In My Own Way

She was born just a couple miles from where I grew up, it turns out, though I didn’t know that until I looked it up just now. I knew, but had forgotten, that she initially enrolled at my alma mater, but left after just one semester, having failed the majority of her writing assignments, depleted all the money she’d saved, and—maybe most surprising in hindsight—been rejected by the college newspaper. Later, she enrolled at (and graduated from) a university just up the road from where I live now, worked in a department store three blocks from here, was buried in a cemetery you can see my house from, and posthumously had her childhood home (in the neighborhood where my elementary school sat but, more famously, across the street from Phil Donahue’s house) named to the National Register of Historic Places.

This isn’t really about her, though—at least it’s not about how I admired or emulated her, or how many commonalities or crossed paths we shared. It’s more what we didn’t have in common that has me thinking about her now.

· · ·

They named a street after her, too. Or part of one, because that’s what we do—with no one left to remember the past luminaries or historic significances originally memorialized with streets named for them, we feel entitled to chop up their full accolade and bequeath segments of it to the heroes of our day, with the promise that now no one will ever forget them. It’s why my address bears the name of a local founding father and turn of the century captain of industry, but I live where the part of it rebranded in honor of a Philadelphia Phillies Hall of Famer intersects with the part of the cross street renamed for a fixture of the local music scene from the ‘80s. Even so, no one here gives directions using “Mike Schmidt Parkway” or “East Mick Montgomery.” Maybe those don’t roll off the tongue the same way “Turn left on Edwin C.” does when someone wants you to take the boulevard named for Olympic track star and local boy Edwin C. Moses.

They still call Brown Street “Brown Street,” too, but if you find yourself driving the section that passes by the university she graduated from, you can’t help but notice the signs designating that short stretch as Erma Bombeck Way.

Ours isn’t the only city that names streets after its hometown darlings, of course. Any small town in the country lucky enough to have one of its own achieve some level of fame or notoriety is all too happy to remind you, lest you think nothing worthwhile ever came out of that patch of earth, that someone who is now a celebrity once breathed that same air. They rarely mention that this lauded person fled the town that produced them just as quickly as they were able to get out, but hey—proof that the soil is fertile and once grew something good, I guess. I have never been to Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, but if there’s not a sign at the city limits that reads “Home of Taylor Swift,” I’d certainly be surprised. I haven’t been to Corning, Iowa, either, but I do know for a fact they have a sign alerting you that “Heeeeere’s…” Johnny Carson’s birthplace.

And when you’re a sleepy, small town, it makes sense. Chances are, most folks there actually knew the celebrity or at least know their family, and are genuinely proud that someone from there made it big. It may also be the only thing about the town that might be of interest to outsiders so, sure, go ahead and build an entire tourist industry around Larry Bird being “The Hick from French Lick,” Indiana, or hang a plaque to tell the world that your restaurant once sold a meatball hoagie to Oprah.

When your town gets to be a certain size, though, that’s when it starts to feel a little desperate. You don’t see New York City posting signs as you exit the Lincoln Tunnel that read “Birthplace of Amanda Peet,” and Chicago rarely has to remind you that Bono once spent a night there. Part of this, of course, is a numbers game—New York would take up most of Manhattan’s acreage erecting a sign that listed all the famous people who came from there—but most of it has to do with there being far more interesting things going on in their town, such that they don’t need to brag about being the place where Lenny Kravitz went to elementary school.

· · ·

Dayton, Ohio, isn’t New York City. It’s not Corning, Iowa, either, but sometimes it needs to be reminded of that. Other cities may tell you about the famous people who are from there, but none of them seem to do it with quite the same defensiveness and something to prove as we do here. When you’re the sixth largest city in a midwestern flyover state, the inferiority complex is more or less baked in, and it’s not helped much by a national media seemingly obsessed with pigeonholing you as the place you were 25 years ago or maybe never were. Celebrity and fame are too often equated with proof that you belong, which probably at least partially explains why I have been to a parade where Gordon Jump was the Grand Marshal, why everyone says John Legend is from here even though he’s from 30 miles away, why I’ve heard people propose building statues of Martin Sheen and Rob Lowe, and why just about anyone in this town will fight you to the death if you try to claim our precious Wright brothers invented flight in North Carolina.

The cruel irony, of course, is that Dayton has so much going for it, but so few people here know it. I’m sure it’s natural for most people to look down on the place where they grew up—especially if they never left it—and to be envious of the things other places have that their town doesn’t. I’ve met plenty of New Yorkers who are sick of the crowds and stress, numerous Angelinos tired of the traffic, Northerners who’ve had it with the cold, Southerners who are over the heat, small towners dying for culture and excitement, and urban dwellers who long for a secluded cabin in Montana to get away from it all. Even Hawaiians get island fever and have filled my long, hibiscus-scented Uber rides through ridiculously picturesque scenery with their complaints about life in paradise.

For Daytonians, though, it’s more than just a “grass is always greener” phenomenon. The collective self-loathing here runs deep and is part of our indoctrination from an early age, repeated again and again by our families and peers, our local news media and industry, and even our businesses, until we not only believe it, but internalize it and allow it to become a central part of who we are. There’s a bar here that sells a bumper sticker I’ve seen on too many cars that reads “Dayton’s alright… if you’ve never been anywhere else.” I’m sure it’s supposed to be funny, but in reality, it just sums up how we’re all taught to feel about our home: We’re sure it sucks, but we can’t quite explain what sucks about it. Or what sucks less elsewhere. Or why it hasn’t yet sucked enough for us to leave it.

We’re probably the only ones who feel this way about Dayton, mind you. I mean, sure, Dayton is frequently used as a punchline by those who’ve never been here, and lazy reporters will paint us as a dying or dead Rust Belt has-been without actually investigating to find how little of that is true. But when it comes to those who’ve spent real time here, we’re the ones with the blinders on. I’ve long lost count of the visitors from larger cities who stop just short of grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me, breathlessly gasping, “You don’t know what you’ve got here!” Dazzled by arts and culture that rival huge cities, a craft brewing scene that keeps growing and somehow never hits its bubble, recreational amenities and parks and cycling everywhere you look, and any number of other amazing perks, they can’t believe we have all this, plus minimal traffic, ample parking, dirt cheap real estate, and other lifestyle benefits we take for granted but they’d kill for. There are bigger city friends of mine who will think I’m nuts to put any of this in writing, because they feel like we Daytonians are sitting on one of the best kept secrets they’ve ever seen, and they’ve warned me to tell no one about it lest the word get out and the great thing we’ve got get ruined.

All this is to say that Dayton is the kind of city where we could all be happy—or at least feel incredibly lucky and satisfied—if we could just get out of our own way. I’m not all that well-versed in what Dayton was like in the Wright brothers’ day, but if its residents were half as full of self-doubt, self-deprecation, and yeah-but-ism as everyone was when I was growing up, then it’s a wonder those boys ever got that plane off the ground. Maybe they had to go to Kittyhawk just to find some air that wasn’t too thick with its own negativity to let their dreams take flight. For a city known for inventors, Dayton sure has a way of making its people feel that their ideas can never be pursued, their hopes will never become reality, and there’s no sense in ever putting themselves out there, taking a risk, or expressing themselves in any way. In Dayton, you get craft beers and great parks and big city amenities with small town charm, but you also get a voice in your head with a discouraging inner monologue:

Stay quiet. Stay humble. Stay in your place. Who are you to think you have anything to contribute? Why would anyone want to hear from you? You’re not John Legend or Martin Sheen. You’re not even Gordon Jump.

· · ·

Gordon Jump, it seems, was not the only Dayton product to serve as a parade Grand Marshal. Ten years before he was waving from a convertible in the Fourth of July parade for the suburb Erma Bombeck and I called home, Bombeck was Grand Marshal of the Rose Parade in Pasadena. She had left Dayton by then, too, although not because she hated it here and couldn’t wait to get out or felt suffocated by its “you’ll never amount to anything” and “stay quiet and don’t contribute” attitudes. Erma had something to contribute—a lot of something to contribute, if the hundreds of columns, radio show appearances, lectures, and books she churned out from that little house in the Dayton suburbs before moving to Arizona were any indication. She had commitment and work ethic, too. In a 1991 interview with the University of Dayton, she explained:

Discipline is what I do best. I can’t imagine any writer saying to you, ‘I just write when I feel like it.’ That’s a luxury, and that’s stupid. The same for writer’s block. If you’re a professional writer, you write. You don’t sit there and wait for sweet inspiration to tap you on the shoulder and say now’s the time. We meet deadlines. I write for newspapers, and newspapers don’t wait for anyone. You write whether you feel like it, you write whether you’ve got an idea, you write whether it’s Pulitzer Prize material. You just do it, that’s it. Discipline is what we’re all about. If you don’t have discipline, you’re not a writer.

Erma Bombeck was from Dayton, and a lot of things about her were “very Dayton.” Her columns and best-selling books were mostly filled with her humorous takes on the life of a midwestern suburban housewife, and her home town no doubt provided her an endless supply of material. What it somehow didn’t provide her was that destructive inner monologue that has given so many of us an endless supply of self-doubt and held us back from putting ourselves out there and taking a risk. In that same interview, Erma noted:

I have a son who’s a writer in Los Angeles for made-for-television movies. He had a job in an advertising agency, and I told him, ‘If you’re serious, then you have to put it on the line. You have to take a risk. You have to say, I am a writer and quit the job.’ There comes a time when you have to stop talking and start doing. 

One of her bestsellers was a book titled The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank. It’s touted as an expose that tells the truth about the suburbs—the premise being that the lifestyle so many view as ideal is full of its own flaws when you peel back the curtain. Daytonians love their suburbs, but they could take a lesson from the title anyway and stop assuming everyone and everywhere else is so much better than they are. They could also stop talking about the things they wish Dayton—and themselves—would be, and start doing something about it.

· · ·

At this point, I should probably confess that I haven’t been entirely straight with you. I’ve painted a picture of my hometown as being only full of negativity and self-sabotage. A place where no one has any pride in their city, and everyone thinks less of where they’re from than the world outside thinks of it. To be fair, I may have been purposely tilting the scale for effect, but I haven’t been embellishing—those attitudes and inferiority complexes really do exist here and really are as strong and deeply ingrained as I’ve portrayed them to be. So, think of it less as a lie and more as a sin of omission. The part I left out is that this homegrown self-hatred is largely found in two places. One is the past—probably the 1980s, likely the ‘90s, and definitely the early 2000s, before Dayton began its recent, post-recession resurgence. There were times when things here were nearly as bleak as everyone liked to claim they were.

The other place is present day, in essentially every part of the metro area that is not the city center itself. Even now, with all the growth and freshness and activity here, Dayton’s suburbs and other outlying areas are mostly made up of people who never venture into the city proper despite living incredibly short distances from it, and whose negative opinions about Dayton and its downtown are based upon the last time they spent time here, which in many cases may actually be decades ago. When others from the city at large learn that I live downtown, they often have no qualms about responding with “Why?!” or with any number of disparaging and ill-informed opinions about the area I’ve chosen to make my home.

As annoying as those interactions may be, I get it. I lived both of those realities—I grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when things were less exciting and positive for Dayton, and I grew up in the suburbs. We were a 20-minute, traffic-free drive from the city, but the only times we ever visited were school field trips to force culture on kids or a rare bus ride with Grandma to have lunch in a tall(ish) building and shop in the big, non-mall department store. We had no idea what our city had to offer and, worse, were frequently told that the answer to that question was “a whole lot of nothing.” So, while I would hope I wouldn’t have uttered it directly in the face of someone who told me they lived downtown back then, I can imagine that I might have been quietly wondering “Why?!”

I know why now. And so do many others. And, while I could list dozens of things that make this city great, that’s not the point I’m trying to make here. The point is that there is actually a downtown community, growing larger all the time, made up of people who buck the stereotype of Daytonians being down on their city, and buck it hard. Downtowners these days aren’t surprised when visitors from larger cities heap praise on our town. They know what we have here. They know our strengths and what makes us unique. They love Dayton, and they fiercely defend it, although they also won’t waste much time trying to convince you—there’s an attitude of “If you don’t get it, that’s your loss.” That one bar is still selling the “Dayton’s alright…” bumper sticker, but it’s surrounded by shops unironically selling shirts with messages of Dayton pride on them and hundreds of people unironically wearing them—something I couldn’t have imagined when I was growing up and everyone answered “Where are you from?” with the name of their suburb so they didn’t have to say “Dayton.”

The visitors from big cities aren’t wrong when they drool over our cheap real estate and cost of living, the city’s walkability, the abundance of independent breweries or arts or recreational amenities, or any of the other obvious, tangible benefits they think we’re lucky to have here. Those who love living here recognize all that—in many cases, it’s likely what drew them here. But the real perk—the real reason for pride in our town—is something much harder to quantify. There’s a character to this city. A personality, or a feeling, or an attitude and way of living that permeates everything and everyone here and makes us different. The only way I know how to describe it doesn’t do much to capture its essence, but it’s true just the same:

Dayton is a town that does things in its own way.

We do things differently here, and we’re proud of it. Everyone here may be doing things in their own way differently than the next Daytonian does, but somehow there’s a common thread linking all those ways together and making a sameness out of the differences. We’re not like other cities—and where that has so often been a source of self-loathing, isolation, and embarrassment, it’s now also a source of confidence, belonging, and pride. It’s not a feeling you can easily sum up in a single sentence or a T-shirt slogan, though many have tried. Local shops sell shirts emblazoned with phrases like, “It’s okay, I’m from Dayton,” or “Dayton as fuck,” or “Dayton ‘til I die.” The Dayton-based band, Brainiac, may have hit it most squarely on the head with its “Fuck y’all. We’re from Dayton” shirts. Basically, the attitude here is something like:

Like it or don’t like it. Get it or don’t. We really don’t care either way. We like it here, but you don’t have to. Dayton’s not for everybody.

Where the intangible becomes tangible is when you see people capitalizing on their uniqueness to create something amazing. More and more folks here have turned doing something in their own way into incredible successes—the realization of dreams, the creation of art, financial success and entrepreneurship, volunteerism and community service, national attention and recognition, and other achievements. Almost all of them, when asked to share their story, will talk about having wanted for years to do something great, but not being willing to put themselves out there until someone or something helped them believe that the way they were different from everyone else was a strength, not a drawback. Overcoming their own self-sabotage was the biggest hurdle between where they were and where they are now. It’s amazing what you can talk yourself out of.

Dayton so often will try to whisper in your ear until you doubt you have anything to contribute. But it will also teach you an important lesson if you listen to what it’s shouting through the whispers: Sometimes the best way to get out of your own way is to ignore the way most people do things, or what worked for someone else, or what’s expected of you.

Sometimes the best way to get out of your own way is to do things in your own way.

· · ·

In the year 2000, the Bombeck family gifted some of Erma’s papers to her alma mater. In commemoration of the occasion, The University of Dayton created the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop, a gathering of writers and aspiring writers with well-known keynote speakers and topical sessions on writing, publishing your writing, marketing your writing, and other writing-related activities. The workshop was intended to be a one-off event, but it was so popular that the university continued to offer it on a biennial basis. It sounds a little quaint, maybe, but it quickly became a big deal, drawing hundreds of writers from all over the world. Erma’s popularity (likely combined with the university’s money) drew some pretty big names to our little town to serve as featured speakers. Granted, the year I had tickets to the keynote, the speaker was Don Novello, best known for playing Father Guido Sarducci on SNL, who gave a very odd and not terribly funny speech accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation of random, seemingly unrelated photos but, whatever—they can’t all be winners. I’m sure attendees were suitably wowed by Garrison Keillor, Art Buchwald, Bart Simpson’s voice in the person of Nancy Cartwright, and the aforementioned Phil Donahue in other years’ keynotes.

Father Guido’s evening of stream of consciousness commentary and non-sequitur slide show was worth every penny, though, mostly because I hadn’t paid for my tickets. The university had given a handful of free admissions to people who were involved as partners of the workshop that year and, as it turns out, I was one. My employer at the time had gotten involved with the Writers’ Workshop by creating a companion Erma Bombeck Writing Competition that solicited entries from all over the globe in two categories, “Humor” and “Human Interest.” (Evidently, they thought humans weren’t interested in humor and, to be fair, I have met a lot of humans who seemingly are not.) It became my role to administer the contest, not because anyone thought I was a talented writer or a natural fit, but because I was often the guy tapped to take on random projects that didn’t necessarily fall under anyone else’s job description, and this was decidedly one of those.

For several years, I developed and sent out the call for entries, managed the website that collected them, answered oddball questions about the contest, recruited judges, served as a judge myself, contacted winners, and attended awards dinners at the conference. It was a mostly-fun part of my job, and it made for some very memorable situations, not the least of which being the day I called former Texas governor Ann Richards at home to inquire about her being a celebrity judge—it was, I believe, the only time someone called me back at work and said, “I’m so sorry, honey, I just got off the phone with Bill Clinton. Otherwise, I woulda’ picked up when y’called.”

