Beneath a Tattered Flag

“For the tragedy of our world is precisely that nothing any longer is capable of rousing it from its lethargy.” Anais Nin

Another Memorial Day to honor our war dead.

We remain at war – preemptive war, continuous war, perpetual war, and shadow war. Pious words will be uttered today by the president and others -- they will talk about heroes and sacrifice and bravery and freedom. We are still killing Afghans and Pakistanis and Yemenis, and inside our own borders another kind of war is being waged, equally continuous and perpetual – the war against the poor, against workers, against students, against the elderly and the sick, against the environment. 

We continue to operate our own version of the Gulag Archipelago – the prison at Guantanamo, where most of the inmates are on a hunger strike to protest years of detention without charges or trial. President Obama says he wants to close Guantanamo but that Congress won’t let him. This doesn’t wash. It’s politics, again. If Obama were to release those inmates who the Department of Defense has determined are not a threat, and one or more of them were to become involved in a plot or actual attack on American interests, the political fallout would be severe. Obama has the authority; he just lacks the guts to issue the order.

American flags will fly today, flutter in the breeze, and Air Force or Navy fighter jets will scream over baseball stadiums, and Major League Baseball will trot out some of our wounded veterans for the obligatory standing ovation, and everyone can feel proud and patriotic while CIA drones swoop low over the frontier in Pakistan, and another car bomb explodes in Baghdad.

Everyone can feel proud and patriotic while income inequality grows and democracy shrivels on the vine, and more people are excluded from college or priced out of gentrified neighborhoods. America the Beautiful. Life is grand up on the hill, surrounded by wrought-iron fences and stone walls, at the end of a private road patrolled by private security forces; the nearest school is private, too, and free of brown or black faces. All the segregation money can buy. Life is grand on Wall Street too, and in the executive suite, and at the country club.

The wealthy send the poor to fight and die in places like Iraq and Afghanistan; the wealthy say that war is moral but helping the needy at home immoral because it makes the needy dependent on the fruits of the producers. This is said without irony.

The flag is flying, red, white and blue, but the country in its shadow isn’t the same. We invade other countries, we kidnap people we suspect, we detain and torture, we kill without due process, and we mock the rule of law. I suppose we have always committed these sorts of crimes and transgressions, but now it’s simply more blatant.

For twelve years the most powerful military force on the planet has chased the Taliban and al-Qaeda across and around Afghanistan. Where has this got us? What has been gained? Twelve Memorial Days have come and gone, and we are still “training” the Afghans to police and protect themselves. How many years of training does it take before we can lower the stars and stripes and close up shop?

War All the Time

I keep thinking my country has hit the nadir and must begin to rebound, but almost every day more evidence pops up to prove the empire is on the down slope and flailing like an elephant on roller skates.

The Senate held a hearing the other day about the Authorization for Use of Military Force or AUMF as it’s known, passed with bipartisan congressional support and patriotic fervor immediately after the 9/11 attacks. The AUMF gave then President George W. Bush and his henchman, Vice President Dick Cheney, unprecedented latitude to take the War on Terror to terrorists, wherever in the world they happened to operate. The president could prosecute the War on Terror any way he deemed fit without consulting much with Congress.

We’re thirteen years from 9/11 and still fighting the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia and other locales in Africa, and the AUMF is alive and well, and if some of the senators and generals who spoke at the hearing are to be believed, may continue another twenty years. 

In his second inaugural address, Obama claimed the era of perpetual war was over, but that was just a line in a speech designed to appease the base, not meant to be taken literally.

Perpetual war is still US policy.

The Obama Administration also uses the AUMF as legal cover for its targeted killing program. Every Tuesday, according to investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, a list of names is presented to President Obama, and the leader of the free world decides who dies and who lives. Terror Tuesday is what the national security and intelligence apparatus calls it. Without due process of any kind, the president hands down a death sentence to be carried out by drone strike or by one of America’s proxies. Quite often innocent people are killed either with the suspected terrorist or instead of the terrorist, but we don’t lose any sleep over our mistakes. 

The U.S. also carries out pre-emptive “signature strikes,” guilt-by-association strikes, aimed at creating terror in a group of people of a certain age and with certain habits of movement and congregation. The military and its allies in the mainstream propaganda industry tell the American public that these strikes are clinical, surgical, precise, carefully designed to limit civilian casualties; they spin other fables for us as well.

