Schmaltz und Grieben

 

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THE GODDAM

The Largely Fictitious Account of an American Life

 

 

copyright 2021 by PSF (the author)

 

 

 

11/26/2021:

So they're sitting at a table in the snug of the Green Lantern Pub in Hardwick, a crossroads on the Luverne half of the Chandler-to-Luverne run. He'd been in there once before, shortly after moving to Chandler, desperate just to hear human voices. No one had made any overtures or invited him to play pool, but no one was unfriendly either. It was Minnesota Nice without the self-consciousness you sensed around the Twin Cities. He had drunk a couple of beers and headed out, always afraid of getting a DUI although in point of fact he had never driven over the limit since he'd been in high school. He strongly believed that if you were a drunk, if you weren't a drunk-driving drunk at least you could make an argument that you weren't a total asshole. Plus, a DUI would end your school bus driver career in a flash. End it in infamy. People on the street would never believe that they could have trusted you with their children.

He feels strange, like he's about to cry, sitting across the table from Ann Gerling as she idly stirs her gin and tonic. He's on a date, no matter what kind of spin you want to put on it, he's on a date. And Ann is really so lovely in a very unpretentious way. He senses that telltale gut ache that tells him he's falling in love. It has been such a long time. This is so inconvenient, but when is love ever anything else?

"You keep putting off the Woodstock story," Ann is saying. "I never knew anyone who was at Woodstock. I really want to hear it."

"Well, number one, I'm not 'putting it off.' It's long and I don't want to keep you from talking. And number two, I wasn't at the festival. As I've said. So if you want to hear about Country Joe singing Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die, you've come to the wrong place."

"No," she said. "I want to hear about you. And don't worry about hearing me talk, you'll get plenty of chances to do that, and then you won't be able to shut me up." Scott caught that. Probably without meaning to, Ann was saying that she foresaw a future for them. He knew better than to flag the comment; instead he tucked it away in the file that said HAPPY THINGS TO THINK ABOUT.

"All right. You can hear it in installments, if you want. But here goes." He took a long swig from his Coke and began.

There was a lot of stuff going on at home, none of it good. I'd been hiding report cards from my father and he finally figured out that he hadn't seen my report card for about a year. Basically I wasn't going to school; I was hiding out in the woods with my friends, getting high. So I was failing everything. He got hold of those report cards and hit the roof. I lit out and went over to my friend Jeff's house; he was in a different school district and my dad didn't know he existed. Plus being at Jeff's solved a number of other problems. Jeff was like me, he lived with just his dad and his dad worked nights at a factory and had quit trying to keep up with Jeff and his two younger siblings. The other kids, a boy and a girl, were pretty strait-laced. It was Jeff who was the problem. Oh, and by extension me. I also had sort of a girlfriend who lived just down the road from Jeff and went to his school, not mine. We had decided that it was time for us to start seriously exploring each other.

And that's what we were doing when her dad busted into her room. He was a Ste. Genevieve County sheriff's deputee. To say that he didn't think much of me would be an understatement. So I had to high-tail it out of there in just my undershorts while this maniac was chasing me with a fire poker. Fortunately I'd been on the track team and the old big-gut sheriff couldn't begin to catch me. But I had to borrow clothes from Jeff, and he was about six inches shorter than me.

My dad was used to me taking off and staying overnight with various friends, so he went off to work and I loaded up a backpack with some of my clothes and some toiletries, stole a couple hundred bucks from dad, and lit out on the road. I got to St. Louis with my first ride, from a nice little old lady of all people. From there on in it was kind of hit and miss--I spent two horrible days and nights at a Fred Harvey rest area in Indiana, and figured that by now the cops had to be looking for me--but finally a guy picked me up and drove me to Matamoras, New York; it's right where New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania meet. Very mountainous. Now that would have been a great ride except that the guy figured I "owed him a return favor" and wanted a blow job. I had to jump out of the car at a stop sign.

I'd never had any idea where I was going when I left Perryville--it more or less depended on where the people who picked me up were going. I could have wound up in Valdez, Alaska for all I knew. But here in Matamoras I figured I couldn't be more than maybe fifty miles from where the Woodstock festival had been held, in these very same mountains ahout a hundred miles northwest of New York City. So I went, via a series of back alleys, to a nice little diner on a sidestreet. I asked the lady behind the counter if she knew how to get to Woodstock, she just laughed and told me I was a year too late but then she called a guy over who was a truck driver and knew exactly how to get there. He informed me that I was less than fifty miles from the site "as the crow flies" and even gave me a ride to Port Jervis, New York--just across the Delaware--where I could take Highway 42 North to a junction very close to the festival site.

Posted by Alois on

 [This appeared on the blog in 2005. I still treasure this memory, so I reposted it. Enjoy. --ed.]

A THANKSGIVING STORY: Back when my son was seven or eight, his mom was sick with some kinda nasty virus. I was feeling a little green around the gills myself, like I was probably next in line.

It was the kind of flat gray, chilly day that is nearly ubiquitous here in Wisconsin during the month of November (I guess it's weird, but I have always loved days like that).

As morning turned into afternoon I was feeling less and less of an appetite; my wife didn't want to even look at food, much less drag herself through the six hour chore of making The Traditional T-Day Dinner. But my son, as little kids are wont to do, was getting hungry.

Back in those days there was a little country store called Steckel's just down the road from us. It was dimly lit, usually empty, and sold only about three things: Beer, tobacco, and hot dogs (that wasn't enough to keep poor old Steckel in business with all the urban people moving south of Madison, but that's a story for another time). Anyway, whenever I went to Steckel's—for beer or tobacco products, typically—I'd pick up a hot dog for my son, who used to have a major jones for hot dogs.

As the day began to darken, which happens at about two in the afternoon in a Wisconsin November, I was trying to get it together in my head to at least go to the supermarket and pick up a roast chicken or something. At least pretend that we were having Thanksgiving dinner.

But then my son had a brilliant idea. "Hey Papa, just forget the Thanksgiving dinner thing. Let's go to Steckel's for some hot dogs!"

He didn't have to work very hard to convince me. Maybe I could manage to choke down a dog. I wasn't feeling very well at all.

We got to Steckel's in the somber gray dusk, bought our hot dogs (which had slightly stale buns and had been on the grill too long) and went right back home. It seemed like a singularly beautiful moment to me; the fact that my son was possessed of that kind of empathy, all the many, many things my family and I had to be grateful for, the battleship gray of the fields and the sky which foretold snow on its way. We ate our hot dogs and watched Planes, Trains and Automobiles, our perennial Thanksgiving movie.

My son has never forgotten that day. "Our best Thanksgiving ever," he says.

I would have to agree.

Happy Thanksgiving!

[UPDATE 11/25/05 a.m.: I've been linked to by Discarded Lies. Thanks, ev!]

Posted by Alois on

 

 

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THE GODDAM

The Largely Fictitious Account of an American Life

 

 

copyright 2021 by PSF (the author)

 

 

 

11/25/2021:

Ann two

 

Luverne as seen from the air

A maelstrom of things swam around in his mind as he looked down at this small woman with the pretty hazel eyes who was, for all intents and purposes, the only woman he'd had a real conversation with since he retired a year ago and moved to Chandler. He had already written off the prospect of romance of any sort since realizing that he was an aging drunk with thinning hair and not much of a future of any kind. Women didn't want that, and he didn't blame them for it.

