It is with a heavy heart…
It saddens me to announce…
There’s no easy way to say this…

The conventions of announcing loss all fall short, and to someone with my temperament, inspire a certain amount of anger and resentment. Anger is the stage of grief I’m most at home in.

But I do need to let you all know that we said goodbye to our good dog Zephyr today. It was all pretty fast and unexpected, to say the least. He was suffering from Lyme nephritis, which we suspect was an unbeknownst to us low lying, chronic condition from when we first adopted him. He was already around four years old, then, and showed many signs of abuse and neglect, including the marks of many past bites, including ticks. I do take comfort in the fact that Dave and I were able to give him another three years of comfort, security, love and safety from the dark days he had previously endured. Zephyr thrived, for a time, in our home.

The last 48 hours (who am I kidding, the last 46 years), have been spent in introspection.

Unexpected. Expecations. Great and otherwise.

This is what I think we’ve been grappling with most this year.

We should be able to expect a certain amount of courtesy in our political discourse.

We should expect our news to be factual and fact checked, not sensationalized or syndicated with an eye to entertainment.

We should expect that we as a people progress and evolve, and not willfully resist history’s lessons of our brutal xenophobic past, let alone allow that past to dictate the present.

We should expect that people’s individual freedoms to identify as who they are, to love whom they love, to enjoy the equal rights codified in our nation’s inceptual documents, will be honored.

We should expect to be housed.

We should expect to be fed.

We should expect our health care needs to be met.

We should expect that our suburban homes will not be engulfed in wildfire, nor that we should yearly live in anxiety because our systems of utility, safety, and management have failed us.

We should expect to have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink.

We should expect that the government, which we support with large percentages of our hard-won wages to, when we cannot work, or pay rent, or pay mortgages, or need health care, support us in turn.

We should expect to be by the bedsides of our loved ones at their most vulnerable and when they pass, not on the other side of an inches-thick glass or the other side of a country, because neither touch nor travel are advisable or allowed.

I am thinking about all of these reasonable expectations, and how they have been disappointed again and again. More personally, I’m thinking that I had expected my well-cared-for dog, who was at most 8 years old, to have at least a few more years of happy, carefree life.

I’m so sad right now, but eerily calm. Because I, like many of us, have become somewhat inured to the disappointment of my expectations.

This is both a weird and on-brand way, I know, to talk about the passing of a pet. It comes of reaching a sort of limit. My bitter cup is full. Take it away.

How do I wrap this up? Maybe it’s a calling out. Death comes for us all. Illness. Loss. We do not have control over much of this, but I do think we should feel empowered to dictate some terms. Condolences are hard for me to take, however well meant. I think what I’m yearning for, in this moment, is that we exercise agency where we still have it. That we work toward making the changes and realizing the expectations that our systems have failed to accomplish.

What would comfort me is knowing that you all are out there, working in some fashion not to control things, but to try to make things incrementally better. Writing postcards to Georgia voters, or putting pressure on our city and county governments to better manage the wild and forested spaces around our towns that have been neglected so long. Adopting a new buddy and giving them a better life. Having a hard talk with a racist relative or friend. Questioning your own rigid beliefs if they infringe on the rights of other, and finding ways to educate yourself and become more flexible in your thinking.

“My dog has died, will you please try to make the world a better place?”

I don’t know how this is connected; I just know that it is.

Sunrise and Moonset at the pier in Deal, Kent

I’ve got a habit of picking a spot on the map and throwing my body at it. Usually, the place has some kind of hook: for instance a particular person, as in the case of my old psych M.A. cohort friend Mathilde, who needed a little moral and editorial support while slogging through her thesis in what I will always remember as the Stepford Golf Enclave of Lutz, Florida. Maybe Lutz wasn’t a pleasant revelation, but the Salvador Dalí Museum in nearby St. Petersburg – housing the largest collection of Dalí’s work outside of Europe – certainly was.

Weird history, particularly the supernatural, is another kind of hook. A few years ago, I got it into my head that I needed to visit the Cary House Hotel in Placerville, California. Hadn’t Mark Twain stayed there? Hook. Didn’t it have the second oldest elevator west of the Mississippi? Hook. WASN’T IT HAUNTED? Hooked. I certainly believed it was haunted, my first night there. Turned out the sepulchral voices calling to me from  beyond the veil belonged to nothing more nefarious than the clock radio, on all night and dialed down just between “inaudible” and “just audible enough to sound to someone with an overactive imagination like garbled messages from the spirit world.”

Cool.

But the upshot of that sleepless night and my gold rush country wandering was that Placerville turned out to be a mine of inspiration for the fantasy series I’m *cough* still working on.

