Well, David French is worried about the state of American Christianity, but should I be? I’m not a Christian, and even though I know some very good Christians, I dislike the church. I am not welcome in many Christian churches, and the feeling has become mutual.
French, who’s a columnist in The New York Times, is worried because a bunch of aimless, misdirected young men have found a convenient way to express their hate through religion. These are the people who celebrated the death of reproductive freedom a couple of years ago by shouting, “Your body, my choice.”
So the young conservative Christians are filling up 2900 pages (that have been released) of Telegram chats about venerating Hitler, sending liberals to death camps, and raping women on their way home. JD Vance is on the situation, fortunately, and tells us it’s nothing to worry about.
“I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence,” he wrote, in a post a couple of days ago.
It’s a gauntlet, but am I going to pick it up?
I could, and have in the past. I struggle with bitterness, which isn’t attractive at any age, let alone old age. I suffer, too, from the absolute conviction that I’m right (fortunately, I am!), and I tell myself that subscribing to the theory of intolerance is a dangerous first step on a very slippery slope.
The theory of intolerance (if I get it right) is that we can, we must, and we get to be tolerant to absolutely everybody in the world…
…except…
…intolerant people.
Intolerant people? Like, the people who disagree with me?
Or is it that we really shouldn’t be giving coffee and donuts to Nazis?
I’m fighting with myself, even now, to remain dispassionate. Actually, I’m struggling to be humane, since I am human instead and feeling exactly about them as they are feeling about me.
Let’s hate each other.
Let’s get it over with. I will burn down your churches and you will put me in the cattle cars.
Let the best man win.
Let nobody win.
What!?
Where did that come from? True, I guess, that in every system besides capitalism, nobody wins if somebody loses (well, there’s also evolution, and a few other things, but you get my point.) Anyway, at some point I will not have to walk past your churches and you will not have to listen to me. We can drop the polite smiles and the clutched pearls and reach for the AK-47’s, or whatever they are.
We can live in armed camps, and we’ll all be happy. I hate you—you hate me. It’s a trade-off we can live with. Actually, we’ll all benefit in the end. My thoughts are poison to you, as yours are to me.
Unfortunately, we have to share the same land, and that’s a shame, because I really love that land. The walk down the road from my mother’s house in rural Wisconsin is one I haven’t taken in a decade and a half, and will never take again.
I can’t go back there.
You guys won.
It’s in me, of course, since I walk that road with everything except my feet quite a lot. I remember the walnut tree that killed the drunk driver, as he careened down Wisconsin’s second biggest hill. I remember my mother’s neighbor, a farmer, telling me that a walnut tree could take out a full acre of usable land, it sucks up so much water. I remember the white frame house that was so well nestled next to the verdant hill that it looked like an Andrew Wyeth painting.
Into my heart an air that chills,
From yon, far country blows
What are those blue-remembered hills?
What farms, what spires are those?
Sorry—poetry.
Bad habit.
So I’ll burn your churches and you’ll put me in the cattle car. The train will take me past my blue-remembered hills and past your burning church, and that will be enough. The orange flames leaping into the blue sky, the acrid smoke choking our lungs—we’ll feel the beauty of destruction.
Well, I guess that’s one way of looking at it. The power in question is the United States government, currently run by a madman who has installed TV hosts to “run” little departments like War, Health, Economic Affairs. The TV hosts look good but are a bit lacking in the policy department. That’s not a problem, because policy is no concern of the guy they answer to. Retribution, yes. Revenge? Of course! Policy can be achieved—or not—on the fly.
I went to the poetry slam and told the story of meeting Rabbi Swarsensky as a young man. I posed the question that we all grapple with, at some point in our lives: what would I have done or said in Nazi Germany? Then I read the letter to John Roberts, retrieved my phone from Nels (who was recording me), and went home to Espresso Chip ice cream and bed.
It was no big deal, in short, and there are times I wonder if that hasn’t been the story of my life. It took me forty years (and a YouTube video) for me to get this, if indeed I have. But I remember watching an interview with Martha Argerich, when someone asked if she hated practicing.
Argerich considered the question, before responding, “No, but I hate the idea of practicing.”
