Rainy days and Mondays

Monday, December 30, 2019

It’s a rainy day, and Monday, and the last Monday of the last month of the last year of the decade, a scary concept since I once thought making it merely to the year 2000 would be an accomplishment. Now, we are edging into the twenties, marking the centennial of those members of my family that predated my uncles and aunts, yet whom I managed to meet before they passed off this mortal coil.

This idea that we have transitioned into another decade scares me a little, and adds to the blue mood I feel with the cold rain pelting at my window.

The outside cat we call “Tiger Kitty Brother” came into the mudroom to get out of the rain and I sat up with him for a while, feeling chilly, but in that sense I used to get sitting on the front porch of the old house in Clifton when I was out of the rain, but still being touched by it.

We made our way to Asbury Park again this weekend, wasted a lot of time between dinner and when we actually were to see the band, and though the band was good, we were too tired to stay for more than one set – a certain sign of our getting old, as was having to listen to the kids around us – me wondering if I sounded as stupid at that age as they do. One woman and three guys behind us was particularly silly, the three guys all trying to get her, only have her take off with a fourth man.

I guess the three guys were good enough to buy her drinks, but not good enough to go home with.

On Saturday, we had breakfast at Franks, read the story posted about Springsteen, then took our stroll down the board walk, where a footrace has just concluded, before we made our way back to the car. We drove south along Ocean Avenue until it stopped near Belmar, and then drove home.

Everywhere were signs of the old days, changing, rust settling on things that had seemed fresher when I made my way through these streets many years ago. I kept thinking of my family, and how this had been such a big part of their lives, and the century in which they came south when it was still just a location for summer resorts, crabbing in the bays, swimming in the ocean, buying fruit from highway stands that have since ceased to exist.

They are all gone, the family, and I carry these memories around with me as I drive, and memories that aren’t even my memories of a time when things seem much more simple, and how we could still get lost on these highways (lacking GPS to steer us home) and how we really didn’t mind, as long as we came in out of the rain at the end.

 

Recovering from Christmas

December 26, 1980

The hard part is over: the expression and glitter of Christmas, the opening of presents and the mad dash from my mother at my uncle’s place at the seashore to the arms of my girlfriend a stone’s throw away from Giant’s Stadium.

I fell asleep in her arms last night and woke this morning on her parents’ couch.

I’m still unsure whether or not her parents objected; but the sticky part of the holiday is over and all that’s left is recovery.

The whole affair started two days ago with me visiting my girlfriend at her parents’ house, and now I am home again, alone, filling my cold-water flat with steam in order to get warm.

My girlfriend came down with tocolytics and wanted nothing more than to stay in bed, where I found her when I showed up and should have left her, but I didn’t, choosing to help her mother wrap presents while letting my girlfriend rest, and my making a mess of the whole things since I’m no better at wrapping gifts than romance, my girlfriend’s mother eyeing me with some distain while asking just when it was I had to be at work – suggesting maybe I should try and go early and leave her with the chore she knew how to do and clearly I did not, with me glancing out the window as the snow and telling her I wouldn’t be going.

Later, their relations arrived and I went up to hide in my girlfriend’s room, waking her briefly, before she faded back into blissful sleep, with me waiting for her to wake so we could both take the trip up to Towaco to Pauly’s girlfriend’s mother’s house for the first part of our annual Christmas Eve tradition, and then later to make the trip south to my mother’s in Toms River on Christmas Day.

Traveling in the snow scared me; traveling south to meet my mother scared my girlfriend.

Garrick saved me from the trip in the snow by picking me up at my girlfriend’s house, waiving back at her as she waved from her door up the long set of stairs from the street with me merely having to pay the price of listening to Pauly in the front seat predicting ill tidings for the upcoming year.

My girlfriend’s sickness allowed her to escape the trip south to see my mother, leaving me to make the trip there and back along, returning to her late Christmas Day exhausted, falling asleep in her arms and waking on the couch under the scrutiny of her parents.

With my girlfriend still not recovered, I wanted to stay with her today – but had already told Uncle Harry that I would drive up to Greenwood Lake to visit him, knowing that he was ill as well.

“Someone has to visit him,” I told his brother Ed down in Toms River, “and since I’m the closest geographically that someone has to be me.”

Harry like many in our family has been ill for a long time and Christmas time did little to help him mend.

Harry and Christmas were old drinking buddies and I over the years was the hapless bartender condemned to listen to their tales of woe.

My girlfriend’s illness robbed us of what may be our last and only Christmas together since this time next year she will likely be off in some remote place at graduate school.

The whole two days made me realize that we are constantly saying goodbye to each other, each time feeling as if it will be the last time, and that we might never see each other again.

Now, I sit in my own place on my own bed aching for warmth that may never come, from a stove that is not adequate to heat this sieve of an apartment, and from a love I know already is only temporary.

A Christmas Tradition

December 26, 1985

We celebrated a traditional Christmas – traditional for us, if not the world, just like in the old days, a fellow might say, me, Hank, Pauly and Garrick, all in the same place at the same time, singing old dogs, drinking until we were drunk, smoking dope the way we did each Christmas Eve as long as we could remember, feeling the age old pain lonely men feel this time of year.

Only Hank seemed reasonably content, having met a new romantic interest last fall. The other three of the Four Musketeers ached with the same old pangs that drew us together in the past, bringing us to Frank and Dawn again for our reunion.

Although the location changed over the last decade, the mood never did, nor the atmosphere – and even when one or more could not stay the whole night, we all made our appearance if only as a gesture of the past, to maintain a tradition we are reluctant to surrender for fear we might not have it when we need it again in the future – when suddenly four years ago, it stopped.

One year, I recall, coming through a thick fog. One year I even deserted my girlfriend to be with this motley crew, deserting them a week later on New Years to be with her.

One year I met Frank’s mother, an elderly woman who startled the crap out of me when passing the joint, she asked for a hit.

