Frankenstein's Monster or How we Monetized Ourselves into the Shitcan

A few years ago I went back to college to get my MA.  One of the classes I had to take was called "Monetization and the New Media." One of the first questions one of the teachers asked was, "Who wants to start their own business?"  Three out of 17 students raised their hands.  These were liberal arts majors trying to figure out how to get paid for the arts they already knew, or budding journalists looking for a paycheck.  Everybody knew that traditional journalism was, if not totally dead, coughing up blood like mad. One day we took a field trip to the L.A. Times newsroom and it was like a mausoleum.  Bats flying out of it, cobwebs everywhere.  No, seriously, there was nobody in there, just a bunch of deserted desks, devoid of personal items, no reporters, no collegial banter between hotshots chasing down big stories.  There were a couple of computer screens lit up to monitor stuff going on in cyberspace but that was it.

In the Monetization class the teacher wanted us all to become entrepreneurs, to learn to market our own stuff.  Smart lad that he was, he was going gangbusters.  One of his favorite approaches was getting off the freeway at accident sites then walking back up the offramp in hope of the big scoop. Mostly he got yelled at for crossing the police lines, but I guess once in a while he sold some video.

But that was years ago, like 2014, and things have changed a lot since then.  Liberal Arts students take the monetization shit to heart now and as the recent presidential election has shown us, they ain't fucking around.  Some bright monetizer finally figured out that the echo chambers of the Internet were just dying to be filled.

Until recently, like most people probably, I didn't realize what echo chambers sites like Facebook actually are.  People interact with like-minded people, reading and commenting on stuff they like and ignoring stuff they don't.  It's easy.  You just stop following someone who annoys your or if they really make you mad you can bring out the big guns and "unfriend" them.  I hardly ever unfriend anyone because I don't want to hurt feelings, but this election cycle I finally had to offload a guy. I knew him a million years ago and we became FB friends a few years back.  He kept posting things about how Hillary should be in jail, investigated by a grand jury, or tried and shot at dawn.  Finally I couldn't take it anymore.  Oh, I made perfunctory attempts, like asking why all this horrible shit should happen to Madam Secretary  But he told me I was naive, that he thought I was smarter than that, bla, bla, bla.  Unfriend.  Bam!

I'm fairly careful about the news I take in.  I realized long ago that  you have to triangulate the truth, which means going to different outlets and reading different takes on events.  I go to the Guardian, the New York Times, The Huffington Post, which okay, is highly skewed but anyway it's not a real paper, just a news aggragator and I like the baby animal videos.  I like The Washington Post. Sometimes I read The Daily Beast and even check out Buzzfeed.  There are journalists I respect and some not so much, but if somebody's making an honest effort to get at the truth I'll read what they have to say.

But what that plucky monetizing, no-paycheck-anywhere-on-the-horizon journalism graduate student figured out was that what all those crapped out, haggard, grey-haired, overweight, alcoholic journalism professors had told them on the QT was Wrong!  There was still plenty of money to be made in journalism.  All you have to do is make a bunch of shit up.

On NPR I heard about a guy just the other day.  I was stuck in a traffic jam going either into or out of L.A., I can't remember which.  This guy lives in Santa Monica, makes 30K a week and has 24 writers working for him.  What those writers produce is 100% bullshit, which is funneled onto the Facebook pages of people inclined to believe pretty much anything that reinforces the beliefs they already have.  Of course I didn't know what my ex-Facebook friend was talking about when he said Hillary should be in prison.  How was I to know she murdered an FBI agent, chopped up his body, then destroyed it with acid in a bathtub.   It wasn't in any of the newsfeeds I read.  But it was in "The Real Story" and "Atrocitities of Democrats Run Amok" and "Why the Left Wants to Cut up Your Babies." And it was there because it was manufactured for money.

It makes sense, in a uniquely American way.  We don't make much actual stuff in this country, I mean besides hamburgers and cheezy crust pizzas and giant sized lattes with 4500 calories each.  So this latest generation of entrepreneurs figured out that they could make a lot of money simply by making up the news.

It's really dangerous to teach young people things.  They're likely to go out and not just do them, but improve on the original idea.

