Death Comes to the Poetess

Well, we’ve come to murdering poets and poetesses, and how we’ve descended into the maelstrom of chaos and emotional pandemonium! The invasion of Venezuela and essentially the start of a war (possibly a world war), which was the trifling breeze flowing through the world stage over the weekend is today wafting through the next galaxy over. Now we’re worried about the murder of a poetess.

 

To stop being ironic, let me show you this:

 

  

 

The car belonged to Renee Nicole Good, who had just dropped her 6-year-old son off at school. 

 

She was driving back home from dropping her kid off at school.

 

Anybody out there ever done that?

 

Look at the car.

 

It’s kind of a mess, isn’t it?

 

Though not a complete mess by any means. Just the ordinary mess of a basically clean person who is running late and trying to put something nutritious in the damn lunch bag that her kid will actually eat. A woman who is stuck like all of us by herself raising a kid (husband died) and not planning to get killed that day.

 

So of course she has that green coffee mug in the mug holder which may still have a slug or two of coffee in it. You think the cops are gonna rinse that out?

 

Nah….

 

Then there’s that feather, which I have to say is a tip-off. Cars tell all, since they are a bit of the house that we detach somehow to move from home to elsewhere. Cars are not vehicles only. And you will never see a feather in the car of a woman pulling into her reserved parking as CEO of a Fortune 500 company. You will never see a feather in the car of a senior partner in the firm of Cabot, Smith, Lodge and Brattle (the prestigious if imaginary legal firm in Boston, of course).

 

A poetess, however….

 

Well, Amy Lodge Lowell may have been the cigar-smoking poetess of highbrow Boston society, but most of us running out the door with our green coffee mug in one hand and our six-year-old son hopefully in the other hand (and the damn paper bag that has the “lunch” left back on the cutting board, of course, because how many hands do you think I HAVE, DAMMIT!)

 

So the problem Renee Nicole Good had, maybe, was that the lunch was on the cutting board, and the plums that her kid wasn’t going to eat now are completely inedible. 

 

This scenario is completely imaginary, but all of a sudden the world has invaded this poor woman’s life, and everybody is telling you exactly who she is (domestic terrorist / murderess not poetess / radical left-wing lesbian mom who needs a good fuck back into submission).

 

This woman is dead, and that’s her car up there, so her life is up for grabs, see?

 

I mean, she’s dead, so we might as well take her life, right?

 

I mean…

 

…she’s not using it!

 

So I get the car thing, because my sister-in-law has a car—imagine that!—if no six-year-old son.

 

Six-year-old son…

 

…wonder if he has a name?

 

…should I google him?

 

Nah—he still has his life and is using it, unlike his mother, who is dead and not using her life. Which means we can take it, of course.

 

Anyway, my sister-in-law is a poetess too, which is why she has the feather stuck not onto the dashboard or in the air conditioner vent but on that little barrier island where Renee Nicole Good’s green coffee mug (that the police still haven’t rinsed out—and that was two pages ago!) lives / lived.

 

Unless, of course, we are not following ancient Egyptian burial practices, in which case a poetess would of course have to be buried with her feather, that vital tool of the trade!

 

Carpenters have hammers.

 

Surgeons have scalpels.

 

Poetesses…

 

And of course mothers have green coffee mugs, usually capable of holding most of the Baltic Sea, since that’s how they get through their days. Amy Lodge Lowell, whose blood is so blue it makes lapis lazuli green with envy, may be buried with her humidor of cigars, but female poets of the modern day run about with…

 

You guessed it…

 

…feathers and mugs.

 

Surprising what a poet can do, and what a mother can do. Who would have thought, two days ago in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that this mother / poetess would not have emulated dear Amy Lodge Lowell, who publicly smoked cigars and conducted her lesbian relationships with a combination of arrogance and deference that only an entitled but still a do-gooding-spinster-from-Boston-Massachusetts could muster. And who won the Pulitzer in 1926.