When it comes to bending the Constitution, Obama is no better than Bush was and in many ways worse. His depredations against the Constitution, the sovereign territory of other nations, and basic human rights are many.

Basically, the U.S. has adopted Israeli operating procedures when it comes to protecting the homeland from terrorists: we assert the right to kill anyone, anywhere, at any time; we shoot first and mop up the mess later; we kidnap, render, and torture. It’s incomprehensible to me that this country maintains kill lists, and that the Executive branch has usurped so much war making power from the Legislative branch. When we finally and fatally become a fascist nation – and there are many disquieting indications that that day is approaching – we will look back at the AUMF and rue the day it became law.

How many more terrorists will we birth during another twenty years of extrajudicial killings and signature strikes and shadow warfare? One thing is for sure, because of the secrecy surrounding these operations, and the viciousness with which the current administration prosecutes whistleblowers and honest journalists, it will be a long time before we understand the full extent of the crimes committed in the name of freedom and security.

History shows that empires cannot sustain perpetual wars. U.S. policy makers will not outsmart or outrun history. The day when our proverbial birds come home to roost will be very dark and very cold.

Poem - Chains

Chains of exploitation encircle the planet

Strong exploit weak

Rich exploit poor

Literate exploit illiterate

White exploit black

and brown

Men exploit women

and children and animals

Land

and

Water

and

Trees

and

Mountains

and

Rocks

Bangor to Bangalore

Dallas to Dushanbe

Riga to Rabat

Across ocean and desert

Valley and rain forest

Drill

Chop

Slash

Burn

Pulverize

Melt

Will we rise up,

Break these rusty chains

Before it’s too late

Or

Is it already too

Late?

Poem - Light

The light is fading

turning silver

slipping through the trees

Another evening on the north end of Milpas

in SB

the Platinum Coast

home to billionaires and film stars

chic and suave

red tile heaven

The old poet sits and thinks of the places he’s lived,

other evenings like this one

sitting

watching the light fade from the sky

Tokyo, Honolulu, Seattle, Irvine

and the long trek

back to SB with his dog and a few

possessions

Home to a city of memories and ghosts,

the streets turned foreign

full of strangers

and the vacant lots he played in as a boy

long gone, paved over, built upon

lost forever

Nothing stays the same

except this early evening light

it falls from the trees

into his outstretched

palm,

lingers a moment

then disappears

Poem - The Big Tipper

I didn’t learn much from my father

Because he didn’t have much to teach

But one thing he taught me was to never

Stiff a decent waitress

When his gambling was going well and he was flush

My father tipped big

Often leaving more for the tip than the cost of the meal

He’d pay the bill in cash, placing one twenty

On top of another

“Keep the change, darling,” he’d say to the waitress

Never stiff a waitress

Never fear to throw the dice

Cut the cards

Trust a horse with the rent

And you might wind up just like me

Broke

Liver gone

Lungs black as tar

Dead at 57

From Here to Bangladesh

Beautiful day here on the Platinum Coast of California, with plenty of sunshine on the red tile roofs, the luxury automobiles, the Farmer’s Market, and the tourists strolling along the waterfront. It’s enough to make a man think nothing but happy thoughts, but I found myself thinking about that factory in Bangladesh that collapsed, killing around 300 human beings.

Those people died because of “market forces” and the “globalized” economy; they died because the game is low wages and low prices at Target and Wal-Mart and Macy’s. For the labor contractors, wholesalers and retailers, it’s business as usual, collateral damage, not their fault. Nobody’s to blame -- it’s just the way of the world, everybody trying to pull down some coin.

Get the most labor you can for the lowest amount you can pay. In the global economy handbook, Volume I, page 1, this is described as sound business, not exploitation. Chase cheap labor from Mexico to Thailand to China to Bangladesh to Sri Lanka, and never lose a minute worrying about the welfare of the people down on the sweat shop floor. The world is divided into camps: slaves and masters, workers and owners, damned and blessed, losers and winners, unlucky and lucky. This is the way it has always been, and will always be.