Reading the entries was always a source of entertainment, too. We would typically get more than a thousand of them, and there were no prerequisites or required proof that you were actually “a writer,” so the level of talent—and, at times, mental stability—varied wildly. I used to half-joke that I could write an essay under a pseudonym, submit it, and be almost guaranteed of winning the competition. This wasn’t because I had an inflated ego or fancied myself a particularly good writer; it was because after several years of involvement with the contest, I had picked up on the patterns in the essays the judges tended to choose as winners, and knew what they were looking for. It was clear—and a bit disappointing to me—that, despite there being no mandate on writing style or subject matter, the more you tried to impersonate Erma, the more likely you were to win. Your essay on politics or sex or race relations might be funnier, more interesting, or better written than others chosen over yours, but churn out some folksy, light chuckler about the trials and tribulations of ironing shirts or parenting a precocious toddler, and you were a shoo-in.

No disrespect meant to the actual winners, of course, and certainly none to Erma herself—her writing style and topics may not have exactly been my particular taste, but it was clear she had talent. And, given the time period she was writing in, the roles available to women at the time, and her suburban midwestern beginnings, finding humor in the everyday life of a housewife not only made sense for her—it was even considered edgy in its day. Edgier still was Erma’s involvement and advocacy for the Equal Rights Amendment, which drew backlash from conservatives and had stores pulling her books from their shelves. She was a fighter for the things she believed in—a fact probably belied somewhat by being known for writing about ostensibly innocuous things like laundry and carpools, no matter how subversive and biting her wit could be on those subjects. Biographer Lynn Hutner Colwell wrote about Bombeck:

Erma believed in true equality, that no matter how you spend your life, you deserve recognition and acceptance and that the contribution you make to society by caring for your family should be considered equal to that made by anyone working at a job with regulated hours and pay.

Erma eventually got the recognition and acceptance she deserved, not only for caring for her family, but for her talents with writing. Her column would be featured in more than 900 newspapers, she wrote several best-selling books, she wrote for magazines and television, garnered numerous awards, had a regular appearance on Good Morning America, became fairly wealthy, and was more than famous enough for Dayton, Ohio, to name part of a street in her honor. Difficult though it may be to imagine now, however, her recognition and acceptance were not immediate. Erma had been writing humorous newspaper columns as far back as junior high school in 1940. Her column in high school was more serious, but she managed to work humor into it, too, whenever she could. She also worked for the Dayton Herald at that time, even interviewing Shirley Temple during her visit to Dayton. After high school, she took small journalism assignments—obituary writing, typing, stenography—to earn enough tuition money to enroll at my alma mater, Ohio University. Given how much of her life and effort she’d put into writing for newspapers to that point—and the fact that she had quit a newspaper job to pursue her college degree—I imagine it was fairly devastating when a guidance counselor at the university strongly advised her to get out of journalism and become a secretary, telling her she had “absolutely no hope, whatsoever” of becoming a writer.

I didn’t know Erma Bombeck. And, honestly, it’s not like I’ve done nearly enough research on her to pretend I know what she was like, either. But the more I learn about her, the more I’m starting to feel like she had one important quality that was probably more responsible for her success than her writing ability or sense of humor or storytelling skills ever could have been:

Erma didn’t get in her own way. She knew she wanted to write, and so she did, regardless of the obstacles and without a voice in her head giving her a million reasons not to bother.

Plenty of other people tried to get in Erma’s way, though. The mentality in the 1940s and ‘50s certainly wasn’t accepting of women having careers of their choosing, let alone being writers, being funny, or exposing the downsides of being a suburban housewife. Even as fortunate as she was to have written regular columns for newspapers in those days, she just as often was given such less writerly jobs as being a typist or a “copy girl.” She worked two jobs to save enough money for college, only to have that college tell her to give up on journalism and be a secretary. But through it all, Erma remained determined—she wanted to write, and she wanted to prove that she could. She kept at it, worked hard, and enrolled at the University of Dayton, where a professor who knew she wanted to be a writer encouraged her to draft something for the university magazine. Bombeck went home, wrote a piece, and slid it under the professor’s door, waiting nervously for his critique—despite her internal drive and her desire to make writing her life, the one thing she’d been missing was some external affirmation from someone whose opinion she respected.

That professor later saw Erma outside the cafeteria and spoke just three words to her, but she has repeatedly said that those words sustained her for the rest of her life. His words, in fact, would later become the tagline and motto of the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop. Today, you can buy mugs and tote bags and a wide assortment of other Erma merchandise, all branded with the line she recalled in so many interviews:

One day, he said to me, “You can write.”

· · ·

I said before that this wasn’t about her. I’ve never been a particular fan of—or, frankly, had strong opinions one way or the other about—Erma Bombeck’s writing. Come to think of it, I haven’t even read all that much of it. I don’t read anything other than pure coincidence into how much of her life was lived in or near the same places I’ve lived mine, or take any particular pride in her being from my home town. I’ve never measured my life by hers or found myself wanting to follow in her footsteps, and my life will not be any less complete if I’m never the Grand Marshal of the Rose Parade. Well, alright—maybe a little less complete.

Erma popped back into my mind at random recently, after a friend had bugged-slash-encouraged me for the thousandth time to start doing something more tangible with my sort of ethereal and ephemeral bits of writing. This wasn’t the first time and she wasn’t the first person to hound me about this—she probably wasn’t the hundred-and-first person. Reminding me of the conversations we’d had many times before, she said something along the lines of “Please start working on a website or a blog or something, will you?!” And, for once, instead of just giving her the usual brush-off and “yeah, I really should” platitudes and going back to mostly ignoring the advice, I started thinking about why I hadn’t done it yet—like, specifically, why hadn’t I done it?

I hadn’t thought about the Erma Bombeck Writing Competition or the Writers’ Workshop in a long time, but out of nowhere I was picturing the logo and the merchandise and the website all branded with the words “You can write” and hearing Erma’s voice in interviews, telling the world that those three simple words were all she needed to put herself out there and make a life doing what she loved and believed she was good at. I found myself jealous of Erma—not of her talent or her fame or even her success or happiness doing what she wanted to do—I was jealous that one small affirmation and encouragement was all she needed to make it happen. Erma had such conviction and dedication and willingness to put in the work, combined with such a lack of self-sabotage, that when one trusted person told her she was good at something it sustained her for the rest of her life, through bestsellers and syndicated columns and a life proving that she could, in fact, write.

Thinking about it not only made me jealous; it made me a little ashamed, or whatever the feeling is when you’re thinking, “What the hell is my problem?” Over the years, I’ve had dozens of folks provide the kind of affirmation Erma Bombeck got from her professor. Countless people have told me that I can write or that I have talent and need to do something with that talent. A handful of those people are actual writers or artists or others with the expertise and experience to know what they’re talking about. Others are well meaning friends who say things like, “You should write for The Daily Show,” without any understanding of how difficult those jobs are to get and how underqualified I’d be, but their encouragement is no less appreciated. Unlike Erma, unfortunately, none of that external praise and motivation has yet been enough to make me start anything, let alone to sustain me for a lifetime.

For Erma, the obstacles she faced and the single affirmation she needed came from outside. For me, the call is coming from inside the house. I’m not up against 1950s sexism and societal expectations or myopic college guidance counselors with bad advice. I’m up against something far more nefarious: my own mind and its ability to talk myself out of anything. I have always been a bit risk avoidant, at least when it comes to things that I perceive as having potential for massive negative impact or pain—changing jobs, dating, skydiving, that kind of thing—and will amplify all the possible negative outcomes in my head until they drown out the potential upsides. And, while I’ve been willing to post what I consider sort of “throwaway” writing or photos or other art on social media where I feel like the stakes are low, there has always been that self-sabotaging voice in my head giving me a million reasons not to take people’s advice and make something more concrete of it all:

You’re not good enough. Your work isn’t polished or edited well. If you make something more “official,” people will think you take yourself too seriously. Not many people understand or agree with what you have to say—not everyone “gets” you. Putting it out there will come with expectations—it will end up feeling like “work’ and take all the fun out of it.

Stay quiet. Stay humble. Stay in your place. Who are you to think you have anything to contribute?

There is also the fact that I don’t write the way Erma did. Frankly, I don’t write the way you need to write if you want to be a writer. I don’t make myself sit down and write when I don’t feel like it. I write when the inspiration hits, when I have an idea, when I have something to say or think I can make someone laugh. I have always done it that way, and the fear of killing my creativity by turning it into a chore is real.

Erma Bombeck would say this means I’m not a writer. In fact, I believe the word she used for it was “stupid.” She may or may not be right on the latter sentiment, but she almost certainly is on the former. Erma may have seen it as laziness or a luxury—I see it as the way I work. I’m at my creative best when I get a random, weird thought, or when someone asks me to write a poem about David Hasselhoff and I think, “I’ll take that challenge.” I spit something out, and it’s done—I rarely go back and edit things much, because the moment has passed and any time I spend trying to make the thing better feels subject to the Law of Diminishing Returns. More to the point, I do most of my editing on the fly, such that my first draft is usually my last. In middle school, we’d be required to turn in all of our drafts stapled to the final draft, and I would fake it, writing a final draft first and then going back and creating counterfeit first drafts with intentionally placed misspellings or cutting room floor words and sentences that had never actually been there in the first place, just so I could cross them out and give the teacher what she wanted. That doesn’t mean my first drafts are perfect—far from it. It just means that they’re usually about as good as they’re going to get, because I’m on to the next thing and unlikely to keep going back and tinkering with them, chasing a perfection that will never exist.

That’s a weird thing for a perfectionist to say, and I definitely fit that description. I’ve spent most of my life trying to come to terms with the fact that sometimes “good enough” is good enough. I’ve never liked to attach my name to something that’s less than it could be, and that probably has a lot to do with why I’ve ignored all the encouragement from friends and strangers and never made something tangible, lasting, and public out of my writing or other creative endeavors. Anything I share with people typically comes with the caveat, “It’s not my best work,” so any talk of collecting all these unfinished, sub-par efforts and making them permanently accessible has, to this point, been just that—talk. But, as Erma told her son, “There comes a time when you have to have to stop talking and start doing.”

I don’t necessarily credit Dayton with instilling negativity and self-sabotage into the core of who I am. More likely, it’s heredity or brain chemistry or just part of my curmudgeonly charm. But it has always been there, making me by my own biggest obstacle to happiness, satisfaction, or being the fullest and truest version of who I am. Fortunately, like Dayton, while much of my brain is populated with an inferiority complex, there is a small but growing section at the core that has a bit of a superiority complex, and knows that doing things differently than everyone else is a strength, not a drawback. Sitting at a bar recently, I made some offhanded joke that had friends and the bartender cracking up, but a woman nearby commented, “Uh, okay. I don’t get it.” At some points in my life, that might’ve made me feel small or like I needed to win her over in some way, or like a guidance counselor was telling me to give up on my dreams. But that night, I didn’t even turn to look this person, let alone worry about what she thought. Instead, I said, “That’s alright. I’m not for everybody.”

I’m not Erma Bombeck. I’m not Martin Sheen or Mike Schmidt or Orville Wright or John Legend or even Gordon Jump. I’m not Corning, Iowa, either, but sometimes I need remind myself of that. I’m not a writer, but enough people have told me those three little words that maybe it’s time I believed them myself, even if I don’t own the mug or the tote bag.

I can write.

I’m going to attempt to take my friend’s advice and create a website or a blog or something where all the weird products of my creative side can live. I’m not looking to make a life out of it or be syndicated in 900 newspapers or, god forbid, contribute segments to Good Morning, America—fame is a septic tank I’ve always known was lurking beneath the greener grass. I’m also not looking to do it the way people may expect me to, with dedication and drive, or with writing tailored to appeal to the masses, or with pieces that have been revised and edited and massaged to perfection.

The best way for me to get out of my own way
is to do things in my own way.

Get Behind Me, Santa

“It’s a Claus-terfuck.”

Jason Isbell was doing some mid-concert banter between songs and describing on stage what both he and I had seen outside earlier—and why we both were feeling happy to be indoors now. I laughed at the term he’d spontaneously coined there in the moment while simultaneously chastising myself for not having thought of it first. My pun skills were slipping—that particular turn of phrase hadn’t occurred to me a couple hours earlier, but I definitely had been feeling more than a little Claus-trophobic as I wandered the Cincinnati streets in search of some pre-show dinner when what to my wondering eyes should appear but twelve thousand drunk Santas, all fucked up on beer.

They were everywhere. And not in that magical way that the One True Kringle is able to be everywhere at once on Christmas Eve—more in a way that is typically described using words like “metastasized” or “contagion” and is dealt with by setting up a Chernobyl-style exclusion zone and calling in an air strike. Downtown had seemed oddly deserted and quiet when I exited the parking garage near the concert venue, but as I turned a corner near the ballpark entertainment district of chain restaurants, I found the streets running red with scarlet fur, as though I was witnessing the realtime genocide of whatever Muppet race Elmo is supposed to be. The vast majority appeared to be college age—there were a few more fatherly Father Christmases sprinkled throughout the crowd, but for the most part it looked and sounded like a frat party at Santa’s workshop. It was barely five o’clock, but they all seemed to have had more than their share of nog already—most shouting several times louder than necessary to be heard and belting out “Wooooo!” for no discernable reason. No one seemed to be using Santa’s famous catchphrase, but more than enough of them had replaced it with a hearty “Bro! Bro! Bro!” as they competed for attention and, ostensibly, for Most Vapid Conversation trophies. They were mostly all Clauses—a few dressed as Comet; bellies shook when they quaffed, like a bowl full of vomit.

Re-routing, I crossed the street a block earlier than planned, hoping to minimize the number of stumbling elves, bellowing snowmen, and blitzed Blitzens in my path. Some had gotten creative with their costumes, but most had opted for full-on Santacon cosplay—the men pairing sneakers with their Santa suits of varying quality and authenticity; the women donning either onesie pajama outfits or the other end of the spectrum—“Sexy Santa” suits with short red velvet skirts that left them all shivering in the December cold like a group of Sexy Meth Addicts going through detox. I assumed that this gathering of cloned Clauses would be confined to the cheesy entertainment strip, so I hurried for the streetcar station to catch a ride out of there and find dinner in another part of downtown hopefully sleeping in heavenly peace.

My assumption wasn’t worth a lump of coal, as it turned out. Dozens more Santas were gathered at the station, arguing about what part of town to descend upon next and arise such a clatter, and offering such screamed holiday tidings as “McKayla! Give me a cigarette, bitch!” or “Dude! Wait for Frosty – he’s pissing in the alley!” When the streetcar pulled into the station, I could see it was crammed full of Kringles. McKayla and Frosty didn’t wait for other riders to disembark before pushing their way onto the streetcar with a holly jolly “Mmmooove-uh! and staking their claim to the handicapped seating, since the frail, elderly woman they’d nearly knocked over on the way in probably didn’t need to sit.

At each stop, we traded a few Santas for a few more Santas, and were treated to loud intellectual conversations about the guys from their Econ 101 class they were sleeping with, which Santa could do more chin-ups on the streetcar handrails (“PROVE it, Chad!”), or how a particular Santa was bummed because she wanted to wear her new leggings tonight but they didn’t go with the red fur skirt. We were all better people for the discourse. I felt bad for the streetcar conductor, who had to repeatedly remind Santas that COVID-19 face coverings were required, and educate these students of higher learning on how their noses actually were part of their respiratory systems. When my stop came up, I was horrified to find that this part of town not only wasn’t any better off than the entertainment district—it was a fa-la-la-la-lot worse. Every bar and restaurant in Over the Rhine was bursting at the seams with Santas, red suits pressed up against the windows, spilling out of doorways, and arranged along barstools like Melania’s murder forest Christmas decor. The streets and sidewalks looked like a monochromatic Mardi Gras, while car traffic came to a standstill to avoid inebriated St. Nics darting across the street or walking in the winter wanderland of downtown’s turn lanes. The shouting and “Wooo”-ing had reached a volume that made me feel sorry for the poor, misunderstood Grinch on Mt. Crumpet, and visions of migraine pills danced in my head. In every sense of the phrase, I was seeing red.

I can’t begin to hazard a guess at the number of Cincinnati Santas out that night, but it was easily in the multiple thousands, and had they all managed to form straight lines and stand at attention instead of drunkenly ricocheting through the city, the Santa army would’ve vastly outnumbered the military forces of any number of European nations. I left the war zone as quickly as I could and managed to find one restaurant three blocks away that was Claus-free. The staff informed me they were closing early to avoid the chaos, but they were happy to fit me in if I could order in the next ten minutes before the kitchen closed. I picked the first thing I saw on the menu and basked in all that was calm and bright, finding the screeching toddler at the next table a welcome respite from the red storm outside. Scream away, Gavin—as long as you’re not sucking down White Claws and telling me which nightclubs you think are “lit,” I do not mind.

