MERRY CHRISTMAS

 A little piece in which I predict the future:

Morning began with a thud as an empty beer bottle hit a Christmas tree in the next room.
“Hon?”
There was no answer.
“Maria, are you okay?”
No one answered and Joe rose. Entering the next room, he saw his wife slumped on the couch, staring at the straggly tree with no presents beneath it, just the beer bottle.
He sat beside her. “What’s the matter,” he said.
“Everything.”
“Everything?” He put an arm around her. “Everything all at once?”
She moved her eyes to his and said, “Why? Why do they have to move here?”
“They are my parents,” Joe said. “They have no place to go. Can’t you understand? What if they were your parents?”
“Mine are both dead,” she said. “Remember the last flu epidemic? Why can’t he get a job?”
“He tried,” Joe said. “It’s hard. No firm wants to hire a man in his late fifties. Particularly with a break in his leg that never healed. He got that at his last job, remember? He’s on the list.”
“What about her?”
“There’s only stenography jobs,” he said. “And they go to the young ones. The ones they call ‘the company ink.’”
“Couldn’t we just give them some money to find a place?”
“You forget,” he said. “Having a child with smallpox doesn’t do much good for savings accounts.”
“Tommy can get a job when he gets out, can’t he? The damned government must let him out eventually.”
“Sshh,” Joe said. He glanced around the room and covered the cell phone in his pocket. Then he spoke toward it. “Now you know the government is trying to help. The news says incomes will rise even higher this year.”
She shook her head. “What did Tommy say when you saw him?”
“Good news,” Joe said. “He is pretty sure his lawyer can get ‘Helping Immigrants’ lowered to ‘Improper Empathy.’ Now doesn’t that make you feel better?”
“And the ones he helped?”
Joe looked around again. This time he was more nervous than before. “Now don’t you worry about them. They are being well cared for. Things are going to get better for us all.” He kissed her forehead. “And… “
“And what?
“Merry Christmas.”

DEFEAT FASCISM

 Journal of a Left-Wing Radical: There came a blessed day in my life in which I thought I would never face fear again. Oh, I’m not talking about the temporary scare of a spring storm, a near automobile accident, or being lowered from a ship in a small boat into six-foot seas.

I’m talking about that gnawing, primal fear that forms when you have no control over your life and you are well aware that there are forces all about you that wish you dead. It’s that “any minute, any second” fear that some know more about than others and which most have never known. It is at its rawest and most fearful on a dark night between midnight and dawn.

Extended fear can seep deeply into places you desperately want to be sacred and untouched. It changes a person, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

I was right for over 50 years. There were storms and there were moments of deep concern, any number of temporary fears. There was even fear that she would say, “No.”

But there wasn’t the raw kind that steals your soul and makes you shrink from strange faces.

Until now.

DEFEAT FASCISM

 Journal of a Left-Wing Radical

No contacts yesterday. The imaginary basement of HC's pizza parlor is empty once again.

Mostly I spent the day in rapt confusion. See … I'm not the least bit confused about Donald J. Trump. Anyone who pays attention at least 30 minutes a week knew, by the end of 2020, that he was an unprincipled, depraved, opportunistic, greedy and gloated grifter unfit for any role of responsibility.

Enough for his good points.

The thing that troubles me is that I could name without wrinkling a brow at least 20 about whom I once trusted to be kind, generous, loving people who now fully support the machinations of the MAGA Cabal.

Most of these people claim Christianity as their cultural and moral base. Oh, they are not the Galilean Christians of years gone by. Lumped largely as "evangelicals," they are what I call "ABC" cult members, as in "Anti-Beatitude Christians."

They belong, mostly, to that lemming-like cohort of devotees who will follow the MAGA leaders over any cliff proposed. They now claim allegiance to the doctrine whereby 10,000 children may starve or die from polio if it would prevent a single same-sex couple who love one another from enjoying the legal sanctity of marriage.

Inexplicable ain't the word for it. But I miss our friendship.

Dream A Little Dream

I’ve had this recurring dream for nearly 50 years. No, it’s not about the class I forgot about in college or the test I didn’t study for, or the paper I didn’t write. I read once where a huge percentage of college graduates have dreams along that line, though. The writer opined that we have such dreams in times of stress and they comfort us by beckoning to when we prevailed against great obstacles.

 I don’t know if dreams mean anything or not. Carl Jung thought they did. But gee, his patients, according to his records, dreamed of things like entering a dark and magic forest and seeing a portal through which the dreamer entered a majestic oak, where he encountered wisps of the spirit world.

Hell, I wonder what he would have thought when I told him about the dream of going to the Saturday matinee at the old Community Theater in Pine Bluff with Al Capone and Sandra Dee? Hmm.

But this recurring dream is different. I dream that, at some point, I’ve promised the United State Navy that they could have be back for four more years anytime they chose under some agreement or other. I think it has to do with fast ships and harm's way. I guess you could call the dream a sort of “Military Mephistopheles Metaphor.”

I had the dream last night, and guess what? Yep. They called and told this aged, decrepit, pitiful, unable, unready, and unwilling old man he was due back for military service. Yes, I’m aware of the hyperbole, but it’s nothing compared to the whining I did the first time.

Perhaps the dream has something to do with the fact that, by all accounts, the military is scraping the bottom of the barrel with its all-volunteer effort. It does this while planning to invade two, maybe three, more sovereign nations on the whimsical orders of a leader who never served and doesn’t read. This political party-head does listen to some ultra-weirdos who formed their opinions of history and foreign policy in the 7^th grade and have never seen fit to change them. “Invade someone, for Christ’s sake,” they are telling him.

It will be the most disastrous event, in my opinion, since Operation Barbarossa commenced, but who am I to say?

A brief bit of inductive reasoning: I heard recently about a new trooper recruited into the military. It was a 32 year-old female with two kids. Think they won’t try to come after me?

Or you?

Or your kids?

Or your grand kids?

Back to the dream. I was on the bus headed back to boot camp with an odd assortment of fellow recruits. Years ago, the dream would have included ending back overseas wondering when my first watch would commence. I left that one years ago, though. I suppose there have been too many wars since then, Anyway, I woke up from the dream and rolled over before the bus reached San Diego.

When I started dreaming again, I was somewhere else and it was cold, real cold.

Oh, never mind.
I'll serve again.