The Old Normal

Well, let’s just paste it in here, this little snippet from today’s New York Times:

 

 

Never underestimate how stupid—and I put myself in this class—the intelligent can be. Nor how loud I can snort.

 

Snorting, of course, because any fool could have seen, back in 2015 when this nightmare started, that Donald Trump…

 

Shall we put in New York Times language?

 

…that Donald Trump was not primarily concerned with those who had chosen him to be president.

 

…Or just plain-damn-fool terms?

 

…that Donald Trump never gave a shit about you and never will.

 

Lovely—and while we diddle with language up here in the previously United States of America, what’s going on in El Salvador? (Just a little fart from a tired brain, but shouldn’t I call El Salvador The Savior?)

 

I can tell you what’s going on in El Salvador, because I have only bound the 80-page report from the Human Rights Watch. I haven’t read it, but the custody of the eyes comes hard for me (even worse is custody of the ears, of course).

 

Just binding the thing told me that reading it—which I will do—was going to be tough. The beatings were constant. The food was scant and inedible. They all got severely beaten after Kristi Noem came down for her photo shoot and somebody shouted, “I’m an American CITIZEN!”

 

I will read this and tell you if any of the above is untrue. Just stand on one leg….

 

Human Rights Watch did what responsible organizations do: they plan, decide, organize, travel, investigate, discuss, and write drafts of the report until nobody has the strength to argue anymore. Then they publish a report that will be completely ignored until we’re done with Jeffrey Epstein.

 

Jeffrey Epstein, who wrote that he had met a lot of awful people in his life, but Trump was by far the worst.

 

I guessed that in whatever year I read the two books about Jeffrey Epstein. Was it five years ago? Seven? Was Trump still in power, or not?

 

I read the books, at any rate, and it immediately became clear: Epstein was a completely disgusting human being, and so was Trump. Did he spend hours with VICTIM (as it appears on the released emails) or Virginia Giuffre (as outed by the White House) alone at Epstein’s house? Did they do it (or have it done to her?).

 

Duh

 

I assumed the worst, because I’m a drunk and I have this belief: it’s always worse than you think. There are always bottles hidden around the house and bills that didn’t get paid because…

 

…you know, ya gotta drink, right?

 

So of course Trump was screwing every chance he could get, and Epstein was putting those chances right in the path, or bedroom, of Donald Trump. When I found out that a huge number of people were obsessed with pedophile rings and Epstein, I thought ‘good for them!’ When I heard that they thought God had put Donald Trump (an unlikely savior, or Salvador) in charge of rooting out this mess….

 

Well, it boggled the mind. 

 

It was a classic awful bind for a liberal. If I tell you that I care more about 250 years of democracy being torn asunder, senators in handcuffs in Federal buildings, armed troops slamming into cars and dragging citizen out of them and into (eventually) El Salvador, am I diminishing the pain of a high school (in some cases middle school) girl being raped by a wealthy older guy? 

 

One man’s death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. Whoever said it (Stalin, supposedly, I think) was just telling the truth. It’s easier for the mind to focus on Trump and VICTIM than it is to deal with…

 

…get ready…

 

“You Have Arrived in Hell” (title of the Human Rights Watch report)

 

Javier L.: “I feel I’ve lost everything—the time I didn’t spend with my daughter. We lived in fear, thinking every time they came into the module it was to beat us.” (page 79)

 

They also said the couldn’t sleep properly, because the lights were kept on permanently (page 75)

 

Miguel Z.:“The hardest part was not knowing what was going to happen, what my future would be, not having access to a lawyer… Not being able to speak with our families—without even knowing if they knew we were in El Salvador—we knew nothing. Not being able to talk to our loved ones or basically anyone—that was the worst.” (page 72)

 

Sounds like just the place for Jeffrey Epstein.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Weary Spirit

How the spirit wearies under this all!

