Friday, June 30, 2017

Poetic interlude #5

Body Language
Body Language

By Michael P Amram

A long while ago I met
the undertaker,
(I remember the grim face)
he escorted death
to its preparatory place

I met him going down
an elevator,
he looked astute—aware of
his ties to dead,
his casual connection to
bodies in bags that zipped,
fitting forms in
heel to vinyl head

he said nothing to me in words
letting dead eyes speak,
ignoring the lights above the
elevator doors,
most eyes' fixation to time
how long 'til they get
to where they'll be

By Michael P Amram

A long while ago I met
the undertaker,
(I remember the grim face)
he escorted death
to its preparatory place

I met him going down
an elevator,
he looked astute—aware of
his ties to dead,
his casual connection to
bodies in bags that zipped,
fitting forms in
heel to vinyl head

he said nothing to me in words
letting dead eyes speak,
ignoring the lights above the
elevator doors,
most eyes' fixation to time
how long 'til they get
to where they'll be

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Congenial-speak #31

Possession is some tense of the law

It is OUR money. We are backed by the pre-amble, the gentle and nonchalant segue into the constitution. Let me reiterate. It reads, in bold letters, WE THE PEOPLE, in order to form a more perfect union. . .blah, blah. Generation X may recall the words schoolhouse rock set to a catchy tune. Lincoln himself said in his address at Gettysburg, on a November day in 1863, that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from earth.” Government is US. Government is as collective, as epic in scope as—God. We make government and, in all fairness, it makes us. It secures us, makes our interstate highways, protects our borders with a nominal fence and negotiating humans, NOT a 40' wall. It does many things for US. We, the collective we, the constituents of a chosen few, have entrusted money to pay for services. Among these, fertile for farming out to third-party interests, is health-care.

Big ticket items

Ever since Lyndon Johnson proposed the medicare system in 1966, the American peoples' tax dollars have been taxed. They have paid for everything, regardless of intent, from police security to wars to inaugurations. Jimmy Carter cut the defense budget of his predecessor to roughly 120.3 billion. For 2018, the House and Senate Armed Services Committee proposes a $640 billion budget, a $37 billion increase from Trump's plan. Admittedly 2018 dollars will not fly as far as 1976 dollars, but who is at the spigot has something to do with getting the most mileage out of OUR money. To illustrate how disproportionate defense spending is to medical spending would explain a lot. Why such an unethical, inhumane, and cost defective bill is even being considered. Weighing the costs, to eyes not reflected in $s, will prove the cost EFFECTIVNESS of dumping more of OUR money into medical programs and skimping a bit on the military spending. Remember Trump's panty raid on Syria, the rhetorical tears shed for the children Assad killed? Just one of those 59 Tomohawk missiles cost $832,000. Gee, the price of a good ground/air war has gone up. In 1999 that same missile cost a mere $596,000. But there, for the grace of god go I, sitting in a hospital bed somewhere hacking into computers, on a ventilator, knowing I will die. In a year I will have run up a bill of $39,000, payable by medicare, Medical Assistance or Medicaid, liberal programs that are, in the truest sense of the word, of, by, and for the American people. These are not pithy prepositions in hyperbole. Remember Lincoln, the Republican who made the mold. His nation was divided. Ironically, Trump finds himself in the same situation (however, I really don't think he gives a damn, if he can even see someone else's reality).

Robbery

Trump has put the least tax money allowable though loopholes into the pot, the chamber vessel into which the ninety-eight percenters are exiled to piss. And each side celebrates little victories. Weeks ago, on the WH lawn, the two percenters with their president lauded their achievement of passing their bill through the House. Last night the 98 percent had reason to celebrate. After weeks of protests, jammed phone lines, open dialogue with senators, indivisible visibility, enough opposition to the worst, most malicious mandate ever in America was found. One by one Republicans rejected the bill. They could not, in good faith, vote for a bill that would cut 22 million Americans' (some of whom voted for Trump) access to health care. Yes! WE won, for now, for the summer break of the 115th congress. Our money talked. . . and talked on the senate floor. The guarantors WE entrusted to curate OUR money rolled out onto the capitol steps, voicing opposition to the evil bill deep into the night. They evoked the words of Edmund Burke, not being among those who did nothing so the evil would not triumph.