This year felt as if nothing had changed, time preserving this night in eternity for us to linger in and recall, except that we all looked older if not acting it, and Frank’s daughter springing from childhood into young womanhood.

Thinking back over the last four years since our last gathering I realize how lost I felt, and hearing the old songs and feeling the old high dragged me back in time to a point where no matter how miserable I was on any other day of any other year, I found peace on Christmas Eve with these people.

Early on Christmas Eve Day I’d felt lost, without tradition after hearing other people talk about theirs, and then attending the event with the others and hearing Hank belt out songs we’d sung since 1971 or so, and having Pauly dominate the room with his satiric humor, I felt as if I’d come home again – We all go home for Christmas don’t we?

Hank had a more self-deprecating humor, mocking his past life and failed accomplishments, while Garrick still pined over that one lost romance from that one time when he lived inside a DH Laurence novel with a woman as acute as any of its characters.

Garrick makes up for his loneliness by going from place to place, seeing a host of people who populate the landscape of his life, but never really manages to escape the fundamental pain he feels – we all feel – this time of year, waiting as we all wait for some woman to jump into his life with both boots on.

I think I hurt him a little when I mumbled something about my interest Hank’s cousin, Mary Kay, a woman Garrick is apparently interested in as well. But waiting for Garrick to act is like waiting for the advance of a glazier. He flirts with commitment, but never commits.

I remember a string of Christmases past in which he occupied himself with a woman from Clifton, coming ever-so-close to getting her to bed, only to wait just long enough for her to eventually introduce him to her future husband. I remember when I was just like Garrick and so we can take comfort in each other’s misery, and the perverse contest of how long each of us could last without a woman’s attention.

Now as always, Garrick operates alone, and sometimes I feel sorry for him, when I am really feeling sorry for myself since – in breaking up with Anne – I’m right back to where he is, one more sad tradition that has nothing to do with Christmas.

Layoff from Toys R Us (1980)

December 23, 1980

With one day more to work before Christmas, Jim – one the assistant managers at the Totowa Toys R Us – came over to us as we cleaned up after our shift to tell us we all will soon be laid off.

No, it wasn’t quite as direct as that.  He didn’t even want to say it, his contorted face going red as he blushed.

“Please, don’t hold it against me,” he pleaded.

But we already knew that our days were numbered and did not blame the man.

This was one of the few jobs I’d worked in my life where I had not problem with the bosses. For the most part, they were all great people – this in contrast to the Garfield Two Guys where I worked last Summer where all the bosses were assholes.

When I said as much, Jim tried to laugh; John and I did.

“Don’t worry, Chief,” John told Jim. “I just got fired from my day job, too. So now I can definitely collect unemployment.”

Jim looked moderately grateful, then glanced uncertainly at me.

“Don’t worry about me. I have a job starting after the first of the year,” I said. “So, don’t bother begging me to stay because I can’t. I know how much you want me to, and how you’re willing to beg the big bosses on my behalf. Don’t bother. I can’t.”

Jim stared at me for a long moment, knowing how willing I was to make stuff up, a regular storyteller, but perhaps this time I might even have been telling the truth.

Then he shook his head.

“You’re just a sick individual, Sullivan,” he said. “You’re testimony to just how willing we are to hire anybody during the Christmas season.”

We laughed; he laughed; then he walked away.

Several people were already gone, taking off early to be with their families or doing last minute Christmas shopping or even down with the bug – we not knowing which was which or who was whom.

But there was a sense of loss, as if working with these people for such a short time had left us saddled with unexpected nostalgia, wishing they had said goodbye or given us a parting Christmas card.

The season is dying and soon John would vanish, as would Debby, and the last holdouts would hold on until Friday when we all would pick up our last checks and go our separate ways.

Marcie seemed particularly sad as she strolled up from the game wall towards the wall where we all hung our coats. She wanted to say something, but didn’t, as if she couldn’t find words to express something, I could only guess she meant to say.

Many of the people laughed sadly, saying, “See you next year,” although we all know most of those we worked with would be somewhere else entirely by next year, and I felt much the same way I felt graduating school, knowing that I would never see many of these faces again, although somewhere in the back of my head, I would wonder what happened to them, if I managed even to remember them at all.

Marcie is the only one I’m sure I’ll see again since she’s the cousin of one of my best friends. But I also have a bit of trouble there since I have a girlfriend who I know I will also be parting from soon, and I’m attracted to Marcie and scared to tell her as much.

I keep thinking of when my girlfriend will take off for graduate school and I will be by myself again, if not immediately, then definitely by next Christmas.

Christmas season is a hard time for the broken-hearted, as Chris – the former girlfriend of Bob, the band’s bass player showed when I met her hear last week. She stumbled through these aisles like a zombie, looking but not seeing, her vacant gaze searching for something she’d never find in a toy store or any store for that matter. We spoke for a time, her bitterness reminding me of how I felt when I broken up with my ex-wife years ago and reminding me of how much pain I can expect to feel when I lose my current girlfriend.

Chris holds a grudge against Bob similar to the one I held against my ex-wife, and I cringe hoping I won’t hold the same grudge against my girlfriend when my time comes again. I like to think I’ve grown up a bit but know pain does terrible things to people, twisting them up inside so we can’t think straight.

While some people do blame Jim for the layoffs, we all saw it coming and so we shouldn’t be as bitter as we would have if it had come as a surprise.

When all the warnings are there, it’s not the other person’s fault, it’s our own.

So here we are, something coming to an end in our lives, and we spend this last night desperate to squeeze out the last drops, clinging to a job we didn’t particularly like or a romance we suspected might be just an interlude between other acts – whether we are Toys R Us friends or lovers, all things must pass.

My future is one of doubt. Although I jokingly told Jim I have job offer, it was just another yarn, and I know after the holiday I will be scrambling to find a way to pay my rent.

Christmas is near. I’ll try not to think about the future until it comes.

A Christmas to remember?