Or how about Marco Chacon?  I read about him this morning in The Daily Beast.  At first he comes off all ironic-like, one of these to-clever-by-halfs millennial wankers who want to see how many undereducated rubes they can fool.  So he'd write fake news stories, create fake hash tags like #NeverEverHillary, the stuff would get passed around the echo chambers of social media, and all the sudden the guy's a success, probably for the first time since he first pooed in his little yellow potty chair.  Not only did people believe his fake news stories, they passed them around and his statistics started going through the roof.  He wrote stories about The Deep State, and Hillary Clinton not just fainting, but being terminally ill.  Like-minded Facebook users passed  this garbage around and believed it to to be true.

And voila.  We got Donald Trump for president.

I'm kind of torn in my feelings about this brave new world.  On the one hand, these guys just created products, sold 'em, and made loads of dough.  It's capitalism at it's best, right?  They correctly understood cyberspaces that needed filling and transformed things really.  They innovated, thought "outside the box."  We live in a "post fact" world now, or so I'm told.  For many people, this is convenient.  Facts are bothersome, hard to remember and sometimes challenge long held beliefs.   But they do have a tendency to raise their ugly heads bye the bye.  May the Lord have mercy on us all.

Wednesday Musings

The dogs are asleep on their living room bed, light on in the kitchen, I finally got two 65 watt bulbs into that fixture where before there were 2 one-hundreds and it was so bright it looked like the aftermath of a nuclear blast.  I've been for a walk; it's cold and crisp outside and as I sit down to write, for no reason other than it makes me feel better, I find it disturbing that I can't focus. This may be due to either having too much to say, all about unpleasant things like Trump and brutality and history along with the sad fact that we're all going to die someday and how dare the sun, when I get my comeuppance, go on shining without me.  Or it may be due to the anxiety pill I took earlier.  Truth be told, I was an anxious mess this morning and when I get that way I can't accomplish a damned thing.  I opened the washing machine threw in a couple of towels, then went to brush my teeth, but remembered the bill that's due today and the fact that I haven't spoken to one of my kids for 4 months even though he's only 5 miles away, and that my coffee's going cold.  Then I stick the coffee into the microwave only to discover a half hour later that I am out of laundry soap.  I run my tongue across my teeth realizing that while I put the toothpaste on the brush, said brush never actually made it into my mouth because the microwave beeped.

So I decided to the gym to take a posture fitness class.

The posture fitness class is run by a woman affectionatly dubbed "the posture nazi."  She believes in her thing, like all people with such things believe in theirs.  According to the posture nazi, correct posture can cure whatever ailes you and bad posture is the root of all evil.  In class we flop our arms around, stand up straight, stand on tippy toes and get harangued about our pelvises, but it's all in the service of the greater good and maybe it will cure everything that ailes everybody. Something's got to, doesn't it?

After the posture fitness class I go and do some time on the elliptical machine.  There are a couple of old ladies next to me, and by old I mean 3 or 4 years older than me.  They are trying to figure out whether they should take Social Security before it is all gone-- even though they won't get as much as they will if they wait until they're 65-- and if they're going to make it to Medicare before Trump gets rid of it and replaces it with leaches and mass deportations onto ice floes.  Their conversation was pretty centered on how they were going to save themselves from all the trouble that's coming.  Not that they weren't decent ladies.  I imagine their logic was like that of passengers on an airplane in freefall.  Always put your own mask on first, then help others.

I've been wondering about what my own little plan might be.  On the plus side, I'm white, was born in the US, and am sort of middle class, although close to the bottom of it.  Chances are that unless I burn a flag or get a subscription to the New York Times, I won't get deported.  Not that deportation must be such a bad thing, but I've always had trouble with Spanish and at this point in my life my brain is calcified sufficiently that I don't think I'll ever really learn it to the degree that I'd need to to survive.  Hell, I can never remember whether derecho or derecha mean go straight ahead or turn right.  If I was stuck in a Spanish speaking country I'd probably just go in circles all the time until I dropped dead of exhaustion.  I can just imagine myself banished to a place like Equador and trying to communicate my dilemma let alone get my prescription for Retin A refilled.  No, I don't think I'd like being expatriated at all.

But the ladies at the gym's concerns not withstanding, what's the best case scenario if one does manage to insure one's own survival in these troubled times?  How can any of us avoid this bloated hot mess that is our incoming president.