Exactly—and I have spent my entire life thinking about what I had to do, thinking about how much I dreaded the idea of doing it, and inventing really good justifications for why I really, really cannot and should not do whatever it is. Then I do it, always at the last minute and usually badly, and I discover once again what every adult except for me knows.
My mother certainly knew it: “You’ll feel better once it’s over,” was a constant refrain in the house.
No matter how many times I heard it, and no matter how consistently I had proven it to be true, it never helped. In the end, I had to be mechanistic about the whole thing: I will never do what others do easily. I will procrastinate, justify, involve myself in other worthy projects, learn the use of the iota subscript in Ancient Greek. At the last minute I will fly into action, and it will get done. Barely and badly, but done.
“If you do your studying every night after class,” my mother once told me, “you really won’t have to study much for the final exam.”
Well, yeah!
Other people are smarter than me about the things that matter. It took me years to figure out what I had to do in the morning, which is essentially to get through it. And so I am Pavlov’s favorite dog—my phone wakes me up at 6:30, and then it’s the same routine, day after day. Anselmo comes first—food and litter box. Bathroom is second. Prayer comes third, as the coffee is brewing. Then I lie down on the sofa at 6:43 or 6:44 and gather wool until the alarm clock goes off again at 7:05.
I get up and I go to the club, and the meeting that I would go to, if I were anonymous and went (or not) to meetings.
I don’t think about it at all, of course, because what sense would that make? And yesterday, at last, I did the same thing about going to the poetry slam. Things conspired against me, of course—the printer that is always reliable decided to hang out with the printer that’s a diva.
Fine—I’ll write the damn letter out in long-hand.
There were six people in the Passage when I started to speak.
No problem—the video can still go viral.
Preaching to the choir, are we, little Marc?
Yup—and if they sing in tune, it’ll have been worth it.
So I did it, and learned the flip side of being an automaton.
Four days ago, it seemed like a good idea to think about Martin Luther, and what he might have meant by that phrase, “Sin Boldly.” Four days ago, I had pulled out the telescope far enough so that I could look at our troubled world dispassionately, from a very great distance. Four days ago, an exploration into the thinking of Martin Luther did not seem like an indulgence.
It seemed normal.
I’m getting through this period of Trump’s eternal presence by pulling that telescope out. I bind books because I need to get out of my mind and into my fingers. I bind books because other guys have done it, in worse situations than I am in. I tell myself that the barbarians are tearing down the walls of the monastery, but that is not my affair. I am in the scriptorium and they are outside, at least for the present.
In fact, most monks working at their desks were dealing with a lot more than I have to deal with, and they probably did it with more grace and humility than I can muster. For no reason at all, I’m trying to remember if it was Luther who had to be “kidnapped” by the duke or the elector or whatever feudal overlord ruled his part of Germany. Luther had pissed off the wrong people, and they were on the roads, disguised as footpads or whatever. The riches they wanted to steal (or at least prevent Luther from enjoying and spreading about) were solely intellectual. So the burgermeeister, or whoever-he-was, kidnapped Luther, shut him up in a room in his castle, and gave him quill and parchment.
As I remember it, Luther used the enforced captivity (or hospitality) to translate the Bible from Latin or Greek into German. To us, that seems like an interesting intellectual exercise. But to Luther, it was putting his soul to the test. A hailstorm hurled ice balls onto the metal roof of the room where Luther was working. He thought the devil was throwing rocks at him, for his grievous sins.
It's a difficult story, for me, at least. I want to believe what they never told me in Midvale Elementary School, since the most important things always go unsaid. Men like Luther were made of finer stuff than the rest of us. They got up, thought deep thoughts, wrote them down, and then retired to bed, assured that posterity would revere them as sages. They were not anxious, violent men who feared the dark and the devil.
I don’t have any connection to Luther, beyond having spent lots of time in the basements of plain-timbered Lutheran churches in my childhood. They all smell the same, by the way, and that was as endlessly reassuring as the inevitability of the service taking place above me. These were not places that could have spawned from a brilliant, terrified, terrible madman.
Which Luther probably was.
So—no connection to Luther, and the stones-throwing devil that tormented him.