December 22, 1980

The count down to Christmas continues, the final push in a long series of days that make up the Christmas season, three more precious days of madness before the whole thing concludes with the fat man sleigh bells.

Only I’m not as pressed as the world is, going from the madness of school to this semi-retired stage between semesters when I have time to clean and relax before the madness starts again.

There will be new obligations and new disasters to deal with come the New Year.

For some reason, I keep thinking back to the Christmas I spent in Portland back in 1971, that last gasp in a long criminal road trip before we made our way back to New Jersey to turn myself in and start my new life as a model citizen (ha!)

I guess this is relevant since that was the Christmas John Lennon released “Happy Christmas,” and I was caught up with his Imagine album ( I still can’t believe he’s dead, and still feel as if I lost a member of my family when he died.)

My daughter, Ruby, loved that album, even though she was not even a year old. She rolled around the big room in our apartment in her walker, rushing to the radio whenever one of Lennon’s songs came on – as she also did for Paul McCartney for songs from “Ram.”

It was a time when Louise and I had to make up our minds about the future. Portland had not been the nirvana we’d hoped. Mike and Marie – scared about the potential that the FBI might finally catch up with them – vanished around Halloween, leaving us with no natural allies.

The Lewis family with whom we’d developed some kind of unreasonable feud had moved out of our hair to a new apartment in a remote part of town.

I remember the huge Christmas tree we had acquired and how it barely fit in the main room despite the high ceiling. I remember Louise cooking a turkey for our dinner and inviting our few remaining friends to come share it with us on Christmas Day.

Louise even invited her secret lover – with whom she had cheated on me – who told her then that he was moving back to Idaho, although at the time I didn’t yet suspect anything between them and wondered why she was so upset when he told her he had to go. Being a blind as I was, I merely thought him as a good friend.

It was a mystery seeing her cry like she did under the glittering branches of that huge tree, and this man trying to give her comfort, and me being too stupid to understand what exactly transpired.

I remember feeling a strange sense of relief that Christmas, but we knew the quiet spell could not last, and were already discussing our return to the East. But later, I knew Louise had other plans other than just the trip, and what she wanted back east had nothing to do with me.

In 1971, I had nothing to hold me in Portland, not even a job – although I had worked a number of jobs our first time there, including temporary work through Manpower, and then several other jobs in New York while waiting for Ruby to be born.

Part of the reason for leaving New York was how dangerous it had become. Hank moved out before we left because he’d been mugged too many times and feared he might get killed if it continued. Louise feared for our safety, too.

But jobless in Portland was little better, and part of my longing to go back was to find a job, although I still hadn’t then made up my mind to settle my legal troubles.

It was also risky to remain because I had lost my wallet and my phony ID, and so risked getting stopped by the police and hauled back East to justice as a wanted felon.

By the time we did get back, everything fell apart, and by Christmas 1972, I was alone again.

I kept thinking of our previous trip through Portland in August 1970 when Louise was still pregnant and we hoped Hank – living in New York at the time – would help us, and how we made our way east, only to long for Portland again, and once in Portland, longed for New York again – an endless cycle of coming and going Louise continues since the last I heard of her she had taken Ruby for yet another trip to Portland.

Now, almost decade later, I still feel the loss, the lingering sense of the unresolved, of something should have done and did not, and may never get to do, thinking about that Christmas 1971 as if it had been my last chance

Four Days to Christmas (1980)

December 21, 1980

Four days before Christmas, the last Sunday before the main event.

Outside, the neighborhood roars with pre-holiday life, people stumbling down steps from the upstairs apartments, hollering at each other over forgotten car keys or presents or some other nonsense I can barely make out. Many need to reach the mall for last minute buys or risk finding empty shelves.

My pal Pauly says he’s yet to buy the hat he plans to give his mother, or so he told me last night when he hopped up on the barstool next to mine, exhausted from performing, caught up on the same Christmas disease he mocked me for earlier.

Garrick, more than a little inebriated, wandering around the bar alternately laughing and cursing, not quite sure whether he was angry or happy – which was perhaps his intent all along.

Although tired after a late night, I’m not hung over.

Outside, the traffic along 8th and Passaic streets has taken on a new tone, not quite like the hectic work-day stuff of the rest of year, yet in some ways more impatient, horns honking with an urgency only impending Christmas can cause.

And yet, behind the impatience is a quiet I can’t quite explain – as if a hope to achieve the peace on earth this time of year always promises.

Someone leans on the horn in the carport outside my door, trying to get passed some visitor who has parked in the driveway in from the street, making it impossible for anyone to get out – a ritual so frequent I would not take notice if not for the time of year and the need to find peace in my own life.

I hear Stella curse and realize she’s the one whose trying to get out, for more than fifteen minutes, needing to get to the store for milk and the newspaper, finally relenting when a young Cuban guy comes stumbling down from upstairs apartment next to Garrick’s and demands to know why Stella and apparently Garrick were trying to get into his car.

“To move it,” Garrick tells him.

Stella tells him she should have called a tow truck.

The boy climbs into the car, starts the engine and grins at Stella as he pulls away.

Four days to Christmas, I think.

I hear the howl of wind, too, stirring up a few brown leaves at the back of the carport and sending a chill through the thin walls of my cold water flat, a chill the stove can barely compensate for, and I shiver, huddled still under my blanket on the bed I moved out of the frigid back room to get closer to the stove – a Christmas present of warmth I will continue to enjoy until spring comes, and maybe even until summer.

My mother – living with my grandmother and my uncle’s family in Toms River – wonders if it will be a white Christmas this year. I peer around the window shade and see a bright blue sky and a brilliant yellow sun and think perhaps not.

I wonder if we will seek out Christmas on Christmas Eve as we used to. Two or three years ago – I forget which – Me, Pauly, Hank and Garrick found Christmas up in Towaco on a rainy Christmas Eve, rain everywhere except at the top of that mountain where Pauly’s girlfriend’s mom lived – there we encountered snow, and a scene straight out of Dickens’ Christmas Carroll – old Victorian structures lining each side of a snow-narrowed road as if waiting for horse and carriage to arrive, smoke rising from the chimney of the house we were to gather in, and the scent of pine and burning logs filling the air when we finally pulled up and got out of the car.