If we paid those folks in Bangladesh a decent wage, allowed them to form unions, and get all uppity with rights and entitlements, American consumers couldn’t buy t-shirts at H&M for $6 a pop, and we couldn’t pay the CEO three hundred times what his secretary earns. And that would be awful, wouldn’t it?

About as awful as that ratfucker George W. Bush opening his library and museum down in Texas. The most anti-intellectual president of the modern era has his own library, a showcase for two disastrous terms in office, two wars, state-sanctioned kidnapping and torture, Guantanamo, Katrina, and an economic meltdown not seen since the Great Depression. The revision of history has begun in earnest. I doubt we’ve seen the last of W. A few years from now he’ll pop up as a GOP elder statesman, with his sordid past forgotten by the faithful.

But like I said, it was a beautiful day, full of light and color, reds and greens and blues. It’s a long, long way from the Platinum Coast to Bangladesh, but the thought I can’t get out of my head is that it’s not as far as we think.   

Strange Week in America

First, the Boston bombing. Then the capitulation of the United States Senate to the National Rifle Association. Then the explosion at that fertilizer factory in Texas.

Death, disruption, shock, fear.

Knocked North Korea out of the headlines. I guess the “tense” situation wasn’t so tense after all.

I don’t yet know what to make of the Boston Marathon bombing. Were the perpetrators terrorists in the classic sense – or publicity hounds? What was their beef and what were they trying to prove? How did they obtain their weapons? Was it really necessary for the forces of law & order to roll out every high-tech, paramilitary piece of gear in their formidable arsenal to apprehend a 19-year-old kid? To lock down a major city? At what point do common sense precautions become paranoid overkill? Will we lose even more of our civil liberties because of what happened in Boston? Will we acquiesce to more surveillance cameras, more electronic intrusion into our daily lives?

Don’t misunderstand – I’m not discounting the victims or playing down the carnage -- the photographs I saw in the on-line edition of the Los Angeles Times were gruesome, horrifying, and every person killed or wounded or maimed loves someone and is loved in return, is connected to someone whose life will not be the same again.

What I’m remembering is the aftermath of 9/11, how the country lost its collective mind, and how our political leaders curtailed our civil liberties and launched two wars in the name of fighting Terror. Yes, the crime in Boston was terrible, but an emotional overreaction might prove to be worse in the long run. Cooler heads should prevail, but I suspect cool heads will be very hard to find.

What happened in the Senate this week only proves the failure of our democracy. The Senate touts itself as the world’s greatest deliberative body, an institution where logic, facts, and reason prevail, but the truth is that in the Senate all that really matters is money.  When it comes to gun control, or, gun safety as it’s euphemistically called, I expect to hear twisted, perverse reasoning from Republicans; I don’t expect to see four senators from the majority caving to their fear of the NRA.

President Obama made the speeches, shed the tears, said all the right things to the right audiences, but when it came to the nitty-gritty, arm-twisting that has to be done to pass legislation in our dysfunctional democracy, he failed once again. Despite his reelection, Obama still hasn’t located his cajones. 

Not that any significant gun legislation ever had a chance of passing the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, because the NRA has a lock on that body. Voters want sensible gun laws, sensible restrictions on who can buy and own a gun, but our lawmakers will continue to ignore us, no matter how many children are killed, because they are scared witless by the NRA, and the NRA is in turn beholden to 18^th century thinking.

When I hear the NRA and its acolytes talk about the need for citizens to own guns for the purpose of protecting themselves from depredations by the government, I think of the Boston Police Department and all the paramilitary equipment it deployed this week, the officers who looked exactly like soldiers, the black armored vehicles, and I think of some idiot who believes that owning a .12 gauge shotgun is going to protect him and his family from all that firepower.

Good luck with that, pal. 

Black Bill

So, Obama isn’t a Democrat after all.

The signs have been evident for a long time, starting with Obama’s reluctance to prosecute criminal bankers, to make good on his promise to shut down the colossal embarrassment that is Guantanamo prison, and his willingness to abandon a public health care option before debate even began.

