It doesn’t always feel “there but for the Grace of God.” Sometimes it feels like “why me?”
Why me?
In real life, and I write about this in my fiction too, that’s a real question. Of course it manifests itself in different ways. When something happens I might think: why now? Or I might think: why me?
So if the cop singles me out and pulls me over, especially when I’m not doing anything other than what anyone and everyone else is doing, then it’s why me? That’s how it was way back in Columbus that day when the cop pulled me out of the crowd of people who were jaywalking and gave me the two-dollar ticket. Why me? Of course I knew why me that time. That time it was me because I was the only hippie in the crowd.
Yes. Long ago I was a hippie. I was ripe for being singled out that time and getting that ticket.
Why now is a different question. You know, and you probably all know well too, when you’re on your way out the door and you shut down your computer and the blue screen flashes “updating do not turn off,” that’s a why now question.
In my fiction, unless it’s within a character, I rarely, if ever, ask why me. Most often, if not always, it’s a why question, and more often than not it’s a “why this one and not that one” question.
I call that my sixty-four thousand dollar question. I almost always ask it like this: why does one dog get euthanized and the one right next to it get adopted?
Honestly, for me, that is a real question. Personally, I find it fascinating. And that dog who’s getting adopted, if we could read its thoughts it might be thinking: there but for the Grace of God… as it watches the dog being taken away.
Somewhere, somehow, some way, it all fits together.
Being cynical and without actually being political, I can tell you decisively that these considerations are foolish ones to our politicians and leaders. They don’t apply, and even if they did they wouldn’t matter. Again, not being political, to them, it’s silly stuff.
Except to say I’m extremely disappointed in where governments and leaders have taken us, even horribly ashamed actually, enough of that.
So back to the perplexing question. I understand and very often feel “there but for the Grace of God.” And I look up into the heavens and I wonder. No, this is not religious. I do believe in God, but this is not about that. This is about gratitude and being thankful on the one hand and about wondering, maybe wonderings, on the other. So much, especially these days, I wonder about.
As from last time, I wonder if this is all we are. I take a look at human behavior and I wonder for how smart and technologically advanced as we are, how can we be so stupid? so mean? so evil? so selfish and greedy?
I wonder what would happen if we followed collectively what the majority of us believe individually, you know, the simple, easy Golden rule, do unto others. If we could actually follow that, the rest of it would fall into place.
And then I wonder about fate, maybe luck, that sixty-four thousand dollar question: why does one dog get euthanized when the one next to it is adopted and finds a loving home?
In a sense, that’s the “why me?” question on a bigger scale, on a grand scale.
But even then, especially then maybe, when stuck in the “why me,” a good sense of gratitude goes a long way.
By Peter Weiss
I’ve been working in a hospital for the past couple of months. It’s one of the bigger systems here in in Massachusetts with many campuses. The one I work in has a big medical school and many buildings and departments. It’s a big, full service hospital.
So every morning I go there, I don’t always work on campus, I park in one of the many parking lots. It’s a good walk from where I park to where I go, a nice walk when the weather is nice, and since this has been a relatively warm and pretty much snow-free winter (I know I shouldn’t say that because it’s not over yet and I’d be willing to bet God has a good laugh in store for us) the walk has been nice and even pleasant most of the time. I like to walk. I was a mid-pack long-distance runner for many years, and I loved running too. Yes, I did run the NYC marathon twice.
Lots of people who are either students in the medical school or workers in the hospital get there about the time I do, so there are always lots of people walking from their cars to where they are going. Sometimes I see the med helicopter taking off from behind the building where I work. I work in the main hospital building on the campus. Each time I see this I think how my young daughter who is just crazy about such things would love to be seeing it rise up from behind the building and going on up into the sky and off to where it is headed. It’s a sight, for sure.
Much more often than seeing the helicopter, I see ambulances. Actually, and I know you all know this, I hear the ambulances long before I actually see them. Since I am familiar with the grounds and the area, I know what streets they are coming from and what direction they will be heading. Almost always they end up at the ER.
