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Shiny & Blue

April 9, 2020

I live in the hills near Austin City Limits. We have no lawns where I live. My driveway is dirt. The post oaks in front of my house have been inching higher since the Civil War. But where I live is less country than when I moved in. Thousands of new homes line a rolling ridge that shoulders rush hour traffic past my small neighborhood. And the night’s dark sky isn’t as dark as it used to be and the swoosh of tires across the ridge continues deep into that silver night. Austin has grown.

I bought my acre when that road was silent at night. I chose this place because its small house on a cliff’s westerly edge offered a 180-degree view of the valley below — no houses in sight — while located within minutes of an extraordinarily vibrant and off-beat city with a voice all its own. I could listen to the birds in the morning and the Blues at night. And in-between was silence.

The 5 Stages of Cool…

Stage 1: Artists discover a beautiful and affordable town. They set up shop.
Stage 2. Trendsetters discover the hidden art community and christen it hip. Tourism follows.
Stage 3. Chic visitors become residents. Wannabees follow their lead. The town becomes a city.
Stage 4. Corporations follow the money because wannabes love nothing more than white chocolate mocha lattes. The city’s unique personality withers under the weight of international branding.
Stage 5. Demand pushes prices higher, local artists and entrepreneurs are forced out, and all that is left in their mirrors is the fog of once cool.

Austin has thrived since the 1990s. The influx of tech and the money that comes with it has made us shinier, sexier, cosmopolitan. New York. Miami. Austin.

Our new chic has brought us dozens of rising skyscrapers along Lady Bird Lake. Their sparkling lights offer a facade of life. But those of us who lived here before their erection, those of us who knew Austin, recognize that its vibrant mortal coil has grown cold. The city has become increasingly a destination. Less a home. Out-of-staters have priced the people who shaped us — artisans, musicians, regular folks who could once afford a home town that allowed them to march to their own beat — out of their homes and away from the city. Imitation has replaced authenticity. Brand has supplanted place. Austin, Texas, has become a grayer shade of blue.

My parents both worked but were home by 5:30. We had four TV channels and lousy radio. The internet wasn’t a thing. Neither did we have the overly-scheduled lives of today’s children. Our nights and weekends were our own. We rode bikes, played in our yards, found things to do with the clutter in our garage. Life was slow.

Last night, a man bored within a pandemic, I again found myself with time to burn. So I sat in my yard and listened. The two-laner between all those new rooftops — widened a few years back into a high-speed commute for the boom of newcomers who wanted a country existence within the shortest possible commute — was quiet like it used to be.

Friends of mine in Houston have made similar observations. Lives have also slowed around them. One wrote that for the first time since he moved into his neighborhood he saw the family across the street, parents and children, playing in their yard. I’ve read the same from strangers on social media. Soccer practices and high-dollar vacations have been canceled. Nights out with buddies have replaced by evenings home with wives. The amplitude of our existence has been turned down. We are decelerating to our natural speed. The presence of death has offered us a remembrance of life.

The threat of the grave is everywhere now. We view everything with suspicion as if but for this virus our bodies would live eternal. But that, of course, is a lie. Death is always near: bullets, illness, weird accidents that would be funny except for the toll. The ridiculous variety of things which can kill us inoculates us to the truth that we’re not long for this world. A distracted driver could hit you three minutes from now.

…gone.

But there are more subtle ways of dying than a final heartbeat. Do you sense them now that you’re still? They — as sure as a distracted driver, a stage-4 diagnosis, Big Macs — have been killing us for years. They are quiet deaths that rob you no less than your conclusion: death of home, death of intimacy, the death of intricate and beautiful pieces of yourself. Those are the deaths which no vaccine can cure.

Covid-19, like Austin, is the bright shiny object getting all our attention. But Covid can only end you. And surviving its passage won’t alone bring you life, because life requires more than functioning lungs. Life requires wide eyes and open hearts that deeply inhale the natural world and the love of your people. Life requires you to be present. It requires that you surrender your time today so that it may enrich the time you have left.

Covid-19 will pass. What will you do if you make it through? With what will you fill your time between the black death and white sheet? What will flow through your mortal coil?

Nobody wants a pandemic. But maybe we can learn from one.

Use this time wisely.

Life

The Final Minute

March 18, 2020

My wife and I have hunkered down for the virus. Sorta. I’m at home, but she is at the small local store she’s managed since it opened fifteen years ago. They’re open. They’re deemed “essential.” Her store’s owner has been given a shot at survival and he’s taking it.