I tried to convince myself not to be such a Scrooge. If nothing else, it was impressive that the city had managed to attract that many Santas to come celebrate the season and patronize local businesses that night. Obviously, the whole thing was several people’s idea of fun. To me, it felt like the North Polar opposite. Presumably, it felt that way to Jason Isbell, too. As he stopped between songs to say hello to Cincinnati and thank the city for coming out to see him, he jokingly warned the audience, “I don’t know if y’all have noticed, but there are a LOT of Santas outside. Runnin’ around, causin’ all kinds of craziness. It’s… It’s a Claus-terfuck, is what it is. And they are not giving out presents, I can tell you that much. They’re taking things from you instead… They’re taking things from all of us.”

After dinner I girded my loins for the walk back into the holiday fray and the streetcar ride back toward the concert venue. A young woman dressed as a chestnut half-apologized for her drunk nutcracker boyfriend swerving in front of me like I didn’t exist, and a guy in a Will Ferrell “Elf” suit managed a “Sorry, dude” when he realized he had just shouted “MADISON! Let’s GO! Move your ass!” to a Sexy Dreidel while standing three inches from my ear. The streetcar was still packed, and the conductor announced that her car was going out of service at the stop furthest away from my destination, so we would all have to get off there and wait for the next car. Fortunately, that stop was directly in front of a brewery, so the other riders all took their Santananigans inside and left me alone in the quiet of the station, with fourteen minutes until the next streetcar’s arrival.

I enjoyed the silent night for three of those minutes, and then bristled when I saw a group of Santas making their way toward the station. Sitting there alone in the dark, I would’ve been more comforted if it had been a street gang approaching me. They were older—possibly in their early fifties—but no quieter than the collegiate Santas making up the bulk of the Claus-terfuck. The women approached me first, reeking of Chardonnay breath and bad perfume, and gave the standard middle-age, suburban, white woman warning and advance apology for the behavior they claimed I was about to endure, because they perceived themselves as much wilder and crazier than they actually were. I knew without a doubt that at least one of them was going to tell me “We’re trouble!” before they inevitably did. Between the perfume and the wine breath and the continued pandemic, I kept inching away from them as they got centimeters from my face to talk to me. One explained (three times, actually—drunk enough to forget what she’d just told me seconds ago) that they were from all over the country, their common denominator being that they all have houseboats on Lake Cumberland and are neighbors there during vacation season, but not the rest of the year. Every December they meet up in Cincinnati to dress like Santa and “get wild” on the town together.

I could feel my eyes rolling back in my head at the predictability and lack of originality of these people who clearly thought they were unique and crazy party animals. In truth, though, they were not crazy or wild or “trouble” at all. It occurred to me that they’d been some of the first Santas that evening to be respectful and friendly to me, and they were going out of their way to ask me questions and get to know me while we waited for the streetcar. One of the husbands wore a ridiculous shirt designed to look like he was shirtless with pierced nipples and Christmas-themed tattoos, along with a red scarf and Santa hat. He had an oddly calming presence and made small talk with me while we waited, simultaneously running unnecessary interference between me and the women he thought were likely annoying me. We joked about the chaos caused by all the Santas throughout downtown that night, and I warned him about it being particularly bad down near the entertainment district. “That’s where we’re headed!” one of the wives excitedly announced.

The streetcar arrived a few minutes later and we boarded. I jumped on first and chose a single seat by myself for some quasi-solitude. As the group of suburban Santas got on behind me, each of them wished me Happy Holidays. The guy in the shirtless shirt was the last one on. “It was really nice talking to you, man,” he said as he passed by my seat and made his way to his lake friends. “Thanks for being so patient with us. I would’ve been really annoyed if I were you, but you just let us have our fun. I appreciate it.”

I didn’t tell Isbell that some of them were handing out presents after all.

 
***

6:07 a.m. EST
Christmas Eve. Dayton to Duluth. 838 miles with Mom and Dad in a rented Hyundai Santa Fe. If this is how it ends, tell my story.

6:34 a.m. EST
Dad nearly missed our first exit (in our home town). Mom has given a dissertation on where we can find all the packs of Kleenex she's strategically placed around the car. She appears to have brought more pillows and blankets than I have in my entire house. It’s like a Bed, Bath & Byundai in here. We are 27 minutes into the drive so far, so I can only assume we'll be making our first restroom break soon, which Dad will apologize for by saying “The coffee just goes right through me."

6:48 EST
Indiana border. I have been entrusted with the awesome responsibilities of a spiral-bound atlas (which we don’t need), printed MapQuest directions marked “home to hotel” (which I won’t use), navigating us through Indianapolis, and a polka dot change purse with funds “for tolls and whatever else.” Stand in awe of my power.

6:54 EST
Already regretting the fact that I put all my Christmas gifts in trash bags for easy transport. The bags have "odor shield" and are apparently scented. We are all high. This is what it feels like to huff a Glade Plug-in.

7:18 EST
Dad: "I'm gonna hit this next rest stop. The coffee is going right through me."

7:34 EST
Fun fact: this state has more Bobby Knight museums than people.

7:42 EST
Judging from the list of snack items Mom just announced that she has stashed in the back seat,
1) Hyundais now come with both all-wheel drive and a pantry,
2) when we slide off the road in a snow storm later it will be weeks before we have to eat each other, and
3) the candy bars and mints alone are almost certainly enough weight to be affecting our gas mileage.

7:59 EST
I-70 and I-74, despite both going through Indianapolis, do not connect to each other. Because, one assumes, there is no god. This always results in a fun 5–10-mile drive down 38th Street, past some of Indy's finest industrial parks and carnecerias, the latter of which we are unfortunately not stopping at.

8:07 EST
Highway signs indicating Brownsburg in one direction and Whitestown in the other. Suddenly making sense how Mike Pence got to be governor.

8:10 EST
Rest stop #2. Coffee and its speed through someone's tract may have been mentioned again.

8:22 EST
Sun’s finally up. Though Indiana was prettier when it wasn’t.

7:40 CST (I think. Indiana time zones are weird.)
This is why Bing Crosby went to Vermont instead of Indiana. No one dreams of a gray and tan Christmas.

7:52 CST
“That faint rattling noise” we’ve been hearing since we got on I-74 has been identified as Mom snoring.

8:01 CST
Illinois. Land of Lincoln. Thirty-four score and seven miles to go.

8:17 CST
Burma-shave-style signs advocating gun ownership:

"Spread the news…
Like Paul Revere…
Guns save lives…
Thousands per year"

and this brilliant gem:

"My gun is blue…
I am safe…
How about you?"

8:28 CST
Champaign. Not the good kind.

8:46 CST
"Trucker's welcome"
I'm hoping that is just an unnecessary apostrophe, because if it's not, I do not want to know what that's a euphemism for.

8:57 CST
A third rest stop was required even though we're stopping for gas in three miles. Mom’s using the restroom for the first time, mostly so Dad will stop asking her if she needs to.

9:04 CST
Dad’s three minutes of pumping gas in 35-degree weather has rendered him so cold that we are now riding in a hot yoga studio on wheels. Bulletin board flyer in the gas station said “Pinball machines wanted.” No word on if that’s dead or alive. Think it's my turn to drive, though. More later.

11:25 CST
Wisconsin.
State bird: the cheese curd.
State flower: Leinenkugel Summer Shandy

12:10 CST
Janesville, Wisconsin - Hello!  (<—Larry King voice)
More or less the halfway point. None of us had ever eaten at a Culver's and didn't know what they serve there. Angioplasty. They serve angioplasty there. Butter burger, frozen custard, and fried Wisconsin cheese curds, and we're back on the road.

12:30 CST
Madison. We could hit all the Big Ten schools on this trip if there weren't 40 of them now.

12:33 CST
Apparently we are not stopping at the Cheese Mousehouse, despite its 20-foot-tall letters advertising "CHEESE. GIFTS. LIQUOR."

12:47 CST
...or the Cheese Chalet

12:48 CST
...or the Cheese and Fireworks Barn

12:56 CST
Someone selling machinery on the side of the highway with a sign that reads "FOR SALL"

1:16 CST
If the Wisconsin Dells are any indication, there's a good chance the "farmer" in the dell was actually the night manager at an indoor waterpark.

1:27 CST
Another rest stop. I did not ask if the cheese curds went right through anyone.

1:40 CST
Snow the rest of the way. I'm just going to plan on Kathy Bates setting my leg.

1:48 CST
Also not stopping at the Space and Bicycle Museum, despite my curiosity.

2:26 CST
Chippewa Falls, and so does the snow. Dad doesn’t seem to have noticed, as he is still doing 85 MPH.

2:35 CST
The Endurance has been crushed by pack ice, but Shackleton is convinced we can make Elephant Island if we use the life boats. Some of the men have resorted to talk of mutiny. Mt. Erebus is a distant dream now. May god have mercy on our souls.

3:07 CST
10 hours in. 10 feet of visibility. 10 times the speed that would be safe in these conditions.

3:48 CST
Mom has done so much sudoku that Alan Turing has recruited her to help crack the Enigma Code. It’s like watching someone preparing their tax return while simultaneously solving a cold case file of a series of murders. Dad is not relinquishing control of the driver's seat. I have been named Warden of the North, but am considering going beyond the wall to fight with The Free Folk. Winter is coming.

4:09 CST
A tired observation: If you can temporarily break yourself from the familiarity of hearing them a million times growing up that gives them a false sense of normalcy and listen to them like you’re hearing them for the first time, Christmas songs are the weirdest.

4:17 CST
It's starting to get dark here on Hoth. Not a single one of Mom's 17 Kleenex packs has been opened, but Dad has polished off half a cord of Snickers since lunch. There's been a strange metallic burning smell since Eau Claire, and the scent from the odor shield trash bags, while enough to give me a headache, cannot overpower that particular olfactory delight. The next sizeable town is named Spooner, but I'm too tired to make a joke about it.

4:48 CST
Late this morning, Mom asked if the car's built-in clock was still on home time or if it changed when we changed time zones. We had a conversation then about how, unlike her phone, the car clock isn't connected to internet or satellite or cell tower, so it only changes if we change it manually. Just now she asked, "Is the car clock still on home time or has it changed by now?" I'm going to tell her that the evil sprite who lives inside the dashboard changed it to Greenwich Mean Time to screw with us.

5:00 CST
Not to leave Dad out of the technical skills posts...
After the sixth time this hour of me asking, "Are you sure your lights are on?" Dad has determined that his lights were, in fact, not on.

5:07 CST
12 hours in. This has to be the most thorough test drive of a Hyundai Santa Fe on record.

5:46 CST
Mom keeps referring to Duluth Trading Company's "Buck Naked" underwear as "Big Ass Underwear."

5:53 CST
Wisconsin behind us. Minnesota ahead. Almost there, and only one of us succumbed to dysentery along the way. This is home now. We settle here on the shores of Gitchegumee.

6:06 CST
‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the day,
I spent eight hundred miles stuck inside a Hyundai

For thirteen damn hours we drove to Duluth
In just as much space as your average phone booth

The dog had been nestled next to the back window
Not yet quite aware of what she’d gotten into

And Mama, in her parka, was Sudoku scoring
Safe bet soon both she and the dog would be snoring

When, one hour in, there arose urgent matters:
The coffee had gone right through Dad’s pea-sized bladder

Away to a rest stop to take care of the task
Since it’s Indiana, no one’s in a mask

Some Burma-shave signs touting guns lined a fence
‘bout what I’d expect from the land of Mike Pence

When what to my wondering eyes should deploy,
But the bust of Abe Lincoln – we’d reached Illinois

The sign said Champaign was the next thing we we’d find
I knew in a moment ‘twas not the good kind

Less rapid than turtles, the cars in our lane
And Dad grumbled and shouted and called them some names

On Bloomington! Normal! Rockford and Peoria!
Just miles of gray nothingness stretched out before ya’.

There was no conversation; the view still unmodified
I commandeered the stereo and fired up Spotify

More windmills out here than there’s deer ticks on Prancer
Let’s hope Trump is wrong that their noises cause cancer

Mom asked where we were, and I threw my response in:
“See the cheese curds and fireworks? We’ve entered Wisconsin”

Forty miles until Madison, where we would take five
Hoping that, after lunch, Dad might let me drive

Ordering at a drive-thru, not Dad’s usual persona,
But we ate in the parked car to side step the ‘rona

Two hours later, and not easy steering
Roads slipperier than Bill Barr in a hearing

Stopped with the dog for her afternoon pees
Thought she’d freeze to the ground, since it’s just five degrees

Now Dad’s doing 80 in all of this blizzardry
Taking curves like he’s trying to reenact Misery

We’ll have food to survive on, though, if we should crash
Mom’s stacked Andes mints by the gross in the dash

We’re long past twelve hours of making this slog,
Two septuagenarians, me, and a dog

It hasn’t been bad, though, albeit not roomy
And we’re just a few miles now from old Gitchegumee

We’re thankful we got here after most of the snow did
And, as far as we know, none of us caught covid

Dad’s done quite well on the icy Autobahn
Considering his headlights may not have been on

We’re getting close now – it’s been a long haul
But we may arrive before St. Nick after all

Duluth is in sight, and we couldn’t feel cheerier -
The skyline is nice, but the lake is Superior

And, at last, we’ve arrived. Maybe next year, a flight?
Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night

***

It’s probably not what you want to hear but, honestly, most of the staff is sick of Christmas by the time Labor Day rolls around. We tell ourselves and each other that “It’s for the children” in order to keep focused and motivated by that higher purpose, but we’ve said it so much that it has become a joke—a mantra lobbed at each other with humor whenever the holiday planning has gotten especially frustrating, or a sentence growled through gritted teeth while commiserating about tasks we can’t muster enough Christmas spirit to feel like doing. “Iiitttt’ss forrr the cchhhiiillldren.”

For the past 49 years, the unofficial official kickoff to the holiday season in our city has taken place on the Friday after Thanksgiving. I’ve been a part of planning the last 13 of those, as an employee of the organization that makes it happen. Planning and preparation typically begin in the spring, and continue in some form throughout the year, with efforts really ramping up in the late summer and fall—we have to start so early partially because there is an incredible amount of work and number of moving parts that go into the event, but mostly because the name of the event is so long that we lose 90 seconds of planning time whenever we say or type it. By the time you’ve said “The [insert sponsor name here] Dayton Holiday Festival, featuring The Grande Illumination presented by [insert other sponsor name here] and the Dayton Children’s Parade Spectacular in Lights presented by [insert yet another sponsor name here]” three times, it’s already lunchtime and your entire morning is shot.

And those are just the overarching event titles. Each of the individual pieces and activities that make up the event has its own separate sponsor, as well, which makes our press releases read like the TV Guide listings for college football bowl games. Not that I’m not excited to watch this year’s TaxSlayer.com My Pillow Cool Ranch Doritos Peach Bowl, presented by Dockers, live from Quad Cities Health Partners Field at Jell-O Pudding Pops Stadium.

To me, “The Grande Illumination” has always sounded much more like the name of a medieval renaissance period when knowledge and art became more widely available to the masses than it does the flipping of a fake light switch to turn on some Christmas tree lights, but that’s what we call it, and people seem to enjoy it. Tens of thousands of people, actually, as they pack themselves onto the town square to witness the tree lighting regardless of cold, rain or COVID variant. I’ve also never really understood what is so appealing about that part of the event. Granted, I’ve never actually seen the tree light myself, since my duties that evening have me stationed around the corner and out of view, but I have seen the tree unlit, and I have seen the tree lit, and I can imagine what it looks like the moment it goes from one of those physical states to the other. If it were the late 1800s and we were at Tom Edison’s for Christmas, maybe I’d be losing my shit over a few strands of Merry Midget lights, but by now we’re all vaguely familiar with electricity, no?

Maybe they’ve all seen the Rockefeller Center tree lighting and this lets everyone pretend we’re New York for a moment. Or maybe it gives them something to do before the parade starts—oh, did you forget I mentioned a parade? There’s a parade. Oh, you bet your jolly ass there’s a parade. We’ll get to that in a minute.

If nothing else, lighting the tree is a fitting symbol of the start of the holiday season. It’s also hopefully a symbol of the end of the angry phone calls and emails we get each year in the weeks preceding the festival—liberal Lorax types on one side, angry that we killed a living tree and propped its lifeless carcass up in the middle of a turned-off fountain, and conservatives on the other, pissed that we dared to use the word “holiday” instead of “Christmas,” offering further, irrefutable proof of the ongoing, bloody war against their beliefs and traditions.

In the four hours leading up to the grande lights-were-off, now-they’re-on moment, we offer a host of other family-friendly holiday activities to get you into the spirit of the season. You and your adorable spawn are invited to enjoy any and all of the following:

• Live reindeer! We always call them that, lest you’d think we’d welcome you to take Christmas-card-ready photos with a taxidermied or freshly “harvested” member of Santa’s convoy. It’s truly a wonder that we’ve yet to attract a PETA protest with this activity. The reindeer wranglers claim they’re treated very humanely, but judging by the looks on Donner and Comet’s faces, it seems they’d rather be touring a venison packing plant than standing in a 3’x3’ pen of hay and their own filth, letting children pet them with their sticky fingers while posing for selfies in front of a plywood sleigh. Buck up, bucks! It’s for the children.

