09/23/2024
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Rebekah Spivey, The Writing Life

Big Talk Un-miked: Rebekah Spivey

Welcome to the second installment in my Pencil series on The Writing Life. This came about after I’d completed an article for the Limestone Post on the Writers Guild at Bloomington’s Local Authors Book Fair, scheduled for Saturday, November 2, 2024, at the Monroe County History Center. I had interviewed some terrific writers for the article and turned a few of those interviews into Big Talk episodes but still had great material that didn’t fit into either format. So, I’ve decided to turn that stuff into Pencil posts. The other day, author and Book Fair organizer Molly Gleeson was the subject. Today, it’s editor, author, and writing Facilitator Rebekah Spivey. She works as an editor for Holon Publishing, founded by Jeremy Gotwals of Bloomington. His Big Talk chat, in two parts, with alternate host Alex Ashkin can be heard here and here. Rebekah has published a novel, Marigolds and Boxes through Holon.)

MG; How long have you been writing?

REBEKAH: Since I can remember.

MG: As a little kid?

REBEKAH: Yeah. I made up stories about animals and people. It was a way to distract myself from what was going on at home which wasn’t always a whole lot of fun.

MG: Why did you choose words? You could have drawn pictures or sung songs.

REBEKAH: That’s just part of who I am and partly because I can’t draw [Laughs.] I like ideas. I have more ideas than I have time to implement them.

MG: You worked for the Indiana Daily Student newspaper, better known as the IDS, for 17 years before you retired in 2012. (She handled payroll and distribution, among many other tasks.)

Mostly I was the “mom.” Talking to the students, talking them off the ledge. A lot of crying went on in our offices.

(After leaving the IDS, Spivey became a Facilitator for Women Writing for (a) Change, a national organization with local chapters. Rebekah took the Facilitator training program offered by the Bloomington chapter. Members participate in “Circles,” formal writing groups led by Facilitators where they can read their work aloud and get feedback.)

MG: Is a Facilitator like the chair of a meeting?

REBEKAH: That’s a good way to say it. We prepare an agenda. There’s a poem, some epigraphs, some prompts. We have small groups where you’re paired with three or four other people; that’s where the real work gets done. You share your work with the group and then we have proscribed ways to ask for feedback so you’re getting the feedback you want and people aren’t crossing boundaries with your work.

“Fast writes” prompt a lot of deep writing. You get a prompt and you write about it for ten or fifteen minutes. You shut off that inner editor and you just write. It’s amazing what comes out.

I’ve seen women come in broken. Our mission is to help people find their voices.

MG: Broken in their personal, private lives?

REBEKAH: Absolutely. It’s where their life is at that moment. They’re kind of closed up into this tight little ball. Then, as they write and they find their voices and they see they’re supported unconditionally — we always presume goodwill in our Circles — they blossom! You can just see them standing up straighter and unfolding and becoming themselves. As a Facilitator, it’s a beautiful thing to watch.

MG: In 2017 you wrote an essay titled “Names I Have Been Called to My Face and the Message That Resulted from Them.” It’s like a résumé or a CV.

REBEKAH: I just keep reinventing myself. I’d been called Becky by my family for years and that sounded kind of childlike. I did a numerology thing and I changed the spelling of Rebecca to Rebekah and I took my paternal grandmother’s maiden name, Spivey. She was someone I really looked up to.

MG: The last line of the essay is, “I wonder who I’ll become next.” Do you still wonder?

REBEKAH: Well, I’m a published author. That’s who I am right now.

MG: Will you be another person later?

REBEKAH: Oh yeah! I’m already working on a flight plan. Stayed tuned for that!

MG: You co-founded Poetry Detectives. What is that?

REBEKAH: My friend Jackie Tirey — she was a student at the IDS; that’s how we met — we wanted to take the intimidation out of poetry and just have a discussion in a non-academic setting. That’s not easy to do in Bloomington

MG: Intimidation? It’s poetry!

REBEKAH: People are intimidated by it. They think they’re not smart enough to understand it. It doesn’t make sense to them. Once I was introduced to poetry through Women Writing for (a) Change, where you really get into the poem, you read it, you get writing prompts from these poems, I just fell in love with poetry. I wanted other people to enjoy it, too, in a way that they could get out of it whatever they needed. We did that for several years.

MG: Good writing is best when it flows like music.

REBEKAH: That’s a very apt description. We would discuss lyrics sometimes. Lyrics can be poetry. One of my favorite ones that we discussed was Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” You can find poetry anywhere. Sometimes I will take a Fast Write, write it as an essay, and then turn it into a poem.

MG: When do you write?

REBEKAH: I don’t write every day, but most days. I like to go to coffeeshops and write.

MG: Just like “Writing Down the Bones“!

REBEKAH: Exactly. Natalie Goldberg. Get out there! I have gotten more ideas…. I’m a really good eavesdropper. I learned to be hyper-vigilant as a child so I can listen and still do other stuff at the same time. I sometimes take notes so be careful what you say in coffeeshops if I’m around — it might end up in a book! [Laughs.]

If I’m at home, I’m distracted — “Oh, I need to alphabetize my spice rack.” So I get good energy from people.

I used to do a thing called Writing Wednesdays where I would put on Facebook, “I’m going to be at this coffeeshop from one to four, come join me if you want.” People would come and write. I’m starting to do it again. You’re wlecome to join us.”

MG: Thank you.

REBEKAH: Thank you.

Listen to the Big Talk edition featuring Rebekah here.