This brings us, almost, to Deal: a living, breathing, picture postcard of a town on the Kent coast in Jolly Old. I found where I wanted to land in Deal by happenstance, through following Noel Fielding on Instagram. If you’re late to the party, you might have a pretty skewed view of him as a quirky caketaster.  I’m not going to get into his entire CV here, but Artist (yes, I insist on the CAPITAL ‘A’) is high on his list of accomplishments. Noel had posted that a couple of his paintings and a number of oil stick drawings were available for purchase in a tiny haven for art in Deal, DON’T WALK WALK Gallery. When one of his drawings, a picture of an owl entitled Andrew, You Piece of Shit became available, I knew it had to be mine.

Andrew, You Piece of Shit by Noel X

But that was just the initial tumble into the rabbit hole. I’ve since fallen in love with works in the gallery by Mark Hargreaves, Maria Clemen, Julius Kalamarz, Vanessa Panayi and Alexander Robertson, to name only a few of the artists featured in this wonderland of a gallery.

Some of the trouble I got into on this visit to DWW

And it’s all down to one fella, the artist and owner of DWW. Neil (Ned) Kelly will be celebrating his 20th year as an exhibiting painter this autumn with – fittingly – an installation of twenty new works entitled, An Instance of Return, at Deal Castle. When I made the trek out to Deal, this *ahem* “Billy Elliot of Visual Art,” gave me a lesson in art and psychology and big-heartedness, disguised as a casual chat over a couple of pints and a tour of the gallery.

Neil Kelly – and a tease of one of his fantastic paintings over my shoulder

That Neil isn’t only a gallery owner but an artist himself makes all the difference at DWW. He knows the genesis of each piece in the gallery off the cuff, and delights visitors with fun facts and affectionate anecdotes about the artists themselves. The artworks appear to be in constant conversation and rotation, like the records he plays in the shop (The Cure! The Stone Roses! Björk!). Maybe the best way I can describe the gallery’s vibe is that it feels warm and winking, like walking into an in-joke with an old friend.

And the driving ethos seems to be: sure, it’s art if it makes you think; it’s art if it makes you reflect; it’s art if it makes you uncomfortable; it’s art if it makes you cry; but it’s no lesser art if it makes you laugh, too.

Neil’s journey as an artist began as an art therapist, and it shows. His own work ranges from updated – or more accurately, “bastardized” – 19th Century paintings, to large-scale, moody storms and clouds and light, oh the light! You can stand in front of these pieces for a long, long time –  until they cease to be paintings and become a mirror of your own interiority, something that you both see and feel seen by. From the moment you step in the door, Neil’s art and the art he’s chosen tells you, “This guy gets it.”

Also, he is a lovely human, husband and father, whose care extends to the people who visit the gallery as much as the artists he features. When I asked after a piece he had hanging in the small studio space where he somehow manages to create images so vast in scope, he gave me a rundown of the artist, David Shrigley, and even insisted I take a book about him from his personal collection . I suspect Neil’s a born educator. We recognize our own. I further suspect he’s great at it.

The David Shrigley piece hanging in Neil’s work space, and my new writing mantra

I’m so glad I went to Deal. My brain is clicking and my own creativity feels revivified, which I think is really art’s highest calling, to bring us back into dialogue with each other and ourselves. What’s more, I have that elusive feeling of a lighter heart despite a lighter pocketbook. There’s no buyer’s remorse when the X on the map marks a treasure like DON’T WALK WALK Gallery.

Another view of the sunrise – because how can I not?

I’m moving through the heartland of California on the Coast Starlight, decidedly NOT on the coast today because of track maintenance along it’s more picturesque route.

It’s still a wonderful way to travel. What might be almonds to my right and may be olives to my left, either way the short exclamation of delight -ah!- leaning into the luxurious diphthong of the approximant ‘L,’ as alive in the mouth as those fruits themselves.
Everything outside is gold and green and gray and blue, and I’m only combatting the soporific effects of the train’s clack and sway by writing this right now.
A night in Los Angeles. Another train tomorrow. My first trip on the Sunset Limited, bringing my collection of long-haul Amtrak routes to a lucky number 7 including
The Coast Starlight