 

Amy Lodge Lowell—and if the name doesn’t automatically stiffen your spine and wonder if your handkerchief is clean, then…

 

You are not from any part of Boston, where the names “Lodge” and “Lowell” are not names. 

 

They are auras.

 

They are legacies.

 

They are very old, very simple, very rich homes of the sort of people who do NOT buy their silver, or the oriental rugs that gleam on their polished walnut floors.

 

Old things handed down, you know.

 

Like the trust fund.

 

Anyway, about Amy Lodge Lowell…

 

Wasn’t I talking about her?

 

Let’s take a look at her, sitting where she should be…

 

 

 

This was from a Time magazine article, probably exactly 100 years ago. That’s when Amy Lodge Lowell…

 

…you know the Lodges from the old poem about Boston (“the Lodges speak only to the Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God”)

 

…anyway, that’s when Amy Lodge Lowell, the cigar-smoking-poetess from Boston won the Pulitzer.

 

She was a Lowell, and also a Lodge, of course, which means that she had the very old, very clean house with those old things like the heavy silverware that is always polished and gleaming and the oriental rugs, which are so beautiful that the sheep would die to give their wool for it.

 

Amy Lodge Lowell may have been a cigar-smoking-poetess, but she conducted herself like a lady (lesbian). We will always remember her sitting in her chair, deeply unfashionable for 1926 but she is a Lodge AND a Lowell and do you think she cares? Of course not! She’ll sit wherever she damn well pleases and smoke her cigar like a lady.

 

Whereas Renee Nicole Good did the unthinkable, the unimaginable. She dropped off her kid (name unknown, since why take his name, which is about all he has? Father is dead, Mom was living with her female partner, now it’s all gone to shit…)

 

Anyway, this mother dropped off her kid, looked at him disappear into the school, stuck the feather back in the dashboard, slugged down the penultimate gulp of coffee (gotta rinse that mug, boys!), encountered Federal agents in the street outside her home, turned her car into a deadly weapon, and then had to be killed at point blank through the open car window by this guy…

 

 

Well, I’m not going to tell you his name, because he hasn’t been identified formally or charged or indicted or held to trial and found innocent or guilty. So we mustn’t ever, ever, judge him guilty—though shooting a driver through the open window of a car that is obviously trying to speed away from you puts most of us at legal risk. It’s hard to explain tire tracks to the judge, to say nothing of ALL the videos we have seen, since dudes?

 

We all have cell phones.

 

Anyway, the heroic man above, having only a moment before escaped death at the hands of (or the car of) a feather-waving, mug-gulping poetess…

 

He took her out.

 

Had to, and seeing her blood-stained air bag which was left at the “crime scene” right under the six-year-old’s window for most of the day, for GOD’S SAKE!

 

…settle down, Marc…

 

Well, I’ve taken a healing gaze out at the calico cat lying on the hot asphalt of the parking lot behind the club.

 

People left white roses in the dirty white snow that even clean cities like Minneapolis have to endure.

 

The white roses…

 

The dirty snow…

 

And a foot print—very male, very boot—crushing a drop of blood from the car / weapon of the poetess / murderess.

 

The poetess is gone.

 

The feather—and her child—remain.  

 

 

Binding History

I remember feeling uneasy about it as I typed the words, a month ago, which I remember were something like…

 

         “perhaps it’s wildly optimistic, but…

         …have we turned the corner?”

 

Meaning: has the country finally come to its senses? Have they come to see Trump for what he is, which is the complete opposite of whatever they thought they saw in a television show? Will they dosomething about him, for whatever of a multitude of reasons? Shit—if the Republicans want to discover, tomorrow morning, that Trump has Alzheimer’s, and that the lighthouse of his genius no longer shines so brightly…well, I’ll jump on that bandwagon. They can name every building, street, town and male child after Trump for the rest of time, and I’ll be totally cool with it.

 

I did it with Reagan, I can do it with Trump.

