Whether you read this a metaphor for yielding before the end of the game or of life’s subtle way of robbing our optimism and easy smiles toward the small yet infinite lives we lead….
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… I can’t wait until the morning to return with the promise of simple politics, instead of this mad view from inside the blender.
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Because some learn a solitary syncopation of the drum and resist further knowledge, we’re going to experience another round of exclusion in the next few days. Whether you believe it to be the right course of action or one chosen with ill-advised rancor, remember that history sits over our shoulder, taking notes – and rarely writes any glowing words in the epilogue for those who choose exclusion. The effects of another barrage won’t touch most of us, except in the most vital way: we will be dulled to the inhuman efficiency of policy.
As an infrequent transient in this small town of Batesville, I confess that at times I feel the old souls of this place lingering around me, dwelling in the interesting remnants and observing its residents. I sit here, alone, in this sunlit open-air courtyard, surrounded in my periphery by those who live here, each of them unable to join me in my admiration for this place and this day. They are chained to their mundane duties as I experience their home. I wonder if the old souls lurking here find the humor in a visitor frolicking amidst their endeavors.
It is a noon on Friday, in the early reaches of March. Spring has already declared its foothold and despite the chilly breeze, people move with the enthusiasm that only spring can provide us. While my previous spar with itching-inducing plants still irritates me, I can’t help but enjoy the day as it unfolds.
I drove haphazardly about Batesville, vaguely looking for places of interest such as the expansive cemetery and the railroad spurs along the river, which, no matter where I find them in any small town, evoke a pungent nostalgia for a time I never lived in. The technology behind such places hasn’t evolved and though I am one to love the reaches of our creativity, I too relish the idea that we are the same nervous souls as we’ve always been, tied to places by the roots of who preceded us.
I made another loop around the railroad tracks and spurs along the boundaries of downtown, then alongside the incredible view of the river serenely passing me by. I stopped to slowly walk along the bank, wondering how many thousands of people had stood in that exact place, feeling March breezes and enjoying one of the quintessential smells of the American South. I then drove around the cemetery, a perfect blend of meandering stones and old town atmosphere, and behind the new park center being constructed. Looping around Harrison Street, I drove until the businesses and houses grew sparse and then returned. I stopped at Goodwill, hoping to find a hideous shirt to make Dawn gasp in mock disgust at my style choices. Instead, I gave my only $20 to someone who was buying a stack of clothing. I didn’t have to be in the conversation to know that she wasn’t buying out of a desire to hoard her closet with clothing – she was buying to keep it from being empty. All I said to her was, “Here, this is for you and I hope that you continue to find the luck you deserve today.” I smiled and left without granting her opportunity to reply. The clerk hollered, “Thank you so much, sir,” as the bell on the door jarred into a high-pitched clang and I made my escape.
Because I was inattentive to my whereabouts, I missed the quaint place near downtown I had chosen to invade with my appetite. As I looped around, I spotted the holy grail of double-barrel fried foods: a double location of KFC and Long John’s Silvers. I learned to distrust my hometown Long John’s; while it might lure one inside with the wafting scent of fried batter and hush puppies, there are myriad reasons to resist its deceptive Siren calls. Anytime I near such a place, I can almost hear a coven of cardiologists applauding their approval, knowing that increased visits to these places guarantee ongoing Colorado skiing vacations for them. In my defense, though, I could eat a platter of cardboard if I have tartar sauce to drown it in.
As I neared the entrance to the double restaurant, I noted a piece of paper taped inelegantly to the glass. “We no longer accept $100 bills or $100 checks,” the note indicated. Sardonically, I asked myself how often such a scenario might arise.
I approached the cashier and he said, “Buffet, I assume?” I laughed and said, “I don’t think you guys can afford to fill me up, so I’ll go for the pirate menu today.” With relief I noted I wasn’t going to have to pay with my chipped debit card. As I was getting my drink, a demure man had approached the other cashier and began ordering. There was a huge language barrier. I could make out he was ordering for 4 people in his family. I went back to the table near the buffet (to better be able to stare at what I was missing) and sat down.