The California Zephyr

The City of New Orleans

The Empire Builder

The Capitol Limited

The Southwest Chief

Some of these multiple times. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t make special mention of the shorter, state-supported routes the Pennsylvanian and the Pacific Surfliner.
But I’ll also be hitting up the Texas Eagle on this trip, so it’ll be 8 long-hauls, the number of infinity, the number of bloody marys one requires to make these trips with sanity intact, if sanity is what you’re after. Personally? I think it’s overrated. You kinda hafta go past insanity to manage all the bullshit this world throws at you and come out the other side, a divine madness right through to a crystalline sobriety that makes you effective, powerful, and A Taker of No Shit.
But I digress. Trains.
I don’t know why I do it. Or if I’m honest, any ONE reason why. I find myself resisting the urge to make a list, to make a case for it, which isn’t an unusual compulsion for me. But the reason this time is, because it is laced with guilt.
My fingers pause at that word. Guilt. The flow of words is staunched, which is what you wanna do with a wound, usually, but there’s a certain amount of bloodletting you have to do to wash the infection out, first. So I have to exert some will to make the words drip from my fingertips again. Why guilt?
A feeling of redhandedness.
Of getting away with something by getting away.
I love California. This is a known fact. And I love my home county of Los Angeles, to the point that I will go to blows – verbal ones, anyway – with anyone who disputes my claim that it is one of the greatest cities in the world for culture and diversity and food and and and ad infinitum.
I think, maybe, I have been less clear about my love for Sonoma County, Santa Rosa specifically. And there’s nothing like having the object of your affection threatened to force you to examine your feelings and make a public declaration. Loudly.
Girlfriend in a coma I know, I know it’s serious.
When Dave and I first moved to the North Bay in 2005, we rented a place for a couple years in Mill Valley. And that was fine, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was commuting up to Sonoma State to finish my BA, and I was making friends up there along the way. When our lease was coming up, and basically the whole time we lived in Marin, I kept expressing to Dave this desire to have a place to put down roots, to live IN instead of commuting TO the communities we were generously welcomed by/forming around ourselves.
This is maybe a strange thing for a nomad to aspire to, but I don’t really think so. I’m a shitty nomad. I love to travel, yeah. It opens up my brain and my heart and it scares me and thrills me and bores me and footsores me, but one of the reasons I can travel with such assurance is that I have a home. That a part of my heart is always locked away alone in a little house with books and a dog and cats and coffee the way I like to make it for myself and a view of some trees.
So when that little house was threatened, I despaired. I had some shitty hours, kids. Some crappy, selfish hours, where I didn’t so much mourn the potential loss of my stuff, but of the house itself.
Of the colors I’d chosen for the walls and the archway we knocked in one of those walls between the living room and dining room to let in more morning light and the library we built with Cody Bean’s profile hidden in the design of the wooden bookcases and the old Gaffers & Sattler stove in the kitchen that came with the house as persnickety as an actual person born in 1938 and the ridiculous Team Zissou bathroom and the trees in the yard and the sage in the yard and the hard work evident inside and out that we ourselves and the talented craftspeople and artists with color and light and flora we had employed had committed to make our nest itself a little work of homespun art.
But that house still stands. Mourning it prematurely now looks, with hindsight, like a luxury. Ruminating on my fears that it COULD have burned is an offense. To the people who have actually lost their homes, and to the people who have lost loved ones. We have been so, so lucky.
I only engaged in this morbid thinking for about 24 hours of the seven days we were evacuated. It quickly became clear that the only way to alleviate the anxiety and make the situation MEAN anything – nobody’s house burns down for a reason: you get out there and you MAKE reason of fire’s brute appetite and indifference – was to DO.
To donate food and medicine and underpants. To help sort said donations. To make soups and sandwiches and sack lunches. To crack jokes and give hugs.
I am again lucky in that I know all the best makers and doers in Sonoma County, the people who could point me in the direction of where and who to help when I felt so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of what needed doing.
I would still be blindfolded and spinning in place, dizzy and nauseous and nowhere near the donkey without their know-how, delegation and efficacy.
So I felt better, for a while. I said many times over the course of the week that there isn’t much altruistic in volunteering when you yourself are under threat, or at minimum you have the empathy necessary to imagine yourself in another’s place.
Volunteering is another kind of evacuation: escaping into service for others so that you are not preoccupied with yourself, with your own fears. In such times, other people’s needs are a gift just as much as our donations and actions. It’s reciprocal and terrifying and beautiful, the way we need each other.
And with that realization, a new fear crept in, related to but different from the old fear of losing the house. “What if…what if we lose the house, and then we can’t really afford to stay local, and I lose my COMMUNITY?”
I am not proud of my quaking and cowardice, but neither am I ashamed to admit that it was this thought, had on Wednesday night the week of the fires, that finally made me cry.
Ruminating on this now as I sit in this southbound, awaybound train, I realize that it was less the fear of losing the structure of my physical home than the fear that I couldn’t withstand the loss of my weekly/daily/heck, HOURLY contact with the people whose friendship and love and talents have created a home for my soul on earth so solid underfoot and sheltering overhead that I can travel just about anywhere on the planet safe in the knowledge that those people exist and are just out there being themselves. That they are who make California home to me. Sonoma County home to me. Santa Rosa, not the home I was born in but the home I chose, home to me.
What I’m trying to say fam, is that I’m traveling. I need a space to write and think. I’m on a trip planned long before the fires, and while I’ve chosen to make it, I can physically feel a tugging in my chest as I move further and further from Sonoma County, even on this late-ass, slow moving train. The concept of “heart-strings” may be a cliché, man, but is it ever apt.
I had to think real hard about sharing this trip on social media. I really don’t want to appear callous or unaffected by what’s happened to our beautiful county, but I don’t think that anyone who knows me really thinks that.
So I’ve decided I’ll go ahead and post like I normally would in the hopes that my dependably ridiculous, often scatological and sometimes even – despite my hamfisted efforts and so many pictures of cats – beautiful misadventures with the awesome Ms. Jenn Hsyu will make you laugh or smile. But my heart will be with you. And when I get back, my hands, too.
None of us is fooling ourselves with the fiction that now that the fires have died down, the work is over. We have so much to continue doing together to ensure we don’t lose a single, precious member more of our awesome community.

