Now there’s a title you don’t see every day, and the guys who made it possible aren’t everyday fellows, either.

How it turned out that in my advanced decreptitude I’ve finally found friends who not only share many of my own predilections and cultural underpinnings but also take care of each other is mildly astounding to me. I say “mildly” because I always figured it was possible to live like that, but the actualization seemed to elude me. Probably I was too fucked up myself, not to put too fine a point on it. If that’s the case, then I must have evolved in recent years, or else I just hit the jackpot. Call it grace and good luck.

But these two fine companions, both outstanding musicians, having followed my recent travails as best they could from my raging emails, wanted to give me a chance to vent. I was invited to a night of therapeutic drinking and gentlemanly pursuits — well, mostly drinking — and vent I did. First I sang them a song I’d written yesterday afternoon, one that you’ll be able to hear soon. [See below*] In the course of the evening, we finished a fifth of Cuervo 1800 and I got dog hair all over my clothes. That would be from Popeye, the resident terrier (?). Much hilarity ensued after the venting, and I even got fed. I also heard an earful about another mother, and it shook me to the bone.

(How did we ever survive???)

When I got back to the run-down adobe on the side of the hill and sat down at my MacBook to catch up on my emails before crawling into bed, there was a message from my brother Rob. It was a beautiful message in many ways and ended with the declaration that the next time, we would both go to Tucson. That remains to be seen, of course, since I’ve said I won’t go back unless Helen is dead or in protective custody, but if she’s really out of it (say, crawling around in circles on the floor and drooling), then a guardianship hearing might prove productive. Time will tell.

What hit me hardest in the email, however, were a few sentences summarizing what life had been like at home in Houston during my younger siblings’ high school years, a period I knew little about. At that time I was at UT-Austin learning where to put it and getting my hippie credentials, so I hardly ever went “home” at all. Guana santo, man!

Remember, I was down in Houston living the hellhouse - ruled by an hourly cycle of shouting fights despite counseling and over God knows what while Mom was going for shock treatments and then the brain tumor. Back then I was hoping they’d divorce and I could move in with Dad. (Dad may have had his issues, but at least he seemed reasonable to me, and I now understand how he got so frustrated when I couldn’t grok his attempts to tutor me in Algebra II).

I got into bike riding back then as a means of staying detached from the madness at home. B____ stayed home and cried a lot. M____ practiced her saxophone and we both spent as much time at school as we could. Band, we called it. B____, not so lucky. He stuck around stuffing his face with chips while attempting to drown out the madness with a television set.

I had literally no idea. Dear God in heaven.

* Oh yes, the song. It’s the first one I’ve written in years, and the rest of the lyrics will fall into place shortly. This is all I have so far, but it sounds great accompanied by my resophonic bouzouki in Appalachian death-stomp mode. In a few days, I hope to have a recording posted here, so keep your eyes and ears open. In the meantime, here’s what I have so far. The title of this piece is [ahem], “Mother Don’t Kill Me,” and it’s a sure-fire hit in hell:

Mother I beg you don’t kill me
don’t throw me outside with the trash
it don’t matter how much you’ve gone crazy
I’d be happy to turn you to ash

Well I came ‘cause you said you were dyin’
I came ‘cause my siblings were scared
but the nightmare I found down in Tucson
was worse than I ever had dared

So Mother I beg you don’t kill me
don’t throw me outside with the trash
it don’t matter how much you’ve gone crazy
I’d be happy to turn you to ash

Then I’d take you on back to Kent County
put you down in the ground next to Dad
there’d me no more abusin’ and fightin’
be the best time that I ever had

Transmutation, chilluns!

I think it’s always been there, though rarely mentioned, this cold, black thing that kills all love and joy. Always! Though in my memory the first remembered taste of it came in Abilene, Texas when I was barely 13 years old.

This would be during the early years of rock & roll, 1958, when Buddy Holly was still alive. I single him out because we lived close to Lubbock, his home town, and to everyone in Abilene, Buddy was still a local hero. His music had a huge impact on me, because after Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, and Fats Domino, listening to Buddy Holly was like listening to a slightly older version of myself. Rock & roll in general was the total antidote to every restrictive guilty pain I’d ever felt when growing up, the sheer joy a healing balm. I grasped the music with both hands and a willing heart, even though from inside my family (and elsewhere) came the darkly-hinted sense that something was “wrong” about letting go and feeling good.

