The Black Revisits

The holidays are here again. I hate this time of year so much and I doubt that'll ever change. It's just the way I'm wired I guess. It's my old dark place. So dark I know it as The Black.

I've said it many times here on these pages that I just can't stand the expected and required happiness for a month over something that is basically a commercial enterprise. This year will be more of the same.

As a bonus, this time around we have a pandemic where everyone is either (hopefully) staying home and thinking about others or (for some) ignoring all warnings and having big family gatherings to share in the Covid-19. 

The railroad is keeping me exhausted and off balance which doesn't help. I'm working relentlessly as the virus and quarantines makes the rounds of the terminal 

It always manages to make me sad...sometimes more than others.

I struggle every year. I miss my sons. I miss sunny days. I don't laugh much and when I do, it feels like I'm faking. It catches me off guard...when I'm driving or almost asleep. Or a memory sets it off or a stray thought leads down the wrong road. I find myself listening to unhappy songs again...angry music or sad. Somehow it appeals to me when nights are so long and days are so dark.

I know that I will get over it and through it like I always do but someday...I hope it isn't so hard. 

And maybe when spring is somewhere near and 'the holidays' are behind once again, The Black will slink back into the places where it hides and leave me alone for a while so I can smile.

The Wizard (Part 3 - The Roller World Chronicles)

Roller World. It was going to be huge. Compared to our old place, it was slated to be a monster. Of course...it wasn't built yet.

It was to occupy a structure that was originally built as an indoor tennis club. 'Courtside' I believe was the name but I could be wrong. My first look in the door was a shock. The thing was gigantic. It was a clear-span steel building with room for 4 tennis courts. It had locker rooms, sauna, a lounge and pro shop in an addition on one end. I was suitably impressed. The outside shell is actually still there if anyone wants to see it but it's now a shopping/office building.

The ceiling was about 40 feet in the air at the peak and hung with noisy, glaring mercury-vapor lighting. Even though it had some kind of padding on the walls, it still echoed like a dry well. The acoustics would take on more significance later. 

There was a couple of other things as well that we didn't notice right away that became somewhat larger issues down the road...like the small fact that the steel roof and beams created their own weather. It actually rained indoors at times depending on the humidity. Not a big deal I guess if you're playing tennis but it matters a lot when you try to skate on a wet floor. It also didn't have air conditioning...at all. It was a screamer in there in the summertime and no amount of opening doors and running fans mattered one thin damn. Likewise, the heating system was built to take the chill off...not to actually heat the big barn. If you tried to warm it up enough to take the frost off the floor in winter, it pretty much ate up the fuel bill for the month in a couple of days. Turning on the heat was a very big deal to the owners and they only allowed it sparingly, hoping that enough warm bodies would come in the door so you at least couldn't see your breath.

It also came equipped with the green all-season carpet in the playing area. That carpet was to become my enemy in short order. Since the owners were basically broke and doing everything on the cheap, they never pulled up the old flooring. Too expensive and too much labor. Instead, they had us rink-rats cutting it out in strips wherever there was going to be a block partition that needed to anchor to the concrete pad underneath. And there were a lot of partitions. The wall around the floor was 600 feet long by itself. There would be more walls for the snack bar, skate concession, ticket counter, office space, restrooms, a workshop and oh yes...the whole perimeter of the building got a concrete block interior liner. There was miles of it.

The construction guys would lay out the cuts and we would start in with utility knives and scrapers. That soon turned into crowbars, chisels and electric jackhammers because the stuff was glued down for all eternity. We worked for weeks getting that crap peeled off. The masons were breathing down our neck all the time to stay ahead of them. Our knees wore out and my hands bled more than once before it was done. I thought I'd left that kind of work on the farm...nope.

The block and brick guys were relentless. Soon there were partition walls and doors all over the place. The snack bar area border was a low brick divider and was supposed to have Bluestone cap to finish it off. Trouble was, nobody could afford to ship the stuff from Pennsylvania. My boss allowed as how I might be able to haul it with my pickup and a trailer as a favor. Who knew what 2 inch stone blocks might weigh?

Being an idiot and young, the challenge was accepted and off I went with a U-Haul trailer behind a half-ton '74 Dodge. The rental place guys would probably have had apoplexy if they had known what I was planning to put on their trailer, to say nothing of the bumper mounted trailer ball that had to hold it all. The yard men at the quarry looked pretty skeptical at the prospect of actually moving the amount on the order with what I had but they loaded me up with all of it and I headed for home. I'll never know how many tons overweight I was but with squishy tires and a very, very hot 318, I made it back. My automatic transmission was never the same and died a slow, painful death after that little misadventure. They paid for my gas but the tranny was a loss I had to eat out of my skate guard money. 

Then one day, a new crew showed up with deep south accents and nail guns. Soon after them arrived flatbed trailers loaded with pallet after pallet after bundle of wood. A whole lumber yard parked in the driveway and started unloading. The floor had arrived. 20,000 square feet of Hardrock Maple over a double layer of interwoven 3/4 inch plywood for the main skating surface. Another few thousand for the smaller secondary floor that was supposed to be the dance club. (more on that later too)

At least on this, the owners didn't cheap out. The main floor was 100 X 200 feet of floating surface in a fan pattern that took about a week to put down. The installers walked and crawled and pounded and nailed all day and into the night under those awful merc-vapor lamps till it was done. Then another crew came in and sanded it for days. Finally, it all got a couple coats of urethane over the perfect red figure lines and circles. It was gorgeous.

I might have been the first one to roll on that floor. It was so smooth it didn't even feel like I was touching the ground. The hours spent getting ready seemed worth it.