When I go into the building and up to the floor where the office I work in is, it’s small clinic, a very specialized one, I don’t get to see the ER. But I have seen it. My wife was in it once. Sometimes it is so crowded they don’t have beds inside the ER and the halls outside are lined with patients on gurneys. My God!
I do have a good walk inside the hospital too, so on the first floor walking to the elevators I need I pass clinics and treatment areas where I see patients who are sick and needing help or are being rolled in by the EMTs. I see lots of people in wheel chairs being pushed by a loved one, lots of older people like me.
So I think, and I especially think it when I hear those ambulances coming, which is almost every morning I go there, there but for the grace of God. I think how lucky I am to be up and walking and working and on the right side of the earth.
There but for the Grace of God.
This morning there were several ambulances and as I was walking from the parking lot, two police cruisers came up one of the streets on the wrong side of the street to block off traffic. Whatever it was, it was an especially bad one.
There but for the Grace of God.
By Peter Weiss
Well, not exactly back to the movies. Not really!
If you read my writing here, then you know or might have seen that I believe all the zombie stuff, very little of which I watch, is about us. I believe they are taking us on a ride, a trajectory, in a direction where they are the zombie masters, the zombie killers, and we the people are the zombies.
Oh my!
Of course this is all metaphorical. It’s about imagery, about pictures and the big picture.
I keep wondering why they are drawing such a gory, gruesome picture!
But that’s not the only gruesome picture. I talk all the time about The Hunger Games, about them leading us down the path to where there’s one gated city of privileged people and all the rest of us who have to work for them.
So maybe there’s going to be Washington DC, the center of it all, where the privileged live. It’s already the richest area, highest income zone, or one of them, and as it is now, the 50% of us who actually pay taxes work for them for almost four months of the year.
Then, if the Democrats get their way they’ll invite more and more poor to come here and that will make the 50% of us who do pay taxes pay more and more and more. Thus they, the already rich, will stay rich and we, the working poor and taking poor, will grow in number, become more convoluted, more divided and more poor. We will fight each other because things will become scarce and they in the gated city will be happy because it will make it easier for them to defend themselves against us. Divide and conquer.
They, the millionaire Despicable Dems, will become all-powerful and we will work for them. Actually, we already do. They live in luxury and if they implement their agenda, we will live in squalor. It’s kind of like that now actually.
It’s what their Hollywood pals are telling us, what they’ve been telling us forever (or at least since about 1979 when Mad Max came out.
Yes, The Road Warrior, another movie, movie series, is one of, if not the precursor to all this fantastic imagery of us destroying ourselves and being thrust into chaos where anything and everything goes.
In this genre, the one-man-saves-all genre, sometimes we don’t even see the rich and protected.
There are many of these movies and they get better and better with Hollywood getting more and more technically savvy.
The genre comes out of the cold war period where when I was a kid you could hear the slogan “I’d rather be dead than red.” Sometimes I wonder nowadays how many people even know of that slogan and then I wonder if any of the people who support the socialist Despicable Democrat agenda have heard of it.
Anyway, shoot forward, and we come out the other end, where we are now. Those wonderfully altruistic billionaires and the poor millionaires like Bernie have saved us although we have morphed into the zombies and they live in the protected places.
Maybe that’s because when they succeeded in getting power, those lefty Democrats took away our second amendment rights, made it so only the criminals among the regular people had guns and so they could easily prey upon the hard-working poor.
Well, seems to me like what they want. Seems like what they are pushing on us every chance they can. Seems like it’s always the rich candidates on the left who are hiding their riches (like the millionaire lefty Democrats, average net worth of the candidates is staggering, most of them being multimillionaires and of course Bloomberg being one of the richest people in the world) and trying to make us think they are regular people.
But really… In their world we are the zombies and they are the zombie masters, the zombie killers.
Make no mistake. It’s no mistake. Hollywood, Pravda USA media and the Despicable Dems all walk hand-in-hand. Make no mistake. There’s no room for you and me in their world except to work for them. We are but their slaves.