09/18/2024
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Molly Gleeson, The Writing Life

Big Talk Un-Miked: Molly Gleeson

I’ve just finished writing an article for the Limestone Post on the Writers Guild at Bloomington‘s Local Authors Book Fair, to be held Saturday, November 2, 2024, at the Monroe County History Center. There’ll be 31 local authors whose books have been published either traditionally or non-traditionally — that is, either by a publishing house or self-published — on hand. In doing the story I got to meet some awfully cool writers, including Molly Gleeson, who is organizing the affair, Rebekah Spivey, Keiko Kasza, and Claire Arbogast. All but Kasza were recorded for Big Talk editions (Keiko, a native Japanese speaker, is shy about speaking English publicly, althoughI think she’s being too hard on herself).

We five covered so much stuff, much of which doesn’t appear in the printed story or on the program episode, that I figured, hell, why don’t I just turn parts of those chats into Pencil posts? And so I will.

These conversations will be edited for accuracy and narrative flow. Otherwise, I’m presenting them in Q&A format, just as we recorded our conversations.

I’ll start today with Molly.

MG: What’s your writing all about?

MOLLY: I write fiction and I write some memoir nonfiction. The books I’ve written are…. [pauses, laughs modestly] not published.

The most recent book I’ve been working on, I call it my smutty, apocalyptic, survivalist, lesbian love story. The grid goes down and there’s this group of women traveling north, trying to get into Canada. They have to go through the Boundary Waters in Minnesota. It’s an adventure.

MG: How long have you been working on it?

MOLLY: I started in September of 2020 so it was a really dark time.

MG: Depressing!

MOLLY: Yes. It was kind of an antidote, actually. It’s not a depressing book. It’s meant to be hopeful. It has a happy ending. People, in spite of adversity and terrible things going on, can still fall in love. They still thrive. Life still happens.

I finished a novella in April. It’s a contemporary story about a woman who’s recently divorced with a ten-year-old kid. Her kid is being bullied at school and she confronts the principal. She and the principal end up having an affair. It’s a love story.

MG: Humor?

MOLLY: Yes, a lot, actually.

MG: You’re balancing the adversity with humor.

MOLLY: Yes, you have to.

MG: How do you write?

MOLLY: In the last five or eight years, I write everything by hand.

MG: On what?

MOLLY: A notebook. Like Moleskine or something.

MG: Cursive or printing?

MOLLY: Oh, cursive! Then at some point I’ll put it on the computer.

MG: Which way do you think better?

MOLLY: For some reason, it’s been by hand. I don’t know why.

MG: That’s how you were raised?

MOLLY: Yeah, that too. I’m really old school.

MG: When do you write?

MOLLY: I’m not a good routine person. I write, usually, in the afternoon. I’m not much of a morning person. I don’t write for long. I don’t put a lot of pressure on myself to write. I know some writers are like, “I have to get a thousand words today!” I’m not like that. It doesn’t work for me that way.

I have to feel it first. With my stories, I always know the beginning scene and I know the end scene. And it’s kind of a mystery to fill it in.

MG: It’s a discovery.

MOLLY: Yeah, yeah, yeah!

There’s the pantser/planner thing. If you write by the seat of your pants, they call you a pantser. Or are you a planner? Do you plot it all out? I never outline.

MG: I read somewhere once that Kurt Vonnegut wrote in different colors for each character and their dialogue. We’ve all got our ways, our tics.

MOLLY: Yeah. It has to be that way. You have to find what works for you. Otherwise, you won’t write. You have to find your way.

MG: When are you going to publish?

MOLLY: [Laughs] Ah! [Sighs] Well, the book fair has taken over my life. But I did an online class in May. It was incredibly helpful. It was though Authors Publish, a Canadian organization, nonprofit. They offer classes and free lectures and workshops and stuff. Anyway, I took this class called Revising Your Novel or something like that. I took notes and now I need to work hard on that.

So, the question is, when will I publish? It could be a while. But I do have shorter things out that I’m trying to get published.

MG: Are you afraid?

MOLLY: Nah.

MG: Well, I am.

MOLLY: Okay.

MG: I’m always afraid.

MOLLY: Well, yes. Life in general.

MG: I think, “Why would anyone want to read my stuff?” I have to go through these mental gymnastics.

MOLLY: Like the imposter syndrome. Yeah, yeah! They’re always hovering back over your left shoulder.

MG: The bad guy.

MOLLY: The bad guy! Yes, it is!

I’ve gotten away from, “I have to get this published traditionally,” “I have to make money,” ” I have to be famous.” I’ve let a lot of that go. The writing is the thing.. For me it’s I just need this in my life. I may never “make it.” That’s not the thing. It’s creating something. You’ve made something. You’ve told some truths.

MG: Do you enjoy the actiual physical work of writing?

MOLLY: I do. I mean, the tortured artist thing is…, we’re over that! [Laughs] It can be joyful.

It can also be work. Especially going back and editing.

MG: People don’t realize you can be writing and not have a pen in your hand or your fingers on the keyboard. I do the dishes every morning, but I’m actually writing.

MOLLY: Yes, yes, exactly! The moments that you wake up at five o’clock in the morning and you’ve got some idea. Or doing the dishes. Or taking a walk. Or talking to somebody. You are always writing.