From nowhere, I heard the cashier tell the gentleman, “We don’t accept $100 bills.” I groaned. “You have got to be kidding me!” I told myself. I filed away a mental note to stop mocking the notices posted on doorways as I entered them.
There were several exchanges between customer and cashier. He found an emergency $20 bill folded in his wallet. He then began a lengthy process of finding pennies, nickels and whatever loose change he could. The cashier did the same with the penny jar. I could see that he was going to be way short, so I approached and motioned to the cashier. “I’ll pay for it. All of it, if you will send it to the card reader.” I swiped my card and all 3 of the people working there came up to tell me how gracious it was for me to do so.
“We’ve got to pay it forward or there’s no point to any of this,” I laughed. “Besides, he can come back later for more with what he saved today. This tartar sauce isn’t going to eat itself.”
While I wasn’t sure the gentleman was Latino, I asked him in Spanish if he spoke Spanish, and then told him to repay the favor to someone else who needed it. His smile almost shattered the edges of his face, as it became so wide and pronounced. I felt a little piece of my heart slide away, recognizing that he hadn’t experienced many such unsolicited offers of help. I went back to my seat to eat my 77 packets of delicious tartar sauce.
As the man I had helped passed by he held out his hand, the same bright smile across his face. I shook his hand and told him to go home and enjoy his day with family. You might think he benefited more than I with our chance encounter, but the opposite is true. The gift of language united us for a brief moment, strengthened by one of the most underrated of our human powers: to help. The people working there got to forget the rush of work demands for a moment and see that we could manage to see beyond the roles of customer, stranger, and employee.
So, I sit in this courtyard, the same sun still beating down on my balding head, probably temporarily blinding anyone sauntering by the open end of the courtyard. For this day, I am thankful. Batesville’s heartbeat can still be heard and felt. For a brief day, I had the opportunity to step away from normal life and be an exclusive member of what can only be described as peace.
A few anecdotes from my diary…
Earlier today, I went to Wal-Mart to buy an array of botanical poisons for the fence line. As they were out of agent orange, I bought a huge supply of the stuff that kills plants, bushes, and probably even the entire biosphere of North America. In addition, I saw that table salt was on sale for about fifty cents a container. Naturally, I bought twelve or so. As I was checking out, I asked if I could borrow a kleenex. The clerk looked up and before she could ask, I warned her that the chip reader was about to make me cry. I think I’d rather have a burglar steal my underwear than deal with chipped cards. As she was scanning the large volume of salt, I could tell she was curious. Instead of letting her wonder, I volunteered the reasons for so much salt. “Well, meth uses a lot ammonia and bleach. The salt can be used to reduce the dissolution temperature of the third stage of the process. Having made a few hundred batches, salt is a cheap way to keep the house from blowing up – again. I was the lucky the first time.” I pointed at my half-closed eye, as if it was the result of a past meth explosion at my house. The look on her face was as startled as any I’ve ever seen. I think she ultimately realized that I was a clown, having a good time. We shared several laughs after that. PS: When she asked me if I wanted cash back, I replied, “Yeah, wouldn’t that be great, to hear his smooth country voice again?” Surprisingly, she got that dumb joke immediately.
(Sidenote for the SWAT Team: I was kidding about the meth thing. While I adored “Breaking Bad,” chemistry requires math -which excludes my participation. Also, given my poor tooth maintenance program and total lack of juvenile dental care, I have to cherish my remaining teeth before they escape my mandibles.)
Once near Batesville, Dawn opted to eat at Aubrey’s Mexican Food and Pizza for the second time. And yes, they do both. It was much better this time – and I made a few friends. I think our waitress wanted to marry me. I only say that because she got down on one knee and proposed. Just kidding, but she was so excited to find someone who is bilingual and so weird. She was very familiar with NWA and lived a long time just North of there in Monett. We talked a long time and shared many laughs and jokes. She came to Batesville to care for a sick daughter and while she loves the area, would love to go back across the state. Although having no personal worries about the law, she was concerned about the change in mood lately. I told her enough reasons in Spanish to allay her fears. There’s nothing like pico de gallo, cheese dip, and taking a moment to both laugh and think to lift a person’s soul a little bit. As a bonus, we also got to work into the conversation my resemblance to a fat version of Pablo Escobar, as well as Dawn’s poorly-concealed admiration of Ricky Martin and Chayanne. While she denies it, I think she keeps muttering “Delicioso” when they appear on TV.