For now this reference is a footnote, one I’ll expand later. In the context of the Helen Chronicles and my immersion into unholy hell in Tucson, it’s important, though: I remember where the ugly started… and it’s been going on for quite a while. Toward the end of my rolling nervous breakdown in Tucson, I happened to email my favorite cousin, almost exactly the same age as I am, with the observation that I thought Helen had probably been mentally ill for her whole life. Her reply was startling:

Absolutely true! I thought you already knew that she had this problem. I remember my parents speaking about an incident or two that happened when your family was visiting Granny. I guess she was never medicated/treated for it?

So everyone else knew except for her own children? If you don’t think this is monumental — and liberating — for a 63-year-old man to absorb, you haven’t been paying attention. Helen does have dementia, but I doubt it’s Alzheimer’s. Even if it is, there’s something else that’s in the mix, and it’s always been there: I remembered the first time my sister T_______ and I visited my folks in Tucson, back in ‘76. It was a Christmas visit, and while opening our presents there was such a horrible outpouring of hate from Helen that my sister and I immediately fled, driving up to the top of Mt. Lemmon outside of Tucson to sit on a rock, smoke dope, and watch the buzzards ride the thermals. Merry Xmas, y’all…

Oh my God

The truth is, I was completely possessed in Tucson. The pressure was unbearable. I couldn’t speak a single sentence without crying. My rage was all-encompassing, too. On the worst day of all, near the end, I cursed out both my brothers and a commenter on this site who’s very much like a brother. That was the day I initiated guardianship proceedings against Helen, so that I could force her into some kind of protective situation for her own good. A nursing home, assisted living, an asylum, who knows? The lawyers agreed that I had an emergency on my hands and had to act. Seven hundred fifty dollars later, phone calls had been made, appointments scheduled. I had a social worker visit Helen for a preliminary interview, and that’s where things began to look unsteady.

According to the social worker, Helen “presented well.” So much for social science, eh? I wonder what Helen was actually asked. Not about the voices, certainly, or the fact that she’d already forgotten that she’d asked me to come to Tucson to have her cremated and sell the properties! (She was dying, remember.) But this was a definite yellow flag as far as an emergency court hearing to obtain guardianship was concerned. Usually such proceedings aren’t undertaken unless there isn’t any doubt, and once again, the authorities were throwing up a roadblock. If I proceeded with the legal action, there would be a fight, and I would end up testifying in court against my mother. Naturally, I balked.

The next thing was that I finally included a younger brother in the deliberations, and he had reservations, too. I could see this wasn’t going to work, even though the alternative was the previously unthinkable one of just leaving Helen be. Leave her there in a rotten, sharp-edged, dirty, dingy trailer with no railing on the outside kitchen steps, no way to wash her soiled linens, no place to store her things. Leave her there in stinking, humid, white-hot Arizona with only one sibling and the cleaning lady to visit her. Leave her like she said she wanted to be left, losing checkbooks, missing $2500 cash, buying trailers she didn’t need with money set aside for taking care of her. Leave her with the voices talking about her in the night, needing dentures, glasses, and good food in the cupboard. Just leave her, like the laws of Arizona say she had a right to be, left alone to live like a crazy, sick, old lady who had no friends and no one to look after her. Just leave her there and go away… If that’s the way she wanted it, crazy or not, then…

Refusing all assistance

But all at once I felt a little loosening, a glimmer of hope for me. That morning I also had a long-distance talk with a Jungian analyst I’ve known for several years. She talked about the “dark, wild thing” that I had taken on myself by coming to Tucson and was clearly worried for my own safety. We both saw then that if I continued with the legal action, the dark, wild thing would still be on my shoulders. I knew I had to drop everything and leave.

Immediately thereafter, I called the lawyers and killed the process. (They agreed!) I told my siblings I was going home. I gathered up the checkbooks and credit cards I’d taken from Helen’s trailer and prepared to take them back to her. Already I felt like I was released from prison, even though I had the major hurdle of confronting Helen to apologize and comfort her.