Meanwhile, things got nearer to opening night. Snack bar equipment came in, the restroom plumbing finally worked, the wooden interior doors were all varnished and hung, carpet went up on the walls (significantly, not on the floor), rental skate shelves got built. A thousand things to get ready. It was interesting that the money ran out before there was any attempt to carpet the off-skate areas. From the first day to the last, we had green tennis court flooring complete with lines everywhere there wasn't wood. There was almost no special lighting so we opened under those same vapor lights that took 5 minutes to warm up after you hit the switch. I think the meter actually whined like a jet when you turned those things on. They only turned on enough of them to see by so the money didn't hemorrhage quite so fast to NYSEG. 

The new world was a weird combination of cheap and top shelf. The counters were just plywood with carpet stuck on them. Changing benches the same. The snack bar tables and seating was used stuff from a fast-food joint that replaced them with new. The sound system came from the old place when we shut down to make the move and was vastly, awfully insufficient for a room 3 times the size it was designed for. Even with added speakers, it was pathetic. Remember those acoustics? The skate wheels could drown out the music on a good night.

On the other hand, the floor was top notch. The walls were built to hold up till Armageddon and the restrooms could be cleaned with a fire hose if necessary. And it was BIG!

There was room for all the rentals, a separate shop to work on them, office space, a real ticket booth, two DJ booths, a snack bar that you could actually work in, lockers by the hundreds and so much skate floor you could get lost on it. We thought we were really big time because we had turnstiles at the entrances. 

We made the move over a few days. I hauled hundreds of pairs of rental skates in cardboard boxes on the flatbed of that same exhausted Dodge pickup. On one trip, I lost some off the back going down Judd Falls Road and for a few minutes, there was a chaos of runaway roller skates zooming down the road, a pack of kids in hot pursuit and confused drivers probably wondering just what the hell they were looking at. It took quite a while to round up all the strays and pair them up again.

But at last, Roller World opened. I don't actually have a clear memory of opening night. I know it was packed but there were so many nights to follow, they all kind of ran together. There was so much story ahead.

It was the end of Skate City though and I never saw the inside of it again before they finally tore it down years later to make room for a drug store. I was sad to see it go especially because by then, Roller World was gone too in an assortment of awful decisions, bad press, poor management and more shady financial and personal issues among the operators than I care to ever know about. 

But the adventure was still more ahead than behind when we opened up on Triphammer Road that first night. I hadn't yet met the hundreds of people who influenced how I skate even still. I hadn't seen the rinks I'd go to from Orlando to Ottawa. 

Roller World was another door and you know the Wizard was going through it.

The Wizard (Part 2)

Back to Skate City...

The '80's rolled along and skating and I went with it. Some strange new things came along with all the prosperity at our little rink...the need for an off-duty deputy to keep the peace was one. There was an armed, uniformed officer working every Friday and Saturday night to quell the parking lot fights, kick out or keep out the drunk teenagers and be a presence...just in case. They had their hands full some nights since we were open from 7 till 1 am and that's a lot of time for stuff to happen in the restrooms and behind the building. There was a cemetery right next to the parking lot that they had to keep an eye on too. A whole bunch of cheap beer got slugged down among the tombstones on a detour from the cars to the admission window. We had to go rescue one of our patrons one night when he had a couple too many, leaned on a headstone, knocked it over and pinned both arms under about a thousand pounds of marble. It kept the security guys busy and amused.

Something else new was a urethane floor coating that finally (sort of) got rid of the rosin dust. We put it down one summer and did it all wrong. Who knew anything? Everybody was giddy from the fumes and we ran out before we got it all coated. The owners tried to stretch it as much as possible so it went on thin and streaky. It peeled almost immediately and made for some treacherous corners but at least it wasn't bare wood.

At some point we also acquired a new DJ who wound up with the name Dangerous Dan. He was open to more kinds of music than Flash but had a tendency to play what he liked instead of what we could skate to. A couple of local AM radio jocks played there occasionally as well...Charlie, Joel...last names escape me but they brought their own stacks of 45's and we learned. Somebody heard that you could mix songs together and make new ones if you had two turntables (which we just happened to have) so suddenly we had twenty minute versions of 'Rappers Delight' stitched into 'Good Times' and 'Another One Bites The Dust'. It was probably awful but we were the rankest of amateurs working on a mixer board with rotary pots and a crossfader that nobody knew how to use. We loved it.

Private parties became a thing that we did on weeknights. They ran the gamut from church groups to frat parties.
The former were some of the biggest nights we had bar none. They could pack the place and at the very least tended not to destroy the bathrooms.
One of the latter comes to mind when a Cornell science department showed up with a cooler full of lab-made 200 proof alcohol. We didn't know about it until after the first broken wrist and the total redecoration of the restrooms. It was bad...very bad.

There were open session Christmas parties, Halloween parties, you name it. 

The joint was jumping. I worked sometimes from 1pm till 3am. Skate guard a matinee, clean the place in between and then open back up for the night session. Clean it up as best we could after we closed at 1 and then, more often than not, go hit Sambo's Restaurant (how politically incorrect is that name now?) for all-you-could-eat fried shrimp and fries. It was a wonderful, awful time.

I kept learning new stuff on skates from wherever I could pick it up. Out-of-town skaters started showing up now and again with their own crazy moves and steps. Packs of kids from Pennsylvania showed what shuffling in a pack looked like. We had a few freestylers and artistic types and they were pretty amazing to watch but the formality of it never really caught my interest that much. 

I stole some of the jumps and turns but I was bound to be a true session skater even way back then. I tinkered with all kinds of weird wheels since I got them cheap on my employee discount. Gone were the impossibly hard 'All Americans' and 'Fomacs'. In their place there was a set of speed wheels, then a set of 'Roller Bones', even a short-lived set that actually looked like red softballs...interesting but pretty awful for edges. I've got boxes of old wheels in the garage still.

For all of it though, I really didn't know much about skating itself. I started seeing a couple of magazines about skaters instead of the trade rags from the RSROA and in them were pictures of huge rinks packed with people all over the country. Skating was big stuff and we didn't even realize it. Our horizons were getting a lot broader than the little place on Judd Falls Road.

