, he is surely right that we must drain the swamp. Getting rid of the barrel of monkeys, in this case the elephants in the room would be a good start.
Term limits are certainly in order.
Published works by Peter Weiss
Ain’t it funny how the night moves!
They talked until almost 5 o’clock in the morning. Arlene laid it out directly. She had no money, which is why she had to drop out of the University. Her mother didn’t have medical insurance, or she actually had some but not enough to pay for what she really needed. Medicaid would cover some of the costs but certainly not all. Her father had run off. She had no brothers or sisters, she had no other family that could really help. Maybe, she told Bill, some people would refer to her as white trash.
Bill would remember that she blushed when she said this. He would remember thinking the expression trailer trash but he would also remember that he’d been taught not to classify people. He’d been taught to treat people as people, to treat them as they treated him.
Bill told her there was nothing wrong with being poor. He told her there was nothing wrong with being a hard-working person, a hard-working regular Joe. He told her how he’d given up a free education at City University of New York to come out to OSU. He told her the only reason he was able to do it was because he was able to get into a work-study program which paid most of his tuition and gave him a job to help pay for his books. He told her he beat the dorm room because his brother was there, but he only lived with his brother for the first month. He told her living with his brother was pure hell.
Arlene never asked for a foot rub. She sat with the robe drawn about her and her legs tight together. She spoke about her mother possibly dying. The prospects of it made her tear up again and almost cry. She told him she never asked anyone for anything in her life, not even her mother because she’d worked for herself from the time she was fourteen. But she was asking now. She was asking God to help her and her mother. She was asking Bill to help her get the shifts she needed. She told Bill she was also asking him to hold her when she needed holding.
“I know I’ve already said it,” she said to Bill as if it were the last thing she was going to say. “I’m so scared I don’t know what to do with the feeling. I’m too goddamn young to be an orphan and my mother is way too young to die.”
Bill just looked at her. For most of the time she talked that’s all he did. He’d wanted to get up and hold her but he kept himself in check and kept himself a gentleman. He sat, he listened and he thought.
“You know,” he said, “I haven’t really told anybody this other than the people who went through it with me, but when I got busted and I knew I was going to jail, I was so scared and so depressed that I couldn’t get out of bed. I stayed in bed, literally, for weeks and weeks. It got so bad I cut the first six weeks of the final English seminar, the last required course for all graduating seniors majoring in English. I almost blew the one chance I had to go on and graduate.”
Bill reached out for Arlene. He took her hands. He looked at the clock that was on her dresser and saw that it was almost time for him to be getting ready to go to work.
“You late girl tonight?” he asked.
Published works by Peter Weiss
Lots of things in his life Bill would never forget. When he thought about it, he could still remember his mother laying on the sofa. She was dead. He was a kid. He stared at her and from time to time he thought he could see her stomach rising as if she were breathing. But she wasn’t breathing. She would never breathe again.
He could remember his father laid up in intensive care after his valve surgery, some twenty-four years later. The shock of seeing him there, the hospital gown laid open, the coarsely sewed stitches down his chest, all the wires and tubes he was hooked up to—that was one thing. The limp, drooping side of his face and the immobile arm and leg, the wholly immobile one side of his body, that was another thing. Nevertheless it was all part of the first. The most remarkable thing of all, the one he could never forget, was his father motioning with his good hand to the pillow to his lips, to the pillow to his lips.
Bill would never forget that on that day his father wanted him to smother him.
Of course he couldn’t know it yet but he would later come to realize that he would never forget Arlene sitting there naked weeping on the toilet. Her feet pointed inward so her toes were almost touching. The shiny, clear-painted, French-pedicured toenails stood out, perfections amidst the imperfect. Her legs were together at the knees, her thighs tight against each other. Her pink-nipple breasts, cone-shaped and non-droopy, pointed forward. Her elbows were tucked into her sides, her face buried in her hands.
Wow, Bill thought. Looking at her, moving into the bathroom and standing before her, he wondered how they had gone from so happily high in the bed naked together and spooning to here with Arlene now weeping uncontrollably. All he had done, the way he saw it, was ask her what she really wanted to tell him, as if she had some hidden agenda, as if there were something she truly wanted to tell him but had not yet divulged.
What he had to do was simple, or at least so he thought, or at least this was what his instincts told him. He stepped forward and got to his knees right before her as she sat there. He took his hands and placed them on the top of her thighs. He leaned forward and kissed first one knee and then the next. Then he reached up with both his hands and gently took her hands in his.
“Shhh,” he said. Her hands in his, he kissed each one softly then began kissing each finger gently. He could see her face now, could see her eyes. They were reddish, wet and non-bright.