• Gingerbread houses! Do you love confectionery real estate? Sure, who doesn’t?! Come see, depending on our success begging people to make them, anywhere from three to 12 gingerbread houses on display inside a musty old courthouse! Most of the entries were received in the “amateur” and “kids” categories, so you know the craftsmanship is top-notch. Not all of them were made using kits from Wal-Mart, either – some people cut their own rectangles out of burnt cookies themselves. Be sure to note the artisan creativity in such themed designs as “house with white icing snow on the roof” and “house with white icing snow on the ground and the roof.” Don’t eat any of them, though—they may have been required to be made entirely of edible material, but keep in mind that hot glue is technically edible.

• Games and crafts! We call this area the “Holiday Village” because it has slightly more appeal than “Unremodeled 1970s Office Tower Lobby.” Here you can make exciting handmade keepsakes by gluing three popsicle sticks together to form an isosceles triangle that looks like a Christmas tree if you squint at it just right and have cataracts. We also offer construction paper reindeer antlers you can wear, which always get advertised incorrectly as “reindeer ears,” which may or may not drive a certain member of our staff absolutely batshit. Children love the crafts zone, and so do the building’s janitors, who will later find every surface covered with almost as much glitter as snot. If crafts aren’t your thing, try your hand at some carnival games we haven’t updated since 1983. You can play a round of homemade Plinko if you promise not to tell CBS that we’re using the name without inquiring about the rights. Or, grab a bean bag and give it a toss at a game that we in the office affectionately call “Pooh Crotch.” Winnie the Pooh is holding his – ahem – “honey pot” between his legs, and for some sick reason, all you have to do to win is to throw that bag and hit him right in the ol’ Pooh Sticks. Oh, bother!

• Dial-an-Elf! On the other side of the Holiday Village is a magical station where you can place a call to a real, live, North Pole elf and tell him or her (do elves have genders?) what you want for Christmas. Your elf will be sure to let Santa know, and will probably freak you out with a trick designed to make you believe in holiday magic—there are cameras pointed at you in a totally non-invasive way, so the elf can see what you’re wearing and comment on something specific about it, making you think elves and Santa can see you wherever you are in the world. It will prepare you for the reality that our government and Mark Zuckerberg can already do the same. Unfortunately, all this magic will be completely lost on you, since Dial-an-Elf uses red, rotary telephones that look like the ones Commissioner Gordon used to call Batman in the 1960s. You’re much too young to know that phones used to look like this, or maybe even to know what a telephone is at all, but we decided “Facetime-an-Elf” literally didn’t have the same ring to it.

• Carnival rides! True, I have absolutely no idea what a rusty ferris wheel, a rickety tilt-a-whirl, and a Scrambler ride missing a handful of rivets have to do with the holidays, but come stand in line for hours to hop aboard a piece of machinery that folds up to fit in the back of the truck of the fly-by-night carnival operators who may or may not have insurance and definitely don’t have all their fingers or teeth. It may not be Christmassy, but it’s terrifying.

• Vintage Window Displays! Speaking of terrifying, stop by the performing arts center to see a series of restored Christmas window displays that used to be part of the department store that was imploded to build the arts center. Each window depicts a charming winter scene, featuring animatronic elves with deformed faces that will haunt your dreams. While you’re there, you can visit with Santa himself. Pay no attention to the fact that this is the fifth time you’ve seen Santa throughout the festival grounds tonight, and that his facial hair, weight, quality of red suit, ethnicity, and relative sobriety have varied wildly each time you spotted him. Santa is a shape-shifter. It’s part of his magic.

• The performing arts center is also the location of The Tike’s Shoppe. That word is typically spelled Tyke, but we wanted it to rhyme perfectly with the name of the department store that used to stand here. There’s also nothing remotely old-timey about the experience that would warrant the extra P and E added to Shop, but no one likes a six-year-old grammar snob, so suck it up, Braydon. Here, you’ll get an introduction to the world of commerce, as volunteers will lead you through a miniature store where you can buy Christmas presents for your parents. Mom will love the rubber pencil topper you picked out for her, and dammit if a plastic comb and a Pokémon sticker wasn’t exactly what Dad was wishing for. We used to require cash for these purchases, but now we take credit cards so you can start accumulating debt as early as possible.

• A model train set! This once belonged to the nice, very rich old lady who started this festival almost 50 years ago. We set it up every year in her honor for you to come view. The trains just go around in an oval and none of the scenery matches up with our city, but you seemed to enjoy electricity when it lit an oversized conifer, so maybe you’ll like watching it in another application.

• Horse-drawn wagon rides! No, these are not carriages, they’re wagons. Think hay ride with Christmas lights stapled to it. No, you cannot choose the wagon you like best—you get the one that comes around the corner when you’re next in line. No, the route is not particularly romantic or festive, unless you’re turned on by rounding two city blocks of parking garages and empty offices. No, you may not bring your stroller, dog, firearms, fireworks, bike, Rascal scooter, picnic dinner, or pet snake aboard the wagon. No, we cannot be responsible for any of those same items you stack on the sidewalk and leave unattended while you ride. Yes, you must procure a ticket for each member in your party before you get in line. You get them at the enormous, can’t-possibly-miss-it ticket booth that you walked by six times before asking where the ticket booth was. Tickets are only one dollar per person and that is only a “suggested donation,” so it’s not even mandatory that you pay, so please stop asking “Do children count?” or “Even if she’s just a baby?” about your nine-year-old. All of this information is posted on the literally eight huge signs that some very smart and handsome member of our staff spent the afternoon hanging for you to not read. The signs also note that ticket sales will end at 7:00 so everyone can ride before the tree lighting, so it is entirely unnecessary to throw a tantrum fit as a grown-ass adult when you’re told you’re too late at 7:38, yelling at the nice, smart, handsome man that he is single-handedly responsible for completely ruining all of Christmas for your children and you hope… he’s… happy. I assure you; he is.

Following the tree lighting is the pièce de resistors—the nighttime lighted children’s parade. Tens of thousands of Christmas lights adorn the trucks, horses, drill teams, marching bands, tiny Shriner cars, and other parade participants as they make their way through downtown streets lined with spectators. Each parade unit is unique, but the part people seem to enjoy most of all are the floats. Each one has a different theme, from Christmas classics like The Nutcracker and Santa’s workshop to some that seem like more of a stretch – a surfing-themed float, a western float with giant cacti, and a patriotic American flag float that we quickly repurposed as a salute to first responders the year our community was hit with a mass shooting, a KKK rally, and a literal dozen tornados. My favorite float of all is one that seems to have no particular theme, but has been decked out with a set of what were clearly supposed to be Sesame Street characters, but look like frightening off-brand versions of all the popular Muppets. Each one appears to be suffering from a terminal illness or melting before our eyes, and yet, somehow, the children can’t wait for a chance to catch a glimpse of Large Bird, Bart and Arnie, Snuffledownagus, and Oscar the Clinically Depressed. The float looks like it’s carrying the characters’ stunt doubles or members of Sesame Street’s B-team, but as the popular character Biscuit Demon likes to say, “B is for biscuit—that’s good enough for me.”

Each year when the festival is over, we store all the festive holiday props and signs and craft materials and lights and other décor in the basement of our office tower, smashed together in the corner of what looks like a bomb shelter and is marked with 50-year-old signage left over from the Mead corporation directing you to the “Micrographics” and “Reprographics” departments. It looks sad and unmagical stashed away in the basement, and more than once I’ve marveled at how it can be remotely possible that all that junk somehow comes together each year to create a winter wonderland. As much as we all make fun of it and get sick of it all after working on it for months, the hard work really does pay off and end up creating something incredible for our community. Yes, people like free stuff, but it’s unlikely they’d have kept coming for 49 years if our efforts didn’t provide a fun and festive kickoff to the holiday season.

We keep the floats in a place we call “The Float Barn,” which essentially is whichever empty warehouse someone lets us use for free until it becomes a development site and we have to relocate the floats to a new barn again. Each time we have to move them, we make quite a scene with a police cruiser escorting a line of holiday-themed flatbeds down the road in mid-July. A few years back, our float barn was a series of old structures that the Wright Brothers had used for the world’s first airplane factory, but now were creepy, abandoned buildings where it felt like just breathing would give you tetanus. At some point during the off-season, most of the floats were damaged, first by animals chewing through cables and decorations, and later by vandals stripping the floats for copper wire, generators, and anything else they thought might be of value. When the community found out the floats had been damaged, volunteers teamed together to help repair the floats. Families came to work on them together, a local artist adopted one float to reimagine it herself, and a team of roughneck guys from the local electricians’ union banded together and had a blast rewiring and rebuilding several of the floats. It turned out no one wanted to see a beloved local tradition go by the wayside. Something that I’m often tempted to look at as a collection of pretty ridiculous activities and weird, outdated props actually meant a lot to our community because of its traditions and its accessibility to everyone, regardless of means.

During one of the float repair days, I was walking by the electrical union guys and caught them deep in a serious conversation about which colors looked best next to the candy canes on one of the floats. “Wow!” I said as I passed by. “You guys are really getting into this!” The guys looked at me and then at each other. One of them sort of shuffled his feet and looked at the floor as he answered me. “Yeah, well, uh… y’know. It’s, uh… It’s not for us. It’s… It’s for the children.”

***
 

One of the trends in recent years on social media, where once-mildly-funny jokes and memes go to have all of the humor beaten out of them through relentless repetition and over-analysis, has been the annual yuletide debate over whether Die Hard qualifies as a Christmas movie. I have no official opinion on this issue—mostly because it’s an argument manufactured by people who need attention and think it makes them more interesting if they pretend to feel strongly one way or the other—but if we’re now adding action movies to our required holiday viewing, my recent reflections on this time of year have led me to develop my own, equally stupid theory:

Apocalypse Now is a Christmas movie.

When I was young, Christmas meant anticipation. The weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve seemed to last forever, and I wanted to jump out of my skin from all the waiting. Time was slower then anyway, since six weeks as a percentage of a five-year-old’s lifespan is far longer than six weeks is now, so being patient while the holiday took a lifetime to get here felt impossible. I loved Christmas back then—and, maybe more importantly, I was excited for it. I was excited to help hang decorations, excited to watch Christmas TV specials (when they weren’t available on demand and only aired once per year, each one was an event), excited to hear Christmas carols, excited to see Christmas lights, and incredibly excited to get up on Christmas morning and find all the presents. My sister and I never slept well on Christmas Eve, and would wake up at four or five in the morning, gathering together in one of our bedrooms or on the landing at the top of the stairs, waiting for hours until our parents got up, ate breakfast, had coffee, read the paper, and finally told us we were allowed to come down. My dad was one of nine children in a family that grew up during the ‘40s and ‘50s when times were lean, but despite the money being stretched thin, his parents always managed to make Christmas special and provide an explosion of gifts under the tree. For that reason, it was always important to Dad to do the same for us, and we’d come downstairs to find dozens of boxes spilling out from the tree and into the living room, with still more gifts unwrapped and displayed on the sofa that were “from Santa.” It wasn’t that my parents had money or spent a lot on us—it was often more about quantity than quality, with them wrapping up things like blank VHS tapes or boxes of tissues or other small things that would increase the gift count and make the windfall look more impressive. It wasn’t Christmas until you’d watched Grandma unwrap a box of All-Bran. Opening gifts on Christmas morning took hours, and still does, since we don’t have the heart to tell Dad we’d probably prefer one big-ticket item or even cash, knowing that it would ruin Christmas for him if we took the gift explosion away. I was too young to know it then, but would start to recognize in the next few years that the anticipation was Christmas—that the day itself was fine, but the leadup and holiday season that preceded Christmas Day was what I really loved.

I don’t remember ever actually believing in Santa Claus. It’s likely that there was a brief period where I did, but I definitely had it figured out early on that he was really our parents (spoiler alert) and the gifts with tags that read “From Santa” in Mom’s handwriting were actually from them. If I did believe at some point, it certainly didn’t take much away from the Christmas magic for me to discover that particular truth. It’s a weird thing we do to kids anyway—we lie to their faces about this one thing, mostly for no other reason than to coerce and bribe them into behaving for a month, and then we expect them to trust us on everything else. “Listen, you two—how do I know everything else you’ve told me isn’t a lie? Are you even my real parents?”

By the time I reached my teenage years and could buy my own gifts for people, being Santa was my favorite part of Christmas. Sure, it was still fun to receive presents, but now I would shop for days, wandering the mall like some archeological treasure hunter in search of the perfect gift, and my Christmas anticipation was now all about the excitement of seeing people open what I’d carefully chosen for them. It was probably where my anxiety about Christmas started, since I put so much pressure on myself to find great gifts for each person, but once everything was found and wrapped, I couldn’t wait for them to be opened.

I miss all of that. I miss the anticipation and the holiday season and Christmas taking forever to get here. Mostly, I miss the excitement and the magical feeling it brought. Ever since those child and teenage years, Christmas hasn’t felt the same to me. Back then, the worst part about it all was that you might feel some post-Christmas blues that were inevitable after you’d spent a month and a half being excited for something that was now over. These days, when Christmas is over, I don’t feel blue because all the fun and magic is done; I feel empty because it never felt fun and magical at all. So often, it just doesn’t feel like Christmas, and it never lives up to what I want it to be. Most years, I’m ready for it to be over. Glad it’s done. Ready to put it all behind me. I’m fortunate in that I’ve never had anything tragic happen to me or my family during the holidays. But when I think about memories of specific Christmases past, nothing especially fun or heartwarming stands out. Instead, I tend to remember the years that were difficult or unpleasant in some way.

My grandmother had been part of Christmas morning for as long as I could remember, but by the time she was in her 90s, her mental health was declining and she’d started showing signs of dementia. The first year she wasn’t with us on Christmas morning, we decided that after opening presents we’d visit her in the assisted living facility she’d recently moved to against her wishes. We brought gifts for her—the usual All-Bran and Kleenexes, but also some more fun presents—and hoped we’d also bring a little Christmas cheer into her world. It turned out she had no idea it was Christmas and was not touched that we’d come to visit. Instead, she sat in her chair and sobbed, repeatedly crying out, “Please, God, WHY CAN’T I DIE?!” At one point, she threatened to throw herself out of the window to what she hoped would be her death but would more likely just be a bruise, given that she lived on the first floor. It was a depressing way to spend the holiday, and I felt awful for her. We tried to cheer her up as best we could, but nothing was working, so at some point we simply gathered our belongings, left her gifts on the table, said “Well… Merry Christmas,” and left.

Another year, six months after our wedding, my partner and I tried to please everyone but ended up pleasing no one. We left our new house and drove 45 minutes north to attend the Christmas Eve midnight church service with her parents, drove 45 minutes home, slept from 2:00 a.m. until 5:00 a.m., got up early so we could have our first married Christmas in our home together before our other obligations, drove 45 minutes north again to spend the morning opening presents with my family who felt we were leaving much too early when we drove 90 minutes east to her extended family’s Christmas where they felt we were arriving much too late, drove 90 minutes west to open presents with her nuclear family, and drove 45 minutes south to go home and collapse. Literally everyone was mad at us, and we hadn’t enjoyed any of it, despite our efforts.

Two years later, we were just two months removed from the first time the word “divorce” had been uttered in our home, and I was spending Christmas at my parents’ house without her. It wouldn’t be all that long before divorce felt like the right thing to both of us and we both felt okay again, but at the time it was still new and raw and miserably heartbreaking. I managed to hold it together all day through our gift opening and lunch, but lost it as I was packing up to head home. I remember feeling like there was nowhere for me to be that felt good and safe and like I was home. I knew I didn’t have it in me to spend any more time with my family, but the knowledge that I was about to spend the rest of Christmas alone in our house was more than I could bear.

Many years after that, alone was all I wanted to be. I’d had enough of the holiday season and my family and people in general, and was hating Christmas. Driving home in a snowstorm, I stopped by my favorite bar and noticed it was open, so I went in. There was no one in the entire place besides the one bartender who’d drawn the short straw to work on Christmas and me, and we sat, mostly in silence, watching E.T. on the bar’s television and drinking whiskey. I remember thinking it was far and away the best part of my Christmas that year.

These days, we typically spend Christmas at my sister’s house in Duluth, Minnesota. It’s an 800+ mile drive that typically takes us 13 hours or so, but can take much longer if the roads are bad due to snow. Riding that distance with my parents can be a slog, especially given that there usually is very little conversation and they rarely turn on any music. Many years, no one says anything at all on the drive home, since we’ve used up everything we had to say to each other by that point. There are few activities, especially with two feet of snow on the ground, that my parents can participate in at their age and physical state, so we usually spend three days sitting in my sister’s small living room, staring at each other and not knowing what to do with ourselves. No one else in my family drinks, and while I’m fine with alcohol not being part of Christmas, I’m sometimes jealous of other families whose family Christmases look like fun parties and celebrations instead of time spent yawning and hoping the dog will do something interesting so you have something to talk about.