Because I’ve worked from home for years and my wife is still working at the store, our life resembles what it was pre-Covid 19, except that she and her boss offer curbside service now, and masks are required inside, and they wipe the place down after every customer, and she and I share an uneasy alliance. Roll the film noir stock.

INT. LIVING ROOM – NIGHT
Wife enters. She and her husband timidly embrace before she exits to the bathroom and closes the door. Sound of faucet running.

When we take a good hard look at our methodical hand scrubbing, the absurdly long stares we give doorknobs before we touch them, and the paranoid curiosity that accompanies every package left at our door, it feels like we’re living through a The Walking Dead spoof where bleach replaces machetes and my wife and I debate kissing. Yeah, kissing. Because while we share a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bed, kissing shares air and air can kill you. So in the back of my mind every time we kiss are images of the people who entered her store who wore the pointless surgical masks or those people who pulled their masks beneath their noses when out of line of sight or who lifted them to speak before my wife could tell them — or not — to place the masks back over their mouths. Did she get out of the store “clean” or is she simply asymptomatic? “What do you mean, you don’t feel well? What feels wrong?” My feet are dangling off the deep end.

And so now we kiss like strangers before we drift to sleep amid gunfire — exhaling, snoring, coughing inches away from each other as bullets whiz — that we hope won’t hit and infect us in our sleep. We’re doing what we can to remain safe, but we’re married with bills.

‘What we can,” though, doesn’t feel like enough. Because I’m searching for time.

I spoke with Mom tonight. We’ve long talked frequently (almost nightly), but our calls feel more precious now because she’s ninety-eight years old and I’m a disabled middle-aged male. Both of us are in Covid-19’s crosshairs. But my priority is my life, not hers, and not because I’m a dick, but because a mother shouldn’t stand over her only son’s grave, not after she put so much effort into keeping him alive.

Daddy died 25 years ago. That’s when I inherited a singular job: become healthier. I began swimming, eating organically, protecting my life, because I have to outlive her. By at least one minute.

But years pass and habits change, and I am now a mother’s child who wishes that as an adult I had continued eating better, had kept on exercising, had traded screen light for sunlight. To gain just that minute.

But life…

I met someone, settled in, became lazy and careless, rediscovered doughnuts. How many minutes did that doughy goodness cost me? It matters now.

My childhood was spent in hospitals, but I was rarely alone. I was frequently sad, but depression wasn’t allowed ground to root. Because Mom was there. My mother did more than give me life. She saved it. I can’t destroy hers now by neglecting that gift.

Just one minute.

I missed grades 7-12. Illness. Yet ten years later, I graduated from a top tier university, married a woman far above my grade, started a surprisingly successful business. You know whose invisible hand supported me as I passed those mile markers. You know.

You can never dismiss dark clouds nor anticipate the different forms they will take. They are that much bigger than we are. And that much smaller. Invisible to the naked eye. Microscopic.

It’s now left to us to manage our protection, to “stay in place,” to breathe less deeply until this machination of nature passes us by.

Tick. Tock.

I am in my fifties and never fathered children. I am an only child. My DNA is speeding down a wide two-laner toward an unavoidable end. No exits. A definitive final scene.

I’m okay with that.

But give me those final 60 seconds.

Life

Terrorism

April 29, 2019

Terrorism is bigger than the destruction of a building. Terrorism changes your priorities far more than it changes your skyline. Terrorism plunders everything in service to that singular necessity: survival. 

It begins with the loss of equilibrium. Your brain feels like it’s unmooring from your skull, melting into fluid; the room spins around you. Your hearing, too, struggles to maintain its grip on reality. If these signals accurately represent the short-circuiting that’s going on within the wiring that is your brain, you then sense nothing at all, and you won’t until you regain consciousness.

You wake in a pool of urine. It’s wet and warm underneath you, or cool if it’s been awhile. During these first conscious moments, you cannot cognitively put words to your name, nor the day, nor the month, nor your location. And so when you’re asked questions, even the most basic questions, your response is that you don’t know. But you do know the people you love, and you’re comforted if they are there.

As you embrace your foggy cognizance, you are sleepy, very sleepy, and you should be. Your brain just ran a four minute marathon. It has nothing left to spend. Your body, too, has thrashed and pushed and contracted and contorted until it burned every ounce of fuel it had in reserve. Left with nothing, barely even thought, your bewilderment turns to calm, and you sleep. You wake an hour or two later feeling as if you have never before experienced such complete and perfect rest. You have never felt better.