 

I shouldn’t complain—I have made a deal with the entity that I call God. I will devote my time and energy to Donald Trump and the current mess for a limited time each day. I try to keep it to half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the evening. I write about it so that I can forget about it. I choose my battles carefully, and yesterday had to force myself out of Washington D.C. and into the Faure Requiem, from the BBC and the Royal Albert Hall.

 

I’m happy to say that England still keeps producing kids, seemingly unchanged for centuries. There they were, in the chamber version of the Faure, which featured boys singing the soprano parts and a kid who nailed the Pie Jesu. This child was unnervingly blond and innocent. This kid was a rock star.

 

So Faure was just what was needed, after I got YouTube to stop pulling me back into the affair of Epstein and Trump. New developments—read, another drip—have occurred. The Senate just released a trove of emails that the Epstein estate has very happily provided. The House has just confirmed the final vote needed to force the release of the Epstein files; the Trump administration is holding a meeting in the Situation Room to try to deal with the situation.

 

One email is particularly troublesome, since it came from Epstein, was addressed to Ghislaine Maxwell, and stated that Trump had spent hours alone in Epstein’s house with one of the most outspoken victims of the sex trafficking scandal, Virginia Giuffre. (The Epstein files redacted the name, but the British press and later the White House provided it, and so do I.)

 

Virginia Giuffre died of suicide six months ago. Her book, Nobody’s Girl, was recently released, and it was so awful that King Charles III had to strip his brother of his “styles, titles, and honors.” His brother went from prince to commoner, got booted out of the Royal Lodge in Windsor Castle and into Sandringham Estate. 

 

Is there an adult in the room?

 

Do I want there to be?

 

The adult, if there is one, would be smacking his lips. Everybody is perfectly in place. We have a demented psychopath in the White House. He did his job, which was to win, let Elon Musk in with the wrecking ball, decimate the entire Federal Government, and pave the way for troops in the streets and the suppression of protest / free speech.

 

Trump did his job.

 

Now he’s gotta go.

 

Fortunately for the moguls who are waiting to run this country, Trump mishandled the Epstein mess. Or perhaps he did the only thing he thought he could do, and that he ever does. He lied and distracted, and it certainly worked for everything else. Nobody woke up this morning thinking about the East Wing of the White House, which is now being used for the fill of a gulf course. Nobody (except me) woke up thinking about Cecot, which is the El Salvador prison that is holding a whole bunch of people from several countries (including possibly the United States) that we rounded up and sent on planes down to El Salvador. Nobody is wondering about the 300 people ICE picked up in Chicago that the judge said had to be released on bond.

 

Nope.

 

We’re wondering what Trump and Virginia were up to in the hours they spent alone together in Epstein’s house.

 

Chess?

 

The spirit wearies. The magnitude of the crimes of Donald J. Trump—and we worried about the pedophilia? It was cool to send Abrego García and the Venezuelan makeup artist Andry José Hernández and hundreds of other illegally detained immigrants to a place that the Human Rights Watch called “hell?” It was all right to put troops on the street to fire bullets at the foreign and domestic media, handcuff and detain US senators and mayors, take revenge on his enemies like Robert Mueller and James Comey?

 

The onslaught of assaults on the laws and the norms of our country has been horrendous. Everyone is overwhelmed, myself included. And I have, if I may say, the additional burden of ancestors who came to this country willingly (thank God), created the first democracy in modern times, adopted ideals that were in large part honorable. My people fought for this country and died for this country.

 

True, Henry Herrick was there, hanging his witches in Salem one year and apologizing the next. Nothing about Herrick is particularly instructive, morally speaking, since his defense (he had fallen victim to the Devil) was the same as the charge against the plaintiffs (they had fallen victim to the Devil). I might call it a bit self-serving; a more balanced viewer might detect blatant hypocrisy.

 

The devil had run through Salem Town in 1670. The devil may be running through Washington DC, and it may be that we / they have all fallen victim to it. At some point, we are all going to have to answer the question: what were we doing when the great American Experiment (Adventures in Democracy was the title of my High School history textbook) got blown away by a corrupt, stupid, demented and very cruel man?