“Shhh,” he said again. Now that he could see her face, her hands still in his, he reached his head forward and upward. He kissed her softly once on each cheek.
“So I guess there’s some things you really want to tell me,” he said.
“Fuck you,” said Arlene.
“So I guess that means I’m right. Maybe we should meet up in the bedroom and talk.”
“Maybe we should,” said Arlene.
When she joined him, he had already put on his pants and his T-shirt. He was still barefoot. He sat on the edge of the bed.
Arlene went to her closet and retrieved a bathrobe from inside it. Facing away from him, she slipped her arms into it and tied it around her. She was no longer crying, he could see when she turned toward him. It was obvious she had dried her eyes.
“So,” Bill said, “pull up a chair and let’s talk.”
Arlene took the one armchair that was there in the bedroom and dragged it so she was sitting opposite him where he sat.
“I’ll rub your feet if you like,” said Bill.
Published works by Peter Weiss
No one questions that nicotine is a drug just as no one questions that heroin, cocaine and meth are. When you get down to it, sugar is a drug too. Once you get a taste for it you want more and more. It’s hard to withdraw from sugar as well.
We don’t generally think of hate as a drug, but these days in our world there is an awful lot of hate going around. Oh, we all know it’s probably been here all along, all this hate, but it’s mostly been concealed, certainly not fashionable to put it out on display.
That’s all changed. Turn on any of the major networks or the major cable media outlets. You’ll find their news people simply hate the president. It’s clear. It’s obvious. They even have 101 ways of explaining why it’s okay to do so because, as they’ll tell you, he’s the cause of all the evil we’ve ever seen in the world.
Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
Chuck Schumer loves the words “the truth is.” The day before the State of the Union Address on the floor of the Senate he made a statement saying “The president will say predictably that the state of our Union is strong, but the truth is the state of the Trump economy is failing America’s middle class,” and “The state of the Trump administration is embroiled in chaos and incompetence.”
Honestly, he doesn’t know what the truth is anymore than we do. Clearly the economic facts belie what Schumer relates to as truth. Furthermore, Schumer has no idea whether or not Trump’s administration is embroiled in chaos and incompetence. That’s his opinion. Opinions are not facts and we all know the joke about opinions.
Schumer is nothing more than a politician. He’s spent just about his whole adult life in politics. He’s been in the US House of Representatives and/or the Senate since 1981.
Schumer may be qualified to talk about political circles but he has little business experience, little experience making a product and/or being responsible for creating paychecks for people whose livelihoods depend upon the success of the business in which they work. In politics, maybe sticking with who you’ve got even if they don’t do a good job is preferable because it creates the impression that things are under control. God forbid they should give an impression that things aren’t in control.
In business producing is important. Surely on the top levels if you can’t produce you don’t get to stay. Thus, it is certainly possible that the turnover Schumer calls chaos and incompetence is nothing more than an attempt to find people who can best produce. In business creating the best product for the lowest cost is the formula for success. Our politicians with their endless supply of our tax dollars know nothing about that.
One thing is clear. With the popularity of our Congress down in the teens, some 30 points lower than Trump’s popularity, Schumer has little room to criticize the current administration or any administration about anything.
So what do you do when you have no policies, when you have no answers, when you’re disliked and unpopular?
The answer is quite simple. Manufacture someone to hate. Create a foe, a scapegoat, an object of derision and ridicule to attack repeatedly.
This is the hate drug, the number one Democrat tactic. If you have nothing to offer, offer someone to hate. Offer someone to hate, have the media broadcast your hate all over the place all of the time and sooner or later you’ve got a good portion of the public hooked on your hate drug. They’ll tune in every day for their daily fix.
Published works by Peter Weiss
Arlene folded her arms akimbo. Bill made sure the joint was out and sat on the edge of the bed, his feet on the floor. He faced her somewhat and gave her the once over. Her arms covered her breasts now, or mostly they did, small breasts they were with the small pink nipples.
“So what do you think? My tits too small?”
“I don’t think anything,” said Bill. “I hadn’t even thought about it.”
“You have any preference? Like them big or small?”
Bill looked at Arlene and smiled. “The size of your breasts wasn’t exactly what I meant when I said what I did about getting to know you. There’s getting to know you, and then there’s getting to know you.”
“Well, which way do you want to get to know me?” Arlene asked.
“Maybe I want you to get to know me,” said Bill. “Maybe I want you to know what I’m really like, what my life’s been like. Maybe you should know how I got my job and why Robert and I are so close.”