Alas, my good intentions did not come to pass. What happened next requires another chapter, in fact, the most unbelievable of all. (Part V, coming up…)

Helen was always good at nest-building, as I recall.

This came in handy, because as I once figured out, we went through over 40 moves before I graduated from high school. Many of those were within the same community, of course. Arriving in Abilene, Texas for instance, we lived for a time in a motel with a kitchenette, then a rental house in the middle of town. I went to Lincoln Junior High School and had the requisite school jacket. After a while, we moved onto the air base for a while. When Helen decided the house was too small, my parents bought a brick rancher in a new subdivision on the edge of town. (I then attended Jefferson Jr. High and couldn’t wear my jacket.) That was where we stayed the longest — with me now at Cooper Jr./Sr. High School — until at last they sold it just before our move to Massapequa, New York (!). What with one delay after another, we then had to make another rented house our home for almost six months before finally leaving town. If you haven’t been keeping count, that adds up to five moves in less than four years!

Helen’s residence until a long month ago was the place I knew as the “family home” in Tucson. She’d lived there for over twenty years alone and outfitted it very nicely for a desert double-wide. It’s where I stayed this time and will likely stay again, when I come back to sign papers and dispose of everything. (IF I come back, I should say. More on that later.) The place has got to be one of the best-landscaped and situated properties in Tucson Estates, the so-called mobile home community for residents over 55 on the southwest edge of town. It’s adjacent to an arroyo where coyotes and javelinas go. There are mature trees and garden areas with a large paved patio. You can sit in a big screened porch and watch the doves and hummingbirds. Inside, it’s filled with Helen’s paintings and many beautiful keepsakes. The carpeting is plush and soft. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms. There’s also a big carport and a separate art studio.

A recurring theme in Helen’s last few years, however, was how she hated the responsibility of maintaining the place and yearned for a smaller, simpler home. On the face of it, this sounded sane to me. It was easy to imagine being 86 years old and not wanting to worry about the plumbing. The trouble was, practical concerns like that weren’t on her mind. She either couldn’t stand to simply let things be or couldn’t face the crisis of making choices and wanted somebody else to “take care of things.” This would invariably be one of us five siblings, and earlier this year she’d again floated the absurdist fantasy that my wife and I should take over the old place and be neighbors with her in Tucson Estates. In typical fashion, however, the thrust of this offer was that I would never be able to obtain a nicer home for us, being an artistic ne’er-do-well, and that my wife deserved far better than my forcing her to live in Taos. (Always the carrot and the baseball bat, together.)

In any case, I never figured she would do it. How can an 86-year-old woman take that kind of disruption in her life? But if she did, I knew or hoped that I could count on her to buy something decent. She’d actually pulled this stunt once before, a few years back, and eventually been convinced by sister M____ and others to move back to the double-wide. What I mean is, I just assumed she’d learned her lesson. Extremely naive on my part, for sure. I also think one sometimes manufactures hope to cover up the pain.

But she did it, and she did it badly. Very badly indeed. For one thing, she paid way too much and wasted precious cash for something she didn’t need. (My gently pointing this out resulted in my being attacked for never supporting her decisions.) For another, well, let’s start with a look at the old residence:

Old house: large screened porch

This is where you want to be except when it’s god-awful hot. From here you can watch the birds and look at your gardens. There’s tons of room and comfortable chaise lounges that are easy to nap on. I love it out there. The evening sun sets on the other side of the house, too, so it’s cooler here. Now contrast this with the screened porch on the “new” trailer Helen moved into a few weeks ago:

New house: narrow, hot, and ugly

Yes, that’s an apartment-sized washer & dryer in the background — Helen wets the bed every now and then, and that machine is too small to wash her blankets. (There are big, matched Maytag machines back at the old place.) This porch is much narrower and looks out on the side of the single-wide next door. What’s more, it’s on the sunny side of the house! In Arizona, that can be a death sentence. No one will ever want to sit out here.