Inside, we gorged on cheese and soaked up the wine, sitting before a fireplace nearly as large as my car, laughing about the holiday and the future, and the dreams we all still had.

We were a small band of old friends sharing the moment.

Today, things would be different because my life is different, college collecting new friends and new rituals, though I suspect I will be returning to that house bringing my newfound girlfriend with me, having had no woman in my life back then.

She plans to join me when I go out with Hank and Pauly shopping for that hat for Pauly’s mother, and the host of other odd gifts Pauly routinely buys to fill in for those folks he hadn’t time to create a painting for.

Four days to Christmas, and really, life hasn’t changed as much as I think, only adding a few new stockings to the chimney, as we plan to throw another log on the fire and open another bottle of wine.

Will you still love me when I’m 74?

Tuesday, December 24, 2019

This would be Hank’s 70th birthday, had he managed to live this long.

Although he lived longer than the age of 25 Pauly predicted, Hank died in March 1995, far short of the year the rest of us have reached in our now-old age.

 I saw Hank last on his Christmas Eve birthday in 1994, when we made our way to his mother’s house in Haledon where we met Garrick and we all made a caravan to Sparta for our annual get-together with Frank and Dawn.

I recall how old Hank looked, more 90 than 45, balding and stooped, forgetful partly because of the toxins stirring in his blood from his bad kidneys.

He looked more like his mother’s husband, than her son, and acted that way even that night, struggling to get himself together for the trip, urged on by Garrick, who on-and-off lived in the spare room upstairs with Hank, best of friends, who spent nights watching TV together while consuming TV dinners or takeout pizza.

Hank always ate badly, smoked too much, drank too much, and refused to give up his nasty habits even when death loomed over him, a dark cloud he suffered under for years before he actually passed.

I met him at the Fabian Theater where we both worked as ushers in 1967, and this changed my life, stirring up in me a passion for art that Hank struggled to realize. He ached for the bohemian life and made me ache for it as well.

We plunged into the Village scene together, where for a time he found comfort in an East 5th Street apartment living with a woman named Laurie, with me still destined for a life of crime I could not completely avoid before winding up living around the block on East 6th Street, a hunted criminal connected to Abbie Hoffman and the Weather Underground.

Hank never got into the radical aspects of the 1960s, preferring the peace and love hippie life, something he could not sustain working as we both did for Mercury Messenger Service.

He eventually moved back to New Jersey and took up various warehouse jobs, while engaging in community theater on his free time, trying to convince me to write songs for him so he could become a new Elton John.

I struggled through similar jobs, scribbling out bad poetry, while learning how to write, not just poems or songs, but eventually real stories, and eventually newspaper stories as well.

At the time of Hank’s death, I was fully into a career as a journalist, something I think Hank admired in me since he saw me living up to my dreams when life kept him from realizing his.

For several years, Hank and I searched desperately for the New York City folk scene that had vanished a decade before our arrival, wandering into a strange new world that included places like The Electric Circus, the Filmore East and Max’s Kansas City.

Hank loved New York with such a passion that he could not leave it, and often drove there after work to hang out at several bars – I eventually wrote a song about him and a place called “Formerly Joes” in the West Village.

I try to think more about those days when he still was creative than the final days when he could not keep up on the treadmill of ill health and struggled just to wake up. He might have survived longer had he gone into more intensive therapy, doing the full-blown dialysis he needed rather than the half-hearted effort he engaged in so that he could continue to work and socialize.

I remember his fantasy when we were young, about he, me, Pauly and Garrick, all as old men, gray-haired, hanging out together on rocking chairs on some porch, viewing the world without usual cynical eye. Hank used to sing the Beatles song about being 64. Now, we have to update it. Yes, Hank, I will still love you when you’re 70 or even 74.

Brainwashed by The New York Times

Thursday, August 15, 2019

After having not talked to what I once considered one of my closest friends, I was horrified to find that he had turned from a working stiff to a pseudo metro-sexual, a wanna-be upper west or east side (I forget which is worse) liberal intellectuals determined to shed any semblance to his blue collar background.

This is a man who spent his entire adult life relying on The New York Times to provide him with information, and so overtime as paper of record turned into a liberal rag, he turned into a pretentious jelly fish, so filled with misinformation about the real world that it’s no longer possible to even talk to him, let alone try to apply reason.

He still believes states outside New York and California have a poll tax (something outlawed in voting legislation in the 1960s), believes that the electoral college should be abandoned (not realizing that it affects only one elected office of president, and not caring a bit about the protections it provides other states smaller than New York or California since the point is to have his liberal views imposed on people elsewhere, so that the people he votes for automatically become president.)

He refuses to believe that members of MeToo are vigilantes, and that Antifa is not a terrorist group (akin to the KKK only wearing black hoods and masks rather than white.)

My friend no longer believes in the concept of citizenship – since he would give the vote to anybody citizen or not who pays taxes – regardless of how these people came to the country – thus feeding the Democratic party with future generations of voters.

While my friend and I would likely agree that ICE is out of control, and that immigrants should not be rounded up like cattle, we disagree on the future.

He claims that at one time voting rights applied only to white males who owned property (an inaccurate statement likely gleaned from The Times as well since voting is regulated by states and various states offered more liberal voting than others). So, to his logic, allowing non-citizens to vote is just another change similar to those of allowing ordinary men and women, black or white to vote. He, of course, would have this applied nationally so stripping the fundamental issue of states to regulate their own voting – currently protected under the constitution.

This idea that my friend would use the federal government to impose its will on people who may have a differing point of view is at the core of the current constitutional crisis. New York and California with their huge populations want to control how people live and think in other parts of the nation. This is why they tear down statutes and flags they find offensive, and why they block highways often far from the part of the country where they actually live – an illusion of New Freedom Riders which is a bogus argument pumped out by left wing publications like The New York Times.