The problem was that, in the back of his mind, he'd entertained fantasies of having some sort of fling with this lady, at least to the point where he looked forward to seeing her every time he went to the liquor store. But she was young (anyone who hadn't reached sixty seemed young to him now) and she was hot and if she wasn't married she certainly would be attached. There weren't a lot of saucy little numbers in southwestern Minnesota, and the ones who did exist were either married insurance agents or running for city councilwoman on the Trump ticket. He certainly hadn't moved here to look for women, and even the idea of "looking for women" now struck him as funny.

He was surely doing something, though. He'd been in the store for ten minutes and hadn't managed to accomplish anything except to talk to--

"Hey, what's your name?"

"Ann Gerling," she smiled. "I was beginning to think you'd never ask--?"

"Scott. Scott Featherston."

His name seemed odd, even to him. He didn't tell people his name generally, because generally they didn't care to learn it. Which was okay, most of the time.

"I don't know why I'm waiting," he went on. "Why don't I ask you out, before somebody else does?"

She laughed. "You've sized me up pretty well," she said. "Divorced. Not especially bitter about it. You've got an eye, Scott Featherston."

Now he said something dumb. "Plus, you're a saucy little number."

Ann laughed again. She got the joke, which is what he had been hoping, stupid as it was. "'Saucy little number?' Is that the best you can do?"

"You're pretty. I feel like a kid now."

She cocked her head a little to one side. Scott really was a dinosaur. He was like a school bus driver except for the heavy drinking. Well, former heavy drinking, she hoped. Ann figured she had probably been groped or propositioned by three-quarters of the men in Rock County, and a few of the women too. Hell, she was still getting hit on by guys in their twenties. And here was this kind of saintly old fellow hitting on her who she couldn't help but like. With his wire-rimmed glasses and wispy hair, he might have even been a hippie once.

"Scott, were you at Woodstock by any chance?"

Scott seemed startled by this totally-out-of-left-field question. He smiled a screwy smile and said, "Why do you ask?"

"I dunno. You just have that old hippie, Country Joe kind of vibe."

"Actually," Scott said, "I was at Woodstock. Not the festival per se, but where the festival had been. They called it Bethel, New York but I thought of it as White Lake, because that's where I lived the summer after the festival. Yeah. I ran away from home in Perryville, Missouri because I was pissed at my old man, because he hadn't let me go to the festival."

Now it was her turn to give him a screwy smile. "Really," Ann said.

This was so convoluted that it couldn't possibly be anything but true.

"Yeah. I was only fourteen the summer of the festival and obviously it was a long way away and my dad couldn't stand the acid rock I listened to anyway, so how did I figure this was gonna happen? Dad already hated hippies. Thankfully you didn't see too many around Perryville, Missouri. This was before the Ozark Mountain Daredevils and them."

And them. Once in awhile the damned Southeast Missouri still came out in his speech.

"I want to hear all about it," Ann said.

Posted by Alois on

 

 

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11/23/2021:

Ann one

 

It actually happened on the first day he was out and about again.

He wasn't even sure of the date. Two or three weeks had passed, so it might be September or they could be into October already. But that didn't matter. What did matter was that he was down to two shots of vodka a day, one in the morning, one at night. In effect, he was now sober.

He was twenty pounds lighter and his beard had grown in; he scarcely recognized the man in the mirror. Fact was, though, that he was nearly out of vodka and hadn't driven a car in weeks. He needed to go to Luverne, if for no other reason than to drive his car and get out of the house. And he'd decided to allow himself one shot of vodka a day for the rest of his life. One, never two and certainly never more than that. He'd beaten the demon by himself and without the help of any other drunks who wanted to prattle on about their glory days as drunks. Without priests or ministers or even self-help books, unless you counted WebMD. And Marlee Matlin. Truth was that he now felt like a million dollars, and was more convinced than ever that the world could go fuck itself.

God, he was hungry too. When was the last time he'd eaten anything worth counting as a meal? There was a good Mexican place in Luverne where they didn't do English very well, but that was okay, he'd learned pretty good Spanish talking to farm hands during his decade at the co-op.

Thirty miles to Luverne. He turned the car out of Chandler and took a right on tbe highway, heading south and roughly paralleling the path of the monster tornado that had hit the town in 1992. You could see few traces of the tornado today, even though it had destroyed the little downtown, but the older people still talked about it, after church or eating breakfast at the Chandler Cafe. He had missed the tornado. Where had he been in 1992? Oh yeah, living in Madison, Wisconsin and finishing his master's degree at the University of Wisconsin. A great party school, or so he had been told. Working and doing grad school didn't leave him much time to party.

Man, the land was big out here. It just went on forever in every direction, obstructed only by the occasional grain elevator or cell tower. He didn't figure it had changed much since the Lakota had chased bison in these parts, near the eastern edge of their range. People seemed to loathe or fear the Plains, but he didn't. While he was walled in by Minneapolis, as much as he loved that city, he often dreamed about the vast expanses that opened up just a little to the west. One day he would live out there.

And now he did. And he didn't have to work. He was sober, and he would never have to worry again about whether he'd had too much to drink to drive legally, or whether he was talking too much when he'd chat with neighbors who almost certainly knew he was a drunk, or lying to his doctor about his drinking. He had an okay house in an okay town and even a dog, one of no particular breed that had adopted him by simply showing up at his back door repeatedly and staring mournfully through the screen. Now all he needed was a woman. He laughed out loud. Good thing he had quit drinking for his own self, because he was definitely too old to woo anyone--except maybe a dog.

Wasn't that the stuff of life. He laughed again. Well, if it had all come to this, it could have come to a whole lot worse.

He caught himself hoping that that "saucy little number" (the strangest phrases ran through his head all the time now) would be holding down the fort at the liquor store.

The sliding door whooshed open and there she was in her requisite tight jeans showing off that marvelous ass no woman in her fifties had any right to. She had her mousy blonde-brown hair tied up in a knot on top of her head. He could smell her springlike scent from here.

"Well well well. Look what the cat dragged in." Really nice teeth, not perfectly straight but well cared for. Always a good sign.

"I thought," continued the Saucy Little Number, "that you had got off the stuff, or something."

"I did," he grinned. "Well, sorta."

She put her hands on her hips. A little bit of belly peeked out beneath the pink top she wore under her ubiquitous flannel shirt. "You don't 'well sorta.' You either do or you don't."

"Then I must explain," he said. It was eight in the morning and as usual no one was in the liquor store. "I went through the withdrawal. Freaking awful. Did it slow with the vodka that you teased me for buying because you know I don't drink it. But it got me through."

"You did this by yourself? You're crazy. You could've died. Anyone who drinks as much as you did shouldn't do withdrawal on their own. That 's why they have rehab for."

"And yet," he harrumphed, "Here I am. Been up for three hours, drove thirty miles. I am stone cold sober."

"Well, congratulations. And I'm glad you made it through. Gonna join the Program?"

She meant AA. "Nah," he said. "That's what I wanted to explain to you. I intend to have, for the rest of my life, exactly one drink a day. Vodka. Which you know I don't particularly like. If I ever catch myself taking two drinks, I'm done for good. But I guess you could say it's symbolic of a victory everyone says you can't win on your own. Which turns out to be, like so many things everybody says, utter bullshit, excuse my French."

She grinned up at him. Couldn't have been more than five-three, five-four. Hazel eyes, which were unusual and which he liked. "You'll let me recommend a decent vodka? 'Cause that stuff you were drinking is piss. Excuse my French." She winked. That was the green light that he didn't need to watch his language like a hawk, and that was good, because he had never been involved with an evangelical (involved?  Now where had that come from?) and he didn't intend to start now. There were a lot of them in these parts, the only growing religion on the Plains since the farm crisis in the eighties. It was bad enough when they were being judgmental on your drinking or cussing, but now they tended to be Trumpster pinheads or even QAnon adherents. That slightly scary thing about evangelicals had turned really scary.