Old house: just part of the landscaping

The shot above shows a little of the outdoor space beside the screened porch at the previous residence. Why give up what had always been a source of comfort and joy? The plantings and nearby wildlife almost made staying at Helen’s bearable, in fact.

Old house: carport, arroyo to the right

Helen’s studio is at the back. The steps to the house are specially-built, wide and shallow, easy for old legs to manage. The trees are full of birds all day. But take a look at this shot of where she lives now:

New house: rear of carport

That’s it, that’s all there is. The view isn’t a fair comparison, but you get the idea. This carport isn’t wide enough for the Chevy Cobalt I rented, and the steps to the kitchen door [not shown] are narrow and steep.

The sink in the tiny kitchen of the new place isn’t big enough to hold a frying pan, and there isn’t any dishwasher like Helen had before. The “bottom shelf” in the lower cabinets is the floor itself, and the counters all have very sharp edges. Dark brown fake wood paneling is everywhere. The previous owner’s dishes are still in the cupboards, and she uses them. I could go on and on and on: the bathroom in her old place was custom-designed with a soaking tub for old folks, special handholds and all. There’s even a walk-in closet. In the new place, the bathroom is so small that if someone were on the toilet when you opened the door, you’d hit them on the knee. The bathtub is horrible and slippery — Helen can only sit in a chair and take a sponge bath. There’s hardly any storage space at all.

This, however, is perhaps most telling of all:

New house: view across the road

Okay, ready now? The following is what it looks like across the street from the OLD house!

A little light in hell

My photos don’t necessarily convey the real differences, so you’ll have to take my word for it. The thing is, it’s just not like her, not like the woman who decorated the old place. No gardens to enjoy, no views, no birds or animals to watch, no porch to sit on. No beauty whatsoever, and someone else’s pictures are still on the walls. The new trailer is narrow, leaky, damp, and dark. My God, I realized: just like a grave!

It makes a kind of sense, this living death, but it’s very hard to take and very stupid. Helen needs live-in care, at least, and in the old home there were extra bedrooms where someone could easily have lived with her. Not so here! What’s more, the old woman paid cash for this, at least $50,000, money she could have used to pay for care. That would make it a tragedy, except that this is Helen’s chronicle. As we shall see, the last move of her life is actually her chosen way to die, as if she had no one to care for her and there were no other choice.

So be it, then, and on with the show.

I hardly know how to begin, but I have to try, in order to save myself.

Those of you who have gone through something similar will understand at least a little, or maybe a lot. We’re all the same and yet so different. It’s one thing to say, “My mother has been diagnosed with advanced Alzheimer’s.” [Note: diagnosis not official after all. - JHF] It’s quite another thing to say that this has happened to Helen Farr. That makes this the Helen & Johnny Chronicles as well, of course, and only I can tell the story of what’s going on now with both of us.

The one who gave me birth

Sobbing in the carport of this stupid, stinking trailer, completely broken, swatting bugs and staggering, trapped here now in the hell-hole that is Tucson. Why does anybody live here? I can’t imagine. Unbearable, putrid heat all day and night, humid too, this time of year, with millions of mosquitoes in the goddamned desert. If ever a city deserved to die, this one does. It shouldn’t even exist, running on water that fell as rain back in the Pleistocene. But why am I talking about Tucson? What’s this place ever done to me??

I freely admit that my Tucson experience has always been colored by the hell of familial disfunction. I could tell you about the time my father was drunk, crying, and threatening violence as my wife and I were leaving, both parents wielding knives and screaming… so we took my mother with us to a McDonald’s on the outskirts of town. We all shared cardboard burgers we couldn’t taste and then my wife and I drove off, leaving my mother to wait long enough for the old man to pass out so she could call a taxi. But oh, there was so much more. There is so much more.

My father died back in the ’80s from lung cancer at age 67, not long after he told me, shaking with rage, that “No one knows what goddamned hell it’s been to live with that woman!” This isn’t a preface to an indictment of my mother, but rather to show the ground in which the current catastrophe has grown. Not from which, but in which — the larger tale is steeped in karmic mystery, of course. I can tell you what I know of what’s happened in my lifetime that relates, and perhaps I will, if I am able. Years of Jungian analysis has taught me how to shine a light into the catacombs where I’m always anchored, though my eyes are in the sky.