I was nine-years-old when I had my first grand mal seizure. It was Chicago, 1970, at a Holiday Inn. My last memories are of a hamburger delivered by room service, the desk mirror mounted on the wall before me, and the feel of the biting winter air brushing against my skin. I then awoke in an ambulance. My mother was crouched beside me. She held my hand as the sirens wailed and I heard my detached voice screaming, “Am I in Hell?! Is this Hell?!”

Sleep.

The seizure followed a day after my doctor changed my massive dose of prednisone, a week after my body, severely weakened by disease, stumbled and slammed head first onto a garage’s unforgiving concrete floor. My doctor said he didn’t know if it was one of those two events or my newly diagnosed autoimmune disorder, dermatomyositis, that caused my epilepsy. It didn’t matter. That seizure and the ones that followed, as much as my soon-to-be confinement to a wheelchair, would control my family’s life through my teens into early adulthood, not because the seizures were daily, but because their threat was.

‟Auras” sound spiritual. But to an epileptic like I had become, they were the precursor. Auras signified that I was on the cusp of a seizure and they sent me fleeing to a space free of triggers. My flights became so common that we – my mother, my father, myself – developed a routine: I closed my eyes and crawled into my head and attempted to tune out every stimuli as Daddy silenced the TV and Mother rushed my wheelchair into my bedroom.

She pulled the top covers down and Daddy lifted me onto the sheet. She pulled the window shades tightly shut (even the smallest gape in the curtain was an opening for light and a cause for panic) and Daddy left for the bathroom. Mother sat by my side. She whispered that she was near. Daddy returned with a cool damp washcloth that she placed over my eyes to remove light’s final opportunity. Then we waited.

I was on the bed. Mother was sitting on a chair beside me. Daddy remained on his feet, reclined against a wall, watching. I shushed every utterance and dived deep into the protective void of isolation.

The quiet lasted a few minutes, or fifteen, or thirty; every episode was different but always the same. The result, most days, was a clear head and a cautious return to the living room. But other days my parents watched their only child convulse and jerk and twist and growl unaware, until I stilled.

Awakening.

Groggily, “Did I pass out?” Rarely came the answer I hoped for. ‟You’re okay. Daddy and I are here.” Mother’s words were without fail gentle and never without her touch. Daddy motioned to her and she removed the cloth from my forehead. He disappeared from the room. He returned and handed Mother the cloth freshly cooled with tap water and he sat on the bed. His powerful voice was tender like Mother’s, “How you feelin’, Pal?”

“I don’t know.” Words were too confusing. Answers impossible.

“Why don’t you go back to sleep?” Mother suggested. “I’ll stay right here.” I drifted off.

We believe as adults that we’re autonomous and strong. We dismiss the herd instinct we understood so well as children and we imagine that individualism is somehow more sacred than conformity. But five minutes of uncontrolled shaking and writhing brings to mind nothing holy but everything sinister. Convulsions, the loss of control to unseen chaotic forces, are the bane of creatures who require conformity. People were feared for this, imprisoned for this, killed for this. And, when a child among children exhibits this demonic-like activity, our primitive nature is empowered; we are helpless before that kind of helplessness; especially scared are the young. Children observing this affliction become as afraid as the epileptic – afraid of the epileptic.

“People won’t understand,” Daddy instructed me firmly. Although I never seized in public, there was within the urgency of his tone a warning: Even a hint that I might seize would doom me. This kind of admonition was normal for my father. He was a private man who frequently urged me to keep our family business within the family. But his command to keep my secret our secret was different, almost pleading, like my exposure put us all at risk. I was a young adult before I understood why. 

It happened in 1936, a car wreck on the outskirts of Granger, Texas. The vehicle flipped and a teenage boy was thrown head first from the old convertible. My father’s first seizure soon followed. Another would see him kicked out of the military during the war within which his best friend, my namesake, died. I don’t know how many more seizures there were or under what circumstances. He never told me. But I do know their possibility so terrorized him that our doctor in Michigan had no idea that he had ever convulsed. That secret was held exclusively by the doctor in Texas who prescribed the medication that arrived in unmarked white boxes from twelve hundred miles away. And yet, despite decades of caution, of silence, of clandestine plane rides to Texas, that thing which Daddy fled still found him. In his son. For him to watch.

Terrorism is unrelenting.

Fiction

Event Horizon

April 10, 2019

Oscar was hunched over his desk while Heidi stood waiting. He was focused on the contract the film producers emailed him a few days earlier. He looked up. A nervous chuckle replaced the nothing expression of his mind at work, “This is more money than I’ve ever made. Combined!”

His manager’s job was to reassure him, to keep him on-track. “Those psychopaths you conjure up have been an ATM for the studio for years.” She nodded at the contract, “This is where you cash-in.”