I can't remember when we did it or where we went but at some point, a bunch of us loaded into some very iffy vehicles and went to another rink. Syracuse or Binghamton is likely because it wasn't that far but suddenly there was a lot more out there. Rinks were all over the place and we traveled whenever we could. 

Everywhere I went, I picked up a little more...another move or another song and kept on learning. 

By now, farming was pretty much gone and I worked almost full time at Skate City. I spent days rehabilitating wrecked rental skates that should have been retired years ago. There was endless, hopeless cleaning to do. The restrooms were a catastrophe almost every night. The rug soon got torn and the owners wouldn't replace it. There was a lot of buzzing about the same owners and very young girls after the sessions. A story went around about one of them looking down the barrel of a revolver held by a very irate father. The holes in in the endeavor were starting to show through in more places than the carpet.

But threadbare as it was becoming, I was still there. Wizard was my sort-of official name because well...everybody had to have one. Then one day, another rumor became a fact...we were moving. The same less-than-reputable operators had decided to quit leasing the building (or the owners threw them out...never knew for sure) and buy a place across town.

Now my time was divided between helping to get the new place ready and running the old one in the interim. The saga of Roller World was underway. That's the next chapter...

The Hope Tree

 Once upon a time, I planted an oak tree. I read somewhere that "He who plants a tree plants hope" and I desperately needed a little hope.

It was a tough time back then and dark. My marriage of over 20 years was slowly and painfully falling apart. My kids were growing up and moving on with college and lives of their own. But I read that line...I don't even remember where, and somehow it rang a bell.

Fairly often, I used to walk up on the hill behind my house to clear my head and calm my shaky self when I wasn't working. Home was a place full of turmoil so sometimes I'd just walk. I remember thinking at times that the house itself must have been evil because so much bad had happened there. So I'd walk.

I can't remember how or why but one day while I was trudging along, I spotted a tiny little oak twig with just two leaves on it poking out of the brush along the road. It looked so fragile and small but there it was...two green leaves on a six inch stick holding it's own against the thorns, goldenrod and burdocks. In some crazy part of my mind, I thought it looked defiant. In a leap that I still can't explain, it looked like hope.

So I went home, got a garden spade and carefully dug the little guy up. I didn't know what to do with it but after walking around the yard puzzling for a while, I picked a spot sort of in the middle of the vast, unused expanse of grass in the front and dug a tiny hole to plant it. It looked completely lost and alone out there, far from the spot where some squirrel had probably buried an acorn and its almost transparent leaves first caught the sunshine. But I pulled some of the crabgrass away from it, put a ribbon on a stick next to it so I wouldn't accidentally run over it with the lawn mower and crossed my fingers.

At that moment, it became my Hope Tree.

I really didn't think it would make it I suppose. I didn't do much except mow around it and pull the weeds that tried to choke it out. A winter passed and to my surprise, that little stick put out four leaves. The rabbits or a deer ate a couple of them and I thought that was it but by summertime, there were a couple more.

Winters and summers came and went. I walked up on the hill less and rode bicycles more. The Tour became a thing and kept me occupied enough to keep moving through some bad times. I didn't think about hope much.

I'd mow the grass around my twig and water it once in a while when summers got dry. Sometimes I'd just walk out there and check on it...shoo the Japanese beetles off and see how it was doing. Four leaves became a dozen and I no longer needed the ribbon to see where it was when I cut the grass. To my delight every spring, what looked like a dead stick stuck in the ground would pop out some buds and turn green again. I never so much as put a fence around it to keep the bunnies and deer away from it but there it was...still defiant.

So now, all these years later, the little tree is almost what could be called a sapling. It put down roots and true to its kind, keeps growing slowly but steadily. It's holding it's own among a bunch of other trees we've planted since. Someday, there will be a grove of companions...maples, other oaks, hopefully a sycamore or two, some birch and a few black walnuts that the squirrels keep planting for me.

But that one feisty little oak in the middle will be my Hope Tree always. Without knowing why or how, it filled one small empty place in my life when the whole world was black.

My favorite twig has gotten to be a couple of feet tall now. I think the runt of the litter is here to stay for well and all and that makes me happy. I know I will never see it reach its fullest size but I hope someday to walk in its shade and look up at it instead of down. I can picture it in my mind, grown to a tower with a vast crown of leaves and branches, full of birds and giddy squirrels, spreading out huge and giving life to that empty useless lawn. 

Once upon a time I planted an oak tree. It became a symbol of so many things to me...hanging on when I thought I couldn't, watching for a new start every season when everything looked finished, seeing something green again when the black was everywhere. 

And I want my kids to know I did that and why. I began something that will live long after I've gone. It won't live forever anymore than I will but it'll be a memory of something I did for many, many years. From something so small, came something so big. 

Life, memories and a little bit of the future.

It is a Hope Tree after all. 

The Lengths That I'll Go To

This is a long one. The first part came across my newsfeed and immediately got  likes and more forwards. I started to respond but it got lengthy so it ended up here. I broke it down into it's various rants and then worked on it some more after that. 

It's actually been good for me to think about. People are worried, scared and unsure what to do. It's a confusing mess we're living through...and unfortunately some of us are dying through. It pays to look at some of the awful stuff out there, tear it up and keep moving ahead. 

So here's the post...

Italics in parenthesis are mine-

THIS!!! YESSSS!!! (NOOOO)

Anyone who thinks social distancing is a good idea for the next few years, or thinks that a 'benevolent' dictatorship is for the good of humanity, just unfriend me now because I won't be giving that point of view and (sic) energy. (I'm not your friend so yeah...)