By Peter Weiss
So back to movies. From Here To Eternity and Here Comes Mr. Jordan are my two favorites. They both are in black and white although I know at least one of them was colorized. Black and white is better, was better back then. Contrast. Clarity. Technique. That’s why.
We’ve come into an era where every waking moment we are bombarded by stimuli. Statistics recording stimuli are staggering, more in one day than our ancestors one hundred-fifty years ago had in a month. Don’t quote me on that. I remember reading it and it’s probably outdated by now. It might have been more in one hour now than in a month then.
The point is that to get attention nowadays you have to be bigger and badder, louder and louder, more and more outrageous. You have to bang the public on the head and say: look at me.
Then: simplicity, clarity, contrast, technique.
Now: outrage, shock-factor, bigger and badder (with little consideration to better).
The next movie I mentioned was Passenger 57. It’s not a great movie, not even a great movie in its genre. It’s just a simple one-man-saves-the-world action movie. I find it of import because it sets a new limit, a higher one in the outrageousness of where we’ve come as a race of people regarding meaningless killing and narcissism.
Passenger 57 presents changes in our established moral code. We are asked to accept as part of our reality the wanton killing of a family man as the way we’ve come, the way we are evolving as a people.
And we do. Now, some years after 9/11, some time after the making of Passenger 57, we see things like this and it’s just another killing, another terrorist act, another day, ho-hum.
Next movie: Set It Off. Four black women rob banks to get money not because they are criminals but because the system will not give them a break, won’t let them make a living even though they try and won’t even let them simply be themselves. They are discriminated against because of their color and abused because they are women.
Of course robbing banks isn’t the answer, no matter what. But that said, they get caught, because they are not criminals, and they “fight it out.” One gets away and one detective sees her getting away and decides to let her go.
This one is a good movie. It’s groundbreaking in many ways. It’s of import (to me) in that it lays bare what the system is in real-life modern terms and questions the rightness and wrongness of the system. It has more in it too, lots more.
So nowadays there’s a real question about who we are and what we are. Nowadays, there are lots of questions most of which none of us ask. We are busy. We are inundated. We are bombarded by stimuli, most of them distracting, useless and negative. A lot of them are even false or falsified. So like that once-shocking-the-senses killing in Passenger 57, we’re numbed, stressed-out, beyond the limit, and consequently we don’t ask the questions we should be asking.
Believe me, there’s lots of questions.
Why movies?
We can learn from them. The old ones including my two favorites show a clear sense of our morality and sense of justice back then, and the new ones, who knows? Morality is convoluted. Justice is often not served.
Kind of what we’re like and where we are at nowadays, huh?
Don’t get me wrong. No better place to be than here in the USA. But our system, our government, is broken and breaking more and more. If you listen to Pravda USA media– you know who they are–they’ll tell you it’s President Trump who did it and is doing it. If you’re interested in truth and reality, you will look at what the Democrats have done from before Hillary lost until now. They’re already talking of another impeachment.
Nowadays in the movies we’re the zombies. The Democrats want us to be just that.
By Peter Weiss
So my second all-time favorite movie is From Here To Eternity. It’s from a James Jones novel. It’s a World War II movie, or that’s the setting, really the vehicle by which the movie operates. It encompasses Pearl Harbor, set in Hawaii. It’s about justice, right and wrong, and so much more. The book is even better. Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Ernest Borgnine, Donna Reed and Deborah Kerr are the stars.
Oh! And how could I forget — no I didn’t forget — Frank Sinatra. If you’ve ever seen The Godfather, this is the movie Johnnie Fontane wants the Godfather to get him in, you know, where the Hollywood producer finds the horse’s head in bed with him…
Most memorable line: just because you love something doesn’t mean it has to love you back.
Ain’t that the truth!
Okay. So I’m a softy. Yes. I cry in the movies. I cry at home watching movies. I cry in my real life, not weeping-crying but choked-up crying. My wife, who never cries at movies, laughs at me.