❤️❤️❤️

A ne’er do well Californian, a Chautauqua, New York marathoner with a serious cupcake addiction, a man obsessed with seeing the Mets trounce the Cubs and another man trying to make it home in time to bid his dying 105-year-old mother goodbye walk into a Chicago-bound dining car…

This happens to me a lot. Okay, situations that feel like this seem to happen to me a lot.

I am seated opposite the pristine Chautauquan in her black and Tiffany blue horn rimmeds, and the intense, wiry Mets fan, who wears a plaid shirt over his sports paraphernalia yet still manages to leave me with the impression that under those sleeves, where some might tattoo thorns or Celtic knots or other decisions to be regretted later, his arms will be tattooed with the miniscule, neat and curving lines of baseball stitches.

Neither seems inclined to talk, which is not the way of it at mealtimes on a train, but I have been trying this thing lately where I’m not the first person to speak in any given uncomfortable situation, from the mildly to the excruciatingly so…so I don’t. My toes are curling in my boots with the effort.

At the last call for the five pm dinner slot, a 6’4” gentleman I measure to be in his early sixties with a belly that hovers in front of his otherwise lanky frame like a balloon low on helium, origamis himself into the spot next to me at table. He also says nothing. He makes a steeple of his fingers in front of half-closed eyes, elbows resting on the placemat in front of him.

I look away and out the window at how the westering light plays on the green and gold checkerboard of cultivated land and patches of wildwood, with here and there a tree torching red or orange or yellow, eager to usher autumn full in.

Our order is taken, the Balloon Man removing his finger teepee just long enough to hold the menu up to his nose so he can read it, and still no one has made a move to introduce themselves, to break the ice.

An older gentleman in the booth behind us whose hearing has gone the way of his teeth hollers between the staccato clack of dentures, “MY GREAT GRANDFATHER WAS AT THAT BATTLE, BUT I NEVER GOT TO MEET HIM AS HE UP AND DIED THE DAY I WAS BORN!”

I catch Chautauqua’s eye. Surely sharing a look and a smile with someone isn’t the same as starting the conversation? I haven’t broken whatever the weird, unwritten vow of silence it is I have with myself. Without leaning in or lowering her own voice she confides, “Harpers Ferry. It’s the same man who was talking about it in the waiting area, before we boarded. You could hear him all the way across the room.”

Excited that someone is finally speaking, I am eager and inane: “I got to the train kind of last minute, so I wasn’t in the waiting area at all before we had to board.” I gesture over my shoulder in the direction of the old man whose great grandfather fought, on a side indeterminate, at the Battle of Harpers Ferry. “But I like him. I like stuff like that.”

Chautauqua nods and smiles without using her teeth, her smooth blond hair moving not a whit out of place, and I think to myself she is just the sort of cool blonde Hitchcock would have approved. We lapse back into silence. To amuse myself and because I like symmetry, I sit wondering if there is also a Cary Grant-type here somewhere on the train, hiding out in a bathroom or half-suffocating in a bunk, waiting for her to give him mouth-to-mouth.

Trains set you off kilter, gift you sea legs on dry land; the fancies we pack in our bags and bring along when we travel by rail buoy the train along the tracks despite the clickety-clack and the awkward, cramped roomettes and the meals of warmed over fish and sugar free pudding, and the half-resentful air of the conductors and the recurring, inexplicable smell of broccoli in the corridors. What we imagine about trains has little to do with the reality of train travel, but nearly everything to do with the romance we ourselves bring aboard, clinging to our clothes and carryons, making these impossible scenarios seem more plausible. Also: too many old movies.

we all have it

If I were laying odds, I would have placed my bet on Mets to speak next, if only to start spewing baseball stats. He was wound up – forgive me, the metaphor is apt – like a pitch. But before he can say anything, the Balloon Man pipes up, through his finger teepee.