Throwing them a bone

Chew on the fringes of that travel ban. The SCOTUS, in the debut of Justice Gorsuch, handed Trump a defeat wrapped in a victory. Muslims with zero connection, no family, no job or school ties to the U.S. won't be allowed in—for a finite period of time, which will soon expire. The big orange man in the harbor said it, “. . . until we can find out what the hell is going on!” He set his Mickey Mouse watch. He tweeted about the multiple blockages. Muslims with families or jobs in the U.S. were the main focus of the crowds and pro-Bono lawyers at the airports. What unit of time is in a until we can find out what the hell is going on?

Nothing form nothing is nothing

I think the GOP is a fighter in the ring. They have been, since Lincoln, favored to win. In the eleven administrations since Ike six, including the current one, are Republican. The GOP, like a heavy-weight fighter, like the British in the American revolution, like the hare, is getting weary. It is now fighting itself to fight the Democrats and a much more Egalitarian vision of democracy. It is grand and old and moaning, weakly, soundlessly trumpeting like a battered elephant trying to remember why it is in the ring. Paul Ryan is the spineless man with his head up the elephant's ass trying to jog its memory, trying to hold together a party that's lost all touch with reality. All Trump has accomplished in his five and a half months as POTUS, as far as any significant legislation, would affect the budgets in western New York, his home state. He has nothing really to show for his time in office—all the more reason to barely grasp a complicated issue like health care and try to amend it by ramming a bill, sprinkling manure on it hoping a law will grow. And, it is, by all ways and means, a reason to rob America.

Thursday, June 22, 2017

Congenial-Speak #30

Angels in the Architecture


After a car accident left me with a chronic ataxia, I was moved from my public school to Michael Dowling School in Minneapolis. In 1971 it was for disabled children. I was on the road to recovering the ability to walk as well as I could, to talk as fast and clearly as possible. The car accident was early that winter. By the fall, after much therapy provided by physical therapists at the University of Minnesota, I remember sloppily chasing a walker. A short decline led into Dowling and gravity knew my pace. Besides formal PT, my dad walked with me almost daily that summer.

The other kids at Dowling, for the most part, did not have the path to ambulation that I did. I maintain, and have seen, that disability is natured as much as it is nurtured, most of the time. Some kids, one of whom I kept in touch with years later, walked with canes or crutches. They had cerebral palsy that handicapped them minimally. However, the kid who comes to mind today was laid up in a reclining wheelchair. From a childhood illness, as the story I was told went, he developed a very high fever. It was somewhere beyond the low 100s—the point at which a fever becomes fatal. At Dowling I recall him laying in his chair in my 3rd grade class. He could not speak and had a green band holding his head in place. One kid was in a tall wheelchair. He had a condition the obviously stunted his growth and left his bones very brittle. Those two examples were on the natured side of disability. Their futures were dependent on the limitations of their conditions. On the nurtured side was a kid who had the capacity for ambulation on wooden crutches. His cerebral palsy, in an independent environment, should have handicapped him minimally. I think of the people with much more handicapping cerebral palsy. Later in life I worked as a counselor at Camp Courage. I saw some of those classmates from Dowling. Some had changed, other were more handicapped either by nature or by nurture. Nonetheless, for most of those adult campers the odds were that some type of medical assistance was in their later years. Some had developmental disabilities, one was a quadriplegic we had to roll each night in his bed.

Regardless of their story, how they walked, what their futures could offer, what their financial needs now may be, the kids I went to school with in 1971 popped into my mind today. I came home today from dealing with trying to get medical assistance to supplement medicare coverage. The GOP is stirring things up and, even if it is in the end more bark than bite, talk of cuts to these programs is very unnerving. It makes dealing with insurance even harder when at any moment the rug might be pulled from under your feet. I come home and look on Facebook and see the disabled. I see what I imagine some of those kids from 1971 might look like after 46 years. I imagine the programs many of those classmates could have been destined to need one day to live. They descended on Mitch McConnell's office in a show of force, of protest from a group people like the majority leader expect to be quiet. A mix of anger and upsetting wove through my stomach as I scrolled, streamed and listened to the requests to save medicaid.