Movies used to, and some still do, teach us things. Nowadays, more often than not, maybe, they teach us by presenting negative lessons. Hollywood surely is leading us in some directions we could do without, we would be better off not going in.
A few other key movies should be mentioned, movies that mean something whether they are good movies or not. Make no mistake, From Here To Eternity and Here Comes Mr. Jordan are great movies.
One movie that should be mentioned is Passenger 57. It’s one of those pass-the-time, get-lost-in-the-movies, movies. It stars Wesley Snipes, whom I kind of like as an actor for what he does, but that doesn’t matter at all. The movie matters because something happens in it that breaks with convention and starts us down a new path, not one of good things or good directions.
Passenger 57 is your standard movie in which a ruthless killer/terrorist and his terrorist gang hijack an airplane and onboard, low and behold, is your lone good-guy, save-the-day bad-ass who happens to have just been hired as the airline’s new head of security.
There’s one scene where to prove his point of being serious, the ruthless terrorist-killer confronts the lone save-the-world good guy. He asks a passenger his name, asks him if he has any kids. The passenger says yes, two children. The terrorist tells the good guy that because of him those kids won’t be seeing their father anymore and shoots the passenger in the head.
This was a new low in our sense of morality. It was meant purely for shock value, and it did just that. But now, many years later, seeing something like this is ho-hum. If you see that movie a second time and you know what’s going to happen, you’re not shocked. Well, that’s how we are now. Another shooting after 9/11, another terrorist act, ho-hum, another day.
Hollywood! Its people would have us believe that they have a real sense of what our morality should be. They tell us this all the time in their political statements, which are mostly, if not always, leftist viewpoints. They tell us we should be doing this or that, then like the big politicians (like Al Gore), they are the old-school parents who say do as I say, not as I do.
In fact, that is very much the key motto of our politicians. They want, at least the leftists do, to dictate morality and direction to us. But they have no sense of what we, the people, want or need or care about. And they don’t practice what they preach and don’t even pretend to.
Anyway… Why mention this? Well, just in general we should take a cold, hard look at what people are trying to sell us, at where we’ve been and where we seem to be going and if we should be going that way.
Another movie next time!
By Peter Weiss
I love movies. I always have. When I was a kid we had no electronics and TV was still relatively new in the scope of things (only about twenty-five years in the actual commercial market) so there were only a few stations. Movies were the bomb.
As a kid in his young teens I went to the movies more to make out with a girl than to watch the movie. There were only two genders then, male and female, boy and girl, so it was easy. Back then, in my world, if it quacked like a duck…
Anyway, in New York where I grew up on Channel 9, WOR TV, they had a show called Million Dollar Movie. Every week the station ran a movie, the same movie, twice a day for the week. That’s when I met my all-time favorite movie: Here Comes Mr. Jordan. I literally watched it eleven times and I cried every time. I was a little kid then. My mother was still alive (she wouldn’t be for much longer but we didn’t/couldn’t know that at the time) and my world was pretty normally abnormal like every kid’s was, like every family’s was. Because we didn’t have electronics and because all of the “information” we have today was limited back then, we didn’t think about normality. What we were as a family was like what every family in my neighborhood was. Simply, it was and we were.
Here Comes Mr. Jordan was in black and white. It starred Claude Rains, Robert Montgomery and Evelyn Keyes. It’s about a fighter destined to become a champion who is pulled by an inexperienced angel from his plummeting airplane before it crashes so that his soul is pulled from his body just before he dies. He’s not supposed to die yet and the rest of the movie is about him finding another body so he can go on and meet his destiny.
Wonderful, wonderful movie about fate and destiny and true love, about mind and body, about our souls which make us tick and more. It’s been remade several times, at least two that I know of offhand.
I didn’t have a computer until I was forty.
I didn’t have a cell phone until I was in my fifties.
Life was so much better.
As a kid with no electronics, every day after school all the boys on my block met to play ball. We played touch football on the street during football season. We played punch ball and stick ball on the street during baseball season, and we played basketball and softball in the schoolyards where we met up with all the other kids and chose up sides.