Dawn wanted a cup of coffee. That or some exotic hallucinogen – I couldn’t be sure. All I know is that she had that intense look of mysterious determination, evidenced by a trail of spittle around her lips. After investigating the infamous whereabouts of the Notorious missing Starbucks (we did find at least 3 doughnut shops in a cluster, though, as if there was a pastry mafia at work in Batesville), we stopped at a stop-and-rob near our intended hotel. After I was able to give the useful and hilarious “Your other right” advice to Dawn when she was vainly searching for a coffee accessory hidden directly to her right, we ambled around the convenience store like drunken sailors on leave after having been quarantined for a month but yet desperately wanting an obscure snack cake. After what seemed like 90 minutes of wandering in the wilderness of the aisles, I went up to the cashier’s station. A large, thick-bearded gentleman offered to help me. I pointed at the cups and said, “Two coffees and two ices.” Dawn for some reason only known to sages and blind gurus, mentioned the coffees again, as if the clerk had been rendered instantaneously blind by my comment. To be funny, I repeated what I had chosen, except in reverse. “Two coffees and two ices,” I bellowed in a strange voice, just to be amusing. To my shock, though, the word “ICES” when shouted sounded exactly like I had screamed “ISIS.” The clerk momentarily looked at me like he was a concealed carry permit holder anxious to exercise his right to blow my stupid head off. I wouldn’t have blamed him. Instead, a slow smile spread across his face. I pointed to Dawn and uttered, “She don’t get out much, sir.”
When we got to the car, I relented and decided to get gas. (Dawn and I engage in an elaborate dance about how frequently we need to put gas in the car. I like to pretend I’m just about to let it coast into the garage on fumes.) Since I had one eye partially closed from my battle with the fence line this week and my glasses weren’t helping, I kept vainly trying to get the gas pump to work. I had a new chipped debit card which evidently didn’t affect anything – but in my mind, it was that darned new-fangled technology that was the problem, rather than my inability to follow simple instructions. I leaned in an kept reading, “Prepray before pumping,”instead of “Prepay before pumping.” Darn, I thought to myself, they have no idea I’m about to start doing just that if I can’t get this pump to work. In the back of my mind, too, I thought I might scream a prayer if the large bearded clerk had changed his mind about my shenanigans and came out to either offer to assist me in the complicated task of pumping gas, or hurling me into the highway.
When we arrived at the hotel in Batesville, I attempted to circumvent my wife’s notorious OCD-whatif-omg tendency by insisting we take both laptops to the hotel room before proceeding with anything else. I didn’t want her to enumerate the potential 47 illicit things that could wrong if something happened to our personal computers. In her defense, she made an impassioned plea to include the package of lemon ice cookies regardless of whatever else we took up. After exiting for the return trip to the car, Dawn noticed she had only one key card in the fold-up holder. “I probably dropped it,” she joked. I replied, “Yes, you probably did, but if not, we’ll be okay with just one.” As we came back up to the room and exited the elevator, we both saw a room key card in the middle of the hallway. As we neared, we could see that Dawn had, in fact, dropped the other key card outside our door where anyone could have picked it up while we were absent for a few minutes. Naturally, we both laughed at the idiocy of it all, because for once we brought the most valuable things up to the room first, only to be vanquished by Dawn’s butterfingers with the keys.
Bonus: Despite several reasons and opportunity to do so, Dawn did NOT in fact push me out the door of the car around the serpentine curves to Batesville. Personally, I think she was afraid of the ‘No Littering’ signs along the highway.
After you’ve been married long enough, there’s no need to wait for your significant other to say, “I told you so.” It’s easier just to say, “You told me so” preemptively and steal their thunder. It’s one of the few pleasures for those in the AARP spectrum.