“Well I’m sorry if I’m not great company but this is the second time I’m doing this trip in three days and I haven’t slept since six o’clock yesterday morning because no sooner did I get to Virginia but my brother called me and said, ‘You’d better hurry home if you want to see your mother alive again for the last time,’ so like I said forgive me if I’m not good company usually I’d be the best company you can have on a train but not tonight.”

Consoling sounds that aren’t exactly words come from the rest of us seated at the table. Mets’ highstrung energy is knocked down a register, and he and Chautauqua share a covert “Here we go” glance. I raise my hand to the Balloon Man’s sweatshirt-clad shoulder. I think it’s the sweatshirt that makes me do it. No one should have to be that sad in a violently purple Lake Tahoe sweatshirt.

“I’m so sorry. And I’m sure there’s no need to apologize to us. It’s completely understandable.”

“Completely understandable,” echo Mets and Chautauqua, nodding in unison, because faced with a stranger’s tragedy in a transient moment, it is easiest to be an undifferentiated voice in a Greek chorus of grief.

The Purple Balloon Man nods his acceptance of our feeble offerings, but still insists, “No, I need forgiveness.” He shakes his head like a dog dislodging a tick and removes his hands from before his mouth. “So what are we all doing here? You, young lady, what brings you on the Capitol Limited?” he stabs a finger at Chautauqua, a bad play at forced light-heartedness making him appear more aggressive than I’m sure he means.

Chautauqua, bless her, is unflappable. She observes him coolly over her glasses. “Just a little weekend getaway. My best friend lives in DC. She moved there to get her Masters.” I get the feeling that offering up this much information to him is out of character and a supreme act of kindness on her part.

The Purple Balloon Man, however, is not satisfied. “And what did you do there?”

Chautauqua frowns, shrugs. “Georgetown. Jazz.” Brightening, “I have DOZENS of cupckakes from Georgetown Cupcakes in my roomette, which may or may not make it all the way back home.” This is not an offer to the table at large, nor does she say this like she is joking.

She suddenly leans in conspiratorially, and as someone who I guess looks like they could appreciate the following story she says directly to me with more animation I’ve seen from her yet, “You know Georgetown Cupcakes? They have a Kitchenaid mixer, pink, with rhinestones on it, that they say was a gift or a prize or something from someone important. They were on television. Have you seen the lines? They go out the door sometimes. But I called ahead and just picked up.”

I make all the corresponding faces of simulated surprise and delight throughout this little speech. I’m pretty sure Chautauqua called ahead before she was born, and demanded cupcakes await her arrival.

Satisfied or bored, the Purple Balloon Man turns his attention to Mets. “And you, young man?” Young being a relative term.

“I’m headed to Chicago to see some baseball…” he catches himself “…to see the Mets BEAT the cubs,” he says with exactitude.

“Mmmhmm, mmmhmm,” the Purple Balloon Man is thoughtful. “My mother says if they win she’ll have been there for their first win AND what hopefully won’t be their last.”

Mets is riveted. “Their first? But that was in 1908!”

The salad comes, and between what sounds to me like an excessive amount of crunching for this limp train salad, Purple Balloon Man clarifies, “Well. She was born in 1910. But when she was a little girl she remembers it still felt like they were winners.”

“Oh.” Mets sits back and attends to his own plate. Over the table hangs both the unspoken and uncharitable fact that while we all feel bad for the Purple Balloon Man, 105 years is a pretty good run. Also, that the Purple Balloon Man is given to bending the truth. I, as a storyteller, support and appreciate this.

Silence and chewing, chewing and silence. Swallowing.

“My mother has lived in Chicago all her life,” our patron saint of unlikelihood intones, with an air of pronouncement. “I think maybe she’s just holding on to see the Cubs win. Give her one, last, little bit of joy before she shuffles off.”

What will Mets say to this? He looks uncomfortable and at a loss. I’ve foregone the depressed salad for a glass of what I’m assured is white wine. This is probably why I say, making the face of mock admonition you, if you know me even a little, have seen me make, “Well I guess you can’t root for the Mets, now.”

This is greeted, luckily, by a general laugh. But then Mets grimaces, pauses before forking in another bite of salad and mutters, “I guess we can let ‘em win a coupla games.” Perfect.

cubs, a prune, an orange segment

Now the main course has come, and the Purple Balloon Man, tired I think, of ruminating on the end of the matriarchal line yet loathe to let anyone else dominate the conversation, sends his steak back because there are vegetables touching it on the plate, commences a long lecture about how one should always order their meat cooked one degree lower than they’d actually like it on a train, laments that real china is no longer used on board, and regales us with a series of grim airline stories that account for his dedicated rail travel.

“And my daughter was only two years old, two. years. old. And they didn’t trust the little pink jumpsuit she was wearing for the cold, so they wanted to take her in a back room to check it for explosives and I tell them, ‘I’m her father, and I don’t know you, and I don’t know you, and she’s only two years old so I’m going, too’ and they tell me ‘Sir, you can’t do that and if you continue to resist we will call in the FBI and have you arrested.’” He pauses for dramatic effect.