Since so many of our forefathers are being discredited by liberal media, we can’t even draw on their wisdom to show how they intended to protect minority states (which are largely smaller, less populated and conservative) from the mob rule of urban elite. The electoral college keeps Iowa from being overrun by a pack of liberal radicals who have managed in their own states to register massive amounts of voters, some of which many suspect are not citizens or even legal residents, but lack of proof at the polls allows them to vote anyway.

My friend is very concerned about voter suppression in places like the south where proof at the polls is seen as unfair to people of color as if poor whites wouldn’t be equally inconvenienced by needing to get proper identification (as required by most states as a result of 9/11 and the passing of the Patriot Act.)

Since my friend reads only The New York Times, he is not exposed to alternative views on many issues such as Climate Change, foreign policy – and he even believes the Russians interfered with the 2016 election, and would still vote for Hillary Clinton if she ran in 2020, despite her taking over the Democratic Party and cheating her way to the nomination.

Since The New York Times’ role appears to be designed to protect Democrats – regardless of how outlandish their behavior or their opinions, my friend protects them, too.

My friend is not stupid. But he is ignorant, and stubborn, and once he makes up his mind on an issue, facts would move him – unless, of course, he reads them in The New York Times, and then it’s gospel.

NJ’s Pathetically Correct Attorney General

Saturday, August 10, 2019

Grewal just issued a report on biased incidents in the state of New Jersey.

More than half the reported cases came from colleges and universities, a scary concept since colleges these days have become incubators of misinformation where students are expected to find racism under ever rock.

One university even required white students to write an essay on why they should be ashamed to be white.

Pathetically correct in schools are constantly trying to rewrite history to reflect their somewhat twisted vision of reality, such as the Elizabeth activist who want to remove the name of Ronald Reagan because he once said something questionable.

We already know activists hated Lincoln during his own lifetime because he preserved law over mob rule when it came to outlawing slavery.

In San Francisco, fanatic radicals want to destroy a mural of George Washington because it also depicted Native Americans (a term many Indians hate) and slaves.

All of this comes at a time when Toni Morrison died, a good writer, but someone who fed into this anti-white crusade, a black woman who preferred propaganda like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to real literature such as Huck Finn (both books written by white people.) Of course, being a white male who once served briefly in the Confederate Army, Mark Twain has been called a racist, too – clearly showing how little of his work critics have actually read (he openly condemned slavery in several of his travelogues but since these radicals are better at banning books than reading them, they would not know this. You would expect Morrison, an author, to be better, but she was not.

We can’t expect better from Grewal because we all know that attorney generals on a state or federal level are required to be political stooges – and so like Holder – Grewal does not disappoint us. But the fact that he is feeding into this anti-white racist frenzy is actually dangerous – giving creditability to this illusion that there are white supremacists under every stone just as there were communists in the 1950s.  This gives license to monstrous terrorist groups like Antifa or productions by NBC depicting violence against those media and schools claim as evil – in these cases, anyone who ever even thought about voting for Trump.

 No doubt racism exists and incidents happened. But how many are provoked by overzealous zealots and something criminals like Antifa?

The most visible of this hatred came out after the 2016 election as fanatic liberals became shrill when they could not lie or cheat to get their candidate elected.

The establishment of a Joint Bias Task Force will only exasperate this anti-white prejudice es, adding more questionable allegations by already questionably reliable people, who imagine racism under every bed and homophobia in every closet

Grewal and his side kick, Oliver, should show convictions, not accusations, and detail the circumstance behind each of these reports. Otherwise, all they are doing is feeding this hate.

Popcorn people call Trump a racist.

Thursday, August 8, 2019

Democrat think tanks are spewing out a lot of crap these days.

This is not unusual for think tanks for the right or the left. What makes this dangerous is the fact that there is a built-in audience of true believers – I call them the pathetically correct (PC), who eat it up – the way movie-goers eat up popcorn.

To be in the in-crowd these days, you have to proscribe to a certain PC ideology, largely made up in these think tanks, and spread through media.

I call them big and little lies.

The Russian conspiracy to influence the 2016 election was a big lie – which taxpayers spent tens of millions to disprove.

Small lies are much more effective because no Mueller investigation is ever going to uncover them as lies, and popcorn-eating liberals gobble them up as fact.

One such lie is the idea that Trump is a racist. Another is that he supports white supremacists’ groups. Others paint him as misogynistic. While still others paint him as homophobic.

There is very little to collaborate any of these small lies except for a more than willing and dishonest liberal-controlled media that spreads them and distorts coverage to support these lies.

Day in and day out we hear how Trump’s rhetoric leads to gun violence by white supremacists, while media plays down those cases in which the culprit is actually a supporter of people like Warren and misguided and dangerous causes like Antifa (anyone who wears a mask is a criminal, white or black.)

If there is a terrorist connection, liberal media plays it down, but harps on any case that involves right wing killers, crediting Trump as the cause.

This comes even when the Trump Administration issues statements to the contrary. Braindead PC people still believe his rhetoric led to the violence, when they cannot actually support this with anything he said, just as they can’t support the claims that he is a racist.

This is fantasy that borders on psychosis, a liberal public unable to get over the shock that other people elsewhere in the country could win an election despite the massive voter fraud Democrats appeared to have used in 2016 to have the outcome come out differently.

We have transcended the concept of a fair media, and have evolved into a movement in which mainstream media has become an organ for spreading misinformation, pretending it is all the news fit to print, creating myths that popcorn people accept as fact because it fits in with their existing prejudices.

The truth appears to be exactly opposite of what these popcorn people believe, and when you have a sitting US congresswoman calling for the assassination of a sitting president and Hollywood spewing out movies that call for hunting down of Trump supporters, you have to wonder just who is actually inciting violence, and why mainstream media isn’t calling them to task.