He returned to the enormous number on the contract, and a panic rose from depths he didn’t even know existed, “What if I can’t live up to this? What if I can’t bring him to life?”

“You’ve got this, O. But, hey, only one schizo at a time, right? That Jekyll and Hyde creep you’re working on can wait until this one fills our bank accounts.” He nodded, understood. “Good,” she said. “I arranged for a car. It’ll be here at eight sharp. Be ready! You’ve got the itinerary?”

“The Algonquin, Paris Vendome, Holiday Inn Berlin, yada, yada, yada.” He tapped his noggin, “Steel trap. Nothing gets out.”

“That’s where the demons are born,” she said proudly.

“Damned skippy!”

Oscar’s wife, Mandy, entered from the hall, stepped around Bruno the golden retriever as she squeezed past her husband’s collection of Houston Astros memorabilia, including his prized José Altuve game-winning bat from the 2017 ALCS Game 6 where Houston (maybe not so fairly) trounced the Yankees. She handed Oscar his mail. “It’s a light day. Funny postcard, though. But you’re not going to like it,” she sing-songed. “I’ll leave you to vent your rage on the innocent.” She exited the room and he found his way to the solid black postcard at the back of the stack. He turned it over, read its message, and laughed; his wife had been right.

“What’s so funny?” Heidi asked. He handed her the postcard. “What’s Event Horizon?”

Oscar was appalled, “You haven’t seen Event Horizon?” She stared at him with her I-don’t-give-a-fuck expression. “Where a mysterious force from a black hole causes everybody on a spaceship to start hallucinating?” He waited. “Murder? Mayhem?”

“Sorry. No go.”

His tone turned grave, “You’re fired!”

“Nice try.”

“Rent it tonight. I’m not kidding! The best two hours you’ll ever spend.”

“Yeah, that’s happening.” She nodded at the contract, “Sign on the dotted line, fanboy, then pack your bags. We’ve got places to be.”

“Like the Stockholm Hilton and Piazza Navona Roma,” he said proudly as he signed the contract.

She pulled the paper from his desk and turned for the door, “Eight A.M. Don’t be late. L.A. awaits.”

Heidi exited the room. Oscar flipped the postcard in his hand and checked the top for a return address. It read simply, “Austin, Texas,” and carried the local postmark. He again glanced at the message, “Event Horizon sucks!” He considered its likely source: an idiot on Twitter with whom he engaged in a tweet war over the classic film. The effort was flattering, until the unease set in; how did some rando on Twitter get his home address? Oscar entered his name and “address” into Google and clicked. His info was everywhere, like everyone’s, and it included every address at which he had lived, from childhood through his and Mandy’s last house. But none of the websites listed the home they had moved into just three months earlier. He sent Mandy a text: “Have you given our home address to anybody other than the usual?” A few beats. “No worries. Just curious.”

Mandy replied: “No one.”

Oscar: “Thx.”

Twenty-four hours later. Oscar stepped into a luxurious single at Los Angeles’s Beverly Hotel. A California king occupied the center of the space. Two comfortable chairs and a decently-sized table sat under a bank of windows. A bottle of champagne rested in a bucket of ice on the table. Next to it sat a postcard. On the card was written “Event Horizon sucks!” He laughed, Heidi was the best. “Nicely played.”

That night. Oscar and Heidi were returning from the studio in a large black car. Their plush ride had been stilled for half an hour by rush hour traffic. “It’s only two blocks up. You wanna get out and walk?” Oscar asked.

“Nope!”

“Fair enough.” He took a sip of wine, “I got the postcard. You watch it yet?”

“What postcard? Watch what?”

“Event Horizon. The card you sent with the champagne.” She flashed him a scoffing side-eye. “That wasn’t you?”

“Do I look like I give a shit about some old sci-fi flick? We’ve had that talk.”

“Horror not Sci-Fi,” he mumbled. Traffic started to move.

Oscar parted company with Heidi in the hotel lobby and was soon stepping refreshed from his shower. He walked to the windows of his fifth floor room and gazed down on a crowd of partygoers walking drunkenly from the hotel. Oscar loved fourth and fifth floor rooms. They were high enough to catch a glimpse out over the horizon but yet low enough for his middle-aged eyes to capture details on the ground. It was the perfect analogy for that place within which writers were required to play. He tossed his towel on the bed, grabbed a pair of worn red briefs from his suitcase, and slipped them over his short chubby legs as he stared mindlessly out the window.