Posted by Alois on

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11/15/2021:

He had forgotten how he'd met Crank until just now.

It wasn't at the farmers' co-op. No, they'd met a year before that when Crank gave up his job as a school bus driver to work full time for Casey.

He'd only been driving a school bus for a year at that point and Crank's route through a poorer part of town was rumored to have some pretty tough customers. It was natural to assign it to an old Harley biker and combat veteran like Crank, who took no guff from anyone. Well, with Crank gone he was the guy who was going to get Crank's route because he had the least seniority.

So he was riding along with Crank to learn the route. They had just pulled out of the elementary school and the kids were already yelling at each other.

Crank grabbed the mic for his intercom and yelled, "SHUT UP, YA MISERABLE LITTLE BASTARDS!"

Suddenly the bus was silent, except for a few random giggles.

"Um, Crank.... language?" he whispered.

Crank just roared at the innocent neophyte. "I don't give a FUCK!"

More giggling.

He didn't see Crank for another year, when they were both at the co-op.

Posted by Alois on

 

   

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11/09/2021:

He got back to the co-op an hour later. When he walked into the cramped little office, Casey, Crank and a couple of guys were standing around laughing. "Hey, look. If it ain't the lawn-killer! " More laughter.

"Lawn-killer? What the fuck?"

"Tollefson says you killed his lawn!" Crank was doubled over and red in the face, guffawing.

There had been a sad scruff of grass at the base of the tank, more like pubic hair than a lawn.

"You mean that ugly little weed patch under the tank? I figure I killed that, sure enough. You can call it property improvement and he can send me a check for a hundred bucks."

Now Casey, usually gruff and reserved, was laughing harder than he'd ever seen him laugh. "Oh, man," Casey choked out. "Bitch pay you. I fucking love it!"

***

Dustin Arrowflot was giggling at something. Dustin didn't giggle often. Knowing he was being regarded curiously, Dustin explained: "I was remembering Casey after you 'killed Tollefson's lawn.' 'Bitch pay you.' I tell ya, that was one of the funniest things I ever heard."

They were pulling into the decrepit Arrowflot farm. Dustin's dad had been on his own for quite a few years. Dustin's divorced mother owned an antique store in downtown Chaska that was more like a storage locker. She could usually be seen on the sidewalk outside the store, chain smoking. There was very obviously a lot of resentment felt by Dustin toward both of his parents. Whatever malevolent treatment he'd received had been channeled into his furious workaholism and his worries about doing enough for his three kids. Highly competent and intelligent, Dustin should have been a feather in the cap of any parent. Why he wasn't was anybody's guess.

"Dad, you got a fuel hose for the spray rig, dontcha? I need to borrow it. Until tomorrow or the next day, latest."

The old man, wearing bib overalls and spitting tobacco, was wild-haired and unkempt. He sure didn't look like the kind of farmer who had his own spray rig. However, the far wall of his machine shed looked like a Napa auto store. Maybe there was some pot growing on the back forty.

Dustin's father spat a wad of Red Man. "Can't spare it," he announced, talking to a disassembled tractor. "Nope."

"Dad!" Dustin said incredulously. "You're not spraying today and I got a hundred acres to finish at Hammersly's. Gimme a fuckin' break!"

"Dad" kicked at some dirt on the floor while continuing to meditate on the extremely interesting pile of tractor parts in front of him. "Nope," he said again. "No can do."

"Well, that's just great. Now I can go back and explain to Casey that I can't finish Hammersly's 'cause you won't loan me a goddamned hose for a day."

"Casey can go fuck himself," Dad grunted. "Got me on C.O.D. again."

"Oh, I know all about that. You owe him twelve thousand bucks, a year past due. We ain't running a charity, you know."

"I know. Which is why Casey can buy his own fucking fuel hose."

"It's like that, huh?" He felt awful for Dustin, who looked like he was about to cry. He felt awful that he'd witnessed this scene at all.

Posted by Alois on

  

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11/06/2021:

He was in the cab of a pickup with Dustin Arrowflot. They were going up to Dustin's dad's farm to see if they could "borrow" a fuel line hose for Dustin's spray rig. He was surprised that Justin's dad actually had his own spray rig; this was a big-ticket item that your average farmer couldn't begin to afford, and the farm didn't appear overly prosperous. Actually it was a bit seedier than most. Small farmers in these parts were barely hanging on, as Con-Agra and Hormel and other huge corporations gobbled up more and more of the fertile farmland of southern Minnesota.

"Arrowflot," he said to Dustin. "Now there's an interesting name. Sounds just like that Russian airline."

"So I've been told." Dustin spit a wad of tobacco out the window. He was a small, wiry guy who in point of fact was probably strong enough to lift his spray rig and change the tire. Dustin was also a little bit difficult to get to know, and he'd known Dustin now for years. Dustin was not just a type-A personality. He was more of a type-AAA personality, driven beyond belief. During planting and harvest he would routinely work sixteen- and even eighteen-hour days. Boss man Casey would actually tell him to go the fuck home, or make him take days off (with pay).

"I guess you're Russian, huh?"

"Not a bit. One hundred percent Norwegian, like all these other dumb farmers around here. Seems my name used to be Arrowfoot, but the fucking illiterate Norskis couldn't spell it right."

"Arrowfoot? Sounds native."

"But it ain't. Pure Norski. God knows what it really is. Probably Kjeldson or something. I mean, have you talked to some of these fuckers? Dumber than dirt."

Now he thought of one farmer in particular who he visited on a regular basis with loads of liquid nitrogen fertilizer. Guy named, yes, Tollefson. The first year he'd worked at the co-op, Tollefson had instructed him to fill a 1000-gallon tank with 1200 gallons of fertilizer. This guy had been farming all his life.

"Uh, well, that's not gonna work, obviously. Where do you want me to put the overflow?"

"In that tank right there." Same tank.

Now he talked real, real slow to Tollefson's vacant, gap-toothed grin. "We've got two hundred gallons in the truck that's not gonna fit in that tank, unless you run some of it off first." He motioned to a cultivator with four small fertilizer tanks attached.

"Gettin' to that later. I just need it in the tank."

This was like talking to a dog. A rather dimwitted dog. "Then you're gonna have two hundred gallons on the ground. I guarantee it."

If he had been smarter, he would have called Casey while they were standing there and put him on the line. He already knew Casey's low opinion of Tollefson, who was on COD terms with the co-op. He could hear Casey now: "Listen, you dumb cracker, 1200 gallons of fertilizer won't fit in a thousand-gallon tank. But if you think it will, I'll just have my man there pump it all in and you can see where the rest of it goes, I don't give a flying fuck so long's you got the money."

"But it can only hold a thousand gallons." He was getting tired of this, and he was late for lunch an hour ago.

"Nah, it can hold more."

He could hear Casey in his ear as he growled, "Alright, done. I'll pump it. Put your dog away." The big German shepherd seemed to have no use for Tollefson and stiffened as Tollefson approached him. Suddenly the dog ran off. Tollefson cussed him roundly.