Obama drifted further from his base by expanding drone warfare in Pakistan, cracking down on whistleblowers at home, and waffling on his support for real action on climate change. He talked about “clean” coal when he knew full well that no such thing exists; he expanded oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico -- after the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Obama is the black reincarnation of Bill Clinton, a Democrat ever willing to abandon the party’s long standing principles in favor of a slick deal with his political opponents and campaign contributors. Let’s not forget that Obama surrounded himself with Clintonites in his first cabinet, including alumni like Lawrence Summers, Rahm Emanuel and Hilary Clinton herself. Like the consummate snake oil salesman that he is, Obama used soaring rhetoric about hope and change to get people – particularly young voters -- excited enough to elect him, and then, once in office, he methodically abandoned every one of his rhetorical positions in favor of “bipartisanship,” which means, of course, terrible proposals and awful legislation, or, more often than not, no legislation at all.

Obama has now made a budget proposal that offers to reduce Social Security benefits -- long a goal of political conservatives who abhor any government initiative that actually works as it was designed to -- in exchange for GOP concessions on tax hikes on the wealthy. Is this a savvy ploy to gain political advantage, the equivalent of a jujitsu move? Is Obama a master pragmatist? Or does he really believe the only way to save Social Security in the long run is to castrate it in the short run?

I don’t know.

What remains of the political left is angry with Obama, but we are an impotent, disorganized lot easily ignored or discredited by the corporate media. John Boehner and his little henchman, Eric Cantor, are probably giddy at the prospect of finally starting the process of dismantling Social Security as we know it, and even more ecstatic that a Democratic president opened the door. Wall Street bankers and money managers are salivating at the thought of the millions in fees they stand to rake in if Social Security is changed from a public trust to a semi-private one.

I’m not surprised that Obama bends his base over a chair and sodomizes it; he’s a stooge of Wall Street, as are most Democrats and almost all Republicans. Politicians of whatever stripe pay lip service to the will of the “American people,” and then proceed to do exactly what their masters tell them to do.  My own congressional representative, Lois Capps, who I believe is a decent person, nearly always votes with the president. I start every letter or e-mail I send to her like this: “You don’t represent me or my interests, and I know you never will, but you’re the only game in town…”

Our political duopoly is rotten, rotten from within, corrupted by money and influence peddling. The Obama campaign spent billions of dollars in 2012 to convince voters of how different he was from Mitt Romney, and of course Obama is different, but the differences are not as stark as his spin-machine wanted us to believe. Obama lives comfortably on the center-right of the political spectrum, rubbing ideological shoulders with financiers and bankers, playing golf at the country club with neoliberals and oil company oligarchs.

Obama is Black Bill, Clinton’s brother of another color.  

Fat Cats, Skinny Dogs

I heard the economic lie again this morning on ABC News, how Wall Street was not impressed by the latest jobs report. The talking head doing the report made the remark matter-of-factly, as if the only thing that matters when it comes to economic news is whether or not Wall Street approves.

To all but the dullest or most ideologically deranged Americans (politicians from both corporate parties fall into this latter category, though I exempt Senator Bernie Sanders), it’s clear that Wall Street and the interests of citizens have nothing in common. Wall Street is about stocks, bonds, investors, obscene executive salaries, insider trading and outright fraud, while Main Street is about jobs and wages, the price of gasoline, milk, meat, health care and college tuition.

But almost all mainstream media reporting about the economy focuses on Wall Street investors, the wealth created by trading shares or commodities, credit default swaps and the like; this is sold to citizens by the corporate megaphone as the equivalent of the real economy where the majority of us live and work, but we know better -- workers don’t receive zero-strings attached taxpayer bailouts, and in fact only receive federal unemployment benefits grudgingly, after brutal political mud wrestling in which one party is forced into absurd concessions for the sake of the other’s ideological hard-on.

Corporations own the media, and media do the corporate chieftains’ bidding, parroting the boardroom line and narrowing the news focus so that Americans can have no idea of what is going on in their own country, let alone around the world. We know plenty about the Royal couple, Kim Kardashian’s pregnancy, Beyonce’s philosophical proclamations, any number of salacious murder trials, and what shows are on the prime time TV schedule, but far too little about climate change, our burgeoning prison population and racist justice system, the cost of college tuition and health care, food and other necessities.  

To top things off, by his latest budget proposal, President Obama appears very willing to roll the dice on Social Security in the hope that by doing so he can extract GOP agreement to raise taxes on the wealthy who have been enjoying a decades long tax holiday. Obama’s head appears to be buried in Bill Clinton’s behind, for remember it was Slick Willie who triangulated his way to NAFTA, the crime bill, and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act; Clinton never hesitated to sell Democrats down the river, and neither does Obama.