The schoolyards were integrated but we didn’t think of them that way. We chose teams by the best pick (best players picked first) not by the color of their skin. We remembered kids by what they did, not by the color of their skin. So when Alfonso Grimes hit a ground ball to anywhere but second base everyone knew not to bother to try to throw him out because he was just too fast. Alfonso Grimes was always first pick, no matter who the captain was.
Those days the only thing that mattered was winning the game. No one had a thought, ever, about everyone being a winner or letting the other side win. Playing to win all the time made us better, gave us inspiration and determination, gave us incentive and purpose.
It was a different time.
In general, now some half-century later, the loonies on the left will destroy us if we let them. They are completely unhinged. In movie terms they are akin to Dr. Frankenstein or the mad scientists. They have perverted and misrepresented what they are about and portend to know what we are about. They are misguided and they are wrong.
Our government in general, in movie terms, well, they’ll be the ones in the gated cities whether those cities are up in the sky like in many movies or in their own protected spaces like in The Hunger Games. We’re the zombies, the masses, the controlled labor forces supporting them.
Question: how does one live with crazed leaders?
By Peter Weiss
Half the winter is gone. January was a gentle month this year. I remember back. Two of the first three years we’ve been in the northeast had brutal winters, one of them with record snowfalls and accumulations over 115 inches.
Beautiful, but brutal.
We had to get rid of a nice, relatively new two-wheel drive car for a four-wheel drive. That two-wheel drive car, with our hilly driveway, was a nine month car.
Global warming? Climate change? No. I’m not a naysayer, but really, they’re all winging it and they’re winging it according to their own agendas. It’s just the weather. They haven’t been tracking the climate long enough to know anything other than that we should be careful and do what we can. Those crazy predictions are just that, crazy, crazy proposals to effectively destroy our economy.
For personal gain and power?
Al Gore? A politician scorned. He turned his ire into a quarter of a million dollar climate change empire. Does he do anything for the environment? Personally? Like in his sacrifices regarding home living and travel?
No! That’s for us commoners, of course. It’s not for them, for him.
That tremendous bastion of truth, EW, Elizabeth Warren, her latest craziness is to say we can do something about the Coronavirus by re-joining the Paris Accord.
My God!
Oops. Forgot. Not supposed to use that word because believing in God, invoking Him, even in a totally non-religious context, upsets some people’s sensibilities.
So I said last time that my father was Big Red One. Go Army! Later in his life he was fond of saying that our country was going down the tubes, that if we didn’t change our attitudes toward certain things, we’d just go down that much faster. All that he’d fought and sacrificed for would then be in vain.
So I think that if Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today and saw that he was replaced by Al Sharpton as the civil rights leader, he would simply have a heart attack and die, this time of natural causes. Where he is, he must be spinning in his grave. And up there, he must be thinking that, and maybe he talks to God about it, this free choice stuff ain’t so great. Human kind’s free choice has become one based upon personal self-interest. Money, money, money.
So did you ever wonder? I do.
How come all those Despicable Democrats who are pushing the socialist agenda are capitalists? And the ones pushing the environmental stuff are the most egregious abusers of the very environmental agenda they’re trying to shove down our throats.
Interesting. At least I think so. I relate this to The Hunger Games scenario, to the Resident Evil scenario. We’re the zombies and all those Despicable Dems, Hillary and all her cronies, and Nancy and all hers, will be safe in the gated city.
It’s not by mistake that Hollywood and the uber-rich media people push socialism. Whoopi is worth about 45 million. Joy about 12 million. Hillary about a quarter of a billion. Even the big O, Obama, is now worth about 70 million. Not bad since he was barely a millionaire when he entered the White House.
So it’s what my father-in-law used to say. Man is by nature selfish and greedy.
And just about everything being pushed at us and thrust upon us by our leaders, most noticeably these days by the Despicable Democrats, is a load of propaganda aimed at suiting only them and their rich media friends, Pravda USA.