MG: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

MOLLY: I came to it late, but I actually worked on a student newspaper in high school. There was something called the “Whole Press.” It came out in the Herald-Times — it was called the Herald-Telephone back then. It had writers and editors from all the high schools: Ellettsville, Bloomington North, Bloomington South. I was an editor for South. That’s where I learned how to write.

I got my masters degree at the Indiana University School for Public and Environmental Affairs. My $60,000 mistake! I’m not very good at what I should be good at. [She took a job in Washington, DC after getting her masters.]

My family came to DC for Thanksgiving. My older sister’s boyfriend at the time said, “Why aren’t you writing?”

I said, ” What would I write about?

I was probably 32. I didn’t have an answer for that until I was probably 40.

I knew I wanted to be a writer. I just didn’t know how to start. After my fiasco in DC as a federal employee, I went overseas for a long time and taught English in China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. I did that, in part, so I’d have something to write about. Later I realized you can write about anything. And I do now. I write about anything. But back before that, I thought I had to have something “big” to write about.

So I wrote a partial memoir of my time in China and then, later, I wrote a whole novel about Saudi Arabia. I taught overseas for like seven or eight years. Then I came back here because my parents are here. And then I got involved with Women Writing for (a) Change. That helped me write regularly. They have “circles” — workshops, basically. They have retreats. A lot of great opportunities. It’s also for all genders, too, sometimes.

MG: Thanks.

MOLLY: I enjoyed it.

 

09/17/2024
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Assassination, Conspiracy Theory, Donald Trump

503 Words: A Lot of Loons

Now a second loon has pointed a long gun at the thankfully-ex-president. One loon pulled the trigger in July and clipped The Only One Who Can Fix It in the ear. The other one, this past weekend, was subdued before he got the aspiring King of the World in his sight.

So what do No. 45 and his Ohio messenger boy say afterward? That the Democrats are responsible for these attacks. And their brother in evil spirit, Elon Musk, wonders publicly why our holy land’s mental patients can’t start opening fire on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

And, to think, some 45 percent of the electorate wants this capo and his mob to move back into the White House next January.

People, we Americans are a fucked up bunch.

And I’m not going to let those on my side of the fence off easily either. My social media feed is rife with folks swearing to their goddesses that the Trump crew has staged one, the other, or both of the assassination attempts.

I’m going to say the same thing I say to Trumpists when they spew their “theories”: show me evidence. Until then, these dramatic, fantastic allegations are irresponsible. It’s not that it’s impossible for a demagogic, wannabe emperor and his co-conspirators to stage a phony attack. Hell, The Hillbilly Elegist just a couple of days ago admitted he and his boss made up the lie about Haitian immigrants eating pet pooches and kitty cats, reasoning, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” Old Joey Goebbels would have grinned in approval. The Trump/Vance syndicate is more than capable of exaggerating, cherry-picking, fibbing, lying, and even choreographing false flag incidents to serve their malevolent ends.

Would your jaw drop if you learned the sniper at Trump’s Florida golf club was a put-up job? Me neither.

That kind of thing is not unheard of in American history. For instance, consider the bounty alleged to have been offered for anyone ambitious enough to tail and kill Martin Luther King, Jr. until the very day someone actually did it. The same year James Earl Ray hoped to earn his hefty financial bonus, the FBI and the Chicago Police actually planted agents provocateurs in the local antiwar movement, hoping to smear the peaceniks. The G-men and the cops also teamed up to cultivate a plant within the local Black Panther Party chapter. The plan resulted in the state-sanctioned murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark on December 4, 1969.

The fact is, even in our land, there exist powerful people as amoral as Nazis, Stalinists, Iranian mullahs, and even the fictional sadists of the book, 1984.

All that said, we still need proof to convict the Trump gang and there is none as yet regarding its staging of the assassination attempts.

Just because we want something to be true doesn’t make it so.

My team sneers at Trumpists for that very sin.

09/13/2024
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2024 Election, Donald Trump

563 Words: Jump!

Now we have bomb threats, harassment, and physical attacks directed against ethnic Haitians in Springfield, Ohio following the Stable Genius’s demented charge during the presidential debate Tuesday that immigrants of that stripe are busy dining on people’s pet cats and dogs.

The thankfully-ex-president has been spewing this kind of mouth toxin since he first announced his run for the presidency back in the summer of 2015. You may recall, early on in his then-seemingly quixotic campaign to become the Leader of the Free World, he swore up and down he saw on TV in the hours after the Twin Towers fell on 9/11 hordes of Arabs dancing in the New Jersey streets in celebration. Like the cats & dogs charge, the dancing in the streets rap was a product of the man’s pathologically unhealthy imagination.

Even allies of The Only One Who Can Fix It know he’s full of shit in this case. Republican activist and rhetorical arsonist Christopher Rufo has offered a $5000 reward for evidence that Haitians in the Ohio town indeed have prepared poodle casseroles, inasmuch as no such confirmation exists in the world sane people occupy. Rufo so badly wants this gross gustatory phenomenon to be true he’s willing to shell out real dough for it. No one, as yet, has claimed the prize.

The clear pattern has been established over the last nine years that when Donald J. Trump says jump, the most unhinged among his fanboys reply, How High? And, while I’m up in the air, will I still be physically capable of throwing acid in a dark-skinned person’s face?

A decent human being might conclude after seeing, for instance, the reactions of the motley crew Trump addressed the afternoon of January 6, 2021 that there’s a direct link between his words and anti-social and  criminal lashing out by a significant portion of his political base. That decent human being might say to himself, Hmm. Maybe I oughtta tone it down a tad.