He had offloaded the long hose from the side of the truck and connected it to the spigot at the bottom of the enormous tank. He pressed a button on a small lawnmower engine mounted on a platform just behind the driver's door, and fertilizer began to whoosh into the tank at nearly fire hose velocity. He could throttle the engine down if need be--not an exact science with the valve half-rusted--but the valve was half-rusted because you hardly ever had to throttle down. The farmer would want 500 or 750 gallons in that thousand-gallon tank and the rest of it put into smaller field tanks or applicators. You'd firehose it into the big tank and then dole it at much lower velocity into the smaller units.

He was tempted to just open it at full throttle and laugh when the inevitable happened and the top blew off the tank. But ever the reliable employee, he left the throttle half-open and stifled a yawn (and a gurgle from his empty stomach) as slowly, ever so slowly, the tank began to fill.

Sure enough, in a few minutes here came Tollefson, red in the face. "What's the holdup here? I've got work to do."

"Well, I don't wanna blow the top off the tank."

"Goddam it, I told you it can hold twelve hundred. Let 'er rip."

He could not suppress a grin as he cranked the throttle to full-bore. It took about three minutes for the top to launch itself about ten feet into the air on a geyser of fertilizer.

Tollefson began literally jumping up and down. "Turn it off. TURN IT OFF!"

"Do which?" he said. He was quoting a daffy farm hand who he had once asked to bring him the toolbox from the truck. "Can't hear you." He cupped a hand to his ear as the fertilizer continued to erupt. A puddle of the liquefied nitrogen began to collect around his boots. He was a good thirty feet from the tank, trying hard not to laugh as he waited for Tollefson's head to explode. Shit was just blowing up today, any which way you stacked it.

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

"...I like they way they present their view even when I don't agree."
Lewis Medlock, Deliverance

"...fortuitously discovered in my recent wanderings - good stuff."
Zee, Road Sassy

"...entertaining and provocative. Just how I like it."
Rachel Arieff

"...whew, wow, yowsa and yikes!" Jan Karlsbjerg

"Malignant." Tim Dailey

 

 

Blogroll: Jake's Wisconsin Funhouse Rock Netroots The Political Environment Caffeinated Politics Democurmudgeon

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11/06/2021:

 

FAIRY GODMOTHER: I once spent a week in county jail (Spokane, Washington) for being in possession of one 16-oz can of Schlitz beer. I was nineteen. The drinking age in Washington was 21.

A good friend of mine spent an entire year in prison for having a joint in the ashtray of his pickup. In a state where pot is now legal (and has been for a long time)--again, Washington.

At the other end of the country, in Florida, a former president struts around his personal golf course like God almighty... and if he isn't guilty of at least one FELONY, you can build a gallows and hang my ass.

Tax evasion. Multiple accusations of rape and sexual assault--against a guy who brags about it. Treason. Personal responsibility for the death of law enforcement officers. The list goes on and on.

Now, unless the dude has a fairy godmother, we've got to surmise that a) he's making some awfully dire threats toward anyone he perceives as a threat; or b) an unbelievable amount of money is changing hands here. Which would mean that our judiciary is hopelessly compromised. Because so far, Trump hasn't so much as had his wrist slapped for any of it.

Meanwhile, my friend Lawton spent a year in prison for having a joint.

There is no chance at all that Trump is innocent. Guys like Mike Pence or John Glenn might be innocent. Not Trump.

So what the hell is really going on here? Now we have a federal judge saying that she doesn't think Trump is entitled to withhold his National Archives records from the courts (he, of course, cites "executive privilege," which was almost cute when he was in office but is downright laughable now--never mind the fact that he would want those records released if it would vindicate him). But you know what? Pretty soon you're not going to hear any more about it. Because that's the way it works with Trump and his "fairy godmother." Everything just sort of... goes away.

 

UPDATE 11/12/21 PM: Was I lying?

Would this have happened to any other person on the planet? And these judges were Democrats?!?

It's kinda like seeing a movie where the hero is hanging from a cliff with attack dogs chewing at his fingers and an entire army blasting at him with high-powered weapons, when suddenly a meteorite obliterates the entire army and the attack dogs jump off the cliff in mortal terror. And of course, part of the bargain is what they call the "suspension of disbelief," because not even the greatest real-life hero is ever that lucky.

Except Donald Trump.

And he is one of the most despicable, worthless human beings that ever breathed air.

There must be a message in this somewhere, but I'm damned if I understand it.

Posted by Alois on

   

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THE GODDAM

The Largely Fictitious Account of an American Life

 

 

copyright 2021 by PSF (the author)

 

 

 

11/06/2021:

 

 

He saw some memorable things whilst delivering buses. Sunset at a truck stop in North Dakota. Lake Superior hiding behind a Culver's restaurant in Wisconsin.

 

Posted by Alois on

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10/30/2021:

It was now full daylight, or so they said. In the real world. Where he had once resided.

And he was still propped up on his elbow. He noted, dimly, that he was spending more and more time in the realm of consciousness. That was probably a good thing, whether it seemed like it or not, but without the vodka it was still painful. His doctor had told him he should probably enter a rehab center because someone having around twenty drinks a day could botch the withdrawal and wind up dead, but in truth he would have rather wound up dead than with a bunch of other drunks talking about being drunks like it was the most important goddamned thing since sliced bread, like they had cured cancer or something. They said it was a disease these days (alcoholism, not cancer) and maybe it was, but he was still old-school enough to feel like at some point he had fucked up. After all, he hadn't always been unable to control his drinking, but he was largely uninterested in how that sorry fact had come to be.

He found Marlee Matlin interesting, though, even if he thought her name was Marlene. This was curious, since one of the things he found rather funny--although not in a way he'd care to discuss with a bunch of drunks, or anyone else for that matter--was that he wasn't really interested at all in sex anymore. That gal he bought his liquor from in Luverne was sexy in a kind of shopworn, not-much-younger-than-him sort of way. She kind of flirted with him, or he thought she did. Had a really nice ass in her tight jeans, and cleavage to spare. No rings. But he couldn't find it in him to appreciate her on more than an intellectual level. How lame was that?

But this Marlene chick in "Children of a Lesser God" was a sure-enough doozy. He found her attractive enough (in some weird way, her deafness and furious signing made her even more attractive) that he was not only getting something like a hard-on, he found himself yelling at the TV, coaching Marlene--Sarah, in the movie--not to fall for idiotic, self-absorbed William Hurt and his stupid interpretive dancing and his cable-knit sweaters (he had always had an innate distrust of men who wore cable-knit sweaters). In fact, he actually gave a shit about what happened to Sarah. It had been quite some time since he'd given a shit about much of anything, except his next drink.

Which reminded him: He'd watched the entire movie without any vodka, and he had hardly noticed. Too busy admiring Sarah's bodacious curves, erotic signing, and disgust with the Hurt character.

Who, in the end, got her anyway. Of course.

But he'd gotten a semi-hard-on and he'd watched a two-hour movie without thinking once about his next shot of vodka.

Life was good.

 

Oscar winner Marlee Matlin, before succumbing to the fervid wiles and cable-knit sweater of non-Oscar-winner William Hurt

 

 

Posted by Alois on

 

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10/28/2021:

The "Brady songs" did the trick for quite a while--years, in fact, until Brady reached middle school. Gently parodic, they made Brady out to be a bulletproof king of mischief-- the lord of Chaska, to say nothing of the kids on the bus. Not only would the other kids request a Brady song (or two, or three) for singalong on a nearly daily basis, Brady himself had his favorites, especially "The Brady Lunch":

Here's the story of a boy named Brady

who ate a hot dog and a hamburger for lunch

then he ate a footlong sub from Subway

and peanut butter crunch!