It’s absolutely maddening, a daily assault on one’s intelligence. When a hack like Jim Cramer is afforded more airtime and credibility than real economists like Joseph Stiglitz or Richard Wolff, you know you are living in a nation fearful of confronting itself; better slick hype and fantasy than the unsettling truth that the economy is not recovering for average working folks, only for the fat cats in the penthouse suite. 

Bon Voyage - My Son Goes to Paris

My son is leaving for Paris in twelve hours and we can’t find his passport. His bedroom looks like it was raided by the DEA; the content of every drawer, shelf and ledge lies in a heap in the middle of the floor.

When I ask him when he last had the passport, my son looks at me like I’m an idiot.

“How do you expect me to remember? This is mother’s fault. Mother, what did you do with my passport? This isn’t funny.”

“It has to be here,” I say. “Don’t panic, we’ll find it.”

His sister is downstairs, searching our Honda CRV, while my wife looks through the file drawer where we keep our important papers: old tax returns, paid bills, invoices, receipts, warranties, report cards, birth certificates, Social Security cards, and credit cards we never bothered to activate. Everything is there, except the kid’s passport.
 

“Great,” my son says, “I’m not going to Paris after all. Six months of waiting, six months of anticipation, six months of planning, down the drain. My life is ruined! I’m texting Winter.” Winter is his classmate and on-again, off-again friend. They’re in an “on” phase now, and spend hours texting or Skyping one another. Winter has a younger sister named Spring.

“Don’t say anything yet,” I say, checking the pockets of one of his coats. “It will turn up. Did you look in your book bag?”

Of course he looked in his book bag. What a stupid question.

My daughter returns from downstairs and reports that the passport isn’t hiding in the CRV. “Does this mean Gabriel isn’t going to Paris?”

“I found my passport,” my wife calls from the other room, “and a pair of earrings I’ve been looking for. Gabriel, you didn’t give me your passport, you have it and it’s somewhere in that disaster you call a room.”

“No, it’s not,” Gabriel sing-songs from his room. “I gave it to you and you lost it. Thanks, mother, for ruining my life!”

“Look under his futon,” my wife advises.

“Done,” I say. “No luck, although I did find two bowls, a cup, and a box of stale crackers.”

A minute later my mother-in-law calls, wanting to know if the passport has turned up. “Gaby texted me,” she says. “Where could the damn thing be? Did you look under his futon?”

While I’m talking to her mother my wife’s cell phone rings; her sister wants to know if we’ve located the passport. Why, she asks, did we wait until the night before to locate the passport?

My daughter announces that she is tired of looking and is retiring to her room to watch the Disney channel. “Too bad Gabriel isn’t going to Paris. He’s so lame.”

After another twenty fruitless minutes of searching, my son, beside himself, throws in the towel and calls his teacher to tell her the news; she urges him to stay calm and continue the search. His iPhone buzzes repeatedly with text messages from his classmates. His grandmother calls again. His aunt calls again, and then his cousin Mia. We’ve looked everywhere and are running out of ideas.

I’m trying not to panic, but the thought of the $3000 plus this trip cost us has my stomach churning. Adding to my anxiety is the fact that the $3000 is non-refundable. I can’t count the times we have lectured our son about taking care of his important things, like his retainer, his glasses, his student ID card, his iPod and iPhone. The boy is careless and nonchalant about his possessions. I remember how tickled he was the day his passport came in the mail, how he danced around his room talking about all the foreign lands he would visit.

We’ve looked everywhere. It’s growing late. My son’s bags are packed and standing by the front door. He’s in his room, curled in the fetal position atop the mound of clothes. “It’s over,” he wails, “I can’t go. Why is this happening to me?”

“What happened to the blue folder that had every scrap of paper related to Paris?” I ask my wife. “Where is that folder? I bet his passport is in it.”

My wife goes to the computer hutch in the living room and shuffles through a stack of papers, finds the blue folder and, sure enough, the passport is inside.

When we tell him he is going to Paris after all, Gabriel says, with all his teenage smugness intact: “See, I told you it wasn’t in my room.”