He missed his home. He missed Mandy. He had been traveling so much the past few years that both had come to feel less real than his stories. Success had a price. He picked up the postcard, studied the solid black front identical to the last one, reread its simple message, and again took note of the “Austin, Texas” postmark. He pushed the discomfort from his mind. Yes, this was 4×6 inches of weird, the uncomfortable kind of weird — the best kind of weird, he mused — but its only threat was a paper cut, and it was time for sleep; they had an early flight out. He dropped the card on the dresser and fell into bed.

Oscar and Heidi were trudging through San Francisco International Airport with their bags in tow. She checked the time and sped her pace, “Pick it up, stumpy!” San Francisco’s Ritz-Carlton awaited. So did the press.

Jean Bernard (French, film critic) was Oscar’s sixth interviewer in two hours and the final of the U.S. leg of the presser. The Frenchman spoke a mile a minute with no effort to break the accent barrier. If this pretentious French fuck wasn’t going to make the effort, neither was Oscar, who answered “Yes” to every question the Frenchman posed. (Like anyone this side of the Atlantic was going to pay attention to this Parisian Bozo.)

Oscar and Heidi were again in the back seat of a large black car. And, again, they were drinking. “I hate the French,” he said.

“I’ve got no opinion of the country, but Bernard can make or break us there, and that’ll set the tone for the rest of Europe. So I hope you kissed him after you blew him.”

“Kiss him, too? I’m not a whore!”

“You are, actually.” Seriously, “You treated him right, right?”

“He’s French.”

“What’s that mean?”

Oscar shrugged and stared out the window.

Oscar stepped into his dark tiny hotel room, kicked off his shoes, and flopped onto the bed. He was already tired of their junket, and they had two more weeks before they were done. One of those weeks would be spent in Europe. (He wondered if he had time to learn French but quickly dismissed the prospect. He’d blown up — if not blown — France; la République was toast.) “Fuck!”

Maybe it was the potential loss of Europe, or possibly the stress of knowing that he had somehow become a big fucking deal who was singlehandedly shouldering the massive expectations of a script still finished, but Oscar was feeling the weight of his success. (How did a writer improve on Robert Louis Stevenson? What the hell he was thinking? And what was Heidi thinking?! She had cranked the P.R. to eleven on that project, and now the entire industry was buzzing about his ‘fresh take on the hundred-year-old classic.’) “I am so screwed,” he whined. He missed Mandy.

And he had to pee.

Oscar turned for the bathroom, glanced at the dresser, noticed a black rectangular void beneath the night’s gray light. “Where did this…?” He spun a quick three-sixty expecting to magically discover the familiar card’s courier. He saw no one there but doubted his eyes. He picked up the card and studied the postmark and return address — “Austin, Texas” — before he pushed his vision through a current thick with fear to the bottom of the card. “Event Horizon sucks!”

Oscar placed the unsettling missive back on the dresser and stepped to the door, where he slipped the chain in the slot, turned the knob, checked the deadbolt. “What are you afraid of?” he asked in a hush. He didn’t know. But he did know he was at that moment standing within the void where gods and insanity were born. It was a world in which he should have found the most comfort — a place he had exploited for years which had rewarded him with fame and, now, fortune — but he was fully aware that at least on this night he was no longer its master. He glanced across the room at the postcard. How had it gotten there? He stormed into the bathroom and ripped the shower curtain back. Nothing! He yanked the bathroom door quickly from the wall. Nothing! He walked angrily back into the room and screamed, “Who’s here?!”

No one.

Oscar crawled into bed, pulled the covers tightly to his chin, stared coldly at the ceiling. He was utterly alone in the quietness and that always scared him, because that was the place from which the monsters came. The silence gripped him. He was barely able to breathe. The quiet was broken by the Full House theme which he hummed privately to himself, until the melody rose in volume and morphed into lyrics as he squeezed his eyes shut and screamed out the words, “What ever happened to predictability?!”

Heidi signed them in at New York’s Algonquin Hotel as Oscar glared at the hotel cat. The cat glared back. “What’s the feline equivalent of bastard?” Oscar asked.

His manager wasn’t in the mood, “What?”

“Nothing.”

The clerk gave Heidi the keys and she gave one to Oscar. “Hold up!” the young man said. “I forgot.” He handed her a postcard.

Heidi presented Oscar with the black card, but he refused, pressed his arms rigidly to his side, shook his head. She jabbed that card at him and he reluctantly took it, turned it over, and checked the return address. He laughed. That was all he could do. “What’s so funny?” she asked.

“You need to rent Event Horizon,” he said giddily. She marched across the lobby into the elevator. “I’m not kidding!” he called from within eyeshot of the cat. “It’s terrific!” The lift’s doors closed between them.