But the answer is clear. Media has taken a side and is too busy screaming fire inside a crowded theater to actually report facts.

Living in the past

08-05-19

I live too much in the past, nostalgic for a time I found pain when I lived it, now far more innocent than time we pass through these days.

some joker on the intern posed an impossible choice between going back to 45 with $10 million or going back to my youth knowing all I know now.

I'd skip the $10 million for the chance to see old friends and family again.

perhaps to meet even family I didn't get to know enough when I met them only in passing.

delving into their lives in retrospect I realize just how much I missed or have forgotten or never knew and only by going back will I truly know them.

Everybody's youth seems more innocent than it actually is. My grandparents, my great grandparents even my great great grandparents each saw their worlds change and become more complex. Each saw the passing of family the way I have to become as my grandmother became and I have become, a sole survivor, burdened with my memories and the memories who came before me, knowing but not well enough my ancestors. but I have only bits and pieces to represent the whole, snapshots in time with which to preserve them.

if I could go back, knowing what I know now, I would know what to look fir, how to fill in all these missing pieces of all those people I have come to cherish through time.

Elated to be fired?

August 4, 2019

The first feeling I feel when I get fired is not panic.

That comes later when I try and figure out how the hell I’m going to pay my rent or mortgage.

The first feeling isn’t even negative, although that comes later, too, the unworthiness that makes me unacceptable.

No, the first feeling is always elation, as if the chains have been removed from me and I am able to move about unencumbered by responsibilities that I been forced to endure just to get a paycheck.

After 32 years as a beat reporter – 27 at the Hudson Reporter, the rest elsewhere, and the week in and week out ritual of a meeting deadlines, the elation this time was even more significant than during other terminations, feeling the links of chain drop one by one as I used by 30 minutes to pack up 27 years of accumulated stuff from my desk, putting notebooks and file folders into recycling, things I thought I needed fore to save for unrealized future stories.

I didn’t even hear the ticking clock in my head I had when fired from other jobs, my whole 30 minutes done in deliberate slow-motion since what I needed to take was significantly less than what I would leave behind – and not all of that physical.

To be unbeholden to anyone, returning to that point in life when I lived more or less carefree, assuming life would someone take care of me – the hippie-hobo life Kerouac wrote about in “On the Road.” Someone on the street of Hoboken even called me a “Darma Bum” as if my new-found freedom emanated from me, a radiation glow I could not keep contained had I wanted to.

How long this glow lasts is up to me – perhaps even for the rest of my life.

My real work

March 24, 1997

The daily grind goes on.

Monday morning rising to face one more week of deadlines.

I always have too much to do and make more promises than I can keep – a story for this cause or that, each a brutal battle from notes to finished copy that I always cringe over.

I keep looking for a formula that will make life easier, knowing I’ll never find one.

All this, of course, comes in the middle of what I like to think of as my “serious work,” those passages of purple prose which will put me in a literature book someday, guarantee me a place among the greats (how many other fools have thoughts like this, like the man at the poetry reading Saturday who ranted on about those writers who influence him, name dropping so heavily he could have served a biography for a text on western literature.

A large part of literary success is self-promotion, such as what happened with Whitman when he wrote reviews of his own book and gave himself high praise.

I am poor at self-promotion, and wish talented amounted for me, and hard work, and some aspect of self-belief. All writers, artists, musicians must believe they are destined for something, or they fail.

But some of us deceive ourselves, relying too much upon the world somehow discovering us.

I did well enough at the open reading this weekend, and more or less discovered a fact that I already knew, that people won’t tolerate long pieces, regardless of the quality. They like beginnings and endings, and would avoid the middles if possible, especial if those middles seem to go on and one.

Even poetry as been pockmarked by the punchy, sliced up images of post-MTV, and in poetry as in my old adage (to whom I can not give credit): keep it short stupid.

The problem is I don’t operate well in the realm of the ultra-short, where every word need be a pearl, where every image as sharp as a diamond. My work plods along in an emotional accumulation, where poetry demands lightning strikes. But I do have a few short pieces, and I’ll see where that gets me. Perhaps I can seduce some sucker into giving me a feature, where I can do what the hell I want.