It is only a bill, shrouded in secrecy. Ironically, it does have the potential to be as destructive and at least somewhat as deadly as the Manhattan project. I really do not see it ever becoming the “law of the land.” I can think of a few reasons why a bill this atrocious was written. Fear factor: Trump love to scare up suckers to appease him, to kiss his ass and distort reality with him. Ego: He won't be out-presidented, least of all by the first black man to hold the office. After everyone from FDR has tried to revamp the national health care system, Obama succeeded. Distraction: Trump and his posse have seen the movie Wag the Dog too much. Notice how every bad idea out of this WH has, at the very least, the potential of clouding its predecessor. This one, though, the worst bill in history, is earmarked to throw some dirt on the growing fire that's implicating the president and his men in the Russia scandal.

Being petrified and not seeing were this could very easily go is very hard to ignore. Life's even more of a bitch when you could die because the rich wanted their tax cut, apparently the only Americans Trump was talking to when he pledged to make America great—again. In a very surprising way we were warned. All those pithy comparisons to Hitler and Mein Kampf bedtime reading have followed him. The mass deportations, and yes, I know Obama deported many. However he lacked the heartlessness of Trump and did not ignore policies designed to keep families together. And the disabled. . . I just watched the video clips and my mind went back to to horrors of 1930s Germany. If all these cuts take effect, see the light of day, it will be as cruel as democracy gets. In a stretch of time, imagination and politics, Ryan and McConnell are, at the end of their constituents' time, no better than Himmler and Mengele. What they propose to do is simple; deny life-saving assistance to care for disabled populations, to elderly who may have worked their whole lives, or to the grown versions of those kids from Dowling.

Thursday, June 15, 2017

Conggenial-speak #29

Bridge-gate trolls

Of course, taking up arms against anyone is never advised. However, I can't say I'm surprised. A disgruntled liberal, a Bernie man pushed to the edge, a man who, by all logic, should espouse tighter gun purchasing laws. I was a Bernie man. To me he is the real deal. He wants to break up the banks and does not let them favor him in the slightest way. But taking out law enforcers, makers, or Republicans stuck in 1840 is not the American way either. Did this true bleeding heart liberal accomplish anything? No, he stirred the pot, made the job harder for real liberals, sane Democrats who let democracy have a fair trial.

The money train

Data from the CDC indicates that, on the average day in America, 93 people are killed BY PEOPLE WITH guns. Yes, I feel the need to emphatically say this, to appease the second amendment stalwarts that retort guns don't kill people. Yesterday was not an average day. I'd wager that not one of those 93 people comes from the upper 2. The NRA has managed to turn the second amendment into a million dollar industry, a ruse that is indirectly enabling much more than the right to own a gun to protect kids from those kindergarten grizzly bears. The 146-year-old organization, curiously begun during an era of reconstruction, likely by sore losers of the Civil War, generated nearly $350 million in 2013. The NRA relies on membership dues, program fees and contributions. The majority of this money is used for a program newsletter, gun training programs and various forums for safety education. But, according to a CNN report on campaign finance, much of the contributing comes from everyday Americans. It is unlikely, though, that yesterday's GOP shooter was among them. (It is highly likely that, in 2011, congresswoman Gifford's assailant was a contributor.) The NRA, in its nepharious sanctimony, uses these contributions to keep pro-gun law makers in office, unless one of them gets killed. This ham-handed abrogation is on the rise and, as sure as I sip coffee from my “feel the bern” mug, shootings will continue to happen.

It is a killing field, a spree, a training of America. Or, since 1871, after war was fought to determine that unpaid humans could not be used as implements for industry, a re-training was deemed necessary. For decades following the industrial revolution 98 percent of the proceeds have been going into the pockets of the upper 2 percent, into salaries of CEOs, middle-men, third party transaction recipients, the Kochs and Wall Street bank. Little goes to people like the GOP shooter, an extreme example of the lower 98. People, I'll wager a few liberals even, contribute to the NRA. It is able to lobby, to advance their agenda which, in theory, is just Americans being who they always were. And its all fun until someone gets an eye out, or a congressman gets shot in the hip with massive internal damage. Jackson, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, TR, Truman, FDR, Kennedy, Ford, Reagan all were the targets of assassins. The nation morns, flags fly at half staff, Speakers of the House say unifying things like “an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us.” The gun will come up tomorrow. Average Americans, with no particular bone to pick with the government, will contribute to the NRA. They have little idea, or simply do not care, of the cycle of violence, racism, and recipe for a trigger snap like yesterday's shooting that they are enabling. They sleep safe with their guns, with a flag ready to lower to half staff. They are good loyal tax-paying Americans. The NRA takes the revenue and lobbys. Pro-gun lawmakers stay in seats, their agenda's fed, gun shows put more guns on the street (yes, even if that was never their indented destination) and law enforcers work to get them off the streets, sometimes getting shot in the process.