Donald Trump really does think that as president, he can deport people who burn the American flag. Now of course he doesn't give a damn about the American flag, and in a pinch I'll bet he can't even tell you how many stripes it has, maybe not even the number of stars, but in his mind, he's the boss now and can do what he wants.  And it's not even this crying baby/man who scares me the most.  It's all the people he's surrounding himself with who see him for exactly what he is: a tool.  All you have to do to make Trump do what you want is flatter him, cheer him on, tell him daily he's not the fat old tiny mouthed short fingered vulgarian the rest of us see, but as studly dynamic and handsome as he ever was.  All he wants to be is worshipped, praised, said yes to.  That's it.

I thought thing were bad when Bush took over, knew he was going to use 911 as an excuse to savage the economy and line all his friends' pockets.  We're still reaping the wages of that.  But Donald Trump is something different.  While Bush's arrogance was substantial, and weilded against the interests of the American people with great force and consistancy, still, after all this time I can't quite characterize him as a "bad man."

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a very bad man surrounding himself with worse ones who are going to play him to the hilt with total disregard for the consequences and suffering of the rest of us. And he's too dumb, or just too fucking disinterested, to see it.  He may, in the end, go down as the biggest toady in history but he won't care.  He can't.

Dystopian Clusterfuck

Trump won the election.  I don't know how and I don't know why.  I've heard various explanations, like the bowels of the earth opened up and spewed their contents into the crankcase of a busted 43 Oldsmobile owned by the Devil and maintained by Pep Boys, to the raging hoards of disaffected and unemployed white male population of the mid-United States suffering simultaneous attacks of Mad Cow Disease.  I tend to favor the latter theory since those types of people eat a lot of hamburger.  People have short memories nowadays, but there was a time when the very thought of grinding bovine spinal cords and brains into hamburger meat sent people running for the shitters all over the nation.  Now?  Ah, who cares?

It wasn't supposed to turn out this way.  In fact, on the night of the election results coming in I was at a potluck with some friends.  The guy with the big eyebrows brought margeritas, somebody made tamales, somebody else a salad.  I brought pasta and we were all geared up for a jolly good time.  But by 8 o'clock things weren't looking the way they should.  It should have been a landslide for Hillary.  What kind of moron would vote for a slimy psychopathic con man with a dead red squirrel on his head?  I went home and binge watched a few episodes of "The Walking Dead" on Netflix, downed a glass of wine with an Ativan chaser, then hoped and prayed the morning would bring something other than it did.  Hell, I didn't even make it to the real morning but awoke at 3 AM and just had to check. There it was "Donald Trump to be 45th president of the United States."  It's hard to describe what I felt.  It was similar to what I felt on 9/11, when I knew what we needed in the Whitehouse was an enlightened leader, only instead we had George W. Bush.  I felt like Chaos had been unleashed only it was so much worse that that sort of disorganization implies.  It felt as if all the worst impulses of the human animal had been shot up with meth and let out of the zoo.

Civilization is a thin veneer.  It dropped away like a pervert's piss-stained pants.

In other news, and because this is blogging and nobody gives 2 shits about continuity, I quit my job today.  I was working at a luxury resort where people pay enormous amounts of money to eat healthy food, do yoga, waggle giant fire hoses around in the gym (this is a real exercise), get their tarot cards read, receive psychic readings, find out why their bowels are acting up or their penises won't follow their commands. Menopausal women are very upset because they're no longer the fuck machines their rich husbands married and are panicked at the realization that it's only a matter of time before they're traded in for newer models.  I worked in, "Medical," which is just across the walkway from "Metaphysics," "Spiritual Consulting" and, ah, I think golf.  I worked at this resort for nearly 3 months-- close to a record for me-- and never saw a sick person.  Rich people would come in to get their blood drawn to find out how they were metabolizing their vitamins, or if they were allergic to cumin, or whether spandex caused them too much stress and was giving them a rash.  Since the ascendence of "Medicine for Profit" commercial labs have sprung up all over the place mostly pandering to these kinds of people.  These labs will test for anything and charge more for it than the GNP of many small African nations.  And rich people fork over the dough too.  My job was to draw blood and send it off to these labs.  The labs would send back long reports telling everybody to eat more kale and less fatty food.  Beware the Medical/Industrial/Kale complex.