I am a free Sovereign Human Being and if you want to stay home, stay home. That's your sovereign right to choose. (see definition of sovereign below)

If you want to wear a mask, wear a mask. That's your sovereign right to choose. (hey, thanks for letting me know it's ok to wear it)

If you want to avoid large crowds, avoid large crowds. That's your sovereign right to choose. (ditto...but yep, I'm on it)

I am not required to descend into poverty for you. (nobody even asked, much less required...focus) 

I am not required to abstain from human contact for you. (strange...I'm not abstaining...just being smarter about it. You need to work on that)

I am not required to shop alone, without my friends and family, for you. (nope not for me. But maybe for them)

I refuse to participate in "quarantine life" until there's an unsafe, untested vaccine released in eighteen months. (again, nobody said you have to quarantine unless you're tested positive...stop using snarl words)

I refuse to receive said vaccine to make others feel more safe. (that's just silly. It won't make me feel more safe, it'll keep you breathing)

That IS my sovereign right to choose!!! (all caps and 3 exclamation points prove it)

If you're convinced the vaccine is safe and effective, you can get it. (oh believe me, I will)

Some of you are allowing fear and policies devoid of scientifically accurate data to destroy our country and ruin your life. (pot, meet kettle)

I can't control your self-destructive behaviors, but we all have a say in the once great USA and the planet we live on. (well, I guess...but I thought we had 'sovereign' choice to do as many stupid things as we want? Now you want to control them? Help me here...)

We need to tell legislators that we demand options. (that's worked so well up till now...I demanded a tax cut and they gave it to Jeff Bezos)

We have a constitutional right to take risks. Life is full of bacteria and viruses--many of which spread before symptoms manifest and after they subside. (um...ok what? We went from Constitutional rights to biology and virology in two sentences. I wish I was that good...)

We have a Sovereign right to receive OR refuse vaccines. (That's the third mention of vaccines. Trend? But I've had mine that are available, you can sign up for your tetanus, measles, polio, rubella etc. here...)

The data was inaccurate at best; purposely overblown to justify government overreach at worst. (to which data are we referring? Vaccine data perhaps? All of it was wrong except the data you got from Twitter, late night AM radio and medical authorities like...the president?)

Stop allowing the government to destroy: (the laundry list of conspiracy talking points)
The Food Supply
Small Businesses
Medical Autonomy
Access to Healthcare
Religious Gatherings
Privacy Rights
Fellowship
Our Mental Health
Our Freedom (yep, show up at the capitol with confederate flags, MAGA hats, body armor and rifles...that's how you get things done around here)

When the "new normal" is filled with starvation, depression, suicide, child abuse, domestic violence, imprisonment, governmental spying, and pure DESPERATION, the virus is going to look preferable to the world you helped facilitate. (see response below)

I'm going to turn this around on people from now on. Those that say I'm (or anyone that supports the mission (Mission from who? Wait...let me guess...) to get us back open) putting money over lives wanting the country back open for business...
Hear this: (this oughta be good...)

-YOU don't care about the people that will kill themselves out of hopelessness (you don't get to lecture me about that Zippy)

-YOU don't care about small businesses that'll close their doors (THEIR LIVELYHOOD (sic))permanently (I'm doing everything I can to support them. Try it sometime.)

-YOU don't care about the children/women/men that'll be victims of domestic abuse (that will be or are? Where have you been all these years?)

-YOU don't care about people defaulting on their mortgages (mortgages are mostly deferred for now. Keep up)

-YOU don't care about bills going unpaid by families with ZERO income right now (yeah, the check isn't enough and unemployment is deadly slow...guess all you sovereigns are getting ready to pony up and help out though huh?) 

-YOU don't care about people wondering where their next meal will come from (I'll feed you if you need it)

-YOU don't care about the people that'll lose their sobriety and slip back into addiction (that's a whole different ballgame. You don't get to call that one either)

-YOU don't care about the people that will starve (see above)

-YOU support the inevitable looting that'll take place (you need to stop listening to InfoWars)

-YOU don't care about anyone that's murdered the longer this shut down goes on (and you cared before the pandemic or just now?)

-YOU don't care about people's mental health (not my field but I am worried about yours)

-YOU don't care about the children that DO need teachers and educators to guide & educate them (they do, they are, it's hard but everyone is doing the best they can)

YOU don't care about the economy crashing down around us (ahhh, the 'mission' again)

-YOU REALLY DON'T CARE. (see below)

-YOU love your shackles (funny...you say shackled, I say bound to others)

-YOU are pathetic, begging your leaders for MORE shut down and MORE regulations (now you're just being ridiculous...ridiculous-er...is that possible?)

I will NOT tolerate another person telling me that I don't care about lives. (pretty quick on the draw to tell me I don't care though aren't ya?)

I care about the situation in its entirety. (Awesome...I wish you'd be much more quietly heroic about it...but that's probably asking too much...sort of like actually doing something)

But YOU don't care about any of that so...(there you go, you've seen right through me...)

YOU stay home. (check...but I thought it was my 'sovereign' right, not a sign of fear. I'm confused...)

YOU wear a mask. (check...so only you get to be 'sovereign' in making choices again? What?)

YOU live in fear. (no...not today)

Authored by a group, those of us WHO GENUINELY CARE about HUMANITY. (who care so much they're afraid to sign it too...)

Please - Copy and paste if you agree! (not an ice cube's chance in hell)

_______________________________________________

I'm so over this stuff...

Let's just start here:

'Sovereign citizen/human being'

"This category of litigant shares one other critical characteristic: they will only honour state, regulatory, contract, family, fiduciary, equitable, and criminal obligations if they feel like it. And typically, they don’t."

—Assoc. Chief Justice J.D. Rooke, Alberta, Canada, in the case Meads v. Meads

By definition, 'Sovereign' indicates belief in a position superior to others which instantly disqualifies the anonymous author(s) from meaningful discussion with the rest of us...proven effectively by this rant and dog whistle showpiece. 

Speaking of..."allowing fear and policies devoid of scientifically accurate data to destroy our country and ruin your life."...sheesh! The anti-vax is strong in this one. 

(Side note: I'm not sure which Amendment gives us the right to take risks with viruses but again...facts are a little thin here..)