But I do have a connection to a guy named Henry Herrick, who was a magistrate and a juror in the trial of Rebecca Nurse in Salem, 1692. The devil, for Herrick, was not throwing stones at his roof but stalking the pious homes of Colonial (or rather Pilgrim) Massachusetts. Herrick sent Nurse to her death, for being afflicted with (or perhaps cozening to) the devil. He was slightly more lenient to himself and his fellow jurors, when he confessed that he had himself been as afflicted by the devil as had been Rebecca Nurse. The same devil that had possessed Nurse so badly had also caused him to fall into the sin of believing that the devil…
…had possessed Nurse.
You will say that’s crazy, and I’ll agree. In fact, that’s the whole point. I am crazy, since I believed both that the men and women who had gone thinking and writing before me were doing it far better than I or we ever could, AND that human history was a rosy ascent into rationality and clear-thinking.
Luther was not a terrified man committing a disgusting sin. Henry Herrick could not have condemned Nurse (as well, apparently, as Sarah Good) to her death for being ensnared by the devil, and then excused himself for…being ensnared by the devil.
They were giants in the earth, who by definition had dealt better with worse shit than I would ever have to cope with. Herrick gets a pass in my mind because he was living in the 17th century, and somehow that gives him a patina of respectability and probity. But he was also 21 years old at the time of his deposition, and even in a society that had no real adolescence and in which adulthood started very early, that’s still young. I’m 68, and shudder at what I might have done in Herrick’s situation at Herrick’s age.
I thought of history, if I thought of it at all, as something that Luther and Henry Herrick had done and taken care of. I was born 11 years after World War II, and I grew up thinking that we had taken on fascism and won. The horrors of anti-Semitism would never be repeated. I would not see white men carrying torches through the streets of Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us.” All of that was over, having been ended by the giants in the earth.
I didn’t think of history as a burden, something that I would have to get up every morning and do something about. I would skate by, taking the bus to work every morning, and coming home to comfort and ease at the end of the day.
History was over—obviously, since it was in the past, and I was living in the untroubled (might I suggest complacent?) present. History was violent and brutal, as well as terminally unforgiving, but it was over. That was the point. I was not supposed to have to get up each morning, and make history (in whatever tiny way it was my lot to endure). I was never going to be the bystander standing next to Rabbi Swarsensky, watching with quiet satisfaction as the synagogue burned down.
Indeed, Swarsensky and Herrick and Luther were all safely in the past, making no claims on me. I could go tonight to a poetry slam two blocks from my house and bind Thomas Mann, whom I’m currently interested in. I wouldn’t have to ask myself if I had the moral courage at least to offer comfort to the rabbi as we watched his synagogue burn down. I wouldn’t have to wonder if I, at age 21 in Salem in 1692, would be any less confused and hypocritical about my affairs with the devil. And nothing I did would ever amount to much—certainly nothing that would warrant the devil throwing stones at the roof of the room in which I had had to be kidnapped.
I could write a scathing letter to a judge—a guy named John Roberts, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, and let it lie in obscurity in a blog that I write. I wouldn’t have to read it, aloud, and in front of a camera. I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about wondering what list of “domestic terrorists” I might find myself on, or where on that list I might fall.
History was over, so I was Scot-free. I could look with detachment on my ancestors and owed no explanation to my descendants.
We were done with that, and we would never have to answer that hypothetical and kind of stupid rhetorical question—what would I have done, as a decent German living in the 1930’s? Would I have spoken out?
We weren’t done with that—not by a long shot. So now, on Tuesday, October 14, 2025, I have to answer the question.
Will I speak out?
If I say yes, then I’ll walk to the poetry slam and read the letter to Roberts. It won’t matter that raising my voice won’t make a difference, that the venue is too small and utterly insignificant, that poetry slams rarely turn violent.
Well, there’s a lot of meat on the bones of this Friday morning, so let’s start gnashing.
We have to worry, first of all, about the health of Donald J. Trump. Anything impeding his work of making America great again—courts, reason, decency, health—is to be dreaded. Thus, the news that he has had to make TWO annual trips to the doctor in this year is worrisome.
The question, of course, is whether today is the day that Trump gets 25thed. Forgive me for making that verb up, but it came to me when I realized—oh, a year ago, maybe—the plan all along.