“So what’d you do?” I ask, less because I believe him or am sincerely interested, and more because politeness dictates and I am on automatic pilot and if no one asks he’ll continue, all right, but probably louder, to make sure we’re all listening.

“I let them take her. I just wanted to get her home.”

This bums me out. This bums the whole table out. So when it’s time for dessert and the Purple Balloon Man bullies us all into the tiramisu – “You can almost taste the rum in it!” we none of us resist.

I am on the inside of the bench seat, closest to the window, and the Purple Balloon Man is a slow eater. Half his steak is still there, and even some stalwart salad from the first course remains, limping along. It’s when the rest of us are halfway through the plastic potted tiramisu that I know what’s going to happen. Chautauqua begins to send her fingers casually, like exploratory scouts, into the depths of her purse for a tip. Mets sees this and hurries to pull a fiver from his own wallet. I look at them, not quite beseechingly, but with mute incredulity. I thought we were in this together, I scream at them with my eyes. But they refuse to look at me directly while they make their perfunctory goodbyes. I watch them over my shoulder all the way out of the dining car.

“Well, it’s just you and me now, young lady. No one else wants to hear an old man’s stories.” This is the way of old guys on trains. They know.

And I know I’m in for it when the Purple Balloon Man settles back and begins with a neat exposition of his surname.

“I don’t think there’s a hundred people in the United States with my last name. My name is a German-Aryan name that no one can ever pronounce. Starts with a G—“ He proceeds to spell it. I proceed to pronounce it, because it is not a difficult name, particularly if you have any knowledge of German. He proceeds to be piqued.

“Well there you go. One in a million chance.” Man, I can’t get any credit.

Over the next half hour, I manage two or three polite interjections, which are mostly plowed under for fodder in the field of Mr. G—‘s soliloquy. I would like to share with you a portion of the lecture I received, to the best of my recollection, which I’ve titled Rich Men’s Wives and Kids These Days: The Nameless Scourge Undermining Family Values and Ruining America, a treatise delivered October 19, 2015 by Floyd G—, as he crosses between time zones via rail on his way to see his possibly 105-year-old mother for the last time.

Kids these days, they don’t understand the meaning of hard work.* My grandmother, she worked cleaning out the school buses in the Thirties in Milwaukee. They’d park ‘em all in this big , cold warehouse, no heat no air conditioning, and she’d work all night cleaning ‘em so they’d be ready to go out again in the morning.

“That does sound like hard work.”

Damn right it was hard work! And cold in the winter. Hot in the summer. And what little in the way of clothes she had on her back and she had to get on her hands and knees and clean up after kids and winos who got sick in the back of the bus on the ride home.

[Winos? I thought we were talking about school buses, but okay. IT WAS A DIFFERENT TIME, ANNE]

On her hands and knees! For a pittance by today’s standards, by any day’s standards. And on the weekends, she worked at Woolworth’s. You remember Woolworth’s, with the soda counter, where you could get a hamburger? No way you could remember Woolworth’s. You know Ray Kroc? The McDonald’s billionaire? You wanna read an excellent biography, a true American story, you read his. He worked selling malted machines, you know, that stir up the shakes? He got a contract, got Mr. Woolworth or whomever, to buy up a malted machine for every store. He got a bonus for brokering that deal, Ray Kroc, that’s how he made his money. I don’t remember what his cut was, was it $32,000 or $37,000, but it was somewhere in there. And you know what he did? He went home to his first wife and said, ‘I’m gonna buy a name.’ So he approached the McDonald family in Des Plaines, Illinois, and he used all his money to buy a name.

[As a California nerd, I’m pretty that the first McDonald’s were in San Bernardino, though it is true that Kroc opened his first in Des Plaines; I know at this point though that there’s no stopping Floyd on a roll, so I keep it to myself]

A name! His wife thought he was crazy. She left him. But you know what, she’d stuck by him all through the downturn in the mixer business and how difficult that was, and he never forgot her. When he died, he left her with seven-point-five million in McDonald’s stock. He’d remarried, but he still took care of her. Yes sir, he took a gamble on a name, took his bonus and sold his house and car right out from under the wife and it paid off! Young people don’t know how to take chances like that these days, don’t want to risk anything, just like Ray Kroc’s first wife.

“Don’t you think maybe it’s that many young people feel displaced, and that the kind of honest, hard work your grandmother did has been so denigrated in our society that those jobs aren’t even seen as an option?”