I submit that this 'new normal' they're afraid of is pretty much like the old normal if you care to look outside the bunker..."filled with starvation, depression, suicide, child abuse, domestic violence, imprisonment, governmental spying, and pure DESPERATION" Where have they been? 

Hell, that was a goodly chunk of the world for most of the last...oh century or so and it seemed like nobody noticed until they couldn't get toilet paper and a haircut. I guess the pandemic didn't really change much after all...

The point is, despite the assertions above...I'm not afraid. I'm aware and that's a different thing from afraid. That means I don't do whatever-the-hell I feel like because I don't know the answers. It means I don't pay heed or make decisions based on overblown passive-aggressive nonsense from the internet. It means staying cautious but also staying in the world. It means not saying screw the rest of you because we don't agree. Yes, our leaders are failing us on an epic scale and that truly worries me but I'm not afraid that tomorrow will be 'Fury Road' because of it.

The only thing I do fear is ignorance. Ignorance by a willful disregard for science, medicine, any type of verifiable facts, law and history. I damn sure don't know everything but I know what makes logical sense. This doesn't.

And I also do happen to care...a lot...in spite of being the all-caps YOU the post is so determined to denigrate. Otherwise I wouldn't bother to waste one second on this...much less the time I've spent writing a response.

Only someone completely out of touch with reality would rattle off that list of 'YOU don't cares' unless you have a wildly different variety of friends than I do. That crap is just idiotic if you're talking about damn near everyone I've ever met in 60 years. Maybe you should get out more...meet some new people...someone who doesn't always agree with you...just a thought.

Here's a surprise...none of us is in this alone no matter how much you blow smoke in your own face. In my view, we're supposed to be E Pluribus Unum...not unaccountable 'sovereigns', not every man for himself. You wail of overreach but if the horror of wearing a mask in public to possibly protect others is my 'shackles' then so be it. 

I'm also weary of being referred to as 'pathetic' by those behind keyboards. I won't hide under the bed waiting for the apocalypse to validate your fear. I don't need your sympathy but thanks for offering.

So I guess if caring about others and doing what I can to help them excludes me from the sovereign club, I'd rather that than be a self-centered, mean-spirited ego maniac with delusions of relevance.

To the 'Sovereign Human Being'...whoever you are...don't do us any favors. We'll get along ok. Spare us your righteous indignation. It's just weird. You are angry and ugly when the world needs no more of either. 

While you're at it, kindly quit presuming to tell me how I think or how I feel or what I know. It only makes you look foolish. Go forth...believe what you want, choose to do what you want because you can but please, please leave the rest of us alone.

We've got this...

Ah...The President

My friends...this started as a Facebook post but kept getting longer so I moved it. This will be my last pre-election post so from here on out...it's up to history and I hope with all my heart that my fears are groundless. 

This is firmly anti-Trump so if you're going to get mad and call me names, I suggest you depart before going any further. Save your indignation...I've heard it all already. We can agree to disagree but my newsfeed runneth over and I need to respond. It needs to be said.

I know that a frightening number of people are all-in with the way this president is running the show and are pretty vocal about it. That's ok but I reserve the right to respond. There's an old line that reads 'Silence is Complicity.' 

I may be more silent than I should be but I've never been very good at complicity so I'm going to say my say.

And let me remind you that it's your privilege to back whomever you wish and your reasons for doing so are yours. That's the real American way unless that's become 'socialist' too. I also understand it's unlikely that anything I can say will change your outlook (although I can hope). It's gotten to the point that all we're doing is yelling at each other and nobody is listening anyway. But here's the thing...I truly do not understand anyone's dedication to this man.

I've been around a long time and remember hearing about Trump way back when he was just another tabloid headline under the 'Alien Landings Reported In New Jersey' breaking story...long before he came on the national scene. Before he ever made it to what is now referred to derisively as 'The Mainstream Media' or for the more outspoken...'Fake News' and 'Enemy of the People'. 

In a checkout-line kind of way I watched him bounce from wife to wife to scandal to birther to TV personality. He's always been what he still is. You may only believe your chosen outlet but what he is has been there from the beginning. He relished that tabloid life of unfaithfulness to his wives, the headlines of his financial failures, interviews full of patently horrifying opinions...until it suited the narrative for all that to be conveniently untrue.

It's all recorded. All the history, all the interviews, even the video of him doing things and saying things he and his followers now deny ever happened. You may think that everything is 'Deep State' unless it agrees with your guy but it's not. It just plain isn't. Fox can spin it and edit it and shout it down but one thing about our world these days...almost everything is recorded and stored in raw form if you care to look for it. 

Then I saw the hate in his eyes when he got roasted at the White House Correspondent's Dinner...a dinner he was only attending because it validated his self-esteem as one of the cool kids. I've watched that hate bear fruit in the undoing of every possible Obama program that he can get his hands on. His absolute, all encompassing need for revenge has consumed an administration. It has wasted time, lives, treasure, trust, respect and worse...any sense that we are a people together. And somehow...a whole swath of America got caught up in it. Somehow...they became him.

I cannot fathom it. We're supposed to be better than this. I'm not talking about just the politics. I'm talking about Trumps utter lack of human empathy, concern or regard for anyone not him. I won't even recite yet again the list. 

The Covid-19 pandemic and the suddenly-regular-news briefings that were neither news nor brief only reinforced what I already knew. He just can't manage to stop talking about himself. Even with his constituency getting sicker by the day and dying by the thousands...231,000 gone at the last edit of this writing...he can't make it about anyone but himself. He takes the stage at rallies for hours and spouts ridiculous self-praise, unseemly attacks on (insert name of current target here) and dangerously foolish medical advice so fast that it makes my head spin. He's not being 'sarcastic'...he's just lying and making up nonsense out of thin air. Spouting QAnon conspiracy and tweeting and re-tweeting fabrications that are verifiably untrue then saying he's "just throwing it out there" is un-Presidential at best...immoral and dangerous at worst. If none of this bothers you or you laugh it off or worse...cheer him on and truly believe the absurdity...we've really lost ourselves.