Escaping the Titanic unscathed

Wednesday, July 31, 2019 I’m unemployed again.This time I’m not completely to blame – although internal politics at my office played a significant part in their choice to chop my head off rather than someone else’s.Sometimes, the universe lines up in such a way that things become inevitable.I’ve carried a target on my back for the last several years, in particular with the change of ownership last year – but even more so when the person who despises me most became by boss and tried at least twice to convince the new owners I was expendable, and even incompetent.Over the last 32 years as a journalist, I always knew I was better respected by the people I covered than the people employed me.But in the most recent case, I’ve become a non-entity entirely because the new owners do not see people as people, but as pieces in a corporate machine, easily replaced, more importantly, easily pressed to do more than we are actually getting paid to do.The recent downsizing was number crunching, nothing personal on the higher levels. The corporation clearly saw my salary as an issue but left the choice for who got chopped on local bosses, and since my boss didn’t like me, I was an easy choice.This was true of some of the others that were giving notice when I was, old adversaries to the local bosses, who found this as a good opportunity to get rid of those they disliked anyway.This trust in local bosses is not new.Managers historically in our society trust other managers regardless of how incompetent or corrupt these managers are.Nobody takes workers seriously enough to actually listen to them, unless these workers make a lot of noise the way I do.Although I have held this job for the last 27 years, I have been fired before, a number of times, only in those instances, I deserved it, mostly for challenging authority.Ironically, each of these events seemed to occur around the same time in the decade, so that the current dismissal is a kind of anniversary of each of my previous events, in 1969, 1979, and 1989. Some jobs I resigned before they got the chance to fire me.Almost in every case, I caused my own demise by pointing out just how incompetent the people who oversaw me were or challenged the corporation mentality that made workers into machine parts and ignored our humanity.I remember how the vice president of Fotomat came to my booth to talk to me after I wrote a long letter to the corporation criticizing the way they did business, or how I got fired from the Garfield Dunkin donuts two weeks before my wedding because the owner was a complete ass and had abused one of the female workers – a similar situation got me fired from the cosmetic company in the late 1970s. I quit my summer job the Garfield Two Guys store before they could find an excuse to fire me. I had challenged them and could afford to, then realized that some of the other workers were looking up to me – and were risking their jobs because I became a kind of spokesperson for a righteous cause, working people. I understood then, that rebellion comes with responsibility, and while I was willing to pay the price, I could not afford to let others suffer.When I wrote a letter to Tony Pro in 1978 about how our union rep was selling out to management, I knew I risked my job. Tony Pro was on his way to jail but took time to fire the union rep (maybe more than that), but I lost my job anyway.I was a constant thorn in management’s side during each of my jobs, because people became invisible, and it was important for someone like me to remind these powerful people than workers are not machine parts, easily replaced, they have families, and their lives are shattered by corporate decisions.That may well be part of the reason I’m unemployed this time, too, since my current boss decided to use the corporate system to try to get me fired – unable to get the previous owners to do it – and I struck back, refusing to recognize my boss’ claims.But I knew in winning, I was losing, and that the whole confrontation with a corrupt local boss was unwinnable ultimately, and that eventually, I was doomed.So, when the corporate downsizing came, I did not resist – it was the least painful of potential events, and let me walk away with the same dignity I always have in such situations, knowing that the victory of the petty local boss will be temporary, and hollow. In the end, letting me and other rebels go also stole the heart and soul of the business, and left a pack of self-serving power-hungry wannabe bosses in place – each aching to be captain of a ship that has already sprung so many leaks that it can do nothing but sink.
It's easy to be a captain of a sinking ship. You need no compass to choose a direction. The only direction is down.Now I know how it feels to be one of the survivors in the life boats watching the Titanic sinking in the distance, saddened by the loss of life, and the tragic loss of a noble ship, but relieved that I have finally managed to escape relatively unscathed, and aware that for the first time in a long time, I do not need to look over my shoulder to see who is taking aim at the target on my back – having left the target on the deck of the ship, and the pack of wannabe captains shooting themselves in their feet as the water rises up around their necks.And while I may feel as if the row to shore is a long one, at least I know I will eventually reach shore, maybe even before my former bosses meet Davy Jones. 

The day the bad guys won

July 27, 2019 Power never lasts.And the tighter you grip it the more it slips like sand through your fingers and leaves your hands empty.This may take days or weeks or even decades, and so on days like this, when it seems like the bad guys won, I tell myself they haven't.And for those of us who seem to have been exiled from the kingdom, outcasts from what we thought was Arthur's perfect realm, we need  to realize, too, that inside those noble halls, those who remain hate each other as much as they ever hated us, and must live with each other, hating each other, more than they ever hated or feared us, sharks living among sharks, always fearful of teeth that might dig deep into them they way their teeth once dug deep into us.We all lived in one big fish bowl where they feed on guppies like us, but now that they have fed on the last of us, we feed on each other.This is poor satisfaction for those of us who spent decades building our power right, brick by brick, instead of body by body, making alliances rather than petty schemes. In the short view, good guys always seem like suckers, having done things the way were taught to do them, living by some moral code that avoided using and abusing others in our climb to the top.On days like this we need to tell ourselves that these mountain climbers really aren't getting to the top of a mountain, but to the top of a dung heap, their own petty egos painting it as something more, and that those same egos will eventually bring about their downfall from even that un-lofty height. We need to convince ourselves that we won even when it seems we didn't, by retaining a moral highground they for all their ambition lack, and that even in exile, we remain the ones who won, though at moments like this, we do not feel like we have.We need to remind ourselves that sharks will remain sharks even when the fish tank is empty of everything but sharks, and we must learn patience, learn to heal ourselves, wait and watch for that day when these sharks turn onto each other – knowing that it must come, knowing that sharks must continue to feed, and in the end, must consume each other.On days like this, we need to remember that all power hungry people carry inside them the seeds of their own destruction, weaknesses they cannot see in themselves, either because their egos won't allow them to, or they simply do not know themselves well enough to avoid their inevitable demise, and that on some future day, the final grains of sand will slip out from between their fingers, and when they open their hands, they have nothing. 

Democrats who do evil are evil

05-21-19

Pelosi took down the sign from the congressional wall saying, "In God We Trust."

This is just one more example if the massive shift in American value best reflected in the song by The Rolling Stones "Sympathy for the Devil" in which all the sinners are saints.

Even “Rules for Radicals,” the handbook of the new left written by a mentally ill Chicago social worker praises Satan as the true rebel.

Drug dealers, murderers, rapists (unless you're OJ or Bill Cosby) are turned into victims of social injustice, completely gutting their victim's right to more conventional justice.

These rules are a reinvention of radical 1930s Stalinist socialism, unsuccessfully revived in the 1960s only to be resurrected by this unethical Hitler-like Chicago community activists that decided that winning is everything, and any means of obtaining it, is okay as long as you can get away with it.

This explains the current crop of pathetic and meanspirited people who profess love and peace by committing the most atrocious acts, destroying innocent people’s live if these innocent people happen to disagree with them politically.

Under these rules, it’s okay to lie, cheat, deceive, even murder for some imaginary higher cause, ignoring the fact that what you do is what you are, regardless of how much you put lipstick on the pig.

This is the Democratic party that orchestrated a fraud to bring down Kavanaugh and earlier Thomas, in order to keep them from overturning Roe vs. Wade.

It’s also okay to terrify the public with dishonest and exaggerated climate change horror stories as long as it leads to distribution of wealth.

This new radicalism saw its pinnacle with the election of Obama as president, since he was raised with its ruthlessness in Chicago, not merely a student of the philosophy of hate, but a professor of it as well, disguising his ruthless ambition behind pretty rhetoric, while he performed dishonest deeds to achieve power.