By Peter Weiss
I was a hippie in the 70s. I was young and naïve and I believed that our government was doing something wrong in Viet Nam. I believed in equality. I believed in the civil rights movement, in Martin Luther King Jr. And I believed in non-violence and Gandhi.
I wasn’t stupid or wrong. I was just naïve.
I still believe in those things. I believe we are all equal. But I know we are not all the same. I believe we should all have equal rights. But I don’t believe your equal rights should step on my equal rights.
I believe in free choice. But I don’t believe abortion should be allowed past the viability time, the time a fetus can survive outside the womb. So absent those usual horrible things, like rape, the danger to the life of the mother-to-be, etc., I don’t believe that an abortion should be allowed after viability. I believe there comes a time when the woman’s free choice is superseded by the viability of the unborn child who cannot exercise a choice.
I believe in a lot more too, things like being independent and paying my own way. I’ve worked since I was eight, paid taxes, worked sometimes three jobs to make ends meet. I’ve never asked for handouts, but I do believe that anyone and everyone who really needs help should be able to get the help they need. So I also believe that the freeloaders and those who don’t belong in this country should be taken off any kind of government services like housing, medical insurance, food stamps and social security. If they need medical care, it’s already established that they can be seen in an emergency room.
And there’s lots more.
So my father was Big Red One, go army! He spent three and a half years in a Nazi POW camp, Stalag 3B Furstenberg. The government, despite his illnesses when he came home, physical and emotional (PTSD before they knew about PTSD), saw fit to only give him an eight percent disability. This was not enough to be eligible for any benefits or services and he couldn’t even be buried in Arlington.
I still paid my taxes and was a good citizen, despite what they did to him.
I paid off my student loans, worked extra to do so, three jobs and longer hours and taught summer school. I didn’t buy name brand sneakers, new cars or take vacations. I worked and supported myself and my wife.
Throughout my life I’ve assessed and re-assessed. I believe I’d rather live in the strongest and freest country there is, which is the United States. I believe that sometimes governments make mistakes, but that even if ours does, it is still the best place to be. If Viet Nam and some of the other wars lately, maybe even all of them, were/are mistakes. At least we, here, can correct those mistakes. And even if the wars are mistakes we should honor, support and take care of our Armed Forces and veterans. And I do.
But I’m beginning now to feel about our government like I did back then, hence cycles and circles.
I’m beginning to see, you’d have to be deaf and blind not to, that individual self-interest is running the Despicable Democrats. The Despicable Democrats, caught in lie after lie and exaggeration after exaggeration, do not care at all about our country or the American people.
I’m beginning to feel that we need to form a coalition (back then it was the anti-war people joined with the Civil Rights people joined with the women’s rights people) to protest and effect change.
A good start would be term limits for all Senators and Congressmen.
And just as an aside, Bloomberg and Steyer spending now over 200 million dollars in political advertising is obscene. Spending more than two billion dollars on an election is even more obscene.
By Peter Weiss
So the other day I wrote this piece, Soviet USA (link here). It describes how the USA today has become much like the Soviet Union of the Cold War era, specifically mentioning how the mainstream media/social media Consortium is like Pravda USA was/is and how our leaders are now a wealthy (way more than half of them are millionaires) political class much like the Politburo was/is.
That piece goes on to describe how our “free press” has become an extension of the Democrats, their lapdogs, biased, not truthful and filled with propaganda, and how the Despicable Democrats are now acting like a dictatorship does by attempting to overthrow (soft coup) a duly elected president.
It doesn’t even talk about the Despicable Democrat push toward socialism or why, and it doesn’t talk specifically about the Despicable Democrat push toward limiting our constitutional rights — you know, things like the thought police, the political correctness police (PCP), or how their liberal policies have destroyed our inner cities and our education system and is now after our guns, God-believers and “whites,” all the while pretending to be tolerant, for the rights for all, and non-racist/sexist.
And more. And worse!