 

What were we doing when Trump came down the escalator in 2015?

 

What have we been doing for the last decade?

 

How did we let this happen?

 

If there are any questions in any mind of any descendant I may have—those are the ones I flinch at being asked. Because I won’t get the easy way out, which is to pretend that basically Trump was fine the first term around, but nuts and demented the second time around. Shoot—if we’d only known.

 

We knew, and we voted.

 

I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to bind a copy of the report that the Human Rights Commission just issued about Cecot—that prison we sent our prisoners to and then forgot about.

 

I’ll put it up on the website I want to have, along with the other documents that may well disappear, if Trump’s extends his authoritarian reach. I’ll talk about it to a bunch of poets in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

 

And I’ll leave you with this:  

 

  

 

 

   

Not a Mission Statement

“Just write a mission statement,” said Paul. Or words to that effect—something that would clue in a visitor to what my (our) website is going to be about. Something that would explain, or maybe even convince, people that it’s better to buy a handmade book than a commercial book. 

 

I nodded my head sagely, as best I could, and didn’t tell him the truth: I never read mission statements, I remove mission statements from any document I have the pleasure of editing, and I will do anything short of lying in the bus lane to prevent you from writing a mission statement.

 

I hate mission statements.

 

I hate them because they suggest that I am acting clearly and purposefully. They suggest that I have a mission, and I should have, I agree. It would be great to have a mission, or to pretend that the mission that I acquired is somehow the real mission.

 

I stumbled into bookbinding just as I stumbled into writing. Officially, I am a bookbinder because of Tyler (my nephew), who got it into his head to get married. This meant that I had to buy a gift long either on expense or sentiment.

 

Surprise—I chose sentiment!

 

So I found myself the perfect thing: a family history my grandmother had written at the end of her life. It needed updating, surely, which meant that a respectable 40- page document became 120 pages. Then I had to hand it in (as it were) and somehow a three-ring binder didn’t feel appropriate. So I bought some William Morris paper and decided to make a book.

 

Anyone can make a book.

 

This story is true, and it’s true that anyone can make a book.

 

It’s true as well that making the book started me off on a long journey into bookbinding. I watched hours of bookbinding videos on YouTube every day for several years. I made journals every chance I got, and once considered bringing sections of paper to the beach and binding them there.

 

The book I made for Tyler (which I earnestly hope got tossed in the move from Brooklyn to New Jersey) was bound using the Japanese stab binding. This meant that I attacked the text block (the book without the covers) with an electric drill. I drilled four holes and laced strong thread through and between them.

 

It’s utterly simple and if you are Japanese (or even just coordinated), it can look beautiful. I glanced at the work I had done, and decided that the William Morris paper was definitely the way to go. Here’s what the book didn’t look like:

 

 

The wedding was a great success, the marriage has been even better. My part was done, and there was no reason ever to bind a book again. But each morning in that dark period when the Covid-19 pandemic was just ending and my mourning the suicide of a dear friend was still enduring, I got up and made a journal.

 

I didn’t understand what I was doing until I saw a Netflix series about the tsunami that hit Japan and knocked out the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Several men were “missing” for several weeks, and each day the widow (sorry for the spoiler) got up and made origami cranes. She acknowledged other people, she ate to keep alive, she rested when she could no longer go on.

 

I sat in my living room and watched her do it. I knew that the actor playing the widow was in real life a perfectly normal woman. It was only I (making terrible journals that slowly got better) and the crazy Japanese woman on the Netflix series who made cranes who were nuts. We had woken up each morning with an impossible life to get through for the day. She made cranes; I made journals.

 

Mission—stay alive (and sober, Marc?) for another day.

 

I couldn’t tell anyone what I was really doing, of course, which is why it helped that Tyler does exist and did get married. But when people drifted by and gaped at what I was doing in the Poet’s Passage, I told them the incidental truth, not the working truth.

