July 5, 2020
I had the strangest dream last night, and spent most of the day discussing it with my youngest son, because he was in it. We were touring the country, and visiting various, large scale sculptures across the Rockies mountain range, the Smokey Mountains, the Adirondacks, all of them. In the dream, he asked me, “Why are there so many versions of Rushmore again, Dad?” And I said, “Well, son, after Trump, the new administration parks officials determined that all of our former presidents were 'Rushmore worthy,' as it were, and so they commissioned large scale sculptures all across America to memorialize all of the presidents that were not Donald Trump.”
He asked me, in the dream, “Where are we going next?” and I said, “Up next is the one dedicated to Millard Fillmore, Warren G. Harding, John Tyler and Richard Nixon.” “What did they do?” he asked me. In the dream. I said, “Not what Trump did. That’s kind of the new litmus test for goodness, when it comes to the executive branch.” He understood the lowering of the bar: “That’s like saying I should be an all star because I didn’t commit an error, when I was sitting in the dugout.”
“Yes,” I said. “Who’s next after that?” he asked me, in the dream. I said, “Well, after that, we go see the sculpture of Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, and Lyndon Johnson.” He asked about them. I explained that Wilson was a racist, who sat on his hands while the Spanish flu raged, and that he could google that. I told him, “When you’re done googling coffin ships and want to learn about Hoover, google presidents who never held public office, and google the Great Depression, and when you’re done with that, you can ask your phone about the Vietnam War.”
He wanted to know what the deal was with Ford. I told him, “Oh, his inclusion is somewhat ironic, given Trump’s inspiration for the new sculptures. You see, Ford was President even though he never won a popular vote.”
We spent the whole day, in the dream, learning about presidents, and the next day, in person, at the kitchen table, between card games, learning about presidents. We had books. We had his cell phone, my computer, his school lap-top computer for remote learning, google, and two sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica, since he and his brother are each inheriting one when I die, thanks to their great-grandparents.
It was like seventh-grade social studies class, only with dream interpretation. So it was like psychoanalysis meets social studies. It was like being in seventh grade again, myself. Call it home-schooling, because it was kind of like that, too.
It was like weirdness.
But then again, no. It was not like weirdness. It was weirdness. And that was because it was like everything, now, after the great unmasking.
That was my day, today.
The clouds were lined with the kind of silver they once used for coins bearing dead men’s profiles.
Good Friday, 2021
I turned on today and tuned in. In the film it was sliding. Or the word is slithering. It was long, muddy and strong. One long muscle in jungle growth and hunger, operative,
was the motive I could discern. No other reason for this. Boa, they said. “Hungry boa.” So focused. A job to do. The only job. Isn’t it?
What is it to be without. Without thought. Without thinking.
Or without regret.
I change channels.
Winston Churchill sent his planes, the R.A.F., to bomb towns full of people. Civilians, I mean. Nazi voters. Civilians. Not the top. The base. No military bases. Just the “base.”
He just knew this would stop the assault on what was material.
And then, British men & women & children who don’t fly and don’t fight and don’t build, manufacture, they call this, the tools of war, would be bombed. Then airfields would be saved. The strategy worked. Brilliantly. Easily. Hitler bombed locations without any . . .
military. . . significance.
I left the English Channel.
I returned to the nature documentary.
The snake, or muscle as I like to call it, had found its prey.
I have heard that the German Philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach is the one responsible for the saying that we are what we eat.
But I say – today, just another day, ever so differently – We become our enemy.
August 1, 2022
My country is insane by half and I actually considered running for office today. I come from a long line of Republicans and I think I could “pass,” and pretend. Maybe call for a 1,000.00 percent sales tax on firearms to address school shootings without taking anyone’s gun away, and with more revenue than cost. Or maybe sell voters on the idea that a party that believes in small government doesn’t believe in one either big enough to police every pregnancy – at what cost, taxpayers? – or one small enough to fit into my lover’s uterus. And then I picked up a National Geographic, looking for topics for this night’s poetry, and when I let it flop – as is my system – to an open page, it showed a skeleton. And I remembered – “right. That’s why I never ran for office in the first place, while serving as a public servant for all these years, these decades. My skeletons.” My skeletons are so many. They are all very fun. They party. There are enough of them to call it a party.
I saw them all, as if in a reverie, partying here, in my house. There’s one over there in the corner chattering away at a computer, laying down insults on former loved ones that include F-bombs and a kind of “suffer no fools” rhetoric that would rival the most frustrated members of Trump’s Whitehouse Attorney staff. “Fuck you, fuck you, and you’re a fucking asshole” he types, and each strike of the key hits like a mallet on the xylophone. It’s rhythmic. Until deleted before sending. In another corner a skeleton leans down in front of the crotch of another one standing, gnawing in clickety-clack time on his pelvis, and the one standing wears a baseball hat. That must be the coach from my adolescence at baseball camp – my inspiration for being so good at busting child molesters in my professional life. Oh look, there are three of them in the bedroom. One skeleton squats on the skull of the one lying down, while the other skeleton grinds on its crotch. Clackety clack, and the beat goes on. That’s me on the bottom. The one on top of the pelvis must be my first ex-wife and the one on the mouth must be her bisexual lesbian friend. Bloomington. A fun town. But I would not be representing them, so running for office takes another hit, when it comes to plans for life. Off in the corner, near the Secretary that I inherited from a Sunday school teacher, my grandfather, via his son and my father, another skeleton gives all of us a contact buzz. Every time he takes a hit from that bong, gripped in his bony knuckles, the smoke just wafts right out from inside of his otherwise empty rib cage. Sticks and stoners. Bones and weed. That’s a graveyard, right? Others stand around with drinks in their hands, and the vodka, beer and rum just pour right down their bones onto the floor, and the cigarettes burn all the way down, and leave charred stains on their knuckles. One is in the adjunct to the office, watching porn. Funny, but everyone in the porno is a skeleton too, and it adds to the percussion if not the repercussions.
It’s a shame. I’m finally mature enough that I could actually see myself representing the wishes of others, my constituents. Not let lobbyists and donors get in the way of doing what’s right. But if my skeletons cannot hide, or run, or run and hide, then I cannot run either. And they can’t. (Bad knees). And so it was, on this day, that I respectfully declined, in my imagination, the nominations for Congressman, Senator, Governor, and President. Did I say that I had so many skeletons that we could throw a party? Let me rephrase. I have so many skeletons in my closet that maybe we can form a third party. As if that ever succeeds.
And I also realized, seeing them, why I chose this house in the first place: the closet space.
