Back from the Brink

What happened?

 

Duhhh…I was terrified, of course. Easy to see it now, and easy to acknowledge it at the time, but very difficult when you are actually in the midst of the terror.

 

Here are the facts as I dimly remember them from the last two weeks.

 

Almost certainly, it started with my visiting a friend in the program that I’m not in. The friend is a lawyer, his specialty is family law, this was a formal visit.

 

I’m getting divorced at 69—not on my bingo card.

 

Holy Week—which is big / not big in Puerto Rico. The words of Miss Jean Brodie—undoubtedly uttered through pursed lips—apply: “For those who like that sort of thing, THAT is the sort of thing they like….” So yes, the Catholics do their best here, though it’s small beer compared to the Philippines or Málaga. They get out the papier mache or Styrofoam cross, dig out the scourges they bought from Condom World all those years ago, and fashion a new crown with all the thorns pointing out (and their tips capped). They walk down the street. The rest of us go to the beach.

 

Except for me, of course, since if there’s a negative emotion around, I have to feel it. So I absorb the misery of those around me, and enjoy the company. But it is a hard week.

 

Made no easier by the news, on Easter Sunday, that the President of the United States…oh, let’s just show it.

 

  

 Oooops, that’s not the one.

 

That’s actually appropriate—sort of—if you don’t mind a blurring / erasure of the line between church and state. But the other (Trump being famously liberal in his posting) post is the one that got everyone’s attention.

 

This was followed, very predictably, by this on Tuesday:

 

 

Today, I’m marveling at the distance that Trump has created for himself. He announces the destruction of a civilization, denies any role in that destruction, expresses insincere sorrow that the world’s oldest civilization is going to be annihilated, puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of the Iranians, and then blesses them!

 

This post appeared on Tuesday at 8:06 AM. I read it several hours later and then sat on a park bench, smoking a cigar. 

Trump had gone on to say that 8 PM eastern time would be the hour. If a deal had not been secured, all bets were off, and destruction assured.

 

The Iranians had submitted a 10-point plan that looked very naturally towards Iranian interests. They wanted….oh, here it is again.

 

 

In fact, Trump announced jubilantly in a post that a two-week “truce” had been secured, that everybody was on board with the peace plan, but that the remaining “details” were yet to be worked out.

 

He caved, and in the worst possible way. There’s no disguising this—he chickened out (THANK GOD) and the world is safe.

 

This time….

 

For the moment…

 

Until the next time that the rat—errrr, president—is backed into a corner.

 

The president is completely bonkers. His lies were never convincing to anyone with half a brain—now, even a moron can see through them. His impulse control is shot. He clearly has no plan for ANYTHING—not the tariffs, not the immigration policy, not foreign policy. His emotions are wildly out of control. 

 

The enduring question is, “what happened?” The “truce” was declared a couple of hours before the 8 PM deadline. I, by this time, had decided to pass the time waiting for the end of the world by binding a book, rather than drinking (which I chose not to do, out of deference to those people in those meetings that they, at least, go to). By the time the book was bound, the news was creeping out that the US top command of the Armed Services may have—they were very cagey in describing this, and they should have been—not refused Trump’s orders, but rather adduced the various complications (military / political / legal / moral) that might ensue if the admittedly bold plans of the dear leader were carried out.

 

Did the last line of defense in our little democracy hold?

 

It was reassuring to be lied to in such a soothing way. Some four-star general got on CNN and assured the world that there was a sane mind left in Washington, and that the situation was normal. In fact, their commander-in-chief is bat-shit crazy, and the books that are going to be written about this fuck-up in American history is going to make the post-Nazi avalanche of memoirs / documentaries / books / movies / etc. look like a snow flurry on an otherwise crisp November day.

 

The president had his finger on the nuclear red button we all imagine is on the Resolute Desk, but then the aide came in with his diet-Coke, and he forgot all about it.

No worries, see?

 

To recap: 

1. Visit to lawyer to end my marriage

2.  2. Awaiting end of world

3.    3.  See below

 

Nobody in MAGA saw this as a Jesus-like figure. Nobody accepted the notion that Trump had posted it (and he admitted he had) thinking he was being portrayed as just a doctor, not the pathway to eternal salvation. Nobody was outraged by the attack on Pope Leo—God knows, I called His Holiness a whore a score of blog posts back, but Trump really went after him. He called him “weak on crime,” which seemed an odd thing to say. Does the pope also have an economic development plan, a scheme to fix our broken healthcare system, and a revision of the penal code?

 

True—the Catholics, who had favored Trump 60 / 40 over Harris in the 2024 election, now put him at a 48% approval rating. 

 

The cumulative effect is staggering. Not, of course, that it would affect many people, because people have tuned out the news. Worse, they have turned people who care deeply about the news into moral lepers, who insist on squandering their time in the filth and decay of current events when they could be looking higher!

 

Their thoughts could be elevated!

 

Their minds purified…

 

Their souls complete! 

 

But no, there was little Marc, sitting on a park bench smoking a cigar because why not? Trump might have blown Iran up, but every other Islamic country would have bombed our military bases in the region the next day. Terrorist attacks on American interests in London and Paris were inevitable, and here in the United States as well. 