“I suppose you’ll tell me all that when you want to.” Arlene moved one hand under the towel Bill had wrapped around himself. At first her hand rested on his thigh. She left it there momentarily, stroked his thigh softly then slid it more toward him.
“Wait,” he said. “I know you know I have a fiancé. I know you know I shouldn’t be here. I know you know I shouldn’t be fooling around with anyone and I certainly shouldn’t be adding anyone to the list of people I’m fooling around with. That said, you should know on some level I don’t think I’m really a nice person. On a different level I think I’m a spectacular person, truly compassionate and caring. Once we cross the line, you know, the line, it’s different. Believe me, I learned that the hard way.”
“Maybe I just don’t care. Maybe I just want to be held. Maybe I just want someone to be able to dump on, someone who can’t glum on to me, someone who can’t make real complications for me at a time when I don’t need anything more on my plate.”
Bill stood up. He made sure the towel was tight around him and then refilled both their wine glasses. He handed Arlene’s glass to her where she sat. He drank his, again like it was soda pop, where he stood. Then he refilled his glass and drank half.
“Drenovis wanted me to get on my knees to get this job,” Arlene said. “At first I interviewed with Tommy. Tommy gave me the job and told me I’d have to be approved by his boss. I guess Drenovis is his boss.”
“He’s a piece of shit,” said Bill. “Maybe people say that about me for my fooling around. But I never forced anyone to do anything. Not Mary, not Marie, not Norma or Lexi or Lorraine. I wasn’t even looking for anything. All I wanted was to work. I was so broke I’d have done anything to earn some money.”
Arlene uncovered herself and stood up. “I have to pee,” she said. “Come with me and keep talking.”
Without inhibition, the bathroom door open, Arlene sat down to pee. Bill stood in the doorway. “So what would you really want to tell me?” Arlene asked.
“No, love. What do you really want to tell me?” Bill asked.
Sitting there on the toilet even though she was done peeing, that’s when Arlene broke down. It was almost instantaneous. Bill said what he said in response to what Arlene asked and she broke. He could see it standing in the doorway looking down at her. Her face flushed red. Her eyes watered then teardrops flew freely down her cheeks on both sides. Then she buried her face in her hands.
Published works by Peter Weiss
It wasn’t a normal night at all. She was sick and ran to the bathroom several times which was quite unusual. The lights went on and off, there was a phone call to the doctor. I didn’t know it was to the doctor until later in the morning. By then she was already dead.
Before that night my life had been on one track. It was simply my life. I didn’t think about it being on a track. I didn’t think about it being the course of my life and/or whether that course was normal or not normal or anything like that. Before that night things simply were. The next day they were vastly different.
Even though life changed and things were vastly different, I still didn’t think about the course of my life, how it was before and how it was after that event. I lived my life day by day doing what had to be done. I was now a child with no mother, a child being raised by his father, a child in a broken family although we didn’t know it was a broken family.
So that day changed the course of my life, or, metaphorically, it was as if my life had switched tracks like a train does.
Now when that train changes tracks and travels along, at first the distance between the two tracks is relatively minimal. The further that train goes on the new track, the greater the distance between the tracks.
I’ve often written about the day I got busted. That was the next time, at least on a grand scale, when my life switched tracks. I had been very close to college graduation but found myself with a criminal record (copping a plea was the only way to be able to complete college) so that my plans to become a professional, maybe a social worker or a teacher, were continually thwarted by police checks. Every time I would apply for a job, the police check would come up positive for having a record and having been in jail. Of course I would not be hired.
I spent 25 years in kitchens. Prior to the day I got busted I had never thought of being a cook or a chef or of being anything other than a writer and maybe a teacher.
By the time I got busted the distance between the original track my life was on and the one I was on at the time of my arrest was already great. After that second switch of tracks, by the time I started working in kitchens my life had no resemblance to what it might have been had my mother not died and if I hadn’t gotten busted.
After 25 years in kitchens, although I kept writing all along, sometimes I couldn’t even see where I had wanted to be, where I had always thought I would have been.
Who knows? Who knows anything?
So the point of this isn’t really about me. Of course it’s about me, but not really. The point of this is about the course our country is on. Let me say that again. The point of this is about the course our country is on.
It’s not about politics. We are way beyond politics now. It’s about train tracks. Our country has been on many different train tracks. It has made some switches, most of them pretty good. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Martin Luther King Jr. led the civil rights movement. Women got to vote.
You get the idea.
But take a look at where we’re at today. Forget the left. Forget the right. Look at the big picture. Listen to what the politicians are saying on both sides. Don’t listen to the media or the posts in social media, including this one. Look and listen and think for yourself. See what track America is on.
Is it the track you want it to be on?