THEN he ate an entire sausage pizza

and washed it down with Hawaiian Punch

and the other kids looked at him with envy

'cause they all wanted Brady's lunch!

The Brady lunch (yum yum)

The Brady lunch (yum yum)

That's why they all wanted Brady's lunch!

{GROAN!!!}

 

Now Brady was the cock of the walk. Kids would come up to him, even at other schools during soccer matches, and ask if he was "THE Brady" or "the famous Brady" or "the Brady the songs are about." Brady would grin smugly and say, "That's me." And he seemed proud and happy to be famous, like most kids are.

But Brady had afterschool daycare with a woman named "Grandma Barb," who was something of an institution in Chaska. She was perhaps ninety years old, looked like a nose tackle for the Minnesota Vikings, and had supervised (or at least intimidated) several generations of young Chaskans. His own relationship with Grandma Barb as a bus driver had been somewhat strained, but so had everybody's. She would do things like complain to the bus company because he'd driven around the block from the opposite direction to avoid a concrete mixer in front of a construction site next door to Grandma Barb's. Stuff like this was par for the course and no one paid any attention to it.

Then came the "bullying incident."

No one who has spent time around children in any capacity during the twenty-first century can be unaware of the primacy of bullying. What once was defined as the sort of incidents most older Americans endured at one time or another, like being shoved into a locker, mocked loudly for their clothes or hairstyle, or even having their head dunked in a toilet, had by then become a vague and wooly nexus of anything negative whatsoever directed in a child's direction. You never really knew what someone meant anymore when they said a child had been bullied. It could be anything from bodily harm to the ever-so-popular-now taunts on social media to "he looked at me funny!". The long and short of it for school bus drivers was that it was a word all of them dreaded to hear.

And so it was for the Brady Bullying Incident. A second-grade girl who attended after-school daycare with Grandma Barb informed her that Brady was being bullied.

By his bus driver. "He makes up all these songs about Brady!"

Brady was summoned by Grandma Barb. "Is your bus driver making up mean songs about you, Brady?"

Brady was in seventh grade by then. Most kids that age no longer required after-school supervision, but Brady's mother felt that he did. There may have been a reason for that.

"Oh, yes," Brady. "He's been doing it for years, too. Since I was in kindergarten."

The end result was that he had to meet with management and actually type out the lyrics to all the Brady songs, and then management met with Brady and his mother (the official feeling was that none of the lyrics could be said to constitute "bullying") to ascertain if there were OTHER Brady songs that had not been accounted for.

There weren't.

He was asked to quit singing Brady songs on the bus. The other kids complained loudly, especially when he wouldn't let them sing the Brady songs without his leading with his PA microphone. Brady seemed to enjoy the fact that he had once been famous for the Brady songs, and now was famous (or infamous) for having disallowed the Brady songs and getting the bus driver in trouble.

Once, when Brady was getting off the bus, he caught Brady's eye.

"Thanks a lot," he said. "Pal."

Privately, or around his friends, he now referred to "Brady the Snitch."

Posted by Alois on

 

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10/27/2021:

Brady was picked on by the other kids, although in all fairness he probably deserved some of it. But he wasn't a bad kid. Just needy, and overpampered at home, and definitely not a real special-needs child.

How to deal with Brady on the bus? Now that was a tough call. Brady would do weird things like plopping down next to some kid he barely knew and staring at them with a strange grin on his face. That was Brady in a word: annoying. You wanted to get his attention away from the other kids, but not really, because if you had him come and sit in the front with you he'd do things like this:

BRADY: Hey, hey bus driver! Hey bus driver!

YOU: What?

BRADY: Hey bus driver!

YOU: What, Brady?

(15-second pause)

BRADY: Uh... I forgot.

So finally he'd gotten on Brady's case for always "forgetting." "Brady, don't start saying something until you know what you're going to say!" Simple, right? Wrong. Next day:

BRADY: Hey, hey bus driver! Hey bus driver!

YOU: What?

BRADY: Hey bus driver! D'you know what? There was this kid!

YOU: Okay. There was this kid. And?

BRADY: There was this kid, see, and he... and he...

YOU: And he what, Brady?

BRADY: He... he... I forgot.

By now everyone on the bus is cracking up. He'd been had. By an eight-year-old.

He wanted to turn the tables, and suddenly found himself singing:

"Here's the story of a boy named Brady... who was very, very annoying on the bus..."

Now the kids were laughing again, but not at him. And thanks to streaming video, most of them had seen "The Brady Bunch" and were familiar with its theme song.

And this was the origin of the infamous "Brady songs."

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"...I like they way they present their view even when I don't agree."
Lewis Medlock, Deliverance

"...fortuitously discovered in my recent wanderings - good stuff."
Zee, Road Sassy

"...entertaining and provocative. Just how I like it."
Rachel Arieff

"...whew, wow, yowsa and yikes!" Jan Karlsbjerg

"Malignant." Tim Dailey

 

 

Blogroll: Jake's Wisconsin Funhouse Rock Netroots The Political Environment Caffeinated Politics Democurmudgeon

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October 2021

10/23/2021:

 

OBNOXIOUS LITTLE TWIT: That's exactly what I was for the first seven or so years of this blog's existence. Smug. Preening. (Mostly) Clueless.

But I don't believe in rewriting the past, so the drivel will remain here to be read and laffed at.

Posted by Alois on

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THE GODDAM

The Largely Fictitious Account of an American Life

 

 

copyright 2021 by PSF (the author)

 

 

10/23/2021:

Surprising, how he missed the kids on the school bus. Some of them more than others, of course.

There was Deathlike Gillian, an angelic fifth grader with platinum hair and a radiant smile. He knew that Gillian was a little different when she excitedly announced one afternoon that she was going to the doctor.

"Um... you like going to the doctor? Why?" Personally, he could think of few things he hated more.

"'Cause I'll probably get a shot, and it'll hurt!" She was smiling like a kid who saw the present she'd always wanted under the Christmas tree.

"You LIKE pain?"

"YES!" Some of the other kids tittered. He thought of telling her about the sciatica he'd suffered for years before a gifted surgeon operated on him and fixed it for good. (He was still the only person he'd known who had had a completely successful back operation.) But he said only, "That's messed up."

"That's what my mom says!" Again, that angelic smile.

Another time she'd asked him if his parents were still alive.

"Nope. They both died a few years ago. In their nineties."

"What did they die of?"

"Gillian, like I said, they were both in their nineties. I figure they died of old age."

"But specifically, what caused their death?" Maybe this kid would grow up to be a pathologist. Or a coroner. Or a mortician. Somebody had to do those jobs, and he figured that an interest in death would probably help.

"Let's see... my dad died of congestive heart failure. I'm pretty sure my mom's death had something to do with her diabetes."

"Wow," Deathlike Gillian grinned. "That's really cool!"

"I don't know how 'cool' it was for them."

"Oh, you know what I mean. It wasn't like a car crash. Or a heroin overdose."

He laughed involuntarily, imagining his staunch Catholic parents dying of a heroin overdose.

Toward the end of the school year, he composed a little rap for Gillian, who had certainly made his school year more interesting:

 

Her name is Gillian, she is deathlike

She got run over with her own bike

 

Gillian loved her rap. So, for that matter, did her parents (mom was a microbiologist, dad an industrial engineer). For his part, he was glad that poor Gillian was not saddled with "normal" parents who wouldn't "get" her. Or, worse yet, pinheads. There were plenty of them around, along with their mean-assed, ignorant kids.