No journalist yesterday would say for sure that James Hodgkinson's politics had any thing to do with the shooting. It is obvious to me that it did. He hated Trump so much, he was sick of the months of town-halls at which many GOP congressmen stood to Trump's policy, gave lip service, or flat out refused to show up. Now, Hodgkinson was described as an otherwise peaceful law-biding person. When someone like that snaps, a Bernie Democrat, one of millions (of much younger people), none of whom certainly would ever use a weapon against a human being, it is quite disturbing. The extreme disgruntled partisan gap has been crossed. This guy was no Timothy McVie, and compounds in Idaho were nowhere in his sights.

Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Congenial-speak #28


Small World Limits

Marina is not around much. She floats around Tel Aviv. I see her on the beach playing Matko with some hairy Mediterranean types. The bar sells cheese toastys. The British snacks are melted Swiss and tomato between the toasties. I see her there in the evening when the beer is pouring with toes tapping to Elvis on 8-track. A lot of Brits are working in the hostel and around Israel. They are there, on work visas (or not) indefinitely. They do brick and construction work around town, finding work here that's unavailable in the U.K.

It would be nice to be able to stay at my leisure, to have the balance and physical capacity to be a Jack-Of-All-Trades. I'm not saying I would have stayed and bummed from job to job, meeting people like Marina, seeing new situations, challenging culture. Having the option to do so would be nice. In my story “The Cheeky Lad” from Finding me—and Them: Stories of Assimilation I write about traveling to a remote part of Scotland. The stories in the book show how I've stumbled, learned, gotten ahead, and been burned as a disabled person. When I went to the Egypt in 1989 I went to see my biological mother who was teaching English as a second language. I visited her in Alexandria and saw the lighthouse, one of the “7 wonders of the world.” I went to Siwa, an oasis village near the Libyan border. I came back with a severe case of culture shock and stayed inside at my mother's place nearly agoraphobic. Let's just say that, in my travels to very poor and rarefied Siwa, I had experienced humiliation and suspicion, resentment and ridicule that made getting stopped by the cops in Scotland look like a day at the beach. After days my mother finally got me to venture out again. I ended up in Tel Aviv.

I listen at night to the South Africans who bunk with me. They show me their passport and say how there are limits to where they can go in the world. Because of their government's system of apartheid they are banned from many desirable areas in the world. They have limitations also. I have been given a week's visa in Israel I suspect because of my name, my skin, maybe the way I walk. My other bunk mates are Polish and German. I speak German and am understood. Gunther goes running in the pouring rain, I sit at the bar and wait for the Messianic arrival of Marina. I can't take my mind off the Jersey girl, the fellow American who is good-looking and able to work odd jobs. She, Like the Brits, could find a job easily in Tel Aviv. She could, but tells me she has a gig back in Jersey. She's a woman, and that might be a limiting factor, although I doubt it comes into play much at the blue-collar level. I watch her sitting eating her cheese toasty, sipping at a frosty mug gently, like a liberated woman.
“Going into Jerusalem tomorrow?”
“No, a bunch of us a the hostel walk to the old city of Jaffa. There is kind of an open market their some mornings,” she tells me, all neat and assimilated.
I am the tourist for a day and book an all inclusive deal. I'll see all of Jerusalem, the Knesset, Western Wall, Yad Vashem and all the last places Jesus walked to become Christ. I'm timid, not as adventurous anymore.
“Did you want to come with us?”
“Well. . .oh damn. . .I already paid for the tour. It might be fun. I better go o that,” I say, nerdishly, thinking I'd have her by my side in Jaffa, or at least know her, a fellow American, if I got in too deep. I missed an opportunity for adventure. After being humiliated and shocked, looked at like the town drunk, threatened at gun point, I want to stay safe with an organized tour. The 8-track player is tracking early Beatles now. The Belgian is singing at the top of his lungs. He is on his eighth mug and unphased by inebriates.