Fool’s Anniversary

Ten years ago this month my country invaded Iraq with imperial hubris and the finest military hardware our tax dollars could buy. Armed to the teeth against a hapless enemy, sold a pack of lies by Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Powell and Wolf Blitzer, and a phalanx of retired generals and admirals, and all the superstar talking heads on the major networks. Less than a month before, millions of people worldwide took to the streets to protest the Bush-Cheney invasion plan, not that it made a difference; Bush flipped the entire world the middle finger and let the dogs of war off the leash.

I remember Bush’s speech to a joint session of Congress. I was sitting with a friend in the Santa Barbara Brewing Company and I stared at the TV screen with my mouth open and my ears ringing. Invading Iraq made no fucking sense -- it was a bizarre pivot from the occupation of Afghanistan and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. I never for a second believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, never believed Saddam posed a threat to any but his own citizens who were already staggering under draconian international sanctions.

The stupidity was staggering, and remains so to this day. What a colossal fuck-up this neocon fantasy turned out to be.

We never bothered to get an accurate census of the Iraqi’s we killed, maimed, or displaced because we didn’t care; we were high on our military invincibility, enthralled by footage of our munitions exploding over Baghdad. CNN reported the invasion the same way ESPN reports NFL games.

USA! USA! USA!

Cruise missiles, “smart” bombs, bunker busters; we were told that our munitions were so technologically superior that they distinguished innocent non-combatants from bad guys, homes from infrastructure, hospitals from military barracks. We bought this BS wholesale. I was ashamed of my country, embarrassed by our arrogance and blindness. Any fool knows that war is messy, a cluster-fuck at best, and in war innocent people die. Women die, children die, elderly people die, no matter what the mouthpieces for the Pentagon say.

Reporters were embedded and co-opted; they wore helmets and flak vests, combat boots, and looked ridiculous. Fuck off, Diane Sawyer, useless twit.

When Shock & Awe became quagmire and death for American soldiers, our cowardly leaders moved the goalposts; we didn’t invade to find Saddam’s WMD, we invaded to give the long-suffering Iraqi people democracy and freedom; and when that didn’t materialize, we decided that we invaded to fight Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.  

It’s unlikely that Bush and Cheney will ever be prosecuted for war crimes; David Petraeus became a hero and media darling for a troop surge that was little more than a funhouse mirror; Rumsfeld went skipping into a comfortable retirement. True to the contemporary American ethos, no one is accountable for destroying Iraq and unleashing a civil war. Our  intelligence operatives tortured Iraqi’s the same way the worst regimes in human history tortured, but we didn’t give a fuck because we felt justified by 9/11.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq required no sacrifice on the part of Americans. Our job was to shop, go to the movies, watch TV, and support our valiant warriors, no matter what, because Boy George and Uncle Dick said so.

History is already in the process of being rewritten, and our depravity in Iraq will be forgotten or forgiven, at least here. Average Iraqi citizens will never forget what we did to them, how we fucked their country over and made their existence more difficult and precarious. We forget, they suffer; we walk away from the destruction we caused, they live with it, every day; we insist on calling it a war, they call it what it was – an armed invasion and occupation.

Happy Anniversary.

PULP

I come home from work and my wife says, “Your children are driving me crazy. You will never believe the day I’ve had.”

“I suppose it’s too late to put them up for adoption,” I say.

“We’re well past the return policy.”

“Any chance the circus is in town?”

“I need a G & T,” she says. “More gin than tonic, please.”

I mix her cocktail, pour myself a goblet of red wine, and we take our drinks out on the deck. We’ve moved on to daylight savings time and the sun is still high in the sky; birds are twittering in the eucalyptus trees, and there’s a definite spring feel in the air.

“Talk to me,” I say.

She talks, I listen.

My wife left our kids at home together so she could take her mother to a doctor’s appointment. Her instructions to the kids were explicit: eat something and then get on with your homework. Don’t talk to one another. Don’t watch TV, stay off Netflix and the Wii. She’s hardly out of the driveway when her phone rings the first time.

“Listen to these messages,” she says, setting her iPhone on the table.