They don’t have any family values! Like Sam Walton’s wife. I worked for Wal-Mart, oh, must’ve been ten years a while back, and the whole time I worked there it was a class operation. A strong family values company. None of this working on Thanksgiving. You want us to give up one of the few days off we have, Thanksgiving day, the day we have to prepare for that God awful Black Friday? That isn’t even humane. But I guess they feel like they have to do it to make the money, to get their money’s worth. Kids these days don’t wanna work. To recoup, they got to be open just about 24-7, I suppose. Even McDonald’s is open on Thanksgiving. Used to be you couldn’t find a place open on a Sunday, let alone Thanksgiving day. You mark my words, before you or I are in the grave, we’ll see these places open on Christmas day. It all comes down to family values. Wal-Mart was a good, strong family values store. Ever since Sam Walton died and his wife’s took over, things have gone downhill.

“Is it really his wife? Isn’t Wal-Mart a publicly traded company?”

I mean, sure there’s a whole whaddyacallit, board of directors or whatever, but you think if she wasn’t so greedy they’d be open Thanksgiving? No. It all went downhill after old Sam passed. Made no provision for his people. I suppose people do what they have to do. You know, I did some research on that ancestry.com, you now that ancestry.com? It’s wonderful. I found out my father stole tickets to a Cubs game when he was a boy, and got caught, and was in jail for two days, and paid a fine of seven dollars and fifty cents. I told my mother about it, and she said, ‘How do you even know it was him?’ and I said, ‘Mother, how many Floyd G—‘s were living at that time and were exactly that age and would’ve done something like that?’ I don’t think there’s a hundred people in the United States with that last name.

The nice thing about Floyd G— is that when he’s done holding you hostage he’s done. He leaves you feeling what I imagine a sentient spittoon, full, would feel like, but eventually he does go. In fact, he gets up with an alacrity that belies his size, his purple balloon belly hovering over the edge of the table as he looks down at me and says “Well, it was nice talking at to you. Sorry I’m not as good company as I would be in other circumstances. Usually I am full of interesting facts and anything you’d want to know about the railroad.” I have a very hard time imagining what Floyd would be like unbound by the constraints of grief.

“What is your mother’s name, Mr. G—?”

“Ethel. Her name’s Ethel. What makes you ask?”

“Just, I’ll be thinking about her. And you. And for the record, my name is Anne, Mr. G— my name’s Anne.”

*Author’s note: people really do say these things, though the odds of finding them saying these things on trains is significantly improved, because older people.

People were murdered on the west coast today and I don’t even know yet how many or why, not that there can be a logical why or that it will matter, anyway, when the facts are presented. People were murdered on the west coast today.

I’ve already seen posts urging me to sign a condolence card for the families of victims at Umpqua Community College. We don’t even talk about a tragedy in hushed tones and the past tense, anymore. When this particular tragedy was still unfolding, as far as I could see from the news, officials were referring to it as this tragic thing that had already happened, as this occurrence in a box with solid and known dimension that we could put on the shelf with all the others. Is it tragic? Yes. But when it’s still happening, when the bullets are screaming overhead and lives are bleeding out into the ground, it is not something we should refer to in the past tense. Not something we categorize as quickly as possible and move on.

It’s something we should fucking stop. Now.

I don’t know the people who died and are possibly dying in critical care right now (this time and yet), and in our full-to-overflowing world of people it’s hard, sometimes, to even summon the proper set of human emotions for your next door neighbor, let alone someone several hundred miles away, let alone someone on the opposite side of the world.

If we could feel, for just a moment, the full impact of every single injustice and murder and abuse to their fullest extents being experienced each day, I think we’d all just sink to our knees, whatever we were doing wherever we were, weeping.

So I get down on myself, I really do, for being able to post pictures of cats on the internet or pithy jokes about bodily functions, or even to take a moment to scream into the internet void any little personal frustration, in the face of all this.

Which is why I’ll reiterate time and again that the number one hashtag every white lady sitting comfortably in her goddamn library drinking her goddamn probiotic shake and typing her precious little feelings into a computer of dubious origin should be ‪#perspective.

But I’m not immune or unfeeling. On the contrary, I feel a lot. I actually have too many fucks to give, which is why I cut through each day with the sharp edge of my tongue and the blunt edge of feigned indifference. If I don’t, wherever I am whatever I’m doing, I’ll just sink to my knees, weeping.

It’s not the sense of helplessness that overwhelms me. It’s rage. I’m paralyzed by the depth of my own rage, and the way it boils my blood and forces the breath from my lungs and how quickly it reduces my own humanity to a single desire to match violence for violence.

This I feel is the mistake of people who label progressives and liberals as ineffectual hippies frolicking in a some kind of nonstop, rarified community drum circle. It’s not that we don’t feel fear, or rage, or jealousy or hatred: it’s that the true progressive looks at those feelings in themselves and wants not to multiply them but reduce them, to make room for something better.