And today he also remembered Brady the Snitch. Brady had been his little special-needs buddy since kindergarten. Now of course there were always your retarded kids and your Down's syndrome kids and your severely autistic kids, and unfortunately also your young sociopaths (generally offspringus pinheadus, in the Linnean) who were already on their way to prison by middle school. But Brady was one of those children you saw more and more of these days, usually diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder or hyperactivity or Asperger syndrome--which grouped them with the other special-needs kids, although with a few exceptions, they were what had been termed spoiled brats back in his day. Now he was no doctor or psychologist and he wasn't going to say anything, but Brady in his opinion definitely fell into that category.

Posted by Alois on

 

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10/22/2021:

He's propped up on one elbow on his mattress, trying to decide who it was who had inspired his "so I sez to him, I sez I sez, who's on the roster?" comment that had awoken him from his sleep last night. Complete with Brooklyn accent, or maybe it was New Jersey. To his Midwestern ear, all the New York metro accents sounded pretty much the same, although people who lived there would certainly argue that point--just like they were still arguing about whose pizza was better (even among the five boroughs!) when to everyone else in the world it was "New York pie" and uniformly excellent.

A lot of strange things had been going through his head. It occurred to him that he had lived quite a long life by now, and very little of it had been boring. So of course things were going to run through your head when you practically didn't sleep or eat and were trying to rid yourself of a toxin you had depended on for most of your life.

Much of what he thought about had to do with work, like his pleasant travels with Buck or hanging out with Crank or even, by extension, his meeting Molly Ringwald at the Museum. He can't believe now, looking back, just how much of his life had been consumed by work. Since he was sixteen. Lots of overtime and weekends, and somewhere in there, although the work never stopped or even slowed, he had managed to get a master's degree in computer engineering. Everyone told him how much money he was going to make, and he supposed they might have been right, if he had really made an effort to do so. But by the time he finished that master's degree, he was pushing forty and running on empty. His marriage didn't survive. Some of his friendships didn't either. Maybe the thing to do would have been to make a quick fortune in a decade or so, working for some soul-crushing combine whose end product was misery for millions, and then he could enjoy himself in Antigua or somewhere being Jimmy Buffett. But it was easier when he got home from work to drink whiskey and stare at the wall and imagine himself climbing in the Cascades or wandering through the mist in Bellingham, Washington, looking for Mexican food while he waited for the magic mushrooms to wear off. And always, always class at seven on Monday morning. And women. And, mostly, work. Which is why he tended to hit it pretty hard whenever he had a break.

 

Fairhaven Park in Bellingham, where he'd gotten lost in the fog

 

He glanced up at the television. "Soul" had long since ended and then there had been some kind of political cartoon show on that he had barely noticed while he relived the trip with Buck--or as much of it as he wanted to do in one session (there was plenty more). Now there was moody music, a gentle washing of sound. It was "Children of a Lesser God," that movie about a deaf girl that had won an Oscar. Meaning that the actress who played the deaf girl had won an Oscar. What was her name? Something like Marlene. He'd never seen the movie, so he'd watch it now. Like he had anything better to do. Well, drink maybe. Nah. No going back.

 

Jimmy Buffett reminds you that life is groovy

 

Posted by Alois on

 

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10/17/2021:

Because, ever since that balmy night in NYC when he'd met Molly Ringwald, he'd thought about her often. Usually at moments like this, when he was in a diner in Eau Claire (not Johnny's Pizza as he had wished, but more on that later) with a fuming Buck seated across from him--fuming because now he'd been forced to take time out to eat, or else sit there and watch somebody eat, "suit yourself." And now Buck's phone had rung and it was Larry, the salesman who handled northern Wisconsin for the bus company. Dale had informed Larry of their woes and of the fact that they were stuck in Eau Claire; maybe he could smooth-talk the client in De Forest? Larry would try. Larry would also drive down to Eau Claire from New Richmond, where he had met with another potential sale, and buy lunch for the guys (on the company!). Larry would be here momentarily, which made Buck's mood even more dour... if that was possible.

It was.

"Look here." He flapped the plastic menu at Buck to get him to look up from his laptop, where he was no doubt filling out a time report explaining to the nth detail why they were not currently on the road and why the bus would be delivered late (if at all). Dale would have taken them at their word, but that wasn't enough for Buck. Everything had to be documented in writing, including--according to company legend--an overlong bathroom break he had taken in Huron, South Dakota due to an adverse reaction to a slice of pepperoni pizza purchased at a gas station.

"Look here. The daily special is this nine-bean soup. Now that sounds mighty interesting. I think I may have to try some."

"No," Buck said flatly.

"No?" Was Buck going to tell him what to eat now?

"I have to ride in that van with you for another six hundred miles. I don't want to have to deal with your noxious emissions."

Now it was time for a Buck slap-down. Every now and then you just had to do it, remind the man that he may have been the boss of the mechanics back at the bus barn, but he was not and never had been the boss of you.

"Listen, pal," he began. And just then Larry arrived, grinning ear to ear.

"D'ja eat yet fellas, or are you waiting for my dragging ass?" Larry slapped his satchel on the seat next to Buck and looked around the room. "Anybody know what the lunch special is?"

"Nine-bean soup. With ground beef. I've gotta try some of that." He grinned devilishly across the table at Buck. Buck did not return the grin.

The waitress arrived as if on cue. She was cute and didn't even look tired. Must have just started her shift. "Did I hear someone mention the bean soup?"

"Yeah, I'll try some," he said. Larry raised his hand and added, "Mark me down for some too. Large if you've got it."

Buck didn't look healthy. He was an unnatural shade of purple. There was steam coming out of his ears. No, there really was. Actual fucking steam coming out of his ears.

Posted by Alois on

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10/15/2021:

It's said that you can meet almost anyone in New York City, and that had certainly proven true as far as he was concerned. He'd seen Yoko Ono, Bernadette Peters, Art Garfunkel (many times--he was hard to miss) and even Paul Simon, who he'd stood behind in the line at a delicatessen in Forest Hills. And then there was Molly Ringwald. He had actually met Molly Ringwald. 

 

Molly, as she looked then

 

Right now she was on his big-screen TV, an indulgence he'd allowed himself because he loved to watch movies (and, truth be told, tornado videos). And he was finally seeing the movie she'd told him to avoid, called The Pickup Artist. The movie she was filming right across the street the night they'd met, at the Museum of Natural History where he had been working for several years stringing their antiquated computer odds and ends into something resembling a network and convincing management to trade in the IBM Selectrics for Wang word processors. He didn't make a lot of money compared to other computer engineers, but he loved working at the museum and walking past dinosaurs and dioramas on the way to his office every morning.

Before he could utter further idiocies, he unlocked the dock entrance and pointed Molly Ringwald the way to the ladies'. She trotted briskly down the hallway, taller than he had imagined her as being. Didn't movie stars at least have their own porta-potties? Things were apparently tough all over.

The thing he'd never been able to figure is why she stuck around for half an hour when she was done with her bathroom break. She asked him if he smoked (why, of course!) and bummed a cigarette.

It was a delightful half-hour, at least from his perspective. They talked and talked and smoked and smoked, sitting on the edge of the loading dock with their legs dangling.

Molly had killer legs.