Now really, saying I drew blood is kind of an exaggeration and in the end the reason I quit.  Oh, I'm good with a needle, no problem there but the management was never quite convinced I would be able to treat the rich people with the deferance and fealty they deserved.  You have to fawn a lot over the monied classes, and if one of them is convinced that having a tiny needle stuck into an arm vein is tantamount to open heart surgery, you have to treat them as if it is.  I suppose in the end, and when all was said and done, I just didn't have that in me.  Mostly I had, "grow up you fucking babys!" stacked up like planes over La Guardia on a Friday night.  Still, I thought I hid it pretty well.  But maybe not.

The Road to Hell

Sometimes, you don't have anything to say for the simple reason that there is so much to say.  The Republican nominee for president is a raving mad man, Tucson is so wet this season that the flowering bermuda grass is trying to kill me.  My new dog, who had five years before he met me and was, during this time left almost entirely to his own limited devices, still lifts his leg occasionally on the living room furniture.  A little girl riding in my car a couple of days ago said, "it smells like Miss Catherine in here."  Since I got back from L.A., I haven't had time to do a thorough job of cleaning the dog barf out of my car.  I've never had a dog who got car sick before.  Miss Catherine smells like dog barf.

Back in the old days, I sometimes smelled like Chanel #5.  Now that I think about it, I think I prefer dog barf.

But getting the dog was all in pursuit of good intentions, the road to which is paved and potholed, oilslicked and fraught with hazards.  There's a crashed bicyclist, his arms where his legs ought to be, trying to save the environment.  If you look further up the road you can see a rich person volunteering, taking foster kids with crap lives to the zoo.  They don't really like the zoo.  They can't go in the exhibits to pull the animals' tails and if they did said animals would maul them to death. They're rather be home playing Barbies and Frozen.  The only reason they agreed to go to the stupid zoo in the first place was for the ice cream promised afterwards.  Big ice cream.  Really big ice cream eight feet tall.  They're only six and eight years old, but already muffin-topping from their church-donated shorts so vehemently they don't even know what color they are. They'll both have diabetes in 2 years.

I don't want to talk about Donald Trump because everybody else is; and he feeds off of it like the Jack-the-Ripper creature from the original Star Trek.  In case you don't remember, there was an entity that invaded the Enterprise and began killing people in horrible ways.  Doing this sporadically in the guise of a dorky bald guy played by I-don't-remember but he used to be on TV all the time, the entity evoked shipwide terror which, it turns out, he fed on.  He had been traveling through the galaxies throughout all of time, always in different guises,Ghengas Khan, Jack the Ripper of course, Hitler, all those guys, wreaking havoc, fear, death, paranoia and doom.  In the end he jumped from his bald guy host to the ship's computer.  Kirk and Spock made the computer calculate the absolute value of pi and then McCoy gave everybody on the ship a tranquilizer so they'd be dopey and happy.  When Jack-the-Ripper thing enter one of their bodies, he got stoned and helpless.  Them beamed him out into deep space scattering his molecules so wide that he couldn't get back together again.

Where are Kirk, Spock, and McCoy when you need them?

Catherine O’Sullivan  “On Coming Full Circle”

Driving back into town, It’s greener than I remember it.  My kid says we’ve gotten more rain.  Picacho Peak looks like broken beer bottle glass, the sun low on the horizon smooths out the landscape as the saguaros disappear into the shadows.

It’s been 6 years but then what’s a little time between friends?  I left Tucson for a bunch of reasons primarily divorce, which is horrible, but what’s even worse-- menopause.  In 2009 it seemed like everything was stacked against me, and what with the hot flashes, well, one day I woke up and proclaimed, “As God is my witness I will never be too hot again.”  I fled to Seattle.

An interesting town, Seattle.  Good music scene—I met some nice people there-- excellent coffee but it rains all the friggin’ time and there were days I pined continually for just a little bit of photosynthetic warmth like a calf pining for its mother.  Just break through for a minute, sun.  Pretty please with sugar on top.