For those who aren’t married, it would help you to know that at least 7% of all married life is spent saying some version of “I told you so,” or “Duh!” -albeit in more cleverly-concealed word packets. You have to choose your battles, with most of them being silent and snickering skirmishes along the periphery of your partner’s attention span. I’ve heard fables of those with the ability to just directly smack-talk their spouses, but I presume these are distraction stories planted by some nefarious society for the abolition of living husbands.
After moving, I swore off fixing the neighbor’s messes, including the inevitable neighbors who let their lawns and fences start to look like Isla Nublar from Jurassic Park, after 100 years of abandonment. My wife Dawn told me ignore the encroaching wilderness or pay someone to do it. (Remove it, not ignore it, although one camp of thought firmly believes that ignoring a problem either solves it -or solves you from being around to need to be involved.) The afternoon we were expecting powerful weather, I convinced myself that the foliage hadn’t had time to mature enough to trick me into making contact with it. I not only trimmed it all, but carefully cut it and compacted it into compost recycling collection bags – and thereby ensuring that it touched every square inch of my body, just as an idiot bonus. Thinking back, I wish I had sneaked over to the neighbor’s house and shoved it through the side windows where, according to the hoarded collection of things shoved there, Bigfoot was probably already living.
At the Cottonwood house, I had some epic struggles with skin rashes caused by some unknown plant, ones which made me resemble the ‘before’ pictures in leprosy photos. Even wearing a bee suit under an astronaut’s gear, I still broke out. We paid thousands of dollars for tree and foliage removal, after which I continued the Sisyphean and quixotic task of removing everyone’s else mess. While wasting my time keeping other people’s messes at bay, I (mostly) silently practiced my barrage of creative cursing, inventing newer and cleverer ways to imply my neighbors were lazy cretins.
At this new house, we have zero trees and zero bushes, so our landscaping ideology could be best described as ‘Spartan.’ The upside to this is that we can’t be accused of allowing our choices to encroach on other people or their property. When I bought this house, I had to shame the home builder into clearing the property to back line as I had been promised, trees, bushes, and any remaining squirrels included. Almost immediately, however, I noted my neighbor’s were more interested in smoking foliage than in maintaining it. Lest the wacky weed fail to dull their senses of duty, they also drown the remainder of their responsibility in small, conveniently packaged cans of work inhibitors.
Wednesday morning, I awoke to skin that felt like it had been dipped in fiberglass itching powder and spread on my body. My right eye looked like I had stepped in the ring for Rocky Balboa for the Clubber Lane fight. And, of course, I had scratched in my sleep, spreading the fun into my unmentionable nether regions.
I tried to work, but finally went to the doctor and admitted that I had ignored the admonition of my wife and ventured into Isla Nublar again. If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to sleep on a fiberglass insulation mattress, come over and I’ll have you toss about in the neighbor’s fence line.
I realize that it would have been much, much cheaper to hire semi-professionals to cut the fence line back, even if they, too, contract my irritating case of itchy-nethers instead of me, rather than me miss work and pay for the privilege of a doctor basically telling me, “Don’t do that and you won’t have this problem again.” He should have handed me a “Here’s-Your-Sign” sign a la Bill Engvall in addition to the prescription for 5,000 steroid pills.
Next time, I’ll grumble dismissively at Dawn and heed her words of advice as she counsels me against doing something else stupid. I’ll listen, though. (She preaches ‘advise and no dissent’ instead of ‘advise and consent’ as Congress does.)
If you hear about a 911 call from the boundary between Vanleer and Green Acres, don’t worry, it’s me. I’m ordering plans now for building my own DIY flamethrower, the kind that can blast waves of fire 20 feet. I could use machinery to trim the neighbor’s neglect, or hire innocent bystanders to do it. I think, however, that a tower of flame, held in my maniacal laughing hands of destruction will send a better message and make for better optics, even if the fire department comes and puts me on the wagon. I’m going to blame it all on the massive dose of steroids the doctor gave me.