Donald J. Trump is not a decent human being.

And, of course even after the fact, Trump pats his most felonious followers on the back when they go so far as to try to take the lives of anybody not as enthralled with No. 45 as they are. To wit, Trump’s “some very fine people on both sides” quote after one of his idolators plowed his car into a crowd of anti-fascist protesters at Charlottesville, Virginia’s Unite the Right Rally in 2017.

So, both before and after, Donald J. Trump’s rhetoric eggs on the most volatile among his base.

There can only be two possibilities for this:

  1. Trump is blithely oblivious to the effect of his words
  2. Trump knows precisely what he’s doing

Now, Trump is no intellectual. He lacks discipline in his thinking. He loves moving and shaking and so is too impatient to sit down and read a book. His thought processes are all viscerally-based. Yet, he’s quick, he’s clever, and he’s bright. He’s got enough on the ball to recognize patterns. He speaks, his followers act.

Trump’s no Nazi but. like Hitler, he’s a small man who finds himself able to move masses. Imagine being so powerful that all you have to do is utter a few words and thousands, even millions of people jump.

They jumped on that January day in Washington, DC. They’ll jump again the day after this November’s election no matter who wins the race.

08/30/2024
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Bicycles, Cars, Traffic Safety

795 Words: Right Of Way

A couple of guys were riding bicycles on a country road near their homes in southern New Jersey yesterday. Both were to serve as groomsmen in their sister’s wedding today.

The wedding has been postponed.

An SUV driven by a man whom authorities believe to have been “under the influence of alcohol” was coming toward them from the opposite direction. The SUV driver attempted to pass two other vehicles and, crossing over into the oncoming lane, struck the two guys, killing them both.

The driver is now in custody, charged with two counts of death by auto.

It’s not unuasual for bicyclists to be hit and often killed by motorists. Bicycle rider deaths account for approximately 2.6 percent of all motor-traffic fatalities every year, acc’d’g to the National Safety Council. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration tells us the years 2017 through 2021 saw a ten percent annual increase in bicyclists’ deaths in motor vehicle accidents over the previous six years. The law firm of Paul B. Weitz, specializing in motor vehicle accidents, attributes the rise on bikers’ deaths to a number of factors; “High on the list were speeding and distracted driving. Texting, using in-car technologies or other distractions, such as children or pets, diminishes drivers’ abilities to react to their surroundings.”

The two New Jersey guys’ deaths became national news because one of them, a fellow named Johnny Gaudreau, 31 years old, was a professional hockey player for the NHL’s Columbus Blue Jackets. His brother, two years younger, was named Matthew Gaudreau.

There’s no evidence that the Gaudreau brothers were riding in a risky fashion or were disobeying rules of the road. It’s not known at this time whether the two were pedaling on the shoulder or within the traffic lane. Right now, the brothers appear to be the innocent, tragic victims of an alleged asshole driver.

Back when I had the physical capability, I was a year-round bicyclist. I did the vast majority of my riding on big city streets. For many years, my bike was my primary mode of transportation, even through the worst of Chicago’s winters. Bike riding in cities is, statistically, the most dangerous form of bicycling. As far back as 1975, the annual perecentaged of urban versus rural bicyclists’ death was a 50/50 split. Every year since then has seen a growing percentage fo city bikers getting killed. By 2022, 83 percent of biker deaths in motor-traffic accidents occurred in cities, while only 17 percent happened on country roads. (Figures from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.)

The poor Gaudreau brothers sure as hell got beaten by the odds.

Bicycling is gaining in popularity these days, thanks to the high cost of owning and operating a car, the exercise benefits of riding, and people’s concern about the environment. Had I a 45-year-old body again, not wracked by all the usual effects of aging in addition to the numerous other maladies I’ve been unlucky enough to accumulate, I’d be out pedaling the streets and roads of Bloomington, Indiana. To this day, every once in a while, I promise myself I’m going to invest in a sturdy, dependable three-wheeled bicycle — that is, until common sense reasserts itself.

This is America, where the car is king. Our cities and our countrysides are designed specifically for automobile traffic. Hell, the car has been equated with our most dearly held quality. “Ever since its debut in 1886, the automobile has been a symbol of American freedom.” So reads the opening line of the “History of the American Car” on the Carchex website.

Bikes and bikers, as a result of decades of planning and engineering, are an annoyance. They’re barely tolerated. Most drivers see bike riders only as obstacles to skirt around. Many drivers’ first reaction upon encountering a biker is anger: Get the hell out of the way!

In confrontations between bikes and cars, bikes always lose. Here in Bloomington, we’ve tried to build supposedly safe passageways for bike riders on some streets, here and there. Some of these fixes — for instance, the clusterfuck that is the dedicated bike lane on 7th Street — cause more chaos than they were built to remedy. No matter how many clever designs roadway engineers come up with, bike riding on city or town streets will never truly be safe as long as we continue to see bikers as pests, and as long as our ever-larger vehicles keep ballooning to the point where we’ll need tugboats to help us parallel park our Cadillac Escalades.

No matter how much bicycle advocates claim they have a right to be on our roads and try to convince the rest of us biking is the future of personal transportation, whenever a biker collides with one of those Escalades, the SUV driver will exit his vehicle unharmed while the biker just might have to be buried.

08/23/2024
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Smartphones, Technology, Texting

810 Words: Cutting-Edge & Bygone

I’ve ridden this rant several times before on this global communications colossus. It’s well-tilled soil, to be sure, but, dammit it, the phenomenon continues to baffle me.