This year, Dad was recovering from a knee replacement, so we didn’t make our usual trek to Duluth. My sister came home instead, and it was nice to not have to drive 800 miles, but that trip has become our tradition, so it was strange not to do it this year. It was 60 degrees in Ohio on Christmas Day, and I had a sinus infection the whole time, so while it was really good to have my sister home and spend some time with her, it never felt like Christmas at all. I had gotten a beautiful nine-foot Douglas Fir and decorated it in my living room since my sister would be staying at my place this year. It failed to take any of the water I gave it, and was long dead and drooping by the time she arrived, as if it was determined to set the tone for the holiday.

As an adult, the holiday season feels opposite the way it felt as a kid. Where it seemed to take forever to get here, now Christmas seems to sneak up on me well before I’m ready, and there’s never enough time for the shopping and cooking and cleaning and other preparations that need to be made. Christmas Day is no longer the incredible morning when I’d rush downstairs to see the gifts, or wait with excitement for others to open the presents I’d gotten them—it now feels awkward and forced and filled with disappointment that I couldn’t think of better gifts to give this year, despite the knowledge that it doesn’t matter much anyway, since no one remembers who gave them what ten minutes after it’s over. And the sadness that used to follow because all the fun was finally over for another year—that has now been replaced with the hollowness of the whole thing being anticlimactic, the frustration that all the work I put into it didn’t result in something magical, and the relief that it’s done and we can move on with our lives.

All that said, unpleasant Christmas memories and times I’d rather have been alone aren’t responsible for the way I feel about the holidays now. It’s not about remembering the bad times as much as it is missing the good. I miss the way it used to feel when I was young, and it’s disheartening to know that’s a feeling I’ll never get back. The worst of those past Christmases didn’t turn me against the holidays, but they did contribute to shattering the illusion and bringing the truth into focus:

The real issue isn’t that Santa is a lie. It’s that Christmas is.

The most difficult part of growing up is the loss of innocence. As we get older, we learn more about how things work and the way things really are. We see the man behind the curtain pretending to be Oz, or peek at the pro wrestlers practicing fake body slams, or catch a glimpse of the proverbial sausage being made, and the wool starts to fall from our eyes. Before long, we begin to realize that Santa wasn’t the only lie we were told. Before long, we begin to realize how many lies we’ve even been telling ourselves. And it hurts. It hurts to know you’ve been manipulated, but more than that it hurts to know you’ll never be able to feel the way you used to feel about a thing you used to love. It starts to feel like nothing is real as you build up a longer and increasingly consequential list of the things you cared so much about that you now know never really existed in the first place. Fat-free brownies. Your favorite sports team. American democracy.

Similar to what the younger generation now calls being “woke,” being an adult—especially one with critical thinking skills and a willingness to value truth over comfort—comes with no shortage of eye-opening realities and the disquieting ruination of so many things you held dear. The reality of Christmas, while arguably not as important as, say, systemic racism, can be difficult to swallow. For me, that reality has included the realization that Christmas is no different than any other day, and expecting it to be something magical just leads to disappointment. That everything about it has become commercialized and commodified and used to convince people that buying a luxury automobile without consulting your partner is totally normal if the bow is large enough. That the prettiest Christmas carols are the religious ones (hard to enjoy because I’m not religious), and the secular carols are all ridiculous and mindless and annoying. That the holiday is not a fun party in my family, but an awkward day of forced conversation and tense reminders of the ways in which we are not particularly close. That no, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus, and you’ll likely need therapy to figure out why your parents swore there was. That for every person taking a beautifully staged Instagram photo of their perfect, matching pajamas family holiday, there is someone sobbing alone and asking why they can’t just die who will not be experiencing some cinematic George Bailey change of heart with Zuzu and her petals. That I can cook and clean and shop and put up a tree and try like hell to think of the perfect gift for everyone on my list, but it will never be enough to bring back the excitement and anticipation I used to feel because Christmas, like so many things we’ve been tricked into believing, is not reality.

In my high school English class on British literature, we read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and then, somewhat surprisingly given its content, watched the film it had inspired: Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. By way of very brief and watered-down explanation, the book/movie follows a man named Marlow/Willard on a boat journey through the jungle of Africa/Vietnam to find a man named Kurtz/Kurtz, who has seen enough unvarnished reality in the way the world works that it has changed him irreparably, arguably to the point of insanity.

A lot of the things I studied in high school have long been forgotten, but Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now and their shared themes have always stuck with me. One of the themes that stood out the most was the concept of surface reality versus truth, or illusion versus reality. 1899 and 1979 were both well before anyone was talking about “wokeness,” but the idea was mostly the same—there is the illusion or surface reality we’ve all been told and sold and participated in the perpetuation of, and then there is the truth or actual reality of what is really going on when we strip off the veneer and see what’s underneath all the decoration and dressing and camouflage. This illusion is not always purposeful or nefarious or meant to keep others from knowing the truth—sometimes it is something we collectively create without realizing we’re doing it, born out of a need to feel comfortable or happy or patriotic… or excited about something good and fun and magical.

I tend to believe that getting to the truth of things is a good thing—that we should strive to strip away the surface reality to get to the actual reality of most things in life, regardless of the sense of sadness or loss or discomfort that may come with that process—that, ultimately, the honesty and reality of it all is better than being lied to and lying to ourselves or others. It may, for example, be more comforting to believe that America hasn’t been built on racist structures that are embedded in all of our present-day institutions and systems, but admitting to ourselves that it has and is ultimately sets us all free and allows us to reckon with “the horror.”

Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness certainly seem to advocate for truth over illusion, too, but they also offer a somewhat more nuanced take on that theme. Kurtz may have had his eyes opened on his decent through the jungle chaos, and he may have discovered the ugly truths about imperialism and interventionalism, civilization and progress, and humanity’s nature in general. But his awakening to these truths and his discarding of all the window dressing and pretense of civilization ultimately drove him mad, turning him into a hollow man, ashamed of what he’d become. The book and movie, largely through the character of Marlow/Willard, if I’m remembering correctly, seemed to suggest that it is important to seek the truth, but perhaps equally important to know when to put the veil of surface reality and illusion back on, at least temporarily. That truth is good and important and should be the goal, but sometimes the lies we tell ourselves have a place and a purpose—even if that purpose is just to avoid insanity or to be able to enjoy life. Willard warned to “Never get out of the boat… unless you’re going all the way.” The world is a very difficult place, and we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be blind to that fact. But we also still have to get through it, which we can maybe do best by allowing ourselves a little magic. And what is magic, after all, if not illusion?

I’ll confess that drawing comparisons between an insane, murderous, special forces Army colonel and my blasé and maudlin takes on the holidays is a bit far-fetched, even for me. I’ll even admit that declaring Apocalypse Now to be a Christmas movie was mostly a joke, the potential delicious absurdity of Robert Duvall as a shirtless Santa strutting across the beach and bellowing “I love the smell of sugarplums in the morning” notwithstanding. But I do think there may be something to the surface reality theme that applies. My upriver journey through the jungle of adulthood has laid bare some stark facts about the holidays, and it’s true that I’m a changed man—I’ll never get the childhood magic of the excitement and anticipation back, now that I’ve seen through the illusion. And, to a large extent, I’d rather know the truth than be a fool still believing that there’s any real magic to the season or that it’s all joy and jingle bells. But, there’s no reason to let it make me a hollow man. No need to seclude myself in my jungle hut, losing my humanity and placing gingerbread men’s heads on pikes outside as a warning to would-be wassailers. Once you go full Kurtz, there’s no going back.

In the end, Christmas, like most things in life, is what you make of it. The balance is in keeping the things that serve you and letting go of those that don’t. It’s in holding on to enough of the traditions and expectations to prod yourself into making the effort it takes to make it special, while recognizing that much of it is made up and it’s okay to discard some of the expectations and obligations so you can actually enjoy yourself without feeling like things have to go a certain way to be a considered a success. The more we try to live up to the memory of what Christmas felt like as a kid, the more we’re chasing after the impossible and setting ourselves up for disappointment and disillusionment. The more we can adapt as we get older, make peace with the knowledge that most of the holiday is bullshit, and create new traditions that feed us and make us happy, the more likely we are to enjoy it. And a lot of that requires temporarily putting the blinders of surface reality back on for a while and pretending that magic exists. If I can still enjoy watching a football game knowing everything I know about the NFL and NCAA, I can probably find a way to make Christmas feel quasi-merry, too.

Truth be told, there are things I still love about Christmas. I’ve come to enjoy the 800-mile drive to Duluth, and actually missed it this year. Northern Minnesota is usually cold and snowy in December, my sister’s house feels like a cozy Northwoods bungalow, and the journey to get there makes it feel like we’re actually doing something for Christmas. It’s become our new tradition, and there’s something I love about it. I still try to find the perfect gift and, while I don’t usually succeed, I still feel a little excited for people to open what I got them, and try to save the best ones for them to open last. I haven’t watched as many Christmas specials and movies lately, but a few years back I started making a point of watching White Christmas every year, usually while wrapping presents. I still love Christmas lights and decorations, as long as they’re not those awful inflatable ones, and I can stomach the occasional Christmas carol, in small doses. Mostly, I love that the holidays give us an excuse to get together, to see family and friends we may not see often, to have a reason to celebrate, to reminisce about memories good and bad, to wish each other well, and to remind ourselves that we are not alone, and that anywhere can feel like home if we allow it to.

It may be a lie, but it keeps us sane. And once you’ve gotten out of the boat, that’s all you’ve got.

Cicada

It’s a prime number,
after all. A product only
of itself

and solitude,
natural and indivisible without
remainder,

and greater than
one—ironic,

then, given the amount of
multiplication
it took to get us here. Division,

too—purposely, cynically
sowed for individual
gain by those and

to those of the prime
conviction that there is
no number
greater than one.

Seventeen:

it’s a long time, tallied in
months. Longer still when you know
it didn’t need to be

so protracted—the most meager of
efforts, of
sacrifice,
compassion,
humility,
logic—of
care and diligence
all that was required to metamorphose

what is

into what could have
been. Should have been. Seventeen
months so easily narrowed to seventeen
weeks. Days, even. If only.

Only.

But there are so few in this particular
brood—such insufficient colony of
those with the patience and sense, the
willingness to do
what is right even at their most
minimal expense and
thus,

seventeen months:

mimeographed days
bleeding and smudging into each other with
indigo blur and hollowed
purpose, one maybe

a slightly altered facsimile of another, but not
enough to matter. Not enough
to give it a different scientific
name. Months spent

burrowed underground,
nymphal and removed
from life above as you knew it, bent on doing
your small part to save a species
mostly not worth saving and
bent on accelerating

its own inevitable extinction
while believing in nothing so faithfully

as its own immortality.
Seventeen months
before you would tentatively
emerge from
the chrysalis of principle
and caution

—reason, too, if that still exists—and stretch
your hyaline,
atrophied wings. A second dose of
innoculative sap
was far enough removed by then

to reach its full efficacy, rendering you
unlikely
to feed the viral predator, infect
others, shorten

life spans. Something instinctual and
mathematical
told you it was time—all
the waiting
underground
building to this climactic moment as
you crept into the

daylight, red eyes
slow to adjust, feeling
your skin soften and shedding
the membranous
shell of responsibility
and restraint. There were,

after all,
things you’d missed—the warm
embrace of a favorite bar, the
favored bar of a
warm embrace, a road trip

to see a band for the tenth time,
arriving in a new town with ears
still ringing from the
buckling tymbals of a
reverberant stereo sonorous

enough to be heard over the open
window highway din—arriving
with anticipation more
fevered than your own

sunburnt left arm. It took no time at all for
the mask that had
morphed into a part of
your own biology to be easily

sloughed and forgotten, those
seventeen months vanishing
instantly, a
dream that fades faster the
harder you try to remember
as you wake. The caution, also—

the care and distancing and self-control all
were soon molted and blew away, carried

on the wind, suspended as aerosols
too microscopic to perceive and too
intangible to fear, but
still there

whether you believed in them
or not. It felt good—

frighteningly so—to return
to places so a part of yourself that
seventeen months felt like
just yesterday—
to feel your soul adjust to the

long-deferred familiarity of
the world outside, letting
the sun warm your form, your
antennae processing the sensory
overload of the swarm’s call, finding
your vocal cords again,
relearning

how to have a conversation,
how to sing your genus’ ancient song. It
scared you to see

how easy
it was to not care—to understand

for a moment how most had been
living
these seventeen months while
you remained
dormant—to feel

how normal reckless could feel and how
quickly rationalization could
take hold. An invisible
enemy is too easily ignored, impalpable
dangers too quickly
forgotten, and the lure of

communing
with others of your
species too strong. Or at least

it was. Before.

They say solitary
confinement changes
a person, and
while that likely is true, it may

not always be for the most manifest of
reasons—the isolation providing
perspective
as much as madness—a forced break from
routine and habit, an
opportunity to observe the

behavior of others, your revulsion
and disappointment at
their choices as responsible for your
Kafkaesque transformation
as anything else. You were

no longer the same
person—and yet—perhaps
more you than
ever before, having
stuck to your principles, unbending

to pressure and persuasion, unyielding
to the ridicule from those who
call themselves friends—the

isolation of derision and
loneliness of perspicacity far

worse than that
of quarantine—but

not enough for you to become
someone you are
not, begging the dispiriting
question: did this scourge devolve
other broods into
something other than themselves, or

is this who they
were all along?

Most were not
like you, that much is certain—
most had emerged from their
underground chambers as
soon as the restrictions
were lifted, oblivious

to the reality that these official
decrees were made not with
health and safety
in mind—driven instead
by political,
economical,

irrational justifications which
needlessly prolonged the
curse. Others had never
heeded the mandates in the
first place, never

bothered to stop living
life as normal or do the
bare minimum
for others, chirping
endlessly about their
freedoms

while infringing on
everyone else’s.

You watched in horror and anger, and in
despondency for your world as
the others couldn’t or
wouldn’t wait—flooding
out of their mud turrets, they
took to the trees,
gathering

in large groups and making
      so
      much
      noise—
blinded by a sudden
awareness
of their own short
lifespans—blinded

by misinformation, disinformation,
pseudo-science and conspiracy,
regurgitating the lobotomizing tissue
they’d sucked from
whatever xylem would feed them

what they wanted to hear:

justification for the behavior
they’d already decided
was permissible and justified,
talking endlessly about it to make
themselves feel at peace
with their choices. The sound

of their bullshit was
deafening at times—a cacophony
of willful ignorance and self-deception—
the consensus that
the threat was over

because they wanted it to be,

a herd immunity to empathy, responsibility,
and reality—not
noticing or caring about the
hundreds of thousands of
carcasses
accumulating on the ground
below them—two hundred times

those lost in the tragedy we were
constantly scolded to “Never
Forget,”

yet piled here in mass
graves, stacked like cord wood
in refrigerated trucks, littering the
base of the tree of our indifference,
the forgotten loam from which to sow
more suffering. Jokes were

made about biblical signs—checking
the tic boxes of
first disease,
then locusts, speculation of
amphibious meteorology next—but,

the sacred text revered and misinterpreted
by so many
failed to teach that there is
no greater plague
than the virulent combination of
stupidity and
selfishness.

Seventeen months:

a long time to go without cutting
your hair, let alone letting
it down and freeing
yourself from worry and
accountability. Yet, somehow

also a fleeting span, since time means
nothing now and humanity
means less. It’s possible—likely,
in fact—that seventeen more
will pass before

we see this blight truly
lifted, if it ever is at all, leaving
unfathomable but largely unnoticed
extermination in its wake. And when

this chapter ends, it will instantly be
torn from the tomes of our
collective history and
discarded as though it
never happened—remembered only as

one more lie “they” want you to
believe—no lessons to be
learned, no improvements made
to what we’d labeled
“normal”—no shakeup of

the status quo for
the good of the species or the
acceptance and assistance of
other broods in dire need—we will
go on, as most did already—with
a life the way it was—
the way it has always been—
a life where

numbers greater than one
don’t exist.

Seventeen months

was far too long but
not long enough
to overcome predation unacknowledged
by most,
to persuade those so fixated on the
economy that there can be
no economy while the plague remains,
to debunk the constant firehose of
lies and bad-faith appeals to
freedom,
to summon the better angels
from their lofted branches—

it was only long enough to
accumulate death tolls so
staggering as to be
incomprehensible,
unrelatable,
surreal, and therefore
unreal—
resulting in a dearth of common register and fading
into the wallpaper—forgotten
as quickly as the threat was and
will be.

Still, you will not forget. You could not even
if you tried and even as the world
around you tries to
make you. This
terrific truth remains
forever seared onto your recall, a

memento mori superfluum, inoculating you
against hope
and mutating your psyche into
a supervariant resistant to trust. You will

Never Forget

the way other broods responded when
tested, or how even those close
to you, respected and highly regarded,
gave you reason to think so achingly
less of them. Any illusions

you might’ve had about who
people are
at their core
have now disappeared as swiftly

as the millions of their brethren
they helped wipe from the earth.