So I gave Los Angeles a try.  Now before anyone jumps to overly harsh conclusions, there was method to my madness.  I was born in Hollywood.  My mother still lives in the same house she and my father bought on the G.I. Bill in 1957.  I wanted to hang with her and see if Thomas Wolf was right, whether it was true that you can never go home again.  He was.  Going back to L.A. after a 25 year absence was like having momentarily left your seat in a crowded movie theater.  When you go back in not only has someone taken your place, but they look at you as though you’re clinically insane having ever imagined it was yours in the first place.  I did a lot of things in L.A.  Worked as an extra in the movies, met David Duchovny, Antonio Banderas, and had a lovely chat with Fabio, who tried to sell me his new line of vitamins.  I worked for a Nazi vegan at a vegetarian restaurant who kept throwing hissy fits because he didn’t like the way I sliced the bell peppers.  He was tall, rail thin with anemic blue eyes and too many calcium deposits at the edges of his scraggly, gapped teeth.

Then one day something happened.  There I was looking at my Facebook page and a college professor friend was advertising a Master’s program in journalism at USC.  He told me he thought I had a swell shot of not just getting in, but getting an Annenberg Fellowship (translation: a full ride including a 20K stipend) because of all the great work I’d done with The Tucson Weekly. 

At USC I learned about “The New Journalism,” which mostly has to do with Twitter and blogging.  That part I understood well enough; it’s like starting a religion.  You do your very best to get as many people as you can to follow you, then via your blog, believe everything you say.  They also taught me about “backpack journalism.”  This involves installing an expensive program on your computer, getting a camera and some mics, although an I-phone will do, and taking them with you everywhere you go.  One of my teachers told me he got his best stuff watching for accidents on the freeway, that once they had it blocked off, walking back up the off-ramp and getting all the footage you want is easy.  The police, he said, hardly every bother you because they’re so busy writing tickets and helping the firemen load shattered bits of humanity into ambulances they don’t have the time.  Plus, they hate arguing with “the press.”  All that pesky First Amendment stuff.  Once you’ve got the material, including an interview with a bystander if you can swing it, you get into the back seat of your car, produce a piece and try to flog it to CNN or FOX News.  CNN pays better, but FOX buys a lot more of the gory stuff.

But the most interesting thing about “The New Journalism” is that since it’s nearly impossible to get a job in old style journalism now, the focus is on how to write advertising copy.  The hitch?  You have to convince yourself that what you’re really doing is being “entrepreneurial,” and not selling out.  I took a class, well, part of one anyway, called “Monitization and the New Media.”  I only went twice, quickly developing severe stomach problems and electing to do an independent study project on Hunter Thompson instead, but in that class they’d have speakers including brokers who pimped out writers to work for corporate publications.  Dell, for example, has a monthly “news” publication that explains all the innovations you can stuff between a couple of glossy, polished covers.  The professor teaching that class was pretty happy to see the back of me.  I kept asking questions like, “what if you want to write something about the corporation or its products that aren’t complimentary?”

By the time my son and I roll into Tucson it is just about dark.  We unload the U-haul and after consuming a bag of cheese crackers and a couple of beers, I find my pillow and blanket, feed my dog, and locating the mattress, fall fast asleep.  The next morning I remember I’ve got to feed my friend’s cat and as I hit the intersection of Speedway and Alvernon, I watch as a short, stout sixty-ish woman in faded black spandex shorts, a basketball jersey with no bra, a can of Mountain Dew in one hand and a cigarette in the other, crosses in front of me.  Nobody looks at her, nobody cares.  I am back in Tucson.

 I turn the air conditioning up inside my car.  

Why ISIS Doesn’t Matter

If caring is a matter of degree, then ISIS doesn’t matter.  Yes, they are loads of nasty people doing terribly nasty things, but that’s not rare on the ground these days.

Poor Barack Obama.  He looks sallow and thinner than ever; his hair is gray.  He’s aged 20 years in less than 7.  They say absolute power corrupts absolutely, but perhaps it’s equally soul killing to have power fairly won, then castrated by people who don’t like you because of your skin color.  He might have been a successful president if the opposition hadn’t sworn, at the very beginning, to oppose him at every turn no matter what.  Maybe when things like that happen, you have no choice but to start acting just like the blinkered idiot who got us into all this trouble in the first place.  George W. Bush

To someone who has been around awhile, it seems like only yesterday that Nine-Eleven happened.  Back in those days, the inhabitants of the Whitehouse were aching for an excuse to invade Iraq.  Dick Cheney was up to his vacant psychopathic eyes in Halliburton, and George W. Bush, so convinced by his boneheaded averageness and arrogance that he knew what he was doing, imagined he was in charge and leapt onto the bandwagon before the first blasts of the sousaphone even sounded. 