This AM at Hopscotch, the coffeehouse that serves as my headquarters and back office, there stood about nine people, both waiting to put in their orders and cooling their heels for their drinks to be prepared. Each and every one of them was furiously thumbing on a smartphone.

And for the jillionth time I wondered, what in the hell are they doing? Whom are they communicating with? What urgent, desperately important task are they engaged in?

I honestly don’t know because, as loyal Pencillistas are well aware, I haven’t had a smartphone since 2017, when the screen of the first one I bought a couple of years earlier cracked and I was loathe to shell out the six or seven hundred bucks or even up to a grand for a new device. I went old school and got myself a nice flip phone, one that’s been in my pocket every day since.

It serves my needs well.

The smartphone has robbed us of those precious few moments of boredom, those instances when, with nothing else to do, we can look out the window and see where the sun’s shadows fall at this time of year, when we can look at the trees and just appreciate them, when we can glance at the lawn and know whether there’s been rain recently, when we can contemplate the infinite, when we can allow our thoughts to flow, unimpeded by demand or need, allowing us to know ourselves more intimately.

How about glancing around and seeing other people’s faces? Taking note of what they’re wearing? Innocently eavesdropping on their conversations? These are all learning, bonding exercises. And, sadly, they’re things we don’t do anymore because we’re busy thumbing messages to…, well, somebody, somewhere.

A friend recently remarked that texting is weird because it’s such an old-fashioned thing. Way back in the 1790s, when the Chappe telegraph was invented in France, it was seen as the height of modern technology, the transmission of codes and letters across distances far beyond our range of hearing. Then, with the spread of electric telegraphy by the middle of the 1800s, just about the whole world could be connected by wire so that those slow, clunky codes and letters could be transmitted, one at a time, across hemispheres. Samuel Morse’s tweak of the technology was so earthshaking, so advanced it could be viewed as the equivalent of some inventor or engineer today coming up with a handheld consumer device that can spot and eliminate any and all cancers in a person’s body at the press of a button.

The electric telegraph was so out there, in the sense of it being a harbinger of the future, that it would go on to profoundly affect the dissemination of information, the increase of knowledge, the growth of commerce, the exchange of culture, and even the execution of war.

Morse, texting.

But that was nearly 200 years ago. See how Wikipedia describes electrical telegraphy: “a point-to-point text messaging system.”

That precisely describes the system those nine people in line at Hopscotch were engrossed in.

That’s another thing that puzzles me about our 2024 mania for texting: it has replaced the telephone as our primary means of communication. Just imagine this with me for a minute: suppose, when people were becoming aware of the telegraph back in the 1840s, someone said to them, “In the future, you’ll be able to speak with each other using a technology that’ll carry your voice around the world if need be. The person you’re speaking with will hear your voice as you speak and be able to respond as if the two of you were in the same room at the same time.”

Those people of the 19840s would surely have gasped, “Holy shit! That’d be amazing. That’d make our electric telegraph look like a kid’s toy.”

That, we know now, would have been the telephone.

Yet today, speaking on the telephone is considered as old school as chopping wood to heat the home.

Somehow, though, that nearly two century-old system of communication, less immediate, less advanced, is new again, advertised by smartphone carriers as if it were as ultramodern as tourist travel to other solar systems. This just doesn’t make sense to me.

Anyway, I know I’ll be buying a smartphone soon. The world demands it. For pity’s sake, I won’t even be able to use a parking meter without one. And, I hear, soon it’ll be the only way I can get on an airplane.

When I do get a smartphone again, I’ll make sure not to be wasting my life texting nonsense to somebody, somewhere, as if the well-being of human life depends on my message. It won’t. It doesn’t.

 

08/21/2024
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2024 Election, Kamala Harris

777 Words: Cry, Babies!

The Loved One cried last night.

She doesn’t do that too much anymore inasmuch as, like many her age, she’s seen her share of setbacks and endured many wrongs, so tears don’t flow as they did, say, when she was 22 years old. Back when she still operated under the misconceptions that the world would be fair and bad people always got what was coming to them.

But, yeah, she was all misty-eyed and her voice wavered a bit when I came into the living room. The reason? She was watching the Democratic National Convention on YouTube (on our big screen, to boot). They’d just cut away to the arena in Milwaukee where Kamala Harris was hosting a huge rally and her supporters, thousands of them, were rattling the rafters and Harris herself was prowling the stage with more self-assurance and glee than Taylor Swift, Chappell Roan, and Mick Jagger collectively could muster.

Harris is riding a wave the likes of which I haven’t seen since Barack Obama greeted that huge election night crowd on Chicago’s lakefront in November 2008. She’s taken a Democratic presidential campaign that barely more than a month ago looked like a catastrophe in slow motion and has transformed it into a winning lottery ticket. Fingers crossed.

Like me, TLO finds the idea of King Trump, redux, as palatable as swallowing a jugful of chlorine bleach. And, like me, she’s thrilled that this holy land appears ready to elect its first woman president — eight years too late and thanks to the Founding Fathers’ fatheaded inclusion of the Electoral College in the nation’s president-making process.

My sturdy life partner choking up reminded me of a similar scene I’d witnessed way back in the spring of 2014. I was recording the second episode of my then-brand new radio program, Big Talk. My guest was Bloomington’s grande dame of local politics, Charlotte Zietlow. The first female president of the Bloomington city council and the first such boss of the Monroe County Board of Commissioners, Charlotte’s the person ambitious citizens seek an audience with and even a benediction from when they contemplate running for office. Charlotte has won elections and lost them, so she knows the highs and lows of the game.