 

Americans are not seeing this as the Iranians are seeing this: they know that they are in a Holy War. The crusades that are open wounds to this day in Iran and are just paragraphs in a History textbook for us—well, the term “Great Satan” to describe the US is not metaphorical. It is real, it is evil, and it is upon them. 

 

Of course, this is a Holy War for the evangelical Christians, who have been waiting for this for the last two thousand years, this moment when the struggle between good (us) and evil (them) will at last celebrate its glorious victory on the world stage. The curtain will come crashing down.

 

The rest of us are worrying about the price of gasoline.

 

The monumental disconnect is jarring.

 

I was terrified.

And I still am

 

 

Donald Trump, Christian

Yes, he is, and don’t you dare tell me he’s not.

 

I know you and I like you, you followers of Christ. You’re good people, as are some of the other Christians, the real Christians. The people who are NOT followers of Christ, but Christians. The people who have claimed not just Christ but the 2000 years of baggage that goes with it. The baggage, with its soaring cathedrals and thunderous music, is called Christianity, and we didn’t use to be ashamed of it.

 

Anyway, Trump calls himself a Christian, so he is, punto. This is called, if I dimly remember it, the grace of God—the unmerited love from God.

 

Unmerited being the operative word, for me. Am I worthy of entering heaven, assuming it exists? No, and neither is Trump. We all squeak in, somehow, those of us who call upon him (or Him, to keep King James happy) and are born again in his (His) name.

 

All right, let’s take the gloves off….  

 

I fucking hate you all. That thing hanging around your neck? It’s a crucifix to you, but a Swastika to me. And I think it’s time to grow up and get real.

 

Fuck the broadmindedness. Fuck being “tolerant” of other people’s religious beliefs. Fuck accepting that we can be “nice,” and that we have to respect the rights of others, when they’re wrong.

 

We don’t get it right. Norway and Argentina got it right, when they looked at the Jehovah’s Witnesses and said, “no, we’re not going to give you tax-exempt status if you practice shunning (Norway) or prevent people in critical need from receiving their own blood, for God’s sake (Argentina).”

 

Jehovah’s Witnesses can now exchange a civil greeting at any worship service that a “disfellowshipped” has the nerve to attend. No Saturday afternoon shopping sprees, of course, and forget Sunday dinner. But you can greet them, cordially and coolly, if they show up at the Church they’ve been kicked out of. And patients can now store their blood (assuming they can find a hospital that will do it) for future surgeries. Assuming you know when you are going to be hit by a bus, and act thoughtfully and prudently, you’ll be just fine.   

 

In the United States, our beloved Supreme Court has just told Colorado that it can’t rise to the level of Norway or Argentina. Colorado had tried to ban conversion therapy—which is the practice of putting kids with a serious problem (they’re gay and they’re terrified) into camps where they will be told that they’re sick or evil but God loves them anyway.

 

Why do I hate you, you Christians or followers of Christ?

 

You’re killing my people.

 

So no, I do not break bread with you.

 

I do not enter your homes.

 

I greet you politely and despise you privately. 

 

We are enemies, not brothers. I am honest enough to tell you that.

 

Are you honest?

 

You had every chance to call out Donald Trump for what he is, but you all sold out. For different reasons—you sincerely believed that God was using a broken vessel (Trump) to convey his salvation to the world. You had “reservations” but didn’t feel “comfortable” challenging him, or bucking your friends. You prayed, hoping for guidance from a higher power.

 

You are killing my people.

We are enemies.  

Afterword

If all goes well, you are reading this. And sorry, it’s not important who you are. Just that you’re reading this. It will mean that after surviving and writing through 2025, I managed to put together something like a book. It will mean that I did the last lap, and crossed the finish line, however bedraggled. It will mean that I failed, inevitably, because I didn’t do the craftsman-like job of stepping back, looking at the job at hand and what I had to work with, and setting down an organized plan.

 

Oh, and then sticking to it.

 

I had two big advantages—I’m a man with a past. Not the dimly lit halls with the roaming men clad only in bath towels, though that certainly is true.  But another past, certainly, since I really did have a grandmother, and she did remember—and write down—enough to hint at who we are, or might have been. I spent a lot of time in 2025 thinking about Henry Herrick—my ancestor who at 21 had to live in the hysteria of Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. Worse, he had to go out and round up some of the women whom I had read about in English class, when we had to read The Crucible (or whatever the title of the Arthur Miller play was….) Even more painful would have been to watch his “charges” (or rather victims) spending all their day with their legs  wrists  and head brutally chained together. The women he arrested had to be sitting, probably in filthy straw on the floor in a medieval torture device. Let’s steal from Getty images, and see if they sue me…

 

 

Henry’s perfect, a gift on a platter. Any writer could squeeze juice out of Henry for days. Do a little research—for God’s sake. Call up the Herrick Family Society—or whatever it is—that safeguards and preserves the treasured legacy of our family and our brave and unfettered service to our country! When witches prowled the foul streets of Salem, polluting innocents’ minds, causing fits of demonic possession, sickening animals and destroying crops, unleashing plagues and violent storms….