 

Anyway, the Christmas spirit seemed to have wormed its way into little Marc, or maybe I was just exhausted. I certainly wasn’t realistic, which was curious, because I did peer out the bus window at all of the destroyers that popped up in San Juan harbor on their way to Roosevelt Roads. I wrote about them last year, if anybody remembers what that was like. I even was going to get off the bus, one morning, just to take a photo. Ah, one of the many little voices I should have listened to.

 

Trump is a dry drunk who has never touched a drop of alcohol—a view I thought was my own, until it turns out his chief-of-staff, Susie Wiles, shares it. And with drunks, everything gets turned upside down. Usually, with normal people, things are not as bad as they seem. Things will right themselves, after a bit.

 

Not with drunks, and not with Trump.

 

Well, the boats were in the harbor, and little Marc was on the bus peering at them through the window, and it should have been obvious right? I’m the guy who keeps wondering what the Germans, back in the 1930’s, thought about that railway built into that enormous forest that sheltered that temporary camp that was both huge and yet not possibly big enough to accommodate the endless trains crammed with people (arriving) and chillingly empty (leaving).

 

And that awful smell of something burning—ugh!

 

The Germans didn’t “see” the concentration camps that were in their backyards and that some of them must have helped build. I didn’t “see” the warships that were floating in front of me.

 

I mean, who could imagine that “we” were going to send a strike force into Caracas, Venezuela in the middle of the night, enter the compound where the President of the country was sleeping with his wife, kill the thirty Cubans who were providing security for them, and then seize the president and his wife, put them in handcuffs and fly them out of the country.

 

This is America, dudes, where we do the subtle / hypocritical approach. Artificial Intelligence has just told me that the phrase “give us your oil or we’ll bring you democracy,” entered the public discussion in the first decade of the century in response to the Iraq / Afghanistan wars. Then, tired old Google gives me the first search entry result, which is this!

 

 

Well, I have no memory of writing about medical sadism, or publishing it in http://lifedeathandiguanas.blogspot.com but it certainly sounds like something I’d say. And if all I’ve done in my life is given the world that phrase, maybe it’s enough.

 

The raid was bad enough. The news conference, in which he outright admitted that the invasion was all about the oil, was horrific. Having the ambassador to the United Nations come out the next day and openly admit to admiring and hoping-to-implement the Monroe doctrine with its “spheres of influence,” was nauseating. Hearing that Greenland, Mexico, Colombia, and Cuba might be next was horrifying.

 

The lack of subtlety was one thing, the lack of planning for the inevitable day-after was another. The idea was that “all” of the big oil companies were going to invest billions, if not trillions, of dollars in a country seething with resentment at foreign interests extracting the wealth of the country while its residents are in grinding poverty and misery. Even assuming that the oil companies are willing to do that, and that they are able to provide security for the enormous workforce that will be needed, what will keep the Venezuelans from nationalizing the petroleum industry, once all those dollars / Euros / pounds / shekels have made the oil fields / refineries / whatever-else all bright and shiny again? Putting little questions of patriotism and pride aside, the best thing for Venezuela to do might be to let the multinationals rebuild their system, and then take it over again.    

 

Nothing about the plan made any sense, on the face of it. Maduro was horrific, but leaving his vice president in power, and being willing to “work with her,” raises big questions. Delcy Rodríguez went from vice president to “acting president” of Venezuela overnight, but the real question is when, if ever, she agreed to play Washington’s stooge.

 

Well, you, Dear Reader, know how it all worked out, or how it didn’t. You’re like God, Dear Reader. I’m supposed to be writing this damn story, but you know the ending and I don’t. I am “driving” this damn bus which has a mind of its own, and you are the passenger, who knows where we’re going.

 

I sure don’t.

 

So there was little Marc on Saturday morning, looking at YouTube, which had clips entitled “Maduro Seized,” and “US Illegally Removes Maduro from Power,” and my non-caffeinated brain dismissed it as AI generated fake news. Worrisome, but not serious. It took twenty minutes for it to occur to me to check The New York Times, or the BBC, to see if the insane had materialized.

 

It was like getting kicked in the stomach.