Youth often have no permanent home. They're just hostile to the mundane. They were vagrants, living life by the drop. Out of packs their life hides and I gravitate to the mundane out of necessity brought on by difference of others to disability. An assumed insecurity manifests itself in odd, often self-destructive behaviors. It comes at the end of the tunnels, the causeways of bouncers, cops and constables. I envied Marina and the Brits, the South Africans, not so much (although their limitations finally went away). The trip was my last before buckling down and finding a job after graduation. Still, a part of me wanted to extend that learning curve and bum around the promised land. The individual I was demanded some normalcy, a restrained complacency, a admission of chains and tethers and cracked roach infested neighborhoods (see “A Gentler Place” in Finding me—and Them).

When I look back on that trip to the mid-east, long before it became a place I would not dare go, I think of what I learned. I think about what I saw in myself, why I was who I am, who I've become. I think of the Jersey girl and the pith with which one says “small world.” In 1989 I was twenty-four years of age. I had plenty of time to let the juice of the world and or Marina drip down my chin. Now, at the ripe age of fifty-two, I trace the instances, the cosmic progressions, of a few times in my life. Those which left impressions, memories, good and bad, thing I can be proud of and those that produced the basest humility one can endure. I muse on how I'd have emerged from them, the able-bodied me. It's an adroit spector always hovering, covering spaces, saving some faces in the dark recesses of my mind, somewhere, and probably had the best chance of cutting free, seeing the clearest picture of the non-disabled me in Jerusalem. It very well may have been there by my side, my altered-ego, at the Western Wall as I rocked with closed eyes in a cardboard yarmulke they hand out.

Friday, June 9, 2017

Congenial-speak #27

Check-mate


He did not tweet during the testimony. He let his lawyer retort as Comey outlined his odd behavior. The POTUS asked for loyalty from a man with a ten year term, too long in dogged terms to be peeking from scarves, from blindfolds to see how the job is done. June 8, 2017 the fourth POTUS to head for impeachment squirmed in his WH bunker. I picture Bannon and Prebis tossing Trump's phone in a game of keep-away. In the oval office it sails over his head, past the grandfather clock by the door which is actually an often mistaken Mike Pence. The VP does not intervene, likely thinking Trump's job soon will be his.

I visited the nation's capitol once. My take-away was that the closer one gets to the seat of government the less efficient things are, the more waiting time there will be for anything; to go to the theater, to get in the zoo, to. . . get rid of a POTUS. Unlike Nixon who agonized over how to best cover up Watergate, and then to cover up the attempts to cover up, all the while being crucified for grandstanding on a war, Trump took another approach. He simply let the cards fall as they pleased—his House of Cards—around his in Trump world. He admitted his motives (see Lester Holt) freely with not much of a pretense.

The rookie

Paul Ryan looks smarter than that. I always saw him valiantly striving for that coveted inclusion as an “adult in the room” in Liealot. So after the hearings he rushes to his boss's defense, claiming he was just new to D.C. and did not fully understand spacial relationships. Is this for real? The man is the president. To preside over anything implies a fundamental under standing of its workings, at the very least. Is the Speaker of the House really asking this tribunal to cut a NY businessman, who rose to the presidency of America by celebrity status, some slack. He wants everyone to ease off on the new guy who happens to have the awesome responsibility of placing thousands in life or death situations? I'd expect as much from that young robotic Hitler youth type Miller.

Hope for a slippery slope

The Chinese checker game just morphed. It became the chess game most presidents begin playing. I think yesterday was the check-mate move. All the king's horses, all his rooks and bishops are gone. His queen, Speaker Ryan, I'd say blew his credibility yesterday with the pathetic aforementioned defense. In a mixed metaphor, Trump dared to play ball in the biggest league of all with no bat. My hope is that the prosecution will be cumulative, that it will once again be “all the president's men” and Pence, Ryan, Bannon, Flynn—any one who conspired to aid in the culmination of obstruction of justice (or their own high crimes or misdemeanors) will crash and burn. I figure, at the rate molasses flows in D.C., a verdict will be reached around holiday time. Seeing all involved go to jail would be the best gift America ever received.