What I truly can't get by is why so many otherwise decent and intelligent people continue to give him a pass to be a catastrophic failure as a human being. Why don't you demand more of him? Why does he own your loyalty so cheaply? What do you see in him that resonates in your world? Why is a MAGA hat more meaningful than a soul? 

You're not stupid. You know what he is. You know what he says. Apparently you don't care.

I care. He lies...continuously. He lies so much he's lying about the lies. A fact-checking industry has sprung up around his administration. Added to that...he is vindictive...what else could you call it? He is manipulative, functionally illiterate, childish, unprofessional, proudly uneducated, abusive, greedy, narcissistic, smilingly racist, intolerant, narrow minded, frightened by everything...and on and on. He's a terrible example of pretty much everything but particularly the presidency. He's a petty tyrant who got his hands on power and isn't about to let it go. He is using his authority to get richer at our expense. He's made the office of President into a cheap, glitzy, phony TV series. The man has denied responsibility for every failure of his administration and claimed personal credit for everything he calls a win. 

He's what I would hold up to my kids and say, "Don't ever be that."

And yet...he has a following that approaches cult status. His base believes with the fervor of the faithful and will attack without restraint if they think someone has impugned their idol. It absolutely baffles me. His should be the voice of conciliation and reason, not accusation. And he's blowing it. Over and over again.

Even formal religions queue up to pile support on a man who is absolutely antithetical to everything they supposedly stand for. Remember tolerance? Mercy? Caring? Remember anything about love at all? It doesn't seem so. It's all gone in tax-exempt status and prosperity gospel.

For no one less than the ever-judging Evangelicals, he's the anti-abortion be-all and end-all. Regardless of the fact that he has no noticeable ethical standards that could be even remotely called Christian. They will break bread with Pilate and wash their hands in the same basin to get what they want. They auctioned their piety and sold their souls to a false idol as a means to an end. 

Wall Street is in love with him and corporations can't get enough of him. He's appointed industry insiders to regulate the industries they came from...my own included. His policies are drowning us in debt in total disregard for anything the Republican Party ever stood for while wiping out decades of work to improve the environment, our health, our workplaces and our retirements. But hey...the next quarter might be great so it's all good. For a depressingly large number of people.

How is this possible? The news is there and when so many different sources corroborate basically the same stories over and over again...you either have to accept that they're probably true or just ignore them all and have a Covid party. You can't ignore everything that you don't agree with and call yourself American. Just because Mr. Trump stands yet again in front of a helicopter or leans over the podium and calls it all fake doesn't mean it is. 

As he so frequently points out, he won the election. He owns the bully pulpit. The 'libbies', 'snowflakes' and 'cucks' are not currently in power. Trump and his allies are. The buck stops here. All references to what anyone else would/did do are therefore irrelevant, especially after four years...two of which were notable for Republican control of both houses of Congress and the White House. Don't tell me the left is just as bad...they aren't running the country. Don't tell me it was worse under Obama...it wasn't. 

Don't deflect. Don't tell me it's Trump being Trump. It's not locker room talk. Adolescent teenagers do locker room talk, not the head of the Executive Branch. Don't defend the indefensible. Since when does anyone have to "...say nice things." about the President to be eligible for disaster relief? Why is 'triggering the lefties' now a presidential imperative? He's supposed to represent those who didn't vote for him as well as his zealous followers. That's a part of the job. He's supposed to be an example to everyone...not only the faithful. And he's a failure at that too.

So much of what he says is just mean and inhuman and somehow, an awful lot of people developed a willingness to overlook and excuse his every awful example of what decent people are not. There's actually a pretty good article relating to this here.

I guess I'm just ranting because it seems that nothing he can do or say will sway the MAGA faithful. They will vote against their own self-interest yet again because he still isn't Hillary. He's isn't Obama. He's not Biden. He's become a mirror to so many. He's the echo box that says what they want to say without consequence. He's a champion of everything ugly and wrong and cheap and shady.

It's a sad fact that he's trying to win again one way or another. I'm horrified that there just might be enough support goose-stepping behind his fairy tales to overwhelm the Democrats...too many of whom are apt to once again wring their hands, wish for purity and vote 3rd party. Term 2 would be Term 1 on steroids. He's had four years and done nothing except undo the work of others and I have serious doubts that he'll go quietly even when his time is up. He's blown up every other shred of normalcy and stability...why not call it an emergency and just stay in power until it's solved...someday? 

Would that be ok with you too? How much is too much? When he denies you your right to vote after eight years, will that finally change your mind? When it's too late?

I wonder...Where is the line my friends? When has he gone too far? What does it take to say enough? Our kids will want to know.

The Wizard (Part 1)

Let's talk about roller skates. Not the ones with a brand new key that Melanie sang about...not the strange things with all the wheels lined up end to end either. I mean quads. Four wheels on each foot and one wheel on each corner.

I've spent what has to amount to years with those things laced to my feet. Of all things to last a lifetime...why skates? I was asking myself that the other day as Kellie and I kicked around which rink we wanted to hit on one of my rare Friday nights off.

I met Kellie at a skating rink by the way...just as information. 

We still like to go when we can and still hold hands like kids when the lights go down and a slow song comes on. But maybe I should start at the beginning...

The actual year is pretty hazy but it must have been sometime after '77 because I'm reasonably sure I was out of high school before I went skating for the first time. I don't remember how it came about that I got talked into going. I liked ice skating on frozen ponds when I was younger so maybe it was the idea of skating while not ending up as frozen as the water...I'm just not sure. I was working on the farm at the time and it's possible my girlfriend suggested it for something different to do...I really don't know. Somebody came up with the idea because it certainly wasn't on my radar at the time.