So I also wrote a piece, Metaphor (link here) about how these Democrats treated Ellen after she sat with President Bush at a football game and how those of her Hollywood friends who twittered to support her were so pressured by that tolerant group of lefties, so intimidated by them (mostly about losing work, you know being blacklisted) that they quickly erased their tweets, rescinded their support.
“Is this America?” I asked in the Soviet USA piece.
Well, since then that comparison has been used in the media (no connection to what I wrote — I am small, unnoticed potatoes) so I must at the very least be “on to something.” And the very same day Soviet USA appeared on my blog someone very publicly in his/her circle on social media pronounced my opinion as dangerous and said “This random yours so off the wall and I believe dangerous. I choose to defriend you. Bye.”
Well, so, need I say more? Ellen is the metaphor and this person is the example.
Those despicable Democrats — the tolerant ones — it’s their way or the highway.
What it is.
They turned us into Soviet USA. They are very consciously and conspicuously limiting our speech, filling our airwaves and print media with propaganda and shooting for our guns. And that’s not to mention abridging our rights, aiming for our money, indoctrinating our kids, giving more consideration to those who shouldn’t be here than the taxpaying citizens and attempting to block our ability to practice our belief in God.
So I asked, and ask again, is this America?
By Peter Weiss
I really don’t talk about myself very much, at least not in non-fiction. Much of my fiction is somewhat autobiographical in that it deals with settings (mostly kitchens) that I know and people I knew along the way. The escapades of these people as depicted by me happened or didn’t happen and either way, the way I see it, that’s okay.
If you read the “about me” part of the blog here, you’ll see I’ve been writing since I was fifteen. It started one night when I was at my friend Richie’s house. We were high and he was playing music. He had these humongous speakers. He also had a lock on his bedroom door. We were locked in listening to music and smoking weed.
Boom!
Out of the blue it came to me, just popped into my head, a line to start a short story. I repeated it over and over again like a mantra so as not to forget it, told Richie I had to go home. I may or may not have said to him that I had to write a story. I don’t remember. But I do remember repeating that line over and over all the way home, getting home, going down to the basement where my desk was, and writing.
I was fifteen. I was a writer. I knew what I wanted to be in my life, for my life. In this regard, I was and am most fortunate.
I’ve never “made it” as a writer. Many things have come in the way, and then there’s me, yes me, who has always been in the way. Fear of failure, fear of success, self-doubt, insecurity, poor self-esteem, a warped sense of love, fear of loss, co-dependency, substance abuse—these are some of the culprits. And then there was having to make a living on top of it all. Contrary to the narrative the Despicable Democrats, socialists and mainstream media, Pravda USA, attempt to continually advance, not all whites have privilege or money or influence or need to be feared.
That narrative, by the way, is a good piece of bull shit. But as the old saying about throwing out the baby with the bathwater goes, there are some elements of truth and reality in that narrative even though the narrative overall is mostly fake. Like the clowns and jesters in Shakespeare, it’s good to hear what they say. There’s always bits of truth.
When I was teaching—I taught for more than thirty years—I used to tell my students to go after their dreams so they did not get to old age filled with remorse and regret. I wonder. I have a lot of wonderings. I can’t say I have no regrets and I can’t say I have no remorse. But I can say that even though I haven’t “made it” as a writer, I have taken writing, which was my dream, with me all the way through so far. For that I am ever thankful.
So I sit out here. Where we live is pretty idyllic, I must say. It’s quiet almost all the time. It’s “country” and I can look up at all the trees and see simple natural beauty. Even in the New England winter, snow after snow, except for having to negotiate the snow it’s postcard picture after postcard picture.
Life is a marathon, not a sprint. Man is by nature selfish and greedy. I fear those Despicable Democrats, in their anti-Trump hysteria, have lost sight of the finish line, and egged-on by the profiteers controlling Pravda USA, our mainstream media, I fear they almost believe their own bull shit.
On second thought, no. They are profiteers as well, interested in money and power for themselves.
They all ought to stop and look up at the trees!