 

I had stopped mourning my friend / son and had gone on to mourning my marriage and my country. I had to get Donald Trump out of my head and back where he belongs, which is NOT the oval office. The disease had shifted, the cure remained the same.

 

So my mission is to get through the day, honestly.

 

That said, I’m ready to talk about books.

 

See you tomorrow!     

 

 

 

  

Stumbling through the door again!

So much has happened that I can’t really write about it. I could, of course, if I had processed it all, but I couldn’t. I know that I went to a meeting last Friday, and an old timer asked me, inexplicably, how I was doing. I gave the usual formulaic answer, and she pressed me.

 

“I think I might be on the verge of a relapse,” I told her.

 

It was a strange thing to be saying, since I hadn’t been (consciously) thinking any such thing. But there it was, a true thing coming out of a false man.

 

I did the meeting and left to go to Marshalls—a store that sells for reduced prices things I absolutely don’t need, but can convince myself I do. So I bought two rolls of garish Christmas paper to cover notebooks (even garish people need notebooks, after all) and went home to ponder it all.

 

Jeanne called.

 

She wanted to know what she had done, since I wasn’t answering my phone much and was pleading being in the wrong place at the wrong time when I did pick up. So I told her that I had just been to a meeting and just declared my impending lapse in sobriety.

 

So we talked about that, and then agreed on next steps. The obvious one was to call my shrink, to see if the antidepressants that I take when times are good will keep working (at a higher dose) when times are rough.

 

Then it was time to go to the Poet’s Passage, where I thought it might be an idea to clue Lady in about my possible future slip.

 

“Fight it,” she said.

 

There was craziness inside and outside of my head. The craziness on the streets came from ICE, which crashed a car driven by an American citizen. The agents dragged her out of the car, handcuffed her, and then held her for several hours before releasing her. The video is below—if no one has bothered to take it down.

 

It was jarring to realize that even now, I don’t have much control. I go to meetings every day; I pray as much as my knees allow; I peer at a picture taken of myself on the day I went into rehab for the (hopefully) last time. I am the model alcoholic, in some senses, but really I’m a guy who got lucky by just skating by. Other people work a lot harder than I do; they suffer relapses that I am spared.

 

Has anybody ever written about what it's like to live with alcoholism? We do the confessional / coming-to-Jesus memoirs really well, but no one had ever written a book that would tell me that, eight years after my last drink, I would find myself in Costco, alone in the vast wine section. I had no desire to drink, and no idea why I was there; nor could I say why it felt so good, oddly, to be surrounded by a poison that nearly killed me. But I was there, and I was able to get myself out of…there. 

 

Which is the story of my sobriety.

 

So I haven’t relapsed, though I have told you the story that I heard in my meeting this morning. Because it wasn’t me in the wine section, it was actually Brad, a guy in my group. He came in a year ago to his first AA meeting, and got around to tell us the story of how he got to us only today.

 

He was suicidal, his wife was out of town, but he got to a phone (somehow) and got to an English speaker (after four tries). So Brad ended up on our doorstep on the day Trump ended up winning his way back to the White House. Since no one could talk about politics, we ended up welcoming Brad into his new world instead. He’s still here, and he’s the guy who got stuck in Costco, not me.

 

A distinction without a difference. Today was both an anniversary for Brad and a new day for another guy, who was coming into the rooms for the first time. Things are turning, turning, until they come round just right, I think, though it may be only because the Democrats have swept every race they could enter last night. But anyway, Brad got through the door, the new guy got through the door, and there’s even a chance that the country will squeak by and get through the door as well.

 

Some of us will find ourselves standing blankly in the wine section of Costco, of course. There are a lot of doors, as any drunk can tell you, and not all of them lead to rooms that have the exit plainly marked. 

 

But there is a way out, even if I don’t know it, or if I can’t see it. I ended up in the rooms—Brad did as well. He got back to the rooms today after visiting the war zone in Costco yesterday.

 

He got out safe.

 

We can, too.