You can be thankful, at least, for
your forethought and caution. For as you
emerged from isolation, you took care
to leave your shell
intact and delicately attached to a
low-hanging limb near the
burrow you’d occupied in those
long, pupal days—a complete

exoskeleton ready to again
accept your thoraxial form and
offer safe harbor. You will be glad for its
protection—not from pandemics or
disease—not from new strains of
deleterious infection, but from
the viral spread of our species’ own
futility and self-
destruction—

as you retreat
once more

underground.

WAP

Sometimes, cooking dinner inspires me to write songs…

Carnivores in this house
Carnivores in this house
Carnivores in this house
Carnivores in this house

I said, certified freak
Dinner with a beak
Wet-ass poultry
Make that diet game weak!

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, you plucking on some wet-ass poultry
Bring a bucket and a mop for this wet-ass poultry
Give me lotsa bread to sop up this wet-ass poultry

Heat it up, fry it in some oil
Bake or roast or grill or broil
Don’t forget to refrigerate
Leave it out too long, it’ll spoil

Chop that squab, butter its hide
Shove some stuffing up inside
Legs and wings and breasts and thighs
This poultry is wet; this ain’t Popeye’s
Truss it up, seal its demise
This bird’s got wings, but it never flies
I want you to slice that Peking duck
Right here at my tableside
Let’s get frisky, make me Kishke
Coq au Vin or cock with whiskey
Original’s fine if you’re not risky
But let me tell you ‘bout this Extra Crispy

Gobble it, swallow it, Tikka Masala it
You ever had Biryani? Now, that’s some praise Allah shit
Don’t plan for leftovers, ‘cuz I’m ‘bout to eat all of it
Eat your dry-ass KFC in the back of your Impala, bitch
Make some sauce, give it a toss
Ask for a toothpick or maybe some floss
You really ain’t never got turducken for the gang
You already ate half of it ‘fore they came
Now get your napkins and your bibs
For this wet-ass poultry
This shit is messier than ribs
This is wet-ass poultry
Pay the mortgage on my crib
For this wet-ass poultry
Now you best be callin’ dibs
On some wet-ass poultry

Look, I need a Brahma roaster, I need a Burma Crested
I need a Cornish game hen, I need a wild pheasant
Not a common quail, I need a Jersey Giant
With some fight in it, all loud and defiant
He got some dark meat, then that’s where I’m headed
Ain’t got no Cochins? We’ll Rhode Island Red it
Pick up that axe, I’m tryna behead it
Some barbecue sauce make it friggin’ poetic
Turn it on a spit, give it a smoke
Roast in a bag, baste it with Coke
I want you to feed me them chicken wings
‘til I have a cholesterol stroke
My heart is a time bomb, my arteries cloggy
But I love the poultry, ‘specially when it’s soggy
Haters salty as hell, like they all tryna brine me
Colonel Sanders is dead, but he still tryna sign me

Your honor, I’m a freak when it comes to chicken
I can make some poultry that’ll make your pulse quicken
Put it in the oven, wait while the magic kicks in
Naw, that shit ain’t just good – positively finger lickin’
Hey, fast food chains, I’m the one that beat ya’
When it comes to cooking up delicious tweeters
Chick-fil-A has its share of eaters
But they only wanna sell they shit to breeders
If it’s free range, it costs more change
But drown it in sauce and it all tastes the same
If you taste it you’ll ask, “What’s in it?”
Secret herbs and spices are my claim to fame

Aaahh...

Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, you plucking on some wet-ass poultry
Bring a bucket and a mop for this wet-ass poultry
Give me lotsa bread to sop up this wet-ass poultry
Now from the top, fowl it up
That’s some wet-ass poultry
Now get a bucket and a mop
That’s some wet-ass poultry
I’m talking BAWK BAWK BAWK
That’s some wet-ass poultry
Make some stock in a pot
That’s some wet-ass poultry

Huh

Carnivores in this house
Carnivores in this house

Do They Know It’s Covid?

An old friend of mine issued me several quick-writing challenges during the first year of covid. This time it was to do a covid parody of the Band Aid classic, “Do They Know It’s Christmas”…

It's Christmas time
And here’s my plead to be afraid
At Christmas time
The health guidelines will not be obeyed

And with our fools aplenty
It will spread for miles, deployed
Covid’s harm around the world
At Christmas time

But, they don’t care
If they kill someone’s loved one
At Christmas time
E.R. beds will be overrun

Covid swirls outside your window
And it unfurls through breath from peers
So we only oughta be going
To essential things this year

And the Christmas norms you cling to
Have your clan confined in rooms
Well, you might swap Bethlehem
Instead for Zoom

As the ‘rona grows per capita this Christmas time
The greatest gift you’ll give this year is life
If you can just forego, abstain, let live, lie low
Dudes you know may be alive next Fall

Here’s a thought: Raise your mask up, everyone
Here’s to facts. Disbelief’s concerning, son
Do they know how science works at all?

Heed the word
Heed the word
Heed the word
Set guests low this Christmas time, my friend

Heed the word
You don’t need to gather in your den
Heed the word
Worse than flu by a factor of ten

Heed the word
Help us slow the virus climb again
Heed the word
Debts are owed to our front line brethren

Heed the word
Yes, I know you spend this time with kin, but
Heed the word
Let some folks see Christmas time again

Last Gleaming

I'm not much of a poet. And this is not so much a poem as it is a loosely-themed mess of a very-much-first-draft of something in serious need of edits and reworks to fix tonight's stream-of-consciousness dump. But, it's Election Eve and I feel the need to capture where my head is right now, so, for whatever it's worth...

And at some point
I lost count

No longer able to list, to name every march
Every protest
Every Sisyphean act of resistance
That dominated travel plans and filled my social calendar

Back when I still had those

A struggle to recall how many trips I’d made
Whether alone
Or with a team of friends infinitely
More prepared than I –

Prepared with snacks
Prepared with plans for what we’d do and who we’d call
And where we’d safely reconvene
If the shit went down
Prepared to fill the rental car with jokes
And songs
Not as much to pass the hours
As to counter the unyielding barrage
Of news stories read
In horror from my phone
Like a dystopian screenplay
Too farfetched
To be greenlit, unfolding before us
Now, a new reality fashioned
Out of whole cloth and
Alternative Facts -
The birth of a nation that registered
In the moment as shocking,
Unconscionable,
Unimaginable – but had, in truth, always been
Inevitable,
The natural outcome of our equation

At some point I couldn’t remember
The number
Of miles and milestones -
The highways stretching through history without
Promise of future, past Gettysburg
And Antietam
Drives through Pennsylvania to stand
On Pennsylvania
On Independence and Constitution
On principle
Huddling with the masses in winter’s inaugural winds and
Sweltering in Lafayette’s oppressive heat
Two years before it would see the heat become
Far more oppressive

Or back home, failing to quantify the midday walks
A few blocks over
To gather in a public square where
The public
Had long since stopped gathering -
Standing in the shadow of an edifice seemingly designed
With the sole purpose
Of reminding me that democracy wasn’t the only
Greek revival we’d
Made a half-assed attempt at
And trying not to notice that the crowd
Was measurably smaller than it was
Last week
And significantly larger than it would be
Next week
As outrage fatigue consumed more corporeal real estate,
The focus of our dissent more and more
Blurred,
Muddied by the sheer volume
Of subject matter,
Of reason for resistance and resistance of reason

So much easier than
You’d think
To lose track of which cause
We were marching for this time
Standing among a half million strangers
Or a half dozen neighbors
Not for lack of conviction, but because
We’d all lost count

Of the lies
Of the cons
The misdirection and obfuscation
The scandals and obstruction and collusion and coordination
Of the grifts
The emoluments
The atrocities committed in our names
Of the treason and power grabs and denigration of norms and absence of morals
Of the boasts and the insecurities
The gross incompetence
The fleecing and slander and broad daylight crime
Of the retrogression
The flaming racism
The violence
The death
And the kids
In
Goddamned
Cages

All of it
Constant and unforgiving
A firehose of barbarity

It was exhausting
It was overwhelming
It was the point

Designed to make it impossible to see the trees
For the forest -
Our capacities and attention spans,
Our bandwidth lacking,
Unable to hold focus and devote the time
And determination
Required to force accountability
Or even to keep tabs, until we’d grow so
Collectively numb
We’d forget it had ever been different

No memory of how many times I’d repeated the mantra:
“This is not normal,”
But not enough to make me
Fully believe it – since, look,
All due respect to Martin,
But the arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend
Like he thinks it does -
Left unfettered, its congenital state is and
Always has been
To buckle toward injustice with a planetary gravitation
So natural it can only be man-made -
Its bow only slowed with resistance
Applied firmly in the opposite direction by those
Without adequate power
To change its ultimate course, but a recurring
And Notorious willingness to make
Good trouble for those bent on
Preserving the system
And delay its progress a little longer

I lost count, too,
Of those who would ask why -
Questioning my drives across states
To stand in capitol crowds or
Local rallies that appeared fruitless,
Symbolic at best -
No obvious point or outcome or objective
For change -
And I would tell them that people
Need allies
And I was happy to be one -
Or that, selfishly, I needed to be in those crowds
To know that I wasn’t the only one
Who thought like me -
To feel less alone and more supportive
But still not hopeful
Never hopeful
That I’d ever see the nation become what
I wanted it to be

The main reason, though,
I most often kept to myself,
Not trusting in my interrogators’ ability to understand -
My reason for being there was
To be there -
To be counted among those who, knowing the boulder would always
Roll down on them in the end,
Pushed it anyway -
“Resistance,” I had read somewhere,
“Must be its own reward,
Since resistance, at least within the lifespan
Of the resistors,
Almost always fails”

This Great Experiment will not last forever
Our country – my country –
Will eventually fall -
Tonight, though, I’ll continue to stand
With those committed to delaying the twilight
A little longer
And hope that, in the early light of dawn,
It’s still there

Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Does Their Duty

Act Two, Song Three from
"Home-a-ton: A Quarantine Musical."

[WASHINGTON]
Let me tell you what I wish we’d learn
To combat our leaders’ cruelty:
We can’t let them control

[WASHINGTON AND COMPANY]
Who lives
Who dies-
Let’s do our duty

[WASHINGTON]
It’s up to all of us

[JEFFERSON]
Gotta resist - our government’s response has been a disaster
They couldn’t have done worse if they tried
And they tried

[WASHINGTON AND COMPANY]
Who lives?
Who dies?
Who does their duty?

[WASHINGTON]
President Great Again:

[MADISON]
He took our country from amity to calamity
And he won’t admit it, but he deserves most of the credit
For all the death that he gave us

[WASHINGTON AND COMPANY]
Who lives?
Who dies?
Who does their duty?

[ANGELICA]
Our blundering and Floundering Fathers hearts are so cold
As numbers are compounding – fathers aren’t gon’ grow old

[BURR]
And when they’re gone, who of us is to blame?
Whose life stayed the same?

[BURR AND MEN]
And who did their duty?

[ANGELICA AND WOMEN]
Who did their duty?

[BURR AND MEN]
Who did their duty?

[WOMEN]
Let’s rise up

[ELIZA]
Increased selfless action’s imperative

[WOMEN]
Let’s rise up

[ELIZA]
We may be washing our hands
And being careful where we stand
It's not enough

[COMPANY]
Let’s rise up

[ELIZA]
We will eschew the exposers who’ll not stay inside

[MULLIGAN/LAFAYETTE/LAURENCE]
Let’s do our duty

[ELIZA]
This virus just spreads, killing thousands of folks while we’re fighting
We can still curb it, but we’re running out of-

[ELIZA AND COMPANY]
Time

[ELIZA]
The deniers-

[ELIZA AND ANGELICA]
Are killing us

[ELIZA]
They’re not inclined-

[ELIZA AND ANGELICA]
To do their duty

[ELIZA]
We are burying people in trucks

[ELIZA AND ANGELICA]
No room

[ELIZA]
Stacked in freezers – there’s just too many at a-

[ELIZA AND COMPANY]
Time

[ELIZA]
And they still accrue
I ask myself, “Why did our response take so much-”

[ELIZA AND COMPANY]
Time

[ELIZA]
The ones left behind us
Whose lives much too early were halted
Can’t give them more-

[ELIZA AND COMPANY]
Time

[ELIZA]
Sick of rules too measly from our waffling government

[WASHINGTON]
We’ll do our duty

[ELIZA]
Our compassion is bravery
We could have saved many more if we’d acted in-

[ELIZA AND COMPANY]
Time

[ELIZA]
And if my time is up, have I done enough?

[ELIZA & COMPANY]
Have I done my duty?

[ELIZA]
Oh, and you know who suffers the most: the-

[COMPANY]
Less fortunate

[ELIZA]
Our essential workers see cases in ratios wildy dis-

[COMPANY]
Proportionate

[ELIZA]
Too late to save hundreds of thousands
The threat just keeps on going up

[COMPANY]
Enormous surge

[ELIZA]
These are times we cannot be bystanders
We don’t have the-

[ELIZA AND COMPANY]
Time

[ELIZA]
And before time is up
Can we do enough?

[COMPANY]
Can we do our duty?

[ELIZA]
And I hope that I’ll see you again
It's only a matter of-

[ELIZA AND COMPANY]
Time

[COMPANY]
Will you do your duty?

Time

Who lives, who dies, who does their duty?

Time

Will you do your duty?

Time

Who lives, who dies-

[FULL COMPANY]
Let’s do our duty

The Zoom Where It Happens

Act Two, Song Two from
"Home-a-ton: A Quarantine Musical."

[BURR]
Ten coworkers and their management log into a Zoom

[BURR AND ENSEMBLE]
Pre-pandemic, were composed pros

[BURR]
Now they’re working from home online, the office shuttered so that

[BURR AND ENSEMBLE]
They won’t be exposed

[ENSEMBLE]
Closed

[BURR]
Advantages emerge as they adjust to working remote home hours
Like wearing pajamas while making the bucks
And meetings converging without taking showers
But here’s the part that really sucks:

No one tells you ‘bout
The Zoom where it happens
The Zoom where it happens
The Zoom where it happens
Now we dwell about
The Zoom where it happens
The Zoom where it happens
The Zoom where it happens
No one really knows if decisions got made
If our file displayed
If our message conveyed
We just assume that we’re trapped in
The special hell we call
The Zoom where it happens

[BURR AND COMPANY]
Thomas claims-

[JEFFERSON]
It said the meeting host would let me in if I wait
So sorry I was late

[BURR AND COMPANY]
Thomas claims-

[JEFFERSON]
Alexander said-

[HAMILTON]
Sent you an access code!

[JEFFERSON]
And basic’ly accused me of sleeping past eight

[BURR AND COMPANY]
Thomas claims-

[JEFFERSON]
I texted Madison and said-
“Is there an agenda?” He didn’t even have the right date

[BURR AND COMPANY]
Thomas claims-

[JEFFERSON]
Well, HE scheduled the meeting!
HE sent out the invite, to incite proceedings!

[BURR]
But!
He still wasn’t in-

[BURR AND COMPANY]
The Zoom where it happened
The Zoom where it happened
The Zoom where it happened

[BURR]
Entered a dozen PINs

[BURR AND COMPANY]
The Zoom where it happens
The Zoom where it happens
The Zoom where it happens

[BURR]
No one really knows what is
Making that loud hisssss
But we can’t meet in person and so
Now we’re stuck with thisssss
We just assume that you’re nappin’
If you’re camera’s off in
The Zoom where it happens

[BURR AND COMPANY]
Meanwhile-

[BURR]
Somebody is laughing at the wacky fake tropic island beach green screen background that they’ve chosen

[COMPANY]
Meanwhile-

[BURR]
Someone is pixelated and not moving anymore-
Their screen is frozen
Then we all spend five minutes on some waving and hellos
And debate who’s on first like Abbott & Costello

[MADISON]
Jefferson, I can see that you’re talking, brother, but we can’t hear while you mutter verbs - in other words-

[JEFFERSON]
Oh, shoot!

[MADISON]
Dude, you’re on mute

[JEFFERSON]
How astute!

[MADISON]
Now there’s an echo – could you just plug in your headphones?

[JEFFERSON]
Actually, I should

[MADISON]
Man, are you making a smoothie?!

[JEFFERSON]
Oh, was my blender too loud?

[MADISON]
Sounds like Michael Bay movie

[JEFFERSON]
Oopsie

[BURR]
No!

[COMPANY]
-one hears you in
The Zoom where it happens

[BURR AND COMPANY]
The Zoom where it happens
The Zoom where it happens
Takes a year to begin
The Zoom where it happens
The Zoom where it happens
The Zoom where it happens

[BURR]
My God!

[BURR AND COMPANY]
Your dog is cute
But do we have to see him while we telecommute?
Click Zoom, there’s your cat’s chin

[BURR]
Here with all your pets in the Zoom where it happens

[COMPANY]
Now we work at home a ton

[BURR]
What did you say? I can’t hear you when we all try to talk all at the same time

[COMPANY]
Now we work at home a ton

[BURR]
Can’t see you when you point your camera’s aim line
Toward the sunshine by the window in the daytime

[COMPANY]
Now we work at home a ton

[BURR]
And did you know, as you typed, it doesn’t matter
What you put in the Zoom chat window?