Edit: Oops. NSFW. This gif image is satire, over-the-top absolute stupidity, designed to exaggerate the absurdity of Trump’s image makeover. I know that DJ Trump isn’t Hitler: Hitler’s dead. But I noticed that only 2 little bars need to be moved in the #45 to make the most well-known of hate symbols in the history of man. (I will probably get a call from Pence, angry to be left out.)
Notwithstanding reality, just as the 45 can be easily morphed into a hate symbol, the ease into which we can slide into anarchy or worse becomes more apparent. People tire of all the arguing and shouting; many fail to appreciate that this shouting is what protects us from forgetting our shared goals and to ensure we are checking the direction of our boat. We’re going to always bicker and argue, sometimes at great volume. With Trump, he plays the role of teenager, arguing with great bellicosity at each imagined slight. We can’t tell how serious he is being until after he demonstrates it through action. Like last night, he can be calm. Some of us, however, are assuming he’s about to send us a text message to kiss his ass again, once we’ve angered him. On a sidenote, when people stop voicing their disagreement or anger, you probably have a much worse problem on your hands – you haven’t obtained agreement, you’ve obtained a rattlesnake in your bed, one which no longer gives a warning by way of rattle.
One of Trump’s biggest millstones is his prejudice problem. For his fans, there isn’t a problem: most see his speech as vaguely echoing their own ideas, or being grossly exaggerated by some. (This is a disparity for another day and another argument.) His hiring and appointing of people with serious issues regarding racism and prejudice doesn’t deter his followers from feeling vindicated. For them, it is a change both long-anticipated and worthy of celebration. It falsely seems as if most of Trump’s followers truly wish to echo words of hatred – and I do not believe this to be true. Most are centrist in attitude and compassionate toward other people, otherwise, our country would already be a loss to us all. I know personally so few people who would express hatred toward Muslims or wish to kick out all Latinos, no matter what their immigration status. I do know, some, I admit, but I hate it when I lose focus on the actual slim quantity of such people. Just as some conservatives see only lefties shouting into their granola bags, I sometimes let my eyeballs get the better of me despite working hard to consume a wide array of media.
Only Trump truly knows what it is in his heart. The accumulation of what he has said and done speaks to his innermost self, in my opinion. I would enjoy no greater pleasure than to witness him coming to the realization that courting such anger and racism has generated more of the same. I was raised in a cauldron of hate speech – and each person involved had convinced themselves that such prejudice was both earned and factual – or that it didn’t really mean anything. Everyone on the giving end of such racism tends to fail to appreciate the consequences of exclusion. I, of course, often found myself at the end of the stick if I challenged prejudice even in its mildest forms.
As president, Trump could use his power to speak frankly while unilaterally avoiding stoking the crazies into falsely believing that most of America wishes to calmly allow an ongoing slide into outright and direct racism. He will fail to make America great if he fails to get out of this racism and prejudice pit, real or imagined. Of what point is a country with economic expansion if we turn away from being better? The ideals we claim as a nation cannot be reconciled with the perception of exclusion that much of Trump’s actions have generated. If George W. Bush has some words of admonition for you, there is a great chance that you might be doing some things wrong and some wrong things in the process.
So many people are simply sick of seeing Trump on the news, reading about him on social media, and discussing him across the walls of their cubicles. All of us, regardless of politics, want to see an absence of allegations of hate and insult.
To date, the resistance has done a passable job of shouting back at Trump. I still find it difficult to believe that Trump himself can be as aggravatingly prejudiced as he sometimes seems. On the other hand, I was completely wrong about so many people I grew up with too, people who were otherwise rational and giving but who turned into venom-spewing adults who could find no fault with their attitudes about any combination of LGBTQ, Latinos, Jews, or any other group with less political power.
If you’ll forgive me for shocking your eyeballs with an absurd swastika, I’ll forget that you wanted me to listen to Trump’s speech last night and then ignore the totality of everything he had done.
PS: As with so many of political posts, this one will be reported to FB as hate speech, which would be ironic; expected, but ironic. I didn’t use the swastika lightly or with malice, although it might seem to be the case. Satire demands an ember in the eye sometimes.
P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 