 

And it was that same, sickening feeling that I used to have when I woke up hungover from the night before. I had started the day before vowing, at last, that today was the day I was going to lick it. I was going to put down the booze and straighten up and get my life in order, open the front door and step into the sunlight! Instead, my head was pounding and my cell phone was harboring hurt responses from the people I had drunk-texted the night before.

 

Putin had won, once again.

 

Trump is probably just a “useful idiot,” and not consciously under the control of the Kremlin. I suspect that he’s in that large group of people who know that they’ve misbehaved, that there’s probably plenty of evidence of that misbehavior, but who doesn’t know exactly what the Kremlin knows or has. Only that they have it—whatever it is—and that it’s probably bad.

 

But even if he knew his behavior had been irreproachable, Trump was susceptible to so many other approaches. There was his grandiosity, and wouldn’t expanding American territory to include Greenland (to be renamed “Trumpland,”), Venezuela, another island (the biggest) in the Caribbean be the best and easiest way to shoot to the front ranks of US presidents? 

 

There was the lack of any moral compass, which can always gum up the works.

 

There was his belief that the rules applied to the suckers, not to him.

 

There was his ignorance of any history, including his own.

 

There was his avarice, because when Trump’s rich friends do well…well, it works out well for all of us, doesn’t it? At least, it works out well for Trump, who likes to have happy, super-rich friends surround him. 

 

Can you blame him?

 

In the end, convincing Trump to invade Venezuela was like persuading kids to steal candy. Ridiculously simple, and very convenient, too. Putin can stick Ukraine and Belarus and Latvia and anything else left over from the old Soviet Union back under his belt.

 

From a military point of view, the raid was stunning. From any other point of view, the thing made no sense, unless you seriously considered—as I would never do—the foolish idea that maybe Donald Trump had just gotten pissed off at Maduro, who had begun “dancing” in a red hat to the 80’s music that Trump loves, with its memories of the discos and the parties. Trump got it into his head that Maduro was mocking him, and even though Trump had admitted, a month ago, that Maduro was willing to “give him everything,” that wasn’t enough. Trump had to send the military in and remove him.

 

Trump is damn close to removing the whole damn world order, and if that sounds pompous, it should. I was taught about the “world order,” the way I was taught about God, meaning that I was in fifth grade, or so, and able to grasp simple concepts above “yes” or “no.”

 

The simple concept was that after two horrific world wars in the first half of the century, nobody could endure the idea of any more such wars (especially involving nuclear weapons) in the next fifty years. So we Americans (insert patriotic adjectives / descriptions) had put together an entire system of international law, and had built a place on the East River in NYC for all the 180-plus nations of the world to come and settle their petty little differences, though if they had just listened to US…

 

…never mind.

 

Well, we set up the United Nations and we created NATO and we kept things pretty much in order, except when there were “regional wars,” which nobody really bothered about, because unless you were Gazan or Syrian or Ukrainian or whatever, well, who cared?

 

I mean, if you can’t even find the damn country on the globe….

 

The adults might see nations in terms of foreign policy and “spheres of influence.” Well, we didn’t understand spheres of influence in fifth grade, but we knew about the bullies in the sandbox. You had better have the teacher (God) on your side or a bunch of your friends (NATO) when the bully started pushing kids out of their corner of the sandbox.

 

Well, the United States had gone over to stupid old Europe and straightened things around (insert sigh / heavenward glance and “once again!”) and then come back home and with Yankee pluck and generosity had rebuilt Germany and Japan and created the framework for a century of peace and prosperity (except for the people living in the “regions,” who kept on having their wars).

 

They gave us the oil, we gave them the democracy, and weren’t we all happy?

 

Miss Steensland explained all of this to us, and we all nodded our heads and took it for granted that all of the rest of the world had listened to Miss Steensland, too. Or they had had a Miss Steensland. Or that Miss Steensland both knew everything and controlled everything, which should have been the case, since when you are in fifth grade and Miss Steensland is your teacher, and she is explaining “the world order” well…

 

…you need Miss Steensland to be in control.