But there was no reason to go to war with Iraq.  Osama bin Laden was not there, nor were any of his friends.  The Iraqis did not have yellow cake uranium.  They were not building a bomb.  And while Iraq and Syria have never been particularly stable nation states, they’re absolute chaos now: wrecked infrastructures, destroyed economies, sad and hopeless populations of the dispossessed and the desperate.  The strategy the Bush administration used to get us into that war was exactly the same one to use if your dog’s got ahold of a dead bird, a cat turd or something.  Distraction.  Throw a biscuit to the other side of the yard and go fetch.  WMD’s, Al Quada, retribution for 911.  They were all just excuses to keep the American people from noticing that the bastards at the top and all their prick friends were busily destroying our domestic economy and plunging us into an economic abyss we may never get out of.

We bashed Iraq, alright.  Never reported, never even counted the dead except for our own, imagining it was possible to force reality into being what we wanted it to be.  Saddam Hussein, holed up in his pathetic spider hole, hairy and feral and filthy.  Hot damn.  The press loved that image and so did plenty of Americans, never actually considering the ruined, shattered lives getting it left behind.

So now, what must it be like to be a young Iraqi male?  The world they’ve left you is not a nice one in which to wake up.  You feel powerless, weak, impotent.  And when you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.  Why not join a terrorist organization and blow people up?  If the best you can hope for is making others more miserable than you are, then that’s what you go for.  It’s called nihilism, philosophical-eze for not giving a flying fuck.  It’s close kin to hatred, towards everyone and everything.

So in Iraq and Syria we’ve got ISIS.  It’s touted as a global terrorist threat and yeah, it might sneak into another country, blow up a train station or a public gathering and kill hundreds of innocent people.  This is a terrible thing but given that it springs from a mess US Government policy created, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. 

The fact that Barack Obama is currently set on a course that looks alarming like the mess caused by his predecessor, is profoundly disturbing.  So he gets ISIS.  Another terrorist group will take its place.  Then another and another.  Violence begets only violence.  This has been true for as long as human beings have walked upright.  It will always be true.

And yeah, chopping peoples head off is barbaric, medieval, un-thinkable.

But not any more unthinkable that the things going on right here, every day.

You can ride your bike around downtown Los Angeles.  There are hundreds of homeless people.  Most of them simply wander the streets during the day returning to hidey holes or tent villages at night.  Well, tent is kind of an exaggeration.  You rarely see an intact tent.  Mostly they are patched together flops with odd bits of plastic tarps, string, plastic bags and whatever else they can find to keep the weather out.  Under an overpass, somewhere around Pico and Washington, both sides of the street are filled with one of these homeless villages, or they were today; the police will probably clear them out by tomorrow.  It looked like a slum in an old time Hooverville.   There is drug addiction there, alcoholism, despair, resignation.  I saw a guy reading a paperback book, and a woman in a dirty dress sweeping the sidewalks in an effort to maintain the appearance of a plausible human community.  This was oddly sweet, especially considering that she was breathing enough car exhaust and filthy road dust to kill the average lab rat in about ten minutes.  Human beings, no matter how poor or of what ethnicity, should not be made to live like this.

There are bodies of passed out workers waiting outside Home Depot for jobs.  Maybe they are illegals.  So what?  They deserve dignity, some minimal standard of living signifying even slightly, that they matter.  Yet we, one of the richest countries in the world, will not give them that.

We are destroying our environment, or maybe we’ve already destroyed it.  A scientists on NPR opined that at this point there is so much carbon dioxide not just in the atmosphere, but the oceans where it is trapped, that nothing can be done.  The oceans are heating up, accelerating global warming.

Public education systems are breaking down.  Once upon a time the general perception was that people who home schooled their kids were all fanatics and nuts.  Not so much anymore.  Columbine, Virginia Tech, Littleton Colorado, Newtown Connecticut.  At this point the frequency of public shootings is so great I’m not sure they even make the news anymore.  Sending kids off to school, something that used to be life affirming, has now become a source of anxiety.

The infrastructure of the US is crumbling.  Bridges, highways, waterways, public utilities.  No one is fixing them.  No one does anything until disaster strikes, and then it’s forgotten before the next news cycle.