Regardless, I somehow I ended up at a little place on Judd Falls Road in Ithaca called 'Ides Skate City'. It was next door to a bowling center and owned by the same family that ran the lanes. Over the years, skating had faded from popularity though and for a while the building was used as a warehouse for equipment from a factory. At some point, a couple of guys (who I found to be very sketchy...more on that later) thought they could cash in on the booming skate craze, leased the building, cleaned out the junk and opened it back up as a rink.

As I remember it, the still-original floor had water damage ripples on the far end from a very leaky roof and it always developed puddles when it rained. There was no surface finish like they use now so they sprinkled powdered rosin over the bare wood to give it grip just like in the old days when both floors and wheels were hard-rock maple. The dust was incredible on a busy night.

The rental skates I took my first spin on were ancient and equipped with incredibly slippery wheels. The leather was crispy from a million sweaty feet and most of the laces had three or four extra knots that made it impossible to tie them right. They also had loose-ball bearings that occasionally fell out and scattered everywhere if the lock nuts backed off. Hitting one of those little BBs with super hard wheels was like instantly nailing your foot to the floor and a hail-mary nose-dive almost always ensued. 

I remember carpet covered plywood boxes for benches, carpeted walls, a tiny snack bar, skate rental counter, bare cinder block restrooms and a DJ booth all crammed in one end by the door. A few flashing lights and six speakers on the walls made it sort of disco-ish and there I was. Something must have clicked even as I was staggering along the wall holding on for dear life because it wasn't long and I was there an awful lot. 

The DJ most of the time was a guy called Flash. Mixing was still in the future so he just played random songs that he liked back to back and droned out the announcements in the same flat monotone used by almost every rink DJ I've ever heard right up to this day. 

"Clear the floor please. Clear the floor", "Couples only on the floor please. Couples only"...it's like a litany that never changes. 

He gravitated to country rock and oldies so I learned to keep my feet under me to 'Long Cool Woman In A Black Dress' by the Hollies and 'Can't You See' by Marshall Tucker. They did an all-oldies night once a week for the fifties and sixties lovers and Tuesdays was organ music on 45's that got a pretty good crowd of waltz and tango couples. They never had a live organist like some of the older, established places did but nobody seemed to mind. Flash gamely played it all and eventually lowered himself to take occasional requests if he was feeling mellow.

I soon found out that there was another rink job called 'Skate Guard'. Mostly it consisted of rolling around with a whistle in your teeth, scolding the tag-players and whip-crackers and helping the fallen back to their feet. I think it pretty much paid  in free admission and soggy pizza at the time.

That job belonged to another character known as Wild Bill. He was probably as old as my father and skated on ancient wheels under an ever-present cowboy hat. Everybody that worked there wore the same hideous orange bowling shirts (courtesy of the lanes across the parking lot) with the rink name in big letters on the back. Bill looked a little odd with a ten gallon hat perched over that shirt but he made up for it when he cut loose and really skated. He had the most incredible, very fast shuffle footwork when he got going and we loved to try to keep up and copy the steps. I think he might have been the one who first taught me how to go from wobbly forward to wobblier backwards. Once I figured it out though, there was no stopping. I never broke any bones during all that...but I sure did fall and hurt a lot. 

To this day, I don't know what the attraction was...but I was there. Saturday matinees, weekends, weekdays...didn't matter. And like anything else, if you do something often enough...you're bound to get better. I got so I could keep up with Wild Bill. Then I got faster.

Somewhere along the line, I decided I'd had enough of scuzzy rental skates and plunked down some cash for the first set of my own. Sure-Grip Super X plates and All American wheels, the cheapest Reidell boots there were, sealed bearings that didn't fly apart and away I went! I tinkered with different wheels. I found out how to tune the trucks the way I wanted. I was well and truly hooked.

Finally, the owners decided I was there all the time anyway so they might as well put me to use. I got an orange shirt, a whistle and no longer had to pay admission. I'd race through chores at the farm...shower, change and be there when the door unlocked. My girlfriend openly wondered what I'd gotten myself into...or more probably...what she'd gotten herself into.

This was the '80's remember and the skating boom was in full swing. Some Saturday nights the floor was so packed you could hardly move. We needed four or five skate guards on our tiny floor just to cover the crashes. We routinely ran flat out of rental skates and some people were using mismatched sizes made out of broken pairs just to get out there. The snack bar ran out of everything. Flash broke down and started playing better music under pain of after-session beatings if he didn't. 'Knock On Wood' brought on a stampede. 'Working Day and Night' was a train wreck waiting to happen if someone went down. 150 mostly out of control people at high velocity in a dark room could never get around that poor soul who lost his footing. The pile-ups were epic.

The off-skate area was shoulder to shoulder too so one unchecked-full-speed exit from the floor into the milling crowd looked and sounded a lot like the bowling alley next door. It was an absolute free for all and I loved it.

I wound up working there as much as I was farming. Skate-guarding morphed into after-session cleaning, working the snack bar and skate rental counter, selling tickets, fixing broken skates and covering the booth so Flash could get a break. I swept up the rosin dust, swamped out the disgusting restrooms, cooked a million hot dogs and became in all senses of the term...a rink rat.

One thing kept leading to another as time went along. I figured out how to build new skates from scratch so I became the resident 'pro' in what was hilariously called a pro shop. I got my hands on the turntables and records and that became yet another story. Music started to matter a lot more. 

I became a fixture. I would work the sessions and then come in early to skate some more (I had a door key by then). I can't even imagine how many miles I put on. I just kept on skating. I wore out set after set of wheels and bearings until I scrimped up enough for a whole new pair of skates. This time around they were Century plates with jump bars (I didn't know how to jump too well yet but the bars looked really cool and nobody else had them), a much nicer grade of boots and Fafnir speed bearings inside Powell-Peralta wheels that rolled like glass. It felt like I just got a new Corvette.

A whole pack of 'rats' developed out of nowhere at Skate City as well. Names and faces...some I can remember...some not. Some I still know...others long gone. They were the circle of friends I never had before. I finally had something...something I didn't even know I was missing.