I asked her that afternoon in the WFHB studio, “Charlotte, how will you feel when the first woman president is sworn in?”

I asked because, at that moment, Hillary Clinton looked to be a shoo-in in 2016 and her prospects would become even brighter. The man who’d beaten her for the Dem nomination eight years before would give her his blessing and the pack of Republican contenders seemed as formidable as newborn chimps. Hell, even Donald Trump joined the GOP fray, and wasn’t that the biggest hoot you’d ever heard?

Well, the voting populace of this benighted democracy had an ever bigger hoot in store for us, thanks to the aforementioned Constitutional technicality. But no matter, when I asked Charlotte the question we both assumed the Clinton campaign was a runaway train.

Charlotte couldn’t respond for a few moments because…, well, she had started crying. And, believe me, Charlotte was — and still is — no fragile lamb. She cried then for the same reasons The Loved One did last night. The two cried in relief, in celebration; their tears a festa*, a simkhe**, a release of pent-up frustration.  They were like wrongly accused convicts suddenly being pardoned by the governor. Hillary Clinton’s and Kamala Harris’ ascendence to the heights was theirs. If an American woman could attain the presidency, how for could Charlotte Zietlow and The Loved One go in this world? Glass ceiling? Hah!

[ *Italian; **Yiddish ]

Well, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here. A lot can happen in the next 75 days. There may be surprises. After all, who could have guessed good old Joe Biden would do the right thing this past July? But if Harris continues to play her cards as masterfully as she has thus far, the White House will be hers for the taking.

By the way, I watched the convention Monday night, when Clinton and Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr spoke. And guess what! The tears flooded into my eyes that night too.

I’d been feeling so down about the direction of this nation just a scant few weeks ago and now, as if somebody flipped a switch, the future looks so bright I think I need two pairs of sunglasses.

It’s enough to make you wanna cry.

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy autumn-fields….,

— Alfred, Lord Tennyson

 

08/14/2024
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1968 Democratic Convention, January 6th, Law and Order

A Thousand-plus Words: Naive?

I lost my virginity, so to speak, in 1968.

I was 12 years old that year, that very unique, dramatic, traumatic year.

Before ’68, I was a typical knuckleheaded kid, blissfully unaffected — or so I thought — by the happenings of the outside world. Vietnam? Who knew where that was? The Haight-Ashbury? San Francisco might as well have been on another planet. Campus protests and riots in the streets of America’s big cities? Well, that kind of stuff wasn’t happening on my block so, as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t happening, period.

Then came that crazy year. The Tet Offensive took place in February and March and the ensuing news reports hit me in the gut. America, I learned, was in danger of losing its first war. Then Martin Luther King was killed, more than 100 American cities burned, Bobby Kennedy was shot, and the Democratic National Convention came to Chicago.

My town. My home. The world was coming to my front door and I was old enough to answers its knock.

World events suddenly became important to me. In the hours after King was gunned down, WCIU, Ch. 26, preempted all its evening programming and just broadcast a head shot of him accompanied by somber music. I sat and stared at the screen and, before I knew it, tears flooded my eyes. Here I was, an almost-teenager, actually moved by something other than the number of pimples on my face.

I looked forward to the convention coming to town, eager for the whole world to see what a fabulous city I lived in.  The John Hancock Center, the 2nd tallest building on Earth, was being built. O’Hare Airport was the world’s busiest. McCormick Place was being rebuilt after a devastating 1967 fire as the world’s biggest convention hall. Even my Cubs had been resurrected, finally becoming a winning team after 20 years of lousiness.

Then I started hearing about the hippies and Yippies and anti-war protesters and civil rights activists who promised to come to Chicago in August to raise cain about the shittiness that existed in too much of American life. I was torn. The likes of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and the Black Panthers all seemed very cool to me. Their long hair, their freewheeling lives, their rebelliousness, their refusal to knuckle under to The Man all appealed to me.

Very cool.

At the same time, what they promised for August would mar what I’d hoped would be a glowing advertisement for my hometown and, by extension, for me. Were they really going to dump truck-loads of LSD into the city’s water supply? Would crazies bump off more candidates or elected officials? Would terror or just silly hijinks take world’s attention away from the Hancock Center, from the Cubs, from me?

Hoffman pledged to let loose an army of hot hippie chicks and well-endowed studs to seduce convention delegates and their wives and daughters.  “We are dirty, smelly, grimy, and foul,” Hoffman announced. “We will piss and shit and fuck in public. We will be constantly stoned or tripping on every drug known to man.”

He was, of course, blowing Yippie smoke, hoping only to shock Mom and Pop America. And he sure as hell did. Chicago’s daddy-o, Mayor Richard J. Daley, quaked in his boots after Hoffman et al’s every outlandish pronouncement. Chicago’s cops licked their chops in anticipation of breaking heads.

The weekend before the convention was gaveled to order, I ate up all the reports of the Yippies gathering in the Civic Center, nominating a squealing pig for president, of the protesters beginning to amass in Lincoln Park on Saturday and Sunday, led in the om chant by Allen Ginsburg, and then getting the hell beat out of them by the cops, and of the dire predictions by news anchors that the coming week looked to be a disaster in the making. On Sunday night, the sound of policemen’s nightsticks cracking the skulls of protesters, passersby, and innocent bystanders seemed to reverberate in my very living room as I watched bulletins and regular news reports.