The other day, thousands of people without health or dental insurance stood in line all day long in the heat at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Center to get wristbands for free health care appointments.  Many did not get in.  They interviewed a guy who got shut out last year.  He said he almost made it up to the gate before it closed and the police turned him away.  He needed dental work.  They told him, “come back next year.”  This year he got in.  What must the last year has been like for him every time he had to chew.  Contrary to public belief, most people do not seek dental care because they want to look pretty.  They go because they’re in intense pain and need help.

Ferguson, Missouri.  Race hatred.  According to Bureau of Justice statistics, at over 2.5 million, the United States has more people in prison than any other country, the vast majority of them African-American males.  Across the nation police departments are militarizing. 

The job market sucks.  Kids can’t leave home because they can’t support themselves.  If they’ve gone to college chances are their debt load is colossal.  It is not rare these days for a college graduate to emerge into the “real world” saddled with fifty or a hundred thousand dollars in debt.  This was unimaginable 20 years ago.

In short, this country has got real problems and would do well to take a lesson from airline flight attendants.  When you lose cabin pressure, put on your own mask before worrying about others.

Thinking this way is called being a patriot.

But of course patriotism is a naïve stance.  Reality forever underlies it like the bones of an ancient graveyard.  The question of whether to go to war again in the Middle East is not only absurd, but a complete non-starter.  Of course we shouldn’t.  We’ve done enough damage.  If you accept the premise that what the citizens of the United States need is employment, education, health care, safety and at least a crack at living contented, peaceful even thriving existences, then prosecuting nonsensical wars is exactly the wrong thing to do. 

But of course that’s not what the war mongering is about.  It’s about oil, and the huge profits accrued and hoarded by comparatively few individuals incapable of caring or even seeing the suffering of people around them.

So yeah, all things considered, ISIS doesn’t matter.  It’s a ghastly organization, agreed.   But its existence is not any more ghastly that murdered children, a ruined environment, countless hopeless and suffering dispossessed, and all the other horrors that have come to exist in this country due to a wrong-headed government hijacked by the powerful interests of big gas and oil companies, hijacked, in the end, by greed.   

Catherine O’Sullivan, September 2014

On Being a Mother

My son’s getting on a plane back to Scandinavia where he goes to school.  He’s raring to go, his mind scrabbling for details.  Has he got everything? Passport, tickets, phone charger?  Jesus Christ, a 9 hour layover in fucking New Jersey, then an 11 hour flight to Stockholm.  L.A., Tucson, back to the wicked cold, and the bleak icy landscapes of Finland, a land so foreign most people forget it exists.

But he likes it there: his friends, his school.  At twenty-two he is not my baby anymore.  He is not anyone’s baby.  He is a young man, busting through his own skin daily and finding a brand new person.  His function in the world is becoming.

Mine is remembering.

I remember his birth, every moment of it.  I remember the light in the hospital room, the dyed hair of the crabby nurse reading the Book of Mormon, who became terrified when I asked her, just a conversational gambit, if she’d didn’t get a little worried about STD’s what with all the blood she had to deal with every day.  Maybe they do now but back in the early nineties, they didn’t routinely test expectant mothers for STD’s.  Not unless you asked.  I thought that was interesting and an interesting conversation was what I needed.  When you’re wracked with contractions, talking about the weather is not going to feed the bulldog.

I remember my husband on my left, always on my left, doing his best to help although really, what can a man do?  We’d been through this once before and he knew the woman on the bed wasn’t really me, or was me only spiritually, hormonally loaded for bear and anything else I could take down while trying to push a nearly nine pound baby boy through a hole that up to that point, had pretty much been used just for pleasure.

It was a long night.  There were ice chips, purgatorial tortures, rending of garments and oaths berating the gods then apologizing frantically for what I’d just said.  There was no doctor in the morning and the admonition, repeated over and over by various nurses, once I’d finally reached full dilation, not to push.  “You can’t,” they said.  “There’s no one here to catch the baby!”  I visualized a guy running in wearing full protective gear and a catcher’s mitt.  I tried, but not pushing after all that work was like asking a wave not to break on the shore.  Would my newborn emerge and crash headfirst onto the floor? Was it clean, was it soft?  Could someone at least put a pillow on the floor?

In the nick of time a frizzy haired MD—at least I think she was an MD; she could have been the janitor for all I knew-- swooped into the room, into latex gloves and the sleeves of her gown.  My child came into the world.