Trump 2.0 is not Trump 1.0. Even the body is not the same—more hunched, slower, less energy, falling asleep in court, shitting in his pants. (Figuratively and now literally). Mentally, of course, he’s gone, and we all know it. All of the signs of dementia are there, in brightly lit neon against a murderous black sky. He’s swearing in public now, he’s getting up on the roof of the White House to supervise little projects that should have stayed in his mind, and when asked yesterday about Ghislaine Maxwell, he said, apparently and oddly truthfully, “I haven’t heard that name for a long time.”
Even worse, there’s the Wall Street Journal saying that the Truth Social post that he published publicly was in fact meant to be a private message to Pam Bondi. (Just to walk my trivial mind, doesn’t it seem like having an Attorney General named “Pam” is a terrible idea? Couldn’t she be “Rebecca,” or “Esther?”)
Well, a good blogger would post a picture of the tweet, and that’s what I’m gonna do.
This is not the tweet that any competent lawyer (i.e., not Pam and not Lindsey) would suggest making. In fact, a text message is still admissible in court as a legal document, so even as a direct message to Pam, this is pretty bad. Fortunately for Trump, we were all so conditioned to illegality that it barely raised eye brows (or blood pressure) among even the most sensitive.
Your call—did he send it on purpose or by mistake?
My call—either way, it’s awful.
So Trump is off today to the doctor, and we’ll see if today is the day the grand plan gets revealed. Today might be the day, in fact, that the oligarchs show their hand, and how happy you’ll be, having heard all about it here.
Trump was never the candidate of Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or any of the other billionaires that needed the pesky Federal government to stop interfering with their careful though nefarious plans. No, Trump was an ignorant, arrogant boor who could play to the grievances of a spoiled American electorate.
Trump had to keep running because he had a grievance and because he’d have been in jail had he not.
Trump was losing his grip, and we all could see that.
Trump was, then, the perfect guy for the billionaires. He could get elected, he could ruin the country, he could destroy the economy, he could cause mayhem. It was impossible for him NOT to do all that.
The news that he was fucking nutso would come out when it came out. True—that little bit about the Haitians eating dogs and cats in Columbus (or wherever it was) was a bit revealing. But we all hated Kamala because she was right and a woman, so we gave it a pass. The rich guys sighed a sigh of relief, and Trump soared to victory.
So Thiel and Musk got right behind Trump, dug into their pockets, and got Trump elected. Now, of course, the trick is to get rid of him. So we’ll probably have to do the drip / drip until it’s too late, and Trump starts pulling his pants down and dropping his Pampers on the Resolute desk.
Here’s comes the 25th amendment to the constitution of the United States, which can occasionally be handy. We can 25th Trump and install JD Vance, who has done nothing since scrambling out of Appalachia and then out of Harvard but work for a guy called Peter Thiel. He’s rich, he’s gay—and that can be great, if you’re not a crazy conservative or rather a crazy reactionary.
But in the case of Thiel, gay and rich may not be our best option.
So is today the day that the doctors at last tell us the truth, which we will bear with a heavy heart.
A great man, Trump is no longer with us.
They’re not doing this because of me—I’m delusional, but not to that point. But they know perfectly that the majority of the American public, who are slowly coming around to little Marc’s point of view, will gladly buy in.
The problem isn’t that he is a fascist, and we all voted for him and made him rich.
Nah, he’s sick!
Well, we’re all off the hook, aren’t we?
Not if I’m writing about it.
So today is the day when all of that could be coming down, and I really wanted to write about John Roberts, who runs this thing called the Supreme Court, which at one point we assumed would safeguard our democracy. We expect people to do things for us, entitled as we are.
Anyway, Roberts is pettifogging away this Friday morning, saying that the Trump administration is going a bit far, really a bit far, in impeaching judges with legally sound but politically inconvenient rulings. If Roberts isn’t pettifogging (a word he famously used in the first Trump impeachment, since he blew off the second), that is. If Roberts isn’t pettifogging, he’s tsk-tsking. But he doesn’t really have much leg to stand on, at least if he had read the letter that I mailed to him a month or so after the inauguration.
That letter, which appears (drumroll) for the first time here in this blog (exclamation marks), reads:
19 March 2025
Dear Justice Roberts,
I never thought I would write this letter, nor do I imagine that you will read it. For most of my adult life, I venerated the Supreme Court. I trusted you to be honest and fair. I accepted that you could be wrong (in my view), but never would have believed that you were anything less than intelligent, educated women and men working hard to preserve, if not improve, our democracy.