Voice mail from Gabriel:

Mother, why did you buy orange juice with pulp? You know I despise pulp. Is that why you bought it, so I won’t drink the entire carton in one day? Well, I’m here to tell you that your little plan is going to fail, because I am going to strain the pulp from the orange juice. I will strain it and save the pulp, and when you’re not paying attention I will add pulp to your wine, or better yet, one of your gin and tonics. Then you will understand how thoroughly I detest pulp. Never buy this pulp-laden juice again, OK? Let’s make a family rule: no pulp. From this moment on we boycott pulp. I love you. Nonetheless, I am very disappointed about this unacceptable OJ. See you later.

Voice mail from Miranda:

Mom? Mom? It’s Miranda. My brother is acting like a giant A-hole. He says he didn’t steal my jellybeans, but I know he did. His fingerprints are all over this one. He’s such a pig. I know you love him, I just don’t understand why. He’s so annoying and stupid. Tell him he can’t come in my room, ever. I really need you to lay down the law for me on this. By the way, why did you buy orange juice with pulp? It’s awful.

Voice mail from Gabriel:

Mother, if I kill Miranda will I go to juvenile hall or prison? I didn’t take her stupid jellybeans. Any time she can’t find something it’s my fault. Last week is was her favorite pencil, this week it’s jellybeans, next week it will be something else. Can you tell her to leave me alone? OK, love you.

Voice mail from Miranda:

Mom, Gabriel is such a liar! You should take his phone away. Better yet, take his laptop away! I hate my brother! But I love you, mom, you’re the best.

Voice mail from Gabriel:

Hi mother, it’s me again. Mother, we don’t have any food. Can you stop and pick something up? I’m feeling like Chinese. I’d like vegetable soup, orange chicken, shrimp fried rice, curry beef, and one order of egg rolls. And ask for extra fortune cookies, at least six. By the way, I have some rather unpleasant news about the algebra test I took today; I may have failed. Miserably.

Voice mail from Miranda:

Mom, Gabriel peed on the toilet seat and didn’t clean it up! I sat on his pee! He’s so disgusting.

Voice mail from Gabriel:

Mother, Miranda’s lying, it wasn’t my pee. I don’t know whose pee it was, but it wasn’t mine. I know you won’t believe me because you always take Miranda’s side, but I’m telling the truth.

Voice mail from Miranda:

Mom, he’s such a liar. It’s HIS pee. It’s not mine, it’s not yours, and dad isn’t here, so who else’s pee can it be?

My wife says, “Now do you understand why I’m stressed out? I had to turn my phone off so I could focus on what the doctor was saying about my mother. Atypical pneumonia, by the way. The doctor prescribed a new round of antibiotics. Mom has to go back for a follow-up in three days.”

“You sure the circus isn’t in town?” I ask. “We could sell ‘em cheap and take a long vacation. Whadaya say?”

“How about you mix me another G&T.”

“You got it, baby.”

Still Life North Milpas

D, our neighbor, is a mid-thirties white guy with an unhealthy pallor, greasy hair, and a big-boned frame carrying thirty pounds more weight than it should. We have lived next door to D for three and a half years, and in all that time I doubt we have exchanged more than a dozen words. It’s not that D is unfriendly -- it’s more that he’s reclusive and works irregular hours at a software company. He rides a bicycle to and from his job, and never wears a helmet.

No family ever calls on D. Every now and then a couple of his co-workers show up. D has no girlfriend.

Our recycling can is full so I go behind the building to toss some flattened cartons in D’s blue can, only there isn’t room in his can either because it’s stuffed with pizza boxes. I stop counting at twelve. There are beer cans and bottles, too, lots of them.

When he first moved in we figured D for a guy who planned to host many raucous and drunken frat-boy style parties, because he hauled more beer and booze into his apartment than furniture and clothes. Gallon jugs of vodka, gin, whisky, and tequila, cases of Tecate, Budweiser, Coors and Corona. We braced ourselves for a rave that never happened. D moved in and drank all that booze and beer by himself.

D keeps the blinds drawn and the windows closed, even on the warmest days of August and September. Dead insects line his windowsill. A Mexican cleaning lady came to clean the apartment a year or so ago but she left the insects on the sill.