 

And indeed, I still need Miss Steensland to be in control, and am privately horrified that she just stopped, a decade ago, which is when she let Donald Trump come down the elevator and unpour his nonsense onto the world stage. She had done pretty well all of those long, boring, peaceful decades. My Uncle Deet had to go off and fight World War II with nothing more than his unread Bible (that little detail I don’t forget) but Donald Trump and I didn’t have to. We had to invent bone spurs to avoid Vietnam.

 

Well, Miss Steensland is somewhere doing, probably, awful and illicit things, since no fifth-grade teacher would ever set up a lesson plan in which the class activity was invading another country, removing its awful leader, and then imposing its will upon the citizens. 

 

Miss Steensland is in a crack house, doing “favors” for gentleman to get her next fix.

 

Fortunately, Dr. Heather Cox Richardson is at hand, and I have no worries..

 

None whatsoever!

 

…about her.     

 

  

Notes from a Puritan

It was a little hard to wrap my head around it, but in the end, I had to admit it: Heather Cox Richardson is right. I am a Puritan.

 

A very bad Puritan—so very bad that any serious Puritan (if there are any serious Puritans today….) would scoff at the idea. Actually, I hope he (or she) would scoff: rage, nausea, revulsion are all more likely reactions.

 

I’m an old, homosexual drunk. 

 

That might not have surprised the Puritans, who seem to have had a surprising grip in reality. True—I know nothing about the Puritans except from what Richardson has told me. In fact, I grew up thinking that the Puritans were joyless, mean-spirited people. Haunted, as Mencken said, by the fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

 

This was the prevailing view of the Puritans in the 1960’s in the United States, which is when and where I first perked my head up and looked about me. They were as grim as their clothes, and anything good about them was accidental. 

 

An odd point of view, since I love New England, and everything about the place screams Puritanism, at least to me. The long, tall, white churches, unadorned except for a window admitting the grey light of winter. The sense of order, the calm.

 

I was last in the United States over a year ago, and went with my brother and sister-in-law to New Hampshire and Vermont. The area is over-grown, now, and we saw the rocks that previous generations of farmers had taken from their ground and piled to make a fence around their fields. The people are gone, their children and great-grandchildren have forgotten them and their fields and their stones. 

 

The Puritans, for me, were only a couple of generations (and unimportant ones, at that) away from the earnest and deadly people that ran the 1950’s. The Puritans had invented Hell, and delighted in sending me to it. They were repressed and hypocritical.

 

That’s what I thought, and what I believed everybody thought. But it turns out that while I was away being adolescent, more serious scholars were looking at the Puritans more charitably. The Puritans were serious people, after all, and what they achieved was in some cases spectacular.

 

I assume that my grandmother got it right, and that I am a descendant of Henry Herrick, of Salem. Who was he, and what did he think?

 

He could not have been a simple man—not the way we have become simple. He believed utterly in a God, but a God who knew the future (since God knows everything, right?). He knew who was going to heaven and who was going to hell, and He wasn’t saying. But nothing you did, and nothing you thought, made the slightest difference. I am an old, homosexual drunk, but I may still have my ticket onto the cloud with the angel strumming away at her harp.

 

Blameless YOU, on the other hand….

 

This is a view of God, and the spiritual life, which is completely foreign to us in 21^st century America, where God has become a Hallmark greeting card, a joke, a weapon, but never any serious figure. I think about God all the time, as I think my ancestor did. But I have no belief that he (if it is a he and not “them”) loves me, and I certainly don’t trust people who tell me he does.

 

So I go to heaven and you do not—or maybe it’s the other way around. Who—besides God—knows? The Puritans did not react as I would react; they didn’t say, ‘well, we’re fucked,’ and go off and get drunk.

 

Instead, they spent their entire adult lives seeking to become better and better people (in their eyes) and dreading the day of judgment. They had, if I read Wikipedia right, a weird sort of relationship with God. They believed in predestination, but also that you had to live an exemplary life to get it. For Puritans, the Bible study, the endless church services, the hours spent in prayer—all of that was preparation for a conversion experience, in which you became (and tried to convince everybody else that you had become) one of the “elect.”