I no longer feel that.
The Supreme Court has done everything in its power to enable a wanna-be dictator. The decision to give Trump (limited) immunity, the endless delays in hearing the cases, the refusal to act when it was vital to do so—it couldn’t be clearer.
You administered an oath of office to a man whom you knew had no intention of honoring that office. You swore in a liar, and you knew it. You knew perfectly well that Trump had pledged to be a dictator “on the first day,” and you knew exactly what that meant.
I watched the inaugural because I wanted to see you administer that oath. That oath meant nothing to Trump, of course—it was only a formality to him, a stupid step before taking office (he didn’t, you remember, bother to put his hand on the Bible). But the oath meant something to me, and still does. I prepared immigrants for many years to apply for citizenship, and each time came away more impressed by the wisdom of our founders. No man is (or was) above the law.
The Supreme Court enabled Donald Trump. And your name, Judge, will forever be linked to Donald Trump. The first line of your obituary will include the name of Donald Trump.
We are now in a constitutional crisis. Trump knowingly violated an order by a federal judge, knowing perfectly well that he could get away with it. You gave away the power of the judiciary, and we are now dangerously close, if indeed not already into, a dictatorship.
The only question that remains is whether you wanted it or not.
Your name will live on in history, Judge. When the question is asked who sold the country out, your name will be the first on many lips. You did something worse than steal my country, Judge.
You robbed me of my trust and faith in my countrymen.
Marc Newhouse
Oh, how he must have winced when he got that letter! The constitutional crisis referred to in the letter, by the way, no longer lingers in the mind. There have been so many, of late, and so very unpleasant. I think it was when the government admitted that they knew the plane full of illegally detained immigrants would be illegally flown to El Salvador, a country which had no legal right to accept them or house them. It was the plane Abrego García was on, or one of them.
What I wanted to do, on this Friday morning, was not to worry about the billionaires 25thing the president, or the Chief Justice pettifogging about his judicial system. I wanted to tell you about Martin Luther and his quote, “Sin Boldly.” Actually, I wanted to write about it, since I don’t understand it, and what did the dude mean, anyway? I’ve done it, for sure, but what is it?
Writing about it helps to deepen my level of misunderstanding.
I know that you’ve seen it, for a very simple reason: they made me—just like you—a member of the human race, which really isn’t a good idea. What I should have been is Anselmo, if you want to know the truth. Here he is, having found a perfectly good use for the Costco bag that I had to buy for my cross addiction.
Shit—am I oversharing?
Let’s get back to Anselmo and that fuck-up that has ruined my life, if you want to know the truth. Whoever it was who handed out the sex assignments did just great—I’m gay, of course, but otherwise perfectly happy being a man. And even though I revere the courage of trans people, I’m happy to report that I will stay right here in the weaker sex, thanks. Being a woman takes serious balls, as we sort of say down here in Puerto Rico (una mujer con cojones, unless I’m making this up, as I probably am.)
So they didn’t do badly by me, and if I were a member of that organization mentioned in that thing that you and I both saw because somebody made the madcap decision to turn us into a human (Marc, who works his fingers to the bone making notebooks for YOU, and ‘tis sharper than a serpent’s tooth to have a thankless cat!) instead of a cat (Anselmo, and see last parenthesis) …
…well, I’d be damn grateful. In fact, I’d be ashamed of myself.
Anyway, let’s get both photos out of the way, before I tell you all about the organization that I’m not a part of.
Anselmo has it made, of course, or so I think. Rather, so I WOULD think if I were a member of that organization mentioned above. I am not, absolutely not, a member of AA because by definition I can’t be. Some things have their codes embedded, as it were, in their names: you can’t ask if a woman is a lady because…well, you’d never ask that question of a real lady. (This is part of my Victorian upbringing, about which later). You can’t know if you’re an alcoholic for the same reason: by definition a person suffering a disease of denial (drugs / booze / sex / being right / needing to tell you about it / but that’s another story) cannot diagnose him or herself. And I would never tell you that I’m in AA because that second “A” five words ago? It stands for Anonymous.
Of course I don’t go to AA.
The idea is preposterous.