It’s 1:30 a.m. We hear heavy footsteps on the landing, a thud, and then D’s voice: “Fucking lying slut. I’m going to put my fist through your head, fucking lying slut. Go fuck yourself, fucking slut.” He’s on his cell, my wife says, peeking through the blinds. “He’s wasted! He can’t find his key.” I ask if he’s carrying a pizza box.

We go to the grocery store, Vons on Turnpike, to pick up a few things for my wife’s parents. It’s 2:30 in the afternoon and we notice immediately that by a wide margin we are the youngest shoppers in the store. Everyone else appears to be Medicare eligible and a recipient of Social Security; it’s as if Vons has declared this afternoon a Senior Special. Liver spots, rheumy eyes and osteoporosis are the order of the day. Arthritic fingers clutch lists and coupons; the oldsters wheel their carts slowly as if each step causes pain, and they spend several minutes comparing labels for sugar and sodium, fat and carbohydrate. They avoid the lower shelves. Watching them I feel like I’m staring at my future, the stark, inevitable cruelty of old age that I see in my in-laws; in the doctor’s appointments written on the white board in their kitchen, the pill bottles arrayed on their kitchen table, the illnesses that linger longer than they once did. We care for them as we hope our children will care for us when our turn comes.

My wife thinks D fits the profile of a serial killer, and that one day the police will knock on our door and ask if we ever noticed anything unusual about D. Did we smell strange odors emanating from his apartment? What about noises, did we hear any strange sounds? Did we ever notice D carrying rope, nylon or wire? What about medical equipment like syringes or scalpels, IV tubes?

I think D drinks too much to be a serial killer. Though the famous ones who evade capture are bat-shit nuts I assume it takes a certain clarity of mind, steady nerves, and the wherewithal to cover one’s tracks, not something a drunk can do with any consistency.

Tip the Bottle (Some nights that's all you can do)

Tip the bottle, fill the glass. Clean shirts hanging in the closet, fat oranges in the fruit bowl, a stack of bills on the kitchen table, ground beef from New Zealand in the fridge. Woman on the radio says soybean oil isn’t natural, not good for us, and commonly used in all sorts of processed foods. The water beneath our feet is contaminated and the air isn’t fit to breathe. I don’t know if everything that dies one day comes back. Is the city of Detroit coming back? Are the jobs of industrial America coming back, and dragging a new middle class with them? Or is all that buried under rubble? Sequester your dreams. Those smooth-talking fucktards in DC bent us over and shoved it in; the little people will suffer most, they always do. Meanwhile, Senator William P. Dickwad collects his government paycheck and hops on a Gulfstream bound for sunny Miami. Some wealthy donor will hand him a check, line up a couple of quality hookers or a young Cuban lad, ply him with top-shelf liquor and tell him what a patriotic American he is, a credit to the republic. This must be vertigo -- everything is upside down and inside out, spinning, out of balance; failure is rewarded and virtue is punished. God is summoned when needed and ignored when not. In the big houses on the hill the lights are burning bright. Life is good up there; the gates are sturdy, the walls thick, and the roof tiles fireproof. Tip the bottle, fill the glass, more cheap wine from Trader Joe’s. Sangiovese. Sounds like the name of a Mafioso from Sicily. You got a toast for me? Here’s to the revolution, may it arrive before it’s too late. I should read some Henry Miller, lose myself in his mystical mind. Henry called America the air-conditioned nightmare. Way back in the early 1940’s, Henry saw what was coming – saw the wars and the greed, the concentration of power and wealth, the abject cowardice of the ruling class and the surrender of the numbed masses. Henry didn’t give a shit about politics; he only wanted to paint and write, create and dream. He wanted to live his finite moments, breathe the air, feel the sunshine on his back. “To paint is to love again,” said Henry. His Paris days were far behind, the whores grown old and ugly; copies of Tropic of Cancer were smuggled across the prudish American border. The sky is clear and the stars are mocking our planet. Can you feel the love tonight? Yeah, I’m losing it now, my hand slips from the tiller. Maybe we’re all crazy and the world is a giant asylum. The bottle’s almost empty. My advice: find the magic wherever you can -- in the bottom of a glass, in a deck of cards, in a pair of dice, in the pew, in the next wave, in the garden, in a ’66 VW bug, in the woods, in the Mojave desert, in your lover’s eyes, in guitar strings, in the sound of silence.