The present disaster has many layers, twists, and turns, which makes a linear narrative quite difficult. And always there’s the context, the heaving, painful, hideous tapestry of lies and idiocy, greed and nonsense, drenched in tears and blood. Yes, blood. You might not see it, but it’s there. So maybe some will understand when I say that when I heard that Helen was in the hospital with pneumonia and that my brother and sister needed me to come, I heard the banshees wail.

South of Socorro, on the way to Arizona

She’s sitting 15 feet away now as I write this, at least as lucid as she was when I was last here almost two years ago. Her dementia (or whatever it is) phases in and out, like the moon moving behind the clouds. Earlier today she all but needed physical restraint, but dementia is easier to deal with than the periods of so-called sanity. I live in dread of those right now, because I’ve already started taking over all the finances, and in this state she might remember. I’ve gathered up the credit cards and checkbooks, taken control of various accounts through power of attorney vested in me years ago if this should come to pass. I wonder if she knows she agreed to this just last Friday, at her bank. Please God, don’t let her ask about it now: I can’t take another fit of screaming.

She hears voices almost all the time. A common theme is sex and dope parties at the neighbors, late at night, people voting for her and against her, whisperings in the dark. An hour ago she came out from the bedroom and wanted to know who that woman was I’d been talking to. I told her I’d been sitting here at my computer the whole time, totally alone. We’ve actually “discussed” the idea of a nursing home, easier when she’s in a weakened state from which acquiescence almost flows. She doesn’t think it’s time, of course, but then she thinks I’m here just visiting. JUST VISITING??? I’ve cried for days, not knowing what to do or where to turn, and she has no idea. I’d say it’s more than I can bear, except I seem to still be here, where I would never want to be.

The pneumonia almost killed her and left her with a concrete-hard mass of congealed pus outside her lungs, restricting their expansion. My sister (a nurse) came out from California to oversee the situation, discussed this with my mother, and both agreed there’d be no major surgery to correct it. No extraordinary measures, no derring-do, let nature take its course, etc. At the same time, my sister, overcome with guilt, decided she would quit her job in LA to stay here and take care of mom — a position she’d only recently gotten after earning her nursing degree at the age of 50. With this decision in her mind, she allowed the hospital to release Helen for home care, thinking that she and my brother could manage the daily injections of antibiotics into the kick-line (IV) that Helen would need for several weeks more. That’s not the end of this installment, though.

While this was going on, I was on my way to Tucson in a rental car, straining against the loss of every mile that brought me closer to the vortex. It was like driving through giant thunderstorms of pain, and when I hit the Arizona line, I slowed down, knowing… Rolling into Tucson at midnight and 92 degrees, I headed for Helen’s other trailer, the luxurious double-wide she’d recently abandoned for the awful place she lives in now — this requires a separate episode — where I could camp out in the wreckage of my mother’s life and get some rest before heading over in the morning. While I was still asleep the next morning, my cell phone rang. It was my wife in Taos, who’d gotten up early and read the email from my sister:

“Sweetie, I know youre not up yet, but I wanted you to know: M____ has gone back to Los Angeles!”

Oh really? Oh God.

I didn’t have to know the reason, though. The context, remember. Always the context. Of course, she’d seen that everything was impossible, never mind her best intentions. Not only was Helen raving mad and vicious when she wasn’t, but my sister had realized she couldn’t quit her job and lose her health insurance, since she’d just had surgery for thyroid cancer and needed radiation treatments. No money would be forthcoming from Helen, either, since the dispensing of funds is always tied to coercion in the name of “doing what’s best.” No hope of getting compensation for giving up her life to stay here, then, assuming she could stand it.

I walked in the door and found Helen sitting in her chair, seemingly completely out of it. I bent down to give her a hug. She knew who I was, but not that I had come from Taos. The morning did not go swimmingly. She obviously couldn’t be left alone and yet there wasn’t anyone to take care of her. No one person can, certainly not my brother. Not me, not my sister, either. No one to take care of her, and what to do? Now everything was up to me, and here I sit, almost a full week later, Helen babbling constantly through the entire writing of this post.