It would be a good idea, I think we can all agree, if I did go to AA, because that would sure be the place for me, if you had seen me, that last weekend before I went into detox for the most recent (not the last, which would be very clear to me, were I a member of the program) time. I was a fucking mess—the booze had stopped working despite drinking as hard as I could. The deal I thought I made with the demon rum was off—in the past I had drunk sullenly to a state of stupor and passed out. That weekend I couldn’t pass out because I couldn’t get to “stupor”, which was followed by “coming to,” during which time I had to pretend that whatever I was doing in “coming to” was in fact “real life.” I had to pretend this because it was critically important to pretend that I was not in deep trouble—an alcoholic, in fact. I knew—at some level, of course—that I was fooling nobody but myself. The cashier at SuperMax asked me, a month or two after I stopped drinking, “Dewar’s?”
An organized, thoughtful alcoholic would spread the booze purchases across several stores, if only not to put the cashiers in the uncomfortable position of being accomplices.
So if you had asked that particular cashier whether the tall gringo sometimes seen carrying his cello on his back needed to go into Alcoholics Anonymous…well, she’d probably just have looked at you.
Yeah, dude, and he could get a haircut once in a while and start shaving before he puts the mug out into the shared public spaces—that’s what she’d tell you.
So I should have gone to AA, but I didn’t. I know why, of course, because I know a lot of people in AA, and they tell me stuff that’s pretty amazing. They sit in the rooms, as they say, and they tell the shit about themselves that they would never tell anybody else except another alcoholic. They do this because they can’t forget—number one. The problem with the program is that it works, but for it to keep working, you have to keep working the program. If this makes sense to you, congratulations. You are not an alcoholic.
I am an alcoholic, though I don’t go to AA (even though I should) because alcoholics are grandiose and delusional. That’s what they tell me, those guys who do go to Alcoholics Anonymous. By definition, I can’t diagnose myself as having a disease of denial (though haven’t I? shit…) and I also can’t plea delusional, since how can I know what’s real or not, if I’m delusional.
Anyway, the point, which I really want to grind home…
…the point, as I was saying…
…the point seems to be, if the booze has cleared my brain enough in the eight years that I haven’t been going to AA…
…oh yes, I get my AA through osmosis, since I happen to be an alcoholic too stupid or grandiose or delusional to go to a meeting, which I would never do, but which even if I did I would never tell you about. Because I believe what they tell me, about keeping my side of the street clean, and minding my own damn business, which is called “not taking someone’s inventory.” Which means that I can see, as I very often used to do, one of San Juan’s most esteemed artists stumbling home every morning at six AM, and I don’t call him a drunk. He was, of course, but who am I to talk?
Anyway, the guys tell me a lot about those meetings because I have figured out a really, really great solution to the problem of what to do, as an alcoholic, with your morning, since I haven’t been reaching down through the slats of my bed to that nether world where the “scotch” in the green plastic bottle lives and rules.
In Norse mythology, the troll—evil creature—lives under the bridge, and steals souls from those who pass above. (Little shout-out to Schubert, and the liedderErklönig, which carries on this legend; also a shout out to Matthias Goerne, whom you can see below). The Dewars becomes, in the life of an alcoholic, not even marginally high-class: Dewars can pretend to be stuff that drinkers who are not drunks would drink, and keep with the crystal glasses in the Peruvian liquor cabinet, which he opens on occasion. That’s why the company keeps it running at 25 bucks a bottle, or so. They make a nice profit and those alcoholics who don’t go to AA (though they should, if I were to take their inventory, which of course I am not) can point out, with impeccable logic, that drunks get their booze out of green plastic bottles.
I digress, though it’s also quite possible that the grandiosity has made me need to explain all this to you, even though it should be perfectly clear to you…
Anyway, the point is that I couldn’t go to AA, for the reasons wearily explained above, but I did have to do something, if only to keep the cashiers at SuperMax happy. I had to get up, in fact, and get out of the house, because even though the Erlkönig no longer lurked beneath my mattress in the green plastic bottle…
…well, he might come back, if I don’t do something about it.
Working that program that you gotta keep working, you know…
So I have to get out of the house and I have to go somewhere and I have to take care of the first order of business, which in my case is to get somehow into tomorrow without a hangover. Any person not in denial can see that.
Even I, a drunk.
It’s more than that.