She seemed really curious about his life, which had been more midwestern, more poverty-stricken, and considerably more humdrum than hers. Actually he didn't want to do so much talking; he already knew his own story all too well, whereas he didn't know any movie stars and never had. But from the rush of events that evening, he could recall very little of what Molly Ringwald had said. She was from southern California. She had been acting pretty much all her life, having been discovered at age 10. Acting could be maddening, like right now when she had to sneak away from the set--Columbus Avenue, in this case--to have a fucking cigarette. (He said nothing about using the bathroom.) Oh, and by the way, the movie she was filming was really, really stupid. "As the title might suggest," she harrumphed through a cloud of smoke. "Don't see it!"

 

Gratuitous Molly Ringwald Smoking Picture

 

She said she was happy that she had met him, "and not only for the obvious reasons." She thanked him for the several cigarettes she had bummed--damn, this girl could smoke!--and accepted his offer to walk her to the museum gate.

It was silly to want to kiss her, but he wanted to, pretty badly. But of course he didn't. Molly smiled her famous radiant smile at him and disappeared up Columbus Avenue to where the barricades and klieg lights were set up for the shoot.

He caught a pleasant scent that drifted after her. At first he thought it was perfume, and then he realized that it was her deodorant. It smelled pretty yummy.

Posted by Alois on

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10/12/2021:

They hadn't eaten anything yet today and already the sun was climbing high. In all fairness, he had only himself to blame for that. Buck didn't like to stop to eat (some kind of nonsense about "saving the company money,") when Dale had said a million times that he wanted them to stop and eat and rest regularly on these long trips. You couldn't argue with Buck, it was like arguing with a rock. The only way to get Buck's attention was to get extremely pissed off and make a scene--or in the immortal words of Larry McMurtry, to "hit him over the head with a two-by-four."

Now his stomach was already gnawing at him and with this little glitch it didn't look like he'd be eating anytime soon. Buck was huffing and puffing over his flip phone, giving Dale the bad news and trying to come up with a plan.

The plan, such as it was, turned out to be to call Cummins Diesel (the engine manufacturer) in Eau Claire and dump the problem on them. Well, that was certainly encouraging. Neither of them had ever dealt with Cummins Diesel before. And no one at Cummins knew them from a hole in the ground.

Other than the fact that the guy who answered the phone at Cummins seemed to have real difficulty understanding what he was being called about or what he was being asked to do, at least he knew enough to get a school bus mechanic on the line. "Aw shit, betcha it's the DEF system sensor."

DEF, or diesel exhaust fluid, was a new cleaner-air additive that all diesel-burning commercial vehicles had to have to operate legally. The sensors--installed to recognize when the DEF system had been tampered with--were, by nearly all accounts, not quite ready for prime time. But he'd never heard of a vehicle completely shutting down, especially while hurtling down an interstate highway.

Posted by Alois on

 

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10/09/2021:

They're into Wisconsin before the sun is really up. There's not a lot to see between the St. Croix River and Eau Claire (where, he remembers, there is a really excellent pizzeria called Johnny's on Golf Rd.), but then the land begins to get quite hilly, almost like Pennsylvania except for the dairy cows everywhere. This is, after all, America's Dairyland. What was hard to understand was that the states bordered each other, had been settled by pretty much the same northern peoples, and had large agricultural sectors. Yet Minnesota, by and large, hewed to a progressive governance that resembled that of Scandinavia--whereas Wisconsin, the so-called "West Virginia of the North," had enough pinheads to push around whatever progressives remained (fewer and fewer, he imagined) with draconian legislation that was more like the Jim Crow South than the enlightened North.

South of Eau Claire, just before the Osseo exit off I-94, the engine quit. As in, totally shut off. All power lost. There was no smoke, no funny smells, no shaking or wobbling. It... just... shut... down.

He eased over to the shoulder, without benefit of turn signals (yes, those were MIA too) and could already see Buck gesturing pointlessly in the minivan. Yes indeedy, Buck, I always try to make a point of pulling off the road with no power, it's so much like those "what-ifs" they give you in the yearly training exercises.

It had been so quiet. Well, that was about to change.

"Why did you pull off? Why didn't you wait for the exit to pull off?" He had noticed before how much Buck resembled a chicken when he wasn't carrying the Secret Briefcase and got worked up and started flapping his arms.

"Bus lost power."

"Buses never lose power."

"Aw, no, Buck. I just switched off the ignition. To see what would happen, you know?"

"You can't just switch off the ignition. It's--"

Buck saw him grinning and realized that he was being shined.

"SO WHAT DO WE DO NOW?" Buck sputtered.

You're the boss? "I s'pose we should call the shop. Fairly sure we can't deliver this bus. They're not going to want a custom bus that can't even make it a hundred miles."

"BUT IT'S TO BE DELIVERED THIS AFTERNOON!"

"But it's not cooperating... and I'm pretty certain we don't have an extra T120 with luggage racks and AC sitting around the yard, n'est-ce pas?"

"Nissy what?" Buck's eyes were beginning to bug like an insect's. Not a good sign.

"Never mind."

Posted by Alois on

 

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10/07/2021:

So Dale, the big boss, asks if he will "accompany" Buck down to De Forest, Wisconsin, practically Madison, with some kind of customized T120 cab-forward bus (flat front, the kind he liked best) that is inexplicably going to the local public school district. Somewhere in Wisconsin, taxpayers are in the dark about exactly what they've just purchased here. But that's no matter, his job is just to deliver the custom bus in one piece.

And spend a very long day with Buck, who will be driving the chase vehicle that they will both take on the long trip home, a ratty Chrysler minivan with unreliable air conditioning.

It's still dark out and already in the mid-seventies. Oh, joy.

But this is precisely when Buck appears from the parking lot, carrying the Secret Briefcase. "Can you believe it," Buck harrumphs. "They actually have air conditioning in this goddam crate. And overhead luggage racks!"

Now he remembered, traveling as he did in a perpetual world of high school sports: De Forest had won the Wisconsin WIAA state football championship last fall. It had been some booster's idea to buy this bus for the winning coach. Amazing, how much money was swimming around just in high school sports. Real money.

They set out from Chaska as the first light seeps into the eastern sky, hoping to beat the rush hour traffic around the Twin Cities. As usual, there is already plenty of traffic and it's just a few minutes past five a.m. Once again he wonders why these people do it. New Yorkers straggle into work sometime between nine and eleven. No one really seems to care. But they sure do here.

Posted by Alois on

 

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10/06/2021:

There was a stubborn streak of libertarian in him, and he wasn't sure how much he liked it.

To avoid collecting unemployment compensation like most of the other school bus drivers did during the summer, he would deliver new school buses (his employer was also a bus dealer) all over the north central states. This kept him from having to deal with the ridiculous conundrum faced by the other drivers, who would have to pretend they were "searching for work" and fill out forms to that effect, when it should have been fairly obvious that they planned to drive bus again come fall. There had been more than a couple of instances when drivers would forget to apply for jobs that they were ridiculously unlikely to get, only to wind up serving burgers at McDonald's until September came. There was a way to play the game and most of the more senior drivers would share it with the newbies, but you had to be careful.

He told himself that delivering buses got you brownie points with your employer (which it did)--plus you got to see the world. Or at least one hell of a lot of bus barns.

The downside was that, more often than not, you had to work with Buck. Every business has someone who is way past 65 and who everyone dearly hopes will retire--someone who has definitely exceeded their shelf life. Where he worked, that someone was Buck.

A former Marine who carried himself like one, Buck was a "shop foreman" who didn't do much during the school year except sit in his office and play Solitaire on the computer (and make life miserable for Alonzo, a young Mexican with a family who was the real foreman). The guys in the shop liked Alonzo and hated Buck, a fact that had not gone unnoticed by Buck and was probably the main reason he wouldn't retire and get out of everyone's way. But Buck had been with the company since its founding. He wasn't going anywhere until he was good and ready to. Or until he dropped dead, which seemed more likely at this stage of the game.