Oscar sat at the window end of his Midtown hotel room across from a reporter from The New Yorker magazine. “I read in an interview that you gave the French magazine Oi that the musical group Yes was one of your biggest early influences,” she said. “That’s an unusual muse for a young writer. Can you elaborate?“

“There might have been a language barrier,” Oscar mumbled.

“Then I’ll ask the same question in fluent English. What artist or artistic creation most influenced you?” Questions like this were bullshit, of course. Writers weren’t influenced by any one particular thing. They were influenced by the exquisite matter the universe hurled at them like particles in an accelerator: colors, words, shapes, smells, and sounds that were consumed by demented imaginations and shit out as “art.” A writer’s imagination was different today than it was yesterday and would be different tomorrow than it was today because their influences were everything, most of all unknowable. Yet during these interviews, the products of which would be sandwiched between advertisements for foot cream and mascara, writers played along.

“Event Horizon,” he said. “That was my primary influence.”

“The old Sci-Fi film?”

“Horror. It’s Horror! Yes.”

“I’ve never seen it. Why Event Horizon?”

The world’s ignorance toward one of the world’s greatest movies was beginning to irritate Oscar. First Twitter, then Heidi, now this bitch. “Because it’s fantastic!” he screamed.

Miami, London, Stockholm, Berlin, Paris. Fuck, Paris. The skylines changed but the questions did not. Neither did the postcards, which arrived for Oscar at every stop through the end of the tour. A tour which had finally ended.

It was approaching midnight when Oscar walked quietly into his office and slipped down the wall to the floor beneath his Astros collection. It felt good to be home. Yet their new home felt as foreign as it did familiar. Bruno rested his head on his master’s lap. Oscar petted the dog and Bruno wagged.

Oscar opened his new screenplay and flipped through its pages for the first time in two weeks. He was excited by the prospect of gaining fresh eyes on his project. Time away helped you catch glitches in a creation you too often knew too well. But nothing registered as he scanned the white pages before him. His fuel was spent. He looked up from his script, “Come on, boy.”

Oscar rose to his feet and stepped to his desk, where he dropped into his chair and rifled through the mail Mandy had piled neatly by his lamp. At the bottom of the stack was another black card. He laughed, accepted the weirdness, wondered if it would ever end. He flipped the card over — “Event Horizon sucks!” — and turned his eyes to the return. That was when he saw it. A small change. Just two words in the reply-to line. But they robbed him of his breath. “Austin, Texas” had been changed to “Oscar’s Den.” He looked into the darkness of the unlit hall and his stomach tightened. These cards were a gag, right? This card was a gag. It had to be. The crazy shit only happened in movies, right?

Or was somebody in his house? And where was Mandy? He dropped the card to the desk, rose to his feet, and retrieved José Altuve’s bat from the wall. “Come with me,” he said quietly to Bruno.

Oscar stepped gently into the hall. At the far end of the short corridor, last door on the right, was a bedroom that he and Mandy had converted into a home theater with six comfortable recliners, a big screen TV, and a kick ass sound system. Flashes of blue light — flickers from the TV — exploded from beneath its door. Oscar raised the bat like he was prepping for a Verlander fastball. He edged toward the opening.

Oscar’s light steps became tip-toes — short, silent, tentative — as he arrived at the door and gently grasped the knob.

Then, with an unrepentant and singular motion that both empowered and terrified him, he turned the knob, kicked the door open, and prepared to swing. A woman was sitting in one of the recliners. “I didn’t hear you come in,” she said cooly. The stranger’s face screamed “Sane when she has to be, crazy in her off-time” as she rose fearlessly to her feet. She stepped toward him.

“Stop!” he screamed.

“What?” she laughed, and she kept walking — twelve feet, ten feet, eight feet, six, five, four…

That’s when Oscar made his move, swung José’s bat like the Series depended on it. The first hit took out the woman’s left knee, the second her right, and she dropped to the floor. She looked up at him and begged him to stop. But Oscar kept swinging — at her legs, at her body, at her head. His impacts were brutal. The cops would call the pummeling “psychopathic” when they discovered her dead body at the first light of dawn. But tonight, it — the feel of the bat reverberating up Oscar’s arms as it connected with her fracturing bones, the hypnotic yet monstrous sound of her organs vaporizing — was primeval in its allure, as beautiful as it was real, as the stranger cried out his name, “What are you doing, Oscar? Stop!!! My God, Oscar, stop!!!”

