A quick word about Craving Change (NOT political)

Change is the nursery
Of music, joy, life, and eternity. 

-John Dunne

She asks “So, do you ever just sit down and look around, and just crave change? Not too sure what you need, you just know you want something different?” The answer - “All the fucking time”.

There was a time in life when changes came at break-neck speed. Big changes. Life was a sports car and the wheel jerked this way and that, careening into the unknown. Partners & lovers & enemies are chosen, children are born, jobs & apartments & classrooms abandoned in a heap - fading into the rear-view, buried by a rooster tail of dust & smoke & tire rubber. Town to town, state to state, the destination matters not. Getting out of here - is the destination.

Every road leads somewhere.

Eventually the sports car turns into a battle ship. You can’t turn a battle ship on a dime, battle ships don’t careen, they plow – steadily forward. There is real property to dispose of, legal obligations to fulfill, bank-rolls to amass, and medical insurance. But, still, a battle ship can be maneuvered, courses re-plotted. Change can be made in a battle ship – measured, thoughtful changes. Reefs & narrow channels avoided. Currents & weather considered.

Ever had the dream that your walking down the aisles of a grocery store and suddenly realize that your naked? You never stop shopping in those dreams – you don’t hide yourself, or sprint out of the store … you just keep shopping. Exposed, vulnerable, different, wrong. 

Sometimes when you crave change, the world feels like a gigantic, over-lit Piggly-Wiggly and everyone can see you - in all of your pitiful flaccidity & impotence, and the change you crave is to reunite with your humanity.

& so the engine room is notified, and slowly the ship comes about...

Because, you can never go back to that fucking Piggly Wiggly.

Goodbye Dummy

It’s all over now Baby Orange

The Trump Presidency is over.

It may take a while to die completely, or it may happen in days, but Donald Trump’s rowdy, crass, insult-laden term as the POTUS is coming to an end. Doomed by hubris and a tone-deafness so extreme it’s almost awe-inspiring.

This man who ran, and won a campaign by externalizing the angst, and anger of an electorate that has been run over by career, special interest teet-sucking slime balls for generations, has made perhaps the last fatal flaw a politician can make in this country: He doesn’t have the ability to even feign humanity or compassion.

He can’t even pretend to give a shit about a 32 yr old woman who was run down like a dog in the street by a deranged psycho Nazi creep. He doesn’t have enough humanity to look at his own daughter and beloved son-in-law and see the legacy of anti-semitism. He doesn’t have the internal compass to make a moral distinction between avowed racists and non-racist protesters. 

Even Nixon wasn’t this tone-deaf.

His complete lack of empathy is unprecedented. So why is this a fatal flaw now? After all, this is no surprise, it was Trump who told a protester at a campaign rally that the crowd should beat him up and he’d pay the legal bills, right? It’s fatal now because he has made himself a political leper.

Dingbats like Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Mike Pence, might not see the desperate humanity of a Mexican worker who sneaks into our great country in an effort to feed his family. They might not believe that people can follow the tenants of the Holy Koran and still live a peaceful, love-filled life. They may see the “free market” as the answer to all of our problems – these are political ideas, they are, character flaws, and spiritual deficiencies, but even as objectionable as some of these beliefs might be to some of us, they still lie within the boundaries of acceptable political discourse.

Trump has stepped over that line, in such a devastating way, that even these creeps can’t afford to hitch their political wagons to his lame and bow-backed horse.

Generals spend a life-time earning, and commanding respect. Rising through the ranks with a skill set that is political, and result-oriented. Elected officials spend endless days, months & years eating bad spaghetti in VFW halls, calling constituents and donors endlessly and navigating through legislative jungles and inter=personal mind games to hold on to their precious jobs. Staffers and lobbyists and all of the other professionals who live within our system, work very hard to get to where they are, and stay there.

Donald Trump has now made it impossible for any of these people to be seen with him. He will be forced out by these mercenaries, or more interestingly, become the first President in our history to be a lame duck in the first year of his first term.

Trump has utterly failed to perform perhaps the most important job a President has. That job is to say the right thing at the right time in the right way. To put a compassionate face on in front of the cameras and make the American People feel like we are a caring people. To take a tone that tells us that no matter what divides us in the way of politics, or religion, or race, we are united in our opposition to hatred and murder. This is what even mediocre Presidents do. Not our guy Donald. He continues to insult. He brags that he watched what happened in Charlottesville, VA “more closely than you” – that’s right, he’s not only smarter than us all, he watches TV better.

The death spiral of this presidency has begun in earnest. The only question is how long will it take, and who will he take down with him.

This is how it's done. Presidents, acting Presidential in the face of tragedy.