The punchline was that Buck was in charge of the summer bus deliveries. And relished that fact. And could not be ignored.

He had been dealing with Buck for years, in his capacity as the more-or-less-manager-of-the-bus-delivery-drivers which meant absolutely nothing except that he'd been doing it longer and had a highly detailed map of the upper Midwest engraved in his brain. That put him at frequent odds with Buck, who hated that he never got asked any questions and was treated like an old fogey who carried around an attaché case and wore high-waisted Docker shorts, which is precisely what he was (the other drivers called it the "secret briefcase" and wondered aloud if it contained "the nuclear codes"--in reality it was nothing more than a couple of screwdrivers and dealer plates for the new buses).

Posted by Alois on

 

 

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10/05/2021:

He raised himself up on one elbow. It had been dark, seemingly forever, but now the sky was beginning to lighten. Crazy dreams had darted through his cranium like tropical fish, most vividly the torrid love affair he'd imagined with Sharon who had been his prom date but nothing else, strangely she had also aged in the dream and wore her now washed-out blonde hair in a ponytail.

The TV chattered. It was the animated movie "Soul" with those little blue creatures who were supposed to be human souls, cavorting around to a really impressive soundtrack that weaved between smooth jazz and techno. He wondered who would be up at this hour, watching this mass-produced art flick about a disaffected jazz pianist. Probably not his neighbor who worked at the grain elevator.

 

 

A foggy thought seeped into his tired brain: He had slept through most of the night! That was a first, at least since he'd tried to throw off the booze. He'd read up on the internet (Mayo Clinic, WebMD) and it was obvious that he couldn't just STOP like he had with cigarettes, although that had been no cakewalk either. But he hadn't realized how much worse his drinking had gotten since he'd retired and moved out here to rural Chandler, much closer to Sioux Falls than it was to Minneapolis. He'd go to the grocery/liquor outlet in Luverne and stock up on his favorite bourbon and beers, with the idea that "this will be enough to last me a whole month!" But it never was. He would be lucky if it lasted a week. It got to the point where the gal at the liquor checkout asked him, "Are you okay?" His hands, clutching the debit card, were trembling. It was eight o'clock in the morning.

No, he wasn't okay. Not anymore. He guessed that when he was working and the amount of booze that would "last a whole month!" actually did, he was flirting with alcoholism but probably wasn't quite there. Certainly he never drank at work or even within eight hours of his starting times (DOT regulations). But now he drank all the time. Morning, noon and night.

He had decided to wean himself from alcohol by taking one shot of vodka (he'd never liked vodka) only when he couldn't stand one more second without a drink.

The first 24 hours he required 18 shots to function. That was just over a fifth of vodka. And this was bare maintenance?

Any way you stacked it, he had sure been drinking a lot.

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10/04/2021:

He'd put his finger on what the thing was: The thing was that his sacred places had all been defiled.

Colorado, where like a lot of other young hippies he'd gone looking for his Rocky Mountain High and mostly found a lot of loose women--whom he had gladly availed himself of, wrapped up in a sleeping bag at ten thousand feet with a twelve-pack of Coors and some local wacky weed. Well, you didn't want to go to Colorado so much these days because every time you turned around there was another wack job with an automatic weapon mowing folks down. Maybe it was the altitude. Or more likely, too many automatic weapons.

California had burned to the ground, as near as he could tell.

The Missouri Ozarks. He'd gone camping there many times as a kid. Then COVID-19 came around and the Missouri Ozarks turned out to be full of pinheads who thought vaccines contained a microchip that would enable Bill Gates (or the gubmint) to follow your every move. Never in his whole life had he held anything in particular against people who lacked his education, even though he had put himself through college and hadn't complained about the hardship. But pride in ignorance? That was something he had absolutely no use for.

Anti-vaxxers, QAnon adherents, and Nazis turned out to be overrepresented his beloved inland Northwest too. Reading A.B. Guthrie Jr. had reminded him of what he'd lost there, how he probably would never find himself driving the High Line along the Canadian border again...

"It's like it's all sp'iled for me now, Dick--Teal Eye and the Teton and all. Don't know as I can ever go back, Dick. Goddam it! Goddam it!" 

As long as swastika tattoos were popular in the northwestern US, he'd give the Canadians his business. Fuck it.

South Dakota: more pinheads. Hard to believe this state had given the world George McGovern, Crazy Horse, Stephanie Herseth, and Tom Brokaw.

Well, Kristi Noem too. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.

His favorite part of Minnesota, the southwestern part near the South Dakota line, he'd always called "the center of the universe"--perhaps it was a certain kinship, however distant, to Native people who felt the same. But now the pinheads were beating up Mexicans (and Natives who reminded them of Mexicans) on a fairly regular basis. And you couldn't blame it all on visitors from South Dakota either, as much as he wished he could.

Texas, where he'd gone to chase tornadoes on a tour with some well-known meteorologists, had weekly beatings of Mexicans plus Nazis plus frequent mass shootings plus a prehistoric state government that still thought it was governing a separate nation, except when the proud Texas power grid melted down and they had to borrow electricity from one of those wussy states that weren't Texas.

On the other hand, he'd never been to Europe.

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10/03/2021:

 

"It's like it's all sp'iled for me now, Dick--Teal Eye and the Teton and all. Don't know as I can ever go back, Dick. Goddam it! Goddam it!"

He had pushed the door clear open, and his feet shuffled and found the step and took him out. Summers followed him, forgetting to give him the bottle he held in his hand. A dog barked, townway, and another took it up and another until finally Boone's old blue-tick hound came loping from behind the cabin and stopped and pointed his nose at the sky and let loose with his deep bay. For awhile Summers could see Boone, weaving big and dark into the darkness, and then he couldn't see him any more, and he turned  and went back into the cabin. There was cold corn pone on the table, and cold poke greens and a ham butt and a pitcher of buttermilk. His woman had gone to bed, she tired so easy these days.

So that was it, A.B. Guthrie Jr.'s epic The Big Sky which he'd been reading for a little over a month now ("I don't read fast, but my comprehension is first-rate!" he used to explain to his professors at college). The end of this book really got to you in a way in which he wasn't quite accustomed; he'd inhaled his quarter-pound roller dog and a big order of cheesy garlic fries without really noticing that he was eating. It was like he'd had the wind knocked out of him. And that was why he read, to experience feelings that were outside his personal realm and for the most part always would be, even though if he was honest with himself, his life had been more interesting than most. He hadn't wasted it, not at all. People asked him why a computer engineer was driving a school bus or a fertilizer tanker for a living. "Because I want to," he'd say, honestly.

Still that didn't explain the heavy drinking, the smoking, the squalid house in a bad part of Minneapolis, and the fact that he hadn't gone on a date in twelve years and was now an old man. Sometimes he laughed when he thought about having sex. He'd been pretty good at it, right up until the very end, but these days he hardly thought about sex at all. If the most gorgeous woman in the world was to plop down naked in his lap, he doubted he could do much about it. Guys at the co-op assumed he was interested in porno like they were and would give him tips on cable channels to get or movies to watch. But he wasn't interested in porno either. He stumbled upon a couple of "nurses" giving a guy a blow job on the internet, and laughed out loud. Yeah, like that had ever happened in the history of the entire world.

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