And somewhere...sometime...someone started calling me Wizard. Whoever you are...wherever you ended up...I hope you know that it stuck.

Choices

You know that we could save everybody right? I mean...everybody. 

Every broken veteran that our endless wars have created; every struggling addict the opioid companies created; every cold, hungry, sick child and family that we've kicked out of the social safety net; every immigrant or asylum seeker at our borders that we've criminalized; every homeless, helpless soul who wanders among dumpsters because we closed the shelters; every senior who has to choose between medicine or food each week because they can't afford both...every single one of them.

(December 2020 Covid-19 update: And since this was first written, a pandemic has torn around the world. 300,000 Americans are dead. We couldn't have saved them all but we could have used our vast power, treasure, knowledge and skill to at least try. We could have saved so many but we chose not to. Thousands of people instead chose to argue over masks and closed bars and if it was even real. It became a political hot button and states that didn't vote the right way or say the right things got cut off. Hundreds of our 'leaders' decided it was expedient to ignore it outright and do nothing. We abandoned the sick and dying for poll percentage points and posturing. The powerful let them die. HB)

We are the richest, most powerful political construct the world has ever known and yet we choose not to be the most compassionate.

We choose not to. We have the money. We have the ability. We choose not to.

We have decided collectively if not individually to to leave the weakest and poorest to fend for themselves while a select few accumulate wealth that most of us cannot even comprehend. Consider...

There were 621 billionaires in the United States in 2019. The highest number ever. Can anyone honestly picture a billion dollars? That's one thousand times one million. $1,000 X $1,000,000. 

Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon is alone worth 13 of them. That is simply an unimaginable number.

He made 130,000 times more than I did last year. At a rate of approximately $3,715 per second. And he does it year after year. Don't get me wrong...there's nothing wrong with being successful...they worked at it or got really lucky or both but how much is enough? How many tax breaks does someone who cannot conceivably spend their income in a hundred lifetimes need? 

Even those like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who are allocating billions from their personal fortunes to charitable work, continue to accumulate wealth faster than they can constructively give it away. 

Individual wealth aside, remember that our own federal government took in $3.3 trillion dollars in tax revenue last year. $3,300,000,000,000. Another unimaginable amount. And 80% of it came from individual income taxes. Corporate taxes came in at a whopping, uninspiring 9% of the total. (CBS News data)

We allow at least 60 Fortune 500 companies in this country to skate by without paying a single cent in income taxes on $79 billion in profits. If they paid the 21% federal tax rate, they would owe $16.4 billion in taxes. Instead they received $4.3 billion in rebates. (Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy data)

And we're in debt. To the tune of $22 trillion dollars. (I can't even imagine what it is now. I cost a bundle to bail out corporate America...again) Those who could contribute the most contribute the least and those who need the most can't keep up.

We're in red ink at the highest level in history but we decided to spend $13 billion dollars on another aircraft carrier. We have 10 of them already. More than any other Navy in the world...but just to make sure...we better build another one. 

Think of it like this. If the companies that paid nothing paid only their share...no more...like most of us, it would buy the Navy's shiny new carrier and lo and behold...there's $13,000,000,000 just kicking around to actually help people who desperately need it.

Or consider this...54% of federal spending is spent for defense. $598.5 billion dollars. Twice what is spent by the entire rest of the planet. We have by far the most powerful professional military in human history...but we decided we needed a new branch..."Space Force"...just in case. And by the way...we still have enough nuclear weapons to mostly eradicate life on Earth should the occasion ever arise. Just like personal fortunes; how much is enough?

But back to helping people who need it. A depressing percentage of the population are convinced that the vulnerable are the enemy. The stereotypical view that people who need help are somehow lazy or choose to be in the predicament they're in or refuse to work or whatever...is not at all typical. Yes, there are people who abuse the systems...but by far the majority are not nor are they looking to have everything handed to them for life. They are not the cause of our financial woes. We are.

Immigrants are not the enemy either. We all came from somewhere else. Unless your ancestors were here before the Europeans, you're an immigrant. Period. Stop calling yourself American if you believe otherwise.

People seeking asylum from Central America are not terrorists. Neither are the African or Middle Eastern refugees. Anyone taking on the danger and hardship of leaving their homes, especially those with families, is probably pretty desperate. They're not animals, not diseased, not bent on stealing 'our' livelihoods. They're looking for hope and we should be proud that they come to us to find it. Building literal or administrative walls to deny it to them is just evil.

They need help. Simple as that. And a society that claims to be a civil one needs to provide it. That's supposed to be who we are. Many working together to help a few to make us all better. Each of us who can putting a little bit in a big pot. It's stone soup. Everybody adds a tiny bit that they can. Those who need a hand now will be able to lend a hand later. It's not Communism or Socialism or any other '-ism' of the week...it's what makes us a country. It's supposed to be what makes us human.

We have the wherewithal to take care of everyone...or we would if we only decided to use it.

But I guess it's easier to just keep on keepin' on. Stay in the bubble where helping anyone is weakness. Where strength is more and more weapons. Success is for a few and power is for the most successful of all.

Hide in religion that preaches 'prosperity' while living in a tax shelter. Where the concepts of love, forgiveness and hope for the most vulnerable are lost in hate for anyone who is 'not like us'. Seek comfort in piety but lock the doors when 'the least of these' comes knocking.

Feed the lobbyists and starve the homeless. Hand out corporate welfare but cut SNAP. Roll out the red carpet to the shareholders and hedge funds but pull the rug out from under a retiree who depends on Social Security. 

Keep saying all is well because Wall Street is on a roll while millions...from WalMart employees to serving military families need public assistance just to eat. 

Cut staff and cut budgets. Build walls instead of homes. Buy another missile system with the money that would feed a thousand families. Save the banks and automakers and airlines with our money while personal bankruptcies skyrocket. And protect the health insurance providers' profits while real people die.

It doesn't have to be this way. We choose for it to be this way. We make a choice.

What happened to us?