And then the convention began and all those dire predictions came true. It was held in the rickety International Amphitheater on the South Side, hard by the old Union Stockyards, the putrid odor of slaughtered pigs and bovines casting an appropriate funk over the proceedings.

I watched almost every minute of the Democratic Convention that year. I watched as images flashed on my TV screen of cops chasing protesters through the streets, swinging their clubs, spraying their Mace, shooting teargas canisters. They’d removed their badges and name tags so as to dispense their brand of “justice” without fear of being fingered for it. I watched as CBS News reporter Mike Wallace was punched in the belly by security goons on the convention hall floor. I watched as Sen. Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut decried from the podium, “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” I watched as Mayor Daley and his entourage on the convention floor, enraged, attempted to outshout him. I didn’t need to be an lipreader to know Daley’s gang was calling Ribicoff a motherfucker. Professional lipreaders did tell reporters they called Ribicoff a Jew bastard and a kike.

The convention devolved into chaos. Cops beat the hell out of protesters at the statue of General Logan in Grant Park. They beat the hell out of protesters at the Band Shell in the park. Fistfights broke out on the convention floor. And then Wednesday night happened — the whole world was watching. The rioting cops beat people mercilessly and gleefully, including hapless passing pedestrians. Delegates occupying Conrad Hilton Hotel rooms facing Michigan Avenue had to shut their windows on that steamy night as clouds of teargas wafted upward from the street below.

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Mom and Pop America watched — me too — as the police rioted. Mom and Pop America — me excluded — concluded that the violence, the mayhem, meant their beloved country was being torn apart. Richard Nixon’s “law and order” campaign seemed just the tonic for that sickness. Nixon went on to win the election by a hair.

Now the Democrats are returning to Chicago for a second time since 1968. In 1996, they nominated Bill Clinton for second successful run the following November. There were few, if any disruptions during the convention that year.

This year? Who knows? We’re living in a post-January 6th world. The sitting president four years ago sicced a mob on the US Capitol to subvert a free and fair election. Is it possible that the same man, running to regain the presidency, and his cohorts might orchestrate a reprise of the ’68 chaos in the hope that Mom and Pop America would again embrace their “law and order” rhetoric?

I doubt it. Then again, I never thought Donald J. Trump could win the 2016 election. Nor that a mob could take over the US Capitol. Maybe I’m naive, even after losing my virginity in 1968.

08/13/2024
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Extinction, Mary Hagedorn, Noah's Ark

880 Words: Specious

How many different types of critters and flora have existed on this planet since life first appeared some 3.7 billion years ago? I was curious so I googled: number of species in earth’s history. There were scads of hits from conservation organizations, university researchers, independent scientists like biologists and archaeologists, scientific journals, and even Answers in Genesis, a Judeo-Christian Bible-based outfit.

The answer? Well, it’s anywhere from a few million up to one trillion. The thing is, nobody really knows because the fossil record is woefully incomplete. Lands have been buried beneath the geologic substrata thanks to the continuing motion of plate tectonics. Countless sea species fossils lie beneath the silt of the world’s great oceans, well beyond the reach of modern technology. Even estimating the number of species alive on this day is nigh impossible, considering there are places on the globe — the Amazon rainforest, for instance — that haven’t been thoroughly canvassed for the variety of bugs, creepy crawlers, furry guys, birds, dragons, hopping and slithering things, and any other motile, reproducing, consuming and excreting characters that dwell there.

Suffice it to say there’ve been more types of life in the long history of Earth than can be calculated on your smartphone. And that’s not even taking into consideration the very definition of life itself, a concept generally defined as a quality apart from that possessed by things that aren’t alive.

Gee, thanks.

Anyway, I got to thinking about all this after news came last week that a paper published by lead researcher Mary Hagedorn, cryobiologist for the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute is calling for a sort of Noah’s Ark to be built on the moon.

Hagedorn and her research team suggest we humans gather up tissue samples from as many species as exist today on Earth and park them in a deep crater on the moon, safely shielded from the Sun’s heating rays, and preserved as efficiently as if they were stored in cryogenic iceboxes here on Earth.

Cryonic storage vats.

“Our ultimate goal would be to cryopreserve most species on Earth,” Hagedorn says. She and her gang want to do this because global warming threatens a certain swath of life on Earth over the next few decades. Not only that, there exists the off-chance that a massive comet or speeding asteroid could slam into, say, Muncie, Indiana, raising a planet-encircling ash cloud that’d wipe out most life on Earth, even Republicans. And, there’s also the possibility that our dear leaders might at some time within the next few years decide to fling thermonuclear bombs at each other, blotting out the Sun and playing havoc with all our plans for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

It’s estimated that far more than 99 percent of all species that have ever existed in these precincts have gone extinct. That’s over the long history of life on Earth so you needn’t feel guilty for it because you opted to buy that big Cadillac Escalade last year. Extinction, it appears, is a natural and necessary aspect of life.

Life itself, extinction included, is a continuum. We — humans, cats, honeybees, oak trees, cyanobacteria, and Elon Musk — all owe our existence to, it has been surmised, the first microorganisms that awakened in deep sea geothermal vents. Or wherever life on this planet originated, because that genesis remains a topic of debate. Again, who knows?