 

The elect ran things, and decided who was a witch and which family truly owned the back forty acres down by the creek.

 

At the back of their minds must have been terror, and a drunk knows that pretty well. I am terrified too—mostly of ending up a drunk lying on a cardboard refrigerator box outside of Walgreens. Terror got me up and to a meeting of AA this morning; terror might have gotten Henry Herrick up and off to church, and then off to be a magistrate.

 

Neither of us believes that we have any friend up there in the sky. And neither of us believes, I suspect, that what other people think about us makes any difference. But it must have been inevitable for Herrick not to look sideways at the people and wonder: are they favored by God? Are they one of the “elect?”

 

Am I?

 

This view of God was completely uncomfortable, unless you happened to live in the society that was spawned from it. Education was huge—you had to read that Bible to get saved, or not—so you have great schools, universities, and libraries. Work was essential, to the point that Richardson confessed that she had always taken her knitting to any meeting / class / activity when she was a young woman. Idle hands may be the devil’s playground, but the Puritans were anything but idle. They were out making fortunes, and the United States was almost unimaginably fertile and fecund.

 

Money was a snare, of course, and so had to be hidden away in banks and trust funds and other unassailable vessels of probity and virtue. You could be spectacularly rich, but never could you show it. It was like being one of the “elect,” people knew about it and respected it—but you could never be sure of it yourself.

 

If a guy named Winthrop gave a speech and said that we were “a city on a hill,” it wasn’t that we were great and everybody loved us. It was that we had made a spectacular claim for ourselves—we were creating a new, divinely ordered society—and the entire world was watching. It wasn’t a pat on the back, it was a call to action.

 

How exhausting it must have been—to wake up each day to obligations, duty, trials. To derive no satisfaction from the opinion of others, to strive mightily with no idea of whether any of it was necessary or made any sense. To have no belief that one’s actions made any difference, and to fear the afterlife and its deadening mate, eternity.

 

The Puritans were adults, dude.

 

And it wasn’t easy, which is why some of us became old alcoholics. It’s also why, when I finally entered the rooms of AA, I was instantly at home. The Puritan ideas, of course, had merged with other, more awful and evangelical forms of Christianity. But if my bed is made (check) and my bedroom is clean (mostly check) this morning, it’s because I grew up a Puritan, and needed the rooms of AA to revive it. 

 

It's the end of the year, and we are in that week before the New Year and after Christmas. I am exhausted, though I have done nothing, or so I tell myself.

 

I lived through this year.

 

I should tell you that Trump is fulminating in Mar-a-Lago—the Department of Justice has released a miniscule portion of the Epstein files and yes, it appears that the cover-up has failed badly.

 

Nor do I know anything more than I knew at the start of the year. It may be exhaustion or the Christmas spirit that keeps leaking through, dammit, but it feels as if we’ve…

 

…turned the corner?

 

…come to our senses?

 

Or maybe we’re just gotten tired. I am tired of the people who love God and are so very loved by him that they have no need to be anything but brutal to everybody else. I am tired of pretending that God put us up here to shine brightly for the world to see on this damn hill. I am tired of believing in endless progress and future joy.

 

I lived through this year, I wrote a book that nobody will read, and I will die. In the end, none of it matters, and I know that. But I need to get through today, and the best way of doing it, oddly, is by being a Puritan. It means waking up early, making your bed and getting down to work. It means yearning to be at the beach when you are making another notebook. It means no screaming at the worker in the club who has just now turned on the television to impossible audio levels. It means doing a lot of shit that I don’t want to do, but that needs to be done.

 

But it also means that at the end of the day, I can put my head on a pillow and sleep. I never got to the bottom of who Henry Herrick of Salem was, or Nicholas Coleman Pickard. Do I know my own heart?

 

I lived through this year, I wrote a book, I will die. And who is this “I?”