Babble, babble, babble, each absurdity inviting an exasperated response I dare not utter.

I took her to a doctor on Friday (as soon as I could manage it), hoping to get some help, but he wasn’t her “primary care physician,” who wasn’t available anyway, so the idiot could do nothing except tell me to take Helen to the emergency room and leave her there. That’s right: ABANDON MY MOTHER at the hospital door and walk away! This advice came from a doctor,, and he’s not the only one who told me so.

This is America in 2008. This is what we have to answer for, all of us, and I’m white-hot with rage.

I don’t need to write about this stuff because, well, I don’t know what I’m talking about, but Barry Ritholtz does. Check out Idiots Fiddle While Rome Burns:

This is financial incompetence writ on a scale far grander than anything seen for centuries… something beyond cognitive dissonance is occurring — this is full blown case of dementia unfolding in the public sphere. When this era of excess and absurdity is treated by historians in the future, the question I expect to be asked most is not why many of these people weren’t jailed for their financial felonies. Rather, I expect them to wonder why so many of these folk weren’t placed in protective custody, and heavily medicated, for the only rational explanation for their statements and behaviors is that they have gone so far beyond the bend as to be completely and totally insane.

Now this could be fun, especially if you have a family:

Your Heimatssicherheitsabteilung — sorry, DHS — is considering having airlines issue shock bracelets instead of boarding passes. You’d put these on, they’d have all your travel and personal info encoded into them, and if there was any trouble, they’d work like a taser: just push a button in the cockpit or in the flight marshal’s pocket and you’d be immobilized for several minutes, writhing like a slug in salt. Now then: this is not a joke. There are people in your government pulling down big salaries who think this might be a good idea. There’s even a manufacturer’s promotional video (see link).

Bush surrendered America to the terrorists years ago. He had help, of course, and most of them are still in Congress. I would have asked, “Why the hell are people willing to take their own lives to hurt us?” and gone from there. Notably, no one did, so here we are. If the country were applying for a job, any employer with half a brain would toss the resume in the garbage can.

I think a lot of people would wear these bracelets. Just look at what they already accept without protest! The reason I mention this is that this is where we are. I see and ask myself, where do I invest my physical and psychic energy? Looking deeper, mainly. Understanding myself. Absorbing the truth of Nature where there is no need for “answers.” Listening to my heart.

Hey! Wait a minute. Since I’d be doing all that anyway, it hardly matters what else happens, does it??

Well, sure it does, because I help create it, and that tells me things.

[BZZZT!]

We’re still looking for a rental with more solar gain and a better woodstove. I’m feeling lucky, too.

I like heating with wood, athough it won’t do for the studio my wife needs for her glossy-black baby grand piano. In the long run, I think we’ll have to buy some land and build a couple of straw-bale “huts” for living and studio space, but for that I’ll wait until we know what our money’s going to be worth after, um… after… well, who knows? But there’s no sense buying something we’ll have to give up later just because we have to eat.

Meanwhile, here’s something that’s absolutely horrible: the cost of heating oil! No, we don’t use that in New Mexico. But back at our old home in Maryland, filling the big black heating oil tank in the moldy basement will cost someone over $700 in the fall at projected prices… That’s for one month, chilluns, and I used to scream when the bill was just one-fifth of that.

Show me how this is anything less than catastrophic for millions of families in the Northeast. I simply can’t imagine how people will cope. That this country hasn’t been on a national crusade to develop renewable energy for all over the last 10 years is worse than cruel and stupid. A lot of people in the news today deserve to be in jail.

We all hope this isn’t a sign of things to come, except that it’s already here.

I picked this up from a post by Dave Neiwert at Firedoglake. (You need to read the whole story at CNN.) It’s about homeless middle class women [Note: see comments] in Santa Barbara, California, sleeping in their cars:

Harvey now works part time for $8 an hour, and she draws Social Security to help make ends meet. But she still cannot afford an apartment, and so every night she pulls into a gated parking lot to sleep in her car, along with other women who find themselves in a similar predicament.