[HAMILTON]
‘Cuz we don’t bother-
That thing is a mess

[BURR]
Don’t unmute to answer

[HAMILTON]
So we just keep nodding yes
Surroundings, your house tells us a lot ‘bout yourself
But you don’t look highbrow unless there’s books on your shelf
Oh, you’ll get love for it. Get high rates for it
Bad connection makes you…

[HAMILTON AND COMPANY]
Wait for it, wait for it, wait!

[HAMILTON]
God help and forgive me
I’m gonna share
My screen, just hold on-
Bear with me

[HAMILTON/JEFFERSON/
MADISON/WASHINGTON]
What do you want, Burr?
What do you want, Burr?

When it comes to meetings,
What do you think is called for?

[BURR]
I
Don’t wanna be in
The Zoom where it happens
The Zoom where it happens
Don’t
Wanna be in
The Zoom where it happens
The Zoom where it happens

Don’t

Wanna be
In the Zoom where it happens

I

Don’t wanna be in the Zoom...
Oh
Oh

Don’t wanna be
Don’t wanna be

I've got to be
I've got to be
In that Zoom
In that online room

[COMPANY]
You sit too close to the screen

[BURR]
Here’s your kid to steal the scene

[COMPANY]
We end each meeting with awkward stares

[BURR]
A more boring version of Hollywood Squares

[COMPANY]
Stuck in a digital trance

[BURR]
Another joke about not wearing pants

[BURR AND COMPANY]
Reach through my laptop and slap him

[BURR]
Don’t want to be in
The Zoom...

Don’t want to be...

Don’t want to be...

But, I've got to be in
The Zoom where it happens...
I've got to be, I've gotta be, I've gotta be...
In the gloom!

Click Zoom.

Re-Opening Salvo

Act Two, Song One from
"Home-a-ton: A Quarantine Musical."

[WASHINGTON]
Ladies and gentlemen, you coulda been anywhere virtually tonight, but you're here with us in a pandemic. Are you ready for a no-win conundrum?!

The issue on the table: Reopening our country with our cases climbing and nothing at all under control. Now, Mister Jefferson, you have the floor, sir

[JEFFERSON]
‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'
Have those words been repealed? ‘Cuz now I’m feelin’ oppressed
We shut down in March, and back then it was fair, but
Now it’s July, and I need a haircut

Nowww
It’s time for a reset
We can’t let our small businesses accumulate debt
So, let’s assess how to open hastily
We can resume our former lives and still do it safely

[HAMILTON]
Not true!

[JEFFERSON]
Ooh, yeah, the truth hurts, mon amie
You might be savin’ lives, but you’re killin’ the economy
Plus, I can’t pay my mortgage statement
Unless my bank takes banana bread as payment
It’s the summer – you’ll find me in the pool
And you know that we gotta send our kids back to school
This financial pain is something we can’t sustain
And most of us just plain need to be unrestrained and entertained
Your closure mission killed our plans by attrition
To say nothing of vacations and holiday traditions
Look, when fireworks were canceled, we got vicious
Imagine what gon' happen when you try to shut down Christmas

[WASHINGTON]
Thank you so much, Mister Jefferson. Alright, Mister Hamilton, your response…

[HAMILTON]
Thomas, that was a nice act of defiance
Welcome to reality, where we believe in science
Would you like to join us, or keep dreamin’
Spittin’ whatever the hell it is Sean Hannity’s been screamin’?
This reopening trend will just extend
How long we’ll be spending time with normal life suspended
Do you comprehend it? If we stay focused and finish strong, it’s
Our best chance at normal. You’d rather we prolong this?
A business lesson laced with apathy – the audacity!
Restaurants can’t last at a fraction of capacity
The plan to open now doesn’t work - it’s like satire:
We’re trying to live in a house that’s on fire
And another thing – schools closed at a thousand cases
But, now we got four million, and it’s off to the races?
Maybe your wack back to school plan would be more highly rated
If you ever listened to the educated
Your crass restlessness is so evident; ignore evidence
Negligent - who cares if we kill another resident?
So the governor told you you could go back and shop at stores
Whose health you think he protects, the economy’s or yours?
Sittin’ here watching society’s ruin
While the curve still bends upward
What the hell are we doing?

You’ll Be Fine

Act One, Song Four from
"Home-a-ton: A Quarantine Musical."

[KING DON]
You say
The virus multiplies like the lies that I tell every day
You cry
‘Cuz you see that our curve climbs bigly and that thousands will die
I say “Sad.”
I’d like to avoid an arraignment for all of my crimes
So I’ll say it’s not bad
Instead of working on containment, feed you lines

You'll be fine
Soon you'll see
It’ll be gone with the April heat
You'll be fine
Calm your fears
Like a miracle, it disappears
It’s a hoax
Liberal spin
Have you tried hydroxychloroquine?
One thing’s true
You poor slobs:
I will literally say anything
To avoid doing my job

Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba
Baht-ba-ba-ba-bing-bing-bing
Ba-ba-baht-baht-bing-bing-bong
Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba
Baht-ba-ba-ba-bing-bing-bing
Ba-ba-baht-baht-baaaa

You say that I’m inflaming the pandemic’s spread
But I prefer just blaming Obama instead
And please, slow down the testing!
‘Cuz our cases are cresting
I don’t need them protesting
The cardiac arresting
Of millions, and billions, and trillions of U.S. civilians

You’ll be fine
Just you wait
It’s as harmless as Mike Pence is straight
Inject light
Drink some bleach
Like I care – I’m already impeached
Covid is
Overblown
And if not well, hell, you’re on your own

‘Cuz, now, don’t
Think I won’t
Let it kill your friends and family
So there’s less of you to vote

Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba
Baht-ba-ba-ba-bing-bing-bing
Ba-ba-baht-baht-bing-bing-bong
Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba
Baht-ba-ba-ba-bing-bing-bing
Ba-ba-
Everybody

[ENSEMBLE]
Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba
Baht-ba-ba-ba-bing-bing-bing
Ba-ba-baht-baht-bing-bing-bong
Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba
Baht-ba-ba-ba-bing-bing-bing
Ba-ba-ba-baht-ba-bing-bing-boooooonnnnng

My Shots

(a love song to the anti-vaxxers)

Act One, Song Three from
"Home-a-ton: A Quarantine Musical."

[HAMILTON]
I am not throwing away my… shots!
I am not throwing away my… shots!
Hey yo, we must have immunity
To live life with impunity
And I'm not throwing away my shots!

I’m amazed at how you reject knowledge
I prob’ly shouldn’t be, but your irrationality’s flawless
The problem is there’s not a turd that you cannot polish
When it comes from your fool president
It’s heaven-sent, won’t acknowledge
That he’s a con and a liar, and Vladdy Putin’s mole
Every word from his blowhole, his callous acts are all impeachable

Kayleigh McEnany’s lies get bolder
Claims conspiracies like Fox Mulder, I told her
Ev’ry chance he’s had to stem damage
He has managed to mismanage, just tells us it’ll vanish
His followers are Klannish
His plan is to fan our divisions to flame
Divert our damn attention, so let me spell out his game
He is the-

[HAMILTON/LAFAYETTE/MULLIGAN/LAURENS]
D-I-S-U-N-I-T
E-R-we are-meant to be…

[HAMILTON]
A colony that’s too distracted to see
His inaction has impacted us with protracted disease
Essentially, death spreads exponentially
While he lies to our face, makes insane decrees
Says maybe you should drink disinfectant tea
And we pray for a vaccination in this century
Please, Fauci?

[LAFAYETTE/MULLIGAN/LAURENS]
(He says in parentheses)

[HAMILTON]
Don’t be shocked if it takes years for a vaccine
Let’s hope the price to get it won’t be obscene
A breakthrough would mean we could finally convene
So I am not throwing away my… shots (shots!)
I am not throwing away my… shots (shots!)
Hey yo, let’s see some effin’ unity
We live in a community
So, don’t throw away your shots

[HAMILTON/MULLIGAN/LAURENS/LAFAYETTE]
I am not throwing away my… shots
I am not throwing away my… shots
Hey yo, it ain’t forced compliance
It’s just medical science
And I'm not throwing away my… shots
It's time to take a shot!

[LAFAYETTE]
I don’t want the government controllin’ me
But, as best I can tell, you’re cajolin’ me
That the dudes at Breitbart are just trollin’ me
When they tell me the government will install 5G
With my-

[HAMILTON/LAURENS/LAFAYETTE/MULLIGAN]
Shot!

[MULLIGAN]
Yo, I know this sounds portentous
But, I’m starting to believe that the dude from Apprentice
May not have all of our best interests in mind
So, when there’s a vaccine, I’d be crazy to decline!
I'm gonna take a-

[HAMILTON/LAURENS/LAFAYETTE/MULLIGAN]
Shot!

[LAURENS]
Burr, you say it’s about freedom. Word?
But why is your freedom more pronounced than that of the herd?
You got rights, yeah that’s right. Until you’re infringing
Others’ rights hinging on your own whims impinging
Have another-

[HAMILTON/LAURENS/LAFAYETTE/MULLIGAN]
Shot!

[BURR]
Freedom is all about choices
Laurens, you’re a turncoat – I don’t care what your boy says
Unlike you, my opinion can’t be bought
I won’t let them control my thoughts
Indoctrinated by their shots!

[HAMILTON]
Burr, you’ve lost the plot
Spittin’ wild theories like schizophrenic buckshot
I think you prob’ly ought
To pop a comfortable squat
Let’s educate your ass, so you don’t sound untaught
Michelle Bachmann said it’s causing autism - it’s not
Hotshot, you forgot, the feds already track you, like it or not
Your phone and your Alexa towers already check your hours and inspect your showers
You think they need the vaccine to track you with injective superpowers?!

Look, I know your Boys are Proud
They don’t trust the government, don’t wanna’ be cowed
But if they don’t want to see the world they love
Turn into a mushroom cloud…

[LAURENS]
Let's do what’s best for the whole crowd!

[HAMILTON/LAURENS/LAFAYETTE/MULLIGAN/ENSEMBLE]
I am not throwing away my… shots
I am not throwing away my… shots
Hey yo, we must have immunity
To live life with impunity
And I'm not throwing away my… shots

I am not throwing away my… shots
I am not throwing away my… shots
Hey yo, let’s see some effin’ unity
We live in a community
And I'm not throwing away my shots

[LAURENS]
It’s just a little sting!
Whoa, whoa, whoa-oh-oh
Hey!
Whoa-oh-oh!
Owww!
Whoa-oh-oh!
Said, let ‘em spear ya!
Yeah
Polio!
Whoa, whoa, whoa-oh-oh
Is gone, and so is smallpox!
Whoa-oh-oh!
Said, so is smallpox!
Whoa-oh-oh!
Come on!
Yeah
Come on, let's go!

[LAURENS]
Mask up!
When you're living with disease, you mask up
Tell your brother that he's gotta mask up
Tell your sister that she's gotta mask up

[LAURENS AND ENSEMBLE]
When are these selfish Me’s gonna mask up?
When are these spreading sneeze gonna mask up?
When they cough and they wheeze, gonna mask up?
When will they just appease and mask up?

Mask up!

[HAMILTON]
We been spreadin’ death so much it feels like we’re supposed to be
When's it gonna get me?
In my office? From people I exposed to me?
If I get invited, do I go or do I let it be?
Why are there so many without empathy?
See, I never thought in twenty-twenty
We’d be so comfortable with deaths this plenty
The doubters ask us why we live in fear, while they jeer, reach for a beer
I fear no number of their dead peers is too many

Screw that
This is not suppression - it’s being human
Where your “Pro-Life,” “All Lives Matter,” and
“Fam-ly Val-ues” been?
Fools oppose this, stick their heads in the sand
Makes rules seem hopeless. Hospitals can’t withstand
Demand. ‘Zat the price of independence?
Trade a selfish bit of freedom for a death sentence?
Or will the shadow of death bring transcendence
Realize that our existence is interdependent?

I know resumin’ your old life is excitin’
But, Jesus, look at all the disease you’re invitin’
And the unease you’re incitin’
Let’s get a handle on this ample devastation
Are we a nation of facts? Then get your vaccination!
You’re rash - flagrantly hatin’, uncompassionately
Bashin’ every adaptation
We enact to try save this nation!
Stop actin’ like the sick and casualties are “someone else”
And for the first time, start thinkin’ past yourself

[HAMILTON AND COMPANY]
And I am not throwing away my… shots
I am not throwing away my… shots
Hey yo, it ain’t forced compliance
It’s just medical science
And I'm not throwing away my… shots

[HAMILTON/LAURENS/
LAFAYETTE/MULLIGAN]
We're gonna mask up! Time to take a shot!
We're gonna mask up! Time to take a shot!
We're gonna

[COMPANY]
Mask up!
Mask up!

[HAMILTON/LAFAYETTE/
LAURENS/MULLIGAN]
It’s time to take a shot!

[COMPANY]
Mask up!
Mask up!  

[HAMILTON/LAFAYETTE/
LAURENS/MULLIGAN]
It’s time to take a shot!

[COMPANY]
Mask up!

[HAMILTON/LAFAYETTE/
LAURENS/MULLIGAN]
It’s time to take a shot!

[COMPANY]
Mask up!

[HAMILTON/LAFAYETTE/
LAURENS/MULLIGAN]
Take a shot! Shot! Shot!

[HAMILTON/LAFAYETTE/
LAURENS/MULLIGAN]
Time to take a shot!
Time to take a shot!
And I am-

[HAMILTON/LAFAYETTE/MULLIGAN/LAURENS]
Not throwin' away my-

[COMPANY]
Not throwin' away my shots!

Cover Your Face, Ace

Act One, Song Two from
"Home-a-ton: A Quarantine Musical."

[COMPANY]
The year two thousand twenty. Hot Spot, U.S.

[HAMILTON]
Pardon me. Y’mind coverin’ your face, ace?

[BURR]
What’d you say to me, libtard?

[HAMILTON]
Give me space, ace
A mandatory ordinance is pretty basic, ace
That doesn’t apply to you?

[BURR]
I'm getting pissed off

[HAMILTON]
Ace…
We’re all in this together. Covering up your nose and mouth should be automatic since you can spread it even when not symptomatic, so, see? Not wearing one is a disgrace, ace. You know you’re hurting people?

[BURR]
You want a taste, ace?

[HAMILTON]
No!
I want you to care ‘bout others. This isn’t about you; be keeper of your brothers. You look at me like I’m a sucker. Did I stutter?

Why don’t you do it? Why refuse to wear a mask?

[BURR]
Because the virus is a hoax, if you must ask

[HAMILTON]
You’re an idiot. Are you… illiterate?!
God, you’re inconsiderate
And worse, you’re just oblivious
To anyone else – it’s hideous

[BURR]
Can I say what I think?

[HAMILTON]
Will you be nice?

[BURR]
While you lecture, let me offer you some free advice:
Shut. Up.

[HAMILTON]
What?

[BURR]
Butt. Out.

[HAMILTON]
Ah.

[BURR]
It’s not your business what I do with my mouth

[HAMILTON]
You can't be serious

[BURR]
You wanna end up dead?

[HAMILTON]
No

[BURR]
Well, the flag on my pickup says “Don’t tread”

[LAURENS]
Yo yo yo yo yo!
What time is it?

[LAURENS/LAFAYETTE/MULLIGAN]
Who knows?!

[BURR]
...here’s more spread...

[LAURENS]
Me time! Me time! Yo!
Drinkin’ in bars is the place to be!
I’ve infected two people and I’m workin’ on three, uh!
Those lab coats don't resonate with me!
Cuz I make uninformed decisions and claim that I’m free!

[LAFAYETTE]
Hey, y’all! Didja’ call? It’s yer boy Lafayette!
Just gonna pretend that there’s no respiratory threat!
I’m havin’ a fiesta for my cousin’s third trimester
None of us are tested, but wanna infect
The rest of ya’

[MULLIGAN]
Brrraaah-choo! I am Hercules Mulligan
Your neighborhood republican – yes, I see your lungs are strugglin’
Not gonna wear a mask; it’s political – I’m critically
Unable to see I’m hypocritically parasitical…

[LAURENS]
This whole virus thing is blown out of proportion
Let's raise a couple more...

[LAURENS/LAFAYETTE/MULLIGAN]
To self-absorption!

[LAURENS]
Well, if it ain't the spokesman of the anti-vaxxin’

[MULLIGAN]
Aaron Burr!

[LAURENS]
Give us some spin, start some waxin’!

[BURR]
Good luck with that: you enjoy your vaccine
I won’t be a part of the liberal machine

[LAFAYETTE/MULLIGAN]
Ooooo!

[LAURENS]
Burr, you’d turn down a vaccine? Man, the stupid is strong with you.

[HAMILTON]
You’d waste your chance to help, Burr? What the hell’s wrong with you?

[LAURENS]
Ooh
Who are you?

[MULLIGAN]
Who are you?