What I’m getting at, here, is that when I hear about gun violence, there is a lizard brain in me that wants to take up my own arms. When I hear about a foiled subway attack, or the closure of a world landmark because a couple of olive-skinned youth were spotted with big backpacks, I am not all that different from the guy who thinks Trump has some common sense ideas, who has a gunrack and a gun safe and a gun locker and some strong if misguided feelings about the second amendment.

Enough enough enough. How does it hurt anyone but those profiting off death-in-potentia to implement background checks for weapon ownership? To give help, not guns, to those channeling the rage that they too, have been screaming into the void until their voiceless erupts in violence?

I feel the creeping fear raising the animal hackles on my neck, too.

But the difference is, the difference is I take a deep fucking breath. I think about the world I want to live in, even when I have both eyes open to the world that is.

And if this makes me a sissy, a liberal, a lamb to the slaughter, so be it. I’m not going to spend my life so fixated on death and paralyzed by fear that I don’t live it, or spend my days making sure I’ve selfishly stockpiled the right amount of ammunition in direct correlation to how much more I value my life over someone else’s.

If in my travels I die in a terrorist attack, or by the gun of someone mentally ill or so malformed in the crucible of our racist, misogynist society that the only power they believe they have is the length and warmth of a fired shaft in their hand, so be it.

I’d rather go that way than crouched behind a bunker built of fear and exceptionalism. I’d rather go that way than compromise that what I want, realistically or no, is to realize the dream of peace.

Jesus. Peace to those in pain. Peace to those fighting for their lives. Peace to those whose lives are already lost. Peace to us all.

As a geek of words, I really, really love that Scalia put (California) in parentheses, that is, “(California does not count)” as the West in his dissent. The guy shows some real understanding, actually.

Geographically isolated for much of the U.S.’s glorious and sordid history, we are bound between the parenthetical described by the Sierra Nevada range to the east and another by the Pacific Ocean to the west, the whole while writing our rich history in many-colored inks on the scorching line of fire that is the Mojave.

If you REALLY wanna get into it, sir, we can add in the Klamath, the Northern and Southern Coast Ranges, and the Transverse, and how frankly, the map of California begins to look like the big, beautiful and bountiful vagina of this nation out of which we birth most of the country’s agriculture and entertainment.

Not to mention the twins we’ve traditionally shared custody of with our crazy communist cousins in liberal bastions (read: places where people are GENERALLY educated to know better than to discriminate) on the Eastern Seaboard, science & tech. If YOU don’t want or value them, no problem. They aren’t exactly orphans hanging out on your doorstep with begging bowls.

And speaking of an East Coast education, we can talk about just how your Georgetown and Harvard Law background makes you such a great spokesperson for the people you presume to champion in the flyover states of your fantasy “West”. I’ll assume your credentials include some time playing cowboy and ropin’ dogies out at your pal Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo…oops! That’s in California, too. My bad.

And finally we can talk about how–not perfectly, not without gross error, no!–but how generally our diversity and progressive policies put us miles beyond your True West, and ALMOST as far left on the map as I’d like to be.

6 am call times and an unrelenting pop song on repeat; tender stems the silvered color sunlight brings out of fog and punctuated with exclamatory yellow buds; a single oak holds back a landslide, rocks straining against a tangle of roots, outspread Kali arms for once keeping chaos at bay; the old stone love seat at the top of the mountain is crumbling away, the view from this precarious shrinking perch now chaparral-obstructed.

I can’t see.

I pissed off the side of an outcropping today, up a trail toward the eastern end of the Angeles. I knew what I was doing, and where I was…moreso, I think, than when you’re discretely tucked away behind a civilized bathroom door. Voiding the bladder outside brings the animal self forward, vulnerability heightens your senses; eyes, ears and nose all dilate until you’re back on your feet proper, standing erect, the alpha predator in the story you tell yourself about yourself in the world.

I watched a woman piss off the side of a curb today, in noontime traffic on the busy corner of Franklin and Vermont. I can’t pretend to know her thought process. One of the young men with me said, “Well, where do you want her to do it?” and I had too many answers. Discretely tucked away behind a civilized bathroom door. Because I wanted her safe? (I hope so) Because I didn’t want to see it? (I’m ashamed to say it) Because my eyes, ears and nose dilated on contact with her? Because my animal self came forward, assessing threat to my young charges because sadly one of the first things I think is: if someone will squat and piss on a street corner, what do they have to lose? A predator in the world.

God no, I don’t think so. Prey. Prey to addictions, to her own mind turned adversary. Prey to the apathy of the traffic racing by her tender haunches, perched so precariously a few feet from the suddenly sinister silvered grills of the cars and their hot black rubberound feet spinning indifferently and at inhuman speeds. Where are the oaken arms to hold it all back?

I can’t unsee.