 

Oddly, I think all that I am is a man who walked down Mounds Park Road, sometime in 2012. That was thirteen years ago, but I remember a cool, foggy morning, and I remember the carpet of white trillium that had been reestablished on the forest floor. I remember emerging from that forest and walking down the road to where my mother had once lived. She was gone, and I knew inside that I too, was walking the road for the last time. There was no reason to come back to that house (now sold) or that hill.

 

There was great comfort in the anonymity. My mother had died, I was soon to be gone as well. The hill remained, gazing at the people walking or driving the road. The hill sees everything and remembers nothing.

 

Other people will walk that road. It doesn’t matter that I will never walk that road again.

 

Only that I once did. 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Why Bother?

The problem is that it’s utterly trivial, but deeply emblematic, as well.

 

It shouldn’t matter to me that a guy named Rob Reiner got killed (allegedly) by his son on Saturday. Reiner’s wife also got killed. The son got arrested within hours, and the story of his (sigh) struggle with addiction came out by noon the next day.

 

None of this is important because Rob Reiner isn’t important, at least to me. Rob Reiner is this century’s equivalent to the great Jullien. You don’t know who he is, and neither do I, and that’s the point. Wikipedia, of course, has the answer.

 

 

Jullien seemed unburdened by the weight of his thirty-six names, perhaps knowing that he would achieve fame and recognition throughout his lifetime. He gave the people what they want, and that’s…

 

 

Well, Mahler may have had the Symphony of a Thousand, but did he require three firemen’s brigades to combat the fire that erupted musically on cue in the Fireman’s Quadrille? As memory serves (meaning I’m too lazy to check on this detail, since we’ve all forgotten about Jullien—so who cares), the fire broke out, the firemen extinguished it, the crowd went wild. It was a sensation—like Bad Bunny today. And like Jullien yesterday, Bad Bunny will be forgotten tomorrow.

 

I pay no attention to Jullien or Bad Bunny, and I like to be high-minded about it. I paid not attention to the fact that Reiner had been killed until I heard that Trump had expertly pinpointed the cause of Reiner’s death: Trump derangement syndrome. Let’s get this out of the way:

 

 

 

Reiner is trivial, of course, and so is Trump, of course. Who knows whether history will “judge” Reiner as an important figure in American cultural life of the mid to late twentieth century? Who knows whether Donald Trump will sink to the level of Adolf Hitler / Josef Stalin or merely be forgotten with all the other unimportant presidents.

 

Remember this guy?

 

 

No worries—nobody else remembers James Buchanan either, except that he was (probably) the worst president to have at the time and he was gay (again probably).

 

So a ridiculous, meanspirited narcissist wrote a hateful comment about an unimportant person. It shouldn’t matter, but it does, and I wish I could tell you why it does. 

 

Our commentators go on overtime with Trump’s posts, which they all characterize as “unpresidential,” or “bringing down the moral tone,” or stuff like that. The problem seems to be that Trump is saying all this stuff.

 

I have no problem with Trump saying all of this stuff.

 

I have a problem with him being all this stuff.

 

Actually, I have a problem with us dealing with Trump at all.

 

Trump is a perfectly wonderful crazy uncle, and if he wants to tear down part of his house without any plan (or permit) about what to build later, that’s fine. 

 

But we don’t elect dudes that are crazy enough to bulldoze the East Wing to be president.

 

We used to care, and we used to bother. 

 

It was fun, for a while, not to care, and hate (for immigrants, black people, gay people, etc.) lasted for a while. But like any other drug, our tolerance went up and so did the price. We could bulldoze the White House last week—what’s up today?

 

‘Why bother,’ I think, and then remember a guy I watch on YouTube. He’s an art restorer, and he does these amazing videos, which is how I’ve stayed sober (or at least dry) during this first year of Trump’s unveiled presidency (too many adults in the room, the first time around).