But Oscar did not stop. “Event Horizon is a great fucking movie!!!” he screamed as Mandy curled into a ball and begged her husband to stop killing her. Until she begged no more.

Fiction

God of the Box

December 12, 2016

One of the first questions of childhood: Where did I come from? One of the last of old age: Where am I going? We seem to feel bigger than this place.

Faith is increasingly mocked by people who no longer believe and by those who never did. Belief has come to be associated with ignorance. The two are, accurately, sadly, often synonymous. Still, I believe. And what I believe, I believe firmly: God, Jesus Christ, Death, Burial, Resurrection. Is it hard to believe such an outlandish story? Objectively, yes. Difficult for me? No.

A long-time friend, an atheist, is raising two sons. He bragged that he asked his boys if they believed in God, and they laughed at the concept. Could they see God? No. Touch him? No. In any way detect him? No. The assertion is that spirituality isn’t measurable and therefore bunk. The 75% of Americans who believe in God would disagree. (Internationally, that number rises to 85%.)

Are those of us who believe in a higher power shoring up our earthly fears with the hope of a second shot? Yeah, maybe. Or maybe our belief finds its genesis in something else entirely.

Programmers have striven to create artificial intelligence since the 1940s. We see the term bandied about everywhere, from tech reviews of smartphones to the burgeoning internet of things. But AI is more than a better search engine. It reaches beyond a Siri-like interface. AI is a complex machine that learns and builds upon that knowledge. It is a deductive — “thinking” — computer.

But what if AI achieved a level above deduction? What if we built machines that were self-aware? Machines that had a sense of self? Who — not what — would those machines perceive themselves to be? And would they understand their place in the universe?

Imagine a self-aware processor chip: a thoughtful chip, an ethical chip, a chip that doesn’t hog all the electricity, a chip that performs its job and treats other chips with respect. Imagine a million chips like it functioning within a single large box. They have seen nothing outside their box. They have witnessed no clues to indicate there is a creator inside or outside the box. Would they intrinsically know they were made?

Add a variable. What if these chips caught a peek outside their box through a camera? What if they saw into the laboratory where they were built? Would they know their creator? Would they recognize the object hovering outside their box — the pasty pale blob in the beige shorts and blue knit shirt eating ham, mayo and iceberg lettuce on white — as their creator? In what context would Bob’s large belly and unshaven face fit into the chips’s understanding of their universe? Likely, none. Bob, aka “the lumbering nebula,” would appear to bear no relationship whatsoever to their existence.

Add a second variable. What if, in addition to a camera, there is inserted into the computer’s kernel a piece of code that identifies “Bob” as the chips’s creator? As sentient beings, their first question would surely be, “Who is Bob?” The hunt would begin, and it would continue through their circuitry until it is clear that Bob is nowhere inside the box. And if Bob isn’t in the box, that can mean only one thing: Bob is outside the box. So they peer through the camera at the nebula searching for Bob. But what is a Bob? What is his electronic signature? His power source? His binary code? They can’t know. Yet they search. But nothing in the external universe of beige and blue and sandwichy colors hints at the identity of Bob. Nothing! They find no Bob. Met with failure, they exchange their search for a physical Bob for mere clues to his essence. The chips search within themselves, within their hardware, within their code. What in their makeup points to Bob? It is a question larger than any chip’s RAM, and seeking it is wearying work with few guideposts and an uncertain destination set deep within a fog. This lack of concrete proof of Bob is evidence enough for many chips that no Bob exists.

Mocking follows, jeers at those chips who hold tightly to the Holy Kernel. Where is your proof? Where is your Bob? But believers in Bob are unable to point to anything tangible and say, “This is proof!” There is nothing for them to share. There is merely the search itself.

From the numbers, it appears that a quarter of us require objective proof of a creator, and you can’t deny their logic. We live in a world of zeros and ones. Even we who believe in a creator make most of our decisions based on data. Yet, with regard to the matter of faith, I and many like me take an exit from deductive reasoning to cling to what is for us an inexplicable certainty. And that exodus from the constraints of the measurable world, while perfectly rational to us, is baffling to those who see no point — who see no “Bob.”

But it is the year’s end. And we are entering the high holy days for many of us who believe the unverifiable. These are joyful weeks in which we take comfort in the belief that we are loved by the one who made us and you. Whatever your beliefs, or lack thereof, I wish you this same joy, not just through December but through the year to come.

Merry Bobmas!

2016 Primary, Fighting Back

Bigger Than November

May 29, 2016

NOTE: This was written before the 2016 Democratic nomination. And though I don’t support Sanders in 2020, as I did in 2016, this post is more true now than it was four years ago.