If I get out of the house, I will force myself to say, in my best gringo Spanish (or español, since I am giving it my all for Bunny!), Buenos días!
Oh, let’s piss them off. I say…
…¡Buenos Días!
If you say it in a Newhouse voice, it will command respect and reply from the five strangers who are trying to get through their morning and then through their day. They won’t want to be bothered, of course, but they’ll hear the inverted exclamation marks the gringo is trying to say, and they’ll grin. As I have grinned, since it’s pretty silly, a gringo speaking español (note that tilda above the “n”—ah, that’ll really drive the conservatives crazy!)
Anyway, by the time I get to the bus station, I will have gotten out of the house (no.1) and gotten away from the Erlkönig that will creep under my bed if I don’t leave the house in the morning and do something about him (no.2). I will have gotten five smiles from five strangers (no. 3). I will have greeted my bus driver, since I am an alcoholic who does not go to AA but who knows that he, like every other entitled drunk, is the piece of shit at the center of the universe. So my bus driver very naturally acknowledges that I am, in fact, the center of the universe. That’s why he stops right in front of where I am going, even though my destination (as the airlines say) is smack in between bus stops, and it’s strictly prohibited to make special stops for people who are just passengers, not alcoholics, with that lingering smell of shit.
My bus driver stops in front of my club, which is called Caribbean Twelve Steps, and which I might photograph since it is not anonymous, as some of the recovery groups that work in the space (work, not meet) are. My club is very nice, since it was made for me, of course.
And I dig seeing those alcoholics, who are usually out there smoking by the front door, since that’s what they do. I like these guys, even the ones who piss me off, or would if I went to their meetings.
I don’t, in case you need me on page six of this damn post to tell you.
Anyway, I am totally down with their laughing at me alighting from my conveyance (think Cinderella and that golden slipper!) since I have just amused five Puerto Ricans by pretending to speak Spanish (we’ll drop the español shit). I might as well let the alcoholics—God bless them—laugh at me for having trained my bus driver (one has to think of the little people who do so much for us entitled folk) to deposit me just where my delicate little feet want to go.
They laugh at me, and one of the drunks even tried to speak to the driver in his bad Spanish to commend him for shepherding his lost sheep over the bridge where Erklönig lives in the green plastic bottle pretending to be scotch.
We can all see this, of course.
So all of that business with the bus driver and the alcoholics hanging out smoking their cigarettes and the grace with which the bus driver has accommodated my entitlement and fended off the Erlkönig in the GPB (green plastic bottle), amuses the little alcoholics, bless them.
It’s entirely coincidental that I am arriving just as they are going into their meeting.
They do, and then they come out and they tell me about it.
Because I have serious stuff to do, which is to write this blog, and to make sure that Anselmo retains his most-favored-species status since they made me into a human and him into a cat.
Which is the whole point of this post.
I’m human, which is why I’m not a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, though God knows I should be. I’m human, so I haven’t told you about the other voice from the void, which is what this post is titled, and which you might reasonably feel entitled to read about. I’m human, which is the reason I knew that you had jumped down and looked at the picture of Anselmo and the fake headline before you had trudged up and began reading the text.
I’m human, and also an alcoholic, though I have to get my recovery second-hand, as it were. You might say that I get my recovery from the alcoholics just the way I get their nicotine—secondhand.
I’m down with that.
And the alcoholics tell me that I have typed 2190 words spread out over seven pages.
Shit—2199!
And—bingo, that “and” put me over the 2200 mark, and even Anthony Trollope didn’t pull that off, with his measly 250 words for every 15 minutes he wrote. It’s now three hours since I started writing after the meeting I didn’t go to in this very nice club where I write this important stuff. Let’s see, three hours is twelve fifteen-minute segments, and twelve times 250 words is only…
Shit, 3000.
Well, I’m human, which means that I am made lesser than the Trollopes (Anthony’s mother was just as disciplined, and considerably more caustic). It doesn’t make me a bad person, to be human.
That makes sense, doesn’t it?
Guess I’ll have to wait until tomorrow, when there are some of the guys from the meeting out smoking their cigarettes.
I’ll get back to you on that.
(If you have to, Erklönig starts at 24:00 in the video, and I get it if you just want to hear that lied. But you'll probably circle back to listen to the whole thing, if you have a pulse...)