Fortunately for America, Obama proved among the most incompetent of presidents and much of the damage he did during his eight years in office may be undone in the eight years of the current president.

This is largely what infuriates Democrats because they still subscribe to the same Marxist philosophy as Obama did and are still engaged in the same class warfare he waged while president.

The idea now is the same one espoused in the 1930s when Stalinism was in vogue - to bring down capitalism.

The idea of equal opportunity is not enough. This new left wants to live up to the mandate of yet another rock lyric by ten years after - to tax the rich until they're rich no more.

The Chicago-based Marxism wants everybody to have the same even those who haven’t earned it or are too incompetent to compete in a world where talent and hard work account for something. This is the logic behind reparations for slavery to steal, from the rich to give to the poor in some misguided belief that the rich had advantages the poor lacked, despite six decades of massive social reforms to provide poor people of color opportunity to succeed.

After decades of failed Democratic social reforms, Democratic radicals have decided to take even more radical steps, spreading seeds of descent that they will hope leads to revolution.

Marx mistakenly believed revolution against capitalism was inevitable because poor people would become miserable and would rise up against the ruling class.

Marx and Marxists miscalculated largely for reasons reflected in a lyric by Springsteen- poor want to be rich and rich want to be king.

the Chicago based radicalism -- out of which the new left has emerged -- takes Marxism to a new level through a process of agitation. Rather than wait for a revolution against capitalism that will never come, radicals rub poor people's noses in their own poverty.  Instead of showing the poor how to make the system work, the radicals cast blame, stirring up hatred towards successful people by calling them racists or worse. this is largely the logic behind antifa and others tearing down statues. But it goes far beyond that. Since successful people largely generate the wealth that ultimately pays for social programs that benefit the poor, these radicals eventually hurt those they claim to help, not merely by destroying icons like God or statues but by prompting the belief poor people can become rich without having to earn it.

email to Al Sullivan

Climate green is about greed

 05-18-19

I suspected the climate change movement was a fraud when Obama made the hundred-watt incandescent light bulb illegal.

The fact is the replacement bulbs that the green movement proposed we're far more deadly and more damaging to the environment then the bulb they replaced. If you step on the broken pieces of the new greener bulb, you die. If you put it in a landfill, it poisons the soil.

 This suggests that some other serious agenda was at work rather than the illusion that somehow bed-wetters could save the planet by unscrewing their light bulbs.

At it turns out, it is all about screwing the taxpayer.

It is no accident that Al Gore launched this new Crusade at the same time the Democrats were taking power, climate change becoming a central part of Obama’s 2008 campaign for president.

Gore began to spread this paranoid world ending philosophy even though it was clear that it has no basis in real science.

But science was not his agenda. Green as it turns out has become a very profitable source of patronage for Democrats and their supporters, allowing them to steer federal money to people, not-for-profits and companies that are Democratic supporters – all with the pretense of saving the plant.

Anyone questioning this new Green science gets accused of being in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry, when in reality, Big Green (as it is now called) has managed to divert hundreds of billions of dollars to support its agendas – and very little has to do with the actual environment.

The real green movement is all about money.

It is a brilliant cover for incompetent local leaders who have over developed cities and other areas, blaming the alleged rise in sea levels for flooding when in truth, they have allowed developers to build on landfill and other historic flood zones, leaders who have through greed or stupidity, failed to provide adequate infrastructure improvements to go along with the development. This is also true in historic drought areas, allowed to develop, where there were never adequate water resources, or in wooded areas such as California where basic forest management was ignored and contributed to massive fires.

Ordinary storms which we have seen for centuries are blamed on climate change because it guarantees local – mostly Democratic areas – green money to pay for what local taxpayers would pay for otherwise.

For areas which generally vote Democrat in national elections, Green has become a new way of obtaining green.

We keep hearing how the fossil fuel industry is pouring millions into groups that are opposed to climate change when in truth the real books are in the Big Green movement billions and billions of dollars being fed from federal government and other groups into an illusionary movement that has no basis in science,

Even some green scientists question their own science but will hardly look a green gift horse in the mouth when it comes to funding their questionable research such as how climate change causes traffic fatalities or contributes to spouse abuse.

Climate change has to be the biggest political scam in American and something designed to scare people to death well picking their pockets.

While for local legislators it may be a way of steering Federal money into their own little personal Empires at the expense of taxpayers, on a national and international level it is just another way to redistribute wealth -- much in the way the slave reparation movement is -- only on a scale far larger than anyone could have imagined.

This billion-dollar rip-off industry has credibility that is beyond science fiction.

Media has helped spread the propaganda so effectively that school kids are now terrified that the world is really going to come to an end, when in reality it is simply a brilliant campaign to steer money to democratic causes and fund Democratic supporters through devious means.

Obama has so effectively inserted climate change into every funding process he could while he was president that we now fund really questionable science to help steer money to Democratic causes loyal democratic political figures and others.

Who is going to question it when well-meaning people, who have bought into this scam, are willing to throw themselves into the street to defend it thinking that they are saving the world?

It does not matter that CO2 emissions do not raise the temperature of the planet or that the seas are not rising at the rate these conspiracy greens say it is. It does not matter that the Amazon rainforests have grown back, and that Greenland is simply returning to a pattern of melting that has been going on for 18,000 years.

What matters is that the Democrats have scared the public into closing its eyes to perhaps the biggest rip-off ever.

The Paris Accord was a joke a bad joke, designed partly by the United Nations to redistribute wealth from more successful nations such as the United States to questionable competent nations. This is a kind of socialism that makes even Bernie Sanders look conservative.

By hiding its agenda behind the Green movement, the United Nations is like someone dressing up like a nun to rob a bank.  You don't even know you're being robbed until you see the gun and maybe you will never see the gun since we’re all busy unscrewing light bulbs that they claim cause global warming.

email to Al Sullivan