There was never any doubt that he would.  Throughout my entire young life I said I never wanted kids.  The world was covered in asphalt, Reagan wanted to start a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and bank tellers had become automated machines.  But one day about age 27 all that changed.  I was at a restaurant and found myself entranced by a beautiful infant on an adjacent table.  All swaddled in powder blue, snuggled into his carrier, a little trickle of drool running out one side of his mouth, I couldn’t take my eyes off him.  His parents finally moved him to another table.

And I knew.  I could no more not have kids than a salmon could not swim upstream to spawn.  My lifelong maternal instincts and twenty-something fecundity made a mockery of my philosophical objections.  Rene Descartes would have thrown me into a fire; my cogito ergoed nil.  I was a human animal and could no longer fool anyone anymore.

I had two boys nearly 4 years apart.

Someone once said we’re compelled by infants because of the innocence in their eyes.  It’s very short lived and once it’s gone you never see it again.  Experience assaults it.  In small ways at first, barely perceptibly.  A favorite toy dropped on the floor through the slats of a crib, the disappointment and rage at being unable to retrieve it.  The sharp, sleep deprived swear-word from a parent none-too-thrilled at having to change a diaper at 3 AM.  Then bigger sorrows add up, sibling rivalry, school, physical and emotional pain change the wide-eyed clear gaze into something else.  It has to.

Because along with innocence comes vulnerability and this is dangerous.  While we long to cherish it, children themselves are desperate to get rid of it.  My four year old, terrified of the garbage truck, used to run in hollering every time it appeared: this great fearsome thing churning up the dust in the alley, making a terrible racket as it flung the bins around like some kind of monster from outer space.  He’d be frantic and hide behind my legs.  This is a fond memory for me.  Not the being scared part, but his rock-hard conviction of extreme danger and my ability to protect him gave me such a feeling of purpose.   But for him it was a moment of exposure, fear, and while he would also come to understand the protective function of “mother,” as he grew into a young man the idea that he needed his mother’s protection would become anathema.

And so it goes.  The times when I felt so needed and useful, sitting up nights with illnesses, emergency room visits, first cars that crashed, first cigarettes taken away.  Or maybe things got heavy.  Drugs, heartbreak, tantrums and forgiveness, mistakes, parental humanity--perhaps the scariest thing of all-- crashing through.  As a mother all your hero moments are the moments in which your children were the most vulnerable.  They don’t want to remember that. They want what we all want: self-confidence, self-assurance, independence.

Sons, anyway.  Sons are like bear cubs, grown up and gone.  They go out into the world and mark their own territory.  They are loathe to remember a time you had to pull them out of the refuse bin they fell into on the side of the road, hell-bent on retrieving that chicken bone.  

Kids grow older, putting their pasts further and further behind them, and as the childish writing on the Mother’s Day cards changes color and the ceramic bowls and keepsakes they made in kindergarten crack and crumble.  As the color in the photographs fades and my confusion and loudly proclaimed objections to the intractability of time are heeded not at all, I wonder what the fuck happened.  Where did it go? What was it all for?  It did not make me money, bring me fame or reputation.  I am now much as I was before.  Just older, grayer, creakier.

The traffic is terrible at LAX.  It has been all the way down the 105.  At eleven at night there is no reason for it, but then this is L.A.  There never is.  My son’s duffle bag has all his worldly possessions and is wedged into the back seat along with a backpack containing a disassembled computer.  These equal all his worldly possessions.  The duffle always gets searched and it makes him mad; he’s got everything organized just so in there and they fuck it all up.  I try to tell him he might have better luck if his luggage wasn’t army green, but what do I know?

My son would like it better, I think, it would have saved a lot of trouble if he’d just hopped out of the passenger seat with a peck on the cheek, but I’m not having it.  I want a full standing up body hug.  I want to take his smell, his height, the feel of his whiskers, his slouch, his preternaturally focused bearing.  It’s a lot like his father’s, but friendlier, easier.  I want to take enough in to hold me until I see him again, an impossible task.

He rambles through the airport doors.  He’s thinking about Stockholm, Amsterdam.  All the places he’ll go and the people he’ll meet.

His world is becoming.  Mine is remembering.  Tears roll down my face all the way home.  The 105 West is clear.  The August air smells of car exhaust and heat.

Catherine O’Sullivan, August 2014