There are 12 parking lots across Santa Barbara that have been set up to accommodate the growing middle-class homelessness. These lots are believed to be part of the first program of its kind in the United States, according to organizers.

The lots open at 7 p.m. and close at 7 a.m. and are run by New Beginnings Counseling Center, a homeless outreach organization.

It is illegal for people in California to sleep in their cars on streets. New Beginnings worked with the city to allow the parking lots as a safe place for the homeless to sleep in their vehicles without being harassed by people on the streets or ticketed by police.

These aren’t crazies pushing shopping carts full of junk. These are people like you and me who fell on hard times and don’t have spouses, families, or government agencies to take care of them. Too poor to afford rent and too “well off” to qualify for assistance (assuming there is any), they sleep in their cars in parking lots set aside for them in one of the richest, poshest communities in California. Author Neiwert suggests calling these lots “Bushvilles,” after the infamous “Hoovervilles” of the Great Depression era.

What happens to your job when gas hits $10/gallon, and if you still have a car, where will you park to sleep?

Nice little country we got here. Holy Mother of God…

Dubuque is a fascinating old city with lots of character perched high on the limestone bluffs overlooking the mighty Mississippi. (The river is quite high now, too.) In the image below, you’re looking north from Eagle Point Park. The opposite bank is Wisconsin. While we were standing there, we saw three pelicans fly by. Yes, pelicans. They migrate through here, and on other visits I’ve seen large flocks of them.

That is one BIG river, folks!

The only “incident” of the day occurred while I was out to dinner with my wife, her sister and brother-in-law (the superintendent of schools in Dubuque), and her brother and his wife, who’d driven up from Atlanta. In response to a perfectly innocent question from the brother about whether “Santa Fe is still growing” — he works for Georgia Power loves to go on about such things — out of my mouth came:

“GROWING?! Growth is OLD. It’s finished. Growth is so… so 20th century!!!”

[silence]

No one said a thing for a good 20 seconds, I swear.

Maybe I was speaking in tongues, receiving a communication from the Universe, or maybe it was the alcohol. I’m not even sure what I meant, although I admit that the frequent references to how this or that place has “grown” so much tends to drive me bonkers, because they’re never delivered with regret. I can’t help it, I guess. Whenever conventional wisdom starts looming over me like a giant wave about to break, I just snap and have to fight back. He didn’t mean anything the least bit aggressive or argumentative by asking me that, of course, but my buttons got pushed. THE COLLECTIVE IS INSANE, you understand, or maybe you don’t. More power to you, though, if you’re immune to the perception — living with it all the time as I do is something of a chore.

My own fault, ultimately, but this came after a detailed discussion of my wife’s nephew’s new home in Georgia. Why any two people need a two-story, four bedroom house is none of my business, but it grated on me. It’s always a shock to get out into the world (America) and find that normal people think nothing of living in homes the size of aircraft carriers. At this very moment I’m sitting in a living room with three big sofas, four upholstered chairs, a baby grand piano, desks, coffee tables, and I don’t know what all. I swear it’s bigger than our entire house in Taos. Hell, the storage room here in the basement is bigger than where we live. I’m not jealous or envious in any way, but it seems so crazy.

The awkward moment at dinner was very telling, of course, because I violated orthodoxy. How dare one utter a dark, sarcastic word about the American Way! No harm was done, fortunately, and I soon regained control. But welcome to Dubuque, you might say.

(I really do need to get out more, too…)

Oh that Hillary (addressing the topic of Iran)… Some words should never be uttered, not even in the heat of a national political campaign. If you like that kind of language, though, this is what you’re signing up for:

Post-blast corpses in Hiroshima, Japan

This photo and others like it were only recently released. They’re from August, 1945 — when I was born, coincidentally — and the entire series is available here. Be advised, however, that the close-ups are extremely gruesome. So too is the very idea that the U.S. would do this to a nation of 70 million people because someone jumped on Israel, which already has hundreds of nuclear weapons of its own.

Personally, I would like America to take an entirely different direction than more of the above. For some reason, I’d rather help people than kill them, and I wish our politicians would do the same. Great God Almighty, are there no grownups running for president these days?!?

Why yes, actually. One, to be precise.