[LAFAYETTE]
Who are you?

[MULLIGAN/LAFAYETTE/LAURENS]
Ooh, who is this kid, in the vaccine queue?

I’mma Stay At Home a Ton

Act One, Song One from
"Home-a-ton: A Quarantine Musical."

[BURR]
How does a plastered, clownin’, man about town and a
Socialite, local tight with many of the
Bartenders, spenders, and others who go out all the time
The paradigm to be seen
End up just disappearin’ from the whole scene?

[LAURENS]
The six-hundred-bourbon-drinker and beer glass clinker
Would always linger, by ordering two fingers
By being a free thinker
By being a good winker
Buy more rounds: and you’re reelin’ him in hook
line and sinker

[JEFFERSON]
And every time that I’m here feeling landed and stranded
In my office full-time, his world was growing, expanded
Outside, chasing after the something his heart demanded
The brother travelled just to see what his fav’rite band did

[MADISON]
Then a virus plague came - a real contagious strain
Our man saw his social plans canceled and constrained
Concerts knocked down, we’re on lockdown, starin’ out the window pane
Want a beer or some Champagne, but now we must abstain

[BURR]
Well, his friends shook their heads, they said, “Dude has gone insane, man
Never leaves his four walls - Howard Hughes is his new name, and
Don’t know how he does it, but that life sounds so mundane
Fam, your new lifestyle is such a shame. What's your game plan?"

[HAMILTON]
I’ve been staying home a ton
It's a pandemic, so I’m home a ton
Sure, there's a million things I’d rather done
But it’s not safe. It’s not safe

[ELIZA]
Way back in March he was unnerved, watched the curve - kept climbing
Two months later, see businesses open - inept timing
Too early – it filled his heart with dread, the bug spread

[COMPANY]
And, yeah, we’re ‘re-opened,’ but now thousands are dead

[WASHINGTON]
Moved by great emotion, his notion was we should stay inside
His was devotion to lay aside what others may decide
His mind told him:

[WASHINGTON & COMPANY]
“You’re gon’ have to entertain yourself”

[WASHINGTON]
He started cookin' and lookin' at every book upon his shelf

[BURR]
There may have been nothin' left to buy
By the time he reached July
His online shopping just multiplied
Amazon shipped it to his lanai
Started clickin', fixin' up his house when he got bored
Buying furniture, carpet, and other things he can't afford
Talkin’ to his dog out loud so has some company
Walkin’ with social distance so there’s no one to accompany
Him in this new world, while our reps failed to plan
And New York soon was worse than Wuhan

[COMPANY]
And New York soon was
worse than Wuhan-

[HAMILTON]
It's not safe!

[COMPANY]
And New York soon was
worse than Wuhan-

[HAMILTON]
It's not safe!

[COMPANY]
If you cough, you can kill someone’s nan

[WOMEN]
If you cough-

[MEN]
You cough-

[HAMILTON]
It’s not safe!

[COMPANY]
You’ve been staying home a ton
(You’ve been staying home a ton)

We just want to eat some wings with you
(wanna eat some wings with you)

Can’t you break your lockdown?
The rest of us go out some-times!

Oh, you’ve been staying home a ton
(you’ve been staying home a ton)

While America spreads the flu
Do they not have an ounce of shame?
Do they know this is not a game?
The world will never be the same, oh

[BURR]
This shit is in our back yard now
We’re the ones that brought it

[MEN]
It's not safe

[BURR]
Fox News said go out again
And all you morons bought it

[COMPANY]
It's not safe

[BURR]
We’ve overcome much more than this –
America forgot it

[MULLIGAN/LAFAYETTE]
We laughed at it

[LAURENS]
Me? Bought masks for it

[WASHINGTON]
Me? I misjudged it

[ELIZA/ANGELICA/MARIA]
Me? I ignored it

[BURR]
And me? I'm the damn fool that caught it

[COMPANY]
Got a wicked case of FOMO, son
But it’s not safe!

[BURR]
What's your game plan?

[COMPANY]
I’mma stay at home a ton!

We Didn’t Stop the Virus

An old friend of mine issued me several quick-writing challenges during the first year of covid. This time it was to do a parody of the Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” about the first half of 2020…

Aussie fires near the shore, Libya’s in civil war,
Soleimani, Netanyahu, Brexit is a go

Kim Jong-un’s building a weapon, Cory Booker got to steppin’,
John Delaney, Marianne zany, no POTUS Castro

Billie Eilish, Kobe’s gone, Ozzy Osborne Parkinson’s
Jakarta floods, Chinese spies, threats on Iran’s cultural sites

Harry & Meghan snub the queen, Wuhan’s under quarantine
Vegas Raiders, Venezuela, Iran shoots down a flight

We didn’t stop the virus
It will just infect us
Since our leader’s feckless
We didn’t stop the virus
No, we couldn’t shelf it
‘cuz we’re much too selfish

Puerto Rican earthquake tolls, Chiefs have won the Super Bowl
Colonel Vindman, Gordon Sondland fired by Trump

Roger Stone, Jim Jordan, Blagojevich and others pardoned
Wells Fargo fake accounts, Yang and Bennett bumped

Newspapers have to fold, Parasite wins Oscar gold
Harvey Weinstein goes to jail, Tom Steyer will also bail

Boy Scouts’ shame brings bankruptcy, shooting in a brewery,
Trump’s impeached, pandemic’s reached, COVID spikes in Italy

We didn’t stop the virus
Simple social distance
Got met with resistance
We didn’t stop the virus
We ignored the warnings
Now there’s thousands mourning

Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Tulsi, Bloomberg, won’t go far
Great momentum, then fall flat? Warren had a plan for that

Virus isolates Ted Cruz, that’s enough from Chris Matthews
Nashville in tornados’ path, Tom Hanks too feels COVID’s wrath

Cruise ships filled with virus docked, all of Italy is locked
Daily briefs by Cuomo, sports season’s a no-go

New orders to stay indoors, S.S. Comfort docked offshore
Stimulus checks, funds to execs, Tax Day has been postponed

We didn’t stop the virus
Couldn’t stand the tedium
So we whined ‘bout fReEdOm
We didn’t stop the virus
Numbers don’t diminish
By pretending it’s finished

Olympics postponed for a year, Brady is a Buccaneer?!
Vi-rus ri-ses, Trump says it will disappear

Businesses get PPP, states compete for PPE,
San-ders drops-out, Biden is the nominee

Tony Fauci hems and haws, Trump says to inject Lysol
50,000 more per day, what else do I have to say?!

We didn’t stop the virus
We opened much too quickly
And made millions sickly
We didn’t stop the virus
Soon we’ll all be patients
Since we’re so impatient

Navy Captain Crozier, Flynn’s life looks much rosier
Bolsonaro, murder hornets, SpaceX launch and dock

15 percent unemployed, racist cop kills George Floyd
Black Lives Matter, I Can’t Breathe, words of protest fill the streets

Rubber bullets, gas the peace, defund militant police
Unmarked cops, Bibles as props, Lafayette cleared for photo ops

Armed like soldiers off to war, ram the crowds with police cars
Shove old men in Buffalo, we won’t take it anymore!

We didn’t stop the virus
It’s just much too tasking
To save lives by masking
We didn’t stop the virus
Sorry ‘bout your father
But we can’t be bothered

Breonna Taylor, Arbery, jogging isn’t robbery,
Tony McDade, Rayshard Brooks, birdwatching makes you a crook

Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, Canceled COPS, Gone with the Wind
Statues, flags have had their day, now meet The Chicks and Lady A

Trump’s dogwhistles still repulsive, Juneteenth rally flops in Tulsa
K-pop stans and Tik Toks win, try Hydroxychloroquine?

KKK back on the rise, Twitter fact-checks some Trump lies
Bolton book, Barr’s a crook, Geoffrey Berman gets the hook

Supreme Court makes two wrongs righted,
Epstein’s fixer gets indicted

Russian bounties on our soldiers,
Europe bans us from their borders

Though this all feels more than plenty,
We’re just halfway through 2020

We didn’t stop the virus
No, we couldn’t face it
‘cuz we’re dumb and racist
We didn’t stop the virus
Since we’re all mor-ons,
It’ll still go on and on and on and on…

How the ‘vid Stole Christmas

An old friend of mine issued me several quick-writing challenges during the first year of covid. This time it was to do a covid version of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”…

Every Who down in Whoville intermingled a lot
But the Virus now meant all in Whoville could NOT.

With the COVID around, leaving your house was treason.
This was bigger than sniffles or allergy season.

It could be you’d get it and cough through the night.
It could be, perhaps, that you’d die from this blight.

But I think that most likely danger of all,
Was you’d heighten the curve ‘cuz you went to the mall.

Whatever the outcome, the cough or the curve,
It infected all Whos with its bent to unnerve.

And the President’s briefings just made it all worse
Since he might know the truth, but he’d say the reverse.

Whos needed good info, and a strong plan beside it,
But they sure as hell couldn’t trust Trump to provide it.

“It’ll be gone in April” he misinformed with a sneer,
“One day like a miracle, it’ll just disappear.”

“It’s just fifteen people,” lied the self-proclaimed hero,
“In a couple more days, it’ll be close to zero.”

“We’ve got plenty of tests!” claimed the spray-tanned ass-clown,
But, since no one prepared, there were few to be found.

Did that stop the Prez from creating more trauma?
“If I don’t like the facts, I can just blame Obama!”

So he kept right on Trumping and spreading his slander
And for no reason yelling at Pete Alexander.

And the Whos just ignored his ridiculous lies,
As they watched Dr. Fauci rolling his eyes.

For they knew, as they roamed past the bare Kroger shelves,
“We can’t count on him, so we must save ourselves.”

Folks had fled to the stores with a feverish urgency,
In weeks they’d be using toilet paper as currency.

Or maybe vice versa, since all of this hype
Made Whos get creative when needing to wipe.

“Stock up!” yelled the Whos while Purell-ing their cash
And raiding the stores for their cans of Who-Hash.

“This could last for months – maybe into next winter”
“I’ll trade you my car for that Hungry Man dinner.”

Then back to their houses for a frozen-food feast,
Or maybe to dine on a Door-Dashed roast beast.

If you had the ingredients, you could make Chicken Florentine,
But you only had oatmeal up in this self-quarantine.

The NBA canceled, as did other athletics,
And by day five, Whos had made it through all of Netflix.

But the Whos persevered, as Whos do in each instance,
They just did their Who-ing online and at distance.

They adapted with grace and occasional gripe,
And still held their Who-Happy-Hours by Skype.

Or, at least SOME Whos did – heeding pleas from lawmakers –
There are always some idiots and selfish spring breakers

Who think that their needs are more important than yours
So they’re willing to kill you while they “Jersey Shore”

Or go out to restaurants, visit their folks,
Ignore all the warnings, insist it’s a hoax.

“How can it be real, when I feel just fine?”
Newsflash: you can have it and still feel benign.

Meanwhile, you’re spreading it to a whole other crew,
But I guess you don’t care, ‘cuz those people ain’t you.

The rules aren’t that hard, but they’re vitally important:
Stay the hell home. Stop selfish hoarding.

Wash your hands many times, for longer than you’d think –
If it helps, sing a song while you scrub at the sink.

And don’t touch your face, though that’s hard not to do.
Cough into your elbow, not at other Whos.

Sanitize all your doorknobs, anything you might lick.
And the top rule of all is: Don’t be a dick.

We Whos will get through this – we just have to weather
The storm for a while as we all pull together.

Well, not literally together – you know what I mean –
The kind of together with space in between.

We’ll be here a while, in self-isolation,
So get comfy and try to pretend it’s vacation.

Stay home and help minimize the virus’ spread.
Catch up on those books that you still haven’t read.

Make peace with the fact it’ll be months, not weeks.
And for god’s sake, don’t listen when the President speaks.

We’re Whos, so by nature we abhor social distance.
But for now it’s the best way to make a huge difference.

Hang in there, my friends. May Amazon provide.
I’ll see all you Whos on the other side.

August 4, 2019

I typed this Facebook post quickly, without any time spent thinking about it or editing it, less than two hours after I first woke up to the news and the frantic text messages and calls. Despite it being my immediate, visceral gut reaction, I still stand by it.

This time, it happened in my community.
But I don’t feel any different.

It happened four blocks from my house, three blocks from where I work, and 20 yards from where friends and I were having drinks a few hours earlier.
But I don’t feel any different.

It happened in an area I’ve been to a thousand times, where I’ve made hundreds of friends and spent countless hours and made a million memories.
But I don’t feel any different.

As it was happening, I was driving home from a friend’s house, traveling down a parallel street two blocks away. I saw five or six ambulances and emergency vehicles speeding to the scene, and had to get out of the way of one that was barreling toward me, going the wrong way down a one-way street to get to the scene as quickly as possible.
But I don’t feel any different.

I spent the first two hours of my day responding to text messages from dozens of friends near and far, asking if I was okay and expressing their relief when they heard back from me. My father almost never calls me and rarely shows emotion, but he called this morning, trying not to show the obvious panic in his voice, just wanting to make sure I was alive and unhurt.
But I don’t feel any different.

I’ve been in contact with many of my friends and know they’re safe. But I sit here not yet knowing the names of any of the victims, fully aware that once I learn them, there will be names I recognize. People I have met or have seen or, likely, have known personally will be dead or injured.
But I don’t feel any different.

Despite all of these personal connections to this tragedy, I feel the same. I see dozens of comments from friends indicating that it’s different this time because it hit *us*. And I completely understand that reaction and by no means am disparaging that feeling, but to me it’s no different. I hear people saying they can’t believe it happened here.
I can.
At an average pace of more than one mass shooting per day in this country, how can I be shocked when it’s in my back yard?

I see people saying that now it has become personal. And, yes, of course it’s personal. It happened in my town, near my house, to my friends, in a place I know well, as I drove by two streets away. It’s personal. But it’s no more personal now than it has been every other time in every other place.

Minutes from now, I’ll be standing at a vigil in my home town, for my home town, with people who *are* home to me. But I don’t feel any more or less personally affected than I was in October when I was standing at a vigil for the shooting at the Pittsburgh synagogue. Or in March when I was standing at a vigil for the shooting at the New Zealand mosque. Or last year when I was standing on Pennsylvania Avenue with the Parkland kids.

If any of this sounds to you like I don’t care, you’re mistaken. I’m angry. Too angry for words. I’m sad. Too sad to process. Worst of all, I’m just numb. I saw a dead dog on the side of the road today and got choked up, but I haven’t been able to feel much of anything about what happened here last night.

All I’ve really been able to do is to stare at a photo on my wall that I took in DC last year of someone holding a sign that read “This is not normal,” trying to remind myself of that and, at the same time, trying to still believe that.

It’s pathetic. I’d like to say we’re better than this, but I’m not entirely sure we are.

All I do know is that I feel the same today as I do every time this happens, despite how close to home it happened this time.

This time, it happened in my community.
But all the other times, it did, too.

Redaction Poetry Submission for “Interference Volume”

The piece below was contributed to a project called “Interference Volume,” a collection of works created using the heavily redacted Bill Barr version of The Mueller Report. Each participant was randomly assigned a single page from the report, and instructed to further redact the page to create a piece of “redaction poetry.” As the project guidelines explained:

Interference Volume is a collaborative effort uniting poets, activists, writers, artists, educators, and outraged people of all ages from all walks of life in the transformation of the Attorney General Barr-redacted Mueller Report (in its entirety!) into a volume of “redaction poetry.” We will use the basic tool of obstruction, obfuscation, and disinformation—the redactor’s black bar—to create acts of resistance, satire, anguish, and beauty.

The piece below also was included in an art installation of the project at The Carole Calo Gallery at Stonehill College.

The assigned page as it appeared originally…

Ode on a Grecian Formula

A poet friend of mine said that she’d been "commissioned" to write an ode to David Hasselhoff. She asked if she could just outsource this one to me instead. The next 20 minutes produced the following…

Thou still untarnished Bavarian punchline,
  Thou drunken king of YouTube lore,
When hungry, best to skip the lunch line
  and eat a burger on the floor.
Too much to drink, you came to rest there,
  and at your daughter, bellowed meanly.
Quite shirtless to display your chest hair,
   Thou acted very Charlie Sheenly.

And still that fails to change the fact
  of your career’s resurgency.
Your reputation’s still intact
  with music fans in Germany.
A rockstar there. A hometown god!
  A mansion and your own chef.
I ask myself, “What are the odds
  that all Germans are tone deaf?”

I kid, of course. Though you’re a ham,
  I still revere the times
Thou conversed with a black Trans-Am
  whilst deftly solving crimes.
My fourth grade self was not so cool,
  so, to alleviate my plight,
I asked my homeroom class at school
  to call me Michael Knight.

Thou soon left KITT for sunnier days –
Thine maCHEESEmo fit right in there.
And guarding lives, thou Watched thine Bays
whilst sporting scarlet swimwear.
O ‘80s idol! Fair ‘90s clown! at whom
the multitudes doth scoff,
May Gott himself bring on them doom
who dare hassle the Hoff.