 

Julian (unlike—and I swear I didn’t plan this—his non-namesake Jullien) takes sharp scalpels and then dulls them to scrape off barely-scopic flecks of yellowing varnish from old paintings that nobody but their owners want to look at.

 

Julian step up to the easel!

 

Julian scrapes and scrapes at the stuff only he can see. Wrong—there’s the next conservator, breathing down Julian’s neck, even though he (or she) probably hasn’t been conceived, yet. But Julian scrapes away until even he is satisfied, and then he rewards himself by making extra work for himself on the back of the painting.

 

And he loves to tell us about it. He knows perfectly well that NOBODY is going to be looking at the back of his canvas, and that nobody will see (or care) that Julian has not just lopped off the extra canvas on the back of the canvas and left it to hang there. No—a thousand times no!

 

Julian has done the same stupid thing that he has done all his life and will die doing. He has neatly folded the remaining canvas and secured them in a straight line to the back of the frame with sterile tacks that are slightly lighter than the tack used to secure the actual canvas on tacking edge. He also folds the corners so that no fraying would be even imaginable. He tacks them down—one tack through the folded corner, one tack immediately adjacent to it.

 

I watch him do this nonsense religiously (both of us), since I have just watched Nicole Wallace attempt to control her disgust at Trump’s smear of Rob Reiner. So I am in a state, which means that I am shouting…

 

…GET SOME SUPERGLUE!

 

…YANK IT!

 

…OH FOR GOD’S SAKE!!!

 

…at Julian, who can’t hear me because he’s in Chicago. Anselmo, the cat, however, is flying in terror up the spiral staircase to the loft.

 

Julian doesn’t know why he does this completely stupid thing, but he does. He even gets a little defensive about it—it’s his studio and he can do what he wants.

 

I got part of the answer by watching an English guy on The Repair Shop talk about the difference between true craftsmen and all the rest of us. The craftsman will do things that make no difference and that nobody will see. They regard it as a guilty pleasure, at best, and an annoying quirk at worst.

 

It’s not either of those things.

 

It’s actually an intrinsic part of being a craftsman. Julian does his thing on the back of a canvas as the pope might take communion: it’s not a sip of wine but a celebration of life itself. He might contain himself if I walked into his studio, paid for whatever work he had done on my canvas, and then ripped off that canvas on the back (hey, I’m the customer!)

 

But he wouldn’t sleep that night.

 

Every craftsman has something stupid like that—so the theory goes. 

 

I do, as you will see if you remove the endpaper from the inside of the front and back covers. The whole point of endpapers is to hide the untidy edges of the corner—so why am I busy trimming them off, forming that beautiful pattern, which is no more than three sides of a square, but do I care?

 

No, Julian is in his studio cleaning up the back of his canvas and I am in the loft squaring up the back of my covers. 

 

And Jack is in heaven, having told me to sand the undersides of the floor boards.

 

Jack, my father.

 

It was the first time I realized both that he (and all parents) are crazy and that I didn’t have to do anything about it.

 

We were building a house, sometime in the 1970’s, and Jack had gotten some cheap lumber from the US government, which had painted it progressively-more-awful shades of green.

 

My job with the green paint was the same as Julian’s, with the varnish.

 

I had to do a certain number of floorboards every day after high school, which meant that after three hours of sanding I was deaf and numb.  Fortunately, I had an electric sander, and not a dulled scalpel. Unfortunately, I didn’t know about Julian yet, nor did I understand why we needed to sand the side of the floorboard that was going to face the dark crawl space under the house. 

 

Who was going to see it?

 

“WE will know,” said my father, in much the same tone of voice that Moses had used, reading the ten commandments to whoever-it-was wherever-it-was.

 

A Charlton Heston voice and impressive, certainly. I dismissed it as more of the parental nonsense I was drowning in at the time.

 

I find it comforting, nowadays. I need to live in a world where Julian is finishing off tidying the canvas at the back of an oil painting and I am squaring up the corners of my book. 

 

I need to live in a world where guys are doing the right thing, even when nobody will notice…

 

…and not doing the wrong thing because it gets attention.