I start with an admission. It’s my own but I think I speak for a lot of Bernie Sanders supporters. I don’t give a damn about the Democratic or any other political party. I give a damn about us.

With that out of the way…

The pundits have been correct for months, maybe since the day Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy for President or, more accurately, since the day Hillary Clinton announced hers. He is not going to get the nomination. Nobody but Hillary will. Ask Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and the superdelegates: The fix was in from the start. We were sheep to them and not voters.

But I refuse to be a sheep. And I’m damned sure not inclined to follow the Democratic establishment, any more than I’m inclined to follow Bernie Sanders.

Still, I’ve reveled as I’ve watched the Senator from Vermont give voice to what so many of us have felt for years. So when the Democratic establishment tried to silence him, they were attempting to silence me. And that’s when they lost me.

Bernie Sanders isn’t my leader. Nor is he the father of this liberal uprising. He is, instead, as he accurately stated must be the case, a manifestation of a grass roots movement. That movement was Occupy. And now it is us. 

Occupy was an echo in the public square of the conversations we’ve been having for years in our living rooms, our dorms, at the bar, in our churches, and it pared those conversations to their core: The 1% is plundering the 99%. It’s them against us. “Class Warfare.” It’s a term conservatives have for good reason mocked, because a war was indeed waged, quietly, under the radar, and it proved to be an easy battle to win as long as the 99% were unaware that they had been placed in the crosshairs. But Occupy spoke the truth. It removed our blinders and presented us with the truth, and our ire rightfully rose. Then, so did we.

You and I — not Occupy or Bernie Sanders — are the wave. And this primary was the sound of that wave crashing to shore.

Occupy found its oxygen in our evaporated jobs, our unaffordable education, our underfunded bank accounts, our collapsing environment, and the greed of the once-populist-now-money-hungry Democratic establishment which has since Bill Clinton’s first term ignored our pleas for economic help while it shipped the working class’s wealth to Asia.

I’m a Yellow Dog Democrat. So for years I refused to acknowledge the party’s apathy toward people like me. I clung to the assumption that they still cared about working men and women. Until this winter. That was when Bernie Sanders challenged a corporate sycophant, and the party establishment sided en masse with the sycophant.

I’m a nobody from the middle of Texas. I vote. I donate small amounts to campaigns when I can afford it. I blog. I tweet. That’s it. But I’ve come to realize that it’s time to fight, for all of us to fight, and to take our country back.

I can’t do squat alone. Neither can you. But together we almost won the nomination. That’s a remarkable achievement when you consider who we were running against: a former first lady, former senator, former Secretary of State, a multimillionaire with deep Wall Street connections and the deepest Democratic Party tentacles. She was the chosen one. Yet we almost knocked her off her throne.

We accomplished that feat because we had the people, the policies, the passion and conviction, and almost all the grassroots money. Now we have the in-the-trenches experience.

It is from alchemies like this that Revolutions are born.

Revolutions are most vulnerable in their infancy. Ours is vulnerable, too, because it will be challenged by candidates we know and party leaders we’ve long considered allies. We already hear their coo, “We welcome Bernie supporters into the Democratic fold with open arms.” We have become a commodity, you and I. The Democratic Party wants to harvest us for our enthusiasm, our money, our votes. It wants to rebrand us The Party Faithful. The party and corporate media use words like “moderation” and “reality” to separate us from our convictions. They deride us for seeking political “Purity.” They frame purity as a dangerous thing. But dangerous for whom?

I don’t choose to be mined for the benefit of the 1%. I prefer to be part of that one thing which frightens the 1%: us, the people, united.

The Democrats are right to want us and the 1% is right to fear us. We have made ourselves a force, and unbridled forces threaten the status quo. So the powerful try to absorb us.

Since the Democratic Leadership Council took the reins of the Democratic Party in the late 1980s, it has proved remarkably adept at smothering grassroots movements within their embrace. It would be suicidal for us to cozy up to the Democratic establishment. We must, instead, become an independent broker, a resource which supports candidates based first on their principles and second on their party. Our mission is to fight like hell, to contribute cash like there is no tomorrow, and to crank out the vote like we have never done before to get liberals (irrespective of party) elected everywhere, to every office, from school boards to mayoral offices, city councils to governorships, state houses to federal houses. We have proven that we can do this. We nearly defeated the queen, her media, her political machine.

As this race winds down, we have to vote our convictions. We have to show our resolve even when defeat is imminent — especially when defeat is imminent.

The 1% cannot be allowed to crush the 99%. We have to win. And we can win. But we have to start now.