 

When the devil prowled Salem in that dark decade before the 18^th century…

 

When mothers had to stand by and watch their angelic children writhe in possession. The hate, the fury the demon unleashed in the reverent homes of the good people of Salem…

 

The dark forest-green of the forest…. 

 

Not the sanitized forest green of my book covers, but the forest green of evil Mother Nature herself. The forest green shelters the “Indians,” and Herrick knows perfectly well that they are not “native Americans” or “First Nation peoples” or Winnebago—Ho-Chunk. At the moment, without conversion, they are willing slaves of the devil. And if little David Thoreau is ever going to be able to hike out into the woods by that pond called Walden—well, sure, he could do it, in 1692. 

 

But he’d last about a week.

 

The forest is evil, the Indians are evil, and we are—coincidentally—evil.

 

Save for the grace of our almighty Lord. 

 

That’s why we gotta kill ‘em, see?

 

This was Christmas morning—this gift of an ancestor like this—but did little Marc bone up on the history, dig into his family ancestry, sort out properly who was who, and then engage in a calm exposition of the facts?

 

Did he deliver the goods for the reader?

 

I come from writers, but there is craft in writing—if it’s something other than a tweet. 

 

Have I practiced that craft?

 

(…funny how much work those three little dots—technically called ‘points of ellipsis’—have to do before that word ‘funny’ that appeared 18 words ago at the start of the sentence (though really this is a fragment or more likely a run-on sentence,) since I have to tell you that my shoelaces are untied. I know this because after I wrote “did he deliver the goods” and “have I practiced that craft,” there was a strange silence in this always quiet room, and I had to look downward…

 

…you know…

 

…at my shoes.

 

Funny about that.

 

Couldn’t look at my laptop in the eye, or the screen.

 

Of course I didn’t do the work of “developing” Henry Herrick.

 

And I screwed up on the second gift under the tree, this time from the crazy Pickards—my rich uncles from the other side of the family. Did I do my homework on the guy who had lost his son in the Civil War, gone into enemy territory to retrieve him, brought him home to his Quacker wife?

 

That Quacker wife that had every virtue, damn her, but softness. I have two pictures of her, and I can see why my grandmother loved her grandmother. But I am a man, not an American-Victorian child. I know things my grandmother did not.

 

God bless them—the Christians produced a miracle in the 19^th century by effortlessly building both the fierce abolitionists of the North and the savage slaveholders of the South with utterly glorious, crystalline, theological palaces. Palaces that could hold two utterly opposing points of view on the central moral issue of the 19^th century.

 

For the South, it was something now called the “theological defense of slavery,” and it did have logic on its side. Slavery is Biblical, and it’s no big deal. The idea of individual freedom for everybody was unthinkable in Biblical times. 

 

You know, like being gay in the 1950’s….

 

But Evangelical Christianity also brought us Wilberforce—the great British figure who spent 20 fighting to free the slaves who were harvesting the sugar on the next islands over. Every breath of his struggle was fueled by his Christian beliefs, and if he got the job done before anyone else (The British got rid of slavery in the 1840’s, the US in the 1860’s, and the Spanish still later), we have Jesus and his death on the cross to thank for it.

 

Anyway, any decent writer could have a field day with poor old Nicholas Coleman Pickard, but did I? Have I researched the Civil War, which is so monumental a deal that even Ken Burns couldn’t bear the idea of doing a documentary on it? True, it may be where angels fear to tread, but that’s my business, dammit. Find out what you could about the man, write a letter to the Historical Society of Lena, Illinois, who actually reached out to me.

 

A couple years ago…

 

Did I bother to follow up?

 

I’m an awful kid, the very worst of the worst, and it is Christmas morning and I have ruined the two glorious gifts of Henry Herrick and Nicholas Coleman Pickard. I have ruined them and abused them and neglected them and never once did I do the decent thing.

 

The reasonable thing.

 

Did I try to understand them? Get to know them? Learn at least something of their live and their times—so that I could deliver them unsullied to my harried readers.

 

Of course not. I made my great-great grandmother into a virago, and my great-great grandfather into a combination Hamlet / Sartre existential crisis-goer.

 

You know what a Hamlet / Sartre existential crisis-goer is, right?

 

I haven’t done my work, and the four-hundred bound-but uncovered manuscript that I am lugging around shows it. I have absolutely nothing to show for it except this, which I have been hauling around for days. This is the book that should have been a masterpiece—that couldn’t help but be a masterpiece. 

 

Didn’t do his job, Little Marc.

 

Well here it is, and I am going to tackle it logically.

 

Manfully…

 

With Christian fortitude and a strength ever-growing in the goodness and grace of our Lord….

Today is 13 March 2026.

 

I will read everything I wrote in the month of January, 2025, next Monday, 16 March 2026.

 

I will read everything I wrote in February, 2025, on Tuesday, 17 March 2026.

 

In 12 days, I’ll be done with the damn thing.

 

I’ll get back to you.  

 

 

 

   

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.