Sunday, June 4, 2017

Poetic interlude #4

Suing God

By Michael P. Amram


They shot their mouths off waving bibles,
flags and guns
They missed the money slot on the
run with them

They stayed to pray in pantomimes
and exist
sealed in a conservative world
swearing to
save every life that God created
with trickles
and pennies from heaven, with all that
prayer can do

when a child is born with disability
unable to work
or seek restitution from their
creator
and cuts find SSDI,
they're in frequent
churches to lead consciences to where
Christ's blood shed

They shot their knees off praying to
savor life
in theory every one matters by
things Jesus said

Saturday, June 3, 2017

Prosaic (Mosaic) Interlude #10

A National Trust

My name was used against me. I thought because of the Arab sound and my dark Minnesota tan, I only was given a week's visa in Israel. Everyone else on our bus from Egypt was given two or three. I did not really care. After a day's trip up the Sinai Peninsula with assorted American tourists, Brits and sweaty Egyptians in week-worn Galhebeas, stinky toe-jammed sandals, a week of another culture was all I wanted. I did feel targeted, although by then it was not such a infringement (see “The Cheeky Lad” in Finding me—and Them: Stories of Assimilation and my blog post of 5-15-17 “Shuffling Through London.”) In hindsight, targeting gets easier to ignore each time it happens. The question is, is it something reversible, something over which you have say or control. In this case I really did not. Objection may have been costly. City hall is hard to fight, and the Mid-East is not the place to learn how.

I arrive in a cab, in a torrential rain. In back of me, down glistening moonlit streets, shadowy sniffing mongrel dogs, I see the Mediterranean tossing white-capped giants, each one threatening to consume Tel Aviv. I'd come from where Moses had crossed, led these generations past into Canaan, where he saw the bush burn and emerged with his tabulations, his percipient calculations for an honest man. I give the cabby the last of my green currency and make his night. A matron welcomes me to a youth hostel's terrace. I swing my duffel bag down heavy, producing a thud that breaks through the pats of roofless rain.
“Welcome to the Tel Aviv Hostel. I show you to your bed.”
We start walking down the hall. I see green walls and a frosted door window. Around a small red table some guys drink beer and talk loudly in German. I have a working knowledge of the language, but this is fast and likely quite idiomatic. Elvis plays on a old faded 8-track player behind a well-lit bar tended by a burly Belgian who looks like a young Pavarotti. He sings, but not nearly as well. “From where do you come?”
“USA, Minnesota. Ever been there?”
“America, really.” She looks at me surprised, suspicious. “I thought you were from a South American country, Venezuela possibly.
“No, certainly not. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota,” I say, a bit insulted. “So how about you, where do you call home.”
“I was born here in Tel Aviv,” she says quickly, as a footnote to our conversation. The implication I take away is that my nationality is of major importance, a talking point. Her's is not. Just like it was to the Israeli border guards earlier today. “Here it is, four bunks to a room,” she measures as we poke our heads in a plywood room with a lone light bulb hung in the middle. The bunks are two to a wall. Each has about four feet between the upper and lower bunk. It is meager conditions and reminds me of a POW barrack. I can't expect much for one Shekel a night. I nod, unimpressed, throw my bags on an empty bunk, and go back to the little hostel bar. The Germans raise their beer mugs, signaling me to join them. I try to follow the German and quickly lose interest. I notice the red head at the adjoining table. She has her sandaled feet up on the next chair and shouts flirtatious words to the Belgian behind the bar.
“Man, who is that, she's beautiful.”
“That's Marina.”
“Where is she from?”
“New Jersey.”
“She got something going with the bartender?”
“He wishes.”
“So she's fair game for a fellow American?”
“I think she is hoping for something more exotic. . .and erotic,” they laugh, that loud gut-propelling German laugh.
“You think I'd have a shot with Marina?”
“You, you're just a boy. No, a woman like that would chew you up, spit you out, and build a better man.”
I am right out of college, 24, and ready to get down to business. This trip is like my last taste of the world before I sell my soul to corporate America.
“Yeah, you're right. Dumkopft, what was I thinking,” I say, smacking my forehead.
Marina smokes and looks sexy doing so. A little ash misses her ashtray and I follow them to the floor.
“Hi,” she says matter-of-factually.
“Hello. Enjoying your trip?”
“It's alright. How 'bout you.”
“Just got in,” I say like a cowboy, a drifter, a bad-ass cool loner who blows into town and blows out before the dust clouds let you know him. “Came up from the Red Sea area, Sharm El Sheikh. Did some diving, saw some chariot wheels.”
“Where are you from?” She asks me with no particular curiosity. She is warm with a playful happiness that makes me trust she won't question my name or my nationality. We are countrymen though, kindred patriots, and our world just got smaller. Well, mine did anyways.


A bed-ridden hacker is bound to cough

I woke up November 9, 2016 to see my visibly upset wife. I never shed a tear for Clinton's loss and its consequence. I was info...