Species have come and gone like shoe fashions. One leads to the other. Our sisteren and brethren in life are winged, scaled, horned, skeletal and not, red- and blue-blooded, predator and prey, deciduous and coniferous, MAGA and sane. The species that are alive today are but a screenshot from the epic movie that is Life on Earth. To preserve today’s species would be like stashing the 1846 daguerrotype of Lincoln in a time capsule and thinking you’ve salvaged the entirety of the history of the United States.

There was more to it than this.

Parking the tissue of the billions of species extant today in a crater on the moon seems to be the equivalent of allowing whatever the lab technicians in Wuhan are working on in any given day to waft freely out the open window. You might recall that when the six Apollo crews returned to Earth from their lunar explorations, they were sequestered for weeks as a precaution against bringing extraterrestrial germs home. That still seems a prudent way of thinking. And even before each mission, utmost care was taken to preserve the bio-cleanliness of the astronauts and their equipment, lest we taint the moon with our funk.

Transporting the millions and millions of earthly species samples to that crater on the moon is asking for trouble. In a way, it’s a reprise of Manifest Destiny, wherein we see the moon as our divinely-bestowed “property,” just sitting there, waiting for us to exploit it for our whim.

Life isn’t exclusive to this planet. We don’t know for sure yet, but it’s logically laughable to think there’s no life elsewhere in the universe. That’s the premise of Stephen J. Dick’s book, The Biological Universe. Dick posits that the whole raison d’etre of the universe, its endgame, is life. Preserving samples of earthly species seems to be rather narcissistic.

And that’s pretty much the raison d’etre, the endgame, of being human.

08/06/2024
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2024 Election, Bill Maher, Presidential Campaigns

802 Words: Turn Off, Tune Out, Drop It

I’ve been reading Bill Maher’s new book, What This Comedian Said Will Shock You. I like Bill Maher. I don’t agree with everything he says; let’s call it a 75/25 percent split, my liking/disliking his bits. A friend of mine calls himself a “Bill Maher Democrat,” which seems to be a good a descriptor as can be imagined for a certain type.

There’s not another human being on this planet with whom I agree about every single thing. That includes even The Loved One, to whom I’ve been hitched up since 2008. That’s what’s most troubling about the MAGA crowd; too many of them treat the former president’s pronouncements as divine gospel. And while the Republican traditional tendency to “fall in line” has reached its apotheosis re: the convicted former Commander-in-Chief, a growing number of folks on my side of the fence have also become knee-jerk devotees to whatever the latest liberal, progressive, or Democratic Party orthodoxy is. Maybe they’re doing so in reaction to the Republicans marching in lockstep since the time of Nixon. Me? I don’t like it no matter who’s doing it.

In his book, Maher talks about this holy land’s presidential campaigns, marathons that now can span up to two years. In fact, it can be argued the 2028 presidential campaign will begin the morning after this year’s Election Day. Maher posits that American presidential races last so long because, essentially, we’re stupid. He points out that the UK’s prime minister contests typically last just five weeks or so and France’s races for its leaders are even shorter.

Whenever anybody suggests we truncate our presidential campaigns, Maher argues, the best counter to it is we need so much time because we’re woefully uninformed, intentionally dumb, and way too busy paying attention to diversions like sports and celebrity-watching to spend any decent amount of time on stuff like world affairs, social justice, economics, and other real world matters. The British and the French, the argument goes, entertain such weighty thoughts as a matter of course. We have to have those concerns hammered into our heads over months and years.

I don’t buy it. Take the British, for example. If you’d canvass the crowd at a football match in, say, West Bromwich you’d find the typical partisan there as lunkheaded and oblivious about the wider world as any in the crowd at baseball’s Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas. Sure, Americans are spectacularly dimwitted, but then again, so is the rest of the world.

The truth of the matter is our presidential races last so long because they’ve become sports contests. Games. My side against yours. We’re better, smarter, more patriotic than you are. We’re gonna win!

US presidential campaigns are analogous to baseball seasons inasmuch as they last forever and there’s a result virtually every single day. How close are we to victory? Today we’re optimistic because of last night’s good news. Tomorrow we may be discouraged depending on the latest polls or gaffes committed by our candidates or even the highs and lows of the stock market.

Tune in to a TV or radio news report on any given day and you’re bound to hear a report from some obscure outpost in the hinterlands, a diner or a church basement, where just plain folks gab about who they want for president. If it’s in, say Iowa, you’ll likely be depressed because they’ll be Trumpists. If it’s in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, they’ll be cheering for Harris. Like last night’s box score, each of these reports is a tiny snippet edging you closer to the end of the season, adding to your team’s won-lost record.

Media corporations love this day to day drama because it hooks us. We eat it all up. You have to listen or watch because you have to know what the future holds.

It’s in the best insterests of CNN, ABC, NPR, CNBC, and the rest for this long season to grow ever lengthier.

The thing is, whatever tick up or down our candidate experiences in last night’s or today’s polls doesn’t matter one iota to the vast majority of us. It would if we were campaign managers or political consultants, sure. But there are 333 million of us, the political non-professionals, some 175 million of whom will vote in November. We ain’t all strategizing national campaigns, for chrissakes!

I’m not suggesting we ignore honest analyses about the candidates’ positions or reports on real conditions here and abroad. That’s the kind of stuff we have to keep tabs on in order to be responsible citizens.

But whenever any of these poll updates or reports from Iowa diners come on I leap up to turn the radio off. They only serve to manipulate my mood and I’m bipolar enough already, thanks.

I bet you’d be happier doing the same.

 

 

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